Daily-Dose

Contents

• From New Yorker
• From Vox
• From The Hindu: Sports
• From The Hindu: National News
• From BBC: Europe
• From Ars Technica
• From Jokes Subreddit

From New Yorker

• A Ukrainian Prisoner of War’s Long Journey Home - An elementary-school teacher returned to her family at the start of the war—then Russian soldiers took her away. - link

• Can Rishi Sunak Save the Tories from Total Collapse? - Britain’s new Prime Minister, the nation’s third in seven weeks, will aim to steer an unpopular party through record inflation and a looming energy emergency. - link

• What to Make of John Fetterman’s Struggles at the Pennsylvania Senate Debate - The cognitive effects of the Democratic candidate’s recent stroke were evident as he faced off against Mehmet Oz. Will his performance imperil his party’s chances? - link

• Are the Midterms Still Anyone’s Game? - Benjamin Wallace-Wells discusses the most decisive (and most competitive) races in the upcoming elections, and which issues seem likely to tip the scales. - link

• Why More and More Girls Are Hitting Puberty Early - A pandemic-era rise in early puberty may help physicians to better understand its causes. - link

From Vox

• Sex, death, and apocalypse meet in season 2 of The White Lotus -

  

  A new Italian season of the hit HBO show is haunted by mortality.

  In Rome this summer, I visited the Capuchin Crypt, a weirdly invigorating set of bone-encrusted tombs near Piazza Barberini. You walk into the first room, and it’s just human bones everywhere, painstakingly arranged in geometric patterns on the floors, the walls, and the ceiling. The skeletal tableaux is crafted from the remains of monks — 300 cartloads full — that were moved to the crypt when their living brothers relocated to their new monastery in 1631.

  The best part of it all, which I did not expect: the bones are hilarious. These Capuchins were having a blast. Jaws and collarbones become appendages to little flying skull creatures. Skeletons of monks sit around, looking like they’re chuckling to themselves, all very much on purpose. Sure, it’s grim, but it’s goofy too. It’s a dare to stop taking yourself seriously. Some day, this will be you.

  The point of all of this, the Capuchins say, is not to creep out visitors, but to serve as wry memento mori — life is short and fleeting and we all are destined to be skeletons in the ground, which is kind of a cosmic joke. It’s of a piece with much of the enduring art of the late medievals, from Boccaccio’s Decameron to the works of Shakespeare, which should be read with a sense of ever-present background plague anxiety. And as with our most recent plague, Italy was one of the first places where the 14th-century “black death” hit Europe. It wiped out half of the people in Sicily’s cities.

  Courtesy of Fabio Lovino/HBO

  Sicily is also where series creator Mike White set the second season of The White Lotus, which I have to imagine is not an accident. The first season picked apart (with varying degrees of success) the racial and class divides that accompany the lives of the very wealthy. But the second season is much more occupied with mortality — specifically, the flailing ways humans try to forget mortality in a time of apocalypse. Watching it happen, all we can do is grimace and chuckle nervously.

  The opening credits of The White Lotus’s first season were modeled on wallpaper depicting exotic tropical scenes, befitting popular conceptions of its Hawaiian setting. The second season’s credits turns for inspiration to Renaissance paintings and, if I don’t miss my guess, depictions of the Triumph of Death. It was a favorite theme of European Renaissance artists, because the threat of apocalyptic plague was ever-present; to live was to think about dying. Might as well face it down.

  One famous one, in particular, comes from Sicily, a fresco from an unknown artist circa 1448 that’s now affixed to a wall in Palermo. In the giant painting, a group of people, including (according to the official description) “noble pleasure-seekers and elegant ladies,” are making merry, partying and hanging out near the Fountain of Youth, seemingly unaware that Death — a giant skeleton on a giant skeletal horse — is bearing down on them.

  History echoes itself, and human nature never changes, and thus The White Lotus’s description sounds eerily similar to the fresco’s. “Noble pleasure-seekers and elegant ladies,” which is to say a bunch of rich Americans and Brits, have turned up at a White Lotus resort in Sicily (apparently it’s a resort chain) to spend a week in the sun. The resort itself is situated on cliffs overlooking the sea.

