On May 4, 1944, at 20,000 feet above the plains of Kansas, a 25-year-old woman crawled through a cramped pressurized tunnel suspended over an open bomb bay and climbed into the cockpit of the most advanced bomber on Earth. Her name was Mildred “Micky” Axton. In that moment, she became the first woman known to fly the B-29 Superfortress—the aircraft that would later play a decisive role in ending World War II. Yet for decades, almost nobody knew her story. The B-29 was far more than a military airplane. It was one of the most secret projects of the war. Massive, technologically revolutionary, and heavily guarded, the bomber was so classified that workers were discouraged from discussing it even with family members. Access was restricted, and every detail was protected. Micky was never expected to be part of that world. In 1943, she joined the Women Airforce Service Pilots, better known as the WASPs. These women ferried military aircraft across the country, transported supplies, towed targets for live-fire exercises, and tested newly built planes before they entered service. The work was not combat duty, but it carried serious risks. After months of demanding training, Micky graduated and became a test pilot. She evaluated aircraft ranging from B-25s to B-26s and eventually worked with the B-29 program. While many pilots worried about flying experimental or troublesome aircraft, Micky willingly accepted the challenge. Someone had to fly them. Only weeks after joining Boeing in Wichita as a flight test engineer, she found herself aboard “Sweet Sixteen,” the sixteenth B-29 ever produced. During a routine flight, she was monitoring engine performance when an unexpected invitation arrived through the intercom. The chief engineer asked a simple question: “How would you like to fly it?” Micky didn't hesitate. She secured her parachute and carefully crawled through the narrow tunnel running above the bomb bay. Emerging on the other side, she entered the cockpit and settled into the pilot's seat. For roughly twenty minutes, she controlled the giant bomber herself. She banked the aircraft, adjusted power settings, and felt the response of a machine that represented the cutting edge of wartime aviation. It was a historic moment. Yet she could tell almost no one. The entire flight remained classified. The chief engineer documented the event in a letter, but the record was tucked away and largely forgotten. What should have been front-page news became a secret known only to a handful of people. The story of the WASPs followed a similar path. More than 1,000 women served in the program, flying millions of miles in dozens of aircraft types. They performed essential duties that freed male pilots for combat assignments. Thirty-eight lost their lives while serving. Despite their contributions, they received no military benefits, no official recognition, and no veteran status. When a WASP died, fellow pilots often collected money among themselves to help return her body home. In December 1944, the program was dissolved. The women who had proven their skill and courage were sent home, and for decades their service remained largely overlooked. Official recognition did not arrive until 1977, when legislation finally granted WASPs veteran status. By then, Micky was already 60 years old. She had returned to civilian life, teaching biology, science, and aeronautics in Wichita schools. She inspired generations of students, shared her passion for aviation, and quietly preserved the history of a program many Americans had forgotten. Then, decades later, the secret resurfaced. In 2006, Boeing publicly shared her story, and the long-hidden letter confirming her B-29 flight became widely known. More than sixty years after the event, the world finally learned that a young woman from Kansas had been the first female pilot to fly one of history's most famous bombers. Recognition continued to arrive. In 2009, a restored PT-19 training aircraft was dedicated in her honor and named “Miss Micky.” When asked what artwork should appear on the aircraft, she responded with characteristic humor, requesting a flattering swimsuit image. The aircraft still carries that tribute today. That same year, legislation was signed awarding the WASPs the Congressional Gold Medal, one of the highest honors bestowed by Congress. Sadly, Micky did not live to attend the ceremony. She passed away on February 6, 2010, at the age of 91. The medal presentation took place just over a month later, and her family accepted the honor on her behalf. Mildred Axton never flew combat missions and never dropped a bomb. Her legacy was something different. On that day in 1944, she challenged the belief that certain cockpits belonged only to men. By taking the controls of the B-29, she demonstrated that skill, courage, and determination are not limited by gender. For the rest of her life, she carried that lesson into classrooms, airfields, and conversations with young people who dreamed of reaching beyond the boundaries others set for them. The recognition may have arrived decades late. But the path she helped open has remained open ever since.

