The Free Press

Three years ago, I found myself on a subway car packed with teenage girls who were on their way to an Olivia Rodrigo concert. To say that I felt old in this moment would not do it justice; to say that I felt like a giant, ancient aardvark who had ended up on public transit after accidentally escaping my enclosure in the Living Fossils exhibit at the zoo would still fall short, but close enough.

They were incredible, these girls. They were all wearing purple, all screaming and gasping and singing; they all had, as far as I could tell, about 17 legs apiece. When the subway doors opened, they poured out and roared away into the night, an undulating wave of miniskirts and glitter that consumed everything in its path.

All of which is to say, Olivia Rodrigo is an artist, and a phenomenon, for which I am most decidedly not the target audience. That also goes for her newest album, released on Friday; I was completely unaware of the massive buzz surrounding it until I searched Rodrigo’s name on Google last week and discovered a countdown clock and a bunch of dancing heart and flower emojis at the top of the results—which I assume mean something to the miniskirted legions; as an aardvark, I have no idea.

But I listen to her music anyway. Partly out of sheer enjoyment—her songs hit the same propulsive sweet spot, sound-wise, as the pop punk anthems of Veruca Salt, No Doubt, and Elastica that I thrashed around to in my own youth—but also because I believe she might be Gen Z’s greatest documentarian. Not just an artist but a scribe, who captures the experience of being alive and young in America in a way that both makes people of her own generation feel seen and also makes their experiences legible to other people, older people. People who know the feeling of being 22, but not how it feels to feel it in 2026.

This week, Jeff Ross informed me that the blouse I was wearing made me look like a used napkin from a Chinese restaurant—“How could it be ironed and wrinkled at the same time?”—and then he complimented my jewelry. Namely, “your grandfather’s watch and the engagement ring you never got.” It was one of the best moments of my life.

Jeff Ross is a comedian, and beyond that, the Roastmaster General. He’s been organizing roasts for over 30 years, first at the legendary Friars Club in New York and then, on Comedy Central, where he convened vicious insult-fests aimed at stars including Joan Rivers, Justin Bieber, James Franco, and Charlie Sheen. He sees his barbs—like when he told Joan Rivers that “Kanye’s mom had a better plastic surgeon,” or Courtney Love, “You’re like the girl next door — if you happen to live next door to a methadone clinic”—as, ironically, a sign of respect.

“It’s a compliment if someone takes the time to write a well-crafted insult,” he told me on my podcast, Second Thought, this week. It means you’re tough enough to take it, and, Jeff added, that “you’re important, you’re made.”

Still, the Ross rules of engagement are real. He won’t roast people who aren’t in the room, and he lays off the low-hanging fruit, like about “Jewish people having big noses or being cheap,” even though at the beginning of his career, that kind of material would kill.

Lately, Ross has taken his talents to Netflix. He most recently convened a roast of Kevin Hart; it was livestreamed, glitzy, and below the belt, and clocked in at over three hours. It premiered at 13.5 million views; now, he says, it’s likely closer to 20 million.

Ross served as a producer and roaster at that event, and at the roast of Tom Brady, where everyone from Tony Hinchcliffe to Rob Gronkowski went scorched earth on the retired football player. There, Jeff told Tom Brady, “You’re an example to future generations that if you work hard, eat right, film the other team’s practices, deflate the balls, and have the NFL make new rules just for you, then you too can be the third-most famous guy in a Dunkin’ Donuts commercial.” He also got a talking-to after he poked fun at New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft for a (dismissed) charge of soliciting prostitution. “Don’t say that shit again,” Brady told Jeff. It was a moment that smacked of Will Smith’s notorious Oscars slap—but this was blessedly less violent. I asked him about it. “Sometimes in a courtroom you’ll object on behalf of a client. They know it’s bullshit, but that’s their job to object. I think Tom did that for Robert Kraft.”

I also asked Jeff why he thinks roasts are making such a comeback—and the appeal of the roast as an art form.

“The tension of the roast kind of reflects the tension of the country,” he offered. Also, “there aren’t that many platforms for unfiltered First Amendment free speech.” And besides, if laughter is the best medicine, he added, “Nobody wants their medicine watered down. They want their medicine pure.”

