@TonyPHenderson , @TheNaijaNerd, and Marista of the Cocoa Chronicles had a great panel this year that attracted the attention of @BET ! Go watch @BET's clip here https://t.co/lVAx0wkpIJ and the full panel here: https://t.co/se3oYp4hwl
if a doctor who graduated medical school says you need something, it should be illegal for someone sitting behind an insurance desk with absolutely zero medical training to deny you coverage...
In some very real sense, Ozempic was invented in 1990. Pfizer ran the human trials and just never published them.
They showed it lowered blood glucose in diabetics, slowed gastric emptying, and killed hunger; the same 3 things that make Ozempic work today.
The joint venture agreement said internal data stayed internal, and that was that. Pfizer killed the program in 1991. The reasoning, as far as I can tell, was that nobody would ever want an injectable diabetes drug besides insulin.
So, the license went back to the hospital in Boston that held the patents.
Novo picked it up in 1992 and spent the next two decades building liraglutide, then semaglutide.
It's insane that data sat in a filing cabinet for 30+ years.
I only know this because Jeffrey Flier, one of the Harvard scientists in the room, finally wrote it up. He's in his late 70s and didn't want the history to die with him.
This makes you wonder what else is in those filing cabinets.
Ozempic could've existed 27 years ago.
In college, I checked out 10+ library books for a research project.
Then I forgot to return them.
A month later, I got a bill for hundreds in late fees.
I was broke.
And the university wouldn’t release my grades until I paid.
So I did something ridiculous.
I stuffed all the books into my backpack.
Walked into the library.
And quietly put every book back in its exact place on the shelves.
The next day, I called the library.
“I received a notice saying my books are overdue, but I’m pretty sure I returned them.”
The librarian put me on hold.
A few minutes later, she came back.
“Oh… you’re right. All of the books are here. We’re so sorry.”
Every late fee was erased.
My transcript was released.
And I graduated thanks to the fact that I technically returned my own books.
Saw a patient today with a hemoglobin of 1.9 g/dL. For context, a level that low is almost incompatible with normal consciousness, but she walked right into the clinic on her own feet.
For three long years, she lived with crushing weakness and since last 6 months breathlessness from just walking across a room. Why didn’t she get help sooner? At first, it was because the kids had crucial school exams and later her husband was reluctant to deal with the hassle of a hospital admission.
Her health was treated as a background inconvenience.
When we dug deeper, it got worse. A year ago, her Hb was 6.4 g/dL. A doctor explicitly told them she needed immediate admission. The family refused, walked out with a basic strip of iron tablets, she took them for two weeks, forgot about them, and nobody in the house ever bothered to check on her or remind her.
She didn't even come to the hospital today because of the air hunger. She came because her periods had completely stopped for months. Her body was so profoundly starved of iron and oxygen that it literally shut down her reproductive axis just to divert what little blood she had left to her heart and brain.
It’s completely heartbreaking. A woman will literally bleed her body dry, gasp for air for years and keep working silently, only to be brought to a doctor when her normal functioning stops.
Please check on the women in your homes. Stop letting them normalize chronic exhaustion.
@JonLemire@AJazzmom98 These lines are relevant to trends in our culture right now — with the intersectional dynamics between celebrity (notoriety) and wealth, and then the subsequent (and often mistaken) act that we assign to those personalities the assumption they have *EXPERTISE IN ALL THINGS*
“When you can buy your way out of any mistake, when you can fire anyone who disagrees with you, when your social circle consists entirely of people who need something from you, the basic mechanism by which humans learn that other people are real goes dark” https://t.co/UkZwbuqVqp
My son brought home a friend for dinner on a Tuesday evening. No heads-up, no "Is it okay?" He just walked through the door at 6:00 PM with this boy in tow.
"Hey Dad, this is Leo. He’s staying for dinner."
