It's not that we're not that into each other. It's more that we're less likely to go out with each other. The epidemic of loneliness is less about not having any friends and more about seeing them less often than we used to. As Olga Khazan explains in The Atlantic (Gift Article), the loneliness epidemic "conjures a nation of friendless hermits who have no one to invite to their birthday parties. But according to a pair of new surveys, American loneliness is more complex than that. The typical American, it seems, texts a bunch of people 'we should get together!' before watching TikTok alone on the couch and then passing out. That is, Americans have friends. We just never really see them." The Friendship Paradox. One "big hurdle is the time and effort it takes to schedule a gathering. In recent decades, participation in groups that allow friends to meet up easily—such as unions, civic clubs, and religious congregations—has dwindled." This is part of the reason why I send an email to each of my friends every single day. This one. 2Word AssociationIn The Graduate, Mr. McGuire famously gives Dustin Hoffman's character Benjamin Braddock one word of advice about his future: Plastics. He wasn't wrong. There was a big future in plastics. But, sadly, the future of plastic-related waste and pollution could be even bigger. "It’s enough pollution each year — about 52 million metric tons — to fill New York City’s Central Park with plastic waste as high as the Empire State Building." 3Me and My RC"If a Zoox robot taxi encounters a construction zone it has not seen before, for instance, a technician in the command center will receive an alert — a short message in a small, colored window on the side of the technician’s computer screen. Then, using the computer mouse to draw a line across the screen, the technician can send the car a new route to follow around the construction zone." NYT (Gift Article): How Self-Driving Cars Get Help From Humans Hundreds of Miles Away. Wait a second, does this mean we're basically being driven around in remote control cars? (For those not old enough to remember the Me and My RC reference, enjoy.) 4Dishing the Dirt"On our way into his lab, we passed a bench piled with bags of dirt—one from the Chihuahuan Desert, another from the Sonoran Desert. 'My parents sent me those during the pandemic,' Brady told me. He has been given soil from Saudi Arabia and the Serengeti; his collaborators have gathered samples in Mexican sinkholes and Australian grasslands." What's all the dirt for? Finding new drugs. Dhruv Khullar in The New Yorker on how the AI revolution is coming to a pharmacy near you. How Machines Learned to Discover Drugs. 5Extra, ExtraSchool Shooting: "What should have been a joyous back-to-school season in Winder, Georgia, has now turned into another horrific reminder of how gun violence continues to tear our communities apart. Students across the country are learning how to duck and cover instead of how to read and write. We cannot continue to accept this as normal." A shooter believed to be 14 years old killed at least four people and injured many more at a high school in Georgia. Here's the latest from CNN. 6Bottom of the News"Larry, the Chief Mouser to the Cabinet Office, has now outlasted five prime ministers—and their pets. A British icon, he has his own unofficial X account, with 900K followers. He is so well known that Downing St. has even reportedly made plans for how to break the news of his eventual death (Larry is 17)." But that's not the most pressing issue. WSJ (Gift Article): There’s a ‘Cat-astrophe’ Brewing on Downing Street.
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