Work

In 1947, a car executive defended slackers and science finally caught up

The case for the guy who won't stop looking for a shortcut.

In 1947, Clarence Bleicher sat before the U.S. Senate and offered a hiring philosophy that would get most managers fired today. If you have a job that's hard and nobody can figure out how to make it easy, he said, hand it to a lazy man. Give him ten days and he'll have found a better way to do it.

The quote got shortened, mangled, and misattributed to everyone from Bill Gates on down. But as Erik Barnes reports, a 2026 study out of the University of Poitiers gives Bleicher's hunch some actual neuroscience. Led by psychologist Nathalie André, the researchers found that people and animals both operate on what they call the "principle of least effort." What looks like sitting around is often a brain running the numbers on whether the reward is worth the trip.

That cost isn't just physical, either. It includes time, mental fatigue, frustration, and the anxiety a task drags along with it. Which explains a strange thing about so-called lazy people: they aren't avoiding hard work, they're just picky about which hard work gets their energy.

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And what did we learn?

Yesterday, we reported on what your walking pace says about your character.

How do GOOD readers pound the pavement? That’s what I wanted to know. Over 40% of you like to keep a brisk, but casual-looking pace. Not me, I’m that annoying guy darting around like someone is after me. Sorry!

• MOVE, I've got places to be (22.0%)

• Brisk, but I make it look casual (42.7%)

• Whatever speed the group is going, I'm agreeable like that (15.3%)

• A leisurely stroll. It's nice to go slow (20.0%)

Nostalgia | Courtesy of Upworthy

The stick shift is a theft deterrent now, and 19 other skills Boomers still have

Gen Z is racing to learn what Boomers were told to forget.

What's a skill you're proud of that the world has decided is useless? That was the question posed to the internet, and the answers read less like nostalgia than like a list of things quietly worth stealing back. Darning a sock. Reading a paper map. Making change in your head at a drive-thru window before the calculator could catch up.

In this story by Emily Shiffer, first shared on our sister site Upworthy, the full 20 range from the practical (canning, hemming, starting a campfire with a single match) to the gloriously obsolete. One commenter still uses Gregg Shorthand, presumably at parties.

Society

The text that revives old friendships without making things weird

It’s amazing what ten words can do.

Somehow you don’t know it’s happened until it has, but one day you think of that friend and realize it’s been so long that unless you’ve got a good excuse, reaching out would be... weird.

A networking expert has a disarmingly simple answer for that exact modern dilemma: send the text anyway, just strip out all the pressure, apology, and emotional throat-clearing. Her suggested message is only ten words long, and it somehow does the impossible by making reconnection feel casual, warm, and not like you’re trying to reboot a canceled sitcom.

As Erik Barnes explains, what makes it work is what it avoids. No “sorry it’s been forever,” no fake urgency, no giant bundle of expectation dropped into someone else’s notifications. Just a small human signal that says: I thought of you. That’s it. Clean, brave, oddly powerful.

On July 22, 1862, President Abraham Lincoln gathered his cabinet and read them something extraordinary: a draft proclamation freeing enslaved people in the rebelling states, the document we now know as the Emancipation Proclamation.

The room did not immediately erupt in applause. Secretary of State William Seward liked the idea but hated the timing. The Union army was struggling, and Seward warned that announcing emancipation from a position of weakness would sound less like moral leadership and more like desperation. His advice: wait for a victory. Lincoln, to his credit, listened, and tucked one of the most important documents in American history into his desk.

The wait lasted two months. After Union forces turned back Robert E. Lee's army at Antietam that September, Lincoln pulled the proclamation back out and issued it to the world, with freedom taking legal effect on January 1, 1863. It's a good reminder that history isn't only made by bold strokes. Sometimes it's made by knowing exactly when to deliver one. 

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