📺 The One Where We Started

📱The kids & phone debate: At least 40 states and Puerto Rico have introduced over 300 bills in 2026 targeting kids, phones, and social media. Ten states have already enacted new laws or resolutions, while the rest are still moving through legislatures and courts.

The research backs the push. A panel of 120 researchers from 11 disciplines recently reached consensus that smartphone and social media use correlates with attention problems and declining adolescent mental health.

The problem — most of these laws are getting tied up in court the second they pass. Tech companies and civil liberties groups keep blocking them, arguing it violates kids' First Amendment rights.

🥛Food recalls are hitting pantry staples: California Dairies recalled bulk powdered milk and buttermilk over potential Salmonella risk, and the impact has extended into downstream products, including some snack seasonings.

Separately, Fly By Jing recalled its Creamy Sesame Noodles due to possible peanut cross-contact.

No confirmed illnesses reported—but worth a quick pantry check, especially in allergy households.

👶 Baby playpen recalled over hardware risk: The HARPPA Wooden Baby Playpen Gate has been recalled due to screws that can loosen and detach during use, creating a choking and injury risk for babies and toddlers.

Four incident reports have been filed, with no injuries reported.

If you own it: stop using it and follow the manufacturer’s recall instructions.

🪑Toddler tower stool recall: The Cosyland Children's Tower Stool has been recalled after 125,200 units were flagged for a serious design flaw.

The stools can collapse or tip over during use, and a child's torso can fit through the openings on the front and back creating a fall and entrapment hazard. There are already 25 reported incidents and 8 injuries on record.

🏈 The NFL schedule dropped: The Rams and 49ers open the season in Melbourne, Australia in the league's first-ever regular-season game in the region (Sept. 10).

Monday Night Football opens with Broncos vs. Chiefs on Sept. 14 with a major storyline. Mahomes (Chiefs QB) tore his ACL and LCL last season and is ahead of schedule in his recovery and the feeling inside the Chiefs organization is that he'll be ready for Week 1.

On the other side, Bo Nix (Broncos QB) fractured his ankle in the Divisional Round and if you were on X this offseason, you probably saw the surgery photos making the rounds. They were not pretty.

People were genuinely questioning if he’d ever be the same. Sean Payton says he’ll be full speed by training camp.

🏀 SGA just went back-to-back - then the Spurs showed up: Shai Gilgeous-Alexander officially won his second straight NBA MVP, becoming just the 14th player in league history to do it. He averaged 31.1 points per game and led a 64-win Thunder team that looked unstoppable in the postseason.

Then Monday night happened. San Antonio walked into OKC and won Game 1 of the Western Conference Finals 122-115. Wembanyama erupted for 41 points and 24 rebounds putting the team on his back.

Translation for work tomorrow: "SGA went back-to-back, OKC was undefeated in the playoffs, and the Spurs just walked into their building and won."

👠 The Devil Wears Prada 2 is BIG hit: "Florals? For Spring? Groundbreaking.”

The sequel has now crossed $546 million worldwide. It already surpassed the entire lifetime box office run of the original film after just two weekends but 2006 was a different time.

None of this existed yet:

If you've been debating it, this is your excuse to go.

You can't walk into a Blockbuster like you could with the original. No wandering the aisles, scanning the new releases wall, or grabbing a last-minute box of candy at the counter.

The theater is the closest thing we've got left to that feeling.

So go get it.

🎬 The "horror movie titles" trend is everywhere: If your feed suddenly feels like people are posting fake horror posters about things like “7am meetings” or “your phone dying at 3%,” you’re not imagining it.

Creators are turning normal adult frustrations into horror-style titles—and it’s one of those trends that’s weirdly relatable and instantly recognizable once you see it.

Now you’ve got the reference point when it shows up again

💸 Inflation is heating up again: April's CPI report landed May 12, and inflation officially hit 3.8% — the highest in over three years, driven largely by surging gas prices tied to the Iran conflict.

🏦 Rate cuts just got pushed further away: After the hotter-than-expected inflation report, markets are increasingly betting the Fed keeps rates higher for longer.

Some traders are even starting to price in the possibility of another rate hike before the end of the year.