I would describe Jeff Ross as a pure man. Purely funny, and, ironically, purely sweet for a guy who keeps the lights on with jokes such as saying to Shaq about the World Trade Center coming down on 9/11, “I’m sorry, Shaq, I know that was your favorite building to climb.” “I got away with being mean by actually being nice,” said Jeff.

Jeff is the standard-bearer for the age-old tradition of If you got something to say, say it to my face. I cautiously asked him to do the same for me, and he delivered. Watch Jeff take his best shots, and hear more about how he came up and why he thinks roasting might be just the thing to heal our deep divisions, below:

I am far from an early adopter when it comes to personal gadgets. I don’t have a washing machine, a television, or even air-conditioning in my home. But I was inspired by my conversation last week with Joanna Stern, who spent a year threading AI through her everyday life, so decided to offer myself up to the tech gods this week—or at least their angels. Cleaners arrived at my door in white collared shirts, with cameras mounted on their hats; they were there to wipe down my apartment for free. Later, a chef turned up to make me some gourmet lunch. The catch was that everyone who came to staff up my barely-a-one-bedroom that day was filming the whole time—sans sound, I was told, and with identifying information blurred—and that the footage would be sent to an AI lab that would use it to train autonomous robots or sell it to a third party. The bet is that someday robots will be able to do manual tasks, in addition to the digital ones they’re already doing, and that valuable human-generated “egocentric data,” as it’s called, will get us there faster.

Read about my afternoon peering into the age of abundance, or at the very least the perfectly cooked branzino I ate for lunch, here.

I’m a bandwagon New York Knicks fan, and I wasn’t locked into until—I’ll say it—game four, when the team came back from a 29-point deficit to defeat the San Antonio Spurs. Now I’m all, Go, New York, go! And then I find out that our star player, Jalen Brunson, married his Jewish high school sweetheart, Ali, and that he proposed to her in the auditorium of their Illinois high school? Give me a break! My second favorite character on the Knicks is, of course, the second coming of Boss Tweed, owner James Dolan. Let’s go Knicks!

If you’ve been reading The Free Press, you know that the state of American dating is in dire straits. People are suffering from an epidemic of loneliness, and trudging through a sexcession. So it’s not surprising that old-fashioned matchmakers are having something of a renaissance. Except, the problem with dating doesn’t seem to be a dearth of eligible people, but insane expectations around everything from baldness, to height, to politics, to “attachment styles.” Tablet spoke to some professional yentes about why their business is booming—and why they’re more concerned for their clients than ever.

What does it take to bring someone who is on the brink of committing terrorism—and how do you get them back into polite society? That’s the story my colleague Maya Sulkin reported on this week. In the latest episode of her Confessions series, she spoke with Mubin Shaikh, a man who had a normal upbringing in Canada, but found himself mixed up with the Taliban, and in a Canadian jihadi network. Now, he’s changed his mind completely, and has become a leading expert in de-radicalization. “Shame and guilt. Shame and guilt,” Shaikh said about how he would recruit young Muslim boys into more radical religious positions. “What a weapon those things are.”

This week, SpaceX registered for what is set to be the biggest IPO in history. The company came in at a $1.77 trillion valuation—and now, over 4,000 of its employees are set to become millionaires. But it’s not just those with equity who are benefiting. As my colleague Sean Fischer wrote this week, the company’s contribution to the rest of the country is in how it’s reviving American manufacturing—only this time in outer space. Read his piece about Varda, the company making drugs of a quality only possible beyond the earth’s gravity.

It’s stone fruit season—the best of all seasons—and you might be noticing that when you go to pick up a peach, or cherries, or other fruits, at the grocery store, they’re impossibly bright, plump, and, most of all, too sweet. Read Ellen Cushing on how the fruit-industrial complex came to be, and how it engineers nature’s candy.

Nick Adams should be drinking Jungle Birds at a sky-high bar in Kuala Lumpur right now. Last July, President Donald Trump nominated the shitposting Australian-American to be the United States’ ambassador to Malaysia. Yet here he is with me instead, drinking Negronis at a bar in Washington, D.C., while trying to convince me the job the president gave him when the ambassadorship fell through is much, much better.

Adams is the first-ever special presidential envoy for American tourism, exceptionalism, and values. The job, the essence of which is to promote the U.S. as a great place to visit, was created by the Trump administration earlier this year, and Adams, 41, stepped into it in March. “Ambassador to Malaysia was a bilateral position,” he tells me. “This is being the brand ambassador for the United States, the top salesman of America. It’s perfect for my personality.”