It wasn't a request; it was an announcement. My son, Jax, is fourteen and usually follows the rules, so this caught me off guard. Leo looked small for his age, drowning in an oversized sweatshirt despite the humid evening. He kept his eyes glued to his shoes. I had exactly four pork chops defrosted for our family of four. Now, we were five.
"Nice to meet you, Leo," I said, already doing the mental math to shrink our portions. "I hope you’re hungry."
Dinner was heavy with silence. Leo ate with a sort of desperate politeness—tiny, careful bites, whispering "thank you" every time a dish was passed. My wife tried to start a conversation about school, but he gave nothing but one-word replies.
Jax just watched us, his jaw set, like he was waiting for us to mess up.
Once Leo headed home, I pulled Jax aside. "You can’t just spring guests on us like that, Jax. We need to know ahead of time."
"He needed a meal," Jax said flatly.
"What do you mean, he 'needed'—"
"Dad. He needed to eat. There’s nothing in his pantry. His dad is working two jobs just to keep the lights on, and his mom hasn't been around in years. He gets a school lunch, and that’s it until the next morning." A cold knot formed in my stomach. "Did he tell a counselor? The school must have resources."
Jax looked at me with a tired kind of wisdom. "If he tells the school, they call the state. Then his dad gets investigated, they might get separated, and everything falls apart. He just needs a hot meal, Dad. That’s all."
At fourteen, my son was seeing a world I had been comfortably ignoring.
"Tell him to come back tomorrow," I said.
Jax finally cracked a smile. "Already did." Leo became a fixture at our table. Monday through Friday, he was there. He was always quiet, always grateful, and never asked for a second helping unless we practically forced it on him.
By the end of the first month, he finally looked me in the eye. "Why do you let me stay?"
"Because you're our guest," I told him. "And there’s always enough to share."
He didn't sob; he just let out a long, shaky breath as a few tears hit his plate. "Nobody ever just... helped. Without a catch."
It turned out Leo was a brilliant kid. He was obsessed with aerospace engineering and was already teaching himself calculus. He graduated top of his class last spring with a full ride to a tech institute. During his commencement speech, he thanked his mentors and his father.
Then he added, "And to the Miller family, who gave me a seat at their table for four years without making me feel like a charity case. You taught me that being in need doesn't mean you're a failure. Thank you for always having a plate ready."
I was blindsided. I sat in the bleachers and ruined my shirt sleeve wiping my eyes. The truth is, I didn't do anything heroic. I just bought more groceries. I put an extra chair at the table. That’s it.
But to a kid who felt invisible, it was a lifeline.
Jax is eighteen now. He still brings people home. Last month, it was a classmate whose family was living out of their car. Last week, it was a kid whose house was freezing because the heat had been cut off.
He doesn't ask anymore. He just sets the table.
And I just keep cooking.
Look around your community. There’s a kid in your neighborhood who isn't just "struggling"—they’re hungry. Right now.
You don't need a charity board or a massive budget.
Just set an extra plate.
Sometimes, that’s all it takes to change a life.
By shahida6603
An MIT professor taught the same math course for 62 years, and the day he retired, students from every country on earth showed up online to watch him give his final lecture.
I opened the playlist at 2am and ended up watching three of them back to back.
His name is Gilbert Strang. The course is MIT 18.06 Linear Algebra.
Every machine learning engineer, every data scientist, every quant, every self-taught programmer who actually understands how AI works learned the math from this one man. Most of them never set foot on MIT's campus. They just opened a free playlist on YouTube and let him teach.
Here's the story almost nobody tells you.
Strang joined the MIT math faculty in 1962. He retired in 2023. That is 61 years of standing at the same chalkboard teaching the same subject to 18-year-olds.
The interesting part is what he did when MIT launched OpenCourseWare in 2002. Most professors were skeptical. They worried that putting their lectures online would make their classrooms irrelevant. Strang did not hesitate. He said his life's mission was to open mathematics to students everywhere. He filmed every lecture and gave it away.
The decision quietly changed how the world learns math.
