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Open for Summer 2026. If you were a kid in the 80s and 90s, you may remember the Pizza Hut “Book It!” program that rewarded reading books with free pizza. Well, Camp Book It! is again open to free enrollment for the summer (now in iOS/Android app form only):

During the summer months of June, July, and August, any child that meets their parent-set reading goals can earn a free Pizza Hut® single topping Personal Pan Pizza®* from participating locations. Use the BOOK IT!® Mobile App to set goals, track progress, and redeem rewards.

* Limit of 5 Personal Pan Pizza® certificates per family, per month. One certificate may be earned per eligible child, per month, for meeting their reading goal.

This program is usually either run directly through schools or restricted to homeschooling parents during the academic school year, but is open to all age-eligible children from Pre-K to 6th grade during the summer. Once you reach 15 days of reading in one calendar month (our goal is 20 minutes per day per child), you complete the goal and a prize code will be emailed to you. The code works online, so it’s easy to order and simply pick it up or add it to an existing order.

The little Personal Pan Pizza rewards are a novelty to our kids, making it feel like a special treat that they earned. We also stack this with the Summer Reading program at our local library and the Barnes & Noble Summer Reading Program.

Updated for Summer 2026. Parent of a teen? It can be tricky to find a place for your young teens in the summer time. Check your local YMCA chapter as many are offering free summer YMCA membership for teens. Some are for specific grades, like entering 7th or 8th graders. Here are some example locations:

• YMCA Dayton (Ohio)
• YMCA Delaware
• YMCA of Honolulu (Hawaii)
• YMCA High Point (North Carolina)
• YMCA Northwest North Carolina
• YMCA Metro Los Angeles
• YMCA North (Minnesota and Wisconsin)

The YMCA can be a safe space for your teen to socialize as well as have access to gyms, pickleball/basketball courts, heated pools, fitness centers, and in-person and virtual live-stream and on-demand exercise classes.

If this really interests you but nothing is shown online, I would still call your local YMCA, as some locations may not list their participation on their websites. They may also offering discounted teen memberships, along with affordable leadership programs and/or lifeguard training. The YMCA can be a great source of first-time jobs for older teens.

In 2019, I wrote the post Buying The Haystack: Sleeping Well Because I’ll Own The Winners (Needles). Recently, Hendrik Bessembinder updated his previous research with the paper One Hundred Years in the U.S. Stock Markets (SSRN/PDF), which tracked the “investment outcomes for 29,754 common stocks listed on the public U.S. stock markets over the 100-year period from 1926 to 2025”. Some highlights:

• Total Net Wealth created over that period: ~$91 Trillion.
• The 0.2% Needles: Just 46 stocks (roughly 0.2% of the ~30,000 total stocks) were responsible for generating 50% of that $91 trillion.
• The 4% Needles: Only 4% of all stocks accounted for 100% of the net value creation. The other 96% collectively just matched risk-free US Treasury bills – many were complete or nearly complete losses, the rest had smaller gains that only just offset those losses. This means that the top 4% created all of the net wealth creation.

Here is a chart that summarizes this info from a Vanguard Australia article Equity market skewness: The few mega-winners and the case for diversification:

I will simply quote Bogle and myself now, because I am lazy and honestly that’s how investment writing works. You just end up repeating and/or repackaging the same 10-25 rules over and over again.

As the late Jack Bogle told us: “Don’t look for the needle in the haystack. Just buy the haystack.”

I don’t know which will be the most successful US companies in the future, but I know that I will own them via the total US index fund in my portfolio. I will own the next Amazon, Google, Facebook, Apple, or Visa. I’ll also own whoever disrupts them after that. Since I own a big chunk of global stocks inside the Vanguard Total International Stock Index fund, I’ll be covered if they come from the other side of the world.

In 2026, this means I own NVIDIA/Alphabet/Google/Microsoft, but in 10 years, I know that the picture will be at least somewhat different.