He’s got his work cut out for him. U.S. tourism declined by 5.4 percent last year—which, according to the BBC, is the result of growing anti-American sentiment caused by Trump’s tariffs and the administration’s hostile rhetoric toward Europe. In addition, some travelers fear being wrongfully detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

And this week, arguably, is Adams’s biggest so far, with the influx of tourists flocking to the U.S. to see the World Cup soccer matches. By some estimates, the games will see an extra one million visitors flying into the country to watch the tournament. There’s been a lot of negative noise around it. The Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) reportedly canceled 75 percent of the hotel rooms it had reserved in Kansas City, Missouri, due to a “lack of interest.” This might have something to do with the fact that ticket prices are insanely high—with primo seats bought at the last minute topping $10,000. Difficulty getting visas has also reportedly made it difficult for some foreigners to attend. But Adams doesn’t seem fazed.

Welcome to Things Worth Remembering, our weekly column in which writers share a literary treasure that all of us should commit to heart. This week the World Cup has just begun, and Niall Ferguson takes on the age-old American question: Why does the rest of the world care so much about soccer? The answer, he writes, is encapsulated in Nick Hornby’s ‘Fever Pitch,’ a book that explains the addictive power of the game—and why it really all comes down to suffering.

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When Europeans first arrived in the Americas, indigenous populations had almost no resistance to the many pathogens that had sailed with them. The results were catastrophic. Half a millennium later, by contrast, the inhabitants of the United States and Canada believe they have developed powerful antibodies, ensuring that most of them are immune to the most contagious and debilitating pathogen of all: football.

The quadrennial World Cup began on Thursday, yet an impressive number of Americans could not care less about the event they are co-hosting with Canada and Mexico. It is not just that they insist on calling the game “soccer” (originally an English contraction of Association Football). It is more that their attention is elsewhere: specifically, on the NBA finals, where the Knicks are just one win away from making history—not to mention hockey’s Stanley Cup. Soccer, meanwhile, is the favorite spectator sport of just one in every 20 Americans, according to Gallup, an improvement on the 2 percent in polls between 1937 and 2004, but still lean pickings—and a rounding error compared to the 41 percent for the NFL and college football. Even among young Americans ages 18 to 29—many more of whom have played the game than their parents and grandparents—soccer is the favorite of just 8 percent, compared with 28 percent for football and 13 percent for basketball.

How, then, to explain to an American the addictive power of the game most people on Earth call football? Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch: A Fan’s Life (1992) is surely the best book on the subject.

It’s Friday, June 12. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Freya India on the apps and subscriptions commodifying Gen Z’s religious revival. Josh Code joins Zohran Mamdani’s rent-freeze canvassing brigade. A UC Berkeley math professor on why abolishing the SAT means her students can’t understand fractions. And much more.

But first: Suzy Weiss on the AI robots coming soon to an apartment near you.

This week, the future arrived at my doorstep in the form of two sweaty college students, wearing cameras on their heads and wielding a tube of Clorox wipes.

I was getting free cleaning services through an AI training start-up called Shift, which bills itself as a gateway to an abundant new economy. In addition to two cleaners, it also sent a private chef to make me lunch.

But here’s the catch: Everyone running a vacuum over my floors or cooking me branzino did so while being recorded, their physical actions batched, analyzed, and transformed into training data for the next generation of AI-powered robots that the company intends to deploy across commercial and industrial sectors—to, eventually, complete chores autonomously.

I spoke with Bercan Kilic, one of the co-founders of Shift, as well as my college-kid cleaners, about the initiative. “What could happen, in 50 years, is basically all services and goods are free, or are close to free,” Kilic told me. But will turning our houses into self-imposed surveillance states spell the bright beginning of a liberated new age, or the bitter end of blue-collar work? Read my story to find out.

—Suzy Weiss

America’s 250th birthday is less than a month away, and we’re celebrating it by paying tribute to the Great Americans who made this country what it is.

Next up: Sandra Day O’Connor. From 1981 to 2006, O’Connor served as the Supreme Court’s enormously influential swing vote, often deciding cases split between the four liberals and four conservatives. Today, Charles Lane reflects on her extraordinary journey from a remote Arizona ranch to the highest court in the land—and how she “made herself a formidable justice the same way she had, as a girl, learned to brand calves, fire a rifle, or turn a bobcat into a house pet.”

