The internet can be more physically vulnerable than you think. Last week, thousands of people in North and Central Texas were suddenly knocked offline. The cause? A bullet. The outage hit cities all across the state, including Dallas, Irving, Plano, Arlington, Austin, and San Antonio. The outage affected Spectrum customers and took down their phone lines and TV services as well as the internet.
“Right in the middle of my meetings 😒,” one users said on the r/Spectrum subreddit. Around 25,000 customers were without services for several hours as the company rushed to repair the lines. As the service came back,, WFAA reported that the cause of the outage came from the barrel of a gun. A stray bullet had hit a line of fiber optic cable and knocked tens of thousands of people offline.
“The outage stemmed from a fiber optic cable that was damaged by a stray bullet,” Spectrum told 404 Media. “Our teams worked quickly to make the necessary repairs and get customers back online. We apologize for the inconvenience.”
Spectrum told 404 Media that it didn’t have any further details to share about the incident so we have no idea how the company learned a bullet hit its equipment, where the bullet was found, and if the police are involved. Texas is a massive state with overlapping police jurisdictions and a lot of guns. Finding a specific shooting incident related to telecom equipment in the vast suburban sprawl around Dallas is probably impossible.
Fiber optic cable lines are often buried underground, protected from the vagaries of southern gunfire. But that’s not always the case, fiber can be strung along telephone poles in the sky and sent to a vast and complicated network junction boxes and service stations that overlap different municipalities and cities, each with their own laws about how the cable can be installed. That can leave pieces of the physical infrastructure of the internet exposed to gunfire and other mischief.
This is not the first time gunfire has taken down the internet. In 2022, Xfinity fiber cable in Oakland, California went offline after people allegedly fired 17 rounds into the air near one of the company’s fiber lines. Around 30,000 people were offline during that outage and it happened moments before the start of an NFL game that saw the Los Angeles Rams square off against the San Francisco 49ers.
“We could not be more apologetic and sincerely upset that this is happening on a day like today,” Comcast spokesperson Joan Hammel told Dater Center Dynamics at the time. Hammel added that the company has seen gunshot wounds on its equipment before. “While this isn’t completely uncommon, it is pretty rare, but we know it when we see it.”
Landlords are using a service that logs into a potential renter’s employer systems and scrapes their paystubs and other information en masse, potentially in violation of U.S. hacking laws, according to screenshots of the tool shared with 404 Media.
The screenshots highlight the intrusive methods some landlords use when screening potential tenants, taking information they may not need, or legally be entitled to, to assess a renter.
“This is a statewide consumer-finance abuse that forces renters to surrender payroll and bank logins or face homelessness,” one renter who was forced to use the tool and who saw it taking more data than was necessary for their apartment application told 404 Media. 404 Media granted the person anonymity to protect them from retaliation from their landlord or the services used.
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Do you know anything else about any of these companies or the technology landlords are using? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at joseph.404 or send me an email at joseph@404media.co.
For years, Customs and Border Protection agents have been quietly harvesting DNA from American citizens, including minors, and funneling the samples into an FBI crime database, government data shows. This expansion of genetic surveillance was never authorized by Congress for citizens, children, or civil detainees.
According to newly released government data analyzed by Georgetown Law’s Center on Privacy & Technology, the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees CBP, collected the DNA of nearly 2,000 US citizens between 2020 and 2024 and had it sent to CODIS, the FBI’s nationwide system for policing investigations. An estimated 95 were minors, some as young as 14. The entries also include travelers never charged with a crime and dozens of cases where agents left the “charges” field blank. In other files, officers invoked civil penalties as justification for swabs that federal law reserves for criminal arrests.
The findings appear to point to a program running outside the bounds of statute or oversight, experts say, with CBP officers exercising broad discretion to capture genetic material from Americans and have it funneled into a law-enforcement database designed in part for convicted offenders. Critics warn that anyone added to the database could endure heightened scrutiny by US law enforcement for life.
“Those spreadsheets tell a chilling story,” Stevie Glaberson, director of research and advocacy at Georgetown’s Center on Privacy & Technology, tells WIRED. “They show DNA taken from people as young as 4 and as old as 93—and, as our new analysis found, they also show CBP flagrantly violating the law by taking DNA from citizens without justification.”
DHS did not respond to a request for comment.
For more than two decades, the FBI’s Combined DNA Index System, or CODIS, has been billed as a tool for violent crime investigations. But under both recent policy changes and the Trump administration’s immigration agenda, the system has become a catchall repository for genetic material collected far outside the criminal justice system.
