Yesterday, our tree-hugging, pizza-loving, drone-having Pope added another notch to his blessed belt when he joined legendary clown princes of basketball, the Harlem Globetrotters, as an honorary member of the team. According to the Washington Post, the Globetrotters met Il Papa while playing in Italy, making a special appearance during the Pontiff’s general audience at St. Peter’s Square. Francis is only the ninth honorary Globetrotter in history, but not the first pope to receive the honor—John Paul II became an honorary member in 2000. Globetrotters “Hi-Lite” Bruton, “Ant” Atkinson, “Big Easy” Lofton and “Flight Time” Lang showed off their skills, helping the Pope spin a basketball on his finger and presenting him with a team jersey with the number 90. From the Post:
“We are very humbled by the opportunity to bestow this honor upon Pope Francis,” Globetrotters president Kurt Schneider said in a statement. “His tireless work for the well-being of the poor and elderly, his humanitarian efforts and his commitment to bridge gaps between people of various cultures are ways the Harlem Globetrotters also aspire to touch lives around the world. He embodies the Globetrotters’ efforts to provide service, smiles and sportsmanship globally.”
Living on a farm often means dealing with the beauty of nature, but for Stuart Baldwin, a livestock farmer in Haydock, it also meant dealing with the mess left behind by others. Baldwin says about 25 times a year his land is targeted by “fly-tippers,” people who illegally dump trash on private property. As the Manchester Evening News reported, the situation recently reached a breaking point when Baldwin discovered a staggering 421 tires scattered across his fields.
Instead of just cleaning up the mess and footing the bill, Baldwin decided to check the CCTV cameras he had recently installed. The footage clearly showed a van arriving at the property and unloading the massive haul of rubber.
Baldwin didn’t immediately call the authorities or retaliate. In a move that reflects a very grounded sense of fairness, he tracked the man down and gave him a chance to make it right. He offered the man a few days to return and clear the field himself.
When the deadline passed and the tires remained, Baldwin decided that if the man wouldn’t come to the tires, the tires would go to the man. Utilizing a truck from his family’s recycling business, Baldwin and a group of volunteers loaded every single one of the 421 tires and drove them straight to the address associated with the van. As The Daily Mail reported, they carefully unloaded the entire pile into the man’s front garden, ensuring no property was damaged in the process.
This wasn’t just about a “petty” dispute. Illegal dumping is a massive problem that places a heavy financial and emotional burden on farmers. According to official government data from the UK, authorities dealt with over 1.2 million fly-tipping incidents in the last year alone. Baldwin’s daughter, Megan, told reporters that the family simply wanted to prove a point about respect and accountability. They wanted to show that a farmer’s land is a livelihood, not a convenient trash can.
The community response has been overwhelmingly supportive. Baldwin noted that people have even approached him on the street to thank him for standing up for the neighborhood. While he joked that the culprit was likely feeling “deflated” after the delivery, the message was serious. By returning the waste to its source, Baldwin turned a frustrating violation of his property into a legendary lesson in personal responsibility.
This article originally appeared earlier this year.
The finding, published in the journal Alzheimer’s & Dementia, is part of nearly two decades of research on the Tsimané and their sister population the Mosetén, communities who have been recorded as having some of the lowest rates of heart disease, brain atrophy, and cognitive decline ever measured in science. A subsequent study from the University of Southern California and Chapman University, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, used CT scans on 1,165 Tsimané and Mosetén adults to measure how their brains age compared to populations in the US and Europe. The answer was striking: their brains age significantly more slowly.
The researchers’ explanation centers on what they call a “sweet spot” — a balance between physical exertion and food availability that most people in industrialized countries have drifted far from. “The lives of our pre-industrial ancestors were punctuated by limited food availability,” said Dr. Andrei Irimia, an assistant professor at USC’s Leonard Davis School of Gerontology and co-author of the study. “Humans historically spent a lot of time exercising out of necessity to find food, and their brain aging profiles reflected this lifestyle.”
The Tsimané people of Bolivia posing for a photograph. Photo credit: Canva
The Tsimané are highly active not because they exercise in any structured sense but because their daily lives demand it. They fish, hunt, farm with hand tools, and forage, averaging around 17,000 steps a day. Their diet is heavy on carbohydrates — plantains, cassava, rice, and corn make up roughly 70% of what they eat, with fats and protein splitting the remaining 30%. It is not a low-carb or protein-heavy regimen. It is, essentially, the diet of people who burn what they consume. CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta, who visited a Tsimané village in 2018 for his series “Chasing Life,” noted that they also sleep around nine hours a night and practice what might be called intermittent fasting — not by choice, but by necessity during lean seasons.
The research also included the Mosetén, who share the Tsimané’s ancestral history and subsistence lifestyle but have more access to modern technology, medicine, and infrastructure. Their brain health outcomes fell between the Tsimané and industrialized populations, better than Americans and Europeans, but not as strong as the Tsimané. Researchers describe this gradient as especially revealing because it suggests a continuum rather than a binary, and that even partial movement toward a more active, less calorically abundant lifestyle appears to have measurable effects on how the brain ages.
“During our evolutionary past, more food and less effort spent getting it resulted in improved health,” said Hillard Kaplan, a professor of health economics and anthropology at Chapman University who has studied the Tsimané for nearly 20 years. “With industrialization, those traits lead us to overshoot the mark.”
The researchers are careful to note that the Tsimané lifestyle is not simply transferable. Their longevity in absolute terms is lower than Americans’ because of deaths from trauma, infection, and complications in childbirth, hazards of living without a healthcare system. The point of the research is not that modern medicine is unnecessary but that the environments it’s embedded in may be undermining the brain health it’s trying to protect.
“This ideal set of conditions for disease prevention prompts us to consider whether our industrialized lifestyles increase our risk of disease,” Irimia said.
This article originally appeared earlier this year.
She’d paid $5 for her coffee, skipped the card tip prompt at checkout, and left a bill in the jar on her way out the door. The barista noticed, glanced at the cash in her customer’s wallet, and said loudly enough for the room to hear: “Oh wow! A whole dollar… that’s SO generous! Thank you SO much.”
Reddit’s reaction was not especially sympathetic to the barista. “Should have picked that dollar back,” was among the most upvoted responses. Others said they would have asked for a full refund on the drink. The OP herself landed on a version of that position: if a tip is going to be met with sarcasm, why tip at all?
But the incident is a little more complicated than a straightforward etiquette violation, because the math here actually favors the customer. A dollar on a $5 drink is a 20% tip, the same percentage most people consider the standard for a sit-down restaurant with table service. Industry veterans generally say a dollar a drink is a reasonable coffee shop tip, and that baristas at most cafés (unlike servers) are paid standard minimum wage rather than the lower tipped-employee rate that makes gratuities more essential.
None of which makes a public sarcastic remark the right response. But it does situate the incident inside a broader frustration that’s been building for a few years. A Pew Research Center survey found that 7 in 10 American adults say tipping is now expected in more places than it was a few years ago. A Bankrate survey found that 41% of Americans think tipping culture has gotten out of hand, and around 63% have at least one negative view about tipping overall. More than 60% agreed that employers should simply pay workers better so tips don’t have to fill the gap.
The tip jar and the checkout screen have become the place where all of that tension gets concentrated into a single uncomfortable moment. The barista’s comment was out of line. The customer’s dollar was not stingy. And the fact that it’s hard to say either of those things without someone disagreeing is probably the actual story.
This article originally appeared earlier this year.