For decades linear algebra was taught the wrong way. Professors started with abstract vector spaces and proofs about field axioms. Students drowned in the abstraction. Most never recovered. They walked out believing they were bad at math when they had simply been taught in an order that nobody's brain is built to absorb.
Strang inverted the entire curriculum.
He started with matrix multiplication. Something you can write down on paper. Something you can compute by hand. Something you can see. Then he showed his students that everything else in linear algebra eigenvectors, singular value decomposition, orthogonality, the four fundamental subspaces was just a different lens for understanding what the matrix was actually doing under the hood.
His rule was strict. If a student could not explain a concept using a concrete 3 by 3 example, that student did not actually understand the concept yet. The abstraction was supposed to come last, not first. The intuition was the foundation. The proofs were just confirmation that the intuition was correct.
The second thing Strang changed was the classroom itself. He said please and thank you to his students. Every single lecture. He paused mid-derivation to ask "am I OK?" to check if anyone was lost. He never used the word "obviously" or "trivially" because he knew exactly what those words do to a student who is one step behind. He treated 19-year-olds learning math for the first time the way he treated his own colleagues. With patience. With respect. With the assumption that they belonged in the room.
For 62 years.
The result is something that has never happened in the history of education. A single math professor became the default teacher of his subject for the entire planet.
Universities in India, China, Brazil, Nigeria, every country with a computer science department, started telling their own students to just watch Strang's lectures. The University of Illinois revised its linear algebra course to do almost no in-person lecturing. The reason was honest. The professor said they could not compete with the videos.
His final lecture was in May 2023.
The auditorium was packed with students who had never met him before. He walked to the chalkboard, taught for an hour, and at the end the entire room stood and applauded. He looked confused for a moment, like he genuinely did not understand why they were cheering. Then he smiled and waved them off and walked out.
His written comment under the YouTube video of that final lecture was four sentences long. He said teaching had been a wonderful life. He said he was grateful to everyone who saw the importance of linear algebra. He said the movement of teaching it well would continue because it was right.
That was it. No book promotion. No farewell speech. No legacy management.
The man whose teaching is the foundation of modern AI just thanked the audience and went home.
20 million views. Zero ego. The entire engine of the AI revolution sits on top of math that millions of people learned for free from one quiet professor in Cambridge.
The course is still on MIT OpenCourseWare. Every lecture, every problem set, every exam, every solution. Free.
The most important math course of the 21st century is sitting one click away from you. Most people will never open it.
Anonymous
My son is autistic. Nonverbal. He’s eight. We went to a restaurant. Family place. He got overwhelmed. Started stimming. Rocking. Making sounds. People stared. A woman at the next table said loudly “Can’t you control your child? This is ridiculous.” I was gathering our things to leave. We always leave. Then our waiter came over. Young guy. Maybe twenty. He knelt down next to my son. Started rocking with him. Gently. Matching his rhythm. My son stopped. Looked at him...
The waiter smiled and said “I got you, buddy. You’re okay.” Stayed there for five minutes. Just rocking. Being present. My son calmed completely. The waiter stood up and said “My brother’s autistic. I know the rocking helps.” Brought my son french fries. On the house. Sat with us while we ate. That woman who complained got up and left. The waiter said “Good riddance.” My son smiled. He never smiles at strangers. We finished our meal. Peacefully. I tried to tip extra. The waiter refused.
Said “Your son deserves to eat out like everyone else.” We’ve been back six times. Same waiter. Same kindness. My son looks for him now. Gets excited. Because someone saw him. Not his autism. Him.
Anonymous
My twin sister and I aged out of foster care on the same day at eighteen which sounds like it should mean we had each other and therefore were fine. What it actually means is that two people with nothing faced a system that considers its job complete the moment the clock runs out and wishes you well with the particular indifference of paperwork.
We had a social worker named Miss Charlene who was not assigned to us anymore the day we turned eighteen.
