What are they Puffin in Iceland? According to the latest numbers, not much. And that's exactly what researchers and public officials hoped they'd achieve when they embarked a "radical and evidence-based" quest to identify why teens get hooked on drugs (with the hopes of ultimately removing or replacing some of those triggers). Consider these remarkable stats: "Today, Iceland tops the European table for the cleanest-living teens. The percentage of 15- and 16-year-olds who had been drunk in the previous month plummeted from 42 per cent in 1998 to 5 per cent in 2016. The percentage who have ever used cannabis is down from 17 per cent to 7 per cent. Those smoking cigarettes every day fell from 23 per cent to just 3 per cent." The strategy has several components, but one of the key elements is the move to replace artificial highs with natural ones. From Mosaic: Iceland knows how to stop teen substance abuse but the rest of the world isn't listening.

+ "If you can smell the alcohol and get to the fruit faster, you have an advantage. You defeat the competition and get more calories." We've been hooked on alcohol for a long time. A really long time. It may have been the thing that got us to come down from the trees. From NatGeo: Our 9,000-Year Love Affair With Booze. (I once had a hangover that lasted almost that long.)

"Direct temperature measurements stretch back to 1880, but scientific research indicates the world was last this warm about 115,000 years ago and that the planet has not experienced such high levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere for 4m years." The heat records set by 2014 and 2015 both proved to be short-lived, as 2016 is now the hottest year ever recorded.

The Trump transition has been bumpy and divisive in the US. But it could be raising even more concerns in Europe and across the globe. Trump has described NATO as obsolete, indicated more countries would probably leave the EU, trolled Angela Merkel, and stated that the one China policy is up for negotiation. Some of this could be part of a negotiating strategy. Or maybe the statements shouldn't be taken literally. I don't know, and neither, it seems, do many US allies. From one senior envoy: "What he's saying is so serious, so grave, that if you take it all seriously it's a world crisis. And he's saying it all in such a reckless and ignorant way that I suspect everyone is praying that this is not serious." Robin Wright on Trump's World Disruption.

+ "I went to my lawyers. I have a lot of lawyers in-house. We have many lawyers. I have got guys that handle this stuff. I said, 'See if you can have this registered and trademarked.'" From WaPo: How Donald Trump came up with Make America Great Again. Like most of Trump's campaign tactics, this one came right from the top.

+ Betsy Devos, Trump's pick for Secretary of Education had a pretty rough confirmation hearing on Tuesday. Many of her answers were instant social media hits, including this one on whether guns should be allowed in schools: "I will refer back to Sen. [Mike] Enzi and the school he was talking about in Wyoming. I think probably there, I would imagine that there is probably a gun in the schools to protect from potential grizzlies." (For what it's worth, you're probably better off using bear spray.)

"Presidents have dealt with constituent mail differently over the years. It started simply enough: George Washington opened the mail and answered it. He got about five letters a day. Mail back then was carried by foot, or on horseback or in stagecoaches — not a high volume. Then came steamboats, then rail and a modernized postal system, and by the end of the 19th century President William McKinley was overwhelmed. One hundred letters every day?" As you may have guessed, the deluge got a lot worse. President Obama told his team he wanted to see ten letters a day (out of tens of thousands). This is how they picked them. From Jeanne Marie Laskas in the NYT Magazine: To Obama With Love, and Hate, and Desperation. (As always, any reader can reply to any edition of NextDraft and your email will go right to my inbox. And you'll always get a response from me -- or my mom, depending on the tone of the letter.)

+ One of Obama's final acts as president was the commuting of Chelsea Manning's Sentence.

+ FiveThirtyEight tracks the last eight years of public opinion across 32 issues to determine how America's thinking changed under Obama.

I didn't do my running this morning because running is bad for your knees. Oh, wait. According to the NYT's Gretchen Reynolds, running may actually be good for your knees by "changing the biochemical environment inside the knee in ways that could help keep it working smoothly." Tomorrow, I'm not going to do my running because it's bad for your ankles.

Citizens of North Korean don't have access to the Internet. But it turns out that those who defect to South Korea can catch on pretty quickly. From Vice: Meet the North Korean defectors who are becoming social media stars. (I've had access to the Internet since there was an Internet, and I still haven't been able to go viral...)

"It's hard to know how to deal with the prevalence of misinformation in a society in which we revere freedom of expression. There are a lot of smart people working on technical ways for companies such as Google and Facebook to identify sites that peddle hoax news and warn readers about them -- and deny them ad revenue. But there is a bigger civic challenge facing all of us." The great Norman Lear chimes in on one of the issues of our era: Why Do People Fall For Fake News?

+ "The stacked boxes of ballots pre-marked for Hillary Clinton." From the NYT: From Headline to Photograph, a Fake News Masterpiece.

+ Media Matters: How Media Outlets Helped Trump Push A Fake News Story About Bikers And His Inauguration.

"This market, obsessed with fine-tuning the mind and its moods, includes products like Thync, Muse, and Feel, but also seeps into the growing nootropics and micro-dosing subcultures. These are different tools chasing the same end game: to make your brain as perfect as possible. To make you feel as good as you can feel, to become a more efficient human -- that, after all, is the subtle (or not so subtle) goal of all technology." Molly McHugh on the fight to fix your brain. (Can technology fix what technology broke?)

Netflix has nearly 90 million subscribers. That gives them a lot of dough to spend on content. And with competition heating up (from Hulu, the cable providers, Amazon, Apple and others), they are spending big time. Just consider one category: Comedy. They are offering mega-deals to top comedians (from Seinfeld to Schumer to Rock) and cornering the market. The content wars are incredibly good news for comedians and other content creators. We'll have to wait and see whether the Netflix strategy leaves the company with the last laugh.

I know it's a "first world problem," but I can't stand the damn stickers on supermarket fruit. If you feel the same, you'll be happy to learn that hope is on the horizon. Swedish supermarkets are replacing the stickers with lasers that provide natural branding.

+ And Japan may finally help the world put an end to complicated bidet controls.

+ The robot that helps you get out of paying for parking tickets.

+ Eater: Ranking America's Fast-Food Chicken Nuggets.