✪ “Resident Alien,” one of our favorite TV shows, is canceled. Son of a bitch! This is some bullshit! deadline.com

✪ Today I learned Ron Goulart wrote a series of mystery novels featuring Groucho Marx as a detective. en.wikipedia.org

✪ “The head of the main UN agency serving Palestinians has said his frontline staff are fainting from hunger, as the number of people dying of starvation in Gaza continued to rise and hopes for a ceasefire faded as negotiations collapsed.” theguardian.com

✪ “A group of far-right Israeli politicians and settlers met in parliament this week to discuss a plan to displace Palestinians from Gaza, annex the territory and turn it into a hi-tech, luxury resort city for Israelis.… Michael Sfard, one of Israel’s leading human rights lawyers, said: ‘This is a plan for ethnic cleansing. Under international law, this would amount to a crime against humanity because deportation is a war crime when committed on a small scale and a crime against humanity when it is committed on a massive scale.'” theguardian.com

✪ “Venezuelan men who were deported by the US to a notorious prison in El Salvador without due process are speaking out about treatment they described as ‘hell’ and like a ‘horror movie’, after arriving back home.” theguardian.com

✪ Immigration agents told a teenage US citizen: ‘You’ve got no rights.’ He secretly recorded his brutal arrest theguardian.com

✪ JD Vance Claims One of Our Worst Traditions as His Own. By Jamelle Bouie. nytimes.com Vance echoes the principles of the Dred Scott decision, which declared that Black people were an inferior race who could never be US citizens.

✪ White House Slams ‘South Park’ After Unflattering Depiction of Trump. hollywoodreporter.com The South Park episode includes a realistic, AI-generated image of a naked Trump showing his micropenis. youtu.be

✪ Ghislaine Maxwell Can’t Help But Notice Interview Room Covered In Plastic Sheeting. theonion.com

✪ Today’s labor market is “less like a ladder, more like a slot machine,” resulting in “zero-sum logic” that is poisoning society, writes Kayla Scanlon. kyla.substack.com

In 1957, the Soviet launch of Sputnik triggered a huge US response. It led to 3x funding for science education, created NASA and DARPA, and created massive investment in talent and infrastructure (and optimism). The US looked at a challenge and said: We can build our way out of this.

As economist Alex Tabarrok pointed out in his piece about the Sputnik moment, that kind of mobilization didn’t happen in 2024 when China’s DeepSeek AI surpassed OpenAI’s GPT-4. The US retreated instead of rallying. We looked at a challenge and say: They must be stealing from us.

This is a shift in how we understand problems and solutions. As Alex highlighted, research shows we’re developing what economists call zero-sum thinking, or the belief that my success requires your failure, that wealth and opportunity are fixed pies to be divided rather than expanded. As Alex explains, zero-sum thinkers “see society as unjust, distrust their fellow citizens and societal institutions, espouse more populist attitudes, and disengage from potentially beneficial interactions.” It’s a form of despair that arises during times of economic uncertainty.”

As Scanlon notes: This is reversible.

✪ The Seeds of Democratic Revival Have Already Been Sown. nytimes.com — I love nearly all of this article — but I am deeply troubled by suggestions we should fail to support our LGBTQ fellow Americans.

✪ “You think you’re the coolest guy in the parking lot and then this guy shows up.” “This guy” being a cat. tiktok.com

✪ Skittles gets a hat. tumblr.com

✪ Prepare Batcopter for immediate takeoff. tumblr.com

✪ By the way, is there anyone onboard who knows how to fly a plane? tumblr.com