RH Digest — April 6th
"The Front Page for Retirement"
📗 e-Book Deals of the Day
Murder on a High Note (Music Shop Mysteries Book 1)
By: Jennifer Lamont Leo
This historical cozy mystery hits all the right notes. In 1916, music shop owner Amanda Parrish investigates when her friend dies mysteriously & a violinist’s secrets threaten the local music camp. Cozy mystery with vintage charm!
Get it now for FREE on Kindle!
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🎥 Watch This Tonight: Joe Pickett
A Wyoming game warden, a murder in his backyard, and a conspiracy that goes all the way to the top. Pull up a chair.
Here is a show that flew almost entirely under the radar and is genuinely excellent. Based on C.J. Box’s bestselling novel series, Joe Pickett follows a small-town Wyoming game warden — the kind of principled, quietly stubborn man who will absolutely write you a ticket even when it would be a lot easier not to — who turns up a dead body on his property on his very first day on the job. Things get complicated from there.
Michael Dorman is enormously likable in the lead role, the Wyoming scenery is spectacular, and the show has a warm, unhurried quality that feels increasingly rare. It is a proper mystery with a proper family at its center — not too dark, not too slick, and very easy to binge. Two full seasons are available, and fair warning: viewers are furious it was cancelled. You will be too. Start tonight.
Streaming on Paramount+. Both seasons available.
🎵 Listen In: Charlotte Cornfield — “Hurts Like Hell”
A quiet Canadian songwriter just made one of the most quietly beautiful records of the year. Here is your introduction.
Charlotte Cornfield is a Canadian singer and songwriter who has been making music for over a decade, mostly beloved by people who stumble across her and then immediately tell everyone they know. Her sixth album, also called Hurts Like Hell, came out last week on Merge Records, and it is the kind of record that feels like it was made specifically for you — warm, unhurried, full of small precise details about what it actually feels like to be a person trying to love other people well.
She recorded it in Brooklyn, with a full band playing live in the same room without headphones, close enough to hear each other breathe, which you can feel in every note. The title song — which is what we are recommending you start with — is what she calls “a shy people love story”: two people with wounds and walls, finally pushing themselves toward each other anyway. The pedal steel curls around her voice like a warm hand. Buck Meek of Big Thief sings harmonies. Feist appears elsewhere on the album. It sits somewhere between Nashville Skyline and a rainy afternoon with someone you love, and it is, without any exaggeration, one of the loveliest things released so far this year. Start here. Stay for the whole record.
🏡 Smart Doorbells: Worth It or Not?
They are genuinely useful. They also share more of your life than most people realize. Here is what you should know before you buy one.
Smart doorbells — Ring, Google Nest, Arlo, and their competitors — have real appeal. You can see who is at your door from anywhere in the world, get alerts when a package is delivered, speak to a visitor without opening the door, and deter porch theft. For anyone living alone or managing mobility challenges, that kind of visibility is not trivial. More than 27% of American homes now have one, and the reasons are understandable.
But the privacy picture is more complicated than the advertisements suggest, and it has gotten significantly murkier in 2025 and 2026. Here is the honest version.
When you install a smart doorbell, you are not just watching your front door. Someone else is watching too.
Your footage and data do not simply sit on your device. Both Ring (owned by Amazon) and Nest (owned by Google) store video in the cloud, where it can be accessed by the company, shared with law enforcement, and in some cases retained even after you think you have deleted it. This became very public in early 2026 when the FBI recovered footage from an 84-year-old woman’s Google Nest camera — footage she was told did not exist because she had no subscription. It was sitting in Google’s backend systems anyway.
Who else sees your data? The list is longer than most people expect. Both companies share information with law enforcement when legally required — and in claimed emergencies, sometimes without a warrant. Ring has partnered with hundreds of police departments, allowing officers to request footage directly from users. Ring also recently introduced facial recognition that scans every face passing your camera, not just people you know. Amazon has shared user data with analytics and advertising companies. The Electronic Frontier Foundation found Ring sharing data with multiple third-party companies not listed in its own privacy policy. An estimated 87% of smart doorbell owners have no idea how their data is being used.
None of this means you should not buy one. It means you should buy one with clear eyes. If the security and convenience matter to you — and for many people they genuinely do — enable two-factor authentication, use a strong unique password, set your camera to record only when you need it to, and read the privacy settings carefully rather than accepting defaults. If the data sharing concerns you more than the convenience appeals to you, that is also a completely reasonable conclusion. A traditional wired doorbell has never shared footage with Amazon.
Share your experience with smart doorbells in the comments.
📻 Flashback Files
Janis Joplin & Big Brother and the Holding Company — “Piece of My Heart” Live in Germany (1968)
Van Morrison was offered this song first. He passed. You are about to understand what a mistake that was.
“Piece of My Heart” was written by Jerry Ragovoy and Bert Berns and first recorded in 1967 by Erma Franklin — yes, Aretha’s older sister — who had a modest R&B hit with it. The song was also offered to Van Morrison, who turned it down. Then it landed in the hands of a twenty-five-year-old woman from Port Arthur, Texas, who had spent most of her life being told she was too loud, too much, too strange, and too ugly to belong anywhere. Janis Joplin recorded it with her San Francisco band Big Brother and the Holding Company for their 1968 album Cheap Thrills, and proceeded to do something to the song that no one who wrote it could have anticipated.
She didn’t sing it so much as tear herself open with it. The voice that comes out of Joplin on this track — raw, pleading, ferocious, almost frightening in its emotional nakedness — is not the product of technique. It is the product of a life spent wanting to be loved and not quite being able to hold onto it. The song hit number twelve on the Billboard Hot 100. Cheap Thrills hit number one. Within months, Joplin left the band to go solo. Within two years she was dead, at twenty-seven, from a heroin overdose in a Hollywood hotel room.
The live performance from Germany in 1968 — this one, right here — captures her at the absolute peak of her powers, which is to say at the peak of anyone’s powers. She is twenty-five years old, she is performing for a crowd thousands of miles from home, and she is singing as though her life depends on every single word. Watch her face. Watch her hands. What you are witnessing is not a performance. It is a person giving everything she has, holding absolutely nothing back. There has never been another voice quite like it, and there never will be.
🍽 Recipe of the Day: 🐟 Garlic Parmesan Baked Halibut
Tender, flaky halibut baked with a golden garlic-Parmesan crust and bright lemon flavor.
Servings: 4
Prep Time: 10 minutes
Cook Time: 12–15 minutes
Ingredients
4 halibut fillets (about 6 oz each)
2 tbsp olive oil or melted butter
3 cloves garlic, minced
1/3 cup grated Parmesan cheese
1/4 cup panko breadcrumbs
1 tbsp fresh parsley, chopped (or 1 tsp dried)
1/2 tsp salt
1/4 tsp black pepper
1 tsp lemon zest
Lemon wedges, for serving
Instructions
Preheat oven
Preheat oven to 400°F (200°C) and lightly grease a baking dish.Prepare the topping
In a small bowl, mix together garlic, Parmesan, panko, parsley, salt, pepper, and lemon zest. Stir in olive oil or melted butter until the mixture is lightly moistened.Prepare the fish
Pat halibut dry and place in the baking dish. Lightly season with salt and pepper.Top and bake
Spoon the garlic-Parmesan mixture evenly over each fillet, pressing gently to adhere. Bake for 12–15 minutes, until the fish is opaque and flakes easily with a fork and the topping is golden.Serve
Serve warm with fresh lemon wedges squeezed over the top.
❤️ Why You’ll Love It: Light, flavorful, and perfectly crisp on top, this halibut is a wonderful balance of fresh and comforting in every bite.
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