  There’s a pair of wealthy young couples (Theo James and Meghann Fahy, and Aubrey Plaza and Will Sharpe) having a tense vacation. Three generations of Di Grasso men (F. Murray Abraham, Michael Imperioli, and Adam DiMarco) are vacationing in the ostentatious absence of the female members of the family, for reasons that start to reveal themselves soon after their arrival. And opulent heiress Tanya (Jennifer Coolidge) returns, with her assistant Portia (Haley Lu Richardson) in tow. Two local girls — sex worker Lucia (Simona Tabasco) and budding singer Mia (Beatrice Granno) — lurk around the White Lotus, too, and a bevy of staff are led by harried manager Valentina (Sabrina Impacciatore).

  In Greek mythology, lotus-eaters were people who went to an island on which a lotus tree grew, ate from it, and forgot everyone and everything off the island. At the White Lotus Sicily, people are having fun, and having sex, and trying to forget the outside world, to shut out anything beyond the sunshine, their cocktails, and maybe the pretty girl down at the end of the bar.

  The oblivious pleasure-seeker mythology, present implicitly in the show’s first season, is more explicit in the second one. Harper (Plaza), a fabulously uptight employment lawyer, remarks at breakfast early in the show that it’s so hard to enjoy a vacation with “everything that’s going on in the world.” As her husband Ethan (Sharpe) nods, Daphne (Fahy) and Cameron (James) look confused. What does she mean, they ask? Oh, they try to avoid the news. It’s too depressing, and you can’t do anything about it anyhow. It’s so beautiful here. Let’s just have a good time.

  But recent events have a way of intruding anyhow, if only psychologically. Portia, Tanya’s assistant, can’t seem to shake the malaise of the last few years of her life; as she puts it, she’s spent three years alone in her room doomscrolling, mired in the miseries of “the discourse.” (Relatable.) She wants to live, she tells Albie (DiMarco). Surely in the past, she muses, the world must have been full of experience and life, not just digital caves we crawl miserably into.

  Courtesy of HBO

  Well, she’s half right, but the past world was full of death, too, and reminders of that are all around them. A key to watching this season of The White Lotus is keeping an eye on the faces in the background. They’re always watching: magnificent frescoes, busts, and statues, or paintings hung on the walls; the faces of the dead, the mythical, the martyred, hovering around fountains of youth with Death looking on. Eyes that never stop watching the living as they try to shrug off existential dread and the knowledge that they’ll die, which for these characters — having just lived through a world-altering pandemic, even for the super-rich — has to be cranked way up.

  That explains their desperation to have fun: fun sex, fun beachside spritzes, fun shopping sprees, fun ragers, “fun” mind games with one another. Like all of us, they’re making up for lost time. Like few of us, they have the resources at hand to shut out everything else — no worrying about the political situation or student loans or who’s saying what on Twitter. Let’s go find some jet skis.

  But the series makes it clear that death is never very far from mind, and that some of this desperate fun-seeking is a reflex to kick away memento mori. It’s a very funny show, but it’s dark around the edges. From the start, it’s clear someone’s going to die; this is the White Lotus motif, after all. The cliffs look awfully craggy and dangerous. The discussions occasionally swing around to what’s so important you’d die for it, or kill for it. People glare periodically at the faces on the walls. Several times, we catch characters staring at the ocean in a way that suggests that, having reached the end of their rope, they wish to plunge in. This island seems to promise eternal happiness, but vacations always come to an end.

  Apocalypse doesn’t mean the end of the world; it means unveiling, a revealing of the truth behind the facade. Having glimpsed the plague-time truth of mortality, in whatever small way, our vacationers don’t wish to repeat the discovery. If money can keep death out, then they’ll be spending it. But we know this cliff paradise can’t last forever, if only because some day the sea levels will rise. And before that — perhaps long before that, though who knows? — death lurks around the corner for everyone.

  So you’re best off watching this season of The White Lotus with our own apocalypse in mind — not, of course, that you can really push that knowledge off anyhow. That raises a pressing question, though, one without much of an answer: is watching TV to escape the world a bit like nibbling the lotus? Is a show like this one — or one with dragons, or elves, or a hapless British football team, or whatever else we’re plunging into these days — just another attempt to forget that we’re all gonna die? Does it even really matter?

  Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe we all ought to just go get a little skeleton and keep it propped up against the corner of the TV, where it can watch us all the time, grinning. Just in case.

  The White Lotus premieres at 9 pm on HBO on October 30, with a total of seven episodes airing each week on Sunday nights and then streaming on HBO Max.

• Joe Biden just signed an international climate treaty. And Mitch McConnell voted for it. -

  

  The US is now committed to phasing out HFCs, a class of powerful greenhouse gases.

  President Joe Biden signed a bona fide international climate treaty on Wednesday, one that was ratified in the Senate with bipartisan support in a 69-27 vote. Twenty-one Republicans supported ratification in September, including Minority Leader Sen. Mitch McConnell.

