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"There are places in America where the ground itself speaks, where silence is not emptiness but weight, accumulated grief pressed into every white stone marker. Arlington Cemetery is such a place. The Trump administration proposes to desecrate it." open.substack.com/pub/kevinmlevi…

I've never seen a photograph look so much like a Hopper painting before.

In the best case scenario, Trump struck a deal to reopen a Strait that was open before the pointless war he started, with the IRGC demonstrating its control over the Strait and potentially extracting fees plus sanctions relief. Thousands of innocents - including hundreds of children - dead in Lebanon and Iran for no reason. U.S. troops killed and wounded. U.S. embassies and bases in the Middle East badly damaged. U.S. standing in the world obliterated. U.S. munitions badly depleted. Hundreds of billions spent. Prices up everywhere. More global economic fallout to come. Putin strengthened and enriched. Just a catastrophic situation even in the best of circumstances. A profoundly shameful episode in American history no matter what happens next.

Artemis II mission route in 3D

Hello, Moon. It’s great to be back. Here’s a taste of what the Artemis II astronauts photographed during their flight around the Moon. Check out more photos from the mission: nasa.gov/artemis-ii-mul…

This is the most horrifying, psychotic, grotesque message Trump has ever posted—openly threatening to commit genocide. This is beyond reckless. It’s dangerous, dehumanizing, and utterly unfit for any leader.

Ronan Farrow’s New Yorker insight on Sam Altman is head and shoulders above anything that has appeared in any UK paper on the AI elite. It is ESSENTIAL reading. @NewYorker @RonanFarrow @andrewmarantz - this is the kind of journalism that changes perception utterly.

A fun visualization in light of the Artemis II mission. It's also why I don't believe humans will visit Mars in 100 years, let alone 20 years. I do not expect to be around to see my prediction proven correct. However I hope to be around to see my prediction proven incorrect.

That’s no ordinary rabbit! 🩸🐇 BEWARE 🗡️☠️

🚨 UNITED PASSENGER CATCHES INSANE NASA ROCKET LAUNCH FROM PLANE WINDOW — FLIGHT ATTENDANT LOSES IT MID-AIR A United flight just turned into a front-row seat to history. A woman captures the exact moment NASA’s Artemis II rocket launches… straight from her window at 30,000 feet. And then you hear the flight attendant: “15 years of flying… I’ve been praying to see something like this.” • Rocket blasting through the clouds • Crew calling it a “once in a lifetime” moment He said he flew to Florida multiple times just to see a launch… Canceled. Every time. And then this happens midair. What are the chances you randomly look out your window… and see history taking off?

The World’s Most Educated Populations, Across 45 Countries College or university degree (%) 🇨🇦 Canada: 64.7 🇮🇪 Ireland: 57.5 🇰🇷 South Korea: 56.2 🇱🇺 Luxembourg: 54.4 🇬🇧 UK: 53.8 🇦🇺 Australia: 53.1 🇸🇪 Sweden: 51.8 🇺🇸 U.S.: 50.7 🇮🇱 Israel: 50.5 🇳🇴 Norway: 50.4 🇱🇹 Lithuania: 47.7 🇨🇭 Switzerland: 46.5 🇩🇰 Denmark: 45.1 🇳🇱 Netherlands: 45.1 🇧🇪 Belgium: 45.0 🇮🇸 Iceland: 44.5 🇳🇿 New Zealand: 44.0 🇫🇷 France: 43.4 🇫🇮 Finland: 42.7 🇪🇪 Estonia: 42.5 🇪🇸 Spain: 42.3 🇱🇻 Latvia: 40.5 🇵🇱 Poland: 39.5 🇦🇹 Austria: 37.7 🇬🇷 Greece: 35.3 🇸🇮 Slovenia: 34.6 🇩🇪 Germany: 34.3 🇧🇬 Bulgaria: 33.8 🇨🇱 Chile: 32.9 🇵🇹 Portugal: 31.4 🇭🇺 Hungary: 31.1 🇨🇴 Colombia: 30.6 🇭🇷 Croatia: 30.4 🇸🇰 Slovak Republic: 29.0 🇨🇷 Costa Rica: 27.8 🇨🇿 Czechia: 27.5 🇹🇷 Türkiye: 26.9 🇦🇷 Argentina: 23.7 🇮🇹 Italy: 22.3 🇲🇽 Mexico: 21.9 🇧🇷 Brazil: 21.5 🇷🇴 Romania: 19.2 🇮🇳 India: 14.2 🇮🇩 Indonesia: 13.1 🇿🇦 South Africa: 9.0 Source: OECD’s Education at a Glance 2025 report.