David Mamet Joins The Lindbergh Conspiracies

On the night of March 1, 1932, someone climbed a ladder to a window of a remote New Jersey estate and stole the infant son of Charles Lindbergh, the famed American aviator. The baby was later found dead, and a man was arrested, tried, and executed—case closed. Or was it? Ninety-four years later, many of the details still don’t add up. Free Press journalists Joe Nocera and Poppy Damon became obsessed with getting to the bottom of it—and we think you will too. Listen to The Lindbergh Conspiracies, a new podcast from The Free Press hosted by Joe Nocera.

In case you’re not sold yet, after hearing about the podcast, acclaimed playwright David Mamet sent Joe Nocera a letter outlining his own theory of the crime—one that puts Charles Lindbergh at the center of the mystery. So, naturally, Joe set up an interview. Listen to a new, special episode of The Lindbergh Conspiracies with Mamet below, and follow wherever you get your podcasts.

Yesterday, SpaceX filed for the largest IPO in history. But the real story isn’t the $1.77 trillion valuation; it’s what SpaceX has made possible: a manufacturing boom—in space. “Musk’s company has lowered launch costs and increased launch frequency to the point where private businesses are planning to build data centers, manufacturing hubs, and labs in orbit,” wrote Sean Fischer this week. He spoke to Delian Asparouhov, the co-founder of space-based manufacturing start-up Varda, about the rapidly growing space economy, and why, in Asparouhov’s words, whichever nation “nails economic activity in low Earth orbit” may just win “the rest of the solar system and likely the rest of the galaxy.”

One of the biggest stories this month has been the personal life of Graham Platner, Maine’s embattled Democratic Senate candidate. Two weeks ago, Platner’s ex-girlfriend Lyndsey Fifield told The New York Times that he emotionally abused her and became physical multiple times. But in the days that followed, many supporters of the #MeToo movement went on the attack, expressing skepticism about Fifield’s testimony—while others questioned her motives on the grounds that she is a Republican. Frannie Block and Audrey Fahlberg sat down with Fifield, who wants to set the record straight.

But if this kind of behavior is becoming more and more common among our politicians, what are voters meant to make of it? Should it matter to us if our elected officials are cheaters? Arthur Brooks says yes. Moral questions aside, he wrote this week, social science research “finds that adulterous behavior is an accurate predictor of professional misconduct, duplicitousness, low conscientiousness, and a tendency to betray promises.” In other words: Vote for faithful spouses.

Speaking of spouses, a very famous one—Jill Biden—has a new book out. The former First Lady’s new memoir is being criticized by journalists, ex-aides, and Democratic operatives—the same people who once pretended her husband was fit for office. But Jill is too convenient a scapegoat for Joe Biden’s brain fog debacle, argues Caitlin Flanagan: “If an old man can’t do his job anymore, don’t ask his wife to keep careful records on his decline. That’s not a wife’s job.”

Last summer, Vaibhav Duggal, a medical student at the Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center El Paso, learned he would have to face the school’s disciplinary body after a patient accused him of asking inappropriate questions about her relationship status and then following her on Instagram. The next day, he died by suicide. Now, his parents are suing the school. Frannie Block has reported extensively on many examples of disciplinary overreach at schools across the country—and in her story this week, she investigated this tragic tale, and the question at its core: What do schools owe their students, even when they are accused of misconduct?

The neuroscientist, philosopher, and podcaster Sam Harris has built his reputation on intellectual honesty, moral clarity, and a willingness to follow arguments wherever they lead. Those traits were on full display in a piece he published last weekend: a methodical explanation of why he refuses to debate people whose obsession with Israel has convinced them that the Jewish state represents a unique form of evil. He isn’t talking about mere critics of Israel, but rather, those unwilling to honestly answer a simple question: What would each side do if it had the power to do whatever it wanted? The result is a powerful, rigorous essay that’s well worth your time this weekend.

As school lets out and the pool covers come off, the kids of America are entering three months of treasured freedom. But while that used to mean one simple thing—it’s time to go earn a paycheck—this year, only a third of teens will work summer jobs. Read Larissa Phillips’s essay on why that may be—and how years of sweating it out in restaurants, retail, and movie theaters brought her a sense of the world that traveling to Europe or lounging by the pool never could.

