Friends Without Benefits

We Can't Get It Together, RC Cars

It's not that we're not that into each other. It's more that we're less likely to go out with each other. The epidemic of loneliness is less about not having any friends and more about seeing them less often than we used to. As Olga Khazan explains in The Atlantic (Gift Article), the loneliness epidemic "conjures a nation of friendless hermits who have no one to invite to their birthday parties. But according to a pair of new surveys, American loneliness is more complex than that. The typical American, it seems, texts a bunch of people 'we should get together!' before watching TikTok alone on the couch and then passing out. That is, Americans have friends. We just never really see them." The Friendship Paradox. One "big hurdle is the time and effort it takes to schedule a gathering. In recent decades, participation in groups that allow friends to meet up easily—such as unions, civic clubs, and religious congregations—has dwindled." This is part of the reason why I send an email to each of my friends every single day. This one.

2

Word Association

In The Graduate, Mr. McGuire famously gives Dustin Hoffman's character Benjamin Braddock one word of advice about his future: Plastics. He wasn't wrong. There was a big future in plastics. But, sadly, the future of plastic-related waste and pollution could be even bigger. "It’s enough pollution each year — about 52 million metric tons — to fill New York City’s Central Park with plastic waste as high as the Empire State Building."

+ In many parts of the world, people avoid all that plastic pollution by turning it into air pollution. WaPo (Gift Article): The world is burning an alarming amount of plastic.

+ "The Berkeley research team’s method ... breaks the plastics down much further to the level of essentially molecular puzzle pieces, which can be reconstructed into new plastics. That means a sandwich bag could be recycled into a new sandwich bag, a soiled milk jug into a fresh milk jug." UC Berkeley Chemists Can Now Vaporize Plastic Waste Into Molecular Building Blocks. (Go Bears.)

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Me and My RC

"If a Zoox robot taxi encounters a construction zone it has not seen before, for instance, a technician in the command center will receive an alert — a short message in a small, colored window on the side of the technician’s computer screen. Then, using the computer mouse to draw a line across the screen, the technician can send the car a new route to follow around the construction zone." NYT (Gift Article): How Self-Driving Cars Get Help From Humans Hundreds of Miles Away. Wait a second, does this mean we're basically being driven around in remote control cars? (For those not old enough to remember the Me and My RC reference, enjoy.)

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Dishing the Dirt

"On our way into his lab, we passed a bench piled with bags of dirt—one from the Chihuahuan Desert, another from the Sonoran Desert. 'My parents sent me those during the pandemic,' Brady told me. He has been given soil from Saudi Arabia and the Serengeti; his collaborators have gathered samples in Mexican sinkholes and Australian grasslands." What's all the dirt for? Finding new drugs. Dhruv Khullar in The New Yorker on how the AI revolution is coming to a pharmacy near you. How Machines Learned to Discover Drugs.

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Extra, Extra

School Shooting: "What should have been a joyous back-to-school season in Winder, Georgia, has now turned into another horrific reminder of how gun violence continues to tear our communities apart. Students across the country are learning how to duck and cover instead of how to read and write. We cannot continue to accept this as normal." A shooter believed to be 14 years old killed at least four people and injured many more at a high school in Georgia. Here's the latest from CNN.

+ Total Dis: The criminal charges "represented a U.S. government effort at disrupting a persistent threat from Russia that American officials have long warned has the potential to sow discord and create confusion among voters. Washington has said that Russia remains the primary threat to elections even as the FBI investigates a hack by Iran of Donald Trump’s campaign and an attempt breach of the Joe Biden-Kamala Harris campaign." US accuses Russia of using state media to spread disinformationbefore the November election. (Of course, the biggest source of disinformation isn't coming from Russia or Iran. It's coming from Mar-a-Lago.)

+ Stark Raving Maduro: "It’s September and it already feels like Christmas. So this year – as a way of paying tribute to you and thanking you – I’m going to decree that Christmas be brought forward to 1 October." Maduro declares Christmas in October amid Venezuela’s post-election strife.

+ Star Crossed: "En masse, celebrity stan accounts posted tearful farewells over the weekend as X was suspended in Brazil amid a showdown between Elon Musk and a Supreme Court justice. Many of their hundreds of thousands of followers learned only then that their favorite celebrity’s most dedicated English-language fan accounts had actually been run by Brazilians." There’s no X in Brazil. Celebrity fandom worldwide is in disarray. And from Axios: "Elon Musk's Starlink said Tuesday it will comply with a Brazil court order to block access after all in the country to X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter that's controlled by the billionaire." (He owns too much. There's too much news about him.)

+ Ethically Challenged: From ProPublica, a lede that truly captures an era when so many people have lost faith in once trusted institutions. "Ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, privately heaped praise on a major religious-rights group for fighting efforts to reform the nation’s highest court — efforts sparked, in large part, by her husband’s ethical lapses."

+ Shot Clock: StatNews: Trying to time your vaccines just right? There are no easy answers, but here are some factors to consider.

+ A Quiet Place: "It is essential that, except for the goalkeeper, offensive guide, or coach giving directions, no one speaks during the game. That's partly because the ball itself is constructed with rattles sewn between the inner tube and the outer shell, which allow blind players to envision its location through sound suggestions. Spectators are asked to remain in strict silence so as not to disturb the players, who must rely on their hearing, such as when one of the players signals to the others that he is making an action toward an opponent. The audience can cheer only after goals." Wired: How Blind Soccer Is Played at the 2024 Paris Paralympics.

+ Episodic Memory: Rolling Stone with a fun list of The 100 Best TV Episodes of All Time.

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Bottom of the News

"Larry, the Chief Mouser to the Cabinet Office, has now outlasted five prime ministers—and their pets. A British icon, he has his own unofficial X account, with 900K followers. He is so well known that Downing St. has even reportedly made plans for how to break the news of his eventual death (Larry is 17)." But that's not the most pressing issue. WSJ (Gift Article): There’s a ‘Cat-astrophe’ Brewing on Downing Street.

+ ‘Fake heiress’ Anna Sorokin will compete on ‘Dancing With the Stars’ amid deportation battle.

+ Navy commander relieved of duty after photo showed him firing rifle with scope backward.