Shoals Technologies Group, Inc. Reports Financial Results for First Quarter 2024

Trump suggests he is open to states restricting access to birth control

When asked if he supports any restrictions on a person’s right to contraception, Trump promised to release a “comprehensive policy” on the issue soon.

5 m

washingtonpost.com

This super-scrubbing BISSELL SpinWave Steam Mop is at its lowest price ever on Amazon

Save big on BISSELL!

7 m

nypost.com

How much are last-minute tickets to see Taylor Swift in Portugal?

Taylor's Globetrotter 'Era' continues in Lisbon on May 24-25.

7 m

nypost.com

My Wife and I Have Finally Saved Enough for Early Retirement. Now She Wants to Throw It All Away.

We've been frugal and cheap for decades.

10 m

slate.com

10 bodies found scattered around Mexico's resort city of Acapulco

The once-glamorous resort city of Acapulco has lost its luster in the last decade as bloodshed has made it one of the world's most violent cities.

12 m

cbsnews.com

Many pushed to free 'kind' LAPD cop who murdered ex-boyfriend's wife. Victim's family fought back

California parole board revoked a decision to recommend release for Stephanie Lazarus after testimony saying the ex-detective 'lied for decades' to cover up 1986 slaying.

13 m

latimes.com

Stay organized with these no-slip velvet hangers from Amazon

Clean up your life one hanger at a time.

15 m

nypost.com

Bill Maher slams Biden’s ‘anachronistic’ speech to black graduates at Morehouse College: ‘We’re not in the past’

"Real Time" host Bill Maher knocked President Biden over the commencement address he gave to Black graduates at Morehouse College, suggesting his comments about racism in America are outdated.

16 m

nypost.com

Go woke, go broke: Boy Scouts’ swerve left is driving families away

The Boy Scouts of America has caved to the wokists — and, surprise surprise, its membership is down the tubes.

19 m

nypost.com

Donald Trump deletes video post on Truth Social referencing ‘unified Reich’

Former President Donald Trump deleted a video that referenced a "unified Reich" from his Truth Social account that sparked outrage on Monday.

21 m

nypost.com

Ex-NSC official calls to defund ICC's 'kangaroo court' over Netanyahu arrest bid: 'We're going to be next'

Ex-National Security Council official Richard Goldberg said the International Criminal Court (ICC) should be defunded before it targets the United States.

21 m

foxnews.com

Giants rookie Malik Nabers throws shade at team’s new throwback uniforms

The Giants' first-round pick isn't a fan of their new throwback jerseys.

22 m

nypost.com

Kevin Costner's ex moves on with family friend, Jessica Biel says she nearly quit Hollywood

The Fox News Entertainment newsletter brings you the latest Hollywood headlines, celebrity interviews and stories from Los Angeles and beyond.

23 m

foxnews.com

The 26 most anticipated movies of the summer

The summer will be packed with sequels, prequels and adaptations. Several franchises will see new installments, including Beverly Hills Cop, Bad Boys, Beetlejuice and Inside Out.

23 m

washingtonpost.com

Many familiar names on roster as U..S. women's soccer team readies for Olympics

Emma Hayes called up her first roster as coach of the U.S. women’s national team and it includes a lot of familiar names.

23 m

latimes.com

James Carville tells Biden to stop complaining about coverage of age: The 'issue is suffocating him'

Democratic strategist James Carville said Monday that the age issue was "suffocating" President Biden during an interview with MSNBC's Jen Psaki.

24 m

foxnews.com

The misleading, wasteful way we measure gas mileage, explained

Time for a pop quiz. Which of these trades saves more gas: A) Swapping a car that gets 25 miles per gallon (MPG) for one that gets 50 MPG, or B) Replacing a car that gets 10 MPG with one that gets 15 MPG. If you said that A conserves more gas, you’re mistaken. And it’s not even close. Here’s why: In the first scenario, the old vehicle getting 25 MPG uses four gallons of gas to travel 100 miles, while the new one at 50 MPG uses two. In the second scenario, the vehicle getting 10 MPG needs 10 gallons to traverse those 100 miles, while the one at 15 MPG uses 6.7, saving 3.3 gallons — fully 65 percent more than in scenario A. If you answered wrong, don’t be too hard on yourself. You’ve succumbed to the MPG Illusion, a widespread fallacy that can easily distort perceptions of a car’s efficiency and muddle debates about transportation and climate policy. Providing the basis for federal fuel economy rules, MPG is a foundational automotive metric in the US. “Americans are very familiar with MPG,” Richard Larrick, a professor at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, told me. “But I think that familiarity means that we don’t recognize what it’s not answering, which is the question of how much gas we’re using.” Larrick co-authored a 2008 paper in Science that illuminated Americans’ “systematic misperception” of fuel efficiency when viewed through MPG. The researchers asked 77 college students questions similar to the pop quiz above. Most undervalued the benefits of rising from 18 to 28 MPG relative to going from 34 to 50 MPG. “We think of gas savings as a kind of linear relationship with MPG,” Larrick told me. But “there are diminishing returns from MPG [improvements].” Because of the MPG Illusion, many people underestimate the benefit of addressing bona fide gas guzzlers. They give disproportionate attention to squeezing a few more MPG from models that are already comparatively efficient. In a subsequent 2015 paper, Larrick and two co-authors offered a solution: Flip MPG and turn it into “GPHM,” or gallons of gas per 100 miles of travel. Such a metric would help consumers see how much more (or less) gas they would buy if they opt for a particular model. It could also nudge public officials striving to reduce oil consumption and tailpipe emissions to focus on the low-hanging fruit: improving the most abysmally inefficient vehicles. The MPG Illusion sheds light on a host of policy issues The European Union already does this, measuring fuel economy in liters per 100 kilometers driven. “They do it that way because fuel consumed per mile is directly related to energy use and directly related to emissions, whereas our MPG is not,” said Kate Whitefoot, an associate professor of engineering and public policy at Carnegie Mellon. The US remains wedded to MPG, although the 2008 Science paper drew a flurry of attention (in part because it was published at a time when the price of gas was surging to $4.05/gallon, equivalent to around $5.80 today). A few years later, the MPG Illusion seemed to catch the eye of federal regulators revising the fuel efficiency stickers affixed to new cars at dealerships. Since 2013, those stickers have included measures of gallons per 100 miles as well as an estimated annual gasoline cost (albeit in a much smaller font than the familiar MPG figure towering above). But Larrick said that climate and consumer groups have paid scant attention to his proposed “GPHM” metric, and it does not seem to have penetrated public awareness. Worse, the MPG Illusion can lead climate advocates to misallocate political capital, downplaying the most effective opportunities to reduce emissions from transportation, the US’s single largest source of greenhouse gas emissions. The Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards, the federal policy that sets automobile fuel efficiency rules, have always been based on MPG, a big reason why the metric is so ingrained in popular consciousness. CAFE establishes one fuel economy standard for “passenger cars” (sedans and station wagons) and a second, more lenient one for “light trucks” (primarily SUVs and pickups). The MPG Illusion helps conceal the distortions of that bifurcated structure, known as the “light truck loophole”: It reduces pressure on carmakers to improve their most inefficient SUVs, like the 2023 Chevrolet Suburban that gets a puny 16 MPG. A similar problem exists for the federal Gas Guzzler Tax, a levy that can add thousands of dollars to the cost of vehicles getting less than 22.5 MPG. Yet nonsensically, the Gas Guzzler Tax applies only to passenger cars, omitting the SUVs and trucks that now comprise more than 80 percent of the US auto market. Another lesson of the MPG Illusion: It’s better to build hybrid versions of the most gas-thirsty cars, rather than of those that are already relatively efficient. A gas-powered 2023 Hyundai Elantra, for instance, gets 37 MPG while a hybrid model gets 50 MPG. Impressive though that sounds, an equivalent 13 MPG improvement for a hybrid version of the three-ton, all-gas Cadillac Escalade which gets a measly 16 MPG, would allow the hybrid Escalade to save four times more gasoline than the Elantra, compared to their all-gas versions. (No hybrid Escalade has been available since 2013.) Purely electric car models are still more climate-friendly than hybrids, but US consumers have shown queasiness about going all-electric, and there is a solid argument that a given number of lithium-ion cells can more efficiently reduce emissions if they are deployed across numerous hybrid vehicles than in a single all-electric one. That being the case, publicly dragging a company like Toyota for prioritizing hybrids over all-electric models, as environmental groups like the Sierra Club have done, risks making the perfect the enemy of the good. One of the most powerful insights of the MPG illusion is the power of simply removing gas-guzzling cars already on the road, rather than solely focusing on making new cars ever more efficient. Many vehicles manufactured in the 1980s and 1990s got significantly worse gas mileage than current versions. A 1995 GMC Yukon, for instance, gets an estimated 12 MPG, while a 2024 Yukon reaches 17 — not much to brag about, but still a 42 percent improvement. Millions of decades-old models are still in use; last year, the average age of an American car hit 12.5 years, an all-time high. Such disparities provide a compelling argument for “cash for clunkers” initiatives like the 2009 Car Allowance Rebate System (CARS), a program that offered Americans up to $4,500 off a new vehicle if they traded in an older, still drivable one that got 18 MPG or less. (Even better: A 2020 Lithuanian program offered those surrendering an old car up to €1,000 toward far more sustainable transportation modes like e-bikes, bikes, or public transit.) The US ended its federal program in 2009, but states including California and Colorado maintain their own. Due to the resources required to produce a new vehicle, it makes sense to limit cash-for-clunkers eligibility to the most inefficient models — a feature that the old CARS program did but Colorado’s current one does not. Eventually, the MPG Illusion will lose its relevance as the American vehicle fleet becomes fully electric. But transitioning to a zero-emissions fleet will take decades, even under the most optimistic projections. Only around 1 percent of cars currently on US roads are fully electric, and more than four out of five new cars sold in the US in 2023 were fully gas-powered. Like it or not, millions of gas cars will be plying American streets for a long time to come. Policymakers should aim to minimize the total amount of fuel those vehicles consume at the same time that they encourage electrification. They’ll have a much easier time doing so if they incorporate the MPG Illusion into their plans.

