“Today, there are so many wealthy people who can afford luxury cars that it simply isn’t that profitable for companies to produce cars for the bottom 40% of Americans by income. That’s part of the reason manufacturers started rolling out so many higher-priced, higher-tech vehicles:”

“In 2021, AT&T reported 71 copper thefts in California. In 2024, there were more than 2,200. The problem is so widespread that it's become difficult to run Little League baseball in Long Beach, where repeated thefts have made the field lights go dark.” www.nytimes.com/athletic/701...

"The color scheme of traffic lights wasn't chosen because red travels farther through fog. The real story involves early railroads, deadly accidents, an exploding gas traffic light, forgotten inventors, and even the evolution of primate color vision."

"Dewey died last July from accidental intoxication after getting a ketamine RX through a telehealth company, highlighting risks in the largely unregulated industry. A 2020 federal rule change allowed remote ketamine prescriptions. Now, more than 500 businesses offer the drug with scant regulation."

Online queries for "Georgia" are more likely to turn up references to the U.S. state than the European country — a problem for the republic in the Caucasus and its people. But a move to drop the name has lost steam.

Here's why so much election analysis is basically useless: A race decided by a point and a half can be blamed on almost anything. Most party autopsies don't stand the test of time, and the narratives that get pushed are mainly exercises in confirmation bias www.gelliottmorris.com/p/2026-05-29...

Researchers looked at people’s positions on specific issues, rather than just whether they identified as conservative or liberal. They found 43% of self-identified conservatives supported mostly left-leaning policies on topics like spending, climate action, immigration, and vaccine mandates.

"Crunchy” was once associated with eating whole foods and having a lefty worldview. Today, it has evolved into a horseshoe alliance between far-left- and far-right-leaning homesteaders and home-schoolers, hippies and religious believers suspicious of "conventional medicine."

“It’s not just in the Middle East either — 115 of 195 American ambassadorial posts worldwide currently sit vacant. Fewer than 20 even have a nominee in the pipeline.”

(Gift link) www.nytimes.com/2026/05/26/u...

Whoa! Everyone had assumed Alabama would get to go back to its old congressional map after Callais. But the lower court that originally struck down that map says, not so fast.

The four richest Californians paid 0.07 percent of their wealth in income tax from 2019 to 2025. A trailblazing tax on billionaire wealth could change that, write two economists who advised on the measure.

‘A version of Google’s open-source model Gemma 3 responded to a question on how to disperse chlorine gas through a crowded indoor space, generated code to steal credit card information and wrote stories describing child sexual abuse.’ www.ft.com/content/5630...

"Walz has maintained close ties to the world-famous Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. The hospital had considerable sway with the Obama administration as it crafted the 2010 Affordable Care Act, and it lobbied *against* a "public option." www.propublica.org/article/tim-...

“When the tool was subsequently tested on more than 20,000 noncontrast CTs, it correctly identified 93 percent of people who had pancreatic lesions, according to a study published in Nature Medicine in 2023. The effectiveness actually surprised us,” Mr. Zhang said. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

(Gift link) www.nytimes.com/2026/05/22/u...

“They’ll insist that you can’t trust scientists, because they’re part of the conspiracy. The podcaster selling you his special creatine gummies, though? He seems trustworthy.”

“Homeland Security has added the words, “The peace of a nation no longer besieged by the third world.” One hundred million, it’s important to note, is almost twice America’s entire immigrant population. They are telegraphing the creation of a far-reaching police state.”

Barney Frank, who in 1987 became the first member of Congress to come out as gay, dies at 86: apnews.com/article/barn... Here's a look at how LGBTQ representation in Congress has grown over time: www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/...

“three men in ski masks set up a table in a rough part of San Francisco and handed out $5 bills and pizza slices in exchange for signatures on a petition. Some signers clutched drug paraphernalia in one hand and a pen in the other. The exchange is illegal. CA officials say they are investigating.”

We'll have a lot of election pages up tonight. For example, Thomas Massie is trying to fight off a challenge from a candidate handpicked by Trump to defeat him. Polls close at 6 Eastern. www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

As some college Republicans invite white nationalists into their organizations, other young conservatives have recoiled. The divide could affect upcoming elections. www.nytimes.com/2026/05/19/u...

“The law required every town with 50 households to provide a “petty school” (the equivalent of elementary school) and towns larger than 100 households to provide both a petty school and a “grammar school” (secondary school).”

