From the Dealer's Choice desk
Dealer's Choice
The news, fully digested. Our published Dealer's Choice stories, newest first.
MBAPPÉ LOSES AN ENTIRE COUNTRY'S TV SCHEDULE OVER ONE MEME
Mbappé went on a French show hosted by his own Real Madrid teammate, got asked his favorite meme of himself, and said it was the one where his face is on a guy he thinks is a Chinese dictator. That guy was Mao. Within about a day he had no Chinese sponsors and CCTV had pulled La Liga off the air.
80-TON BOULDER FINALLY FELL AFTER 104 YEARS
An 80-ton granite boulder that families posed under for 104 years let go at a New Hampshire park, on the last day of the season, with nobody underneath it. The sign on the trail had already told visitors the rock was cracked through and that 75 percent of its weight was over their heads. We go through what the geologis
RHODE ISLAND MAN GROWS 3,156-POUND PUMPKIN, BREAKS WEEK LONG WORLD RECORD
Ron Wallace of Coventry, Rhode Island put a 3,156-pound pumpkin on the scale, and Guinness has confirmed it as the heaviest ever and the first fruit of any kind over 3,000 pounds. The British grower whose record he broke had held it for seven days. We go through how Wallace did it, including the greenhouse and the seed
ANTHROPIC PLEDGES 5% OF ITSELF TO THE PUBLIC
Anthropic is putting 5% of itself, roughly $48 billion on paper, into a new public benefit fund partly aimed at workers AI might put out of a job. The whole thing still needs a shareholder vote, and the valuation baseline that triggers bonus top-ups hasn't been disclosed. Elon Musk's reply was to recommend skipping the
FEDS SAY OPENAI ENGINEER USED HIS WIFE'S CHATGPT TO LEARN HOW TO BUG OPENAI
An OpenAI engineer got arrested after the company found a recorder wrapped in toilet paper behind the TV in the executive conference room. Prosecutors say the how-to research happened on his wife's chatbot account. The whole plot cost about twenty-four dollars.
DIVERS FIND 4,700-YEAR-OLD SHIPWRECK, POTENTIALLY OLDEST EVER DISCOVERED
Divers off southern Turkey pulled 30-plus clay jars and three stone anchors off the seabed from a boat that sank around the time Egypt was building the Great Pyramid. The wood is long gone, so the date rests entirely on jar design. Some of the jars still have a thick glossy residue in them, and nobody is sure yet what
CORNELL BANS FRAT PARTIES
Cornell's president apologized to Jane Doe and shut down every fraternity party for the rest of the school year. The reason that lands badly is the timing: the alleged assault was in October 2024, and the school's own panel closed the case with sanctions that went from expulsion all the way down to writing an essay. We
AN ENGINEER BUILT A WEBSITE WHERE YOU CAN SIT AT ELIZABETH HOLMES' DESK
A software engineer recreated Elizabeth Holmes' 2016 desk as a clickable website, down to the MacBook, the iPhone and a simulated Edison. Everything on it is real evidence from her criminal fraud trial. It is also, quietly, an ad for a document-parsing startup.
TENNESSEE SAYS IT FOLLOWED THE EXECUTION PROTOCOL PERFECTLY. THE WOMAN IS AWAKE AND TALKING.
