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

Careers

ISO FLAMIN’ HOT CHEF: The new restaurant Doritos After Dark, which opened at LA’s Crypto.com Arena, serves dishes and drinks that elevate the corn chip. The menu includes no-brainers like loaded nachos as well as California rolls dusted with flamin’ hot crumbles and a nacho cheese michelada.

LASER GUARD: The Jonas Brothers had to pause their concert in Prague this week because someone was pointing a laser pointer at Nick Jonas. In response, the EU passed a law making it illegal to harass the most talented member of any music group.

Personal

CHECK UR BORDEAUX: Police in Paris, Turin, and Milan arrested six individuals suspected of running a fraudulent wine ring, selling fake vintage wine for as much as $13,500 a bottle. Some crime just doesn’t Chardonn-pay.

LEAF-PEEPER-PALOOZA: A flood of foliage enthusiasts clogged up New Hampshire hiking paths last weekend, leading to “chaos,” according to one witness. Most of the peepers were unprepared for the difficult terrain on the trails and arrived without their leaf-tracing pads.

LOAN 4 GOLF TICKETS: Golf fans blasted the Ryder Cup after the tournament announced that tickets for next year’s event on Long Island would cost nearly $750 a piece for match days. Tickets include unlimited food and non-alcoholic beverages, which only feels worth it if there’s a baked potato bar.

For sale

BUTTERFINGER 2.0: The only candy bar able to plaster itself to every single tooth will become even stickier. Parent company Ferrero said it will sell a limited-edition Butterfinger with a salted caramel coating instead of milk chocolate, the first flavor change to the candy in almost a decade.

TALKING DOG: A startup has created a $595 dog collar it claims will help your pet talk to you. It measures your dog’s vitals and uses AI to form sentences. The product is called Shazam, and just like the song discovery app, it will be humiliating to witness someone using it.—MM

Photo of the week

Dog people: Look away.

Tokyo’s Kagurazaka Bakeneko Festival is a cat parade that has taken place annually about two weeks before Halloween since 2010. It features real felines and people dressed as cats, but doesn’t include a haunting James Corden. If you don’t have a costume, fear not—there are makeup artists on hand, and you can always rent a cat kimono for ¥2,750 (~$18 USD).

Why cats? Japanese culture is like many others that once believed cats had mystical powers (some cat owners today still do). Bakenko translates to “demon cat” or “changed cat,” and is believed to represent a supernatural being in the form of a cat. The festival takes place in the neighborhood of Kagurazaka because Natsume Soseki, the author of the novel I Am Cat, lived in the area.—DL

Dept. of Progress

Here are some illuminating scientific discoveries from the week to help you live better and maybe even assure your colleague that it’s OK they used the wrong “their” in an email.

Standing desks aren’t helping your health much. Well, that made us feel good about ourselves while it lasted—but standing at your computer doesn’t make your lifestyle any less sedentary, and doing it for two or more hours per day could even increase risks of swollen or clotted veins in the legs, according to a new study of UK adults. Researchers found that standing more doesn’t do anything to boost heart health or reduce the risk of stroke. Instead, they recommended the age-old tip for feeling good: Move your body throughout the day—go for a walk, opt for the stairs, take quick breaks from your desk, and exercise.

Queen bees prefer contaminated soil. Because who wants a healthy situation(ship) when you can be in something toxic? To scientists’ dismay, bumblebee queens appear to like hibernating in pesticide-filled soil more than chemical-free dirt, according to a new paper published in the journal Science of The Total Environment. When presented with a range of burrowing choices with varying levels of pesticides, the vast majority of the queens went for contaminated soil—especially the highest-concentration samples. The researchers called the results “very surprising” and “terrifying.” They don’t yet know why bees like pesticide-treated soil, and they’re concerned that exposure could weaken future bee colonies.

Fellas, is it unmanly to forgive a coworker? Researchers are trying to crack a correlation between men’s views on their own masculinity and their willingness to forgive colleagues’ mistakes. In a study of 800+ people, UC Riverside researchers found that the more worried men are about appearing “manly,” the less likely they are to give someone a pass for botching a task, because they tend to view forgiveness as a feminine trait. They also noticed that masculinity-concerned guys are more likely to retaliate against a coworker who makes a mistake. These guys became more forgiving after being asked in the study to recall just two experiences that affirmed their manhood. Interestingly, men asked to list 10 such instances struggled to remember that many and didn’t become more forgiving.—ML

Why WordPress’s CEO is spooking the internet

The company that invented blogging is on the verge of self-destruction. Over the last month, internal drama at WordPress has spilled into the public domain, causing chaos for a large portion of the internet that relies on its open-source technology.

WordPress is a content management system that allows people with no coding experience to run a website. It's immensely popular, hosting 43% of all websites in the world, including the ones from NASA, the White House, and Harvard University. It’s often held up as a shining example of the internet’s OG promise to democratize information by allowing developers to collaborate, study, use, and distribute software with full transparency.

It’s also experiencing a total meltdown stemming from a power struggle between its founder and its largest competitor, a feud that has the potential to damage—or at least meaningfully alter—the infrastructure of the internet.

