Robots Run Faster Than Humans Now

Wonderwall and Other Wonders

EDITOR’S WORDS There is only one official Shaolin kung-fu center in all Shanghai and it happens to be very close to where we live. So we sent our boy to study kung-fu for a few years before elementary school. Along with other boys, he learned how to kick, fight, and flip, mixed with meditation and Chinese calligraphy. It was a good vibe there. He was taught by Master Yan’An, a 34-gen secular disciple of Shaolin . Yan’An played an active role in spreading Shaolin kung-fu globally. Our timelines actually overlapped in Stanford, though we didn’t know each other then. Yan’An speaks fluent English. Many expats in Shanghai send their kids to his class. In the hot summer of 2025, a new disciple began his study under Master Yan’An. He shaved his head just like Yan’An. He loved Chinese culture and played good basketball during kung-fu breaks. He is also extremely tall. His name is Victor Wembanyama, the French basketball superstar that just carried San Antonio Spurs into the NBA Finals. So by Chinese way of teaching, Wembanyama is a junior fellow disciple to my son, who began a few years earlier than him under the same master. So I am the father of the senior fellow disciple to Wembanyama. You feel me? TECH Pokemon [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/wonderwall-and-other-wonders/pokemon.jpg] A Dutch newspaper, Trouw, reported that data from the hit phone game Pokémon Go may have ended up helping build technology for the military. The game launched in 2016, and in 2021 it began rewarding players for using their phone cameras to scan real-world spots like statues, parks, and buildings. Players did this billions of times. The company behind the game, Niantic, used those scans to train an artificial-intelligence system that figures out exactly where a camera is by what it sees, useful when GPS signals are blocked. Late last year, the part of the company that owns that technology partnered with a US defense firm to put similar navigation into drones and robots. Niantic says the game’s data is not part of the military deal and that players chose to scan. But experts told Trouw the gamers had unknowingly helped a system that could one day guide military machines. Offside [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/wonderwall-and-other-wonders/offside.jpg] At the 2026 World Cup, a machine helps decide one of soccer’s trickiest calls: offside. The official ball carries a sensor that records the exact instant it is kicked, and cameras track 3D models of every player, built from a one-second body scan taken before the match. Together they work out who was past the last defender the moment the ball was struck, and now whisper the verdict straight into the referee’s earpiece in seconds, a job that used to cause long, frustrating delays. The system is deliberately limited: it measures position, which is a fact, but it does not judge whether an offside player interfered with the play, which is an opinion. That call still belongs to the human referee. But the machine is now sharp enough to flag a player ahead by just 10 centimeters, a hand’s width, one so small it is fair to wonder whether it is still an offside that matters. GLOBAL phones [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/wonderwall-and-other-wonders/phones.jpg] For years, wealthy countries raced to put screens in front of children, packing classrooms with tablets and letting phones go everywhere. Now some are hitting the brakes. In June, the United Kingdom announced it will ban social media apps like TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat for everyone under 16, starting in 2027, saying the apps are designed to be addictive and are making kids unhappy. Sweden, once one of the most tech-forward nations on Earth, is going back to books: from this autumn, schools will collect phones from students aged 7 to 16 each morning, and the government is spending hundreds of millions on printed textbooks. The trigger was alarming evidence that reading and writing skills had slipped as screen time climbed. Both countries are following Australia, which banned under-16s from social media in 2025. Fake [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/wonderwall-and-other-wonders/fake.jpg] For nearly 17 years, Geoffrey Wall sat in the captain’s seat of Air Canada jets, commanding more than 900 flights and carrying tens of thousands of passengers across Canada and the world. The flying was real. The license, police say, was fake. Wall, 59, was a fully trained pilot with a valid commercial license, but when he was promoted to captain in 2009 he allegedly never earned the higher airline transport license that Canadian law requires to command large airliners. Instead, investigators say, he forged the documents and fooled both his airline and the country’s aviation regulator for years. The story has drawn comparisons to the Steven Spielberg film “Catch Me If You Can,” in which a young con artist talks his way into a pilot’s uniform. Wall’s deception only unravelled after he had already retired, having earned nearly three million Canadian dollars as a captain. He now faces seven criminal charges, including fraud and forgery. Dong Lu [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/wonderwall-and-other-wonders/donglu.JPG] A team of Chinese schoolkids just did something no Asian team had ever done. On June 2, a U12 squad called the China Football Kids won the SIGISMONDI Cup in Italy, a tournament so respected that people call it the “little World Cup” for that age group. They beat the academy teams of European clubs one after another, going seven games without a loss and scoring 21 goals while conceding only 2. In the final they drew 1-1 with the youth side of Everton, an English Premier League club, then won 5-4 on penalties. In 37 years of the tournament, no team from outside Europe had ever won it. What makes the win stand out is the backdrop. The team’s coach, Dong Lu, a former TV commentator, built this youth program himself over nine years, and his players are ordinary students who train mostly on weekends and holidays. In the mean while, China’s senior men’s team is one of the weakest in the world: it has reached the World Cup only once, in 2002, and remains the only country in the group-stage era to leave a World Cup with no points and no goals at all. Japanese [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/wonderwall-and-other-wonders/japan.jpg] After Japan’s World Cup match against the Netherlands in Texas, hundreds of fans did something unusual: instead of heading for the exits, they pulled out blue plastic bags and started picking up trash, leaving their section of the stadium spotless. The players cleaned their locker room too. Japanese supporters have done this at every World Cup since their first one in 1998, and it has become their signature around the world. The habit starts in school, where Japanese children spend a few minutes each day tidying their own classrooms and hallways. One fan explained the thinking behind it: you should leave a place cleaner than you found it. ECONOMY & FINANCE Labubu [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/wonderwall-and-other-wonders/labubu.jpg] China’s national team didn’t qualify for the 2026 World Cup, but almost everything else about the tournament has a Chinese fingerprint on it. The merchandise tells the story: roughly 70 percent of World Cup flags, jerseys, scarves, and toys come from a single Chinese trading city, Yiwu. Four of FIFA’s 16 top global sponsors are Chinese companies. Lenovo runs the tournament’s AI and computing systems, and Hisense supplies the giant screens referees use to check replays. Getting fans to the stadiums in Mexico is largely a Chinese job too: the bus maker Yutong built about 85 percent of Mexico City’s new fleet, including 26-meter electric “land trains” that carry 270 passengers at once. Even the event’s viral collectible, the fuzzy Labubu dolls that danced at the opening ceremony, comes from a Chinese toymaker. None of this is sudden: Chinese factories have supplied World Cup goods since 1994, but they have climbed from stitching jerseys to running the tournament’s referee screens and AI. NATURE & ENVIRONMENT iceberg [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/wonderwall-and-other-wonders/iceberg.JPG] Antarctica has been making news at both ends of its ice. Iceberg A-23A, which broke off the continent in 1986, was once the largest on Earth, about 4,000 square kilometers, roughly twice the size of Luxembourg, and weighing nearly a trillion tons. It was so heavy it got stuck on the seafloor and barely moved for over 30 years. In 2020 it finally floated free, then spent months trapped in a spinning column of water before drifting north toward South Georgia, an island packed with penguins and seals that scientists feared it might block. It missed, and by spring 2026, after nearly 40 years, it had melted away and was gone. Around the same time, in the middle of the Antarctic winter, a research station on the peninsula recorded 15.4°C on June 6, roughly 20°C above normal, warm enough that rain fell on glaciers and bare ground showed through the snow. Scientists watch both as signs of a warming continent. Super El Nino [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/wonderwall-and-other-wonders/elnino.jpg] A weather pattern called El Niño is building in the Pacific Ocean, and this one could be the strongest in about 150 years. El Niño starts when the winds that normally push warm water toward Asia weaken, letting a vast pool of warm water spread east across the Pacific toward South America. That heat throws the world’s weather out of balance: floods in some places, droughts in others, failed harvests, more wildfires, and global temperatures pushed higher. The last strong El Niño helped make 2024 the hottest year ever recorded. This one is forming over water near the equator that hasn’t been this warm since 1877, and the very strongest events like it have a nickname: a “super” El Niño. SCIENCE Solstice [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/wonderwall-and-other-wonders/solstice.jpg] On