24 m

vox.com

Time for a pop quiz. Which of these trades saves more gas: A) Swapping a car that gets 25 miles per gallon (MPG) for one that gets 50 MPG, or B) Replacing a car that gets 10 MPG with one that gets 15 MPG. If you said that A conserves more gas, you’re mistaken. And it’s not even close. Here’s why: In the first scenario, the old vehicle getting 25 MPG uses four gallons of gas to travel 100 miles, while the new one at 50 MPG uses two. In the second scenario, the vehicle getting 10 MPG needs 10 gallons to traverse those 100 miles, while the one at 15 MPG uses 6.7, saving 3.3 gallons — fully 65 percent more than in scenario A. If you answered wrong, don’t be too hard on yourself. You’ve succumbed to the MPG Illusion, a widespread fallacy that can easily distort perceptions of a car’s efficiency and muddle debates about transportation and climate policy. Providing the basis for federal fuel economy rules, MPG is a foundational automotive metric in the US. “Americans are very familiar with MPG,” Richard Larrick, a professor at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, told me. “But I think that familiarity means that we don’t recognize what it’s not answering, which is the question of how much gas we’re using.” Larrick co-authored a 2008 paper in Science that illuminated Americans’ “systematic misperception” of fuel efficiency when viewed through MPG. The researchers asked 77 college students questions similar to the pop quiz above. Most undervalued the benefits of rising from 18 to 28 MPG relative to going from 34 to 50 MPG. “We think of gas savings as a kind of linear relationship with MPG,” Larrick told me. But “there are diminishing returns from MPG [improvements].” Because of the MPG Illusion, many people underestimate the benefit of addressing bona fide gas guzzlers. They give disproportionate attention to squeezing a few more MPG from models that are already comparatively efficient. In a subsequent 2015 paper, Larrick and two co-authors offered a solution: Flip MPG and turn it into “GPHM,” or gallons of gas per 100 miles of travel. Such a metric would help consumers see how much more (or less) gas they would buy if they opt for a particular model. It could also nudge public officials striving to reduce oil consumption and tailpipe emissions to focus on the low-hanging fruit: improving the most abysmally inefficient vehicles. The MPG Illusion sheds light on a host of policy issues The European Union already does this, measuring fuel economy in liters per 100 kilometers driven. “They do it that way because fuel consumed per mile is directly related to energy use and directly related to emissions, whereas our MPG is not,” said Kate Whitefoot, an associate professor of engineering and public policy at Carnegie Mellon. The US remains wedded to MPG, although the 2008 Science paper drew a flurry of attention (in part because it was published at a time when the price of gas was surging to $4.05/gallon, equivalent to around $5.80 today). A few years later, the MPG Illusion seemed to catch the eye of federal regulators revising the fuel efficiency stickers affixed to new cars at dealerships. Since 2013, those stickers have included measures of gallons per 100 miles as well as an estimated annual gasoline cost (albeit in a much smaller font than the familiar MPG figure towering above). But Larrick said that climate and consumer groups have paid scant attention to his proposed “GPHM” metric, and it does not seem to have penetrated public awareness. Worse, the MPG Illusion can lead climate advocates to misallocate political capital, downplaying the most effective opportunities to reduce emissions from transportation, the US’s single largest source of greenhouse gas emissions. The Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards, the federal policy that sets automobile fuel efficiency rules, have always been based on MPG, a big reason why the metric is so ingrained in popular consciousness. CAFE establishes one fuel economy standard for “passenger cars” (sedans and station wagons) and a second, more lenient one for “light trucks” (primarily SUVs and pickups). The MPG Illusion helps conceal the distortions of that bifurcated structure, known as the “light truck loophole”: It reduces pressure on carmakers to improve their most inefficient SUVs, like the 2023 Chevrolet Suburban that gets a puny 16 MPG. A similar problem exists for the federal Gas Guzzler Tax, a levy that can add thousands of dollars to the cost of vehicles getting less than 22.5 MPG. Yet nonsensically, the Gas Guzzler Tax applies only to passenger cars, omitting the SUVs and trucks that now comprise more than 80 percent of the US auto market. Another lesson of the MPG Illusion: It’s better to build hybrid versions of the most gas-thirsty cars, rather than of those that are already relatively efficient. A gas-powered 2023 Hyundai Elantra, for instance, gets 37 MPG while a hybrid model gets 50 MPG. Impressive though that sounds, an equivalent 13 MPG improvement for a hybrid version of the three-ton, all-gas Cadillac Escalade which gets a measly 16 MPG, would allow the hybrid Escalade to save four times more gasoline than the Elantra, compared to their all-gas versions. (No hybrid Escalade has been available since 2013.) Purely electric car models are still more climate-friendly than hybrids, but US consumers have shown queasiness about going all-electric, and there is a solid argument that a given number of lithium-ion cells can more efficiently reduce emissions if they are deployed across numerous hybrid vehicles than in a single all-electric one. That being the case, publicly dragging a company like Toyota for prioritizing hybrids over all-electric models, as environmental groups like the Sierra Club have done, risks making the perfect the enemy of the good. One of the most powerful insights of the MPG illusion is the power of simply removing gas-guzzling cars already on the road, rather than solely focusing on making new cars ever more efficient. Many vehicles manufactured in the 1980s and 1990s got significantly worse gas mileage than current versions. A 1995 GMC Yukon, for instance, gets an estimated 12 MPG, while a 2024 Yukon reaches 17 — not much to brag about, but still a 42 percent improvement. Millions of decades-old models are still in use; last year, the average age of an American car hit 12.5 years, an all-time high. Such disparities provide a compelling argument for “cash for clunkers” initiatives like the 2009 Car Allowance Rebate System (CARS), a program that offered Americans up to $4,500 off a new vehicle if they traded in an older, still drivable one that got 18 MPG or less. (Even better: A 2020 Lithuanian program offered those surrendering an old car up to €1,000 toward far more sustainable transportation modes like e-bikes, bikes, or public transit.) The US ended its federal program in 2009, but states including California and Colorado maintain their own. Due to the resources required to produce a new vehicle, it makes sense to limit cash-for-clunkers eligibility to the most inefficient models — a feature that the old CARS program did but Colorado’s current one does not. Eventually, the MPG Illusion will lose its relevance as the American vehicle fleet becomes fully electric. But transitioning to a zero-emissions fleet will take decades, even under the most optimistic projections. Only around 1 percent of cars currently on US roads are fully electric, and more than four out of five new cars sold in the US in 2023 were fully gas-powered. Like it or not, millions of gas cars will be plying American streets for a long time to come. Policymakers should aim to minimize the total amount of fuel those vehicles consume at the same time that they encourage electrification. They’ll have a much easier time doing so if they incorporate the MPG Illusion into their plans.

