At the annual county fair in my hometown, there was a roller coaster that went around in circles, first forward, and then backwards, as the ride operator shouted into a microphone, "Do you wanna go faster?" That's a lot how the Trump-era news cycle feels. With the firing of the FBI's Andrew McCabe and the weekend attacks on the Mueller investigation, we've reached the scorched-earth phase of the Trump presidency. If you think the news around this White House has been crazy so far, you better fasten your seatbelts and keep your hands and feet in, because we're about to go a lot faster. As the NYT's Maggie Haberman reports: The decision to go after Mueller and his team "was the decision of a president who ultimately trusts only his own instincts, and now believes he has settled into the job enough to rely on them rather than the people who advise him." Newly Emboldened, Trump Says What He Really Feels. (Yes, that headline implies that, up until now, he's been holding back...)

+ "If you wanted to tell the story of an entire Presidency in a single tweet, you could try the one that President Trump posted after Attorney General Jeff Sessions fired Andrew McCabe ... Every sentence is a lie. Every sentence violates norms established by Presidents of both parties. Every sentence displays the pettiness and the vindictiveness of a man unsuited to the job he holds." The New Yorker's Jeffrey Toobin: Donald Trump and the Craven Firing of Andrew McCabe. And David Frum on why firing McCabe is just the start.

+ "When the full extent of your venality, moral turpitude, and political corruption becomes known, you will take your rightful place as a disgraced demagogue in the dustbin of history." We've grown accustomed to reading statements like that in our Twitter stream. But not directed from former CIA directors towards a sitting president. For better or worse, the gloves are off. The wheels may soon follow.

We may know that most car accidents are caused by human error. And we may accept the notion that computers will ultimately be much better drivers than humans. But there's still something decidedly unsettling about an autonomous vehicle causing a deadly accident. From Bloomberg: Uber has halted autonomous car testing after a fatal Arizona crash.

"We're clearly dealing with what we expect to be a serial bomber at this time." That was Austin Police Chief Brian Manley following a fourth package explosion in Austin (this one detonating via a tripwire). Here's the latest from the Austin American Statesman.

The Atlantic's Alexis Madrigal: Scholars have been sounding the alarm about data-harvesting firms for nearly a decade. The latest Cambridge Analytica scandal shows it may be too late to stop them: "Is the problem with privacy-obviating social networks, psychological profiling, and political micro-targeting that some researcher violated Facebook's terms of service? Or is it that this controversy estranges the whole enterprise, providing a route to approach the almost unthinkable changes that have come to democratic processes in the Facebook era?"

+ In The Guardian a 28-year-old coder goes on the record to discuss his role in hijacking the profiles of millions of Facebook users in order to target the US electorate. "As Wylie describes it, he was the gay Canadian vegan who somehow ended up creating 'Steve Bannon's psychological warfare mindf-ck tool.'"

+ "Facebook was being used as it's designed, and that's the problem." NY Mag: What You Need to Understand About Facebook and Cambridge Analytica. And here's a good explainer from WaPo: Everything you need to know about the Cambridge Analytica-Facebook debacle.

"It's your data: your individual biology, your health history and ever-fluctuating state of well-being, where you go, what you spend, how you sleep, what you put in your body and what comes out. The amount of data you slough off everyday—in lab tests, medical images, genetic profiles, liquid biopsies, electrocardiograms, to name just a few—is overwhelming by itself. Throw in the stuff from medical claims, clinical trials, prescriptions, academic research, and more, and the yield is something on the order of 750 quadrillion bytes every day—or some 30% of the world's data production." We've been collecting health data for a long time. Now we have the computing power to process and understand that data. And that brings us to the future of health. Fortune: Tech's Next Big Wave: Big Data Meets Biology.

+ MIT Tech Review: AI can spot signs of Alzheimer's before your family does.

"White boys who grow up rich are likely to remain that way. Black boys raised at the top, however, are more likely to become poor than to stay wealthy in their own adult households." From NYT Upshot: Extensive Data Shows Punishing Reach of Racism for Black Boys.

"The Time's Up organization is calling for an investigation into New York District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. for his office's decision not to prosecute Harvey Weinstein in 2015 after Ambra Battilana alleged that she had been groped and harassed by the indie mogul."

+ The move by the celebrity-founded and well-funded group followed the publishing of this Kathy Dobie piece in NY Mag: To Catch a Predator. "The NYPD's top sex-crimes investigator tried to bust Harvey Weinstein three years ago. Then the DA stepped in."

"Why have so many otherwise law-abiding elderly women resorted to petty theft?" According to Bloomberg, "lonely seniors are shoplifting in search of the community and stability of jail." Japan's Prisons Are a Haven for Elderly Women.

"Ten years ago, when my son Nicolai was 11, his doctor wanted to put him on medication for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. 'It would make him less wild,' I explained to my mother, who was then 85. 'It would slow him down a bit.' My mother grumbled. 'Look around you,' she said in Yiddish. 'Look how fast the world is changing. He doesn't need to slow down. You need to speed up.' It was a surprising recommendation from someone who had never learned to use a microwave. But recent research suggests she had a point: Some people with A.D.H.D. may be naturally suited to our turbocharged world." Leonard Mlodinow in the NYT: In Praise of A.D.H.D.

I picked the middle school across the street from my house to win the NCAA tournament, and my March Madness bracket still probably looks better than yours. In one of the most understated headlines of all time, FiveThirtyEight explains: This Year's Sweet 16 Is Downright Odd. (It's one thing for underdogs to win games. But this year, underdogs are crushing teams.)

+ DC councilman apologizes for promoting conspiracy theory that weather is controlled by Jews. (If that were true, I would have struck this guy with lightning by now.)

+ The bidet is making a comeback.

+ "In a case reminiscent of a Kafka novel, a Romanian court has ruled that a 63-year-old man is dead despite what would appear to be convincing evidence to the contrary: the man himself appearing alive and well in court."