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

Careers

DAM DESTROYER: Salmon will be able to swim in a section of the Klamath River along the California–Oregon border for the first time in over 100 years after crews tear down some rock dams. The move comes just in time for those aquatic freaks’ spawning season.

CREATIVE GARDNER: Illinois passed a law preventing HOAs from banning native plants in homeowners’ yards. Next step: Allow 12-foot-tall Home Depot skeletons all year round.

ISO ENERGY WORK: A school district in Silicon Valley will not renew a $189,000 contract with an energy healer after parents voiced concerns that the work seemed extravagant. Mock this all you want, but those fourth graders had the nastiest vibes pre-session.

Personal

SEEKING FRIENDS: Timeleft, an app that schedules dinner for you and five strangers, has popped up in cities around the US, including Denver, DC, and Indianapolis. Every dinner takes place at 7pm on a Wednesday and costs $16 to book, not including the shots someone will inevitably order to break the ice after everyone shares their fun fact.

NEW PARENTAL FEAR: A four-year-old boy accidentally broke a 3,500-year-old jar in a museum. This means that the child destroyed an enemy 875x his elder.

For sale

GLACIER TREAT: Ludacris posted a video of himself drinking water straight from an Alaskan glacier, freaking out fans who warned of bacteria and parasites. The rapper is doing fine and is excited to enjoy other natural tastes on his tour—like licking the Rockies and eating redwood bark.

HARD MONSTER…PLEASE: The energy drink’s booze division is performing about as well as a Loca Moca in a 14-year-old’s stomach during a long car ride. (It’s not doing well.)

OPEN LOFT SPACE: Tennessee police were searching a home for a murder suspect when every clue pointed up. The suspect fell from the attic he was hiding in directly into the investigation.—MM

Photo of the week

The Paralympic Games began in Paris this week with the US men’s wheelchair basketball team in pursuit of a third consecutive gold medal, which would be a first in Paralympic history. Jorge Salazar of Team USA is seen here defending against Spain’s Ignacio Ortega in group play. Team USA won the match, 66–56.

The US men’s wheelchair basketball team has won a record nine gold medals since the Games began in 1960—that equals the combined total for every other country.—DL

Dept. of Progress

Here are some illuminating scientific discoveries from the week to help you live better and maybe even avoid a paper cut.

🩸 The types of paper most likely to cut you. Sometimes, science means trying to slice fake skin with a book page: Three physicists in Denmark have determined the paper cut hierarchy after cutting a gelatin material with all the types of paper you might find in an office. In Goldilocks fashion, the paper most likely to cause a cut was mid-thickness, which includes printer paper, newspaper, and Post-It notes. Thicker paper usually had too flat an edge to slice, while thin tissue paper and photo paper buckled against the skin stand-in. Some printer paper was so slicey that the scientists used it to cut vegetables and meats.—ML

Matching dino tracks found across the ocean. Paleontologists have discovered a trail of preserved dinosaur footprints in South America and Africa, suggesting the existence of a prehistoric highway along a dried-up river that once connected modern-day Brazil and Cameroon. The prints date back ~120 million years, after Pangea started breaking up and when South America and Africa were part of a smaller supercontinent called Gondwana. The continental breakup brought the study’s authors together—two of them became friends years ago when they were researching the dino steps from opposite ends of the ocean.

What your favorite films say about your brain. If your roommate doesn’t want to watch the same movie as you, it might be because your pick literally doesn’t stimulate their mind (no shade). In a new MRI study of the brain’s emotion and reward centers, self-identified fans of action and comedy films showed strong reactions to pictures of scary or angry faces, while fans of crime films, thrillers, and documentaries were less affected by the images. This surprised the researchers (they expected seasoned action buffs to be more desensitized to excitement and difficult to provoke), but now they think it means that people favor the film genres that most stimulate their brains. Arthouse fans, mount your horse.

The head-spinning case of Telegram’s CEO

French authorities are fed up with Telegram’s level of liberté and the messaging app’s enigmatic founder, Pavel Durov.

The Dubai-based Russian billionaire, who sometimes seemed to exist only in the ether, proved he wasn’t a hologram when he was arrested at a Paris airport last weekend and later charged with various offenses in connection to criminal activity on the social platform, famous for its hands-off approach to content moderation. 

• Citing Telegram’s “almost nonexistent cooperation” with authorities, the criminal complaint highlighted its use for drug trafficking, fraud, and child pornography distribution. France charged Durov with complicity in enabling these activities after ignoring requests to aid authorities in going after the perpetrators.
• His lawyer called the accusations “absurd,” while Telegram asserted it abides by European laws and Durov “has nothing to hide.”

Durov, who is worth $15.5 billion, was released on bail of $5.6 million, pending a trial where he could face years in prison if he’s found guilty.

The case pits his free-speech absolutism against the French justice system, and it will be a first-of-its-kind attempt to prosecute the liability of a social media CEO for what goes down on a platform. Let’s look for an encryption key to this tangled case, which could shape Silicon Valley executives’ fortunes and your scrolling experience.

#FreeDurov?

While French President Emmanuel Macron denied that Durov was being politically targeted, many saw his arrest as an attack on Telegram’s free-expression-above-all-else ethos. The app has a reputation as a safe space for content of all stripes. It is frequently used by Russian and Iranian dissidents, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, as well as Russian soldiers and military propagandists.

