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

Careers

PAW-BLUCIST: From Ripley to Argylle, Hollywood is now obsessed with casting cats—and not even just to make a female character appear reclusive and lonely. Mr. Bigglesworth would be proud.

INFAMOUS ANTIQUE DEALER: The white Ford Bronco O.J. Simpson rode in while puttering down the highway in 1994 is being sold by Simpson’s former agent and two friends of the infamous driver, Al Cowlings. They’re hoping to get $1.5 million from it but would take your best conspiracy theory.

Personal

NEED HOCKEY TEAM NAME: Salt Lake City is getting an NHL team next season, but owner Ryan Smith isn’t sure what they’ll be called—“It will be ‘Utah Something,’” he told NHL.com. Washington Football Team walked so the Utah Something could run.

ISO STONED OKTOBERFEST: Bavaria banned smoking weed at the famously drunken beer fest in the fall. It’ll be a challenge for some, because alcohol intoxication can only help you eat so much of a giant pretzel.

CYBERTRUCK JUMPSTART: An owner of a Tesla Cybertruck said his vehicle turned into a giant brick after taking it on a routine visit to the car wash. It started working again after a complete reboot.

For sale

HEAVENLY STAIRCASE—USED: Stairway to Heaven will go back to just being a song your dad knows how to play on guitar. A historic staircase on Oahu, known as “The Stairway to Heaven,” will be removed after visitors kept illegally hiking it.

ROYAL JAM: American Riviera Orchard has its first product: fancy, small-batch jam. Meghan Markle is planning to officially launch the brand later this spring, and everyone is too afraid to make fun of it after what happened last time.—MM

Photo of the week

No, this is not an inside look at the stomachs of Hot Ones guests the morning after the show.

It’s a bone-rattling shot of Mount Ruang in Indonesia, a volcano that has erupted at least five times since Tuesday night. Amid concerns that the lava belcher could partially collapse into the sea and cause a tsunami (which happened in 1871), authorities evacuated more than 11,000 people from the area and urged tourists to stay at least 3.7 miles away. No casualties were reported.

Dept. of Progress

Here are some illuminating scientific discoveries from the week to help you live better and maybe even wonder how much there is to learn about bees.

Bees survived underwater for a week. Accidents in the lab typically ruin experiments, but sometimes they cause an amazing unforeseen outcome, like this one: Scientists in Canada accidentally flooded an enclosure of hibernating queen bumblebees and…they survived the submergence. The team tested their unexpected finding on 143 more of the same type of bee, some of whom were kept underwater for seven days straight. In line with their original misadventure, scientists found the hibernating queen bees to have roughly the same survival rate whether or not they spent a week below the surface, suggesting that hibernation could be protecting the bees from drowning. “These bees are effectively on energy-saver mode,” one scientist said.

Fool’s gold may contain green energy gold. Amid soaring demand for lithium, a key component of electric-vehicle batteries, a new source of the soft metal has been discovered in a surprising place: pyrite, aka fool’s gold. A team of geoscientists in West Virginia took rock samples from the Appalachian basin and found lots of lithium in the samples’ pyrite minerals, which is “unheard of,” one of the researchers said. They’re optimistic that lithium will be found in other pyrite deposits outside their sample site, which would provide a low-energy way to secure more of the much-needed metal without breaking ground on new, possibly environmentally damaging mines.

🫥 How to fight deepfakes? Teach algorithms diversity. AI-altered images/videos/audio are getting more convincing and concerning, but just in time for the US presidential election, computer scientists from the University at Buffalo-SUNY found a way to boost the effectiveness of deepfake detection. By building the tech’s algorithm to recognize demographic diversity better, the researchers improved accuracy rates from 91.5%—the baseline for the foundation commonly used in deepfake detection systems—to 94.2%. That’s a bigger boost than the researchers got when they tried to build an algorithm to be more accurate without paying attention to demographic diversity.—ML

Can a product review be too harsh?

A futuristic, AI-powered wearable that aims to help humanity kick its smartphone addiction was about as critically acclaimed as the restaurants on Kitchen Nightmares. But the Ai Pin, billed as a screenless assistant by the much-hyped startup Humane, got people talking after its evisceration by the famously straight-shooting product review guru Marques Brownlee, aka MKBHD.

In a video titled “The Worst Product I’ve Ever Reviewed... For Now,” which received over 6 million views, he praised the gadget’s sleek design and clever charging system but criticized everything else, from its inconsistent battery life to its inability to sync with a smartphone.

But then the YouTuber himself got a thumbs down in the form of a viral X post from former Amazon Web Services Engineer Daniel Vassallo, who accused Brownlee of chasing clicks at Humane’s expense and called the video’s title “distasteful, almost unethical.” Brownlee pushed back, saying that he was simply doing his job of educating viewers about a product before they shell out $699 plus a $24 monthly subscription fee for it.

The back-and-forth stirred up a conversation about what reviewers owe to their audiences and the companies whose products they feature. Here’s an unboxing of that discourse.