"You make a rough version of the movie seven or eight times before you go to final animation." A behind the scenes look at how Pixar makes its movies: "When I got there, I was like, what's the secret sauce? Is it the people or is it the system? After about six months, I realized it's really both." "I wrote the first draft of Toy Story 3. We made what they call a set of reels, which is a rough animatic of the movie. And then based on the feedback that we got to that, I wrote another ten more drafts, and then we made a second set of reels." "What's great about the Pixar system is that you write, and then you direct, and then you edit...There's a way that you beta test your story." "It's sort of a series of concentric rings. So the first set of reels, which is usually pretty terrible, you show to twenty, twenty five, 30 people. And then you always wanna preserve fresh eyes." "By the time you get up to your seventh or eighth screening, you're showing it to everybody and his grandmother that you can pull in." -Michael Arndt (Toy Story 3 Writer)

The Secret Scent That Comes Straight From the Source “Boss, It smells like… Let’s put it into a toy!” Dogs live in a world of smell that humans can barely imagine. What we experience as a vague “doggy” odor, they read like a detailed biography: who was here, how healthy they were, what mood they were in, and whether they were available for company. One of the richest chapters in that olfactory novel is written by a pair of small glands most owners would rather not think about too hard. The original social media of the dog world Anal glands (or anal sacs) sit at roughly the 4 o’clock and 8 o’clock positions around a dog’s rear end. These little pouches produce a pungent, oily fluid packed with volatile compounds that act as a chemical ID card. When a dog poops, a small amount is usually squeezed out and deposited with the stool. Other dogs can then “read” it and learn a surprising amount of information. The fluid is not subtle. It contains short-chain fatty acids, trimethylamine, and other compounds that, to the human nose, range from “interesting” to “please open a window.” To a dog, it is pure data. It is also one of the reasons dogs are so intensely interested in each other’s butts. They are not being rude. They are checking LinkedIn. Enter the patent that went straight to the source In 2016, an inventor named Glen Sica of Yorktown Heights, New York, decided that if dogs find this scent so compelling, perhaps toys should too. He filed a patent application for a “Scented Pet Toy” that is infused with a synthetic version of the primary chemical compounds found in dog anal glands. The patent language itself is almost gleeful. It opens by declaring that the invention “goes directly to the butt of the matter so to speak.” The goal, it explains, is to provide “that irresistible and natural scent that attracts all dogs around the planet, the scent that originates from the anal glands of dogs.” The listed chemicals form a cocktail that includes acetic acid, propionic acid, isobutyric acid, n-butyric acid, iso-valeric acid, various methylbutyric acids, n-valeric acid, and trimethylamine, among others. In the preferred version of the invention, the scent is concentrated in the “butt” area of the toy. Some versions even allow for replaceable scent capsules so the magic can be refreshed when it fades. In short: someone looked at the most distinctive smell a dog produces and thought, “We should put that in a toy.” Why this is less crazy than it sounds From a dog’s perspective, the idea is almost elegant. Food scents (bacon, peanut butter, chicken) work because they trigger appetite. Prey-like squeaks work because they trigger the hunting sequence. Anal-gland compounds work because they trigger pure social curiosity and recognition. They say, in chemical form, “This object has been claimed by a dog” or “This is interesting dog-related information.” Whether the patented formula ever became a commercial hit is less clear. What is clear is that the thinking behind it is sound. Dogs do not fall in love with toys primarily because of color or brand logos. They fall in love with them because of how they smell, how they feel in the mouth, and the emotional associations that form around them. Scent is the fastest route into that process. The larger lesson The next time your dog carefully investigates a new toy with intense concentration, remember that she is reading a story written in molecules. And somewhere in the patent archives sits a document that tried, quite literally, to bottle the most intimate chapter of that story and sew it into a stuffed animal. It is equal parts science, commerce, and pure audacity. And it may be the most honest admission ever made about how dogs actually experience the world: if you want their full attention, sometimes you have to go straight to the source.

To mark Apple's 50th anniversary, Tim Cook walked WSJ inside a secret archive of prototypes and early hardware. Watch the new video to see the story of five decades in one room—including tech Cook himself had never seen.

