P.S. We’re now breaking down the answers at the end of each edition, so you get a little more insight.

Helen Keller gets a weird rep in pop culture. Most people’s mental image is limited to the jokes they heard in middle school and a vague idea that she was blind and deaf and “overcame adversity.” Which is true. But what most people miss is that Helen Keller was not just a polite inspirational poster. She was a political stick of dynamite.

She learned to communicate in a world that assumed she never would. She graduated from Radcliffe College in 1904 when women barely got to vote on what color the drapes were in their own living rooms. She learned five languages. She was a published author, a socialist, an activist for workers’ rights, women’s rights, and civil rights. And when she saw something she thought was wrong, she didn’t write a polite letter. She launched a verbal missile.

Case in point: her response to Adolf Hitler in 1933.

It is May 1933 in Germany. Hitler has been Chancellor for only a few months, and the Nazis are doing what they do best: being cartoonishly evil. Their latest PR stunt was organizing massive bonfires to burn “un-German” books. These included works by Jewish authors, Marxists, pacifists, and basically anyone who thought Hitler might be a jerk.

Among the books tossed into the flames were some of Helen Keller’s own writings. And here’s the thing. She could have ignored it. She could have stayed in her lane as the “inspirational blind lady” the public liked to package her as. But Keller was not built for silence.

When Keller heard about the book burnings, she dictated a letter to the Nazi student group responsible. And it was not “Dear Sirs, I’m disappointed.” It was a verbal molotov cocktail.

She opened with a history lesson:

She dared them to think they could erase her:

She even reminded them that she had donated all royalties from her books to German soldiers blinded in World War I, not out of politics, but compassion:

And then she swung for the head with a moral haymaker:

This was not polite language. Keller wrote as if she could already see the whole Nazi experiment ending in disaster — which, spoiler alert, it did. She told them their actions would be judged by the world, and not kindly. She said she pitied them for being so afraid of ideas that they had to destroy them. She made it clear that truth had a funny way of surviving idiots with matches.

It is easy to forget just how dangerous it was to openly criticize the Nazis in 1933. The world was still figuring out what Hitler was. Most leaders outside Germany were trying to play nice. But Helen Keller, who could neither see nor hear the news like everyone else, understood exactly what was happening. She called it out immediately.

And she was not doing it for clout. This was 1933. There was no Twitter, no viral outrage cycle, no late-night comedy bit. She wrote the letter because she believed it was the right thing to do. Because she knew the cost of silence.

If this story was all you knew about Helen Keller, it would already make her a legend. But it was just one bullet point in a stacked career.

She campaigned for women’s suffrage when that was still treated as a joke. She was an outspoken socialist in America during the Red Scare. She fought for disability rights decades before that was even a phrase. She traveled to 35 countries promoting peace and equality.

And through it all, she kept pushing against how people saw her. Society wanted her to be a mascot for “overcoming adversity.” She wanted to actually change the world. And she did.

The Nazis probably did not lose sleep over Helen Keller’s letter. They had a whole evil empire to run. But that is not the point. The point is that a woman born in 1880 who could not see or hear was braver and more principled than most of the world’s political leadership at the time. She called out tyranny in real time and did it without watering down her message to be “palatable.”

Helen Keller was not just an inspirational story. She was a fighter. She was the kind of person who could face down history’s worst villains and tell them to their face that they were pathetic. Which is why the sanitized version of her life you learned in school does her a disservice.

So the next time someone cracks a lazy Helen Keller joke, feel free to let them know that the woman they are making fun of once stood up to Adolf freaking Hitler in 1933 — and she did it better than most of the so-called tough guys of her day.

Because Helen Keller was, without question, a total badass.

Canada is home to an estimated 318 billion trees. The Milky Way, by comparison, contains between 100 and 400 billion stars. Even at the high end, Canada is in the same range. At the low end, it has hundreds of billions more.

It’s a fact that’s hard to wrap your head around. We talk about stars as uncountable, infinite. But one country on this planet holds more trees than the entire galaxy holds stars. That puts into perspective just how massive Earth’s living systems really are.

Forests often feel quiet and ordinary. But the scale is anything but. Canada’s landscape is not just beautiful. It is one of the most densely packed reservoirs of life on the planet. When you hear a number like that, it shifts how you see it.

This song absolutely rules. It is nothing like the Don’t Stop Believin’ Journey everyone knows. This was before Steve Perry joined the band, when Journey was making spacey, psychedelic prog-rock with soaring guitars and zero concern for pop hits. Steve Perry still bangs, don’t get me wrong, but this version of Journey feels like a completely different band.

Give it a listen 👇

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Hubert Latham flying over the Channel - 1909

In 1909, French aviator Hubert Latham tried to become the first person to fly across the English Channel. He took off in his Antoinette monoplane and made it about halfway before engine trouble forced him to ditch into the sea. The dude literally crashed into the Channel while smoking a cigarette, calmly waited on his wing for a rescue boat, and then tried again a few days later.