June 21 the Earth reaches the summer solstice, the longest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere and the astronomical start of summer. It happens because Earth spins on a tilted axis, leaning about 23.5 degrees. On the solstice the North Pole points as far toward the Sun as it ever does, so the Sun climbs higher in the sky and stays up longer. The word comes from the Latin for “Sun standing still,” because around this date the Sun’s path barely shifts for a few days. South of the equator it is the opposite: their shortest day. MATH Panini [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/wonderwall-and-other-wonders/panini.jpg] Before the World Cup even kicks off, millions of fans chase a different prize: filling a Panini sticker album. The Italian company has made one for every World Cup since 1970, a booklet with an empty numbered slot for every team and player. You fill it using sealed packets of stickers, and the catch is that you can’t see what’s inside until you open them. This year’s album is the biggest ever, with 980 stickers to collect. Because every packet is random, you can’t simply buy 980 and finish. Early on, almost every sticker is new. But near the end, when you need just 10 more, each random sticker has only a 10-in-980 chance of being one you’re missing, so you have to buy about 98 stickers just to land one of them. Adding up that growing struggle across all 980 slots, completing the album alone takes around 7,300 stickers. That is why swapping your doubles with friends is not just fun but the smartest way to finish. Possession [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/wonderwall-and-other-wonders/possession.jpg] Soccer keeps detailed statistics, and one of the most watched is possession: the share of the game a team spends with the ball. You might assume the team that hogs the ball wins. The 2026 World Cup keeps proving otherwise. Portugal held the ball for 75 percent of their match against DR Congo, the highest possession of any team in the tournament, and still only drew 1-1. Turkey was even more striking. Against Paraguay they had nearly 80 percent of the ball and fired off 32 shots to Paraguay’s 7, yet lost 1-0 and were knocked out. High possession can quietly measure desperation, not dominance, a team passing endlessly because nothing else is working. LIFESTYLE, ENTERTAINMENT & CULTURE Wonderwall [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/wonderwall-and-other-wonders/wonderwall.jpg] After England beat Croatia 4-2 in their opening World Cup match in Dallas, the most memorable moment came once the final whistle had blown. The players walked over to thank their fans, and the stadium began to play “Wonderwall,” the 1995 song by the British rock band Oasis. Thousands of England supporters sang it back to the team at full volume. The players stopped and stared, visibly moved; some, like Jude Bellingham and Harry Kane, were caught on camera mouthing the words along with the crowd. The clip went viral, and Oasis and singer Liam Gallagher both reshared it on their own accounts. The song isn’t an official anthem. England, like every team, submitted a playlist of tunes to be played at their matches, and “Wonderwall” was chosen after talking with fan groups. It drew a far bigger reaction than the other classics, and some are now calling it England’s unofficial song of the tournament. SPORTS Brunson [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/wonderwall-and-other-wonders/brunson.jpg] [Basketball] The New York Knicks are NBA champions for the first time since 1973, closing out the San Antonio Spurs 94-90 in Game 5 to win the Finals four games to one. The series was a nerve-shredder. Three of the Knicks’ four wins came by a single possession, and the pattern was almost cruel to San Antonio: the Spurs would build a lead, control the tempo, and then watch it evaporate in the fourth quarter. Game 5 was the template. New York scored just 13 points in the first quarter and trailed most of the night before erupting for 29 in the final period to steal it. Jalen Brunson was the closer all series, pouring in 45 points in the clincher. Victor Wembanyama, San Antonio’s brilliant young giant, gave everything with 19 points, 14 rebounds, and 5 blocks, but the Knicks answered every time, and after 53 years the title belongs to New York again. Messi [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/wonderwall-and-other-wonders/messi.jpg] [Soccer] Lionel Messi is 38 years old, and he is not finished rewriting the record books. In Argentina’s opening match of the 2026 World Cup, a 3-0 win over Algeria, Messi scored all three goals. The hat-trick carried him to 16 World Cup goals in total, tying Miroslav Klose of Germany for the most ever scored by any man in the tournament’s history. The night set other marks too. By simply walking onto the field, Messi became the first man to play in six different World Cups, a span reaching back to 2006. And at 38, he became the oldest player ever to score a hat-trick at a World Cup, taking that record from his longtime rival Cristiano Ronaldo. The crowd of nearly 70,000 rose to its feet as he left the pitch, saluting a player chasing history at an age when most have long retired. Haaland [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/wonderwall-and-other-wonders/haaland.jpg] [Soccer] The expanded 48-team World Cup has packed the past week with goals. Brazil, the record five-time champions, looked sharp in a 3-0 win over tournament debutants Haiti, scoring all three goals in the first half. Their star winger Vinícius Junior was involved in every one of them, capping a dazzling individual display. France, the team Argentina beat in the 2022 final, opened with a 3-1 victory over Senegal, with superstar Kylian Mbappé scoring twice. Germany, another former winner, had a tougher time but edged Ivory Coast 2-1. The biggest story among the newcomers was Norway, in their first World Cup since 1998. Their giant striker Erling Haaland, one of the most feared scorers in the world but long denied a World Cup stage, finally got his chance and scored twice in a 4-1 win over Iraq. Elsewhere the goals flowed: the Netherlands thumped Sweden 5-1, Canada crushed Qatar 6-0, and hosts the United States beat Australia 2-0. Cycling [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/wonderwall-and-other-wonders/cycling.JPG] [Cycling] Belgian cyclist Liam Slock had been a professional for nearly four years without a single win. On June 14 at the GP Gippingen in Switzerland, he finally held off a strong group, including 2020 Olympic champion Richard Carapaz, in the final 200 meters and lifted his arms to celebrate his first victory. Then it went wrong. A gust of wind caught his front wheel the moment he let go of the handlebars, and he crashed and slid across the finish line on his shoulder. He still won, because his bike crossed first, but the embarrassing photo of him sprawled on the road instantly became an internet meme. “Luckily the win came with it,” Slock said, “otherwise this would probably have been the fail of the year.” THIS DAY IN HISTORY Ferris [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/wonderwall-and-other-wonders/ferris.jpg] When the Eiffel Tower wowed crowds at the 1889 Paris world’s fair, organizers of Chicago’s 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition wanted something to top it. A young engineer named George Ferris answered with the very first Ferris wheel, a giant steel wheel 264 feet tall that opened on June 21, 1893. It carried 36 cars, each holding up to 60 people, so more than 2,000 riders could turn through the sky at once. From the top they could see across Lake Michigan, higher than many had ever been. Over 1.4 million people paid 50 cents for a ride that summer. The original was torn down for scrap in 1906, but Ferris’s idea spread everywhere: today Ferris wheels turn at fairs and city waterfronts around the world, from Chicago’s Navy Pier to the 820-foot Ain Dubai, the tallest yet. ART OF THE WEEK Sunday [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/wonderwall-and-other-wonders/sunday.jpg] Stand far back from this painting and you see a calm scene: well-dressed Parisians relaxing by a river on a Sunday afternoon, with parasols, a sailboat, and even a small monkey on a leash. Step close, and the people dissolve into millions of tiny dots of pure color. That was the whole idea. Georges Seurat, a young French artist, finished A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte in 1886, when he was 26. Instead of mixing paint on a palette, he placed dots of separate colors side by side and let the viewer’s eye blend them, a method he based on the science of how we see. He believed dots of pure blue and yellow would look brighter than green mixed on a brush. The painting is about seven by ten feet and took him two years. His careful, scientific technique earned a name, pointillism, and launched a new movement called Neo-Impressionism. FUNNY World Cup map [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/wonderwall-and-other-wonders/map.jpg] All the countries that have won the World Cup fall into this triangle. Dragon Ball [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/wonderwall-and-other-wonders/dragonball.jpg] Two men dressed as Vegeta and Goku from “Dragon Ball” for the Japan vs Tunisia World Cup match. Respect. ---------------------------------------- PREVIOUS ISSUES ---------------------------------------- June 13, 2026, Who Will Win the 2026 World Cup? [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/who-will-win-2026-world-cup] June 07, 2026, Wear Adidas to Handle Important Business in the City [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/wear-adidas-to-handle-important-business-in-the-city] May 31, 2026, Countdown to World Cup [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/countdown-to-world-cup] ---------------------------------------- Thanks for reading! If you enjoy this newsletter, please share it with friends who might also find it interesting and refreshing, if not for themselves, at least for their kids.

Who Will Win the 2026 World Cup?