Elouise Cobell and the Missing Money The land was generating wealth everywhere you looked. Oil wells pumped day and night. Ranchers grazed cattle across leased fields. Companies paid royalties, rent, and fees to use Native American land. Yet many of the Native families who owned that land were receiving checks so small they hardly seemed believable. Elouise Cobell looked at those two realities and asked a question that would challenge the United States government for more than fifteen years: Where did the money go? At first glance, Cobell did not appear to be someone preparing for a historic legal battle. She was a mother, a grandmother, and a proud member of the Blackfeet Nation in Montana. She was also highly skilled with numbers. After serving as treasurer of the Blackfeet Tribe, she helped establish the Blackfeet National Bank, one of the first tribally owned banks in the United States. She understood how money should flow when land is productive. For decades, the federal government had managed millions of acres of Native American trust land. While Native Americans remained the rightful owners, federal agencies oversaw many of the leases involving oil companies, ranchers, mining operations, and other businesses. Those businesses paid for access to the land. The government collected those payments and was supposed to distribute the money to the Native landowners. The process sounded straightforward. What Cobell discovered was anything but. She saw active oil production on tribal lands. She saw livestock grazing on leased property. She knew businesses were earning profits from land owned by Native families. Yet many of those families continued to live in poverty. Some struggled to afford basic necessities. Others received payments that seemed impossible when compared with the economic activity taking place on their land. The numbers simply did not add up. Cobell knew that oil generated revenue. Leases generated revenue. Royalties generated revenue. If money was being collected, there should have been records showing exactly where every dollar went. So she began asking for answers. The explanations she received only raised more concerns. Federal officials said the trust system was extremely complicated. Ownership interests had been divided among generations of descendants. Records stretched back decades. Tracking every transaction would be difficult. Cobell was not satisfied. She wanted to see the books. As she dug deeper, she discovered problems far beyond bureaucratic complexity. Records were incomplete. Accounts had been mixed together. Payments could not always be traced. Important documents had disappeared. Some records had been destroyed altogether, while others had deteriorated after years of poor storage conditions involving water damage, mold, and even rodents. The government had managed Native trust funds for generations, yet it could not provide a complete accounting of where all the money had gone. Initially, Cobell tried to push for reform from within the system. She asked questions. She requested records. She pressed officials for explanations. Progress was slow, and accountability seemed even slower. Eventually, she concluded that asking politely was no longer enough. In 1996, she filed a lawsuit against the United States government. The case became known as Cobell v. Babbitt. It was brought on behalf of hundreds of thousands of Native Americans whose Individual Indian Money accounts had been managed by federal agencies. This was not a dispute over a single payment. It was not about one lease or one accounting mistake. The lawsuit challenged the entire system responsible for managing Native trust funds. The government resisted. Attorneys disputed claims, challenged rulings, and argued that reconstructing decades of financial history would be enormously difficult. But Cobell refused to back down. Again and again, she traveled from Montana to Washington, D.C., attending hearings, depositions, negotiations, and court proceedings. She returned with the same demand every time: Show the accounting. As the case progressed, federal judges grew increasingly critical of how the trust accounts had been handled. The courts identified major failures in recordkeeping and management. At various stages of the litigation, senior Interior Department officials were held in contempt during disputes involving court orders and government records. Still, the case dragged on. Presidential administrations came and went. Cabinet officials changed. Government leaders rotated in and out of office. Cobell remained. The lawsuit continued through the Clinton administration, through the Bush administration, and into the Obama administration. More than a decade after filing the case, she was still fighting for answers. Then, in 2009, a breakthrough finally arrived. The Obama administration announced a settlement worth $3.4 billion. The agreement included compensation for Native American trust beneficiaries, funding to address issues involving fractionated land ownership, and financial support for educational scholarships benefiting Native students. Congress approved the settlement in 2010, and President Barack Obama signed it into law. For years, the government had argued that the accounting problem was simply too complex. Elouise Cobell spent fifteen years proving that complexity was not a valid excuse for avoiding accountability. Sadly, she would not live long to see the full impact of her victory. On October 16, 2011, Elouise Cobell died from cancer at the age of sixty-five. The settlement continued to be implemented after her death, and her legacy only grew stronger. The scholarship program established through the settlement would eventually bear her name. The case itself became one of the largest class-action settlements ever involving Native Americans and the federal government. Yet the most remarkable part of the story may be how it began. There were no leaked documents. No secret recordings. No dramatic whistleblower revealing hidden evidence. There was only a woman who understood how numbers worked. She looked at land producing oil. She watched cattle graze on leased property. She saw businesses earning money from Native-owned resources. Then she looked at Native families receiving almost nothing in return. The math did not make sense. Most people would have accepted the explanations and moved on. Elouise Cobell did not. She spent fifteen years forcing one of the most powerful governments on earth to answer a question that Native families had been asking for generations: Where is the money? And she kept asking until the government could no longer avoid the answer.