One of the sharpest revelations came from DHS data released earlier this year showing that CBP and Immigrations and Customs Enforcement have been systematically funneling cheek swabs from immigrants—and, in many cases, US citizens—into CODIS. What was once a program aimed at convicted offenders now sweeps in children at the border, families questioned at airports, and people held on civil—not criminal—grounds. WIRED previously reported that DNA from minors as young as 4 had ended up in the FBI’s database, alongside elderly people in their 90s, with little indication of how or why the samples were taken.
The scale is staggering. According to Georgetown researchers, DHS has contributed roughly 2.6 million profiles to CODIS since 2020—far above earlier projections and a surge that has reshaped the database. By December 2024, CODIS’s “detainee” index contained over 2.3 million profiles; by April 2025, the figure had already climbed to more than 2.6 million. Nearly all of these samples—97 percent—were collected under civil, not criminal, authority. At the current pace, according to Georgetown Law’s estimates, which are based on DHS projections, Homeland Security files alone could account for one-third of CODIS by 2034.
The expansion has been driven by specific legal and bureaucratic levers. Foremost was an April 2020 Justice Department rule that revoked a long-standing waiver allowing DHS to skip DNA collection from immigration detainees, effectively green-lighting mass sampling. Later that summer, the FBI signed off on rules that let police booking stations run arrestee cheek swabs through Rapid DNA machines—automated devices that can spit out CODIS-ready profiles in under two hours.
The strain of the changes became apparent in subsequent years. Former FBI director Christopher Wray warned during Senate testimony in 2023 that the flood of DNA samples from DHS threatened to overwhelm the bureau’s systems. The 2020 rule change, he said, had pushed the FBI from a historic average of a few thousand monthly submissions to 92,000 per month—over 10 times its traditional intake. The surge, he cautioned, had created a backlog of roughly 650,000 unprocessed kits, raising the risk that people detained by DHS could be released before DNA checks produced investigative leads.
Under Trump’s renewed executive order on border enforcement, signed in January 2025, DHS agencies were instructed to deploy “any available technologies” to verify family ties and identity, a directive that explicitly covers genetic testing. This month, federal officials announced they were soliciting new bids to install Rapid DNA at local booking facilities around the country, with combined awards of up to $3 million available.
“The Department of Homeland Security has been piloting a secret DNA collection program of American citizens since 2020. Now, the training wheels have come off,” said Anthony Enriquez, vice president of advocacy at Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights. “In 2025, Congress handed DHS a $178 billion check, making it the nation’s costliest law enforcement agency, even as the president gutted its civil rights watchdogs and the Supreme Court repeatedly signed off on unconstitutional tactics.”
Oversight bodies and lawmakers have raised alarms about the program. As early as 2021, the DHS inspector general found the department lacked central oversight of DNA collection and that years of noncompliance can undermine public safety—echoing an earlier rebuke from the Office of Special Counsel, which called CBP’s failures an “unacceptable dereliction.”
US Senator Ron Wyden (D-Kans.) more recently pressed DHS and DOJ for explanations about why children’s DNA is being captured and whether CODIS has any mechanism to reject improperly obtained samples, saying the program was never intended to collect and permanently retain the DNA of all noncitizens, warning the children are likely to be “treated by law enforcement as suspects for every investigation of every future crime, indefinitely.”
Rights advocates allege that CBP’s DNA collection program has morphed into a sweeping genetic surveillance regime, with samples from migrants and even US citizens fed into criminal databases absent transparency, legal safeguards, or limits on retention. Georgetown’s privacy center points out that once DHS creates and uploads a CODIS profile, the government retains the physical DNA sample indefinitely, with no procedure to revisit or remove profiles when the legality of the detention is in doubt.
In parallel, Georgetown and allied groups have sued DHS over its refusal to fully release records about the program, highlighting how little the public knows about how DNA is being used, stored, or shared once it enters CODIS.
Taken together, these revelations may suggest a quiet repurposing of CODIS. A system long described as a forensic breakthrough is being remade into a surveillance archive—sweeping up immigrants, travelers, and US citizens alike, with few checks on the agents deciding whose DNA ends up in the federal government’s most intimate database.
“There’s much we still don’t know about DHS’s DNA collection activities,” Georgetown’s Glaberson says. “We’ve had to sue the agencies just to get them to do their statutory duty, and even then they’ve flouted court orders. The public has a right to know what its government is up to, and we’ll keep fighting to bring this program into the light.”