Anti-Humane rhetoric accusation

Vassallo’s main complaint seems to be that someone with Brownlee’s reach could undermine a plucky upstart on the bleeding edge of the AI revolution, like Humane, by trashing its first product.

• Vassallo maintained that Brownlee’s 18 million YouTube followers obligated him to be mindful of how his choice of words could harm a company.
• He claimed that Brownlee chose the “sensationalist” video title to do “maximum damage,” though he later clarified to TechCrunch that he found the review itself “fair and balanced.”

Other tech industry veterans agreed. Entrepreneur Alex Kehr said that the review was “devastating for the future of Humane,” as it’ll destroy sales. Tech influencer Alex Finn also wrote that Brownlee used his immense influence to erect the company’s “gravestone.”

Indeed, Humane was banking on its smartphone supplanter being a hot commodity after it raised $230 million in VC funding, and expected to sell 100,000 pins in the first year.

This isn’t the first time a company’s misfortunes have been pinned on Brownlee’s panning. Some think his recent review of the Fisker Ocean SUV, “This Is The Worst Car I’ve Ever Reviewed,” is a reason the EV startup is on the brink of bankruptcy.

Reviewer not responsible

MKBHD replied to the charge that he’s a company valuation destroyer with a follow-up video in which he stated that it’s not bad reviews but bad products that drive companies out of business.

• Brownlee reminded viewers that Fisker was already in dire straits and known to be at risk of getting delisted from the New York Stock Exchange before he reviewed its car.
• He claimed that negative reviews can only accelerate the demise of a company, not precipitate it.

Also not salty about the Ai Pin review? Humane itself. The company’s head of new media, Sam Sheffer, said MKBHD’s critiques were “fair and valid” while assuring that the startup was listening and learning.

Plus, MKBHD’s defenders pointed out that he’s just one voice in a chorus of Ai Pin haters. Other prominent YouTubers engaged in similar clickable dunking on the product, and most tech sites agreed it was more of a glitchy gimmick than a game changer. Fellow tech analysts like Ben Thompson contend that MKBHD has no obligations to anyone other than his trusting audience, the greatest source of his power.

Big picture: Since a large chunk of the product reviews on e-commerce sites are considered unreliable or even sponsored by sellers, many shoppers are increasingly counting on the level-headed input of vloggers like MKBHD, which raises their profile as well as questions about their responsibilities.—SK

Place to be: Luxury airplanes for dogs

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.

There’s one airline hoping to fetch a pretty penny from customers who really love their dogs.

Bark Air, a new airline from the company behind BarkBox, is offering private jet flights from Los Angeles to New York and New York to London that cater to dogs, beginning on May 23. It costs $6,000 for the transcontinental flight and $8,000 to bring your pup across the Atlantic.

While you’re being herded into a middle seat on your commercial flight, these dogs will be cruising in the lap of luxury. The canine-focused amenities include:

• A treat menu with “Doggie Champagne,” aka chicken broth.
• More room to roam the main cabin. Only 10 human passengers can ride on a jet that holds as many as 14.
• A play area that resembles a dog park is also in the works.

The biggest difference between dog and human flights is removable carpet tiles should a passenger (the dog, not the human) leave a mess on the floor mid-flight.

Is this viable? Pet Airways attempted something similar in 2007 but was sent to a business farm upstate four years later. Bark CEO Matt Meeker foresees lower prices if there’s enough demand, and there’s reason to be hopeful: 65 million US households own pets, up from 38 million when Bark launched the treat subscription service BarkBox 12 years ago, per Bloomberg.—DL

Crowd work

Last week, we asked: What’s your unorthodox idea for how to revitalize abandoned malls? Here are our favorite responses:

• “Extreme Dave and Buster’s. Instead of a target-throwing game, a full football field. Instead of pop a shot, full 3x3 games. Give people enough room to really break a sweat.”—Pat from MA
• “One of the first malls in Indiana, Mounds Mall, is an abandoned eyesore. There’s a committee in our town with plans to build a dam and create a reservoir lake, essentially drowning the mall’s location. So that’s one way of dealing with it.”—Autumn from Anderson, IN
• “Let us live our Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater dreams and convert them into skateparks.”—Blake from New York
• “Bring back Rainforest Cafes but let them take up the entire mall this time.”—Katie from Grand Rapids, MI
• “Turn them into DIY film sets, where each store is another locale filled with suitable props awaiting the next budding Spielberg or Scorsese. People can tour the mall for inspiration and advice for a nominal fee, and the public can vote for their favorites at monthly screenings.”—Carl from Gaithersburg, MD

This week’s question

Invent a word that’s missing from the dictionary and use it in a sentence.

Matty’s response to get the juices flowing: “Loosegg, meaning a food item—particularly a sandwich—that is messy but worth it. It stems from breakfast sandwiches with a runny or ‘loose’ egg.”

Sentence: “Their pulled pork meal is loosegg so it’s more of a dinner item as opposed to lunch.”

Share your response here.