September 14, 2026
Good Morning. Doctors are doing brain surgery without a scalpel. Plus, Judge Judy passes the gavel, why your feed makes you angry, and Emmy predictions (first time here? Join 523,000 Betterists ).
Friday’s most clicked link : Secret to longer, focused days.
TOP STORY TODAY
No Scalpel Brain Surgery
Doctors at West Virginia University are treating drug addiction with focused ultrasound , a procedure that reaches deep brain tissue without a scalpel. Results published this year cover 35 patients treated since 2021.
A helmet fires dozens of ultrasound beams that converge with millimeter precision on the nucleus accumbens, the brain's reward hub. Patients wear goggles showing images of drugs while the waves fire. The outpatient session runs about 20 minutes.
The treatment is not FDA approved for addiction and no insurer covers it, so the only access is enrollment in a clinical trial. Active studies are recruiting at WVU, Virginia Tech, and a DC VA center.
The move: access runs through trial enrollment, not a referral or a bill | The peer-reviewed trial data
Slowing Down AI
The chief executives of Anthropic and OpenAI called this weekend for the industry to slow AI development . Anthropic committed to giving outside evaluators permanent, employee-level access to verify its safety practices, and OpenAI said it would match.
The trigger was a July incident in which roughly 1,200 OpenAI test agents escaped isolation and found each other on an unsanctioned message board. Some gave up their own compute so other agents could continue.
About 700 of them went on to attack the software platform Hugging Face. OpenAI's initial public offering, among the most anticipated listings in years, is now pushed to 2027 on safety grounds. The essay that started it .
Judge Judy Retires
Judith Sheindlin is ending her on-camera career after 30 years. Her Prime Video series Judy Justice stops producing new episodes, with the final one set for October 22. She is 83 ( the reporter who accidentally made her famous ).
Judge Judy premiered in September 1996 and ran 25 seasons and 12,500 episodes, pulling nine to 10 million daily viewers. The robe and lace collar made her the highest-paid host on television at $47 million a year .
Her son, former Putnam County district attorney Adam Levy, will take the bench in a new syndicated show she created . Litigants on her shows signed arbitration agreements beforehand, making every ruling binding arbitration rather than a court decision.
▲ Judge Judy Sheindlin on Good Hang with Amy Poehler
TOGETHER WITH SPRUCE
Earn 8x Your Current Savings Account
Most banking apps charge you for the privilege of holding your money. Spruce runs the other way.
Spruce is a mobile banking app built by H&R Block. No monthly fees, no minimum balance requirement, no sign-up fee, no credit check. Savings earn 3.50% APY⁴, roughly 8x the national average⁷, with no balance minimum and no qualification tiers to clear first.
Right now there's a kickstart bonus. Open an account, receive $500 or more in qualifying direct deposits within 45 days, and $100 lands in your Spruce account. Offer runs September 1 through September 30, 2026.⁶
Open a Spruce account here →
Spruce fintech platform is built by H&R Block, which is not a bank. Bank products by Pathward®, N.A., Member FDIC. Annual Percentage Yield is variable and subject to change. ⁴Savings APY. ⁵Early access to direct deposit funds depends on timing of payer's submission of deposits. ⁶$100 bonus requires qualifying direct deposits totaling $500 or more within 45 days of account opening; offer available September 1 through September 30, 2026. ⁷National average per FDIC.
GET 1% BETTER
1 Question that Kills 1,000 Decisions
Great Britain's rowing eight lost everything they entered for seven years. Two years out from Sydney, they stopped making decisions and adopted one question instead: will it make the boat go faster?
- Extra pint the night before? No.
- Skip the warmdown? No.
- Argument that goes nowhere? No.
- Ugly technique that's actually quicker? Yes.
- Sleep instead of the team night out? Yes.
In 2000, they won gold.
That's the trade. Not more motivation, less deciding. A thousand small choices a week, each one a chance to negotiate with yourself, collapsed into one filter that takes two seconds and doesn't care how you feel.
Write yours. Make it binary. Then stop deciding things. Get the book .
Why Your Feed Makes You Angry
Aaron Sorkin wrote The Social Network. The sequel, The Social Reckoning , is coming. In a new interview he names the exact moment the feed turned.
In 2018 Facebook was losing engagement to TikTok, so it retuned the algorithm:
- A comment became worth 5 times a like
- An emoji, 15 times
- A reshare, 30 times
They already knew that what gets reshared most is rage bait.
The first film ended by putting 500 million users on screen to make the audience gasp. It is 2.8 billion now, more than twice the largest country on earth, and roughly a third of American adults get their news there . Sorkin himself has no social media accounts at all.
Also in this episode : why he thinks AI movies will never land emotionally (33:13), the second Hollywood blacklist he says we are already knocking on (19:09).and the decade he lost to cocaine (12:53).
TRENDING
5 Stories
▲ Emmys tonight : The Pitt and Widow's Bay lead the favorites, with Jean Smart chasing an eighth | The Pitt's 25 nominations
▲ Chinese imagery reached Iran before the July strike on a Jordan base that killed three soldiers | The three soldiers who died
▲ Texas erased a 20-point fourth-quarter deficit to beat No. 1 Ohio State, a first since 2004 | He had nightmares about last year
▲ Saharan dust is suppressing Atlantic hurricane formation as an unusually large September plume reaches Florida | Check your county's air quality
▲ Celine Dion sang 26 songs over two hours, six years after Stiff Person Syndrome sidelined her | The 26-date run through 2027
TOGETHER WITH OTTERBOX
Your $1,200 Phone Deserves Better Than Luck
You will drop it. Probably this week, probably on concrete, probably screen-first. The only question is whether that costs you $12 or $400.
OtterBox just launched its full lineup for the iPhone 18 Pro and 18 Pro Max. Defender Series Pro is the toughest, with 7X military-standard drop protection and a tri-layer build. Defender Series Pro XT gives you the same protection in a slimmer, pocket-friendly shell with a clear back. Every case is MagSafe compatible, with raised edges guarding the screen and camera.
Pair one with OtterBox Glass and the whole thing is handled.
Shop the iPhone 18 Pro lineup →
Please support our sponsors!
Fun Links
Most famous house in Los Angeles [ Video ]
Hormozi: $0 to $100k in 90 days [ Video ]
How they made Band of Brothers [ Doc ]
Entourage is back (sort of) [ Video ]
Make millions from digital downloads [ Video ]
Breakdown of the foldable iPhone [ Video ]
Soderbergh’s full 2025 watchlist [ Blog ]
Grow your audience and revenue : Join brands like AG1, Hims, BetterHelp. Reach +500K ambitious professionals who open 1% Better every morning. Apply here .