From ear to ear

Good morning Staker! Here’s what’s cookin’ today: A look at the size of the Great Wealth Transfer; It turns out you aren’t actually “hardwired” to be left- or right-handed; and why the theme at the heart of The Odyssey is so relateable…🏡

Let’s get into it!

Sorry fellas, it’s not Rockville.

According to Airports Council International, Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International remains the busiest airport in the world, with 106 million annual travellers passing through it.

The airport has held the designation as the world’s busiest for 27 of the last 28 years, and the only year it fell off was during the pandemic.

Part of the reason for its success is the decades spent convincing airlines and other aviation companies that it’s the place to be. Georgia created the Center of Innovation in Aerospace in the early 2000s, which has helped draw companies to the Atlanta area ever since.

It’s also the only airport of its size in the region. There’s no competition like between Chicago’s O’Hare and Midway or New York’s JFK and LaGuardia (not to mention Newark).

“As cities get larger, typically, they have more than one airport that is serving them,” Laurie Garrow, a professor of civil engineering at Georgia Tech, told CNN Travel. “So Atlanta is pretty unique in that. I like to say it’s the ‘Powerhouse of the South.’”

You can read on here for more on the secrets of Hartsfield-Jackson’s success.

According to a study published by neurologists at Johns Hopkins University and UCLA, your dominant hand doesn’t come about from hardwiring in the brain, but rather it’s simply due to practice and repetition.

The team acknowledged the difficulty of determining hand dominance origin, since it’s usually established at an extremely early age. However, they hypothesized that such dominance would apply to the entire arm, so they devised an experiment that saw participants write letters and numbers with their elbows instead of hands.

The first task was to have right-handed participants write the letter A and number 8 with each hand. Unsurprisingly, they were terrible at writing with their left hands. However, when writing with the pen attached to their elbow, they were equally bad with both arms.

Notably, after being trained to write with either elbow, participants learned how to do so with much better control and clarity, suggesting it’s about practice and not an innately encoded characteristic.

Mount Olympus was believed to be the home of Zeus, the king of Greece’s 12 Olympian gods who established his court atop the mountain after defeating his Titan father Cronus.

The mountain rises nearly 3,000 meters above sea level, though its base rests practically at sea level.

Amid the hype surrounding the release of Chris Nolan’s adaptation of Homer’s The Odyssey, Greeks in 2026 hope the most famous landmark of their Hellenistic ancestors will be granted official UNESCO World Heritage status.

“Olympus is our life. It is the place we grew up in,” said Evagelos Geroliolios, mayor of Dion-Olympus, based in Litochoro, the mountain’s main town. “It is the place we see every day, but at the same time, it is also a place which carries with it myth, history, biodiversity, extraordinary beauty and a very great cultural weight.”

“It is a place we love. It is a place that many people from all over the world visit to see, to live, to experience. We want to protect it,” Geroliolios said.

Achieving UNESCO status would be “something very big that goes beyond not just local boundaries, but national boundaries. It is something that concerns the entire world. It is very important.”

Speaking of The Odyssey, the film debuted over the weekend with a global box office pull of nearly $300 million, setting it well on its way to being one of the summer’s top grossing films.

On a deeper level, it may be on its way to tapping into a more meaningful theme in society, and one that’s resonated since the time when Odysseus would have been attempting to reach Ithaca after the ten-year Trojan War: the longing for home.

“We want this hero to find his way home, we identify with him, we root for him,” said Tom Roach, a Bryant University history and literature professor.

“It really is a story about a family trying to reunite after a war,” he told CBC’s The Current, in a bold attempt to take an epic poem spread across 24 books and explain it in a sentence.

On the other hand, he also offered a take about the poem’s applications in a modern world, and how its archetypal themes still resonate today.

“It's so much a poem about the world and about the place of an individual in a globalizing society and what does it mean to be either belonging in a place or be a migrant or an immigrant—which, of course, is a central theme in contemporary culture.”

Hangin’ with the old man

From Howard Cunningham to Mike Brady, we’re quizzin’ you on classic TV dad’s with today’s trivia! 😏