Putin His Place?: “The invasion has already backfired on Russia, and its remaining battlefield efforts are focused on making the most out of a bad situation — to make sufficient gains that it could sell the war as a win to its population and the world. But just because the war has been bad for Russia doesn’t mean that it’s a victory for Ukraine.” We’re six months into Putin’s murderous mayhem. How do we know who’s winning in Ukraine? And from Vanity Fair: Holding Russia to Account for War Crimes in Ukraine. “First, you encounter an individual case. Next, you see similar cases stretched across a town, then a region, then a country. In time, you begin to see patterns in the atrocities, and you start to understand that the intent had been to deliberately erase a population and destroy its identity.”

+ Living in a Simulation: “The amount of young adults who said in 2021 that they used marijuana in the past year (43%), the past month (29%) or daily (11%) were at the highest levels ever recorded.” Young adults are using marijuana and hallucinogens at the highest rates on record. (Watching democracy and the planet die is a decent reason to want to hallucinate.)

+ Charge! “California’s stance on new car sales is extremely consequential given the state’s status as a standard bearer for clean air regulations … California is also one of the largest markets for car sales in the world, with nearly 15 million registered vehicles on the road and 1.85 million new vehicle registrations in 2021.” And the state is prepared to ban the sale of new gas-powered vehicles starting in 2035.

+ Cloud Computing: “If the solar system were full of soup out to Jupiter, things might be okay for some people for a few minutes. Then, for the next half hour, things would definitely not be okay for anyone. After that, time as we know it would end.” Ask an absurd question, and xkcd’s Randall Munroe will give you a (somewhat) serious answer. Among the questions: What If You Tried to Swallow a Whole Cloud? (I live in the hills of Sausalito. I probably swallow three a day.)