EDITOR’S WORDS When I was young, Italy’s Series A was watched by every soccer fan in China. The Dutch trio of Van Basten, Gullit, and Rijkaard carried AC Milan; and the German trio of Matthaus, Brehme, and Klinsmann anchored Inter Milan. Videos were fuzzy and TV screens were small, but we watched very game we could find. When I studied and lived in Singapore, Manchester United dominated England’s Premier League in every fashion. Keane, Beckham, Giggs, Scholes, Cole, Yorke, Schmeichel became part of the collective memory of my generation, before corporate jobs overtook our lives and consumed us. When I went on several ventures in Beijing, La Liga from Spain became the most popular league in the world, with an epic rivalry between Real Madrid and Barcelona, featuring the incomparable Ronaldo and Messi. I was too busy chasing other dreams to watch soccer. As my 10-year old boy put on his 10-Messi jersey today, I was ready to enjoy a blissful summer of good old fashion World Cup. Circle of life. TECH Vision Pro [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/who-will-win-2026-world-cup/visionpro.jpg] Apple’s $3,499 Vision Pro headset, launched in 2024 as the future of “spatial computing,” has quietly hit a wall. Reports say it sold only around 600,000 units total, drew an unusually high return rate, and saw its marketing budget cut by more than 95%. Apple kept the current model on sale and gave it a new chip in late 2025, but in 2026 incoming CEO John Ternus reportedly killed the planned Vision Pro 2 and a cheaper “Vision Air” version outright. The engineers have been moved to a different bet: lightweight smart glasses to rival Meta’s Ray-Bans. The headset that was meant to define a new era became a stepping stone to a smaller one. bots [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/who-will-win-2026-world-cup/bots.jpg] The internet company Cloudflare, which helps run a big chunk of the world’s websites, reported in June 2026 that for the first time, most of the traffic asking for web pages isn’t coming from people. Machines now make about 57.5% of those requests, and humans only 42.5%. Before the AI boom this kind of automated traffic was around 20%. The big reason for the jump is “agentic AI” — programs that browse the web on their own to do tasks for assistants like ChatGPT. A person shopping might check five websites; an AI agent doing the same job might visit five thousand. Cloudflare’s boss said the crossover happened about a year sooner than he expected. It’s a real headache for websites, since bots use up their resources and read their content but don’t see ads or click links the way humans do. GLOBAL Tesla [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/who-will-win-2026-world-cup/tesla.JPG] A video went viral in early June showing a Tesla driving itself along a narrow, wet cliffside road in China, hugging tight mountain curves with no hands on the wheel. Tesla’s head of self-driving, Ashok Elluswamy, shared it, and it spread fast among Elon Musk’s followers, who marveled that the car handled roads most human drivers would find nerve-wracking. The clever part: Tesla trained its system for China partly using ordinary road videos pulled from the internet, since it had little local driving data. Not everyone was impressed — others pointed to the system’s missing regulatory approval in China and a string of crashes elsewhere. Balogun [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/who-will-win-2026-world-cup/balogun.jpg] The United States’ star of the World Cup opener almost wasn’t American at all. Folarin Balogun scored twice in the 4-1 win over Paraguay, becoming the first US player to score two goals in a World Cup match since 1930. He was born in Brooklyn but only by accident: his Nigerian parents lived in London, and his mother was visiting family in New York late in her pregnancy when the airline wouldn’t let her fly home without a doctor’s note saying it was safe. She couldn’t get one in time, so Folarin was born in the US. The family moved back to London weeks later, where he grew up and played for England’s youth teams 28 times. That birthplace gave him a choice of three national teams — the US, England, and Nigeria — and in 2023 he switched to the country where he happened to be born. ECONOMY & FINANCE Puma [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/who-will-win-2026-world-cup/puma.jpg] At the 2026 World Cup, a quieter contest is playing out on the jerseys themselves. Three companies make the kits for most of the 48 teams: Adidas outfits 14 nations, Nike 12, and Puma 11 — together about 77% of the field. Each brand picked a different strategy. Adidas dresses host Mexico and champions Germany; Nike leans on glamour teams like Brazil, France, and England; and Puma went heavy in Africa, supplying five nations including Senegal, Morocco, and Ghana. Puma is the interesting one. It’s a German company that’s been struggling, and in early 2026 China’s Anta Sports bought a 29% stake — not the whole company, but enough to become its single largest shareholder. So this World Cup is Puma’s first big test under new financial backing, with its turnaround being watched closely from both Germany and China. SpaceX [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/who-will-win-2026-world-cup/spacex.jpg] On June 12, 2026, SpaceX — Elon Musk’s rocket and Starlink satellite company — sold shares to the public for the first time, in what became the biggest stock market debut in history. The shares jumped about 18% on day one, valuing the company at close to $2 trillion. Because Musk owns roughly 42% of SpaceX, the jump pushed his total wealth past $1 trillion, making him the first trillionaire the world has ever had. A trillion is genuinely hard to picture: if you spent $27,000 every single day, it would take you a hundred years just to spend one billion — and a trillion is a thousand billions. Part of why investors value SpaceX so highly is Musk’s goal of building a self-sustaining city of about a million people on Mars by around 2050, using a fleet of giant Starship rockets. The dates keep slipping, though, and Musk has missed many of his own space deadlines before. Amazon [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/who-will-win-2026-world-cup/amazon.jpg] For thirteen years straight, Walmart was the biggest company in the United States by revenue. In June 2026, Amazon passed it on the Fortune 500 list, the annual ranking of the largest US companies, taking the top spot for the first time. Amazon brought in about $716.9 billion in 2025, just ahead of Walmart’s $713.2 billion. In the list’s 72-year history, only four companies have ever been number one: General Motors, ExxonMobil, Walmart, and now Amazon. Amazon didn’t get there mainly by selling more things online than Walmart sold in stores. A big driver is Amazon Web Services, the division that rents out computing power and data storage to other companies — the invisible plumbing behind much of the internet — which earns money far faster than selling products does. NATURE & ENVIRONMENT Blue Moon [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/who-will-win-2026-world-cup/moon.jpg] On June 1, 2026, photographers in Moscow caught the full moon rising behind the Zhivopisny Bridge, and it was being called a “Blue Moon.” It didn’t look blue at all — in the photos it glows a warm orange. That’s because a “Blue Moon” usually has nothing to do with color. It’s a calendar quirk: the moon goes through its full cycle of phases every 29.5 days, just a touch shorter than a calendar month, so once in a while you get two full moons in the same month — and the second one is nicknamed a Blue Moon. A moon that actually looks blue is far rarer, and happens only when wildfire smoke or volcanic ash of just the right size fills the sky. SCIENCE World Cup [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/who-will-win-2026-world-cup/worldcup.jpg] With the 2026 World Cup underway, two very different machines tried to predict the winner and landed in nearly the same spot. The Opta supercomputer played out the whole tournament 25,000 times using team and player stats, and made Spain the favorite at 16.1%, with France, England, and Argentina close behind. Polymarket — a website where people bet real money, so the combined wagers act like a crowd’s prediction — also put Spain on top at around 16%. One method is cold math, the other thousands of human hunches backed by cash, yet they agreed. Opta’s own history is a mixed bag: it correctly tipped France in 2018, and France reached the final again in 2022 behind a rare hat trick from Kylian Mbappé. But it favored Brazil in 2014, the year Brazil lost a semifinal 7-1 to Germany in an epic debacle — and in 2022 it gave the eventual champion, Argentina, only about a 5% chance. MATH Pareto [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/who-will-win-2026-world-cup/pareto.jpg] Around 1900, an Italian economist named Vilfredo Pareto noticed something odd about land in Italy: roughly 20% of the people owned about 80% of it. He started checking whether that lopsided split showed up elsewhere and kept finding versions of it, even in his own garden, where a small number of pea plants produced most of the peas. Later thinkers named the pattern after him. The Pareto principle says that in many situations, most of the results come from a small share of the causes — about 80% of the outcome from 20% of the effort or input. It turns up all over: a fraction of a store’s products bring in most of its sales, a few of a program’s bugs cause most of its crashes, a small set of words make up most of everyday speech. The numbers are rarely exactly 80 and 20. The real point is that results are seldom split evenly, so it’s worth figuring out which small part is doing most of the work. LIFESTYLE, ENTERTAINMENT & CULTURE Pace [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/who-will-win-2026-world-cup/pace.jpg] Pace Gallery, one of the biggest art galleries in the world, announced in early June that it’s dropping about 50 of the roughly 135 artists it represents, along with cutting 50 of its staff. A gallery represents artists by showing and selling their work and splitting the money, so being on a famous gallery’s roster is a big deal for an artist’s career. Pace’s CEO, Marc Glimcher, said the whole way big galleries operate has become “broken” and even “unfixable” — too large, too corporate, too expensive to keep running. His plan is to shrink back to around 80 artists and focus more closely on them. The move worried many people in the art world, because Pace spent years getting bigger, even building a $100 million headquarters in New York, and now one of the most powerful galleries is saying that bigger stopped working. Lions [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/who-will-win-2026-world-cup/lions.jpeg] Next Sunday, June 21, is Father’s Day in the US, the UK, China, and many other countries — always the third Sunday in June. It started with a young woman named Sonora Smart Dodd in Spokane, Washington, in 1910. Her father had raised her and her five brothers and sisters alone after their mother died, and she thought dads deserved a day like the new Mother’s Day. People sometimes say a mother’s love and a father’s love feel different, and researchers have found there’s something to that — not that one is stronger, but that they often show up in different ways. Studies find dads tend to do more of the physical, playful stuff: wrestling, chasing, tickling, piggyback rides. That kind of play seems to help kids learn to manage their emotions and handle a bit of excitement and risk safely. You don’t need to buy anything for Father’s Day. A drawing, a note, or doing a chore without being asked works perfectly. SPORTS NBA [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/who-will-win-2026-world-cup/knicks.jpg] [Basketball] The 2026 NBA Finals have the New York Knicks leading the San Antonio Spurs 3–1, with Game 5 in San Antonio on Sunday, June 14. The Knicks are chasing their first title since 1973; the Spurs, built around 22-year-old Victor Wembanyama, are after their first since 2014. Game 4 was the wild one. San Antonio raced to a 29-point lead, then watched it vanish: New York