TouchStone Reads - May 22nd, 2026

We often set aside articles that are longer, deserve a re-read, are broader in scope…or just for fun - for weekend reading. Below are some from this week - pour yourself a hot cup of coffee & enjoy... 

• Save the Date.  On Wednesday May 27^th, 2026 at 10:30am - Richmond | Goodman Wealth Management will be hosting a free virtual event: Protecting your finances in the digital age: Practical cybersecurity for families
  With technology evolving rapidly, protecting your personal and financial information has never been more important. Today’s cyber threats are highly targeted, personalized, and designed to create urgency, often catching even the most careful individuals off guard. Our expert Brent Fowles is Director of Cybersecurity at Western University - Please join us (and feel free to share).  Click here to register

• Pulitzer-winning newsrooms are quietly publishing mountains of gambling slop: A large network of prominent regional newspapers have posted thousands of low-quality articles promoting gambling and prediction markets. (Popular Information)

• The surprisingly strong case for feeling great about your coffee habit: Another week, another coffee-is-actually-fine review. The effect sizes are real, the mechanism is still hand-wavy. Drink up. (Vox)

• Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent: Including a back-of-envelope on the climate cost at billion-device scale. The ‘opt-out’ fiction continues. (That Privacy Guy!)

• Profiting From Inflated Hospital Prices: The cost curve has many parents, but the hospital pricing model is doing more work than most. (Washington Monthly)

• ‘The Biggest Student Data Privacy Disaster in History’: Canvas Hack Shows the Danger of Centralized EdTech: Thursday afternoon, millions of students at thousands of universities and K-12 schools were locked out of Canvas, a piece of catch-all education technology software that has become the de facto core of many classes. (404)

• The Age of No Innocence: What if all you knew was extremist politics? Welcome to being young in America. (The Western Edge)

• The supreme court’s takedown of American democracy is complete: The only solution is at the ballot box (The Guardian)

• The man they call Toad, and his lifetime collection of bikes that no-one wanted: A specialist’s lifetime collection, lovingly profiled. Almost everything about why hobbies matter is in this piece. The man they call Toad, and his lifetime collection of bikes that no-one wanted. (The Bike Shed Times)

• Attenborough at 100 - A Nature Documentary Archive (Attenborough at 100)

• Video of the day: How Concerned Should Boeing and Airbus Be About the New Flying V? (YouTube)

• Video of the day: World War II told in 20 Episodes with Tom Hanks (YouTube)

What are you reading or listening to?