Life Inhale
Publishers Go Nuclear, Weekend Whats
As much as AI “search” results have changed your internet experience, it’s nothing compared to the way it’s changed things for online publishers. For the entirety of the web’s brief history, using every search engine optimization trick to achieve a high page rank and appear among the top few search results was the name of the internet game. The quest to achieve search result prominence drove nearly every textual element of internet design. But then everything changed. Google stopped sending traffic to web publishers and instead started inhaling the content it indexed and providing searchers with concise summaries of what they were after. Goodbye links, hello answers. Oh, and goodbye web traffic. The strategy may have saved you a click, but it leaves one wondering if anything can save online publishers. Their golden goose is now quite literally sucking the life out of them. How bad is it? Publishers are considering the nuclear option. AdWeek: Once Unimaginable, Publishers Are Preparing to Opt Out of Google Search. “For decades, publishers have done everything in their power, from the legal to the not-explicitly illegal, to rank as highly in Google Search as possible. For many websites, traffic from the search engine was their single greatest source of audience and, as a result, revenue. Now though, a handful of influential players in the digital media ecosystem have begun moving in the opposite direction, laying the groundwork for what was once unthinkable: removing themselves from Google Search.”
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Taking Acception Exception
Back in September of our Covid year, I was sitting outside on the deck with my 96 year-old dad who grew up in Poland during WWII, was the only member of his family to survive the Holocaust, and spent years fighting the Nazis as part of a Partisan group. I mentioned that the numbers were looking pretty good for Biden, and Trump was starting to lose his grip (political and mental). My dad said, “Yeah, but he’ll never accept the results.” It was one of many predictions my dad got right over the years. He didn’t live long enough to witness January 6, but nothing about it would have surprised him. He’d seen these kinds of stories play out before. It’s about time that everyone stops being surprised by the extent to which Trump (and his enablers) will go to overturn election results. The latest example: Armed with new powers granted by the SCOTUS majority, “the Trump administration has forced out the three remaining members of an independent, bipartisan commission that supports states in administering their elections, the White House confirmed on Thursday. The move comes as President Trump seeks to cast doubt on the outcome of the upcoming midterms and impose control over how ballots are counted.” NYT (Gift Article): Trump Administration Fires Members of Independent Election Group. “Mr. Trump has been laying the groundwork for months to claim that Republicans would face a tough midterm election, not because of the broadly unpopular war in Iran and plummeting approval ratings on the economy, but because the country’s election system is fraudulent.”
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Ram Sham
While searching for a different person, federal immigration officers in Houston shot and killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo. They later explained that Araujo tried to ram them with his van before they opened fire. Sound familiar? Witnesses of ICE Killing in Houston Dispute the Official Account. “Three men who witnessed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo’s killing by federal immigration officers in Houston disputed the Department of Homeland Security’s account and said the victim never tried to run over a federal agent. The men, who were inside the vehicle, were arrested during the Tuesday encounter and spoke from immigration detention with their lawyer, Hugo Balderas-Ibarra. They said that Mr. Araujo, a 52-year-old Mexican immigrant who was driving to work at a construction site, did not use his vehicle as a weapon or attempt to run over the immigration officers who opened fire.”
+ Texas ICE Killing Darkens: Rep Says Witnesses Pressured to Self-Deport.
+ “A federal immigration agent killed a man from Mexico on Tuesday in Houston, firing into the car that the man was driving. It was at least the 21st shooting by agents involved in President Trump’s deportation crackdown since he took office for his second term in January 2025. Five people, including three U.S. citizens, were killed as a result of those shootings, nearly all of which involved officers firing at people in vehicles.”
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Weekend Whats
What to Watch: From the creators of For All Mankind comes Star City on AppleTV, which imagines a future (from the Soviet perspective) in which the Soviets got to the Moon first. You don’t need to have watched For All Mankind first to enjoy Star City. But you’ll probably want to start on that show next.
+ What to Read: I first heard about Vijay Gupta’s memoir, Restrung: A Memoir of Music and Transformation from my friend Joel Stein’s newsletter. “By age twenty-five, Vijay Gupta had lived several lifetimes: he played Carnegie Hall at eight, studied at Juilliard and Yale before most had finished high school, joined the Los Angeles Philharmonic at nineteen, gave a celebrated TED Talk seen by millions, and launched a nonprofit. But behind the accolades was estrangement, addiction, and a private unraveling.” In addition to being a great musician, Gupta is also an excellent writer. This is a very personal story about personal achievements, family relationships, and how music really connects us, from symphony halls to Skid Row. (Bonus content: What Skid Row Taught Acclaimed Violinist Vijay Gupta About Music.)