  Wait, what?

  It’s stunning that any measure, let alone a global environmental agreement, could garner so much support in a bitterly divided legislature. But the Kigali Amendment to the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer proved to be an outlier.

  I’m proud to sign the Kigali Amendment – a historic, bipartisan win for American manufacturing and global climate action.
  
  My Administration is phasing down super-polluting chemicals so the U.S. can lead the clean technology markets of the future and unlock thousands of new jobs.

  — President Biden (@POTUS) October 27, 2022

On the surface, the Kigali Amendment may not seem like it has anything to do with the climate at all. But in fact, it may be one of the biggest steps to limit warming of the planet. If fully implemented, the measure would avert upward of 0.5 degrees Celsius — almost 1 degree Fahrenheit — of warming by the end of the century. Keeping in mind that the Paris climate agreement aims to hold the rise in global average temperatures below 2 degrees Celsius, the Kigali Amendment would take a big step toward that goal. And it builds on one of the most successful efforts to prevent an environmental disaster in history.

The Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer, as its name says, was initially meant to protect the ozone layer, the part of the atmosphere that acts as a sunscreen for the planet. It filters out high-energy ultraviolet light from the sun, which would otherwise scorch much of the life off the surface of Earth. Even a thinning ozone layer can pose problems, causing cancer and cataracts in people living below.

In the 1970s, scientists found that the ozone layer was declining. In the early 1980s, they found a hole in the layer over Antarctica. Scientists at the time warned the ozone layer was on track to vanish entirely.

The culprit was a class of synthetic chemicals called chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs). They were commonly used as propellants in aerosol cans and refrigerants in air conditioners. But when they leaked into the atmosphere, CFCs rapidly devoured ozone molecules.

Countries around the world convened to try to solve the problem, and in 1987, developed the Montreal Protocol. It was the first treaty to be ratified by every country in the world. Countries began to phase out CFCs entirely. And it worked. The ozone layer is on track to heal entirely. By 2065, the Montreal Protocol is estimated to have prevented 443 million skin cancer cases, 2.3 million skin cancer deaths, and more than 63 million cases of cataracts in the United States alone, according to the State Department.

The Montreal Protocol also had a massive unanticipated side benefit. CFCs are also potent greenhouse gases, with some varieties that are more than 13,000 times more powerful than carbon dioxide when it comes to heating up the planet. The Montreal Protocol has thus been the single most effective action taken to date to mitigate climate change.

There was an unanticipated problem as well. CFCs were replaced with another class of chemicals called hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) in many applications. While HFCs aren’t as damaging to the ozone layer, they are powerful greenhouse gases. The Kigali Amendment, drafted in 2016, aims to zero out HFCs as well.

Cyril Ndegeya/AFP via Getty Images

But why did so many Republicans back Kigali when they’ve criticized just about every other major international environmental agreement? Recall that many Republican lawmakers cheered when former President Trump began the process of withdrawing the US from the Paris climate accord.

Part of the reason for Kigali’s success may be that conservative stalwarts Margaret Thatcher, a former chemist, and Ronald Reagan, a skin cancer survivor, were framers of the initial Montreal Protocol.

Another is that the amendment comes packaged with solutions. There are already climate-friendly refrigerants on the market, and appliance manufacturers are eager to deploy them. Some lawmakers see this as an opportunity to play to the US’s strengths.

“This amendment will give American manufacturers the ability to continue exporting sustainable coolants and the products that depend on them,” said Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) in a statement. “Not only does this create tens of thousands of jobs here at home, it protects our markets from becoming a dumping ground for China’s outdated products.”

President Biden also highlighted the economic benefits of the treaty, projecting that it would lead to 33,000 new manufacturing jobs in the US, another $4.8 billion in exports, and grow the overall economy by $12.5 billion every year.

The Kigali Amendment will “spur the growth of manufacturing jobs, strengthen U.S. competitiveness, and advance the global effort to combat the climate crisis,” Biden wrote in a statement.

The Environmental Protection Agency has already begun the process of developing new regulations for HFCs. A rule proposed last year aims to cut US use of HFCs by 85 percent over the next 15 years. That would prevent the equivalent of 4.7 billion tons of carbon dioxide being emitted between 2022 and 2050.

