Our Road to Springfield
“In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs. The people that came in, they’re eating the cats, they’re eating the pets of the people that live there, and this is what’s happening in our country.” Somehow, the guy who said that then laughable line during a presidential debate won that presidential election, with support from many who were still certain his immigration hardline policies would only be aimed at real criminals. A couple years later, no one is laughing, as many of the Haitian immigrants in Springfield are being fitted for ankle monitors. That included Pierre Damas Bel. “He was 20, and had arrived legally in the United States in March 2024 and been granted something called Temporary Protective Status, or TPS, due to dangerous conditions in Haiti. He had joined his family in Springfield, where roughly 15,000 Haitians had settled in recent years. He had just graduated from high school, where he’d been a standout student, soccer player, and member of the Junior ROTC program. He’d enrolled at Wright State University, half an hour from Springfield, and wanted to study neuroscience.” That doesn’t sound like the kind of immigrant we should be targeting. It sounds more like the type of person America has always benefited from welcoming to our shores. But did you expect logic from a president who kept repeating that people like Pierre Damas Bel were eating your pets? Did you expect compassion and decency from a then Vice Presidential candidate who described his own repetition of the pet-eating claims by explaining, “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.” Well, there’s no need to create repulsive stories about Springfield anymore. Wearing his ankle monitor, Pierre Damas Bel recently stepped out in front of a speeding truck. Stephanie McCrummen in The Atlantic (Gift Article): A Reckoning in Springfield. “A truck driver out on his route confronts what the country has become.”
+ WaPo (Gift Article): As Trump rallies his base in Ohio, a Haitian migrant is laid to rest nearby. “Trump brought up Springfield during his remarks and recited a version of ‘The Snake,’ a song by civil rights activist Oscar Brown Jr. in which a woman dies after being bitten by a snake on which she took pity and invited into her home.” It’s too late for Pierre Damas Bel, but more people are finally realizing who the snake is in the current American story.
Betting it All on Gambling
“It’s the individual gambler that Silicon Valley can make the most use of. Casinos need marks. Crypto needs bag holders. Prediction markets need dumb money. And L.L.M.s need information.” Max Read in NYT Mag (Gift Article): How Everything Became Gambling. “What underwrites this emerging industry — besides an excellent business model and billions of dollars of revenue from suckers and billions of dollars of investment from the smart-money set — is a shared vision of a world built around gambling and the calculated risks that accompany it. The influencers, livestreamers, podcasters and aggregators (not to mention rappers and comedians and athletes) who have reoriented their output around the imperatives of betting capital not only work in service of what you might call the speculative sector but operate according to its logic as well. What is social media, after all, but a venue where you can wager your reputation and stake high-risk claims — and, perhaps, trigger a lavish (if infrequent) payout? All while enjoying the addictive satisfactions of endless nondeterministic push-button stimulus. Gambling, in other words, is not simply paying for the culture. It is the culture.”
Buying Our Way Out of the Problem
“Upbeat spending is particularly remarkable because it seems to contradict downbeat consumer sentiment. Long-running gauges of consumers’ moods are running near historic lows, weighed down by high gasoline prices, subdued hiring and contentious politics. Lousy consumer moods once correlated with lower consumer spending, but since the pandemic, sentiment has increasingly decoupled from spending and other economic indicators.” WSJ (Gift Article): The Mighty American Consumer Is Crashing Through Inflation and Driving Growth.
A Clear Conscious
“Researchers have implanted millions of functional human brain cells in mice, for instance, prompting speculation that the work might someday endow mice with consciousness. Philosophers and theologians are musing about whether A.I. will become conscious, and how we can know for sure. Amid all the uncertainty, there’s one fact that everyone can agree on. In each of our lives, there was a time when our brains were still too rudimentary to support consciousness, and there was a time when that changed.” Carl Zimmer with an interesting look at what consciousness is and when it begins. Are Babies Conscious? (I always advised mine to avoid it as long as possible.)
Extra, Extra
Break a Plague: “The death of a Russian researcher who is believed to have shattered a test tube containing the pneumonic plague pathogen at a laboratory in Siberia has triggered worldwide alarm.” Russian scientist dies after ‘dropping test tube’ containing pneumonic plague. More from MoJo: Reports of a Plague Outbreak in Russia Follow the Death of a Researcher. As many as five hospitals might be under quarantine. It’s unclear how broad a risk there is right now because in Russia, pathogens spread faster than clear information.
+ Bolsonaro Victory: “A surprise victory for a right-wing populist embroiled in scandal. Crushing defeat for a party deemed out of touch with its base. Supporters on the left grasping for answers. The scene may feel familiar to Americans. This time, it unfolded in a Latin American nation thousands of miles away. And the results could profoundly reshape the region and its relations with Washington.” In a Major Boost for the Right, Another Bolsonaro Nears Brazil’s Presidency.
+ Greasing the Skids: “The Trump administration’s talks with Russia about ending the war in Ukraine have expanded to include a multibillion-dollar oil deal that would benefit Middle Eastern business executives with ties to the two main U.S. negotiators, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner.” U.S.-Russia Talks on Ukraine Now Involve an Oil Deal Tied to Trump Allies. (The worse the midterm numbers look, the faster the corrupt will move to get what they can get.)
+ Brainiacs: “Three scientists won the 2026 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine Monday for discoveries that allow researchers to switch on and off nerve cells in the living brain.” (Weird, I was sure it would go to the guy who popularized the notion that dumb has a B at the end.)
+ Read All About It: US book bans in public schools reach record annual high of 12,000. (Congratulations to Texas for topping the list.)
+ The Claude Mod Squad: “I’m going to shoot up the sheriff’s right the [expletive] now … This is 100% last chance I’m done. I got a new [expletive] gun today. [Expletive] you.” Carli Michelle Heller was arrested for those threats. But she didn’t make them directly to Lee County Sheriff’s Office. She made them to Claude.
+ Liquid Courage: “Tell them: hey dont give me no bs maisntream [sic] stuff about urine therapy.. give me esoteric knowledge please. And they will give you a bunch of really cool info.” A headline that defines an era. People Who Drink Their Own Pee Are Obsessed With AI, Using It to Reassure Themselves That It’s a Miraculous Cure-All. (The official drink of doing your own research.)
+ Rocket Science: The controversy over fraternities is nothing new, and the Cornell 7 led an old Caitlin Flanagan lede to go viral over the weekend. “One warm spring night in 2011, a young man named Travis Hughes stood on the back deck of the Alpha Tau Omega fraternity house at Marshall University, in West Virginia, and was struck by what seemed to him—under the influence of powerful inebriants, not least among them the clear ether of youth itself—to be an excellent idea: he would shove a bottle rocket up his ass and blast it into the sweet night air. And perhaps it was an excellent idea. What was not an excellent idea, however, was to misjudge the relative tightness of a 20-year-old sphincter and the propulsive reliability of a 20-cent bottle rocket. What followed ignition was not the bright report of a successful blastoff, but the muffled thud of fire in the hole.”
Bottom of the News
“Why didn’t anyone tell me there’s an animal that smells exactly like hot, buttered popcorn? Researchers at Duke University spent years wondering the same thing, and in 2016 they finally tracked it down: binturong urine contains a compound called 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline, or 2-AP, which happens to be the exact same molecule responsible for popcorn’s smell.” (One of my beagles has a snout that smells exactly like a tennis ball. Even more perplexing: That smell becomes more pronounced during majors.)
+ Some of the 2026 Comedy Wildlife Awards Finalists.
