When news gets around that a quarter of all patients who use your most popular drug over the long-term develop an addiction, and an overdose epidemic claims more than 200,000 lives, it starts to eat into profits. So what's a company like Purdue Pharma to do to make ends meet? The family behind the company decided to follow in the deadly footsteps of big tobacco. "As the United States takes steps to limit sales here, the company goes abroad." The LA Times with a special report: OxyContin goes global.

+ "Distributors have fed their greed on human frailties and to criminal effect. There is no excuse and should be no forgiveness." Other countries should pay close attention to the drug dealer's playbook. Get doctors in a certain region to prescribe the drugs. Wait until people are hooked. And then unleash more and more drugs into that market in order to feed the beast. From the Charleston Gazette-Mail: Drug firms poured 780M painkillers into West Virginia amid rise of overdoses.

+ Stat: 52 weeks, 52 faces: Obituaries narrate lives lost to the opioid epidemic.

"Salaries for female physicians average some $19,879 -- eight percent lower than male physicians. At academic hospitals, male physicians receive more research funding and are more than twice as likely as female physicians to rise to the rank of full professor." Is there a category where female doctors score higher than their male counterparts? Yes. Quality of care. From The Atlantic's James Hamblin: New research estimates that if all physicians were female, 32,000 fewer Americans would die every year.

German officials are quite certain the a truck rampage through a Christmas market in Berlin was an intentional act. They are less sure of other facts, including whether or not the Pakistani asylum-seeker they arrested was actually the driver. Twelve people were killed in the incident. Here's the latest on the investigation from The Guardian.

"A crime has been committed and it was without doubt a provocation aimed at spoiling the normalization of Russo-Turkish relations and spoiling the Syrian peace process." So said Russian President Vladimir Putin in response to the fatal shooting of Russia's ambassador to Turkey by an off-duty police officer who shouted, "Don't forget Syria and Aleppo!" before the shooting.

+ "The event seemed routine, the opening of an exhibit of photographs of Russia. So when a man in a dark suit and tie pulled out a gun, I was stunned and thought it was a theatrical flourish." Associated Press photographer Burhan Ozbilici witnessed and photographed the incident.

"The A.I. system had demonstrated overnight improvements roughly equal to the total gains the old one had accrued over its entire lifetime." The NYT Mag's Gideon Lewis with a very interesting look at the future of Google (and to a certain extent, everything else). The Great A.I. Awakening. (I'm old enough to remember when artificial intelligence just meant pretending you were smart.)

+ Researchers are pushing the limits of machine learning by programming a robot to fold laundry. The irony is that by the time robots can fold clothes, none of us will need to leave the house anyway. So who cares about a few wrinkles?

Here's a happy story. People who live in "a mountain-ringed desert about 25 miles from Argentina's northwest border with Chile" have been struggling to maintain some of life's basic services: drinking water, heat for schools, sewer systems. But it turns out these poor communities were sitting on top of a massive reserve of one of the world's most in-demand elements: The lithium that powers the batteries of whatever device you're using to read this right now. So they hit it big and lived happily ever after. Needless to say, the real story is a little different. Here's the report from WaPo: Indigenous people are left poor as tech world takes lithium from under their feet.

+ This is part of an excellent series about where technology begins. See also, Cobalt in the Congo, and Graphite from China.

After all the coverage and hype around the fevered efforts to convince some of the nations' Electors to switch their vote away from Trump, things went pretty much as usual. Well, there was this one unexpected outcome: "More electors tried to defect from Hillary Clinton Monday than from Trump, by a count of eight to two."

+ "Throughout the election, both the media and the Clinton camp were obsessed by outtakes from the reality show, amid allegations of hair-raising things said by the now president-elect. An investigation into why such tapes never surfaced." Nick Bilton takes you inside the desperate, year-long hunt to find Donald Trump's rumored Apprentice outtakes. (Well, there's one thing I never thought I'd never want: More of The Apprentice.)

+ Tom Arnold says he has tapes of Trump saying bad things on show's outtakes. (I sort of doubt any more offensive talk from Trump would've swayed the election.)

"She discovered that patterns on card backs, designed to be symmetrical, were not perfectly so. Sun trained herself to identify aberrations along the left or right margins of the card backs, no wider than 1/32 of an inch." Famed poker star Phil Ivey teamed with a partner to win $9.6 million in baccarat. Now a judge has ruled he has to pay it all back.

"This idea of homosexual sex cementing heterosexuality and traditional, rural masculinity certainly feels counterintuitive, but it clicks a little once you read some of the specific findings from Silva's interviews." NY Mag's Jesse Singal on the studies that examine the phenomenon of ‘bud sex' between straight rural men.

If you are a Bay Area driver who commutes on Highway 101 or you'll be heading to the SF airport, then don't forget to look up. My wife Gina gave me (and I think, the world) the ultimate birthday gift. Ladies and Gentlemen, The NextDraft Billboard: Real. News. Daily.

+ If you missed it, all the year's Weekend Whats are in one place: The Smart Binge, Music, and Book Guide.

+ Think your job is complicated? Try being the shoe guy for the Warriors.

+ Inside the booming business of adults who play with toys on YouTube. (That career path could have saved me a lot of typing.)

+ Golf on a frozen pond seems like a bad idea because it is.