Andrew Walters

Tyrion shrugged. “We all need to be mocked from time to time Lord Mormont lest we start to take ourselves too seriously.

[Danny Freeman @DannyEFreeman]

In the end, Philadelphia's fireworks began at ~2:30am on July 5th after Will Smith, DJ Jazzy Jeff, Meek Mill, and the Roots all took the stage and performed post-storm.

[Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani @NYCMayor]

The assault on an NYPD officer outside Madison Square Garden last night was unacceptable.

New Yorkers are rightfully excited about the Knicks' historic Finals run, and we want fans to celebrate this moment together. There is, however, no place for violence, and no tolerance for attacks on police officers.

Thank you to the officers who worked to keep fans safe throughout the night, and we wish the injured officer a speedy recovery.

The overwhelming majority of New Yorkers celebrated responsibly, and I urge everyone to continue doing so as the Finals return to New York.

[Owen Sparks @OwenSparks]

An incredibly touching moment on board Orion as the Artemis II crew calls down an unnamed crater that they have observed on the Moon, asking to name it 'Carroll', after Carroll Wiseman, Commander Reid Wiseman's wife who tragically passed away in 2020. ❤️

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

If you're under 53 years old, you have never once been alive while a human was farther than 250 miles from Earth. Tonight, four astronauts are heading 252,000 miles out. That's a thousand times farther than any person has gone in your lifetime.

The 250-mile ceiling is where the International Space Station floats. Every astronaut since December 1972 has been stuck in that zone. Spacewalks, science experiments, cool photos from orbit, sure. But nobody left the neighborhood.

The last crew to go farther was Apollo 17. December 1972. Nixon was president. The internet didn't exist. Cell phones were 11 years away. The youngest member of that crew is now 90 years old.

The farthest any human has ever been from Earth is 248,655 miles. The Apollo 13 crew set that number in 1970, and they didn't mean to. Their oxygen tank blew up, and the emergency route home took them farther out than anyone before or since. Tonight's crew will break that record on purpose.

And the crew itself. Victor Glover becomes the first Black astronaut to leave Earth's neighborhood. Christina Koch becomes the first woman. Jeremy Hansen, a Canadian fighter pilot, becomes the first non-American to do so. When they come home, they'll slam into the atmosphere at 25,000 mph, faster than any human has ever traveled.

The Moon's south pole has ice. Water ice, sitting in craters so deep that sunlight hasn't hit them in billions of years. A 2024 NASA study found way more of it than anyone expected. You can split water into hydrogen and oxygen, which gives you rocket fuel, breathable air, and drinking water, all made on the Moon instead of hauled up from Earth. George Sowers at Colorado School of Mines calculated that Moon-made fuel could shave $12 billion off a single trip to Mars. The Moon is a gas station on the road to Mars.

NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman announced last week a $20 billion plan to build a permanent base at the South Pole over the next seven years, with landings every six months. China is developing its own lunar lander and spacesuit, aiming for a crewed landing by 2030. The Artemis program has burned through $93 billion so far, and the first actual surface landing is penciled in for 2028. There's a real question of who gets there first this time around.

Harrison Schmitt walked on the Moon in December 1972 as part of Apollo 17. He's 90. Asked about it this week, he sounded pretty relaxed. "Mars is attainable," he said. "We're humans. That's what we've always done."

[New York Magazine @NYMag]

Hundreds of videos of cartoon food characters, rendered in brightly colored Pixar-style animation, acting out heart-wrenching plot lines have been going viral. There’s the homophobic clementine that kicks his gay clementine son out of his house when he catches him experimenting with a strawberry (1.8 million views). There’s the pregnant broccoli that dumps her broccoli child in the trash, only to FaceTime him years later begging for forgiveness (2.1 million views). Many of the videos in this genre are silly, but others have distinctly misogynist or racist subtext. Yet people can’t seem to turn away.

At first the videos were somewhat educational, according to Fana Yohannes, a trend curator and digital strategist. But over the past few months, Yohannes has watched the trend shift from practical advice to narratives featuring extreme human emotions — separation, terror, betrayal. The more heightened the drama, the more viral the post. “It seems like it went from a tool to create educational content to something people can use to make a quick buck and farm engagement,” she says. She refers to the talking-fruit videos as “the first-ever custom-GPT-generated social-media trend.”

We’re already aware of how AI-generated content can collapse our ability to distinguish what’s fake from what is real, “but the talking-food videos indicate that AI isn’t just getting better at messing with our heads — it’s going to get better at messing with our hearts as well,” writes E.J. Dickson.

Read Dickson on how fruit and vegetable AI slop videos are tapping into people’s emotions without actually earning it: https://t.co/h5TjRmLXqT

[harrison @HarrisonQuinnO]

mark wahlberg doing this at the 9/11 museum

[Everything Price Sufferer (but especially eggs) @agraybee]

Comedy when the writers were pulled from the Harvard Lampoon was so different from when they're pulled from social media.

[poppa @popitforpoppa]

send me to iran with this loadout

[Eric Michael Garcia @EricMGarcia]

I know it's not popular to say it on here, but at what point do people finally admit that a Democratic governor who wins a swing state by double digits is an obvious frontrunner for president?

[SportsCenter @SportsCenter]

🇺🇸 🇺🇸 🇺🇸

[Ari Meirov @MySportsUpdate]

Bad Bunny held up a football at the end of his Super Bowl halftime show:

“Together, We Are America.”

[Acyn @Acyn]

Bad Bunny: Before I say thanks to God, I’m going to say ‘ICE out.’ We’re not savages, we’re not animals, we’re not aliens. We are humans and we are Americans.

[Lumpy @LumpyTheCook]

Every single baby boomer spends 8 hours a day half-awake watching shows like this

[Senator Reverend Raphael Warnock @SenatorWarnock]

ICE needs to get off the streets and focus on targeted enforcement to find and deport violent criminals.

Enough is enough.

[Governor Phil Murphy @GovMurphy]

Shameful and depraved.

She was convicted of the murder New Jersey State Trooper Werner Foerster, who was executed in cold blood.

There are so many worthy heroes to celebrate. She is not one of them.