In 2014, University of California, Berkeley biologist Robert Dudley wrote a book called The Drunken Monkey: Why We Drink and Abuse Alcohol. His controversial "drunken monkey hypothesis" proposed that the human attraction to alcohol goes back about 18 million years, to the origin of the great apes, and that social communication and sharing food evolved to better identify the presence of fruit from a distance. At the time, skeptical scientists insisted that this was unlikely because chimpanzees and other primates just don't eat fermented fruit or nectar.
But reports of primates doing just that have grown over the ensuing two decades. Dudley co-authored a new paper published in the journal Science Advances reporting the first measurements of the ethanol content of fruits favored by chimps in Ivory Coast and Uganda, finding that the chimps are consuming 14 grams of alcohol every day, the equivalent of a standard alcoholic drink in the US. After adjusting for the chimps' lower body mass, the authors concluded the chimps are consuming nearly two drinks per day.
Earlier this year, we reported that researchers had caught wild chimpanzees on camera engaging in what appears to be sharing fermented African breadfruit with measurable alcoholic content. That observational data was the first evidence of the sharing of alcoholic foods among nonhuman great apes in the wild. They recorded 10 instances of selective fruit sharing among 17 chimps, with the animals exhibiting a marked preference for riper fruit. Between April and July 2022, the authors measured the alcohol content of the fruit with a handy portable breathalyzer and found almost all of the fallen fruit (90 percent) contained some ethanol, with the ripest containing the highest levels—the equivalent of 0.61 percent ABV (alcohol by volume).
That's comparatively low to alcoholic drinks typically consumed by humans, but then again, fruit accounts for as much as 60 to 80 percent of the chimps' diet, so the amount of ethanol consumed could add up quickly. It's highly unlikely the chimps would get drunk, however. It wouldn't confer any evolutionary advantage, and, according to the authors, there is evidence in the common ancestor of African apes of a molecular mechanism that enhances the ability to metabolize alcohol.
Nearly two drinks a day
This latest study involved chimp populations at the Ngogo Chimpanzee Project (Uganda) and a second site at Tai (Ivory Coast), where scientists have estimated the animals consume between 5 to 10 percent of their body weight (about 40 kilos) in fruit each day—around 45 kilograms. The authors collected fallen fruit pulp samples from both sites, packed them in airtight containers, and froze them back at base camp to keep the fruit from ripening further.
Then they quantified the ethanol concentrations using a breathalyzer, a portable gas chromatograph, and chemical testing. The Uganda fruit contained 0.32 percent ethanol, while the Ivory Coast fruit contained 0.31 percent ethanol, which might not sound like much until you consider just how much fruit they eat. And the most frequently consumed fruit at both sites had the highest ethanol content.
If anything, this is a conservative estimate, per Dudley. "If the chimps are randomly sampling ripe fruit, then that's going to be their average consumption rate, independent of any preference for ethanol," he said. "But if they are preferring riper and/or more sugar-rich fruits, then this is a conservative lower limit for the likely rate of ethanol ingestion." That's in keeping with a 2016 report that captive aye-ayes and slow lorises prefer nectar with the highest alcohol content.
“Our findings imply that our ancestors were similarly chronically exposed to dietary alcohol,” co-author Aleksey Maro, a graduate student at UC Berkeley, told New Scientist. “The drunken monkey hypothesis suggests that this exposure caused our species to evolve an association between alcohol consumption and the reward of finding fruit sugars, and explains human attraction to alcohol today.” One caveat is that apes ingest ethanol accidentally, while humans drink it deliberately.
"What we're realizing from this work is that our relationship with alcohol goes deep back into evolutionary time, probably about 30 million years," University of St. Andrews primatologist Catherine Hobaiter, who was not involved with the study, told BBC News. "Maybe for chimpanzees, this is a great way to create social bonds, to hang out together on the forest floor, eating those fallen fruits."
The next step is to sample the chimps' urine to see if it contains any alcohol metabolites, as was found in a 2022 study on spider monkeys. This will further refine estimates for how much ethanol-laden fruit the chimps eat every day. Maro spent this summer in Ngogo, sleeping in trees—protected from the constant streams by an umbrella—to collect urine samples.
After the Sept. 10, 2025, assassination of conservative political activist Charlie Kirk, President Donald Trump claimed that radical leftist groups foment political violence in the US, and “they should be put in jail.”