Her caseload moved on and technically so should she have. She did not move on. Showed up at the group home on our birthday with a cake and two folders. Inside each folder was everything she had spent three months quietly assembling. Apartment listings she had called ahead about. Bus routes to the community college. A list of employers who had hired former foster youth and treated them decently. Phone numbers with names attached and notes about who to ask for.
She sat with us for four hours that afternoon going through every page...
Then she wrote her personal cell number on the inside cover of both folders and said use it.
We used it. Many times. More than we probably should have.
She answered every time.
My sister is a registered nurse now.
I run a mentorship program for youth aging out of foster care.
Miss Charlene came to both of our graduations.
Front row.
Same smile both times.
Amazon just got caught running a secret price manipulation operation with Levi's, Home Depot, Walmart, and many more.
Every time you "comparison shopped" online, you were looking at prices that were already rigged.
Here's what happened:
Amazon would monitor prices on Walmart, Target, Best Buy, Home Depot, and Chewy in real time. The second a competitor listed a product cheaper than Amazon, they'd contact the brand directly and tell them to "fix it."
And the exact emails are now PUBLIC.
Amazon sent Levi's links to two Walmart listings with the subject line "styles of concern." They basically said the prices on Walmart are too low and we have a problem.
The next day, Levi's responded: "I talked to Walmart and they have partnered with us to take Easy Khaki Classic fit back up to ladder SPP price, $29.99 immediately."
Levi's literally called Walmart and told them to raise the price. Because Amazon told Levi's to make the call.
Walmart complied. Then Amazon matched the HIGHER price.
Both retailers ended up charging more. The customer paid extra. Nobody competed.
Same playbook with Hanes:
Amazon sent them links showing Target and Walmart prices were lower. Hanes confirmed they "reached out to Target and Walmart to have the prices increased."
Target increased the prices. Walmart increased the prices. Amazon kept their margins.
But it gets even worse...
Amazon told Allergan (the company that makes eye drops) that their product was "suppressed" on Amazon because it was cheaper on another site.
Allergan responded: "Walmart got their price back up to $16.99." Amazon then unsuppressed the listing.
They did this with pet treats on Chewy. Furniture on Home Depot. Products across dozens of categories spanning YEARS.
The mechanism is simple but terrifying:
If you're a brand and you sell cheaper on Walmart than on Amazon, Amazon suppresses your product, removes you from the Buy Box, buries you in search results, and effectively makes you invisible to 300 million customers.
Brands can't afford that. So they call Walmart and Target and say "raise your prices or we'll lose our Amazon listings."
Walmart and Target comply because they need the brand's products.
Amazon captures 40 cents of every dollar spent online in America. That gives them the leverage to set prices across THE ENTIRE internet. Not just their own platform.
So turns out, you were never comparison shopping.
You were looking at a coordinated price floor set by Amazon through backroom phone calls between brands and their competitors.
"Amazon is working to make your life more unaffordable."
3 separate antitrust trials are now scheduled for 2027. The FTC has its own case. 18 states plus the DOJ are piling on.
This is literally happening during the WORST affordability crisis in a generation. Groceries up 25% since 2020. Housing unaffordable. Wages flat.
And the largest ecommerce company on Earth has been secretly coordinating with brands to make sure you can't find a cheaper price ANYWHERE.
"Competition" in retail is just a fantasy.
Marvel Studios Visual Development: 2010–2026
End of an era. I was there at the start of a team that broke the mold. 16 years, 40+ films, and 15 films led as Director of Visual Development, I couldn’t be prouder of the history we made.
My journey continues…
#Marvel#AndyPark
Disney just fired the man who designed the visual identity of the entire MCU.
16 years. $30 billion at the box office. And they replaced him with freelancers.
I’m going to put all of Andy Park’s contributions in the comments so you realize who this man actually is.
Sony spent up to $400 million making a single video game. It sold 25,000 copies in 14 days before Sony pulled it from sale. Cost per copy sold: about $16,000. The studio shut down two months later. The executive who warned them had already been fired for saying no.
