Tom Crosson

These are some great life/business lessons from Sec. Baker.

One company, one beat. What it's like for a reporter to cover a single company. cjr.org/feature/one-co… via @cjr

WATCH: A tiny Boeing 747SP Las Vegas Sands Luxury Resort taking off for the last time before retirement. 📹: JayaviationLV

America burned Japan's first gift of cherry trees. All 2,000 of them, on President Taft's direct order. The 1910 shipment arrived in DC crawling with insects and nematodes. Agriculture inspectors condemned the lot, Taft signed off on the bonfire, and the State Department braced for a diplomatic disaster. Tokyo's mayor, Yukio Ozaki, responded by sending 3,020 more, grafted from the famous grove along the Arakawa River. Those trees have spent a century paying the friendship back. Four days after Pearl Harbor, vandals chopped down four of them. Park officials renamed the survivors "Oriental" cherry trees for the rest of the war to protect them from axes. Then came the twist. By 1952 the original Arakawa grove in Tokyo, the parent stock, had nearly died from wartime neglect. Japan asked Washington for help. The Park Service shipped budwood from DC's trees back across the Pacific and restored the grove that created them. When a flood wiped out more Japanese trees in 1982, horticulturists took 800 fresh cuttings from the Tidal Basin. These 250 new trees solve a real problem too. The Tidal Basin is sinking, and a $133 million seawall rebuild forced crews to rip out roughly 150 trees. Japan offered replacements before anyone asked, timed to America's 250th birthday. So the genetics run in a loop. Tokyo's grove seeded Washington's. Washington's saved Tokyo's. The saplings going in this spring descend from both. 114 years of diplomacy, running on grafted branches.

The final draft of Declaration of Independence was submitted to the Continental Congress by Thomas Jefferson today in 1776!

It’s officially U.S. Open week 🇺🇸 Welcome to Shinnecock Hills

On June 13, 1777, a 19-year-old French teenager landed on a beach in South Carolina, uninvited, to fight in someone else's war. He would become one of the most important men in American history. The Marquis de Lafayette was one of the richest young aristocrats in France. He had a beautiful wife, a fortune, and zero reason to risk any of it. But he believed in the American cause so fiercely that when the French king forbade him from going, Lafayette bought his own ship and sailed anyway. He literally went AWOL from a life of luxury to bleed for a country that didn't exist yet. Congress was annoyed at first. Another foreign officer looking for a paycheck? Then Lafayette offered to serve for free and pay his own way. That got their attention. He met Washington and the two formed one of the great father-son bonds in American history. Washington had no biological children. Lafayette named his only son George Washington Lafayette. He took a bullet in the leg at Brandywine and kept rallying the retreat. He was instrumental at Yorktown, the battle that won the war. He went home a hero on two continents. A foreign teenager believed in America before America did. 249 years ago today.

Is LinkedIn Entering Its Post-Cringe Era? nytimes.com/2026/06/04/bus…

This is devastating news. The Prime Rib is legendary.

Metro Phoenix has long been America’s back office. But AI is leaving its cubicle jobs in the dust. wsj.com/economy/phoeni… via @WSJ

There's only one king in the soda wars: Coca-Cola Classic... wsj.com/arts-culture/f… via @WSJ

Watching the Navy Blue Angels choreograph their air show routine is insane. Every movement is planned down to the second

LIV plans to tell players and staff by Thursday that Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund would end its funding for the upstart league. But the PGA Tour isn’t yet ready to welcome back those who jumped ship. wsj.com/sports/golf/li… via @WSJ

Americans spent over $109 billion on lottery tickets last year, which is more than they spent on movies, books, concerts and sports tickets - combined.

The Billionaire Trying to Build the ‘Next Great Washington Newsroom’ wsj.com/business/media…

More than 12% of US households stash their overflow in rented storage spaces. But in local government and urban planning circles, the window-less establishments are seen as hogging land and creating dead zones where there ought to be activity. wsj.com/real-estate/se… via @WSJ

Life automation: Meet the AI running a blockchain CEO's life axios.com/2026/04/20/blo…

Only one chance in this lifetime… Like watching sunset at the beach from the most foreign seat in the cosmos, I couldn’t resist a cell phone video of Earthset. You can hear the shutter on the Nikon as @Astro_Christina is hammering away on 3-shot brackets and capturing those exceptional Earthset photos through the 400mm lens. @AstroVicGlover was in window 3 watching with @Astro_Jeremy next to him. I could barely see the Moon through the docking hatch window but the iPhone was the perfect size to catch the view…this is uncropped, uncut with 8x zoom which is quite comparable to the view of the human eye. Enjoy.

Rory McIlroy commissioned this pencil drawing after last year's Masters Tournament. The artist (@KeeganHall) provided context on Reddit: • Spent 6+ months working on it • Estimates 600-800+ total hours • Worked on it 6-7 days each week • Uses a Pentel Graphgear mechanical pencil Hall says this piece was incredibly challenging because so much detail went into such a small area. For context, the original is smaller than 30x22, so each face in the crowd is essentially a quarter of the size of a fingernail. This is the second piece he has done for Rory.

The Iran war, Epstein files, betting markets all cry out for “monitoring the situation” bloomberg.com/news/articles/…

In 1993, a local Chicago reporter covering the St. Patrick's Day parade spotted Tommy Lee Jones filming a movie amidst the festivities and stopped him for a quick interview. The movie was THE FUGITIVE 🔥