outscored the Spurs 58–30 in the second half and won 107–106 when a last-second Spurs shot missed. OG Anunoby scored 33 on 7-of-9 from three, and Jalen Brunson added 36. Wembanyama had 24 points, 13 rebounds, and 3 blocks. Only one team has ever come back from 3–1 down in the Finals — the 2016 Cavaliers led by Lebron James — so the Knicks are one win from their first championship in 53 years. Tennis [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/who-will-win-2026-world-cup/tennis.jpg] [Tennis] The 2026 French Open at Roland Garros, finished June 7, was a tournament of breakthroughs. On the men’s side, Germany’s Alexander Zverev finally won his first Grand Slam title at his fourth attempt, beating Italy’s Flavio Cobolli 6-1, 4-6, 6-4, 6-7, 6-1. It came on the same Paris court where he’d badly injured his ankle in 2022 and lost a two-set lead in the 2024 final. The women’s title went to 19-year-old Mirra Andreeva, who defeated Poland’s Maja Chwalinska, a qualifier ranked 114th, 6-3, 6-2. Andreeva became the youngest woman to win in Paris since Monica Seles in 1992. After a fortnight of upsets that knocked out nearly every favorite, both champions were claiming a Grand Slam for the first time. Opening [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/who-will-win-2026-world-cup/opening.jpg] [Soccer] The 2026 World Cup is the first ever co-hosted by three countries, so it got three opening ceremonies and three home-team openers over two days. Mexico kicked off the whole tournament on June 11 in Mexico City, beating South Africa 2-0. The next day, the other two hosts played: Canada drew 1-1 with Bosnia and Herzegovina in Toronto, and the United States crushed Paraguay 4-1 at SoFi Stadium near Los Angeles. The US result stood out — the team had scored only three goals total across its entire 2022 World Cup, then scored four in this single game. Folarin Balogun got two of them in the first half, becoming the first American to score twice in a World Cup match since the very first tournament back in 1930. The matches are spread across 16 cities, with most games in the US and the final on July 19 in New Jersey. Carolina [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/who-will-win-2026-world-cup/carolina.jpg] [Ice Hockey] Ice hockey’s biggest prize is the Stanley Cup, awarded every year to the champion of the NHL, North America’s top hockey league. It’s one of the oldest trophies in sports, first handed out in 1893, and there’s only one of them: the same silver cup gets passed to each new winner, and the winning team’s players have their names engraved right onto its bands. The Cup can’t hold every name forever, though — its base has five rings, and roughly every 13 years the oldest ring is removed and sent to the Hockey Hall of Fame to make room. To win it, the best team from the league’s Eastern half plays the best from the Western half in a best-of-seven series. This year the Carolina Hurricanes lead the Vegas Golden Knights three games to two, with Game 6 in Las Vegas on Sunday, June 14. THIS DAY IN HISTORY babies [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/who-will-win-2026-world-cup/babies.jpg] June 13, 1920 was the day the US Post Office ruled you could no longer mail a child. Parcel post had launched in 1913, letting people send packages up to 50 pounds, and Americans tested it with eggs, bricks, snakes, and live bees. A few families mailed their kids too — the first was an Ohio baby sent a mile to his grandmother for 15 cents in stamps, insured for $50. First Assistant Postmaster General John C. Koons ended it, ruling that a child was not a “harmless live animal which does not require food or water.” ART OF THE WEEK David Hockney [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/who-will-win-2026-world-cup/splash.jpg] David Hockney, the British painter who died on June 11 at 88, was one of the most popular artists of the last century, and his most famous works are his swimming pools. After moving from grey Yorkshire to sunny Los Angeles in the 1960s, he became fascinated by something almost impossible to paint: water, which never holds still. His best-known pool picture is A Bigger Splash (1967). It shows a calm pink house, an empty chair, a diving board, and a bright white splash where someone has just jumped in — but the diver is hidden, so you never see who. The strange part is how he made it. A real splash lasts about two seconds, but Hockney painted his slowly and carefully with small brushes over roughly two weeks. He liked the contradiction of spending so long capturing something that vanishes almost instantly. FUNNY QUOTES ON WORLD CUP The most impressive thing about American soccer fans isn’t the support — it’s the muscle memory. They call it soccer for four straight years, flip to “football” the day the World Cup starts, and flip back the day it ends, every single time. The only people awake at 4 AM during the World Cup are fans and people who made terrible decisions. We are one and the same. Every World Cup there’s one country nobody predicted going far and one country that disappoints everyone. The second one is always England. Brazil loses one match and the entire country treats it as a humanitarian crisis. Respect the passion. Messi dribbles through defenders like they personally owe him money. Ronaldo celebrates goals like he personally invented the concept of scoring. Rule one for World Cup watch party: no explaining the offside rule to newcomers until after the match. ---------------------------------------- PREVIOUS ISSUES ---------------------------------------- June 07, 2026, Wear Adidas to Handle Important Business in the City [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/wear-adidas-to-handle-important-business-in-the-city] May 31, 2026, Countdown to World Cup [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/countdown-to-world-cup] May 17, 2026, The Call of the Wild [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/the-call-of-the-wild] ---------------------------------------- Thanks for reading! If you enjoy this newsletter, please share it with friends who might also find it interesting and refreshing, if not for themselves, at least for their kids.

Wear Adidas to Handle Important Business in the City

EDITOR’S WORDS The most laborious part of producing the Sunday Blender used to be getting the images. I need to Google search for the image, find one that fits the story, visit the original web site containing the raw format of the image, download it, rename it, convert it into jpg, adjust its dimensions to keep its size in check, and finally embed it into the article. I gotta do this for 20~25 times for a typical issue. It’s not rocket science but just tedious. Curating news stories is fun. Jumping through all these hoops for images is anything but fun. That’s where good old Claude came in to help. Two weeks ago I used Claude Code (then Opus 4.7 model) to write a bash script that takes an image link as input and automatically handles everything else in seconds - downloading, renaming, conversion, and resizing. This automation probably saves me 1-2 hours and allows me to spend more time focusing on the intellectual part of the publishing. It’s a God-sent. Make publishing fun again! TECH Spark [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/wear-adidas-to-handle-important-business-in-the-city/spark.jpg] On June 1, 2026, at a tech conference in Taipei, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang unveiled a new PC processor made alongside Microsoft, called the RTX Spark superchip. Nvidia’s chips already power most of the world’s AI, but this is its push into everyday laptops and desktops. The chip combines a graphics processor and a main processor on one piece of silicon, designed to run AI helpers directly on your computer instead of through the internet. “This is going to be the new PC,” Huang said, arguing that instead of clicking and typing, people will simply ask their computer to do things. The RTX Spark arrives this fall in Windows machines from Microsoft, Dell, HP, ASUS, Lenovo and MSI. Rocket [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/wear-adidas-to-handle-important-business-in-the-city/rocket.jpg] On May 28, 2026, a Blue Origin rocket exploded in a giant fireball during a ground test in Florida. The company was test-firing the engines of its New Glenn rocket while it was secured to the launch pad at Cape Canaveral when the rocket erupted into flames. No one was hurt, but the blast destroyed the rocket and badly damaged Blue Origin’s only working launch pad. Blue Origin is the space company owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. New Glenn is its only rocket able to reach orbit, and NASA had hired it to help carry equipment to the Moon. Repairing the launch pad could take until 2028, throwing those plans into doubt. Luce [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/wear-adidas-to-handle-important-business-in-the-city/luce.jpg] On May 25, 2026, Ferrari revealed its first-ever fully electric car, the Luce, Italian for “light.” It was a big departure for the famous sports car maker: a four-door, five-seat family car priced at €550,000, developed with help from former Apple design chief Jony Ive. It produces over 1,000 horsepower and a top speed above 310 kph. The reveal did not go smoothly. Many people disliked the unusual styling, and Ferrari’s share price dropped about 8 percent, a sign that investors weren’t convinced. Ferrari is betting big on electric power even as rivals like Porsche and Lamborghini pull back on their own EV plans. GLOBAL Faker [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/wear-adidas-to-handle-important-business-in-the-city/faker.jpg] On June 5, 2026, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang landed in Seoul and headed straight for a gaming cafe, making six-time League of Legends World Champion Lee “Faker” Sang-hyeok his first stop in South Korea. Huang runs Nvidia, the company whose chips power most of the world’s AI and computer graphics, and which became the first company to reach a $5 trillion market value in October 2025. Faker, 29, is widely considered the greatest esports player ever. Huang gave him a personally signed GeForce RTX 5090 graphics card, telling the roughly 500 fans packed into the venue it was the only one in the world and might be worth a million dollars. Huang credits Korea’s gaming culture as the foundation of Nvidia. Adidas [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/wear-adidas-to-handle-important-business-in-the-city/adidas.jpg] A small translation mistake turned into a marketing hit for Adidas in China. A jacket’s English description suggested pairing it “with jeans for errands around town,” but an automatic translation rendered the phrase in oddly old-fashioned, countryside-sounding Chinese — closer to “dressing up to go handle important business in the city.” The mismatch between that humble wording and a sleek global brand struck people as hilarious, and jokes spread across Chinese social media. Instead of hiding the error, Adidas embraced it, releasing custom T-shirts playing on the phrase and having its celebrity spokesperson wear one. It’s a reminder that machine translation still misses what humans catch. Pope [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/wear-adidas-to-handle-important-business-in-the-city/pope.jpg] On May 25, 2026, Pope Leo XIV released the first major document of his papacy, and its main subject was artificial intelligence. The lengthy letter, called “Magnifica Humanitas,” or “Magnificent Humanity,” warned about the growing power of AI and called for stronger rules to govern it. The Pope argued that AI systems “do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain,” and cannot truly understand love, work, or friendship the way people do. He also raised concerns about AI’s effects on jobs, fairness, and truth. Leo XIV, elected in 2025 as the first American Pope, has made AI a defining theme of his leadership. Dawa Sherpa [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/wear-adidas-to-handle-important-business-in-the-city/sherpa.jpg] For nearly a week, Dawa Sherpa was a dead man as far as anyone knew. The mountain guide had vanished high on Mount Everest