Temperatures are already rising, however, and cooling demand is growing. In some parts of the world, artificial cooling is necessary for survival. Air conditioning creates its own environmental footprint as it quaffs electrons. So there is urgent demand for sustainable, efficient cooling. But staying cool while stopping the planet from getting warmer will also require strategies beyond air conditioning, like planning cities and designing buildings to cool down passively.

• You don’t need to be a parent to build meaningful relationships with kids -

  

  Kids of all ages benefit from community ties with adults who aren’t in their immediate families. What could that look like in practice?

  On any given weeknight in the early 1990s, Athena Palmer’s house was full of people. A mining accident had upended Palmer’s family, grievously injuring her dad and spurring her mother to attend dental school. This required moving the whole family away from their small Appalachian hometown to Lexington, Kentucky.

  But it was her mother’s decades-younger classmates who really made an impression. Palmer was young and homesick, and her older sister was a struggling teen. Encouraged by Palmer’s mother, the dental students started coming over to score a free meal and study. They kept showing up for the food and the camaraderie, and later to support Palmer herself. The effects of this period of extended community would reverberate for the next 30 years.

  “In this moment, she collected these people,” Palmer says of her mother, “and the gift it gave me was I didn’t go through this really dark period alone.”

  Supportive relationships are vital for everyone. The saying “it takes a village to raise a child,” acknowledges that parents can’t do it by themselves, but “it doesn’t necessarily acknowledge how much kids need the village,” says historian Stephanie Coontz.

  Coontz, author of the forthcoming book For Better and Worse: The Problematic Past and Uncertain Future of Marriage, has spent her career studying marriage, family, and gender roles. Throughout human history, childrearing has been a much more communal project than it is in many societies today, she says. Not only did this make life easier for caregivers, it also conferred benefits to the children themselves.

  The United States’ fertility rate is at an all-time low. Birth control, abortion, and options for independent adult living mean that parenthood is not simply the default choice. As individual families are smaller, there’s less opportunity for mixing across ages and generations. This can create a skills gap — many parents have never taken care of a baby before they have their own. It also isolates nearly everyone. Nuclear families feel pressure to handle everything “in house,” and folks without children are often cut off from the natural community networks that form through kids, like schools. In making parenthood optional, we have also accidentally implied that children themselves are some kind of aspirational hobby, rather than the fundamental mechanism of society’s continuation, which everyone has a stake in.

  America is overdue for a correction on this issue from the top — investing in child care and early childhood education — to the bottom: treating kids as members of the communities in which they live and showing up for them.

  Showing up for kids can happen in informal care networks, formal mentoring relationships, and even advocacy, and they’re all important. Research has shown that being a mentor to a young person is valuable not only for the youth but also for the mentor themselves. Intentionally cultivating these relationships has the potential to distribute domestic labor across a wider group of people in a way that relieves stress on primary caregivers and is deeply beneficial for young people.

  Creating meaning in community

  Researchers have recognized how important it is for people to have a sense of meaning in their lives. Being a real member of a community, counting on other people and having them count on you, helps fulfill this important psychological need.

  Jason, who asked to be identified only by his first name to protect his mentee’s privacy, became a mentor through Big Brothers Big Sisters in 2019 after he moved to a new town. He says that his relationship with his mentee has integrated him into his new community more fully than he expects would have happened otherwise. His relationship with his mentee (his “Little,” in the organization’s parlance) has been a source of value for him, even as it’s been challenging.

  “I really feel like I have played a role in his life that’s been positive. He’s been a positive influence on my life,” Jason says. “Honestly, he just brings me a lot of joy.”

  A diverse set of relationships also builds practical skills, says Coontz.

  In earlier eras, when there was little separation between home and the marketplace, running errands, taking on household tasks, and interacting with adults were all opportunities for young people to practice the skills that would be needed in adulthood, Coontz says. Far from feeling guilty about working with their children this way, parents in these earlier times would have seen themselves helping educate their children in important skills. Embedding young people in a web of relationships, including with unrelated adults, continues to have benefits today, Coontz continues.

  “Firstly, they begin to know that people have different problem-solving skills — they have different weaknesses, they have different strengths,” she says.

  Second, she says, adolescents trust the feedback they get from other adults more than feedback from their primary caregivers.

  Finally, they’re much more motivated to live up to other people’s expectations when completing a task, Coontz says. Many caregivers will recognize this dynamic at play when kids strive not to disappoint favorite teachers or coaches.

  A range of relationships ensures that young people can be on both the giving and receiving end of advice, knowledge, and expertise. Meaningful relationships can form with paid caregivers, including teachers, babysitters, and after-school and camp counselors.