“The radical left causes tremendous violence,” he said, asserting that “they seem to do it in a bigger way” than groups on the right.
Top presidential adviser Stephen Miller also weighed in after Kirk’s killing, saying that left-wing political organizations constitute “a vast domestic terror movement.”
“We are going to use every resource we have… throughout this government to identify, disrupt, dismantle, and destroy these networks and make America safe again,” Miller said.
But policymakers and the public need reliable evidence and actual data to understand the reality of politically motivated violence. From our research on extremism, it’s clear that the president’s and Miller’s assertions about political violence from the left are not based on actual facts.
Based on ourown research and a review of related work, we can confidently say that most domestic terrorists in the US are politically on the right, and right-wing attacks account for the vast majority of fatalities from domestic terrorism.
Political violence rising
The understanding of political violence is complicated by differences in definitions and the recent Department of Justice removal of an important government-sponsored study of domestic terrorists.
This follows other politically motivated killings, including the June assassination of Democratic Minnesota state Rep. and former House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband.
These incidents reflect a normalization of political violence. Threats and violence are increasingly treated as acceptable for achieving political goals, posing serious risks to democracy and society.
But different agencies and researchers use different definitions of political violence, making comparisons difficult.
Domestic violent extremism is defined by the FBI and Department of Homeland Security as violence or credible threats of violence intended to influence government policy or intimidate civilians for political or ideological purposes. This general framing, which includes diverse activities under a single category, guides investigations and prosecutions. The FBI and DHS do not investigate people in the US for constitutionally protected speech, activism, or ideological beliefs.
Datasets compiled by academic researchers use narrower and more operational definitions. The Global Terrorism Database counts incidents that involve intentional violence with political, social, or religious motivation.
These differences mean that the same incident may or may not appear in a dataset, depending on the rules applied.
The FBI and Department of Homeland Security emphasize that these distinctions are not merely academic. Labeling an event “terrorism” rather than a “hate crime” can change who is responsible for investigating an incident and how many resources they have to investigate it.
Right-wing extremist violence has been deadlier than left-wing violence in recent years.
Based ongovernment and independent analyses, right-wing extremist violence has been responsible for the overwhelming majority of fatalities, amounting to approximately 75 to 80 percent of US domestic terrorism deaths since 2001.
By contrast, left-wing extremist incidents, including those tied to anarchist or environmental movements, have made up about 10 to 15 percent of incidents and less than 5 percent of fatalities.
There’s another reason it’s hard to account for and characterize certain kinds of political violence and those who perpetrate it.
The US focuses on prosecuting criminal acts rather than formally designating organizations as terrorist, relying on existing statutes such as conspiracy, weapons violations, RICO provisions, and hate crime laws to pursue individuals for specific acts of violence.
The State Department’s Foreign Terrorist Organization list applies only to groups outside of the United States. By contrast, US law bars the government from labeling domestic political organizations as terrorist entities because of First Amendment free speech protections.
Rhetoric is not evidence
Without harmonized reporting and uniform definitions, the data will not provide an accurate overview of political violence in the US.
But we can make some important conclusions.
Politically motivated violence in the US is rare compared with overall violent crime. Political violence has a disproportionate impact because even rare incidents can amplify fear, influence policy, and deepen societal polarization.
Trump and members of his administration are threatening to target whole organizations and movements and the people who work in them with aggressive legal measures—to jail them or scrutinize their favorable tax status. But research shows that the majority of political violence comes from people following right-wing ideologies.
I met Tsutomu Matano, the renowned car designer known as one of the fathers of the Mazda MX-5 Miata, in San Francisco just over a year ago. You may know him as Tom. It was June 2024, and I was at a Mazda event with my husband, driving a new Miata from the ND3 generation. My friend Jake Stumph, a Miata enthusiast and Mazda representative who hosted a small group to drive the ND3, invited Tom to have dinner with us. The group was about eight people, and we’d all been around each other for about a day — thus, we had a casual rapport. If someone new gets introduced to a group like that, I plan ways to make sure they’re included in the conversation. When I heard Tom was on the way, I did that for him too.
When Tom arrived, I realized my plans were for nothing. He walked into the restaurant with a huge smile and pencil-straight posture, commanding the table and making everyone laugh. Unlike most people, he didn’t need help in an unfamiliar group. He was a star in every sky.