on May 30, 2026, during one of the last climbs of the season. He was last seen at a spot called the Yellow Band, more than 23,000 feet up, where the air holds so little oxygen that the region above is called the death zone. His own oxygen ran out. The mountain emptied as the season ended. Back home, his family stopped waiting and began the prayers said for the dead. He had no food, so he chewed ice to stay alive. Then a clean-up crew packing away the season’s ropes near base camp spotted something moving: Dawa, crawling down the mountain on his own, frostbitten but alive. His wife said the family was overjoyed. He had descended thousands of feet by himself. Hong Kong [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/wear-adidas-to-handle-important-business-in-the-city/hongkong.jpg] For decades, Switzerland was the world’s go-to place for wealthy people to park their money. Now it has been knocked off the top spot by Hong Kong. According to a major report by the Boston Consulting Group released in May 2026, Hong Kong ended 2025 holding $2.95 trillion in cross-border wealth, just edging past Switzerland’s $2.94 trillion. “Cross-border wealth” means money that people keep in a financial center outside their own country. It’s the first time Hong Kong has ever topped the list. The shift was driven mostly by money flowing in from mainland China, plus a busy year for companies selling shares to the public. Analysts expect Asian hubs like Hong Kong and Singapore to keep growing faster than Switzerland in the years ahead. ECONOMY & FINANCE GoPro [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/wear-adidas-to-handle-important-business-in-the-city/gopro.jpg] GoPro, the company that invented the modern action camera, is fighting for survival. In a June 1, 2026 filing, GoPro warned investors of “substantial doubt” about its ability to keep operating over the next year. The company has approved a plan to lay off about 23% of its workforce and is searching for a buyer. Two problems are squeezing it. First, GoPros have been steadily pushed aside by smartphones and cheaper Chinese cameras. Second, a spike in memory chip costs of up to 115% has wrecked its profits. Founded in 2002, GoPro once defined an entire category of rugged cameras strapped to helmets, surfboards, and even spacecraft. Without new funding, bankruptcy is a real possibility. Quantinuum [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/wear-adidas-to-handle-important-business-in-the-city/quantinuum.jpg] On June 4, 2026, Quantinuum, one of the world’s leading quantum computing companies, made its stock market debut, raising $1.68 billion on the Nasdaq under the ticker “QNT.” Quantum computers use the strange rules that govern tiny particles to solve certain problems far faster than ordinary machines. The company’s founder, Ilyas Khan, took an unusual road to get there. He grew up in old mill towns in Lancashire, England, the grandson of immigrants, spent two decades as a banker in Hong Kong, and once owned his hometown football club, Accrington Stanley. Fascinated by physics and mathematics, he founded the quantum software firm Cambridge Quantum, which merged with Honeywell’s quantum business in 2021 to create Quantinuum. Curry [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/wear-adidas-to-handle-important-business-in-the-city/curry.jpg] On June 1, 2026, basketball superstar Stephen Curry of the Golden State Warriors announced a deal with the Chinese sportswear brand Li-Ning. The 10-year contract is reported to be worth over $400 million and covers basketball shoes, clothing, and a golf line. It ends his 13-year partnership with the American company Under Armour, which broke up in November. Some fans questioned the move. Curry is 38 and near the end of his playing career, so why pay so much? The answer is China: Curry is a household name there, having toured the country seven times to enormous crowds, and Li-Ning is betting his fame will sell shoes for years. The brand also wants to grow in America, where it is little known, and Curry hopes to open Curry Brand stores in both countries. For Li-Ning, the deal is as much about the future as the present. IPO [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/wear-adidas-to-handle-important-business-in-the-city/ipo.jpg] Three of the biggest names in technology are heading toward the stock market in what could be a record-breaking year. SpaceX, Elon Musk’s rocket company, is reportedly the furthest along, with its public debut possibly priced around June 12, aiming for a valuation near $1.75 trillion. Close behind are two artificial intelligence companies: OpenAI, maker of ChatGPT, and Anthropic, maker of the Claude assistant. Together, the three offerings could raise close to $200 billion from investors, more than the entire US market raised in some recent years. A company “goes public” by selling shares to ordinary investors for the first time, raising money to grow. Whether these giants live up to their enormous price tags is the big question. NATURE & ENVIRONMENT canyon [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/wear-adidas-to-handle-important-business-in-the-city/canyon.jpg] Beneath the Grand Canyon lies a hidden world of caves, and scientists are exploring it to answer a vital question: how does water reach the park’s springs? Millions of visitors a year rely on a single source called Roaring Springs, a cave-fed spring on the canyon’s North Rim, for drinking water. A team from Northern Arizona University mapped more than 10 kilometers of caves in just 45 days using mobile laser scanners, building detailed 3-D models. They found that water can travel about 20 kilometers underground from surface sinkholes to the springs in as little as a week, so fast it barely gets filtered. Understanding these paths helps protect the water from drought and pollution as the region grows hotter and drier. SCIENCE Tsunami [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/wear-adidas-to-handle-important-business-in-the-city/tsunami.jpg] On the morning of August 10, 2025, in a narrow Alaskan inlet called Tracy Arm, a mountainside gave way and crashed into the water below. More than 64 million cubic meters of rock fell into the fjord, enough to trigger a wave that surged 481 meters up the opposite slope — taller than all but a handful of the world’s tallest skyscrapers. It was the second-largest tsunami ever recorded, and the largest not caused by an earthquake. A study published in the journal Science in 2026 pieced together what happened. The cause traces back to climate change: as the South Sawyer Glacier melted and retreated, it stopped holding the mountain in place, and the rock eventually collapsed. Remarkably, no one was killed, even though the fjord is a popular cruise destination. Scientists warn that warming will make such landslide-tsunamis more common in icy regions worldwide. drug [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/wear-adidas-to-handle-important-business-in-the-city/drug.jpg] Pancreatic cancer is one of the deadliest cancers there is. More than half of cases are found only after the cancer has spread, and the five-year survival rate for those patients is around 3%. Now scientists have reported a real breakthrough. A new once-daily pill called daraxonrasib roughly doubled how long patients lived: 13.2 months on average, compared with 6.7 months for those on standard chemotherapy. That works out to a 60% drop in the risk of death. The drug works by jamming a faulty protein called RAS that drives many cancers to grow, something doctors spent decades unable to target. When the results were presented at a major cancer conference, the room gave a standing ovation. It isn’t a cure, and the drug still needs final approval, but it’s a hopeful sign in a fight that has frustrated scientists for a very long time. MATH Connection [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/wear-adidas-to-handle-important-business-in-the-city/connection.jpg] In a stadium of 80,000 people, are two strangers’ lives secretly connected? A famous math idea called the small-world phenomenon says yes, and more strongly than you’d guess. The claim, often called “six degrees of separation,” is that any two people on Earth can be linked through a chain of about six acquaintances: you know someone, who knows someone, and so on. It sounds impossible across 8 billion people, but the math works because connections multiply fast. If each person knows just 100 others, then friends-of-friends already reach 10,000 people, and one more step reaches a million. After six steps, the number balloons past the world’s population. In the 1960s, a scientist named Stanley Milgram tested it by asking people to deliver letters to a stranger only through people they knew personally, and the letters arrived in around six hops. Modern studies of social networks have found chains even shorter. LIFESTYLE, ENTERTAINMENT & CULTURE Harvard [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/wear-adidas-to-handle-important-business-in-the-city/harvard.jpg] On May 28, 2026, comedian and talk-show host Conan O’Brien gave the commencement speech at Harvard University, the school he graduated from in 1985. His 25-minute address mixed self-deprecating jokes with a message about humility and openness. O’Brien told the graduating class that his wish for them was that one day, being a Harvard graduate might be “the least important thing people know about you.” He explained that while a degree from a famous school is a real achievement, leaning on that status too much can hold a person back. He also shared lessons from traveling the world, arguing that letting yourself be vulnerable and humble leads to deeper connections with others. Metallica [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/wear-adidas-to-handle-important-business-in-the-city/metallica.jpg] On May 30, 2026, Metallica played to 94,000 fans at Berlin’s Olympiastadion, setting an attendance record for Germany’s biggest-ever stadium concert. The previous record belonged to U2, who drew just over 90,000 to the same stadium in 2009. Metallica are an American heavy metal band formed in Los Angeles in 1981, known for fast, loud guitar music and songs like “Unforgiven” and “Master of Puppets”. Over four decades they have become one of the best-selling music acts in history, with tens of millions of albums sold worldwide. The Berlin show was part of their M72 World Tour, which had grossed $476 million across 64 shows and played to 3.9 million people as of August 2025. They closed the night with “Enter Sandman”. game [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/wear-adidas-to-handle-important-business-in-the-city/game.jpg] A new video game called Neverness to Everness is making waves in Japan, and what’s surprising people most is where it came from. The game has an anime art style and even recreates real Japanese landmarks like Tokyo’s Akihabara district, making it feel thoroughly Japanese, yet it was made by a Chinese studio called Hotta Studio. It’s an open-world game where players hunt strange supernatural creatures in a sprawling, living city. It quickly shot to the top of the PS5 download charts in Japan. Some Japanese developers openly wondered why their own industry couldn’t build something on this scale, pointing to the huge teams and budgets Chinese studios now command. Commercial [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/wear-adidas-to-handle-important-business-in-the-city/commercial.jpg] On June 4, 2026, Nike released a star-studded commercial for the upcoming World Cup, and one moment had fans buzzing. The ad, called “Rip the Script,” shows two of the greatest athletes alive, basketball’s LeBron James and soccer’s Cristiano Ronaldo, sitting together in a conference room jokingly discussing a fictional movie about retirement. Both are nicknamed the GOAT, short for “Greatest of All Time.” James is the NBA’s all-time leading scorer, while Ronaldo has won five Ballon d’Or awards as the world’s best soccer player. Some fans asked why soccer’s other superstar, Lionel Messi, was absent. The answer is business: Ronaldo is sponsored by Nike, while Messi represents its rival, Adidas, so the two are rarely in the same ad. SPORTS Knicks [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/wear-adidas-to-handle-important-business-in-the-city/knicks.jpg] [Basketball] The NBA Finals are underway, with the New York Knicks leading the San Antonio Spurs two games to none. New York won Game 1 at home 105-95 on June 4, then took Game 2 by a single point, 105-104, on June 6. To reach the Finals, San Antonio survived a thrilling seven-game Western Conference Finals against the Oklahoma City Thunder, the league’s top seed. The Spurs, led by French center Victor Wembanyama, won the decider 111-103 on the road. The series now moves to San Antonio for Game 3 on June 8, with the Knicks chasing their first title since 1973. Victor Lai [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/wear-adidas-to-handle-important-business-in-the-city/victor.jpg] [Badminton] On June 7, 2026, 21-year-old Victor Lai became the first Canadian ever to win a Super 1000 title, the top tier of professional badminton. He beat Indonesia’s Jonatan Christie, the world’s fifth-ranked player, 21-19, 21-8 in the final of the Indonesia Open in Jakarta. It was an upset. Christie was the home favorite in front of a roaring local crowd, but he admitted the pressure got to him, while the younger Lai stayed calm and made few mistakes. Badminton is dominated by countries in Asia and Europe, and North America has rarely been a factor. Lai is changing that: in 2025 he became the first Canadian to win a medal at the World Championships, and this title pushes him into the world’s top 10. “In Canada we might not have the support or firepower of other countries,” he said, “but if you believe, you can do it.” THIS DAY IN HISTORY St. Peter Basillica [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/wear-adidas-to-handle-important-business-in-the-city/basillica.jpg] On June 7, 1929, the world’s smallest country officially came into being. The Lateran Treaty took effect that day, recognizing Vatican City as an independent state of just 109 acres in the heart of Rome. The Vatican is unique: it’s the only country that exists mainly to serve a religion rather than a population, home to only around 800 people yet with its own flag, passports, and a small army called the Swiss Guard. It’s the center of the Roman Catholic Church and the home of the Pope, who leads a faith followed by over 1.4 billion people worldwide. At its heart stands St. Peter’s Basilica, built over what tradition holds is the tomb of Saint Peter and home to Michelangelo’s Pietà. Nearby is the Sistine Chapel, where Michelangelo painted the famous ceiling and The Last Judgment, and where cardinals gather to elect each new Pope. ART OF THE WEEK Adam [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/wear-adidas-to-handle-important-business-in-the-city/adam.jpg] One of the most famous paintings in the world sits on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Vatican City. It’s called The Creation of Adam, painted by the Italian artist Michelangelo over 500 years ago. The image shows God reaching out to give life to the first human, Adam, their fingers almost touching but not quite, separated by a small gap. That tiny space between the two hands has become one of the most recognized images in art, copied and joked about everywhere. Michelangelo painted it lying on his back on tall scaffolding, working on the ceiling for around four years. The Creation of Adam is only one scene in a vast painted ceiling showing stories from the Bible, but it remains the part visitors crane their necks to see. FUNNY Yes but 1 [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/wear-adidas-to-handle-important-business-in-the-city/yesbut1.JPG] Yes but 2 [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/wear-adidas-to-handle-important-business-in-the-city/yesbut2.JPG] ---------------------------------------- PREVIOUS ISSUES ---------------------------------------- May 31, 2026, Countdown to World Cup [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/countdown-to-world-cup] May 17, 2026, The Call of the Wild [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/the-call-of-the-wild] May 10, 2026, Double Wins for Arsenal in 2026? [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/double-wins-for-arsenal-in-2026] ---------------------------------------- Thanks for reading! If you enjoy this newsletter, please share it with friends who might also find it interesting and refreshing, if not for themselves, at least for their kids.

Countdown to World Cup

EDITOR’S WORDS I joined a pickup badminton game this morning, playing men’s double with five other guys. I was paired with someone I had never played with before, against two other pairs. The other two pairs were better players. They beat us repeatedly. I was struggling with my new racket grip. My partner’s footwork had limited court coverage. We were a cheerful pair though. We clapped when winning a hard-fought rally. We laughed when losing to a lucky shot by the opponent. We chatted about how the game might have gone the other way when sitting on the bench. Usually for such a pickup game, players don’t talk much. One thing that was certain - we were closing the score margin, game by game, even though we kept losing. We could see that we were getting better playing together and learned to complement each other. We were playing with heart out. After almost two hours, we finally won a game 21:19. It was the only game we wont today, but it felt really good. TECH Tau Law [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/countdown-to-world-cup/tau.jpg] Huawei, the Chinese tech giant, just announced a chip breakthrough that could shake up the global tech race. On May 25, the company unveiled a new way of designing chips it calls the “Tau Scaling Law” — named after the Greek letter τ, which engineers use to measure how fast a signal can switch on and off inside a chip. Instead of making transistors — the tiny switches that power chips — ever smaller, Huawei’s approach stacks them in layers and shortens the distance signals have to travel, packing more computing power into the same space. This matters because the U.S. has banned Huawei from buying the most advanced chipmaking machines, made in the Netherlands. The Tau approach is a workaround. The first chip using it, the Kirin 2026, is expected to power Huawei phones launching this fall. Huawei says it can match the world’s most cutting-edge chips by 2031, though that would still trail leaders like Taiwan’s TSMC by a few years. Bambu [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/countdown-to-world-cup/bambu.jpg] Bambu Lab, a Shenzhen-based company that makes some of the most popular home 3D printers in the world, landed in hot water this month. A solo developer in Poland had built a free, modified version of the software people use to control these printers, sharing his code openly — which the software’s open-source license allows. Bambu Lab sent him legal threats demanding he take it down. The 3D-printing community erupted. Popular tech YouTubers piled on, one pledging $10,000 toward the developer’s legal defense and daring the company to sue. Then a software-rights nonprofit, the Software Freedom Conservancy, accused Bambu Lab of breaking the very license its software is built on. Facing the backlash, the company dropped its threats, but the watchdog group says it will keep an eye on Bambu Lab. At the heart of the fight is a bigger question: when you buy a device, how much control should the maker still have over how you use it? Opus [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/countdown-to-world-cup/opus.jpg] When AI giant Anthropic released its newest AI model, Claude Opus 4.8, a developer in Taiwan ran a simple test: he asked it in Chinese, “what model are you?” four times. Strangely, the AI answered that it was Qwen or DeepSeek — two Chinese AI systems made by other companies — and only correctly called itself Claude once. This kicked off an online debate, with some people claiming it proved Claude had been secretly copied from Chinese models using a technique called distillation. Distillation is real: it’s a way of training a smaller, cheaper AI by having it learn from the answers of a bigger, smarter one, like a student taking notes from an expert teacher. But most experts think this test proves no such thing. An AI learns to talk by reading enormous amounts of text from the internet, which is full of mentions of other AI systems. So when asked what it is, it sometimes just repeats the most common pattern it saw, like a parrot, rather than stating a real fact about itself. Interestingly, people had used this same test before to accuse Chinese AIs of copying American ones — on equally shaky ground. GLOBAL Everest [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/countdown-to-world-cup/everest.JPG] Mount Everest just had its busiest season ever. According to Nepal’s Department of Tourism, 1,008 climbers reached the summit during the 2026 spring season — the most in the mountain’s history, beating the previous record of around 900. Nepal also issued a record 494 permits, each costing $15,000, and on May 20, a record 274 climbers reached the top from the Nepal side in a single day. The crowds have renewed worries about safety. High on Everest sits the “death zone,” where oxygen is so thin that delays from traffic jams can turn deadly. Two climbers died during this year’s season. ECONOMY & FINANCE Micron [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/countdown-to-world-cup/micron.jpg] Shares of companies that make computer memory chips have been on a wild run this year, and the biggest American one, Micron, just became worth more than a trillion dollars for the first time. Its stock has more than tripled in 2026 alone, after climbing nearly 700% over the past year. The reason is the artificial intelligence boom. AI systems like chatbots need enormous amounts of memory — the part of a computer that stores information for quick access — and companies building AI data centers are buying up so many chips that there aren’t enough to go around. That shortage has pushed prices, and profits, sharply higher. Micron makes two main types: DRAM, which handles a computer’s short-term working memory, and NAND flash, the kind used to store files long-term. Rival chipmakers like Sandisk and Western Digital have seen their stocks soar too. Clarity [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/countdown-to-world-cup/clarity.jpg] The U.S. government is trying to write its first big set of rules for cryptocurrency, the digital money that exists only online. The bill is called the CLARITY Act, and on May 14 it cleared an important committee in the Senate by a vote of 15 to 9, moving it one step closer to becoming law. Right now, crypto in America lives in a gray zone where it’s often unclear which government rules apply to it. The CLARITY Act would change that by giving cryptocurrency its own rulebook for the first time, spelling out how these companies must operate and who watches over them. That would be a turning point: after years of operating in legal limbo, crypto would move closer to being treated like a normal, recognized part of the country’s financial system, alongside banks and stock markets. NATURE & ENVIRONMENT India heat [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/countdown-to-world-cup/india_heat.jpg] India just sweated through another brutal stretch of heat. In late May, the India Meteorological Department warned of heat wave and even “severe heat wave” conditions across northern states including Punjab, Haryana, Delhi, and Uttar Pradesh, with Delhi temperatures hitting 44 to 46°C — that’s about 113°F. On one morning in late May, nearly all of the world’s 100 hottest cities were in India. Not one region, not one season — one country, on a single day. Scientists blame the heat on climate change, vanishing pre-monsoon rains, and hot dry winds, and they warn these extreme summers are becoming more frequent and more widespread across India and the world. SCIENCE negative time [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/countdown-to-world-cup/time.jpg] Physicists at the University of Toronto recently confirmed something that sounds impossible: “negative time.” They fired tiny particles