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

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ANIMAL CONTROL: A Washington woman called 911 after 100 raccoons descended onto her lawn in broad daylight. The operator suggested that they are definitely planning something…but what?

PEE POLICE: For six years, a cloaked crusader has been terrorizing the ritzy California town of Pasadena by leaving bottles of human urine on top of a utility box after it gets dark. The bandit is still out there right now, chugging liters upon liters of water in preparation for nightfall.

NFL KICKER: The athletes who put the foot in football have gotten incredibly good at kicking the ball through the uprights. So far this NFL season, about 29% of field goal attempts have been from 50+ yards, and an astonishing 76% of those have gone in, per the WSJ. Both of those stats have shattered previous records.

Personal

BOT WITH IMPECCABLE CREDENTIALS: The AI Hawk’s Auto Jobs Applier can apply for 17 jobs in an hour, and some tech-savvy job hopefuls have it running 24/7 to submit hundreds of applications. Unfortunately, it only recognizes roles with titles like “Chief Dream Alchemist” and “Wizard of Aha Moments.”

HAVE U SEEN THIS CAN: A technician at a museum in the Netherlands accidentally threw away an art piece that looked like two empty beer cans thinking he was cleaning up garbage. The cans were recovered from the trash and promptly tossed in recycling.

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IT’S-A ME…SNOOZE: Nintendo released its latest piece of hardware, Alarmo, a $100 alarm clock that will make you feel like you’re back in a dorm room, begging your roommate to put headphones on.

SNACK W/LORE: Nutter Butter’s weird TikToks are the most recent chaotic social media presence in a long line of fast-food clapbacks and mascot humor. Oreo could never.

WEATHER APP THAT WORKS: As if there wasn’t enough wacky weather to be concerned about, a glitch on the BBC Weather app on Thursday led to forecasts such as 832-degree Fahrenheit temperatures in Brazil and 13,000 mph winds in Chicago. It was almost believable.—MM

Image of the week

Ryan Salame / LinkedIn

Ryan Salame, the former co-CEO of FTX Digital Markets, isn’t letting a seven-year prison sentence for fraud prevent him from letting people know he will remain on the grindset. On Thursday, he took to LinkedIn to announce his new position as “Inmate” at medium-security prison FCI Cumberland. It’s one of the few entry-level positions that doesn’t really require any experience.

Look for Salame to update his LinkedIn in the coming years to let us know what working in the mess hall taught him about B2B sales, how hard it was for him to fire the first person from his startup gang, and how cigarettes are the new crypto.—DL

Dept. of Progress

Hey Arnold!/Paramount Global

Here are some illuminating scientific discoveries from the week to help you live better and maybe even live the longest possible life any human can live.

We may be nearing our maximum lifespans. Bryan Johnson might consider this a personal challenge, but the upper limit of human life expectancy is leveling out, according to a new study published in the journal Nature Aging. Back in 1990, life-extending tech and health measures were increasing the average global lifespan by about 2.5 years per decade, but that dropped to 1.5 years per decade in the 2010s and closer to zero in the US, where there are more drug overdoses, shootings, and medical care inequities. Only about 1 in 50 Americans lived to 100 in 2019, compared to 1 in 20 people in Japan. And technology may not be able to elongate our lives much more than it already has, the study suggests.

How to tell if an elephant is a righty or a lefty. It’s all about the wrinkles: Like with our pencil-holding preferences, elephants also have a favorite side that they’ll bend their trunk toward when scooping up items. And while it tends to be a 50/50 split within herds, you can determine an individual elephant’s right-or-left-trunkedness based on the side that has more wrinkles and whiskers, according to researchers in Berlin. Since wrinkles are thought to make trunks more flexible (like an accordion), whichever side an elephant bends toward more has developed more wrinkles. It’ll also have more whiskers than the non-dominant trunk side, which looks more worn down from scraping against the ground more frequently, kind of like the knuckles of a gripped fist.

‍ Our kidneys could make Mars travel difficult. Something painful is busting out of astronauts’ chests bladders: kidney stones, which have found prime conditions within extraterrestrial travelers, according to new research published in Nature Communications. Kidney stones are surprisingly common in astronauts (even after they’re back on Earth), which may be because of the lasting impact of cosmic radiation forming an “unholy alliance” with microgravity, according to the lead researcher of the study. Low gravity makes it harder for kidneys to properly filter out minerals that can build up into stones, and makes them more sensitive to radiation, which—unlike gravitational changes—can cause permanent damage. To carry out longer space missions like voyages to Mars safely, the researchers say spacecraft will need stronger radiation shields.—ML

Can an app solve loneliness?

Narcos/Netflix

It can be tough to make adult friends ever since the disappearance of the “free hugs” sign, but the tech industry is desperate to convince you it can help. Last month, the Chicago-based startup Pie announced it raised $11.5 million on its “mission to fight social isolation” by helping you make friends through an app of curated events around the city, like “Dudes Getting Pancakes” and silent book clubs.