Meet Matt Mullenweg

He’s the founder of WordPress as well as its owner, Automattic, which is a website operator that users pay to service ads, manage security, and do other back-end website management. Worth $7.5 billion in 2021, Automattic has one competitor, called WP Engine (WPE). And in September, Mullenweg went after it:

• He called it a “cancer to WordPress,” and accused the company of extracting hundreds of millions of dollars from his platform.
• After exchanging cease and desist letters with WPE, Mullenweg banned WPE from accessing WordPress, a move that rendered numerous websites unusable and vulnerable to cyberattacks. (WordPress temporarily lifted the ban for four days before reinstating it.)

On October 3, WPE sued Automattic and Mullenweg, alleging abuse of power. WPE maintains that Automattic and Mullenweg, by taking away WPE’s access, reneged on their promises to run WordPress open-source projects without constraints. The same day, 159 employees left WordPress after Mullenweg offered anyone who disagreed with his decisions to take a severance package and walk out. Of that group, 80% had worked on Automattic/WordPress.

The fight over open source

At the crux of this internet beef is that Automattic/Mullenweg sees WPE as a leech: WPE profits off of WordPress technology but doesn’t contribute to any of its research and development, according to a blog post written by Mullenweg.

• To address “confusion” over what WordPress actually is, Mullenweg proposed changes to the trademark.
• He said that using “WP” in its name confuses people, allowing WPE to make “billions of revenue on top of WordPress.”
• Because of this, Automattic/Mullenweg asked WPE to hand over 8% of its annual revenue.

Such a request, which was part of a larger set of non-negotiable conditions outlined by Automattic, has prompted scrutiny from prominent software developers. David Hansson, the creator of influential web-app platform Ruby on Rails, called it a “violation of general open source ideals.”

Mullenweg’s weaponization of WordPress’s open source platform has sparked a fury among other software developers, who fear that their domains could be taken away at any time. Automattic continues to change the rules of its trademark, and the developer community hasn’t received clarification on whether they can or cannot use the term “WordPress.”

Zoom out: Mullenweg’s complaints echo gripes from other open source platforms being scraped by large AI systems for training. Reddit, for example, began charging for access to its application programming interface (API) last year, resulting in massive backlash and boycotts from Redditors who found the decision to be against the ethos of open source. Mullenweg, and Automattic, face a similar reckoning: allow other entities, like WPE, to profit off of WordPress’s open source model, or change the governance of the model to only benefit the originator, foregoing its original purpose. The future of 43% of the internet is at stake.—CC

Place to be: The Grand Egyptian Museum

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.

When the Grand Egyptian Museum fully opens, it’ll take more than one night to enjoy everything it has to offer: It will be the largest museum in the world devoted to one civilization.

For now, you’ll have to settle for this week’s soft opening that allows visitors to explore 12 sprawling galleries about a mile north of the Great Pyramids of Giza outside of Cairo. At full capacity, the museum will contain 100,000 objects from 700,000 years of ancient Egyptian history on 120 acres of land—the equivalent of 80 American football fields.

But what’s available now is still very impressive.

• The six-story grand staircase, which is lined with statues of ancient Egypt’s most famous rulers, leads to the top of the museum that features a view of the nearby pyramids.
• Each of the 12 halls and their thousands of artifacts not only offer a glimpse into the lives of kings and queens, but also highlight how ordinary people lived.

The King Tutankhamun exhibit, which contains Egypt’s most famous historical artifacts and includes the boy king’s treasures, won’t go on display until fighting in the Middle East subsides, officials told NBC News.

Worth the wait: The museum is a billion-dollar endeavor that was originally planned for a 2012 opening, but has dealt with delays caused by the Arab Spring in the early 2010s and the Covid-19 pandemic. The most recent holdup is believed to be a product of the country’s struggling economy: The Egyptian pound has depreciated by 600% since 2014.—DL

Crowd work

Last Sunday we asked: What holiday should we make a bigger deal about? Here are a few of our favorite answers:

• “Old Rock Day: January 7. Celebrate, acknowledge, and learn about old rocks and fossils by taking a walk in the park and collecting rocks that look interesting. Pick up a book about fossils from your local library. Also, did you know petrology is a branch of geology that is focused on the composition, structure, and origins of rocks? Well, now you do.”—Mo from New Jersey
• “International Jazz Day: April 30. Let’s take a break, kick back, and enjoy very cool music.”—Roger from Christchurch, New Zealand
• “You mean to tell me there’s a clairvoyant groundhog named Punxsutawney Phil who predicts the length of our seasons and we don’t make a big deal of it? C’mon. Groundhog Day is so slept on. I want a countdown to Phil’s emergence like when the ball drops for the new year. I want outlandish bets to be made and traditions to center around this four-legged, fuzzy medium.”—Rea from Wilmington, NC
• “Baba Marta is a Bulgarian holiday that I fell in love with during my Peace Corps service there. March 1, you give everyone you know bracelets that they cannot take off until spring arrives and they see a flowering tree. Then they hang their bracelet on the tree for good luck!”—Adrienne from New York City

This week’s question

What popular product from the past will get a second-life resurgence and why?

Matty’s answer to get the juices flowing: I have recently been feeling such a strong urge to buy an iPod Nano in a bright color. For the same reason some people are leaning into “dumb phones,” I think people are down to take a walk and bump some Sheryl Crow without being tempted by Instagram.

Share your response here.

✢ A Note From Pendulum

*Disclaimer: Based on preclinical studies.