The wackiest headlines from the week as they would appear in a Classifieds section.

Careers

PROFESSIONAL COLLEGIATE ATHLETE: Tight end Cam McCormick will play in a record ninth season of college football at the University of Miami after being sidelined numerous times with injuries. In just two more years, he’ll be up for tenure.

SINGING GATSBY: The book that confused every seventh grader in America is entering its next stage: Broadway. Will Myrtle’s death be a tap number? Only if we’re lucky.

Personal

B-DAY PRESENT: In a sermon that no one would want to attend with their parents, the pope said sex is a gift from God.

JUSTICE FOR JIMMY + KIM: Better Call Saul set a record for being the most snubbed show in Emmy history, nabbing 53 nominations but 0 awards over its six seasons. Somewhere in New Mexico, Mike Ehrmantraut is scowling.

Wanted

A WATCH FOR MADONNA: The pop star was sued by two upset fans for showing up more than two hours late for a show last month in Brooklyn. Madonna, who has faced promptness complaints before, responded to her critics in 2019 with a Gandalfian post: “There’s something that you all need to understand. And that is, that a queen is never late.”

ISO PG-RATED NAME: The gas station Kum & Go will be getting a new name. The chain was bought by the Utah-based Maverik convenience stores last year, and the new owners reportedly don’t love the name’s double-entendre.

For sale

‘SUCCESSION’ TREASURES: A set of pink index cards containing Roman Roy’s eulogy for his father on Succession sold for $25,000 at an auction offloading hundreds of famous props from the show. The ludicrously capacious bag sold for a ludicrous $18,750.

KATNISS IN COLOR: Fans are getting an illustrated version of the Hunger Games novel in the fall. Finally, a non-Donald Sutherland take on President Snow.—MM

Jim Beam me up, Scotty.

You’re looking at University of Kentucky chemistry professor Robert Lodder sending a message into deep space last October inviting aliens to visit Lexington. It’s part of a tourism campaign announced this week that aims to capitalize on the recent resurgence of UFO fever following 2023’s extraterrestrial hearings in Congress.

The encoded message, sent to the star TRAPPIST-1, included the chemical components for bourbon, a recording of Lexington blues musician Tee Dee Young, and the outlines of two horses and a human. But since TRAPPIST-1 is 40 light-years away, it will take at least 80 years for the aliens to RSVP, which means they won’t be placing any win-place-show bets at Keeneland soon.—DL

Here are some illuminating scientific discoveries from the week to help you live better and maybe even work with NASA.

We all think we’re doing better than our neighbors. Recent YouGov surveys revealed that American adults believe they have better social and financial well-being than their peers. When asked to rate 14 aspects of their lives, more than half of the participants said their healthcare, educational opportunities, relationships, and employment were either good or excellent. But the group was less likely to give positive ratings to other people in their communities and way less likely to do so when assessing the general livelihood of everyone in the US. Safety, health, and housing were among the categories with the biggest gaps, but here’s the largest discrepancy: Respondents were 42% more likely to see their own mental health as good or excellent than they are to positively rate the country’s mental health overall.

NASA wants your help. Do you want to become a *checks notes* “burst chaser”? NASA hopes so: After gathering data on thousands upon thousands of gamma-ray bursts, the space agency is asking for volunteers to help its scientists determine the origin of these prehistoric, outer-space explosions. There’s no expertise needed—the online program feels almost like a game and includes a tutorial on how to identify different pulses of gamma-ray bursts, by the shapes of the graph lines plotting their energy. NASA is taking a page out of the Buffalo Bills’ playbook and asking the public for help (albeit unpaid) because human eyes can classify certain patterns that their computers aren’t yet able to, according to the project site.

A breakthrough in monkey cloning. A two-year-old rhesus monkey named ReTro is the first healthy clone of his species to live into adulthood, scientists in China announced. ReTro is not the first primate successfully cloned like Dolly the Sheep was—that title belongs to six-year-old twin macaques Zhong Zhong and Hua Hua—but he is only the second type of primate scientists have been able to clone. Replicated embryos typically have low survival rates, but the scientists used a somewhat unconventional method to create ReTro, swapping out the placenta of the cloned embryo with the placenta of an embryo created with in vitro fertilization, which reduced defects. The research team said this gets scientists closer to the possibility of producing genetically identical primates for clinical drug trials, rather than having to breed genetically diverse groups of research monkeys.—ML

Quality television can provide cozy entertainment on a wintry Sunday afternoon, but sometimes, it can also prompt a national reckoning. The British miniseries Mr Bates vs The Post Office, a show based on what’s been called the biggest legal travesty in UK history, premiered this month and managed to do both—spurring the government to help the victims.

While getting kudos from critics, the TV show shined fresh light on the fate of hundreds of UK Post Office employees who were wrongly prosecuted for crimes they did not commit because of what turned out to be glitches in the Post Office’s accounting software system, Horizon, which was created by Japanese company Fujitsu.

• Over 900 innocent Post Office branch managers, known as subpostmasters or subpostmistresses, were wrongly convicted of theft, false accounting, and fraud between 1999 and 2015.
• Many of the affected employees lost their careers, while some ended up in prison, and several died by suicide.

The miniseries presented a dramatic retelling of former subpostmaster Alan Bates’s campaign to redress these wrongs. And it got Brits riled up in real life because this story doesn’t have a Hollywood ending yet. Even though the subpostmasters won a ruling from the High Court in 2019 that vindicated their claims about shoddy software and ordered limited compensation, most of it got absorbed by legal costs. Only 93 convictions have been overturned, and many victims are still waiting for payment.