Tom was born in Japan in October 1947. He spent his life and career all over the world, including large portions in the United States. Among so many other things, Tom is renowned for his design work on the original Miata and the FD-generation Mazda RX-7, both of which remain staples of car culture and the automotive industry. He had both in his garage at home.
The Miata Concept
Photo Courtesy Of Tsutomu Matano
But Tom’s work on the Miata went far past the design of the car. He studied the American market to create the perfect sports car for it, setting the Miata’s tone and personality to become what it is today: one of the biggest icons in the automotive industry. His pillars of the car included, as quoted from his 1986 “Miata Concept” document:
“I would like to see that Mazda’s image for the ‘90s, starting from the [Miata], will be recognized as a quality car that has great, fun-to-drive personality and has a cheerful character.”
“Various activities such as club members’ picnics and sporting events using the [Miata] help form camaraderie. The United States is an individualistic country, but making friends through hobbies is very common and the bond of friendship is tight. It is a fun and affluent society.”
“One of the important issues for strategies is controlling prices of used [Miatas]. It is necessary to have a substantial number of accessories and repair parts that the second owners are able to use to customize their vehicles.”
“It is very common to see vehicles 10 to 20 years old in the United States. If you stand on the corner of the street for one hour, you can see Mazda’s history (successive vehicles). Instead of making vehicles change for the sake of change, such as all new or something new, the continuity of Mazda philosophy, Mazda design and Mazda engineering policy has to be seen in all of Mazda’s products. Avoid thoughtless changes, and be patient.”
“If you can accept vehicles as an object of religion, you will be able to understand and love sports cars.”
Photo: Alanis King
One of my favorite Tom quotes, from another document called “Inspired Sensations,” was a blueprint for the Miata’s product strategy. It said: “The customer takes the car home, and, of course, takes the family for a ride, shows it to their neighbors and friends. Just before retiring to bed, you stop for one last look, and say ‘goodnight’ to the car, or maybe even sit in the car one last time.”
Tom will always be known for his career achievements and contributions to the automotive industry, and I’m sure you’ll hear a lot about that in the coming days and weeks. But Tom was so much more than his automotive talents, so I want to tell you some of the beautiful things I learned about him in our year of friendship.
Lasting Impressions
The first night I met Tom, I was wearing a bright-turquoise vintage jacket from Leyton House, a Formula One sponsor and team from the 1980s and ‘90s. The Leyton House racing brand failed spectacularly when its boss, Akira Akagi, got arrested in connection with “questionable loans” from Japan’s Fuji Bank circa 1991.
Tom couldn’t believe I knew what Leyton House was, let alone the details of its failures. We spent the rest of the night sitting at a table on a sidewalk, eating ice cream and bonding over our similarities. Tom told me he liked a specific wristwatch so much, he bought a ton of them in case one broke. I told him I liked my 17-year-old shoes so much, I’ve glued them back together at least 10 times. We bonded over how we go to restaurants and order the same dish again and again, because we know what we like. We laughed all night.
Later that weekend, I saw Tom at a fancy car show, where he wore his usual outfit for those outings: a nice coat and a tie with Miatas all over it. He hugged me with a big grin and even bigger squeeze. That big squeeze was a Tom staple, communicating his love and joy to see people better than words ever could.
Photo: Alanis King
We exchanged contact information, as people often do, but I didn’t expect to hear from Tom so often or so quickly. He was a big deal, after all — a famous designer with an assistant and adoring fans. I was one (loud and silly) woman in a sea of people.
But Tom had a fierce desire to connect with people and to love them. That weekend, he sent me an email titled “For your flight home” that contained his original planning documents for the Miata (part of which is quoted above). And from that point forward, he sent me every object, car, or photo he saw with Leyton House turquoise in it, so we could decide if it was “Leyton House” enough. He’d caption the texts:
“Too green, but pretty.”
“A little blue.”
“Very close.”
Photo Courtesy Of Tsutomu Matano
Tom and I talked about everything. He strongly believed that cars should make you look back at them after you park, due to their design and their sentimentality. A few weeks ago, I sent him a photo of my Miata to tell him I always look back at it.
“Lasting impressions,” he said.
“Always,” I responded.
Knowing Cars Means Knowing People
Photo: Alanis King
Tom had an incredible ability to study people and society, then turn those studies into automotive design and product planning. His studies of American culture — how we’re an individualistic society but form friend groups through hobbies, clubs, and shared interests, like car models — were the basis of his strategy for the Miata. His 1986 Miata Concept document planned the Miata’s exact trajectory from debut through the year 1999 (and he sent me the shortened version!). All of Tom’s years-out predictions and plans for the car, including how it would be seen from a market and sentimental perspective, were exactly right. He knew his car and his audience better than most people know themselves.