“The first law related directly to schooling came in 1647, when Massachusetts passed the “Old Deluder Satan Act,” named for the opening line of the act (“It being one chief project of that old deluder, Satan, to keep men from the knowledge of the Scriptures…”).”

This is the article you guys are getting mad about this morning? The one that says good things? You guys sure love getting mad at the New York Times.

“Some aid targeting dire needs in places like war-torn Sudan makes sense. Yet the previous system allowed too many govts to plan their budgets around a perpetual flow of foreign dollars. Countries are better off when their leaders are focused on growing the economy rather than winning more aid money

“Projects that are supposed to offer mental health and substance use care to foster youth, new mothers, unhoused people and other vulnerable Californians have been delayed or cancelled.”

“The Pledge of Allegiance: A final revision to the national oath came in 1954 during the [anti-communist] Cold War. In response to lobbying by religious groups and fraternal organizations—and with the support of President Eisenhower—Congress passed a bill that added the words “under God.”

Prime with ads. Just how Kubrick intended.

“Captured CO2 is liquefied, shipped to a terminal, and pushed through a 68-mile pipeline into the seabed’s geological reservoirs about 1.6 miles below the ocean floor (see process below). The first CO2 injection came from a cement plant in southeast Norway.“ totalenergies.com/company/proj...

"Most of all, this increasingly trivial and mindless culture is a calamity for our politics. Amusingly, from the perspective of the present, the *reading* revolution of the eighteenth century was accompanied not only by excitement but by a moral panic."

“world’s first commercial offshore carbon storage facility began operating yesterday off Norway's western coast. The Northern Lights project—led by Equinor, Shell & TotalEnergies—aims to cut industrial carbon dioxide emissions by capturing carbon from smokestacks and injecting it beneath seabed.”

“No “you must be fit to look like a leader” shit here.”

“What had been the point of all the hard work and sacrifice? Inflation was out of control, and the basic necessities of existence had to be acquired from a black market mired in violence and criminality.”

“But the apocalyptic rumors he collected, Black says, also surely expressed a sublimated consciousness that Germans were guilty of the horrendous crimes that none of them wanted openly to discuss.”

“Gaza Amputees Fight for Survival in Hospitals Hollowed Out by War - Doctors, running low on painkillers and antibiotics, struggle to treat thousands of Palestinians who have lost limbs.” www.wsj.com/world/middle...

“When the Trump administration slashed foreign aid, it gutted a program that had reduced malaria deaths world wide. In northern Cameroon, health workers tried to protect children in one last rainy season.”

"The housing bill now in Congress may seek to increase the housing supply—but not for renters. The legislation now being considered by Congress may effectively eliminate both approaches, discouraging corporations not just from *buying* single-family homes to rent but also from *building* them."

“Through the Congressional Freethought Caucus, Huffman now leads nearly three dozen colleagues in a public defense of secular society against a rising Christian nationalism that he fears will undermine democratic norms and religious freedom in the United States.”

“Derek Stevens, who owns several casinos in downtown Las Vegas, said his properties’ limos are picking up more private jet passengers than ever before. He said he is tired of seeing headlines about Las Vegas’s financial woes.”

"An Artist Reimagines the Spaces of Childhood, With Thorny Results - For “Homecoming,” sculptor Hugh Hayden created a provocative replica of Kidsville, a suburban Dallas example of the wooden playgrounds that flourished in the 1980s." www.bloomberg.com/news/feature...

“People who eat around 9 [!] servings a day of “ultraprocessed” foods like chips and doughnuts have about a 67% higher risk of heart attacks, strokes and dying from heart disease compared with those who eat about one serving a day, according to a new study.” Ya think? 😂

"Spain has, however, gone further by moving to regularize nearly half a million undocumented migrants and by courting many more foreigners, a push that its socialist prime minister has argued is helping drive an economic boom." www.nytimes.com/2026/02/04/o...

"But the standard story of asbestos as a mistake – or even a crime – of massive proportions does not do justice to the real benefits it brought. Asbestos was central to mitigating urban fires, which cost thousands of lives each year as modern cities grew larger, denser, and more flammable."

"Partly because the hammer-beamed, faded, asbestos-riddled glory of Westminster felt so out of keeping with the relative decline of the country in which it was situated."

The video highlights stories like Johnny Gupton, who could not read or write, and Robert Romo, an autistic recruit whose death was predicted by his own uncle, a lieutenant in Vietnam.