First Principles Ep. 6 with Shafi Goldwasser What if you could prove something is true without revealing why it’s true? Turing Award winner Shafi Goldwasser tells the origin story of zero-knowledge proofs: how a playful question about playing poker securely over the telephone led her, Silvio Micali, and Charles Rackoff to rethink what a mathematical proof could be. Goldwasser traces those ideas through interactive proofs, the sum-check protocol, SNARKs, and the systems now used to verify computation and preserve privacy on blockchains. She also reflects on why breakthrough ideas are often rejected at first, how toy problems can produce foundational theories, and whether AI systems should have to prove their answers. Hosted by @Tim_Roughgarden with @SuccinctJT 00:00 Intro 03:36 How mental poker inspired zero-knowledge proofs: Proving that something is true without revealing the underlying information 06:30 The simulation paradigm and the meaning of “zero knowledge” 08:33 Why the original paper was repeatedly rejected 10:33 How interactive proofs became more powerful than conventional proofs 13:36 The road to modern SNARKs 19:02 Why the sum-check protocol is so useful for verifiable computation 25:31 Why many so-called “zk proofs” are not actually zero knowledge 34:06 Why toy examples, playfulness, and narratives can produce deep theory 37:23 The role of rigor and computational assumptions in cryptography 42:44 Applying zero-knowledge proofs to law, evidence, and secret software 45:23 Training AI systems to provide proofs alongside their answers 54:27 Why genuinely new ideas are often difficult for experts to recognize

First Principles Ep. 6 with Ron Rivest Long before the internet became a place to bank, transact, or build blockchains, Turing Award winner Ron Rivest helped solve a foundational problem: how can strangers communicate securely without first meeting to exchange a secret? Rivest tells the story of inventing RSA with Adi Shamir and Leonard Adleman, why digital signatures fascinated him even more than encryption, and how cryptographic hashes, government pressure, patents, and standards shaped the security infrastructure we rely on today. Rivest shares his unusually candid views on quantum computing, post-quantum security, and more. Hosted by @Tim_Roughgarden with @danboneh. 00:00 Intro: the two problems that could break modern cryptography 01:10 Why Ron Rivest’s work underpins the internet and blockchains 08:10 Before public-key cryptography, there was no theory of security 11:05 The open problem that led to RSA 13:55 The night Ron Rivest discovered the core idea behind RSA 17:55 Why digital signatures were the real breakthrough 19:14 The RSA challenge — and a prediction that was off by quadrillions of years 28:33 How government pressure shaped cryptographic standards 30:36 Designing the hash functions that made digital signatures practical 33:26 The Fiat–Shamir transformation, explained 38:04 Building a cryptography company before the web existed 42:31 Will quantum computers ever become powerful enough to break RSA? 48:02 The cryptography securing the internet, elections, and everyday life 50:11 What surprised Dan: Quantum giveth and quantum taketh away

A Haitian-born formerly enslaved woman spent thirty years walking into New York slave markets with cash in her pocket, paying full price, and walking back out the door with signed manumission papers. Her name was Juliette Noel Toussaint. She was born into slavery in the French colony of Saint-Domingue — modern Haiti — around 1786. Her enslavers, the Noel family, fled the Haitian Revolution during the early 1790s and dragged their household slaves with them, first to Baltimore, then to New York. She was a housemaid, a cook, and a nanny before she was ten years old. She knew, better than almost anyone alive in the city of New York in the 1820s, exactly what it meant to be priced, appraised, and legally sold. Then, in 1811, she married a hairdresser. Pierre Toussaint had been born into slavery in Saint-Domingue in 1766. Brought to New York in 1787 by the Bérard family. Apprenticed as a hairdresser as a young man. By his mid-thirties he was the most sought-after hairdresser in the city, styling the hair of the wives of Alexander Hamilton, Philip Schuyler, and John Church at their Upper Manhattan estates. When