The 1-800 Flowers 84-year-old founder and Katy Perry are in a bizarre real-estate legal dispute over a $15 million mansion | Treat your happiness like an investment portfolio and focus on these 4 areas, says Harvard professor | Why We'll Never Live in Space | Book Review: ‘Roman Stories,’ by Jhumpa Lahiri

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The 1-800 Flowers 84-year-old founder and Katy Perry are in a bizarre real-estate legal dispute over a $15 million mansion - Fortune

Watch out, Katy Perry is coming for your house like a dark horse—at least if you’re Carl Westcott, the founder of 1-800-Flowers. In 2020, the 84-year-old Westcott sold his $15 million Montecito, Calif., estate to the millennial pop star, famous for hits like “I Kissed a Girl” and “California Gurls.” Perry was set to become neighbors with the likes of Oprah Winfrey and Brad Pitt in the exclusive enclave outside Santa Barbara, but Westcott claims he was in an unusual state of mind when he agreed to sell the house he had just acquired himself a few months earlier.

“The combination of his age, frailty from his back condition and recent surgery, and the opiates he was taking several times a day rendered Mr. Westcott of unsound mind,” reads a lawsuit that claimed Perry took advantage of Westcott being under the influence of painkillers at the time. Perry’s camp insists that Westcott’s mind was, in fact, sound, and is trying to push through with the deal.

The dispute over the Montecito estate has all led to a proposed law in Katy Perry’s name, as Westcott’s family has pushed for the development of the Protecting Elder Realty for Retirement Years Act in an attempt to curtail similar conflicts with seniors. While 1-800-Flowers has a market capitalization of about $450 million today, Westcott sold it back in the 1980s and his net worth is now estimated at between $15 million to $20 million, according to CoreStreet. He is somewhat of a quiet millionaire, but his son Court and Court’s wife Cameron have become recognizable for appearances on Bravo’s Real Housewives of Dallas. To make things even stranger, this is not even Perry’s first housing litigation involving a senior citizen.

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Treat your happiness like an investment portfolio and focus on these 4 areas, says Harvard professor - CNBC

This story is part of CNBC Make It'sÂ Tools for HappinessÂ series, which details what we learned from taking a free happiness course offered by Harvard University.

There is no framework for sustaining joy, but Arthur Brooks, a Harvard instructor who teaches a class all about building a happier life, believes that any such plan should start with treating your happiness like a well-balanced investment portfolio.

Put simply, people should aim to invest in four areas that are equally important in order to feel more fulfilled in life, Brooks says in one of the happiness course's videos.

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Why We’ll Never Live in Space - Scientific American

NASA wants astronaut boots back on the moon a few years from now, and the space agency is investing heavily in its Artemis program to make it happen. It's part of an ambitious and risky plan to establish a more permanent human presence off-world. Companies such as United Launch Alliance and Lockheed Martin are designing infrastructure for lunar habitation. Elon Musk has claimed SpaceX will colonize Mars. But are any of these plans realistic? Just how profoundly difficult would it be to live beyond Earth—especially considering that outer space seems designed to kill us?

Humans evolved for and adapted to conditions on Earth. Move us off our planet, and we start to fail—physically and psychologically. The cancer risk from cosmic rays and the problems that human bodies experience in microgravity could be deal-breakers on their own. Moreover, there may not be a viable economic case for sustaining a presence on another world. Historically, there hasn't been much public support for spending big money on it. Endeavors toward interplanetary colonization also bring up thorny ethical issues that most space optimists haven't fully grappled with.

At this year's Analog Astronaut Conference, none of these problems seemed unsolvable. Scientists and space enthusiasts were gathered at Biosphere 2, a miniature Earth near Tucson, Ariz., which researchers had built partly to simulate a space outpost. Amid this crowd, the conclusion seemed foregone: living in space is humans' destiny, an inevitable goal that we must reach toward.

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Book Review: ‘Roman Stories,’ by Jhumpa Lahiri - The New York Times -

In “Roman Stories,” written in Italian, nine protagonists have little in common except their foreignness.

Lily Meyer is a writer, critic and translator. Her debut novel, “Short War,” is forthcoming in 2024.

When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.

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