Bottom line: if you’ve been waiting for dramatically lower rates before making a move, you may be waiting a while.

📈 The rally keeps going anyway: The S&P 500 posted its seventh straight winning week last week.

On Monday it barely moved (closing at 7,403) but the session was anything but calm. The 10-year Treasury yield climbed above 4.6%, oil pushed $110 a barrel, and tech took a hit.

Your 401(k) probably still looks fine. But inflation is quietly eating into purchasing power at the same time.

_{Not financial advice — just the headlines.}

🎮 Roblox made a major safety change: Roblox is launching dedicated age-based accounts called "Roblox Kids" for ages 5–8 and "Roblox Select" for ages 9–15.

Roblox Kids shuts off communications with other players entirely by default. Roblox Select gives older kids more access with guardrails still in place.

If your kid is on the platform, you can link a parent account to theirs now. It lets you manage spending and content filters from your own phone.

🌱 The game every kid seems to be playing: Grow a Garden: A farming simulator on Roblox with 35+ billion visits.

They plant seeds, harvest crops, collect pets, and somehow lose two hours without noticing. It sounds simple. It's not.

If your kid plays Roblox, ask them to show you their garden. You'll learn more about what they're into in five minutes than you will from asking "what did you do at school today?" all week — a question no kid on earth has ever been able to answer, and yet here we all are, still asking it.

Side note this is why they can’t actually answer it: the question is too broad. Kids' brains need a specific hook to recall anything. "What did you do today" has no starting point. It's like asking someone to summarize their entire day in one sentence on the spot.

Try these instead:

📺 YouTube’s new parent problem: “AI slop”: More than 200 advocacy groups are pushing YouTube to crack down on low-effort AI-generated videos slipping into YouTube Kids.

The concern: weird, autoplay-friendly content that looks real enough for kids, keeps attention forever, and often bypasses normal quality filters.

Child behavior experts warn these hyper-vibrant, nonsensical loops act like digital hypnosis. Hijacking a child's attention span and distorting their sense of reality.

Because these cartoon formats bypass YouTube’s current AI disclosure rules, advocacy groups are demanding an outright ban on synthetic media within the YouTube Kids app.

🗣️ Slang, translated:

A few words worth knowing so you don’t feel 100 years old at dinner:

🍋 The Lemonade Stand Is Dead. Long Live The Desk Plant: Lemonade stands are a childhood rite of passage, but let's be honest… Nobody is drinking that lemon water. They're paying $1 to support a kid and their first business.

Here's a much-needed refresh: Desk Plant Stand

Instead of a table with lemonade, you set up a table with your kid selling plants specifically tailored for the office.

🌱 Why This Actually Works: The indoor plant market is worth $30 billion, and most plant purchases are impulse buys

And if the person you're selling to doesn't need one? Odds are good they know 10 people who sit at a desk all day and would love one.

Research from the University of Exeter found that adding a plant to a workspace boosts productivity by 15%. NASA data shows certain plants can remove up to 87% of indoor air toxins within 24 hours. This creates an opportunity to position the plants as a wellness item not just a decoration.

💡 The Plan: Start with high-survivability plants. Succulents and snake plants thrive on neglect, which matters when you're selling to busy adults who will forget to water something. (I’m not even trying to sell you a plant and you are probably thinking you need one of these)

A nice addition to push the sale over the edge is giving a little personality to each plant.

💵 The Numbers: The input costs are almost nothing:

Package it with a name and a personality tag and sell it for $12-15.

👨‍👩‍👧 What Your Kid Walks Away With: This isn't really about plants. It's about one of the most important business lessons there is: the value of something is rarely about the thing itself it is about the problem it solves.

A plant that fixes "my desk feels dead" is worth 10 times more than a lemon-flavored water.

Issue 001 is out the door.

If you're reading this right now, you're one of the originals. The founding readers. That really means something, and I don't take it lightly. Thank you for being here from day one.

It's not perfect. Neither is working full-time, raising kids, trying to build something on the side, and staying connected to the people who actually matter. That's kind of the whole premise here.

Nobody has this figured out. We're all just showing up, doing the best we can, and trying not to drop the important stuff.

We're all just Winging It. ✌️