+ What to Doc: Rafa on Netflix is a four-part docuseries on the rise and injuries of Rafael Nadal. This docuseries is part of a trend of docs essentially produced with their subjects, so you don’t necessarily get any hard-hitting insights. But if you’re into tennis, you will definitely enjoy this look at the mental and physical challenges faced by one of the greats. (FWIW, his trainer Uncle Toni has basically the same mentality as my pilates teacher.)
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Extra, Extra
Cease Ceased: U.S. President Donald Trump said on Friday that Iran had asked to continue talks and the U.S. had agreed, but that the ceasefire was over. (Of course, we can’t be sure of any of that because of the source.)
+ Playing with Housing Money: Housing affordability bill is about to become law, even after Trump refuses to sign it in PROTEST.” (So he gets to enrage his own party with nothing to show for it.)
+ Nolan Wells: “Nolan Wells was last seen boating with friends around 3 p.m. Saturday on Horn Island, a barrier reef off Mississippi accessible only by boat, the Jackson County Sheriff’s Department said. He was wearing blue swim trunks and sunglasses. Wells’ mother reported him missing that night after he did not return on the boat with the rest of the group.” Investigation underway into death of Mississippi 18-year-old who vanished on July 4 boating trip. (This feels like it’s going to become a massive story.)
+ Parasite Unseen: “There’s a lag between when people consume the parasite that causes the illness and when symptoms appear, making it tough for those infected to remember what they ate to pinpoint the problem. Health officials are alarmed by the rapidly growing number of cases, which they say are likely undercounted because some people recover without medical care and are not tested.” Why we don’t know what food is spreading the parasite sickening thousands.
+ The Recline of Western Civilization: “Life is full of ethical dilemmas, some more consequential than others. Should you eat meat? While you decide, the lives of countless animals hang in the balance. Will you use Claude to write your cover letter? While you contemplate, your integrity is at risk. In comparison, seat reclination is small-scale. Only a few inches are at stake, perhaps for just a few hours. And yet that little wedge of space and time looms large: whether you seize it seems to suggest something about how you treat other people, or even conceive of society in general.” The New Yorker: Should You Recline Your Airplane Seat? “Investigating the central dilemma of our time.” (There are still some airplane activities we can all agree are bad. For example: Passenger partly sucked out of window soon after takeoff from Greece...)
+ Messi Business: “They discovered that the name they had chosen in honor of Lionel Messi violated an obscure 1969 Argentina statute prohibiting the use of surnames as first names.” This is why there aren’t thousands of Argentinians named Messi.
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Feel Good Friday
“You do not have time for this. You do not have time to sit in a 200-degree box, as if you were a slice of leftover pizza. You do not have time to spend a half-hour in a hotter-than-even-standard sauna, then immerse yourself in a bath of water that is extremely frozen if not actual ice, shocking the eggshell of your sanity from the membrane of your gelatinous insides. You — meaning I, who have lately been thinking of myself as a you — truly do not want to do what is called cold-plunging.” Taffy Brodesser-Akner: I Survived a Cold Plunge and All I Got Was Everything I Ever Wanted.
+ “Long-tenured workers like Barzar are Costco’s secret weapon. They are reliable and experienced, able to speed shoppers through a checkout line and serve as mentors to newer workers, passing down the company’s unique culture.” He Earns $33 an Hour as a Costco Cashier. Now He’s a Millionaire.
+ This program gives Black single moms $1,000 a month for a year. The results are undeniable.
+ Female US rower reflects on ‘surreal’ record-breaking journey from California to Hawaii.
+ A tiny eye implant invented by a Stanford scientist is helping blind people read again.
+ Jesse Eisenberg Explains Why His Decision to Donate a Kidney Was Very Easy.
+ How Olivia Rodrigo Is Getting Back at the Trump Administration.
+ In any language: English speakers are tuning into World Cup broadcasts in Spanish. There’s really only one word you need to know. Goooooooal.