Six Ideas That Made Us Think

1. Bad Driver

The peerless car reviewer Dan Neil test drives the new McLaren through the sleepy provinces of France. He adores the car. The locals do not:  

The hunter-orange convertible ($381,558, as tested) passed through villages along the route with the subtlety of a tumbling boulder. Whatever the exotic car of the moment, people beg to know: What’s it feel like? For a shy person, it can be exhausting. Most people, it turns out, aren’t celebrating the good fortune of the white-haired dude rolling through town in his mango McLaren. Bonjour, Monsieur Dickweed!.  

2. Beware of Dog

Arstechnica checks in with psychologist Hal Herzog who is on “a lonely quest, convincing people that puppies and kittens may not actually be terrific for their physical and mental health." A prominent professor at a major public university once described Herzog as “a super curmudgeon” who is, in effect, “trying to prove that apple pie causes cancer.”

Plenty of people believe there’s something salubrious about caring for a pet, similar to eating veggies or exercising regularly. But, Herzog argues, the scientific evidence that pets can consistently make people healthier is, at best, inconclusive—and, at worst, has been used to mislead the American public

 The article reveals that most of the studies claiming to show the benefits of pets were funded by the Waltham Petcare Science Institute, a division of Mars, which owns numerous pet food and vet brands. “Nobody else was willing to put money into this field,” one expert admits.

3. Troll Wars

The latest installment of the Star Wars franchise, The Acolyte, has quickly garnered an astonishingly low 13% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes. Over at IMDb, 58% of its 66,000 reviews gave the streaming series one star. Paul Tassi at Forbes sniffs an orchestrated “review bombing” campaign.

The data here is absurd, showing a clear tidal wave of users racing to make it the lowest user-scored product in 50 years of Star Wars history, and it’s amassed quadruple the reviews of the longest-running Star Wars series...I have never in my life seen a more textbook definition of review bombing, and the way this has escalated into a protest metric, driven by forums and rage-farming YouTubers has gotten absolutely insane.

4. No Applause for Homer 

On his website, Reasonable Approximation, Phil Hazelden, offers an unabashed, non-academic review of Homer’s The Iliad – once described by The Guardian as “the first great book.” Hazelden finds it wanting.

We're often told that some characters are the best at something or other, but given little reason to believe it. Notably, Hector is supposedly the most fearsome Trojan fighter, but he doesn't live up to his reputation. He almost loses one-on-one against Ajax before the gods intervene to stop the battle; he gets badly injured fighting Ajax again; and even after being healed, he only takes down Patroclus after Patroclus has been badly wounded by someone else. And Achilles is supposed to be the fastest runner, but when he chases after Hector, he doesn't catch up until Hector stops running away. Lots of people are described as "favored by Zeus" but Zeus doesn't seem to do jack for them.

5. Ad Week in Cannes

 Cannes Lions is the Davos for the advertising world, where global creatives gather on the seaside to talk on panels and give each other awards. Podcaster Brian Morrissey files this dispatch:

Cannes is a place where four top CMOs or CEOs will talk to an audience of a dozen people. The programming itself is mostly innocuous. Cannes is where people tend to keep things at 30,000 feet and push some kind of soft messaging around purpose – or push some kind of data-enablement tool. The sessions rarely break new ground, usually serving as an excuse for convening. The real value for attendees is typically in the cocktail party following the session rather than the actual session. 

6. Chinese Lab Geek Theory

The Economist details how China has built itself into a scientific superpower by pumping out academic papers, building labs, and spending on R&D. But in the long report, one paragraph points out where Western countries retain a strong lead:

When it comes to basic, curiosity-driven research (rather than applied) China is still playing catch-up—the country publishes far fewer papers than America in the two most prestigious science journals, Nature and Science. This may partly explain why China seems to punch below its weight in the discovery of completely new technologies. Basic research is particularly scant within Chinese companies, creating a gap between the scientists making discoveries and the industries that could end up using them. 

Websites Worth Reading

Collecting Memories: New Exhibit at Library of Congress

What Lincoln Read: Bedside books from Honest Abe

TikTok as News Service: New data from Pew

Feeds We Follow

Thread on French elections: French Politics

@GaryParrishCBS: Reggie Jackson on Baseball History

@jamesbmeigs: Jim Meigs, science writer