of light, called photons, into a cloud of chilled atoms and measured how long the light lingered inside. The answer came out less than zero — as if the light exited the cloud before it even went in. This doesn’t mean time travel is real or that you can rewind the past. It’s a strange quirk of quantum physics, the branch of science that governs how the universe behaves at the tiniest scales, where particles routinely break the rules that hold true in everyday life. Critics argue the “negative time” label oversells what is really an odd effect of how light moves through matter. Even the researchers say they don’t yet know what it’s good for. cancer [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/countdown-to-world-cup/cancer.jpg] The technology behind the COVID-19 vaccines is now being aimed at one of medicine’s biggest targets: cancer. Those vaccines used mRNA, a molecule that works like an instruction note, telling your body’s cells to build a specific protein. For COVID, the note taught cells to recognize the virus. Now scientists are using the same trick to fight cancer, and a treatment from companies Moderna and Merck is in the final stage of testing against melanoma, a dangerous skin cancer. The idea is remarkable: doctors take a sample of a patient’s tumor, study its unique mutations, and then design a custom mRNA vaccine made just for that one person. It trains their immune system to hunt down and destroy their specific cancer cells. Early results have been promising, and researchers expect the first approvals for cancer vaccines like this could come within the next year or two, opening a new way to treat a disease that affects millions. MATH birthday [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/countdown-to-world-cup/birthday.jpg] Imagine a room with just 23 people in it. What are the odds that two of them share the same birthday? Most people guess it’s tiny — after all, there are 365 days in a year. But the real answer is about 50 percent, a coin flip. With 23 people, it’s just as likely as not that two share a birthday. Bump the room up to 70 people and the odds shoot past 99 percent — almost certain. This surprises everyone, which is why it’s called the birthday paradox. The trick is that you’re not comparing your birthday to everyone else’s; you’re comparing everyone to everyone. With 23 people, there are 253 different pairs who could possibly match, and that’s a lot more chances than it first seems. LIFESTYLE, ENTERTAINMENT & CULTURE Drake [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/countdown-to-world-cup/drake.jpg] Drake just passed a record Michael Jackson held for decades. With his single “Janice STFU” debuting at the top of the Billboard Hot 100, the Canadian rapper now has 14 No. 1 hits — the most ever by a solo male artist. Jackson had held the record with 13, dating back to “Ben” in 1972. The milestone came after Drake released three albums in one night earlier in May. He also set a new record for most songs on the Hot 100 in a single week, with 42. Among all artists, only Mariah Carey and the Beatles still have more No. 1s. Cannes [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/countdown-to-world-cup/cannes.jpg] The 79th Cannes Film Festival wrapped up in France on May 23. The top prize, the Palme d’Or, went to “Fjord,” a drama by Romanian director Cristian Mungiu about a Romanian family that clashes with child services after moving to Norway. It’s Mungiu’s second Palme d’Or, making him the tenth director ever to win the award twice. Cannes, held every May on the French Riviera, is one of the most prestigious film festivals in the world, with a jury picking winners from films screened over two weeks. This year’s jury was led by South Korean director Park Chan-wook. The runner-up prize, the Grand Prix, went to “Minotaur,” a thriller set in Russia during its war in Ukraine. Its director, Andrey Zvyagintsev, who now lives in exile in France, used his acceptance speech to address Russian President Vladimir Putin directly, urging him to end the war. Astro [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/countdown-to-world-cup/astro.jpg] Fans of Astro Bot, the cheerful PlayStation 5 platformer about a tiny robot, are hoping for big news soon. Sony has announced a showcase called State of Play for June 2, and players are buzzing that a sequel, Astro Bot 2, might finally be revealed. Nothing is confirmed, but the timing feels right to many. When the original launched in 2024, few expected a small, family-friendly platformer to compete with the year’s blockbusters. Then it won Game of the Year at the industry’s biggest awards show, beating giants like Elden Ring, Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, and Black Myth: Wukong — huge, sprawling games made by hundreds of developers. The upset shocked a lot of gamers, some of whom thought a cute robot had no business winning. But the praise kept coming, and Astro Bot is now widely loved as one of the best games of its kind in years. SPORTS spurs [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/countdown-to-world-cup/spurs.jpg] [Basketball] The New York Knicks are going to the NBA Finals for the first time since 1999 — a 27-year wait that has frustrated one of basketball’s most passionate fan bases. On May 25, they finished off the Cleveland Cavaliers with a 130-93 blowout, sweeping the series four games to none and winning their eleventh straight game of the playoffs. Their star guard, Jalen Brunson, who grew up rooting for the team he now leads, was named the most valuable player of the Eastern Conference Finals. The Knicks have been crushing opponents all postseason, winning by an average of more than 20 points. Now they’ll face the San Antonio Spurs, who fought back from a two-game deficit to beat the Oklahoma City Thunder in a tense seven-game series, winning the decider 111-103. The best-of-seven Finals, where the two teams play until one wins four games to be crowned champion, starts June 3 in San Antonio. The Knicks haven’t won an NBA title since 1973, the longest drought in the league. Vinegaard [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/countdown-to-world-cup/vingegaard.jpg] [Cycling] Danish cyclist Jonas Vingegaard has won the Giro d’Italia, one of cycling’s three biggest multi-week races. He sealed the victory on May 30 with a crushing ride up the mountain to Piancavallo — his fifth stage win of the race, attacking alone with 10 kilometers to go and leaving every rival behind. The win put him more than five minutes ahead of his nearest challenger, with only a ceremonial final ride into Rome left to complete. It is Vingegaard’s first Giro title, and it makes him just the eighth rider in history to win all three of cycling’s Grand Tours — the others being the Tour de France and the Vuelta a España in Spain. His dominance now sets up what could be one of the most anticipated Tour de France showdowns in years, where in July he is expected to battle two-time defending champion Tadej Pogačar and Paul Seixas, a 19-year-old French sensation many see as the sport’s future. Ronaldo [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/countdown-to-world-cup/ronaldo.jpg] [Soccer] The 2025-26 European football season just wrapped up, and the champions are crowned across the continent’s biggest leagues. In England, Arsenal won the Premier League — their first title in over two decades. Spain’s La Liga went to Barcelona, Italy’s Serie A to Inter Milan, France’s Ligue 1 to defending champion Paris Saint-Germain, and Germany’s Bundesliga to Bayern Munich, who win it nearly every year. The grandest prize, the Champions League, brings together Europe’s best clubs, and this year’s final in Budapest was a thriller: Arsenal led early through Kai Havertz, but Paris Saint-Germain fought back to tie it and won 4-3 in a penalty shootout, becoming the first club in nearly a decade to win the trophy two years running. For Arsenal, it was a heartbreaking near-miss — the club has never won the Champions League in its 140-year history. Far from Europe, another famous name lifted a trophy: Cristiano Ronaldo finally won his first league title in Saudi Arabia, where his club Al-Nassr edged out their rivals on the final day of the season. At 41 years old, Ronaldo has now won league championships in England, Spain, Italy, and Saudi Arabia, and has scored 971 goals in his career. Ayase [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/countdown-to-world-cup/ayase.jpg] [Soccer] Japanese striker Ayase Ueda finished the Dutch league season as its top goalscorer, winning the Willy van der Kuijlen Trophy with 25 goals for his club Feyenoord. The award is named after the all-time leading scorer in the history of the Eredivisie, the Netherlands’ top football league. Ueda is only the second player from Asia ever to top the league’s scoring chart — the first was Iran’s Alireza Jahanbakhsh back in the 2017-18 season. The 27-year-old from Mito, Japan was one of the most reliable players in an up-and-down season for Feyenoord, scoring 18 of his goals before the winter break. He now turns his attention to the 2026 World Cup, which will be held this summer across the United States, Canada, and Mexico, where he is expected to lead Japan’s attack. THIS DAY IN HISTORY Big Ben [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/countdown-to-world-cup/bigben.jpg] On May 31, 1859, the famous clock tower in London now known as Big Ben kept time for the first time. It rises high above Britain’s Houses of Parliament and has been a symbol of the city ever since. The giant bell that gives the tower its name had a rough start: the first one cracked during testing and had to be melted down and recast, and the replacement cracked too, just months after it began ringing. Rather than start over again, engineers turned the bell slightly so the hammer would strike an undamaged spot, which is why it has rung with a slightly off, distinctive tone ever since. The clock is fine-tuned using old coins: adding a single penny to its huge swinging pendulum speeds it up by about two-fifths of a second per day, so keepers adjust the time by stacking or removing pennies. During both World Wars, the clock faces were blacked out at night so enemy aircraft couldn’t use the glowing dials to find Parliament in the dark. And no one is quite sure how Big Ben got its name. One story credits a government official named Benjamin Hall; another, a popular heavyweight boxer of the day called Benjamin Caunt. ART OF THE WEEK Swan [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/countdown-to-world-cup/swan.jpg] Annie Leibovitz is one of the most famous photographers alive, and for decades her portraits have shaped how the world pictures its most famous faces. She got her start in 1970 at Rolling Stone magazine while still an art student, and went on to become the chief photographer at Vanity Fair, shooting everyone from musicians and movie stars to athletes, presidents, and Queen Elizabeth II. What sets her work apart is that she rarely just snaps a picture of someone standing still. She builds a whole scene: a young Leonardo DiCaprio with a live swan draped around his neck like a scarf, Whoopi Goldberg lying in a bathtub full of milk, Steve Martin in a suit splattered with paint to match the painting behind him. Her photos feel less like snapshots and more like stories frozen in a single frame, and many of them have become some of the best-known images of the past fifty years. FUNNY Stairs [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/countdown-to-world-cup/stairs.jpg] ---------------------------------------- PREVIOUS ISSUES ---------------------------------------- May 17, 2026, The Call of the Wild [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/the-call-of-the-wild] May 10, 2026, Double Wins for Arsenal in 2026? [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/double-wins-for-arsenal-in-2026] May 03, 2026, The Way You Make Me Feel [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/the-way-you-make-me-feel] ---------------------------------------- Thanks for reading! If you enjoy this newsletter, please share it with friends who might also find it interesting and refreshing, if not for themselves, at least for their kids.