Bridgerton’s third season is more diverse — and even shallower — than ever

With the recent Netflix drop, Bridgerton’s color-conscious casting enters its third season, and we still have many of the same questions for the series that we had at the beginning. What impact does this casting have on our storyline, if any? Does the injection of so many characters of color add complexity to our understanding of the Bridgerton universe, or is this casting ultimately little more than window dressing for the same old crusty patriarchal tropes? Bridgerton is almost — but not quite — an alternate historical universe, one where a colorblind view of society prevails. This slight historical rewrite posits that Queen Charlotte, who was the real wife of Britain’s King George III, is a Black aristocrat who marries into the British royal family and presides over society in all her glory. That thin historical tie, along with the show’s season-one acknowledgment that slavery exists in this universe, has always complicated how we understand the diversity of the ton (Bridgerton-speak for society). Season one, indeed, drew criticism for “having Black people strolling around in the background” without giving most of the show’s Black characters meaningful identities or storylines. Season two expanded the number of minority characters and gave two of them the show’s focal storyline, but did little to address the concerns held over from season one about the lack of complexity in this universe. Granted, romance as a genre is all about escapism; but how can the show simultaneously tell us that class and racial inequalities exist while usually pretending they don’t? Season three, rather than attempting to reconcile this paradox, has simply flung more characters into it. And while it’s a lot more fun to have even more characters of color strolling around in the background, the show still largely configures them all as shallow and undeveloped. Bridgerton’s Black men are all isolated within their society Bridgerton frankly enjoys its surface pleasures, and season three has chosen to go wide, not deep. We’re introduced to a truly dizzying number of new characters and relationships — everyone from lead character Penelope’s (Nicola Coughlan) dueling love interests to Marcus Anderson (Daniel Francis), cane-tapping Lady Danbury’s (Adjoa Andoh) surprise brother. He appears and immediately develops a flirtation with Danbury’s bestie, widower Lady Bridgerton (Ruth Gemmell), who’s one of four Bridgertons looking for love this season. (Anthony, who married his love Kate last season, also makes an appearance.) Among them, another unexpected sibling, Francesca (Hannah Dodd), who was previously played by a different actress in a much smaller version of the role, returns from Bath just in time to make an amiable connection with the quiet, quirky but charming John Stirling (Victor Alli), a little-known earl who seems destined to easily win her hand. Francesca and her mother seem to represent opposite ends of the marriage spectrum: Lady Violet wants all of her children to make a love match like she did with her late husband, but Francesca seems perfectly content to make a convenient marriage based on her friendship with the earl. What’s less clear is what either man hopes to gain from wooing a Bridgerton. Lady Danbury seems to be wary of Marcus, with the vague implication that he might be a rake, but he gets so little screen time that we barely get any sense of his character beyond his shallow banter with Violet. John, by contrast, gets one of the more interesting arcs of the season — if you can call socially awkward courtship an arc. Both get sidelined by a script that has too many characters to cycle through and not enough time to devote to giving them all three dimensions. Additionally, as Black gentlemen of the ton, both men appear to be disconnected from the society they’re moving within. Marcus has arrived from out of town and no one seems to know him apart from Lady Danbury. John likewise seems to have come to town specifically to tour the marriage mart — no one among the Bridgerton families seems to know him at all. His apparent neurodivergence further sets him apart from their sphere, at least initially. It’s unclear whether the writers intended both characters to feel this isolated, or whether it’s a byproduct of the show’s divided attention, but the result leaves us questioning what role Black men actually play in this society, and how integrated they actually are within it. Recall that our season one hero, Simon (Regé-Jean Page), was also a solitary figure within his set whose best friend, Will Mondrich (Martins Imhangbe), was a working-class boxer who bonded with him through the military. Throughout season one, Will’s primary role was that of sidekick and exposition tool for Simon. Over the course of season two and season three, Bridgerton has tried to redeem its mechanical use of him in season one by gradually elevating him through the social ranks. Season two sees him breaking away from the shady world of boxing and trying to establish himself as a respectable barkeep. Season three cavalierly upends that storyline by handing Will’s young son a surprise title and elevating Will’s entire family to the peerage. This “unexpected fortune” trope forms the basis for many a romance, but Will is happily married to Alice (Emma Naomi). She’s not too pleased, though, when Will fights to keep his club and continue running it himself. His resistance to luxury horrifies the gentlemen who formerly patronized his establishment, and they drop him, threatening both his business and his family’s new position in society. Given that Will is one of only a few significant characters in Bridgerton with an actual job — dressmaker Madame Delacroix (Kathryn Drysdale) has likewise hovered around the edges of polite society for all three seasons — it’s hardly surprising that so much of his character revolves around work. It also makes sense that a show so fixated on wealth would explicitly create an upwardly mobile character to both center all the show’s class concerns and represent the show’s modern middle-class viewer. Yet it’s striking that the conflicts that arise from this new season three storyline have everything to do with class but nothing to do with race. The Mondriches have no trouble being accepted by the ton until Will determines to keep the club; it’s only his choice to buck the trendy disdain for work that makes him unfashionable. Will and Alice each afford the show a rich opportunity to explore the combination of class and race, one that so far the show has declined. Bridgerton’s prequel series, Queen Charlotte, addresses these intersections more explicitly — and arguably more improbably — than the main series yet has. There seems to be little thematic connection between the social isolation of Marcus, John, and Simon and the ease with which Will is initially accepted into society. Yet their disconnection, combined with the fact that Will’s patrons turn on him so rapidly once he chooses to keep working, implies that for all of these men, race may be the primary factor keeping them set apart from the other characters. Again, this could be all down to the writing, to the show’s expanding storylines and self-conscious frippery. Still, intentional or not, race provides subtle friction for these characters. That brings us to Bridgerton’s most isolated character of all. Queen Charlotte may be the reason Bridgerton’s London has so many diverse marriages Bridgerton is a story that’s ultimately all about competition — competition for a better position in society, for a wealthy spouse, for more money, and for more power. At the center of all that competition sits the regent herself — Queen Charlotte (Golda Rosheuvel), who simultaneously reigns over London society and fiercely fights to maintain her position. The show configures its arch gossipmonger, the anonymous scandal-sheet writer Lady Whistledown, as the foil to the queen herself. Both women exert huge influence over the fates of their fellow members of the ton. But where Whistledown’s influence is usually strategic, due to her writer’s need to protect herself and her loved ones, the queen’s influence often feels random and quixotic — characterized by bored vanity and occasional whimsy. Queen Charlotte, much like the real-life prince regent who’s missing from this version of history, functions as a sort of chaotic neutral in the world she dominates, using her power and social influence to move chess pieces around according to her whims. Typically, only Whistledown, who operates more like a true neutral among the society she observes, can disturb her sense of studied nonchalance. As we learn in the issue-laden prequel series, Charlotte secured her position in the world of Bridgerton through a sociopolitical “experiment” spearheaded by her husband to integrate the races among all social classes. So what seems like arbitrary meddling in the affairs of the ton on Charlotte’s part may be her way of ensuring that the “experiment” continues for the benefit of all British society. Yet increasingly, for all Charlotte’s queendom ensures the elevation of her and all Black characters in this universe, we see that it’s left her almost entirely alone. Her position of power alienates her from almost everyone in the ton; the sole exception, Lady Danbury, serves her more as an advisor than a friend. We might question, then, whether anything in Bridgerton, for all its lavish luxury, leads to true community or connection, especially for its characters of color. Throughout the third season, the proliferation of minor characters of color becomes more than just window dressing; it becomes a metaphor for the show’s inability to do more than merely maneuver its characters, like Charlotte herself, without providing a cohesive narrative purpose for any of them. The show offers marriage and family as the best path to meaning, and matchmaking duly occupies most of Charlotte’s attention; yet outside of the Bridgertons, all of the marriages we’re privy to are either arranged (the Featheringtons) or currently experiencing friction (the Mondriches). And even among the Bridgertons, marriage feels so burdensome that several members of the family have done all they can to avoid it. Meanwhile, queerness exists so far outside the main scope of the show so far that it mainly occurs only accidentally; the writers so far have seemed committed to a fully heteronormative, traditional take on the concepts of marriage and family. All of this means that Bridgerton season three, for all its infusion of new characters, ultimately feels like more of the same. The ultimate test might be simply the depth test, and the show’s failure to dole out so little of it to anyone. Still, if Bridgerton has firmly embraced superficiality, then this season at least gives multiple races an equal slice of its thinly layered pie. This threadbare representation makes for the gauzy fabric Bridgerton prefers, never mind that it’s not enough for a decent muslin gown at Vauxhall. With the string quartet playing Pitbull, no one will notice.