TGIF! In tomorrow’s Weekend Press, Josh Code spends the weekend at a Christian men’s retreat, where Marines and Muay Thai fighters go to war for Jesus. Niall Ferguson explains why loving football (sorry, soccer) is really all about suffering. Will Rahn reviews “Disclosure Day,” Steven Spielberg’s new alien movie. Kat Rosenfield ponders why Olivia Rodrigo just can’t seem to grow up. And much more.

My cleaning crew was late. When they arrived—a 20-year-old and a 21-year-old, both sweaty, in matching white, branded collared shirts—they were armed only with Clorox wipes and gusto. But I couldn’t complain: They were about to spend two hours scrubbing my Brooklyn apartment for free. The lunch that a private chef showed up to make me while the cleaners wiped down my windows and vacuumed the rugs (branzino, with saffron orzo, sugar snap peas, English peas, roasted tomato, capellini onions, and asparagus) was also gratis. The catch? The two cleaners and the chef all wore baseball hats with cameras attached to record their every move, with the footage then sent to an AI lab which would analyze the “egocentric human data”—of an arm mopping a floor, or flipping a filet of white fish—to train robots so that, one day, they can do those tasks for us.

“Don’t worry if you see the camera pointed at you,” one of the cleaners told me. “Your face will get blurred out.” So began an afternoon spent in the future.

My temporary staffers came courtesy of a platform called Shift, an online marketplace set up by MicroAGI, which is based in Germany. It works like this: Users get free services; the humans who provide those services get paid by shift—around $30 bucks an hour, I’m told—and absolutely everything gets recorded. Users can also sign up to wear a headpiece to surveil themselves doing physical tasks—like planting a garden, or washing dishes. MicroAGI then takes the videos, which it says offer valuable data for future AI systems, and sells them to a third party, or keeps them for itself. It’s not the only company doing this. Luel, Kled, and Waffle Video all offer to pay people to record themselves doing their everyday tasks.

“Our job is to figure out how to deploy robots at mass scale using human footage,” Bercan Kilic, a co-founder of MicroAGI, told me. For him, the name of the game is volume, and variety. “All we care about is diversity,” he said: “diversity of settings, diversity of lighting, diversity of objects, diversity of hand, hand size, gloves—all of these things.”

Against my better judgment and the advice of Oscar Wilde, I let socialism in New York City take up another one of my evenings. This time, I was curious to see a new, taxpayer-funded canvassing machine in action before this month’s crucial decision on Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s campaign promise to freeze the rent on the apartments where about 2.4 million New Yorkers live.

Six weeks ago, Mamdani announced the launch of Organize NYC, which he said “will mobilize New Yorkers to make sure they know they have a voice in that decision—and how to use it—because government only works when it answers to the people it serves.” The city agency in charge of Organize NYC is led by Tascha Van Auken, who built Mamdani’s campaign organizing operation.

It wasn’t the first time I responded to the mayor’s call to participate in civic life. After a major snowstorm in February, I enlisted in the city’s emergency snow shoveling corps for a day. I earned $70—but still haven’t been paid. (On Thursday, a city official told me that my paycheck exists, is sitting in a downtown office, and will be promptly mailed to me.) In March, I attended a “Rental Rip-off” hearing, sitting under a banner that said “New Yorkers vs. Bad Landlords.” Most of the complaints I heard were about the same landlord: the city.

For the canvassing effort, the mayor said volunteers would fan out across the city to encourage tenants and landlords to testify at hearings, including one on Thursday night in Brooklyn, by the Rent Guidelines Board (RGB), which proposed raising rents by 0 to 2 percent on one-year leases. The announcement also said canvassers “will not advocate for any specific outcome in the RGB vote or guide what participants say if they choose to testify.”

Diego sported a shiny blue Cal jacket and beamed with Berkeley pride as I interviewed him for the Fiat Lux Scholarship, the top award for low-income, high-achieving students admitted to the University of California (UC), Berkeley. He was one of the finalists. Diego grew up in a one-bedroom apartment with his parents and his sister—his father worked as a gardener and his mother was a factory worker; their family income was below $35,000. Diego’s dream was to pursue a degree and career in mechanical engineering, designing better agricultural machinery for farmers like his grandfather. By all the measures available to him, he had done everything right.

