The General Assembly hall in New York. Photo: Basil D Soufi via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.

On Thursday the twenty-fourth, Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel, walked to the podium at the United Nations General Assembly in New York. Delegations from roughly seventy countries either walked out as he started or never showed up at all. Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, Iran, Qatar, Indonesia, Spain, Brazil, and Peru were among them.

He spoke to the emptying room anyway. As the delegates filed out he said from the podium, "If there are any other moral cowards who haven't left this hall, please do so now." He called the allegation that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza the biggest lie of the century, defended the war against Iran, and said that some of the leaders walking out had privately thanked Israel for destroying Iran's nuclear program.

Outside the building it was louder. Hundreds of New Yorkers linked arms across a road leading into the UN complex as he was getting ready to speak. Police made more than a hundred arrests over the course of the day. Another crowd marched toward the headquarters after he finished.

What is worth noticing here is not the speech. It is the room. The General Assembly is the one place on earth where every country gets a seat and a vote no matter how small it is. Walking out is one of the very few things a small country can actually do in there.

Seventy of them doing it at once is not a reaction to a speech. It is a headcount.

Photo: Pexels.

If you have been online at all this year you have been told seed oils are poisoning you. Canola, soybean, corn, sunflower. The claim is that they cause inflammation and that getting them out of your kitchen changes everything.

The research does not back that up. Linoleic acid is the fat people are pointing at when they say seed oil. A 2025 review pooled the data from 150 separate groups of people followed over time. Higher intake lined up with lower rates of heart disease, not higher. Controlled trials have repeatedly looked for a rise in inflammation markers and have not found one. Swapping saturated fat for these oils lowers cholesterol. That is the actual state of the evidence and it is not close.

There is a real difference between oils though. It is just not the one people fight about. The split that matters is how much monounsaturated fat an oil has because that is what holds up under heat. Olive oil, avocado oil, and peanut oil are mostly monounsaturated. So are the bottles of sunflower and canola labeled high oleic, which is just a way of saying the plant was bred to carry more of the stable fat. Refined avocado oil takes over 500 degrees before it breaks down. Regular sunflower, corn, and soybean oil are mostly polyunsaturated, which is fine in a dressing and less fine when you get a pan screaming hot.

So here is the honest version of good and bad. Good is a fresh bottle used at a temperature it can handle. Bad is oil that has been sitting in a deep fryer getting reheated for three days. That second one is chemically a different substance than what came out of the bottle. It is also what most people are actually reacting to when they say fried food makes them feel terrible.

One more thing worth saying. Most of the seed oil in the American diet does not arrive in a bottle. It arrives inside chips, crackers, frozen food, and takeout. When a study finds that people eating a lot of it are in worse shape, the oil is riding along with everything else in the bag. Cook with olive or avocado when the heat is high, use whatever you like cold, stop reusing frying oil, and spend the energy you were going to spend on this somewhere it matters more.

APR and APY sit on every financial product you have ever signed. They look like the same acronym with a typo. They are not. The difference between them is doing quiet work on you.

APR is Annual Percentage Rate. It is what borrowing costs you, interest plus certain fees. It shows up on credit cards, car loans, and mortgages. APY is Annual Percentage Yield. It is what saving earns you. It shows up on savings accounts and CDs.

Here is the part nobody explains. APY includes compounding. APR does not. Compounding is when the interest you earned gets added to your balance and then starts earning interest of its own. It works exactly the same way in reverse when you are the one who owes. That is why a number can grow faster than it looks like it should.

Put those two facts together. When somebody wants to lend you money, the number they are required to quote is the one that leaves compounding out. The cost looks smaller than it will be. When somebody wants to hold your money, the number they quote is the one that puts compounding in. The return looks bigger. Neither is a trick. The first is required by the Truth in Lending Act and the second by the Truth in Savings Act. It is just worth noticing that in both cases the flattering number is the one you get shown.

Credit cards are where this bites hardest. Most of them compound daily. A card advertising twenty-four percent APR will cost you meaningfully more than twenty-four percent over a year if you carry a balance because every day's interest joins the pile that tomorrow's interest is calculated on.

The rule is simple. Compare loans to loans using APR. Compare savings to savings using APY. Never compare one against the other and think you have learned something because you have not.

Somebody cleaned their place, bought food, and opened their door to you. Walk in with something in your hand.

It does not have to be good. A six pack works. A bottle of wine for fifteen dollars works. Nobody is grading it and nobody will remember what it was by Tuesday. What they will remember is that you thought about them before you left your house.

The man who arrives with nothing is not rude. He just reads as a guest, somebody who came to be hosted. The man with something under his arm reads as part of the thing. It is a small difference and people feel it without ever putting it into words.

Keep two bottles in a closet so you are never standing in a gas station at seven fifty-five doing math. If you do not drink or you do not know the host well, then one good idea is to bring ice. It is the most useful thing anyone brings and the thing everybody forgets.

Hand it over at the door, do not make a speech about it, and let it go. It was never really about the bottle.

Roman soldiers carrying the Temple menorah, carved on the Arch of Titus in Rome. It is still standing. Photo: Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

Judea revolted against Rome in 66 AD. By the spring of 70, the Roman general Titus, son of the emperor Vespasian, was camped outside Jerusalem with four legions.

His first move was patient and cruel. It was Passover and thousands of pilgrims were traveling to the city for the holiday. Titus let all of them walk in and let none of them walk out. More mouths, same food, no exit.

What happened next is the part worth knowing. Jerusalem was not one city under one command. Three rival factions held different quarters and they spent the siege fighting each other as much as the Romans. Josephus was a Jewish commander who had surrendered to the Romans. By this point he was standing next to Titus, writing down what he saw. He recorded that while the factions fought each other, they burned each other's grain stores. The city had food stockpiled to last years. They destroyed it themselves while an army sat outside the wall waiting.

The famine that followed did more damage than the legions did for months. The walls came down in stages through the summer. In late summer, the Temple burned. Whether Titus ordered it or a soldier threw a torch is still argued about. Josephus put the dead above a million, which is almost certainly too high. Modern historians say several hundred thousand. Around ninety-seven thousand people were taken as slaves. Some of them were put to work building the Colosseum.

Here is the long part of the long view. Judaism at that time was built around that one building. Sacrifices, priests, festivals, all of it happened there. The Temple was gone and nobody ever built it again. So the religion changed shape. Instead of priests making sacrifices in one building, you got the synagogue, the rabbi, and study. Judaism survived by turning into something that did not need a building at all. That is the only reason it is still here.

Rome took the city. The siege was lost inside the walls first by men who were so busy with each other that they set fire to the thing keeping all of them alive. You do not need a city under siege for that to happen. It happens in families, in companies, and on teams. Any group that would rather win the fight inside the room than deal with what is waiting outside it.