The small screen’s big impact

A public inquiry to get to the bottom of the matter began in 2021, but only now has the public been riveted by the saga—and that’s helping move things along.

Petitions related to the cause have gotten hundreds of thousands of signatures recently, including one to grant Bates knighthood. Meanwhile, ex-Post Office head Paula Vennells—who led the Post Office during the period when employees were wrongfully prosecuted—gave up her Commander of the Order of the British Empire title after over 1.2 million people called for her to lose the royal award (but only King Charles can officially take it away).

And, in response to the public outrage, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak announced an unprecedented measure that would exonerate and compensate the subpostmasters en masse. If Parliament passes it, each falsely convicted employee would receive at least $765,000.

Who should be held accountable?

With so many people taking up the subpostmasters’ cause, it’s brought new urgency to the question of who is responsible for their plight. And there’s plenty of blame to go around.

A Financial Times analysis shows that politicians from all three major UK parties failed to properly deal with reports of problems at the Post Office.

This week, the House of Commons Business and Trade Committee heard from key participants in the multiyear affair, including Post Office officials and victims’ advocates, who testified on the Post Office’s role.

• A lawyer representing a group of subpostmasters said that the Post Office likely used forged documents and fake testimony to dismiss employees.
• The revelation comes after a former Post Office security team employee told the public inquiry about a compensation scheme that rewarded investigators for every subpostmaster convicted. Victims have accused Post Office investigators of trying to intimidate them and behaving like “mafia gangsters,” as one convicted subpostmaster put it.

Fujitsu’s European head, Paul Patterson, who joined the company in 2010, also spoke at the committee hearing, apologizing for the company’s role in the scandal and acknowledging that it helped prosecutors go after subpostmasters. He said that it would help the Post Office compensate victims, an effort that’ll cost at least $1.28 billion. Fujitsu’s stock is down 8% so far in 2024, as it is expected to lose the Post Office contract after it expires next year.

Zoom out: The problem of employees obsessing over procedures and ignoring issues is endemic to over-bureaucratized orgs far beyond the UK postal system, according to a Bloomberg opinion piece by business columnist Adrian Wooldridge. He claims that out-of-touch managers at the Post Office’s central London office making all the key decisions contributed to the debacle.—SK

Cook: A versatile white chicken chili. Pro tip: Serve with Fritos.

Sweet treat: This twist on classic Rice Krispies Treats adds black sesame seeds.

Listen: Check out Freakonomics Radio’s two-part series on academic fraud.

Kitchen tool: Get to your morning beans on toast faster with a better can opener.

Watch: Death and Other Details, a murder mystery show starring Mandy Patinkin.

Brag: The beginning of the year is an excellent time to create a brag document for yourself.

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It’s a big world out there. In this section, we’ll teleport you to an interesting location—and hopefully give you travel ideas in the process.

Meet the Hahnenkamm, a ski event taking place this week in Kitzbuehel, Austria, that features a decline so steep that it’s reasonable to wonder if it was inspired by the Philadelphia Eagles.

This year marked the 87th year of skiers attempting to navigate the treacherous Streif, a downhill course considered the most dangerous in the world. Nearly every part of the track has the ability to break competitors both mentally and physically—there were so many nasty crashes in 2016 that the event had to be canceled after 30 racers.

• The Mausefalle section of the course includes an 85% gradient where skiers can reach a top speed of 75 mph. There’s also a jump that sends skiers 260 feet through the air.
• The Seidlalmsprung is the midpoint of the race and features a blind jump skiers must take at an angle so they can land properly to get through the fast-approaching Seidlalmkurve.
• Skiers who have somehow not crashed and shattered all their bones will reach the final jump at the Zielsprung by traveling in excess of 90 miles per hour.

Between 15,000 and 25,000 people attend the other races throughout the week, but the downhill event draws about 45,000 spectators every year. The usually quiet medieval town takes on a carnival atmosphere, leaving the skiers to walk through the intoxicated throngs on their way to the course.—DL

Last week, we asked: “You can only choose one type of soup: stew, consommé, chowder, or bisque. What are you going with?” Here are our favorite responses (including some that bent the rules):

• “Stew hands down. Bisque and chowder are so rich that you’ll be able to make it, like, once a month in between stomach aches. Consomme is great, but you’ll never have it on its own, and if it’s REALLY good consomme, then odds are that the food you’re dipping it in is also REALLY good, and that’s good enough for me. Stew is like the food AND the consomme all in one, it’s a whole meal in itself, and there’s such a variety of stews that the opportunities are literally endless.”—Natalia from Manhattan, NY
• “Gumbo?????????????!!!!!!”—Milton from Fort Worth, TX
• “Caldo verde: Chorizo is the best sausage ever, and it’s green, which automatically means that it’s healthy.”—Phillip from The Bronx
• “Crawfish bisque, but only the kind my roommate’s parents from Baton Rouge froze in milk cartons for us. Since I was 20, it’s been my gold standard for anything savory one eats with a spoon.”—Susan from Arkansas
• “Soup...when you’re at death’s door, you need some chicken noodle, not Manhattan clam chowder.”—Julie from Wisconsin
• “Chili—because it keeps on giving. Think of all of her cities, hotdogs, nachos, spaghetti. It has so much to give!”—Lori from Davis, CA

This week’s question

Surprise: We’re bringing back a Morning Brew classic game from 2022, the Meme Contest. We’ll give you a blank meme template, and you have to fill in the punchline. We’ll share the funniest responses next week.

You can find the template here. When you’re done, download your masterpiece and submit it here.