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A jury in Massachusetts has spent six days trying to decide what to do about Lindsay Clancy and still cannot agree. She is a former labor and delivery nurse who killed her three children at home in Duxbury in January of 2023. Cora was five, Dawson was three, and Callan was still a baby. Nobody in that courtroom disputes that she did it. The entire trial has been about whether she is criminally responsible for it.

The defense argued she was in postpartum psychosis. That is a rare and severe illness that can bring delusions and hallucinations. Her lawyer said she was hearing a voice telling her what to do and described a woman cycling through psychiatric medications who was not getting the care she needed. The prosecution argued something colder. They said she acted intentionally and rationally. They said she was well past the window most clinicians use for postpartum illness and that the psychiatrists who examined her found no psychosis.

That is where the country split and it did not split cleanly. Both sides know three children are dead. Nobody is arguing about that. They are arguing about what should follow from it. One side sees an illness a health system failed to catch and does not believe a prison cell is the answer to psychosis. The other side sees a mother who took three lives and believes a diagnosis cannot become a door out of responsibility.

What has made it uglier is that most people are not following the trial. They are following clips of it. Testimony that took a full day gets cut to forty seconds, secondhand summaries travel faster than transcripts, and a claim gets passed around enough times that nobody can say where it started. Plenty of people on both sides are now certain about details that were never entered into evidence.

The legal question is narrower than the public one. Massachusetts asks one thing. It asks whether she was so ill that she could not understand what she was doing or could not stop herself from doing it. That is a far higher bar than being unwell and it is why juries hang on cases like this one. Twelve people can agree completely on what happened and still not agree on what the law should do about it.

The jury has now told the judge twice that it cannot reach a verdict. On Thursday, the foreperson sent up another note. It said the split is eleven to one and that the holdout will not follow the law on reasonable doubt. Clancy's lawyer asked the judge to throw that juror off the case. Instead he brought all twelve in one at a time, questioned them privately, read the reasonable doubt instruction again, and sent them back. They go in for a seventh day at nine o'clock this morning, about half an hour after this email lands. If they come back deadlocked he will likely declare a mistrial and prosecutors would then decide whether to run the whole thing over.

Whatever they decide in that room, it will not settle the argument outside it.

Photo: Pexels.

Most men lift for how they look or for how they want to feel at forty-five. There is a third reason and nobody brings it up at the gym. You will only ever need it on the worst day of your life. That is exactly why you want it handled now.

Research on people already diagnosed with cancer keeps landing in the same place. Higher muscular strength and better cardiorespiratory fitness track with a significantly lower risk of dying. That holds for the cancer itself and for everything else. The link runs strongest in advanced cases and in lung and digestive cancers. Turn it around and the number is uglier. Patients who go into treatment carrying low muscle mass have roughly eighty percent higher overall mortality than patients who do not. Muscle lost during chemotherapy lines up with worse side effects, lower physical function, and a harder time finishing the course.

The reason is not complicated. Cancer burns through the body and so does the treatment. Chemotherapy is dosed against body size so a man carrying real muscle handles the same regimen differently than a man who is already wasting away. Muscle is what the body pulls from when it runs short. How much you have when treatment starts decides how much is left when it ends.

None of this means a man who gets sick did not lift enough. Strong men get cancer. Weak men go their whole lives without it. What it means is that the work is not only about the mirror. You are building something your body can spend if it ever has to. Two or three real sessions a week with enough weight to mean something. That has been the answer for years and it has not changed.

The word millionaire still sounds like a different kind of life. It is not. It is a normal salary, a boring index fund, and about forty years of not touching it. That is the whole method and almost every man reading this can do it.

Here is how it works. The S&P 500 is a basket holding the five hundred largest public companies in America. You are not picking winners. You are buying all of them at once and the index drops the ones that fail and adds the ones that grow. Since 1957, it has returned around ten and a half percent a year on average, closer to seven once you take inflation out. That average hides some ugly years. It has fallen forty percent and taken years to climb back. You only get the average if you are still holding when it comes back.

Now run the numbers. A man who puts three hundred dollars a month into a low cost S&P index fund starting at twenty-one and keeps doing it every month until sixty-five, lands somewhere around a million dollars in today's money. Not a million inflated future dollars. A million that buys what a million buys now. Across those forty-four years he put in about a hundred and fifty-eight thousand of his own money. The rest of it is time.

One thing worth saying plainly before you get excited. A million dollars is not what a million dollars used to be. Matching a million from the year 2000 would take about one million nine hundred thousand today which means a million now buys roughly what half a million bought then. The word millionaire has not kept up with the number. It sounds like you never work again. What it actually buys you is a retirement that holds up. That is a reason to start sooner rather than later.