24 m

vox.com

With the recent Netflix drop, Bridgerton’s color-conscious casting enters its third season, and we still have many of the same questions for the series that we had at the beginning. What impact does this casting have on our storyline, if any? Does the injection of so many characters of color add complexity to our understanding of the Bridgerton universe, or is this casting ultimately little more than window dressing for the same old crusty patriarchal tropes? Bridgerton is almost — but not quite — an alternate historical universe, one where a colorblind view of society prevails. This slight historical rewrite posits that Queen Charlotte, who was the real wife of Britain’s King George III, is a Black aristocrat who marries into the British royal family and presides over society in all her glory. That thin historical tie, along with the show’s season-one acknowledgment that slavery exists in this universe, has always complicated how we understand the diversity of the ton (Bridgerton-speak for society). Season one, indeed, drew criticism for “having Black people strolling around in the background” without giving most of the show’s Black characters meaningful identities or storylines. Season two expanded the number of minority characters and gave two of them the show’s focal storyline, but did little to address the concerns held over from season one about the lack of complexity in this universe. Granted, romance as a genre is all about escapism; but how can the show simultaneously tell us that class and racial inequalities exist while usually pretending they don’t? Season three, rather than attempting to reconcile this paradox, has simply flung more characters into it. And while it’s a lot more fun to have even more characters of color strolling around in the background, the show still largely configures them all as shallow and undeveloped. Bridgerton’s Black men are all isolated within their society Bridgerton frankly enjoys its surface pleasures, and season three has chosen to go wide, not deep. We’re introduced to a truly dizzying number of new characters and relationships — everyone from lead character Penelope’s (Nicola Coughlan) dueling love interests to Marcus Anderson (Daniel Francis), cane-tapping Lady Danbury’s (Adjoa Andoh) surprise brother. He appears and immediately develops a flirtation with Danbury’s bestie, widower Lady Bridgerton (Ruth Gemmell), who’s one of four Bridgertons looking for love this season. (Anthony, who married his love Kate last season, also makes an appearance.) Among them, another unexpected sibling, Francesca (Hannah Dodd), who was previously played by a different actress in a much smaller version of the role, returns from Bath just in time to make an amiable connection with the quiet, quirky but charming John Stirling (Victor Alli), a little-known earl who seems destined to easily win her hand. Francesca and her mother seem to represent opposite ends of the marriage spectrum: Lady Violet wants all of her children to make a love match like she did with her late husband, but Francesca seems perfectly content to make a convenient marriage based on her friendship with the earl. What’s less clear is what either man hopes to gain from wooing a Bridgerton. Lady Danbury seems to be wary of Marcus, with the vague implication that he might be a rake, but he gets so little screen time that we barely get any sense of his character beyond his shallow banter with Violet. John, by contrast, gets one of the more interesting arcs of the season — if you can call socially awkward courtship an arc. Both get sidelined by a script that has too many characters to cycle through and not enough time to devote to giving them all three dimensions. Additionally, as Black gentlemen of the ton, both men appear to be disconnected from the society they’re moving within. Marcus has arrived from out of town and no one seems to know him apart from Lady Danbury. John likewise seems to have come to town specifically to tour the marriage mart — no one among the Bridgerton families seems to know him at all. His apparent neurodivergence further sets him apart from their sphere, at least initially. It’s unclear whether the writers intended both characters to feel this isolated, or whether it’s a byproduct of the show’s divided attention, but the result leaves us questioning what role Black men actually play in this society, and how integrated they actually are within it. Recall that our season one hero, Simon (Regé-Jean Page), was also a solitary figure within his set whose best friend, Will Mondrich (Martins Imhangbe), was a working-class boxer who bonded with him through the military. Throughout season one, Will’s primary role was that of sidekick and exposition tool for Simon. Over the course of season two and season three, Bridgerton has tried to redeem its mechanical use of him in season one by gradually elevating him through the social ranks. Season two sees him breaking away from the shady world of boxing and trying to establish himself as a respectable barkeep. Season three cavalierly upends that storyline by handing Will’s young son a surprise title and elevating Will’s entire family to the peerage. This “unexpected fortune” trope forms the basis for many a romance, but Will is happily married to Alice (Emma Naomi). She’s not too pleased, though, when Will fights to keep his club and continue running it himself. His resistance to luxury horrifies the gentlemen who formerly patronized his establishment, and they drop him, threatening both his business and his family’s new position in society. Given that Will is one of only a few significant characters in Bridgerton with an actual job — dressmaker Madame Delacroix (Kathryn Drysdale) has likewise hovered around the edges of polite society for all three seasons — it’s hardly surprising that so much of his character revolves around work. It also makes sense that a show so fixated on wealth would explicitly create an upwardly mobile character to both center all the show’s class concerns and represent the show’s modern middle-class viewer. Yet it’s striking that the conflicts that arise from this new season three storyline have everything to do with class but nothing to do with race. The Mondriches have no trouble being accepted by the ton until Will determines to keep the club; it’s only his choice to buck the trendy disdain for work that makes him unfashionable. Will and Alice each afford the show a rich opportunity to explore the combination of class and race, one that so far the show has declined. Bridgerton’s prequel series, Queen Charlotte, addresses these intersections more explicitly — and arguably more improbably — than the main series yet has. There seems to be little thematic connection between the social isolation of Marcus, John, and Simon and the ease with which Will is initially accepted into society. Yet their disconnection, combined with the fact that Will’s patrons turn on him so rapidly once he chooses to keep working, implies that for all of these men, race may be the primary factor keeping them set apart from the other characters. Again, this could be all down to the writing, to the show’s expanding storylines and self-conscious frippery. Still, intentional or not, race provides subtle friction for these characters. That brings us to Bridgerton’s most isolated character of all. Queen Charlotte may be the reason Bridgerton’s London has so many diverse marriages Bridgerton is a story that’s ultimately all about competition — competition for a better position in society, for a wealthy spouse, for more money, and for more power. At the center of all that competition sits the regent herself — Queen Charlotte (Golda Rosheuvel), who simultaneously reigns over London society and fiercely fights to maintain her position. The show configures its arch gossipmonger, the anonymous scandal-sheet writer Lady Whistledown, as the foil to the queen herself. Both women exert huge influence over the fates of their fellow members of the ton. But where Whistledown’s influence is usually strategic, due to her writer’s need to protect herself and her loved ones, the queen’s influence often feels random and quixotic — characterized by bored vanity and occasional whimsy. Queen Charlotte, much like the real-life prince regent who’s missing from this version of history, functions as a sort of chaotic neutral in the world she dominates, using her power and social influence to move chess pieces around according to her whims. Typically, only Whistledown, who operates more like a true neutral among the society she observes, can disturb her sense of studied nonchalance. As we learn in the issue-laden prequel series, Charlotte secured her position in the world of Bridgerton through a sociopolitical “experiment” spearheaded by her husband to integrate the races among all social classes. So what seems like arbitrary meddling in the affairs of the ton on Charlotte’s part may be her way of ensuring that the “experiment” continues for the benefit of all British society. Yet increasingly, for all Charlotte’s queendom ensures the elevation of her and all Black characters in this universe, we see that it’s left her almost entirely alone. Her position of power alienates her from almost everyone in the ton; the sole exception, Lady Danbury, serves her more as an advisor than a friend. We might question, then, whether anything in Bridgerton, for all its lavish luxury, leads to true community or connection, especially for its characters of color. Throughout the third season, the proliferation of minor characters of color becomes more than just window dressing; it becomes a metaphor for the show’s inability to do more than merely maneuver its characters, like Charlotte herself, without providing a cohesive narrative purpose for any of them. The show offers marriage and family as the best path to meaning, and matchmaking duly occupies most of Charlotte’s attention; yet outside of the Bridgertons, all of the marriages we’re privy to are either arranged (the Featheringtons) or currently experiencing friction (the Mondriches). And even among the Bridgertons, marriage feels so burdensome that several members of the family have done all they can to avoid it. Meanwhile, queerness exists so far outside the main scope of the show so far that it mainly occurs only accidentally; the writers so far have seemed committed to a fully heteronormative, traditional take on the concepts of marriage and family. All of this means that Bridgerton season three, for all its infusion of new characters, ultimately feels like more of the same. The ultimate test might be simply the depth test, and the show’s failure to dole out so little of it to anyone. Still, if Bridgerton has firmly embraced superficiality, then this season at least gives multiple races an equal slice of its thinly layered pie. This threadbare representation makes for the gauzy fabric Bridgerton prefers, never mind that it’s not enough for a decent muslin gown at Vauxhall. With the string quartet playing Pitbull, no one will notice.