• X owner Elon Musk, who also recently clashed with European authorities over social media misinformation moderation laws, called for Durov’s immediate release. Musk said it’s wise to limit his travel to countries with constitutional free speech protections.
• Washington Post columnist Megan McArdle argued that giving the government power to police content on social media can be a slippery slope to authoritarian censorship.
• Russia accused France of hypocrisy and said it would monitor the case, while the United Arab Emirates said it would reach out to French authorities (Durov is a citizen of both countries, which do not have great track records on freedom of expression).

Durov’s situation gained even more free-speech salience when Mark Zuckerberg told a Senate committee this week that he regretted Meta not pushing back more on pressure from the Biden administration to remove some Covid-related content from its platforms.

Crime cesspool

Telegram’s critics were quick to enter the chat and point out that it’s not just a magnet for free political expression, but also for heinous law-breaking. Upon Durov’s arrest, investigative journalist Christo Grozev sarcastically mused about what got him behind bars: “the undisturbed sale of hard drugs via telegram, or the undisturbed recruitment of freelancers for [Russian security service] GRU’s terrorist attacks across Europe.”

The Latvian publication Important Stories pointed out reasons for Telegram to be on the radar of European officials, noting that Germany and Spain have also investigated the platform.

• Telegram has long been used by militant organizations like the Islamic State group and Hamas for recruitment, and Important Stories noticed that IS is still active on the platform even after some of its channels were scrubbed in the aftermath of the Moscow concert hall attack this spring.
• The publication reports that Telegram is also a verdant ground for crypto scams, while terrorist organizations use its crypto wallets to fundraise.

The French authorities issued an arrest warrant for Durov after Telegram ignored requests to identify a user involved in a case of child pornography distribution on the platform, Politico reported. Telegram’s moderators anonymously told the BBC in 2022 that it doesn’t typically make a proactive effort to combat any type of pornography on its network, and the news organization recently found that Telegram does not collaborate with anti-child-pornography groups.

Black box

Few details are known about Telegram’s internal workings. According to the BBC, Telegram does not publish regular lists of content it has taken down, unlike other social media companies. And while it occasionally complies with government requests to crack down on illegal content (including instances of removing political content at the request of the Russian government), it’s been criticized for failing to publish consistent moderation rules.

Some have questioned Durov’s commitment to combating authoritarian censorship and how transparent he is about his relationship with authorities. While he has long publicly claimed to have fled Russia due to attempts by authorities to censor his social media platforms, Important Stories recently found that he took almost 50 trips to the country between 2015 and 2021.

It’s bigger than Telegram…GZero Media columnist Alex Kliment argues the case is about litigating the right balance between free speech and protecting people from the harms of criminal content circulation. The outcome could determine whether other social media CEOs are held liable for illegal content on their platforms and will influence how likely you are to stumble upon the internet’s dark underbelly.—SK

Place to be: The Oasis reunion tour

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.

Summer is unofficially over after this weekend. But instead of looking back in anger, you could always look forward to a historic music event 15 years in the making.

British rock icons and legendarily feuding brothers Liam and Noel Gallagher have finally mended fences (and/or ran out of money) to reunite Oasis for a UK summer tour next year. Tickets went on sale yesterday, and one industry expert believes the tour will gross ~400 million pounds ($526 million), with Liam and Noel pocketing ~50 million pounds apiece—and that was before the band announced three more dates.

• To put the popularity of Oasis into perspective, Taylor Swift grossed $13.6 million per show during the North American leg of Eras Tour.
• Oasis is predicted to more than double that during its 17 shows in Cardiff, Manchester, London, Edinburgh, and Dublin.

Business writer Eamonn Forde told the Guardian that Oasis stands to earn more money from these shows than they did in the entire 1990s.

Oasis is big business for everyone. Promoters, venues, ticket sellers, and local businesses can all expect to benefit. Hotel rates are already off the charts, with one X user showing how the prices in Dublin skyrocketed after the tour dates were announced. A trip to the UK to see Oasis will undoubtedly be pricey, but just remember that you won’t live forever.—DL

Crowd work

Last time we asked: “What is one thing you wish you could do for the first time again?” Here are our favorite responses.

• “Watch Vader reveal he was Luke’s father.”—Ryan from Manitowoc, WI
• “Many years ago I hit my only home run. I was so astonished I stood at home plate and watched it go (barely) over the fence. At age 79, I don’t think anyone will sign me now.”—Jim from Asheville, NC
• “Attend the 1988 Celtics/Pistons game at The Boston Garden. My husband and I were considering a relocation to Boston. His potential employer gave us tickets to the game to entice us to make the move. Entering The Boston Garden for the first time, experiencing the crowd, watching Larry Bird, Kevin McHale, Danny Ainge, et al, play against Bill Laimbeer, Isiah Thomas, and Darryl Dawkins was awe-inspiring.”—Linda from Scituate, MA

This week’s question

Taking inspo from the Timeleft app arranging dinners for strangers…how did you make friends when you moved to a new city?

Matty’s response to get the juices flowing: “When I moved to Chicago, I didn’t have a job and only had about $1,500 to my name, so I immediately forked over a fourth of that for improv classes. Great for making friends; horrible for my financial stability.”

Share your response here.