Understandably

World War II edition of Stars & Stripes. This will probably be all over the place but what the heck. You guys know I used to be a reporter at Stars & Stripes, right? It was only for a year, but it was an important year. It was my “I need a purpose every day because I’m going through a divorce and everything is out of kilter” job. I guess it was ... roughly February 2010 to April 2012. Despite my sort of cynical how-I-got-there story, I took it very seriously.

Today’s newsletter is brought to you by the fact that my wife and daughter and I went to a Yankees game on Sunday, and stopped by Five Below on the way home to buy tennis balls on the way home ($7 for 8, can’t beat it). Only, we got stuck in a giant traffic jam outside the shopping plaza. The reason, we realized when we finally got close enough: Five Below is around the corner from Costco, where cars were lined up like it was the 1970s oil crisis to get cheaper gas.

My wife and I have had a laugh or two recently over the sheer number of middle-aged men we know who went to see the band Rush at Madison Square Garden earlier this month. It’s a guy thing — especially (by reputation) guys born between say 1960 and 1975. Honestly, I probably would have dragged my wife along if I had realized they were playing here. I mean, how many more chances would we get?

Big Optimism is a bit different today. Bear with me. Michael Korenblit was born in Ponca City, Oklahoma on July 30, 1951. His parents, Meyer and Matl Korenblit, were Holocaust survivors: Jewish teenagers from Hrubieszów, Poland, who fell in love before World War II, survived the Nazi occupation in separate camps, and found each other again afterward against odds that are almost impossible to calculate. Their families — parents, siblings, cousins — were almost entirely murdered.

It’s Free for ALL Friday! Each week I keep track of some of the off-the-path things I've found, and work extra-hard to make sure you never hit a paywall, using my own subscriptions, gift links, and other (legal) hocus-pocus. Philanthropist Herbert Wertheim paid a record price at auction for a Luce sports car in the name of charity An optometrist turned billionaire philanthropist with an eye for bold design paid a record-setting $40 million for a bespoke Ferrari Luce at auction.

Do these kinds of things ever happen to you? You come up with a great idea at work, and you get through maybe 20 percent of the way through executing it before coming up with a second great idea shows up. The original one gathers dust, and the second one dies on the vine as well. You sit down to answer emails — but then you also reorganize a folder, look up a flight to somewhere you’re probably not going, and forget why you opened your inbox in the first place.

Long ago photo of Eddie Smith Jr. at Grady-White Boats. Of all the many people I’ve written about over the years, one who stands out was the former multibillionaire Chuck Feeney. Feeney made his fortune co-founding an enormous duty-free business (the kind you see in airports), but then later made it his life’s mission to give away almost every last cent of his net worth to charity.

Let’s talk about loneliness. The World Health Organization’s Commission on Social Connection reported last year that about 16% of people worldwide experience loneliness, and linked it to roughly 871,000 deaths a year. For researchers who study loneliness, there’s a chicken-and-egg question: Does loneliness cause poor health, especially mental health? Or does poor mental health simply make people lonely to begin with?

Hey everyone. Do me a favor. Every evening, the first person who looks over Understandably and Big Optimism is my friend Tom Bennett in Maine. I can’t begin to tell you how many times he’s caught mistakes, saved my bacon, and made really good suggestions. Sunday was Tom’s birthday. He’s the real unsung hero of this effort. So if you have a minute, please wish him well in the comments. I’ll go first.

It’s Free for ALL Friday! Each week I keep track of some of the off-the-path things I've found, and work extra-hard to make sure you never hit a paywall, using my own subscriptions, gift links, and other (legal) hocus-pocus. From writing speeches to sorting constituent mail, AI is spreading through Congress faster than the rules governing its use. The amendment was one of hundreds filed this summer to an annual defense bill making its way through Congress. Along with her proposed change, Rep.