The math is the easy part. The hard part is that it stays boring for four decades and there is a long stretch in the middle where it looks like nothing is happening. Most men quit in a bad year. Some borrow against it. Others decide they will start once they are earning more. Starting at twenty-one and starting at thirty-one are not the same decision. Those ten years end up worth more than every raise that comes after them.

Nobody can promise the next forty years look like the last seventy. This is how the math has worked. It does not guarantee it will keep working. It is also not advice from anyone licensed to give it. It is the simplest way to become a millionaire. The only real requirement is that you stay consistent for a very long time.

Most style advice out there now is bad. It comes from people trying to sell you something and it changes every six months. Two things do not change and men get both of them wrong constantly. The first is the untucked shirt. The second is the fedora.

Look at the bottom of the shirt and it will tell you what it wants. A hem that curves down into a long tail front and back was built to be tucked in. That is a dress shirt and it will look wrong hanging loose no matter how good the shirt is. A hem that runs straight across and ends around the middle of your fly was built to be worn out. Wear a dress shirt untucked and you do not look relaxed. You look like a guy who was tucked in an hour ago and quit.

The fedora is a different problem. Nothing is wrong with the hat. The problem is that most men wearing one are wearing a costume and everybody can tell. Nothing else they have on belongs to the same decade as the hat. A hat should be the least interesting thing you are wearing. The second it is the first thing people notice, it is wearing you and you look ridiculous.

The rule underneath both is the same. Your clothes should look like you picked them. They should not look like you are playing a character. Nobody is going to walk up and compliment you for getting this right. They will just stop noticing what you have on. That is the whole point.

Matthew McConaughey, 2019. Photo: All-Pro Reels / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0.

Many know Matthew McConaughey for his roles in Dazed and Confused, Interstellar, and The Wolf of Wall Street but he is much more than that. A man that built a successful career as well as had an influence on the young adult male population. A few of the philosophies he lives by are that the problems you are facing today turn into blessings and that resilience beats giving up. He also talks constantly about keeping your perspective and your gratitude.

Not many know that Matthew took a step away from Hollywood to avoid being the cliche, handsome, young 20 something year old that's only known from the romantic comedy genre. For nearly two years he wasn't on any stage, set, or dressing room. During that stretch, a studio came at him with an action comedy and walked the offer from eight million dollars up to fourteen and a half and he turned down every version of it because the script never changed. Many roles were turned down to elevate his career even more. He wanted more challenging roles, something to give himself more fulfillment when it came to acting that stuck true to his personal morals and ethics. That's when we got Dallas Buyers Club, which paid him around two hundred thousand dollars and won him an Oscar. True Detective and a long run of better work followed.

Now to the average Joe. When that job opportunity shows up, take a step back and look at what is around you and where it actually leads. You do not want to end up known as the rom com guy. You want to be the one who refused to settle for average and went after something that meant something to him. Matthew takes a deeper dive into his philosophies in his book Greenlights, a best selling collection of personal poetry, prayers and life lessons.

A clay tablet recording an allocation of beer, southern Iraq, around 3000 BC. British Museum. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

Beer is older than writing. Traces of fermented drink turn up in pottery nine thousand years old and by the time Mesopotamia was building its first cities the stuff was everywhere. It was not a treat. Sumerian beer was thick and cloudy and heavy with carbohydrate. It was closer to a loaf of bread you could drink than to anything you would order now. It was calories, it was safer than a lot of the water, and it was money.

The men who built the pyramids at Giza were not slaves. They were work crews who rotated through in shifts and lived in a town beside the site. Their pay came as bread and beer handed out through the day. Archaeologists found their bakeries, their breweries, and their tombs sitting near the pharaoh's. Nobody buries a slave there. Mesopotamia had been running the same arrangement a thousand years earlier. A man finished his shift. Someone pressed what he was owed into wet clay. That tablet lasted long enough for us to read it.

The oldest surviving account of how to make it is a song. The Hymn to Ninkasi was set down around 1800 BC as praise to the Sumerian goddess of beer and it walks through the whole process step by step. Scholars still argue about whether it was ever meant as instructions. Nobody argues about why it rhymes. Most of the people brewing could not read so the method was put to music and carried in their heads.

That is the part worth keeping. In one of the first places on earth where anybody wrote anything down, they bothered to record what a man was owed for his work. They also wrote down how to make the drink he was paid in. The recipe has changed a lot since then. The reason has not. The work ends, men sit down together, and that has been true for about as long as there has been work.