  Part of the benefit of these relationships is the problem-solving they incentivize, so parents should hold back from micromanaging when there are conflicts. “Try to help the child strategize, rather than to step in on the child’s behalf,” Coontz says.

  Mentoring can take many forms

  One of Palmer’s most enduring mentors was Kathy, another of her mom’s classmates and very engaged in local cheerleading. “I was 5 and 6 and needed some sort of outlet,” Palmer remembers. “She eventually became the coach of a cheerleading squad and required me to be on it,” Palmer says. It’s not necessarily what Palmer would have chosen for herself at that age, but she was out of the house and enjoying herself.

  Later, when Palmer’s mother became a practicing dentist and the family moved to wealthy Franklin, Tennessee, cheerleading was how Palmer made inroads in her new community.

  “I was like, ‘Oh, thank god I have this thing that I would never have joined otherwise,’” Palmer says.

  Coontz said that she and her friends regularly hired each other’s children for small jobs, which was easier than paying or nagging their own. Caregivers are often in a position to informally mentor their children’s friends — when carpooling, on play dates, or at social gatherings.

  Mentorship of any kind is often a mechanism for getting exposed to new experiences, says Artis Stevens, the president and CEO of Big Brothers Big Sisters. Organizations like BBBS, Mentor, and Friends of the Children systematize that pipeline and make it accessible to more people, though the particulars vary from one organization to another.

  Stevens says his goal is for “any positive contributing adult who wants to get engaged, wants to be supportive, has a way to be able to get engaged and become a positive mentor in a young person’s life.” While most Littles are from communities of color, most Bigs, or mentors, are white, he says. Stevens sees this as a valuable source of allyship in a time that sorely needs it.

  For LGBTQ+ young people, mentorship can be a lifeline. “When there are people in your own community living their lives, it makes it so much easier to envision yourself with a real future,” says Teri Blauersouth, a licensed professional clinical counselor who regularly works with LGBTQ+ clients.

  “Even youth with ultimately supportive family often have a period of wondering, if they are honest about who they are, if that support will be there,” they say.

  Mentors can reassure young people that “there are trustworthy, caring adults in the world,” Blauersouth says, ultimately improving their relationships with supportive primary caregivers. In extreme cases, they continued, mentors can offer “material refuge” to youth whose caregivers stop supporting them.

  Palmer, who is bisexual, remembers how reassuring it was when, as a child starting to have feelings for other girls, she saw a family friend, Becky, and her girlfriend, warmly and casually included in gatherings. Not only did she see a same-sex relationship modeled by a trusted adult, she saw her parents accept that relationship.

  “I didn’t come out when I was 7, but it was still wonderful,” Palmer recalls. “When I did come out, I don’t think I ever questioned that my parents were going to be an issue on that front.”

  What’s holding us back from mentoring?

  Though the benefits are clear for kids and caregivers, there are obstacles to creating these relationships. They require time, sometimes money, and they’re hard.

  “It is a very, very rewarding experience, and a lot of people should really consider it,” says Jason. “But it is difficult. It does take a level of responsibility and maturity and thoughtfulness.”

  It also bears noting that many people are afraid of children being harmed by adults who were supposed to be helping them. Even Palmer, the beneficiary of these types of relationships, says she’d be hesitant to form them with a young person now. The sanctity of the nuclear family feels too hard to breach.

  “You know, I feel like we’ve been taught explicitly, especially middle-class millennials, to, like, protect your kid from adults that aren’t you,” Palmer says.

  “We don’t need to let those concerns rob our children of the potential benefits of these relationships,” says Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan, a professor of psychology at Ohio State University and president of the board of the Council on Contemporary Families.

  Primary caregivers and parents should think of being present and involved with their kids’ lives as a safety precaution, says Schoppe-Sullivan. Introduce yourself to coaches and get to know the adults who will be spending time with them.

  “It’s important from an early age with your children to develop a close, trusting relationship,” Schoppe-Sullivan says. The goal is that “they feel comfortable talking to you and that you’re not going to judge them for what they say.”

  These lines of communication allow for children to tell their parents if another person is making them uncomfortable and to know that those concerns will be taken seriously.

  Formal mentoring programs offer institutional assurance for families and adults who want a straightforward option with a proven track record of safety and efficacy. Parents are the number one way young people come into BBBS, says Stevens, and they trust the organization because of its decades-long track record of looking out for young people.

  Volunteers go through training before they’re matched with a Little. There’s support staff that both Bigs and Littles can turn to for advice or help, and regular communication with families.