The game was Concord. The executive was Shuhei Yoshida, who ran Sony's in-house game studios for 11 years and helped ship some of the biggest PlayStation hits ever: God of War, The Last of Us, Uncharted, Ghost of Tsushima. These are games you buy once and finish. Sony made billions on that model. Spider-Man alone generated $315 million in digital sales. The Last of Us 2 pulled nearly $250 million. God of War Ragnarok sold 15 million copies, with $279 million from digital downloads alone.
Then in 2019, a new CEO took over PlayStation. Jim Ryan wanted Sony's studios to stop making those kinds of games and chase a different model: live service. Live service is Fortnite's model: games designed to keep you playing and paying forever, earning money through endless small purchases instead of one-time sales. Ryan told his team to ship 12 of these by 2025.
Yoshida refused. Ryan removed him from running the studios and gave him a choice: take a smaller role working with indie developers or leave the company. Yoshida took the role and stayed at Sony for another six years. At an industry event in Australia last weekend, he finally said plainly that Ryan fired him from running the studios for refusing to do the 'ridiculous things' Ryan had demanded.
Of those 12 live service games, 8 were cancelled before they ever came out. Naughty Dog killed a Last of Us multiplayer game in late 2023. Bend Studio's sci-fi game died in January 2025. Twisted Metal and a London fantasy game were both scrapped in early 2024, and the London studio was closed. Insomniac's Spider-Man multiplayer was abandoned. A God of War live service game was cancelled, then the studio making it (Bluepoint) was shut down this past February. A Destiny spin-off was scrapped. Deviation Games, a studio Sony had partnered with, was shut down before shipping anything.
Only one of the 12 actually worked. Helldivers 2 was a big hit. But the studio that made it, Arrowhead, isn't owned by Sony, and they've already said they won't partner with Sony on their next game.
The total damage under Ryan: $3.7 billion spent buying Bungie (the studio behind Destiny), up to $400 million written off on Concord, and roughly 1,500 jobs lost across studios that got shut down. The PS5 generation is now short on the kind of games that built PlayStation in the first place.
Yoshida was pushed out in 2019 for saying no to one strategy. Five years and a few billion dollars later, Sony's current CEO says the new plan is to 'fail early and fail cheaply.'
I lived in Japan for a year. Most of my experiences were exhausting in ways I’d rather not get into, but this one still makes me laugh.
I was on the train in Osaka, minding my own business, when I noticed a group of school kids a few seats down. They were whispering, glancing at me, then whispering again. They kept passing a folded piece of paper between them as if they were planning something top secret.
I watched this go on for two stops.
Finally, one of the kids was pushed forward by the others. He walked over to me slowly, like he was approaching a wild animal that might bite. He stopped right in front of me, bowed politely, and held out the folded paper with both hands.
I opened it.
Inside was a handwritten note in careful English: “Hello. We think you are a very cool person. We are practicing our English. We hope this note is correct. Please give us a score.”
At the bottom, they had drawn a literal grading box, out of ten.
I looked up. Seven pairs of eyes were staring at me as if their entire semester depended on my response.
I pulled out a pen, wrote “10/10” in the box, and added a note: “Perfect English. Well done.”
The boy carried it back to the group. They read it together… and absolutely lost their minds. High-fives, jumping, and one kid even pumped his fist in the air.
Their teacher, who had been pretending not to watch from the end of the car, was biting her lip, trying hard not to smile.
I rode the rest of the journey grinning to myself.
That’s the Japan I always remember.
🚨 Lumumba, one of DR Congo’s most iconic fans, was denied a visa and couldn’t travel to Mexico for the play-off final against Jamaica. 🇨🇩❌
So he did what he always does — stood for the full 120 minutes in front of a giant screen in his neighbourhood in Kinshasa, watching his country qualify for the World Cup for the first time in 52 years. 👏😍
We NEED to see Lumumba at the World Cup. 🇨🇩👏
Stand up for his incredible dedication and pure passion.