NASA's new telescope, a parental network, and Meta's settlement

Good morning {{name!|reader}},

Happy Labor Day! Hopefully the day off comes with some well-needed time to relax and process the unofficial end of summer (although the autumn equinox gives us until September 21^st – so get those last-minute beach trips in now before everyone starts to judge). It’s hard to believe we’re already six weeks into writing Three Great Things. While the format you receive every Monday hasn’t changed very much, we’ve learned a lot and have been constantly iterating along the way. Our goal has always been to craft a newsletter that cuts through the negativity of mainstream media, offering a fresh perspective while helping you get smarter on what’s going right in the world. We’ve also been building a handful of exciting new features in the background that we’re looking forward to sharing with you soon.

Reflecting on where we’re at, I’m reminded of the conversations I’d have with my dad as we planned and built 3GT pre-launch. Every time we spoke, he’d ask me when he could finally sign up and start seeing the newsletters each week. I’d temper his enthusiasm and tell him we weren’t ready yet, but he’d end each conversation with the advice: just start publishing something, anything really, and we’d learn from there. He couldn’t have been more right. While it’s tempting to make sure everything is final on day 1, no matter how long we spend planning (or how much the banking perfectionist in me wants it), it’s simply not possible. You can plan forever, but there are some things you can only learn by doing.

Over six short weeks, we’ve had hundreds of new ideas on how to make 3GT better and expand the scope of what we initially set out to accomplish. As much as we’d like to think we knew what we were building, we really didn’t know the answer until we started doing it and saw what worked. And to be honest, we’re still figuring it out.

On that note, each of this week’s stories revolves around the same idea: nobody knows the answer until you start. The Roman Telescope takes a leap from its predecessor by capturing the whole sky, leaving astronomers to make discoveries in the residual anomalies. In Boston, a Brazilian immigrant struggling to navigate the special education system for her daughter developed a community that leans on each other for support, which the state is now building upon. And Meta has settled a nationwide lawsuit placing limits on its apps for teens – a starting point for proper usage regulation, not the final answer.

With gratitude,

Brenner, Jordan, and Zac

NASA’s newest flagship observatory – the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, named for the astronomer who ran NASA’s astronomy program in the 60s and 70s and was known as the mother of Hubble – was just launched into space. However, it can’t see any better than Hubble, which was launched in 1990.

Behind the scenes: Roman’s primary mirror (the light-collecting tool) is the same size as Hubble’s. However, Roman’s focal ratio is three times smaller, allowing it to capture a much wider image. It’s sort of like aiming a projector at a screen: Hubble’s projector is much farther back, so the screen only captures a slice of the movie, while Roman’s projector is much closer, capturing the whole image. Here, Roman’s image captures 100 times more sky. Roman will be able to capture in one month what would take Hubble a century.

So, while it can’t see any finer detail, Roman doesn’t have to pinpoint any particular thing to study – it can simply capture an entire patch of the sky. Now, no one has to decide in advance what part of space is worth looking at because everything is recorded anyway. Priyamvada Natarajan, a Yale astronomy professor, argues that the biggest discoveries will emerge “in the residuals,” the anomalies nobody set out to find.

With Roman, there’s another layer too: no proprietary period for image capture. Normally, a team wins telescope time and gets to hold the resulting data for a year to do the research before anyone else can see it (like your friend who refuses to pass the controller). Here, democratized access means that new discoveries could come from anyone from a NASA intern to the janitor at MIT.

After exiting Earth’s atmosphere and separating from the SpaceX rocket that launched it, Roman is currently on a three-month cruise to the second Sun-Earth Lagrange point, the gravitational parking lot for telescopes, about a million miles out. Since it will take a few months for Roman to get far enough away from Earth such that image captures mean anything, we can’t flaunt results just yet, but the abundance of data could accelerate how quickly we learn about the universe.