The True dwelling of the holy.

Tens of millions of Americans voted for this guy to lead them, twice.

Stop delaying joy until life looks a certain way. You're allowed to be happy while still figuring things out Image: instagram.com/selfcare.recipe

@GunnelsWarren Meanwhile countries like Sweden and Denmark are moving back to physical textbooks and handwriting as it is proven to be better for retention and training your brain.

On landmark Meta and Google child harm verdicts, it’s critical to note this isn’t a one-off. It’s been 10+ years of prioritizing profits over people. Massive surveillance advertising + monopoly businesses. Cambridge Analytica. Data leakage. Search + adtech monopolies. Recidivism.

Wow. So unbelievably and heartbreakingly on-point.

It’s gotten so bad that Sweden is now spending 100 million euros to remove tech from schools, while Denmark is investing millions in physical textbooks. Ubiquitous screens turn education into entertainment, & the constant stimulation makes learning impossible.

I don’t think society is ready for the disruption that is coming as a result of educated, civically engaged, middle class 22-35 year olds experiencing the brunt of the impact of AI. This is a specific form of betrayal that strikes directly at the heart of the “America. Dream” and is politically distinct from the manufacturing offshoring/automation story that has dominated populist politics for decades. This cohort isn’t just losing their existing jobs, they’re losing the *opportunity* for the jobs they were educated for, and losing them to AI systems often trained on their own work product. For the first time in modern history, college educated workers are more pessimistic about finding meaningful and stable work than non-college workers.

George Lucas traded $350,000 in directing salary for something Fox executives thought was worthless: the right to sell Star Wars toys. It was 1976. Over 40 studios had already passed on his script, including Disney. Fox only greenlit the project because they wanted Lucas for other films. Nobody at the studio expected to make money on a space opera with no stars, so when Lucas offered to cut his directing fee from $500,000 to $150,000 in exchange for merchandising and sequel rights, Fox said yes on the spot. Movie merchandise was a dead business. Fox had lost money on Doctor Dolittle lunchboxes a decade earlier. They thought they were getting the better deal. Lucas couldn’t even find a toy company that wanted in. Kenner, a division of cereal company General Foods, finally bought the licensing for a flat $100,000. Then Star Wars opened. Between 1977 and 1978, Kenner sold $100 million worth of toys off that $100,000 investment. They couldn’t make enough for Christmas ’77, so they sold empty boxes with IOUs inside, promising to mail the action figures later. Parents paid real money for cardboard and a promise. Nobody around the production saw any of this coming. Alec Guinness, who played Obi-Wan, privately called the script “fairy-tale rubbish.” But he was shrewd enough to negotiate 2.25% of royalties instead of a flat fee. About 20 minutes of total screen time earned his estate somewhere between $50 million and $100 million. Lucas himself was so convinced the film would flop that he offered Spielberg a bet while visiting the Close Encounters set: swap 2.5% of each other’s profits. Spielberg took it. That handshake has paid him around $40 million. And then the money started compounding. Lucas poured his Star Wars profits into ILM, the effects house he’d built for the film. When its computer graphics division got too expensive to maintain, he sold it to Steve Jobs in 1986 for $10 million. Jobs renamed it Pixar. Disney bought Pixar twenty years later for $7.4 billion. Then in 2012, Disney came back for the rest, buying Lucasfilm itself for $4.05 billion. Total franchise revenue today sits around $46.7 billion, over $20 billion from merchandise alone. The filmmaker 40 studios passed on is now worth $5.3 billion according to Forbes. Fifty years ago today, cameras rolled on a desert in Tunisia. The $350,000 pay cut that made it all possible might be the best trade in business history.