YMidtownL

Joel Embiid had one of the most incredible double doubles in NBA history tonight

May 15, 1963. Astronaut Gordon Cooper climbed into a capsule barely larger than a phone booth and launched into space aboard Faith 7. The mission was simple on paper: Orbit Earth 22 times. Stay in space for a full day. Come home alive. For most of the flight, everything worked perfectly. Then, on the 19th orbit, the warning lights came on. First, a faulty sensor falsely reported reentry. Then the electrical system failed. One by one, the automated controls died. Guidance system: dead. Orientation system: dead. Reentry calculations: dead. At 165 miles above Earth, Gordon Cooper suddenly had no functioning instruments to bring him home. And reentry is unforgiving. Too shallow, and the capsule skips off the atmosphere into space forever. Too steep, and friction turns it into a fireball. The difference between life and death was fractions of a degree. Mission Control could only watch. So Cooper became the computer. He drew reference marks on the capsule window with a pen. He stared at the stars he had memorized before launch and used them to orient the spacecraft by eye. He strapped a wristwatch to his arm and timed everything manually. Then he did the math in his head. No autopilot. No navigation system. No backup computer. Just a man, a watch, and the stars. At exactly the right second, Cooper fired the retrorockets manually. The capsule dropped into Earth’s atmosphere. For several minutes, communication vanished as plasma wrapped the spacecraft in fire. Nobody on Earth could contact him. Then the parachutes opened. Faith 7 splashed down just 4.4 miles from the recovery ship USS Kearsarge — the most accurate splashdown of the entire Mercury program. Later, Cooper described it simply: “I used my wristwatch for time, my eyeballs out the window for attitude.” That’s it. In one of the most dangerous moments in early spaceflight history, a human being outperformed the machines. We live in a world obsessed with automation and software. But Gordon Cooper’s flight is a reminder that when everything breaks, the final backup system is still the human mind. Calm under pressure. Thinking clearly. Making the call when nobody else can. It was true in 1963. It still is.

Jimmy Kimmel: "Our First Lady is here. Mrs. Trump… you have a glow like an expectant widow."

Scam Altman and Greg Stockman stole a charity. Full stop. Greg got tens of billions of stock for himself and Scam got dozens of OpenAI side deals with a piece of the action for himself, Y Combinator style. After this lawsuit, Scam will also be awarded tens of billions in stock directly. The fundamental question is simply this: Do you want to set legal precedent in the United States that it is ok to loot a charity? If so, you undermine all charitable giving in the United States forever. I could have started OpenAI as a for-profit corporation. Instead, I started it, funded it, recruited critical talent and taught them everything I know about how to make a startup successful FOR THE PUBLIC GOOD. Then they stole the charity.

I am a senior coordinating producer for the White House Correspondents' Association Dinner. I have worked eleven of these. I was backstage at the Washington Hilton when the shots were fired. The first thing I heard was not the gunfire. It was glass. A champagne flute hit the floor of the International Ballroom at approximately 9:47 PM. Then a second. Then the sound that I have since been told was a 12-gauge shotgun, which from inside the ballroom sounded like a heavy door slamming in a parking garage. Then the Secret Service moved. They moved the President, the Vice President, the First Lady through the east corridor in under ninety seconds, which is protocol, which is practiced, which is the one part of the evening that worked exactly as it was designed. Everything else was improvised. I know this because I ordered the wine. 94 tables. Two bottles per table. 188 bottles of a Willamette Valley pinot noir that the Association selected in February after a tasting committee spent three meetings debating between Oregon and Burgundy. Oregon won. The budget was $14,200. I signed the invoice. I can tell you the vintage. I can tell you the distributor. I can tell you the per-bottle cost because I negotiated it down from $89 to $76. What I cannot tell you is how 147 of those bottles left the building during an active shooter evacuation. I can tell you what I saw. A correspondent from a network I will not name picked up two bottles on her way to the east exit. Full bottles. One in each hand. She was wearing heels and she did not spill. A man in a tuxedo tucked one inside his jacket the way you'd shoplift a paperback at an airport bookstore. A woman picked up a bottle, looked at the label, put it back, and took a different one. She checked the vintage. During an evacuation. That's editorial judgment under pressure. The theme of the dinner was "A Free Press for a Free People." The banners were still hanging when the evacuation began. I know because I hung them. Twenty-three banners, navy blue, gold serif lettering, $11,400 for the set. They were still hanging when 2,600 guests were directed to the exits by Secret Service agents, one of whom had just taken a shotgun round in his ballistic vest and walked to the ambulance on his own feet. The agent's vest costs approximately $800. The wine that left the building was worth $11,172 at Association cost. At restaurant markup, roughly $29,000. The guests saved more in wine than the vest that saved the agent. That's priority. The video went viral by 10:15 PM. Not the video of the evacuation. Not the Secret Service response. The wine. Three guests in formalwear grabbing bottles off white tablecloths while being told to move toward the exits, while a man with a shotgun stood in the same motor entrance where John Hinckley shot Ronald Reagan 45 years ago. A woman near the service entrance was crying. She said "I just wanna go home." She was not holding wine. She was holding her phone. She was the only person I saw that night who looked afraid rather than inconvenienced. That's the distinction. The rest of the ballroom did not look afraid. They looked interrupted. An active shooter at the WHCD is a logistical problem. The dinner was disrupted. The timeline was off. The after-party at the French Ambassador's residence would need to be rescheduled. These are contingency matters. Contingency matters have solutions. Fear is for people who attend events without security details. I have produced eleven of these dinners. I have managed seating charts that require diplomatic-grade negotiations. I have handled comedians, cabinet secretaries, network anchors, and the editor of a major newspaper who once threatened to leave because his table was behind a column. I have never, in eleven years, seen a guest leave a $76 bottle on the table during an evacuation. I have also never seen a guest check the label first. Both observations are consistent. The bottle is worth taking. The evacuation is worth surviving. The instinct is to do both simultaneously. 188 bottles placed. 41 recovered. 147 unaccounted for. One agent shot. Zero guests injured. Zero bottles broken. A free press for a free people. The press is free. The wine was $76 a bottle. They took it anyway.

If they’re willing to die to assassinate, imagine what they will do if they gain political power

As my colleagues and I walked toward the Hilton for the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, a man shouted “F*** you!” right at us — simply because we were attending. Later that night, after the shooting, we were running to the White House for the briefing when we passed three teenage girls glued to their phones, reacting to the news. One of them said, “Aw man, I wish they got him,” and her two friends giggled. That moment stopped me cold. When our young people casually cheer for violence like it’s a game, we have a serious problem. Radicalization isn’t some abstract issue — it’s showing up casually in everyday conversations and in our kids’ attitudes.

Meanwhile outside WHCD, the dude on the right hit me with his sign