What Time Is ‘The Good Doctor’ On Tonight? How To Watch ‘The Good Doctor’ Series Finale Live And Online

It's time to say goodbye to Dr. Shaun Murphy.

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nypost.com

Emma Hayes, USWNT’s new coach, names her first roster as Olympics near

The Americans will play two friendlies against South Korea before the 18-player squad for the Paris Games is selected by the former Chelsea boss.

24 m

washingtonpost.com

‘I think she thinks that she’s still good’: Ayo Edebiri reveals how Jennifer Lopez reacted to her ‘scam’ career diss

Ayo Edebiri had to apologize for her insulting comments about Jennifer Lopez when they filmed "SNL" together earlier this year.

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nypost.com

Stay cool with the Igloo Polar Hard Cooler this Memorial Day weekend, now 20% off on Amazon

Cool off with Igloo this Memorial Day!

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nypost.com

Scientists Are Very Worried About NASA’s Mars Plan

In the Martian lowlands, one rocky crater is dotted with small holes, winding from the floor to the rim like breadcrumbs. Their clean and cylindrical appearance is distinctly unnatural, suggesting the work of aliens—which it is. For three years, a robot from Earth has been collecting samples of rock and soil into six-inch-long tubes, whirring and crackling on the otherwise quiet planet. The robot, a rover named Perseverance, has deposited some of the samples on the Martian surface in sealed tubes. The others, about two dozen so far, remain stored inside the rover's belly.Perseverance will stay on Mars forever, but the majority of its carefully packaged samples are meant to return to Earth. The Mars Sample Return mission, known as MSR for short, is one of the boldest undertakings in NASA history, as consequential as it is complicated. The endeavor, which involves sending an extra spacecraft to the red planet to retrieve the samples, serves as a precursor to getting future astronauts home from Mars. It’s a test of whether the United States can keep up with China’s space program, which is scheduled to return its own Mars samples in the 2030s. It could uncover new information about our planetary neighbor’s history, and reveal a picture of the cosmic wilderness that was the early solar system. Some scientists hope the dusty fragments will contain tiny fossilized microbes that would prove life once existed on Mars. Those tiny life forms will have been dead for who knows how long—but still would be evidence of a second genesis in our own backyard. If, that is, the samples ever make it back to Earth. NASA officials recently announced that the sample-return effort has become too expensive and fallen worryingly behind schedule. The latest estimated cost of as much as $11 billion is nearly double what experts initially predicted, and the way things are going, the samples won't arrive home until 2040, seven years later than expected. At a press conference last month, NASA chief Bill Nelson repeatedly called the state of the Mars Sample Return mission "unacceptable," a striking chastisement of his own agency, considering that MSR is an in-house effort. Officials have put out a call—to NASA’s own ranks and to private space companies—for “quicker and cheaper” plans that don’t require “huge technological leaps” to bring the samples home.[Read: Scientists really, really want a piece of Mars]NASA officials say that they remain committed to the return effort, but researchers—including the agency’s collaborators who work on the project—are concerned. “The path forward is not clear,” Aileen Yingst, a geologist at the Planetary Science Institute who works on the Perseverance mission, told me. Scientists who study Mars are worried that the mission will be downsized. Scientists who don’t study Mars—and a few who do—are frustrated, because MSR consumes so much of NASA’s budget. Scientists can’t imagine NASA giving up on the mission entirely, but the debacle has even prompted some whispered jokes about China coming along and claiming the tubes on the surface before NASA can fly them home. Last year, an independent review ordered by NASA ominously warned that “by abandoning return of Mars samples to other nations, the U.S. abandons the preeminent role that [President John F. Kennedy] ascribed to the scientific exploration of space.”If and when the MSR tubes come home, their contents could dramatically shift our understanding of Mars. The first NASA spacecraft to land on Mars, in 1976, carried instruments designed to examine Martian soil for evidence of tiny, metabolizing life forms but didn’t find anything conclusive. Some bits of Martian rock, ejected by colliding asteroids, have made it to Earth as meteorites. (And scientists have tried to find proof of life in these, too). But such fragments arrive scorched by atmospheric reentry, their composition altered and contaminated from the journey. Pristine samples are far more tantalizing.MSR would deliver Martian dirt straight from an area that scientists believe holds a promising chance at containing signs of life from 3.5 billion years ago. The Perseverance rover is exploring the shores of what scientists believe was once a lake, at a crater called Jezero, where the sedimentary rock may bear signs of a once-habitable world, or preserved life itself. The samples might also offer hints about Earth’s origin story. The rocks that existed here 4 billion years ago, when the solar system was just getting started, have since been crushed, melted, and eroded away. But Mars, a world lacking plate tectonics and serious weather, still bears rocks from the time of its very formation.[Read: The most overhyped planet in the galaxy]The promise of such samples has been a top research priority for planetary scientists for over a decade. The original plan to do so, devised by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), is accordingly ambitious, involving several different spacecraft to retrieve the capsules, launch them into Martian orbit, and fly them back to Earth. No astronauts are involved, but Mars scientists have likened the mission choreography to the Apollo program in terms of complexity.That plan was apparently destined to unravel from the start. NASA’s independent review found that MSR had “unrealistic budget and schedule expectations from the beginning" and was "organized under an unwieldy structure," with "unclear roles, accountability, and authority.” Technically ambitious missions always cost more, and MSR is arguably one of the most complicated that NASA has ever undertaken. But the scientists who help NASA set exploration priorities have no control over the budgets of the resulting programs—Congress does.Last summer, some congressional appropriators briefly threatened the entire MSR effort with cancellation. This February, facing uncertainty over the money that Congress would allocate for MSR in the next fiscal year, the JPL laid off more than 500 employees. (Congress has since allocated a fraction of what NASA spent on the mission last year.) Thanks to budget concerns, NASA has delayed the launch of a telescope that would monitor potentially hazardous asteroids near Earth, and put on hold a proposed mission to study Earth’s atmosphere and magnetic field.Some scientists fear that MSR will draw resources away from other potential projects to search for life in places that they now believe to be far more promising than Mars. The search for alien life in the solar system has long been guided by water, and in the 1990s, when NASA kicked off a golden age of Mars missions, the red planet’s ice regions seemed appealing. But in the years since, other celestial bodies have become more compelling. A moon of Saturn, Titan, is the only body in the solar system besides Earth that has bodies of liquid on its surface, even if that liquid is methane. Two moons of Jupiter, Europa and Enceladus, are likely icy worlds with subsurface oceans; on the latter, cracks in the ice release plumes of salty water, hinting at something like deep-sea hydrothermal activity on Earth. NASA is launching an orbiting mission to Europa later this year, and the latest survey of planetary scientists advised NASA to start working on another to Enceladus. “If I could go anywhere, I would go to Enceladus,” Brook Nunn, an astrobiologist at the University of Washington, told me.[Read: Mars’s soundscape is strangely beautiful]Even some Mars scientists believe that Mars is no longer the top candidate. Darby Dyar, a planetary geologist at Mount Holyoke College, has spent decades studying Mars. “If anybody should be enthusiastic about the returned samples, it’s me, and I am,” she told me. But now she works on a NASA mission to Venus, a planet that might rival Mars as a candidate for extraterrestrial life, and she says she wouldn’t prioritize MSR over her current research.For scientists who support Mars exploration, MSR is a problem, siphoning funds away from other efforts to study it. “There’s so many aspects to studying a planet that do not involve analyzing small amounts of rocks in the lab,” says Catherine Neish, a planetary scientist at Western University, in Canada, who’s working on an international mission to map the ice deposits on Mars’s polar regions. NASA pulled its financial support from that project in 2022, citing MSR’s cost as part of its motivation. Planetary scientists have recommended prioritizing a mission to drill deep into the ice at the Martian poles, far from Perseverance’s domain, where conditions could be just comfortable enough to support small life forms now.NASA is well aware of the all-consuming nature of MSR. As the mission is redrawn, officials have said they are even willing to consider proposals that would bring home just 10 sample tubes, one-third of the amount initially planned. Lindsay Hays, a program scientist at NASA’s planetary-science division, told me that NASA will seek input from the science community about which sample tubes to return. “NASA has a responsibility to use taxpayer funds in the most effective and efficient way possible,” she said. “But it’s also part of our mandate to the nation to do things that have never been done before.”[Read: Too much of a good thing at NASA]Most planetary scientists aren’t happy with a potentially scaled-back approach either. “You’ve decimated the science, because now you’re not going to get the diversity that you could have if we brought back the full suite of samples,” Phil Christensen, a geologist at Arizona State University who co-chaired the community’s latest decadal survey, told me.A badly delayed sample-return mission would fracture NASA’s grand vision for its Martian future. By the 2040s, NASA intends to be focused not on the red planet’s soil, but on sending astronauts there and, crucially, bringing them back. That operation relies on having successfully practiced launching off from Mars, which NASA hasn’t yet managed with MSR. Instead, the agency is back at the drawing board, hoping to find a way out of an $11 billion pit. Officials expect to finish reviewing new proposals and come to a decision on the mission’s future in the fall. Meanwhile, Perseverance chugs along, excavating the mythical oasis of Jezero Crater with each curated tube.