He took nearly every advanced class his high school offered and earned stellar grades, including an A in AP Calculus AB as an 11th grader. He seemed like the kind of student targeted by Governor Gavin Newsom’s Higher Education Compact: a multibillion-dollar agreement pressuring the UC system to close racial and socioeconomic gaps in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) by admitting students like Diego into premier programs. But Diego also scored a 1 out of 5 on his AP Calculus exam. That’s why he was exactly the kind of student the Compact is likely to fail.

What does an A grade in AP Calculus mean when it is paired with a score of 1 on the national exam? Exactly what a recent UC San Diego report revealed: In too many public schools, grades have become completely decoupled from learning.

Every week in this newsletter, we focus on the seemingly endless wave of hate and violence directed at Jews. We consider what it says about the societies we live in, and how the West is changing in front of our eyes. It can feel overwhelming; that’s because, all too often, it is. But this week, we wanted to bring you a piece with a different perspective. Rabbi Joanna Samuels is the CEO of the largest Jewish Community Center in New York City, on the Upper West Side. She disagrees with the commonly held narrative that the Jewish community is more vulnerable than ever before, and in her piece today, she offers practical solutions that many of us, Jews and non-Jews alike, would do well to take with us into our increasingly fractious world.

—Josh Kaplan

A congressional candidate’s comments about imprisoning and castrating “American Zionists.” A stabbing in London. More than two dozen documented attacks or threats on Jewish institutions around the world within the past two months.

Antisemitism isn’t just rising. It is being normalized all around us.

At such a difficult time, there is something even more discouraging: Just when we need one another most, the world is telling us that the Jewish community is coming apart at the seams. Since October 7, media headlines and social media feeds have told a narrative of a fracture: synagogues divided internally, American Jews disavowing Israel, debate over the causes of the rise in antisemitism.

But I want to tell a different story.

Welcome back to TGIF, where we do the news. Writing to you from a subterranean reading camp where my 3.5-year-old is spending two days. I’m that tiger mom. Scott Pelley is standing outside, chewing his glasses and chastising me, but I’m honestly getting used to it. It’s a comforting baritone.

In other notes, please scoop up your America at 250 hats for July. And remember that the best comments section now is at The Free Press Forum, especially our red-hot dating section!

→ The Vances got a chicken coop: Sure, it’s not the most important news. Sure, we’re bombing Iran again (why not, it’s summer, but then again maybe we’re not bombing anymore), but we begin with the coop. J.D. Vance has installed a chicken coop at the Naval Observatory, the home of America’s vice presidents. Inflation is so bad, the VP can’t even afford to buy eggs at the store. This is a sign of total Berkeley, California dominance. What was a weird, crunchy, left-wing hobby is now embraced by “guys who are definitely into QAnon and I just really don’t want to go to their house for dinner.” Yes, by our own J.D. Vance, homestead guy. And now the Vances are tradlife influencers posing for photos like this:

Move over, Ballerina Farm, it’s Usha’s turn. And I know there may be more pressing questions to ask the Second Lady, but there’s only one thing I want to know: midwife or doula, Mrs. Vance?

→ Insane amounts of money are about to be made: With the SpaceX IPO, it’s estimated that more than 4,000 people are about to become millionaires, with 400 projected to have fortunes over $100 million. And then there’s the upcoming Anthropic and OpenAI IPOs. Between space and LLMs, we’re looking at a new generation of wealth. And if I can climb back on my California soapbox for a moment, it’s always amazing to me that the East Coast produces none of this. The East Coast is the Europe of America. You go to New York when you decide it’s time to hire a dozen ADHD-identified individuals in Brooklyn who will sue you, not like, build stuff. For that, it’s all still the Bay Area or, thanks to SpaceX, Texas! And in the boom times, one group that’s thriving is (of course) prostitutes. Forbes has an amazing story about the nerdy escort boom. These ladies are charging upward of $2,000 an hour, even as much as $6,000 an hour—and you know they’re spending most of that hour talking about Moravec’s Paradox. One reports charging $23,000 a day. The absolute weirdest people in America have created artificial consciousness (probably Satanic) and despite all their efforts, they still exist in these pesky bodies that demand stupid things like [redacted], which the computer can’t quite do yet. Good for the prosties.

In other signs of new financial realities, women are hiring witches to help protect their weddings, or so Bloomberg tells us this week. Is it just me, or is heterosexuality getting weirder than being gay? Prostitutes and witches? Maybe you guys should take Pride this year, I think you need it.