Tom kept meticulous documentation of his life, digitally scanning and archiving everything from childhood and young-adulthood photos to an old paper letter he received as blackmail from a guy claiming to be the “true designer of the Miata.” Tom once showed me a pre-smartphone photo he took on a digital camera, which was him in a mirror with a plank of wood strapped to his back because he injured it. He loved simple solutions — in this case, forced spinal posture by 2×4 — and he told me: “That was the best night of sleep I ever got.”
Tom was mischievous, always plotting little jokes and harmless pranks. One time, when we were snacking at the bar of a nice hotel with some friends, Tom told us about the time he got personally invited to the White House. He wanted souvenirs for loved ones, and when he went to the bathroom, he noticed the disposable hand towels had fancy presidential seals on them. He grabbed the whole stack and stuffed them in his pocket, then went back later that day when the staff restocked them and did it again.
Photo: Alanis King
After Tom told this story, he got up and walked away. I figured it was a bathroom break he forgot to announce. He came back a few minutes later with a giant stack of fancy disposable hand towels from the hotel bathroom, passing them out and putting a final punchline on his story. We all signed a towel, and I took it home.
My Last Visit With Tom
Tom loved plotting things like that. But if you plotted things back — like when I flew to California a few weeks ago to surprise him with gifts and company — he’d point at you and scrunch his face with a little smile, shocked but secretly thrilled you got away with the same mischief he loved to pull.
Photo: Alanis King
Tom loved Italian food and bread. He had a better memory of the 1980s than I do of last week. He liked to read the first few chapters of a murder-mystery novel, guess the killer, skip to the end and see if he was right, then finish reading the book to see how the author dropped hints about the guilty party.
He signed everything with “Always Inspired – T. Matano,” and he was, truly, always inspired. He always joked about the quality of his English writing, but I told him there was no need to joke because his writing was beautiful. I meant it. He loved Hallmark movies, no matter how bad they were, because they gave him a nice happy cry at the end. When I told him I was looking at a Leyton House-themed kei truck in Japan once, he told me to call him if I bought it, and he’d park it at his house there until he could connect me with someone to import it. When he would hang up the phone, despite knowing me for such a short time, he’d say: “Okay, love you, bye!” Even if he felt ill or unwell, you couldn’t tell, because he was always so happy and positive. When I visited Tom last, he’d set up his laptop and desk in the garage so he could be with his Miata all day.
Tom loved the Miata, and the Miata was where he wanted to be — so that’s where we spent the day. It meant the world. He showed me photos from the time he grew his hair out in his 20s, and he said that as soon as he saw his grandmother, she couldn’t believe the sight of him and gave him money to get it cut. I told him he looked very California surfer, and I liked it.
Photo Courtesy Of Tsutomu Matano
Tom meant so much to me. We met when I was 28 and he was 76, and we formed one of the best relationships I will ever have, all because of his fierce pursuit of love and friendship. Tom spent his life and career surrounded by the coolest people in the world, including himself, yet he still put in so much effort to get to know me. He was one of the most special people I will ever know, and I’ll miss him for the rest of my life.
Tom loved life. He loved people. He loved teaching his skills. He loved cars. And he loved his Miata. If I can tell you to do one thing, it’s this: Live your life as if it’s short, because it is. Find peace and joy every day. Call people and tell them you love them, even if you haven’t known them very long. Fiercely pursue happiness and relationships and the things that bring you a sense of purpose. And please, enjoy your cars. Put the top down if you can. One day, whether it’s sooner or later, you won’t have the ability to drive them anymore. That’s sad, but it’s also a reminder of how happy they make you. Do this with everything and everyone you love.
Grief is love, and I loved Tom. I always will. I hope I can love people as well as he loved me.
Thank you for listening, and I hope you remain Always Inspired. Tom would want that.
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Tom kept meticulous documentation of his life, digitally scanning and archiving everything from childhood and young-adulthood photos to an old paper letter he received as blackmail from a guy claiming to be the “true designer of the Miata.” Tom once showed me a pre-smartphone photo he took on a digital camera, which was him in a mirror with a plank of wood strapped to his back because he injured it. He loved simple solutions — in this case, forced spinal posture by 2×4 — and he told me: “That was the best night of sleep I ever got.”
