Public transit 🚊, a narcolepsy treatment 🛏️, and what libraries return 📚

Good morning {{name!|reader}},

After sending this out every Monday morning, we’re greeted with a page of analytics that displays the newsletter performance: open rates, click-through, unsubscribes, and any other interactions. We then spend more of the day than we’d probably like to admit refreshing it. In theory, they’re the most important numbers we have. They tell us what’s working, what isn’t and what you’re getting out of it.

But week to week, these numbers are noisy. Maybe Apple Mail decided our use of emojis in the subject line was distasteful and our deliverability got worse for a week. Or some mail apps load emails in the background, and some security filters click through each link to scan for viruses, padding our open and click rates with subscribers who have never looked. A headline that gets a flurry of clicks isn’t necessarily a win either – it might just feel like clickbait, which is exactly what we want to get away from.

No matter how satisfying it is to watch the numbers tick up, we have to remember no single data point is worth completely reorienting around. Economists call this Goodhart’s law: when a measure becomes a target, it stops being a good measure. And it shows up all over the place. In an age where we can track everything about our health, any anxiety induced by trying to optimize for something like your sleep score can negate the goal you probably set out with in the first place: to practice a healthier lifestyle (apparently this is called orthosomnia).

At the end of the day, what we actually care about is whether you read to the end, learn something new about what’s gone right in the world, or are able to share something you read with someone else and help reframe their perspective, none of which show up on a dashboard. So, we try to orient around consistent values that drive our goals first and look at the numbers second.

On that note, this week we’re bringing you three stories where the number everyone was watching wasn’t the one that mattered. BART still carriers fewer than half its pre-pandemic riders, but its trains now run on time and crime on board is down by two-thirds. For decades, narcolepsy treatment meant forcing people awake, until a drug went after what was actually missing from patients’ brains. And Texas cities cut library funding over falling book checkouts while every dollar spent was returning nearly $5.

With gratitude,

The 3GT Crew

Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART), the heavy-rail system running under San Francisco and the Bay, just posted record numbers for last quarter: 95% of trips ran on time – only 1 trip in every 20 ran late, down from roughly 1 in 5 in early 2023. And riders reported a 91.4% satisfaction score, up 21 points from just a few years ago and the highest since BART began tracking the metric. On top of that, it hit all six of its safety targets for the first time since late 2018. So, what did it take to get here?

Behind the scenes: this year, BART resurfaced nearly 100 miles of track and added three new substations to boost power. Away from the construction, the metro system also implemented a pair of safety-oriented reforms that are driving the better numbers. BART replaced the waist-high plastic fare gates with 6-foot-tall barriers across every station. Now, the share of riders who say they’ve seen someone jump the gate has fallen from 25% to just 9% in two years.

The second change had no hardware: Transit Ambassadors, unarmed safety specialists who ride the trains carrying radios and Narcan. Working alongside them are Crisis Intervention Specialists, staff with social-work backgrounds who de-escalate situations rather than make arrests. In a single quarter last year, they kept over 2,500 calls away from police dispatch (nearly 30 a day handled without an officer showing up).

Since the end of 2024, crimes against riders per million trips have fallen 67%. And that safety translates: over that same window, safety-related train delays are down by nearly half. Fewer incidents mean fewer trains held up waiting for police. Complaints are down, and riders told KQED that the trains feel cleaner and the people are nicer.

Stepping back: BART did all this without waiting for riders to come back. It still carries fewer than half its pre-pandemic riders while the US heavy rail system more broadly is back to roughly 80%. Meanwhile, other cities are making the same bet. Every Metrorail station in DC has retrofitted gates, and NYC has started testing taller gates across several stations. It could go national: a bill introduced in the House would let transit systems use crime prevention and security grants for unarmed transit support specialists.

Earlier this month, Dr. Emmanuel Mignot and Dr. Masashi Yanagisawa received the 2026 Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award, the most prestigious American medical prize short of the Nobel. For their part, Mignot and Yanagisawa discovered orexin and the role it plays in regulating sleep and wakefulness, ultimately showing that its deficiency can cause type 1 narcolepsy (a disorder of excessive daytime sleepiness and sudden muscle weakness called cataplexy).

The details: the two researchers worked independently of one another to find the answer. Yanagisawa, a molecular biologist in Japan at the time, found in 1998 two unknown peptides in rat brains which he named orexin. He then bred mice without the orexin gene and found they dropped into sleep mid-activity. Mignot, working out of Stanford, spent ten years hunting for the faulty gene in a pack of narcoleptic Dobermans and Labradors. What he found was the receptor orexin binds to. Putting the two findings together, orexin turned out to be the brain’s signal to stay awake, and people with type 1 narcolepsy have lost the brain cells that make it.

Impact: for most of the twentieth century, nobody knew what caused narcolepsy. Until now, treatment meant stimulants to force wakefulness paired with a sedative taken at night and scheduled naps throughout the day. The result: medications that constantly need adjusting and patients who never feel fully treated. Using Yanagisawa and Mignot’s research, a Japanese pharmaceutical company developed a drug, Orzeyful, that binds to the orexin receptor and turns it on in place of the missing peptide. The FDA approved it in August, calling it the first to target the sleep disorder’s root cause.

What’s next: the approval came with a recommendation for control under the Controlled Substances Act, which requires the DEA to designate a schedule for it. The decision is expected in the next few weeks, but until then, the drug remains commercially unavailable. Once designated, Orzeyful could change how roughly 120,000 Americans with type 1 narcolepsy are treated.

Last fall, Dallas closed a library branch to help alleviate a budget deficit. This summer, the city came back for more. Meanwhile, San Antonio cut 39 library jobs, pointing to how residents use the library now: physical borrowing there is down 40% since 2019 while digital use is up more than 160%. The assumption underneath it all is that the internet made libraries a luxury. However, a study released this month by the Texas Library Association flipped that on its head. Across the state’s 517 public libraries, it found that for every $1 spent, libraries returned nearly $5.

By the numbers: in a single year, Texas libraries logged over 37 million Wi-Fi sessions, and over 6 million visits to in-person programming, among several other uses. For a lot of Texans, the library is their home interent (roughly 1 in 12 households lack a broadband subscription), so the Wi-Fi is more than just a perk. All in all, libraries left a $3.8 billion economic footprint, more than the state’s entire movie and sound-recording industry. And then there’s what no dollar figure captures: 82% of libraries help people apply for jobs, and 93% register voters or serve as polling places.

And the return per dollar has only grown: $4.42 in 2011, $4.60 in 2015, $4.74 now. Those years spanned the smartphone, streaming, and the pandemic, each supposed to make the library obsolete. Book check-outs have been dropping, but libraries didn’t lose readers, they moved them: Texans borrowed 40 million e-books and other digital items, more than the 36 million physical ones.

Communities equipped with this knowledge are already pushing back, and governments are reacting in real time. Two weeks ago, Dallas restored hours at 11 branches and 25 positions after the library’s Friends group stood up for them. Libraries have won bigger fights too. When an executive order moved to dismantle the federal library agency in March 2025, librarians sued and won the grants back this April. Had it stood, Texas would’ve lost about a third of what the state passes to local libraries, money that funds initiatives like the Talking Book Program, which supports around 16,000 visually impaired Texans. The study’s final section is a guide for walking city councils through the data. Next budget season, the fight over Dallas’s libraries will come with fresh numbers attached.