his enslaver Madame Bérard died in 1807, he was freed. The first thing he did was buy Juliette's freedom out of the Noel household. They married at St. Peter's Catholic Church on August 5, 1811. They moved into a modest two-story wooden house on Franklin Street in lower Manhattan. Pierre worked at the estates six mornings a week. Juliette managed the household accounts. She decided where the money went. New York State had passed the Gradual Emancipation Act in 1799. It was a legal twilight zone. Children born to enslaved mothers after July 4, 1799 had to serve extended terms — twenty-eight years for men, twenty-five for women — before they were free. Enslavers who did not want to wait sold their people to Southern buyers who came up to the harbor docks, loaded them into ships, and hauled them to the cotton and sugar plantations of Louisiana and Mississippi. The market was legal. The paperwork was standard. The clock was running out. But the clock was still running. Juliette watched. She started intervening around 1815. She found people about to be sold South. She found families about to be broken up by a master's unpaid debts. She found Haitian refugees living on the docks near the East River, terrified of being seized by slave-catchers and shipped down the coast. The first time she walked into a transaction, she brought cash. She did not bargain. She did not plead. She placed the money on the table. The seller counted it. The seller signed the bill of sale. The moment the ink dried, Juliette signed a second document. A manumission paper. The property was now a person. She filed the manumission paper at the clerk's office at City Hall the same afternoon. She paid the small processing fee. She kept the receipt in a small wooden box in the back kitchen of the house on Franklin Street. She did this for the next thirty years. She kept no public ledger of the names of the people she bought. She wrote down no biographies. The less written evidence that existed, the safer they were from Southern slave-catchers who came north on legal warrants trying to reclaim "escaped property." The receipts were her only record. When the cholera epidemic swept through the lower wards in the summer of 1832, killing thirty-five hundred New Yorkers and leaving thousands of children orphaned, she pulled her savings again. She helped fund the first Catholic orphanage in the city — the St. Vincent de Paul asylum. Pierre opened their own home on Franklin Street to Black orphans nobody else would take. She paid for pews at the first St. Patrick's Cathedral on Mott Street. When she tried to sit in them one Sunday morning, the white ushers asked her to move to the back of the sanctuary. She moved. She kept funding the parish. She and Pierre took no vacations. They bought no larger house. They purchased no fine clothing. Pierre made enough money styling the hair of Manhattan's oldest aristocratic families to fund a small country estate in Westchester. Juliette decided instead to spend essentially all of it on other people's freedom. She died at the Franklin Street house on May 14, 1851, at approximately sixty-five years old. Pierre died in the same house two years and one month later, on June 30, 1853, at eighty-seven. The St. Vincent de Paul asylum they helped fund moved twice and merged into other institutions across the following century. The house on Franklin Street was torn down. The blocks of lower Manhattan where Juliette walked into slave markets with cash in her purse are now paved over by the skyscrapers of the Financial District. The New York Public Library holds Pierre Toussaint's papers today at the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street. Roughly twelve hundred documents dated 1793 to 1853. Hundreds of letters from people asking for money, for shelter, for sanctuary. Manumission receipts filed at City Hall between 1815 and 1849. The archive is cataloged under the title Pierre Toussaint papers. The husband's name only. The manumission receipts are still inside. Juliette Noel Toussaint: the woman who bought freedom in secret. If her story stayed with you, drop one word in the comments — Juliette, Franklin, freedom, anything that comes to mind. Tap the like button so more people find this story. The page is small. Every reaction helps us keep telling stories like this one.