Tennessee tried to execute Christa Pike on September 30, gave her two doses of pentobarbital, and six days later she woke up in a hospital and started talking. The Department of Correction's official position is that it followed every step of its lawful protocol. Her lawyers say the IV lines were never in right, and th
EX-PRINCE ANDREW'S BIG LEGAL MOVE IS ARGUING THE COPS FILLED OUT THE FORMS WRONG
Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor is taking Thames Valley Police to the High Court, and the argument isn't that he's innocent. It's that the warrants used to search Sandringham and Royal Lodge should never have been issued. We get into the birthday arrest, the six-day search of a house he'd already moved out of, and why Thurs
FEDS INDICTED A 67-YEAR-OLD CANOEIST OVER A POOL THEIR OWN CONTRACTOR WRECKED
A D.C. judge threw out the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool vandalism case against former Olympic canoeist David Hearn with prejudice, so it can never come back. Prosecutors had already admitted the damage came from a botched contractor install, not a guy with his hands in a puddle. The judge said out loud that he was
CALIFORNIA IS GETTING A FREE EXTRA FOOT OF OCEAN AND NOBODY CAN EVEN SURF IT
A Kelvin wave, a warm-water pulse thousands of miles wide, reaches California in October and raises sea level 6 to 12 inches. You can't see it or surf it. A NOAA oceanographer calls the full stack of conditions a quintuple whammy, and the worst timing lands on Thanksgiving and Christmas.
THE TRUMP-XI SUMMIT PRODUCED TWO PANDAS AND NOT MUCH ELSE
Two giant pandas landed in Atlanta Sunday on a FedEx 777 that somebody officially named the Panda Express. They're the headline outcome of a three-day Trump-Xi summit that otherwise settled nothing, and you can't even see them for a month.
NFL FINES A GUY WHO DOESN'T DRINK BEER $14,926 FOR PRETENDING TO DRINK A BEER
Kyle Juszczyk mimed chugging something after a catch against Miami, and the NFL billed him $14,926 for an "offensive demonstration." He says he doesn't even drink beer. We go through the rule they cited, the second guy who got hit for the same thing, and the jar labeled NOT BEER that Juszczyk parked in his locker.
GRAND JURY DELIVERS NOLAN WELLS CASE VERDICT
A Jackson County grand jury went through 43 witnesses and 132 subpoenas on the death of 18-year-old Nolan Wells and came back with no charges and no cause of death. Both pathologists, the state's and the family's, wrote down 'undetermined.' Now the DA and attorney Ben Crump are publicly swinging at each other over what
LOOKSMAXXING GURU 'CLAVICULAR' CHARGED WITH RAPE
Clavicular, the 20-year-old looksmaxxing streamer, is charged in Massachusetts with rape, drugging a person for sex, and buying alcohol for someone underage, over a May 2025 night at his family's Cape Cod house. He denies all of it, and his rep's loudest public argument so far is that Peters hasn't physically been serv
BUILDING-SIZED SPACE ROCK PUNCHED A 728-FOOT HOLE IN THE MOON AND NOBODY NOTICED FOR 18 MONTHS
A comet or asteroid the size of a six-story building cratered the Moon in spring 2024 and the entire planet slept through it. A NASA image guy found the hole a year and a half later during a routine data check. It is the biggest fresh crater ever found in the solar system, and it turns out the Moon got fluffier for fou
NEW CAT DLC DROPS FOR FIRST TIME IN A CENTURY
A guy in Bolivia found a spotted kitten on a forest road, kept it about a year, then handed it to a sanctuary that couldn't identify it. Ten years later the genome says it's a brand new species, the first living cat named in over a century. The joke is that the locals already had a name for it, and science just borrowe
BETTING APP SWEARS ITS NUDE AD IS ABOUT "JUST SPORTS," REACTION IS ANYTHING BUT
Novig launched its first big campaign with Sydney Sweeney naked behind two footballs and the tagline "just sports." Olympic swimmers, a sprinter on live BBC and a gymnast with a training montage all told the app where sports actually is. Sweeney's defense was ESPN's old Body Issue, which is a weaker comparison than she
TRUMP SAYS THE ONLY GUARDRAIL AI NEEDS IS A 'HIGH IQ' PRESIDENT, MEANING HIM
Anthropic's Dario Amodei asked the entire AI industry to slow down, and Altman, Musk and Hassabis all agreed with him inside a day, which basically never happens. Trump answered with a pile of Truth Social posts declaring that the only guardrail AI needs is a smart president. We walk through the posts, including the pa