To date, a Boston-based WhatsApp group, Super Special Parents, has helped 500+ Portuguese-speaking families navigate special education. It’s been running for over a decade, and in that time has grown into a community of immigrants helping one another out wherever needed. Anything from finding a home or job to applying for health insurance.

It started when Priscilla Bessa left a teaching career in Brazil to move to Boston with her daughter, who has a learning disability. To find a proper specialist, she attended lengthy meetings with unqualified translators and discussed dense legal jargon that even most native speakers would struggle with. Long-established organizations exist to support children with disabilities (Federation for Children with Special Needs) and to support those learning English as a second language (Massachusetts Alliance of Portuguese Speakers), but Priscilla uncovered a gap at the intersection of the two.

Big picture: nearly 250,000 Massachusettsans speak Portuguese at home, the third-most of any non-English language in the state. And almost 50% of those speakers have limited English proficiency. While families reap the benefits of Super Special Parents, there’s only so much that nine volunteers orchestrating everything from greeting new parents to finding sponsors for events can do before burning out. However, a state-led program over eight years in the making is being developed in parallel.

In June, the Massachusetts Board of Elementary and Secondary Education finally approved a major initiative: starting September 2027, Advanced Education Interpreters (not just bilingual adults) will be placed in all specialized meetings (everything from special ed to discipline hearings) as needed. If you want proper care for your child, the education system has an unstated entry requirement: you have to know how it works before walking in. For an immigrant parent who’s already struggling with English, a bad translation could leave them with the wrong info, and they wouldn’t even know it. Now, proper help is stepping into the classroom to bridge that chasm and serve families beyond the reach of any group chat.

Last week, Meta settled a lawsuit with 47 states and Washington D.C., which accused the company of designing its apps to keep children hooked. The $17.1 billion settlement ($12.1 billion guaranteed) came with a side of avoiding any admission of wrongdoing. The sum will be paid out over the next 10 years, and product changes have been mandated for teenagers, but of course no one’s touching Meta’s crown jewel: the algorithm. Not to mention that $1.2 billion per year is a drop in the bucket vs. its $200 billion in revenue (roughly the cost of an annual Spotify and Netflix subscription for someone making $60k a year). And the market agreed – Meta’s stock rose 1% following the news, signaling that a small fine and some updates are a godsend “punishment” vs. the looming uncertainty of a national wave of lawsuits. However, the script has flipped: Meta is now the conductor, orchestrating its social media competitors into compliance with the new standards.

The nitty gritty: by late February 2027 under the agreement, teenagers’ accounts must have a two-hour daily limit across all Meta apps (unless you have a cool mom who’s willing to say otherwise). In addition, the apps must be closed from midnight to 6am, notifications muted during the school day, a prompt shown every fifteen minutes of continuous use, and like counts hidden. It stops short of requiring a non-algorithmic feed for teen users (the chance to just see content from your friends like the good ol’ days), deferring to an opt-in solution. However, the kicker: if YouTube, TikTok, and Snap settle, the nighttime block widens to 10pm to 7am, daily limits become 60 minutes per app, the rules go from a five-year mandate to a ten-year one, and $5 billion more becomes due.

A lot of these changes were already a part of Meta’s internal roadmap, which to date included a published Sleep Mode that muted notifications from 10pm to 7am and provided a 60-minute usage reminder but ultimately didn’t stop anyone. With formal time limits now imposed, teens will pivot over to the unblocked icons just a tap away. And Meta can’t have that. So as perverse as it is, Meta is financially incentivized to ensure its competitors are regulated, which tightens the standards for all.

Zooming out: while it might be tempting to draw parallels to the 1998 Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement, critics like Scott Galloway are quick to point out that this doesn’t compare to the $206 billion fine ($422 billion in today’s dollars) against the four largest cigarette makers. However, alongside ensuing federal and state tax hikes, regulation drove teen smoking down 86% from 1997 to 2021. It may not be Meta’s Big Tobacco moment, but the settlement marks the first court order to dictate how the product works, not just the price of getting caught. Now Meta’s just waiting on company.