28 m

theatlantic.com

In the Martian lowlands, one rocky crater is dotted with small holes, winding from the floor to the rim like breadcrumbs. Their clean and cylindrical appearance is distinctly unnatural, suggesting the work of aliens—which it is. For three years, a robot from Earth has been collecting samples of rock and soil into six-inch-long tubes, whirring and crackling on the otherwise quiet planet. The robot, a rover named Perseverance, has deposited some of the samples on the Martian surface in sealed tubes. The others, about two dozen so far, remain stored inside the rover's belly.Perseverance will stay on Mars forever, but the majority of its carefully packaged samples are meant to return to Earth. The Mars Sample Return mission, known as MSR for short, is one of the boldest undertakings in NASA history, as consequential as it is complicated. The endeavor, which involves sending an extra spacecraft to the red planet to retrieve the samples, serves as a precursor to getting future astronauts home from Mars. It’s a test of whether the United States can keep up with China’s space program, which is scheduled to return its own Mars samples in the 2030s. It could uncover new information about our planetary neighbor’s history, and reveal a picture of the cosmic wilderness that was the early solar system. Some scientists hope the dusty fragments will contain tiny fossilized microbes that would prove life once existed on Mars. Those tiny life forms will have been dead for who knows how long—but still would be evidence of a second genesis in our own backyard. If, that is, the samples ever make it back to Earth. NASA officials recently announced that the sample-return effort has become too expensive and fallen worryingly behind schedule. The latest estimated cost of as much as $11 billion is nearly double what experts initially predicted, and the way things are going, the samples won't arrive home until 2040, seven years later than expected. At a press conference last month, NASA chief Bill Nelson repeatedly called the state of the Mars Sample Return mission "unacceptable," a striking chastisement of his own agency, considering that MSR is an in-house effort. Officials have put out a call—to NASA’s own ranks and to private space companies—for “quicker and cheaper” plans that don’t require “huge technological leaps” to bring the samples home.[Read: Scientists really, really want a piece of Mars]NASA officials say that they remain committed to the return effort, but researchers—including the agency’s collaborators who work on the project—are concerned. “The path forward is not clear,” Aileen Yingst, a geologist at the Planetary Science Institute who works on the Perseverance mission, told me. Scientists who study Mars are worried that the mission will be downsized. Scientists who don’t study Mars—and a few who do—are frustrated, because MSR consumes so much of NASA’s budget. Scientists can’t imagine NASA giving up on the mission entirely, but the debacle has even prompted some whispered jokes about China coming along and claiming the tubes on the surface before NASA can fly them home. Last year, an independent review ordered by NASA ominously warned that “by abandoning return of Mars samples to other nations, the U.S. abandons the preeminent role that [President John F. Kennedy] ascribed to the scientific exploration of space.”If and when the MSR tubes come home, their contents could dramatically shift our understanding of Mars. The first NASA spacecraft to land on Mars, in 1976, carried instruments designed to examine Martian soil for evidence of tiny, metabolizing life forms but didn’t find anything conclusive. Some bits of Martian rock, ejected by colliding asteroids, have made it to Earth as meteorites. (And scientists have tried to find proof of life in these, too). But such fragments arrive scorched by atmospheric reentry, their composition altered and contaminated from the journey. Pristine samples are far more tantalizing.MSR would deliver Martian dirt straight from an area that scientists believe holds a promising chance at containing signs of life from 3.5 billion years ago. The Perseverance rover is exploring the shores of what scientists believe was once a lake, at a crater called Jezero, where the sedimentary rock may bear signs of a once-habitable world, or preserved life itself. The samples might also offer hints about Earth’s origin story. The rocks that existed here 4 billion years ago, when the solar system was just getting started, have since been crushed, melted, and eroded away. But Mars, a world lacking plate tectonics and serious weather, still bears rocks from the time of its very formation.[Read: The most overhyped planet in the galaxy]The promise of such samples has been a top research priority for planetary scientists for over a decade. The original plan to do so, devised by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), is accordingly ambitious, involving several different spacecraft to retrieve the capsules, launch them into Martian orbit, and fly them back to Earth. No astronauts are involved, but Mars scientists have likened the mission choreography to the Apollo program in terms of complexity.That plan was apparently destined to unravel from the start. NASA’s independent review found that MSR had “unrealistic budget and schedule expectations from the beginning" and was "organized under an unwieldy structure," with "unclear roles, accountability, and authority.” Technically ambitious missions always cost more, and MSR is arguably one of the most complicated that NASA has ever undertaken. But the scientists who help NASA set exploration priorities have no control over the budgets of the resulting programs—Congress does.Last summer, some congressional appropriators briefly threatened the entire MSR effort with cancellation. This February, facing uncertainty over the money that Congress would allocate for MSR in the next fiscal year, the JPL laid off more than 500 employees. (Congress has since allocated a fraction of what NASA spent on the mission last year.) Thanks to budget concerns, NASA has delayed the launch of a telescope that would monitor potentially hazardous asteroids near Earth, and put on hold a proposed mission to study Earth’s atmosphere and magnetic field.Some scientists fear that MSR will draw resources away from other potential projects to search for life in places that they now believe to be far more promising than Mars. The search for alien life in the solar system has long been guided by water, and in the 1990s, when NASA kicked off a golden age of Mars missions, the red planet’s ice regions seemed appealing. But in the years since, other celestial bodies have become more compelling. A moon of Saturn, Titan, is the only body in the solar system besides Earth that has bodies of liquid on its surface, even if that liquid is methane. Two moons of Jupiter, Europa and Enceladus, are likely icy worlds with subsurface oceans; on the latter, cracks in the ice release plumes of salty water, hinting at something like deep-sea hydrothermal activity on Earth. NASA is launching an orbiting mission to Europa later this year, and the latest survey of planetary scientists advised NASA to start working on another to Enceladus. “If I could go anywhere, I would go to Enceladus,” Brook Nunn, an astrobiologist at the University of Washington, told me.[Read: Mars’s soundscape is strangely beautiful]Even some Mars scientists believe that Mars is no longer the top candidate. Darby Dyar, a planetary geologist at Mount Holyoke College, has spent decades studying Mars. “If anybody should be enthusiastic about the returned samples, it’s me, and I am,” she told me. But now she works on a NASA mission to Venus, a planet that might rival Mars as a candidate for extraterrestrial life, and she says she wouldn’t prioritize MSR over her current research.For scientists who support Mars exploration, MSR is a problem, siphoning funds away from other efforts to study it. “There’s so many aspects to studying a planet that do not involve analyzing small amounts of rocks in the lab,” says Catherine Neish, a planetary scientist at Western University, in Canada, who’s working on an international mission to map the ice deposits on Mars’s polar regions. NASA pulled its financial support from that project in 2022, citing MSR’s cost as part of its motivation. Planetary scientists have recommended prioritizing a mission to drill deep into the ice at the Martian poles, far from Perseverance’s domain, where conditions could be just comfortable enough to support small life forms now.NASA is well aware of the all-consuming nature of MSR. As the mission is redrawn, officials have said they are even willing to consider proposals that would bring home just 10 sample tubes, one-third of the amount initially planned. Lindsay Hays, a program scientist at NASA’s planetary-science division, told me that NASA will seek input from the science community about which sample tubes to return. “NASA has a responsibility to use taxpayer funds in the most effective and efficient way possible,” she said. “But it’s also part of our mandate to the nation to do things that have never been done before.”[Read: Too much of a good thing at NASA]Most planetary scientists aren’t happy with a potentially scaled-back approach either. “You’ve decimated the science, because now you’re not going to get the diversity that you could have if we brought back the full suite of samples,” Phil Christensen, a geologist at Arizona State University who co-chaired the community’s latest decadal survey, told me.A badly delayed sample-return mission would fracture NASA’s grand vision for its Martian future. By the 2040s, NASA intends to be focused not on the red planet’s soil, but on sending astronauts there and, crucially, bringing them back. That operation relies on having successfully practiced launching off from Mars, which NASA hasn’t yet managed with MSR. Instead, the agency is back at the drawing board, hoping to find a way out of an $11 billion pit. Officials expect to finish reviewing new proposals and come to a decision on the mission’s future in the fall. Meanwhile, Perseverance chugs along, excavating the mythical oasis of Jezero Crater with each curated tube.