  Stevens says would-be volunteers are held back by thinking they need to be perfect role models. But that’s not what kids — or anyone, really — needs.

  “What we ask is for you to be present,” he says. “That’s what kids want: presence, and persistence.”

  That persistence pays dividends. When Palmer got married, decades after their initial meeting, Kathy did her hair and hosted her bridesmaids.

  “There were just all of these ways that they’ve changed our family’s life,” she says of her extended community, “let alone mine.”

  Alex Hazlett is a freelance journalist who covers modern family life, technology, and science.

  Even Better is here to offer deeply sourced, actionable advice for helping you live a better life. Do you have a question on money and work; friends, family, and community; or personal growth and health? Send us your question by filling out this form. We might turn it into a story.

From The Hindu: Sports

• Forest Flame upsets hot favourite Juliette for the Teena Katrak Memorial R.W.I.T.C Ltd Trophy -

• Succession runs with a good chance in the Manjri Stud Farm Trophy -

• Diamond Gold, Priceless Beauty and Emperor Charmavet shine -

• Knotty Dancer, who has been well tuned, is expected to score in the Mysore Race Club Anniversary Cup -

• F1 | Fernando Alonso gets U.S. Grand Prix P7 finish, points reinstated - The Renault-owned team successfully argued there was a “significant and relevant new element”, allowing the penalty to be overturned on review and double world champion Alonso restored to seventh place from 15th

From The Hindu: National News

• NIA arrests former PFI State secretary -

• Wildlife keeps Kulathupuzha residents indoors - Villagers reluctant to leave homes for fear of elephants and bisons; Forest officials blame a surge in jumbo population

• All welfare schemes of Congress stopped by BJP in State, alleges Siddaramaiah -

• Woman’s death at MCH: post-mortem report finds no medical negligence - She had died on Thursday following an allergic reaction, says the report

• One injured in elephant attack -

From BBC: Europe

• Russia ends civilian pull-out before Kherson battle - An eight-day operation ends in Kherson city as Russian officials prepare for a Ukrainian attack.

• British kayaker rescued clinging to buoy in Channel - A British man is saved by a Dutch fishing boat after his kayak capsized miles off the French coast.

• Pablo Marí: Stabbed Arsenal defender faces two months out after surgery - Pablo Marí is to be sidelined for around two months after having surgery on wounds he sustained when he was stabbed in an Italian supermarket.

• World faces most dangerous decade since WW2 - Putin - Russia’s president says the West is unable to stay in charge, but is “desperately trying” to cling on.

• Spanish fan detained in Iran while hiking to World Cup - Santiago Sánchez was hiking from Madrid to Qatar, but is now believed to be in a Tehran jail.

From Ars Technica

• Rocket Report: Norway’s nuclear rocket concerns; Ariane 6 delayed again - “When the briefing ended, I was baffled and, if I’m honest, angry.” - link

• No new combustion engines cars from 2035, says European Union - New cars will have to meet a 50% reduction in CO2 by 2030 ahead of complete ban. - link

• Elon Musk completes Twitter purchase, immediately fires CEO and other execs - Musk completes $44B purchase, fires CEO Parag Agrawal and others. - link

• Uganda Ebola outbreak tops 100 cases, 30 deaths; cases growing in capital - Officials say they will test three experimental vaccines in the coming weeks. - link

• Redditor acquires decommissioned Netflix cache server with 262TB of storage - 2013-era server offers rare peek under the hood of Netflix’s Open Connect network. - link

From Jokes Subreddit

• Alyssa: “I’ve had it up to here with you, John! You think I talk like a pirate and you never buy me flowers! -

  John: “You want to know something? I do think you talk like a pirate! And I didn’t even know you sold flowers!

  submitted by /u/CattDawg2008
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• Judas: Hey Jesus, you coming to the last supper? -

  Jesus: the what?

  Judas: the supper…I mean are you coming to the supper?

  submitted by /u/atomicpete
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• A Roman walks into a bar.. -

  ..and asks for a dry martinus.

  “Surely you mean a martini,” asks the bartender.

  “If I want a double I’ll ask for it, you plebeian scum,” replies the roman.

  submitted by /u/RealisticCharacter84
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• A computer programmer goes to buy some bread. -

  On his way out, his wife says, “and while you’re there, get a carton of eggs”.

  He never returned.

  submitted by /u/PedroFPardo
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• My paycheck is like my penis -

  Its small, not enough for my wife, comes only once a month, but it’s still pleasing.

  submitted by /u/WhiteWolf1706
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