The startup used the first three slides of its pitch deck to dive into the “loneliness epidemic,” pointing to a warning from US Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy last year that isolation among adults is a public health crisis.

Now an avalanche of apps think they can address that crisis, throwing loneliness stats into their mission statements and telling you that—despite many of them having news feeds and DM functions—they are totally not like the social media apps you’re trying to escape.

• Timeleft, which is available in 60 countries and dozens of major US cities, uses an algorithm to place you in a dinner reservation with a group of strangers who have similar feelings about politically correct jokes.
• The Breakfast pairs you with someone to have deep conversations over eggs Benedict.
• Geneva, which was recently acquired by Bumble, promises to connect you with new people in your city.
• Kndrd wants to make it easier to grab a spontaneous drink after work, claiming there is currently “no way to find the same serendipitous social interactions we had in colleges or town squares.”

It’s true that there are fewer opportunities to gather in person today, especially without a town crier announcing updates to the village witch list. But is relying on an app the way to fix that? These platforms primarily focus on a very particular type of user: city-dwelling, middle-to-higher income young people who will buy a drink or two—the same group that most activities in cities already cater to.

• While most apps haven’t been around long enough to definitively say whether or not they’re creating deep and lasting connections, some users report they can be a lifeline when moving to a new city or expanding their circles.
• And some are self-organizing outside the apps, creating Discord channels or other virtual groups to offer a sense of community for its members.

But…since many of the apps are riding a big wave of venture capital investments, or are actively courting investors, they’ll need to figure out how to make money and grow at VC-expected speeds. That could mean more ads, more revenue streams (Pie plans to expand into the ticketing business, for instance), and other things that decidedly aren’t “meeting people.”

Big picture: Young people, especially new transplants, appear willing to give these apps a try. In February, Kndrd said it had a waitlist of over 6,000 in New York, while Timeleft boasts that it has already brought 60,000 strangers together in six months. But if they have the same trajectory as the Facebooks and Twitters that came before them, all users may be able to do is enjoy a nice meal with some strangers before the feeds get pumped full of so many ads and influencers that they become isolating again, like the very apps that have contributed to the IRL loneliness epidemic in the first place.—MM

Place to be: The Chicago Marathon

Michael Reaves/Getty Images

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.

Today marks a secondary reason why people join a run club: The prestigious Chicago Marathon, one of the world’s six marathon “majors,” is taking place. Organizers expect a record number of participants, 50,000+ this year, and there’s no way to know how many have signed up for the love of running or because this could improve their odds of meeting someone special.

No matter your motivation, you may as well leave your GPS watch at home: Chicago’s marathon, which weaves through the city’s tall buildings, is notorious for making those watches useless.

• If your GPS malfunctions in Chicago, you could end up in one of the city’s more undesirable locations, like a place that sells deep dish pizza or a White Sox game.
• The solution is simple: a stopwatch. If tracking your splits over 26.2 miles is too much to memorize, bring a pen and write your times on your arm (and after the race, use it to write down the phone number of a fellow runner you met at an after-party).

No really, there are after-parties. A marathon bib can get you access to discounts on meals, desserts, coffee, and beer at numerous Chicago hotspots. Venteux, for example, offers a free half-dozen oysters and 50% off a post-race meal to runners.

One man’s personal marathon for charity: Lincoln Park resident Matt Brusich ran 26.2 miles yesterday but did so by circling his block 79 times to raise money for Lincoln Park Community Services and the neighborhood’s homeless community. In the end, his GPS didn’t even matter.—DL

Crowd work

Last Sunday we asked: What would you do with $6.6 billion (the amount raised by OpenAI)? Here are a few of our favorite answers:

• “I would buy every shoe and clothing item that Carrie Bradshaw is seen wearing or drooling over in Sex and the City. That ought to debunk she survived off her columnist’s salary in New York City.”—Claire from Minneapolis, MN
• “Go to McDonald’s (or another place with a self-order kiosk) and order thousands of burgers. See at what point they tell me the order can’t be completed. Repeat until I find the maximum number of burgers McDonald’s can make for me until they call the police.”—October from Utah
• “A nationwide passive-aggressive billboard campaign, e.g. ‘You WOULD be in the left lane,’ ‘Weaving through traffic? Cool guy.’”—Jamie from Lewisburg, PA
• “Road repairs in our county with no red tape. Just fix them all.”—Sara from Wisconsin
• “471,428,571 copies of Shrek 3 ON BLU-RAY.”—Parker from Arizona

This week’s question

What holiday should we make a bigger deal about?

Matty’s answer to get the juices flowing: Arbor Day. Aside from it originating in Nebraska (where I’m from), it’s a holiday dedicated to planting beautiful trees. We should all get the day off work to plant trees!

Share your response here.