This Outdoor Trampoline from SereneLife is at its lowest price ever today on Amazon

Jump around, and save!

30 m

nypost.com

Wrongful conviction hearing starts for Missouri man imprisoned 33 years

A wrongful conviction hearing for Christopher Dunn begins in Missouri. Dunn has spent 33 years in prison for a murder he says he didn't commit.

32 m

cbsnews.com

Mayor Adams may revoke Diddy’s key to NYC after ‘chilling’ domestic-abuse video

Mayor Eric Adams says his administration is considering taking back Sean "Diddy" Combs' key to the city after horrifying footage surfaced of the rapper brutally assaulting ex-girlfriend Cassie Ventura.

33 m

nypost.com

West Virginia transgender athlete defeated girls in track events over 700 times, new legal filing says

A new court filing in a lawsuit against the Biden administration said a transgender track-and-field athlete at a West Virginia middle school displaced girls in competition over 700 times.

35 m

foxnews.com

Disney’s Pixar cutting nearly 200 jobs, will focus exclusively on feature films, cut streaming series

Disney CEO Bob Iger has scaled back spending on original streaming content to lift Disney+ to profitability.

36 m

nypost.com

Bruce Nordstrom, who helped grow family-led department store chain, dies at 90

Bruce Nordstrom, a retail executive who helped expand his family’s Pacific Northwest department store chain into an upscale national brand, died at his home Saturday.

36 m

latimes.com

Laughter at Bengal Cat's Hilarious Way of Getting Revenge on Dog

"Thankfully, he has never gone anywhere else inappropriate," Skeeter's owner from Queensland, Australia, told Newsweek.

37 m

newsweek.com

Dad won’t see this gift coming: A temperature-controlled Ember Mug

Drink piping hot coffee, sip after sip.

38 m

nypost.com

Construction Complete On New High-Speed Rail Tunnel

A 14-mile high-speed rail tunnel has been finished in China after 10 years.

38 m

newsweek.com

The Shenandoah County School Board’s Terrible History Lesson

A Virginia school board voted to reinstate confederate names. It’s a disgraceful chapter of our community’s history, write Sarah Kohrs and Neil Thorne.

38 m

time.com

The Reich Stuff

At this point, Americans will believe almost any story about Donald Trump. That is both a strength and a weakness for him. On the one hand, it means that nearly nothing he says, including for example that he wants to be a dictator, penetrates too deeply. On the other hand, it means people rarely extend him the benefit of the doubt, even when it’s warranted.That’s what happened yesterday, when Trump’s Truth Social account posted a video featuring fake newspapers with celebratory imagined headlines about Trump (IT’S A LANDSLIDE! TRUMP WINS!!). Below, a sub-headline referred to “the creation of a unified Reich.” Naturally, the combination of Trump and a “unified Reich” was combustible. “This man is a stain, a Nazi, a pure a [sic] simple garbage of a human being,” fulminated Adam Kinzinger, the former Republican congressman. “Flush Trump down the toilet.” The controversy is illuminating about Trump and the presidential campaign, but perhaps not in the ways that it first appeared.Trump’s account has removed the video, and his campaign said it did not create the video but reposted it from another user. It also said the post was done not by Trump but by a staffer who hadn’t noticed the “Reich” reference. Although Trump has a long history of blaming staffers for foolish posts, the excuse here is plausible. The video appears to have been made using a stock video template available online. And the text that appears in the video—about the “unified Reich”—comes, as the Associated Press notes, from a Wikipedia entry about World War I (“German industrial strength and production had significantly increased after 1871, driven by the creation of a unified Reich”) rather than anything about Nazis. It’s a safe bet that the gospel singer Candi Staton wasn’t aiming to boost Hitler when she used the same template for a video of a song about the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing.[David A. Graham: Trump says he’ll be a dictator “on day one”]This election cycle has seen a slew of stories about how the Trump campaign is far more professionally run and regimented than in 2016 and 2020. That appears to be true, but only in a limited sense. Any competent campaign would have vetted such a video before it reposted it in order to avoid just this kind of mess. But Trump and his team can’t or won’t bother to look carefully at what he (or his staff) reposts on social media, and never have. In 2016, he posted an anti-Semitic meme with a Star of David and then tried to convince people it was a “sheriff’s star.” In 2017, he posted a GIF that showed him body-slamming CNN, created by a Reddit user who, whaddya know, also posted lots of anti-Semitic material. Earlier this year, a brief controversy broke out when Trump posted a video of a convoy of trucks decked out in pro-Trump swag, including an image of a bound and tied Joe Biden on one truck’s tailgate.Despite having served as president for four years, and despite being a gifted political messenger, Trump has never grasped—or perhaps never cared—that sloppy words from someone in his position can be hugely consequential, and he resists guardrails that would protect him.[Read: If Trump wins]Trump’s problem here is that even though his excuse makes sense, he is also an authoritarian who has used anti-Semitic language. Believing that he might have posted subtle Nazi messaging doesn’t require much of a leap. Not only did he attempt to steal the last election and promise to be a dictator, but he has also consistently disregarded checks and balances and suggested “termination” of the Constitution. He called neo-Nazi marchers in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 “very fine people,” hobnobbed with white nationalists, and delivered menacing remarks about American Jews who do not support him—on Rosh Hashanah, no less. His former chief of staff says Trump once told him that “Hitler did some good things.” It’s no coincidence that so many of those past sloppy reposts came from supporters of his who hold hateful views. (It also doesn’t help that a staffer on the campaign of Ron DeSantis, a rival and would-be successor in the GOP presidential primary, was caught surreptitiously inserting Nazi imagery into social-media posts.)The Biden campaign quickly pounced on the situation. “Trump posts a new ad foreshadowing a second Trump term that says he will create a ‘UNIFIED REICH,’ echoing Nazi Germany,” its official account posted on X. The Biden campaign is not stupid, which means both that it should have figured out the real origin of the post (and may well have) and also that it was not going to let an opportunity to savage its opponent pass by.[Yair Rosenberg: Trump’s menacing Rosh Hashana message to American Jews]Biden’s team has been taking a more aggressive approach to Trump as the election nears. After years of elliptically referring to his “predecessor,” the president has begun naming Trump in attacks. The rest of his apparatus is also attacking Trump, trying to remind voters of the reasons they rejected him in 2020. In this case, the Biden campaign seems to have succeeded in manufacturing a controversy. Every major outlet has a headline this morning about the video (a representative example from The Washington Post: “Trump’s Truth Social Account Shares Video Referencing ‘Unified Reich’). These stories are not untruthful—he did share the video—but they are also a little misleading, though perhaps unintentionally so.Whether the backlash to the video helps Biden beat Trump in November is anybody’s guess. Trump’s critics debate whether it is more effective to attack Trump as a threat to democracy, criticize his unpopular policy ideas, paint him as corrupt, or focus on Biden’s positive accomplishments. The incident shows exactly why Trump was so bad at being president. It probably doesn’t tell us anything new about Trump’s feelings regarding Hitler that we didn’t already know. The bizarre thing is that many voters may hear about the controversy and assume that it reveals Trump’s sympathy for the Third Reich, and then vote for him anyway.

38 m

theatlantic.com

At this point, Americans will believe almost any story about Donald Trump. That is both a strength and a weakness for him. On the one hand, it means that nearly nothing he says, including for example that he wants to be a dictator, penetrates too deeply. On the other hand, it means people rarely extend him the benefit of the doubt, even when it’s warranted.That’s what happened yesterday, when Trump’s Truth Social account posted a video featuring fake newspapers with celebratory imagined headlines about Trump (IT’S A LANDSLIDE! TRUMP WINS!!). Below, a sub-headline referred to “the creation of a unified Reich.” Naturally, the combination of Trump and a “unified Reich” was combustible. “This man is a stain, a Nazi, a pure a [sic] simple garbage of a human being,” fulminated Adam Kinzinger, the former Republican congressman. “Flush Trump down the toilet.” The controversy is illuminating about Trump and the presidential campaign, but perhaps not in the ways that it first appeared.Trump’s account has removed the video, and his campaign said it did not create the video but reposted it from another user. It also said the post was done not by Trump but by a staffer who hadn’t noticed the “Reich” reference. Although Trump has a long history of blaming staffers for foolish posts, the excuse here is plausible. The video appears to have been made using a stock video template available online. And the text that appears in the video—about the “unified Reich”—comes, as the Associated Press notes, from a Wikipedia entry about World War I (“German industrial strength and production had significantly increased after 1871, driven by the creation of a unified Reich”) rather than anything about Nazis. It’s a safe bet that the gospel singer Candi Staton wasn’t aiming to boost Hitler when she used the same template for a video of a song about the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing.[David A. Graham: Trump says he’ll be a dictator “on day one”]This election cycle has seen a slew of stories about how the Trump campaign is far more professionally run and regimented than in 2016 and 2020. That appears to be true, but only in a limited sense. Any competent campaign would have vetted such a video before it reposted it in order to avoid just this kind of mess. But Trump and his team can’t or won’t bother to look carefully at what he (or his staff) reposts on social media, and never have. In 2016, he posted an anti-Semitic meme with a Star of David and then tried to convince people it was a “sheriff’s star.” In 2017, he posted a GIF that showed him body-slamming CNN, created by a Reddit user who, whaddya know, also posted lots of anti-Semitic material. Earlier this year, a brief controversy broke out when Trump posted a video of a convoy of trucks decked out in pro-Trump swag, including an image of a bound and tied Joe Biden on one truck’s tailgate.Despite having served as president for four years, and despite being a gifted political messenger, Trump has never grasped—or perhaps never cared—that sloppy words from someone in his position can be hugely consequential, and he resists guardrails that would protect him.[Read: If Trump wins]Trump’s problem here is that even though his excuse makes sense, he is also an authoritarian who has used anti-Semitic language. Believing that he might have posted subtle Nazi messaging doesn’t require much of a leap. Not only did he attempt to steal the last election and promise to be a dictator, but he has also consistently disregarded checks and balances and suggested “termination” of the Constitution. He called neo-Nazi marchers in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 “very fine people,” hobnobbed with white nationalists, and delivered menacing remarks about American Jews who do not support him—on Rosh Hashanah, no less. His former chief of staff says Trump once told him that “Hitler did some good things.” It’s no coincidence that so many of those past sloppy reposts came from supporters of his who hold hateful views. (It also doesn’t help that a staffer on the campaign of Ron DeSantis, a rival and would-be successor in the GOP presidential primary, was caught surreptitiously inserting Nazi imagery into social-media posts.)The Biden campaign quickly pounced on the situation. “Trump posts a new ad foreshadowing a second Trump term that says he will create a ‘UNIFIED REICH,’ echoing Nazi Germany,” its official account posted on X. The Biden campaign is not stupid, which means both that it should have figured out the real origin of the post (and may well have) and also that it was not going to let an opportunity to savage its opponent pass by.[Yair Rosenberg: Trump’s menacing Rosh Hashana message to American Jews]Biden’s team has been taking a more aggressive approach to Trump as the election nears. After years of elliptically referring to his “predecessor,” the president has begun naming Trump in attacks. The rest of his apparatus is also attacking Trump, trying to remind voters of the reasons they rejected him in 2020. In this case, the Biden campaign seems to have succeeded in manufacturing a controversy. Every major outlet has a headline this morning about the video (a representative example from The Washington Post: “Trump’s Truth Social Account Shares Video Referencing ‘Unified Reich’). These stories are not untruthful—he did share the video—but they are also a little misleading, though perhaps unintentionally so.Whether the backlash to the video helps Biden beat Trump in November is anybody’s guess. Trump’s critics debate whether it is more effective to attack Trump as a threat to democracy, criticize his unpopular policy ideas, paint him as corrupt, or focus on Biden’s positive accomplishments. The incident shows exactly why Trump was so bad at being president. It probably doesn’t tell us anything new about Trump’s feelings regarding Hitler that we didn’t already know. The bizarre thing is that many voters may hear about the controversy and assume that it reveals Trump’s sympathy for the Third Reich, and then vote for him anyway.

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Shoals Technologies Group, Inc.
Condensed Consolidated Balance Sheets (Unaudited)
(in thousands, except shares and par value)

	March 31, 2024		December 31, 2023
Assets
Current Assets
Cash and cash equivalents	$	15,236	$	22,707
Accounts receivable, net		103,403		107,118
Unbilled receivables		23,406		40,136
Inventory, net		59,565		52,804
Other current assets		6,872		4,421
Total Current Assets		208,482		227,186
Property, plant and equipment, net		26,213		24,836
Goodwill		69,941		69,941
Other intangible assets, net		46,772		48,668
Deferred tax assets		465,700		468,195
Other assets		8,198		5,167
Total Assets	$	825,306	$	843,993

Liabilities and Stockholders' Equity
Current Liabilities
Accounts payable	$	15,728	$	14,396
Accrued expenses and other		10,352		22,907
Warranty liability—current portion		31,708		31,099
Deferred revenue		21,834		22,228
Long-term debt—current portion		—		2,000
Total Current Liabilities		79,622		92,630
Revolving line of credit		168,750		40,000
Long-term debt, less current portion		—		139,445
Warranty liability, less current portion		20,091		23,815
Other long-term liabilities		2,866		3,107
Total Liabilities		271,329		298,997
Commitments and Contingencies
Stockholders' Equity
Preferred stock, $0.00001 par value – 5,000,000 shares authorized; none issued and ...