The Call of the Wild

EDITOR’S WORDS After trying out OpenClaw for a few intense weeks since late January, I gradually stopped using it because it was always too buggy and unstable for meaningful tasks. The new kid on the block in this AI agent craze - Hermes seems a much stronger replacement. It’s much easier to switch to different AI models and its self-learning capability looks interesting. I’m slowly hooking up my Hermes agent with all the web services/sites I’m developing, making this AI aide-de-camp the exclusive channel to receive notifications from my applications and transforming my operation into a true AI-native OPC. In the past, this channel used to be email, SMS, Telegram, and WeChat. It’s now becoming my autonomous AI agent, which helps me not only with coding, but also with filtering and curating information that will reach me. Maybe one day the agent can even help me produce the future issues of the Sunday Blender, once it learns of my taste and view of the world. TECH Unitree [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/the-call-of-the-wild/mecha.jpg] A Chinese robotics company just built something straight out of Pacific Rim. On May 12, Hangzhou-based Unitree unveiled the GD01, which it calls the world’s first production-ready manned mecha — a giant robot suit with a cockpit in its chest where a human pilot climbs in. It stands 2.7 meters tall (nearly 9 feet), weighs around 500 kilograms with a rider inside, and can switch between walking on two legs and crawling on four. A demo video shows it punching through a brick wall with its hand. The price tag: 3.9 million yuan, or roughly $570,000. Hermes AI agent [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/the-call-of-the-wild/hermes.jpg] If you want to build AI agents that work for you, there’s a fast-rising new tool called Hermes Agent — named after the Greek god of messengers, who carried words between the gods and mortals on his winged sandals. A fitting name for software that runs errands on your behalf. Released in February 2026 by an AI lab called Nous Research, Hermes is free, open-source (anyone can see how it’s built), and it learns from what you ask it to do — so the more you use it, the better it gets. In just ten weeks it picked up over 110,000 stars on GitHub, the website where programmers share code, and is quickly stealing the spotlight from the older market leader, OpenClaw. To pull in more developers, Nous Research recently teamed up with Chinese AI company Kimi — whose newest model is tuned to work well with Hermes — to run a 16-day coding contest, called a hackathon, with $25,000 in prizes. the beast [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/the-call-of-the-wild/beast.JPG] When the US president travels abroad, his car, his security team, and his secure communications gear travel ahead of him on huge military cargo planes. Ahead of President Trump’s two-day visit to Beijing on May 14–15, at least four US Air Force C-17 Globemaster III transport planes landed at Beijing’s airport carrying the goods. The C-17 is a flying truck the size of a small office building — 174 feet long, able to carry up to 77 tons, with enough room inside for an entire 69-ton M1 Abrams battle tank. What did they unload? The presidential limousine, nicknamed “The Beast” — an 18,000-pound armored Cadillac with 8-inch-thick steel-and-ceramic armor, 5-inch bulletproof windows, doors as heavy as those on a Boeing 757, and a hermetically sealed cabin with its own oxygen supply in case of a chemical attack. It even carries a stash of the president’s blood type in a built-in fridge. And the gadgets? Reportedly night-vision cameras, smoke screens, tear-gas cannons, oil-slick sprayers to spin out enemy cars, and door handles that can deliver a 120-volt electric shock. Spotted by Beijing residents on the city’s Third Ring Road, the convoy looked like something out of a James Bond movie. GLOBAL Jensen [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/the-call-of-the-wild/jensen.jpg] While in Beijing this week as part of a US business delegation, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang took an afternoon off to wander around Nanluoguxiang, one of Beijing’s oldest and most famous alleyways. Even though it was a warm 27°C (81°F) day, he wore his trademark black leather jacket — the same one he wears for every big public appearance. The man who runs the world’s most valuable company ($5.7 trillion) ate street food, posed for selfies with tourists, and slurped a bowl of Beijing zhajiangmian noodles right on the sidewalk. He also tried douzhi — Beijing’s famously divisive fermented mung bean drink — and the look on his face said it all. After he gave a thumbs-up to a peach tea at Mixue, the chain reported sales of that drink jumped 140% the next day. Quite a side hustle for a chip-company CEO. ECONOMY & FINANCE Porsche [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/the-call-of-the-wild/porsche.jpg] The German sports car maker Porsche is having a rough time in China. In 2025, Porsche sold 41,938 cars there — down 26% from the year before, and less than half of what it sold in 2021. Things got worse in early 2026: deliveries fell another 21% in the first three months. So Porsche is closing roughly a third of its Chinese dealerships, shrinking from 150 stores at the end of 2024 to around 80 by the end of 2026. The biggest reason? Chinese carmakers like Xiaomi and BYD are now making fast, fancy electric cars of their own — and many Chinese drivers prefer them. Cerebras [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/the-call-of-the-wild/cerebras.jpg] A Silicon Valley company called Cerebras went public this week, in the biggest stock market debut of 2026 so far. Cerebras makes specialized chips for running AI models — and unlike normal computer chips the size of a fingernail, theirs are the size of a dinner plate, with about 4 trillion tiny switches packed onto a single piece of silicon. The company raised $5.5 billion when it listed on the Nasdaq stock exchange on May 14, and its shares almost doubled on the first day of trading, briefly valuing Cerebras at around $66 billion. Cerebras is trying to challenge Nvidia, currently the world’s most valuable company. NATURE & ENVIRONMENT Antelope [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/the-call-of-the-wild/antelope.jpg] Scientists have just released the first-ever drone footage of the largest land mammal migration on Earth — and it’s not the famous wildebeest stampede across the Serengeti. It’s happening in South Sudan, where roughly six million antelope migrate across grasslands and wetlands every year, more than twice the size of the East African wildebeest migration. The migration was hidden from the world for decades because of war in the region, which kept scientists and tourists out. It was only confirmed in 2024, when researchers flew planes over the area and took 330,000 aerial photos. The May 2026 issue of National Geographic features the stunning new drone images. Birding [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/the-call-of-the-wild/birding.jpg] There’s a competition called the World Series of Birding, where teams race across the state of New Jersey for 24 straight hours, trying to spot or hear as many bird species as possible. The 43rd annual event was held on May 9, and one team that drew lots of attention was The Pete Dunnelins — three high school friends, ages 16 and 17, who had won the past two years. Starting just after midnight, they sprinted from park to park with binoculars, fueled by energy drinks and M&Ms. By the end of the day, they had counted 206 species — but lost by three to their rivals, The Flying Penguins, who got 209. wolves [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/the-call-of-the-wild/wolf.jpg] This past Friday, May 15, was Endangered Species Day — a yearly reminder to celebrate animals that are at risk of dying out, and to highlight species that are making a comeback. One of the most surprising returns: gray wolves are back in California. The state’s last wild wolf was shot in 1924, and for the next 87 years there were none. Then in December 2011, a young radio-collared wolf nicknamed “Journey” walked south from Oregon into California — entirely on his own. More wolves followed his trail over the years. Today, an estimated 50 to 70 wolves roam California in at least 10 packs. Nobody released them. They just walked back home. SCIENCE Money Plant [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/the-call-of-the-wild/moneyplant.jpg] Scientists just discovered that one of the world’s most popular houseplants — the Chinese money plant, known for its perfectly round, coin-shaped leaves — hides a famous mathematical pattern in its veins. Researchers at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and two Canadian universities analyzed 34 leaves and found that the web of veins on each leaf follows a Voronoi diagram — a pattern where every point on a surface “belongs” to whichever center it’s closest to, like dividing a playground into zones around each kid. The same math is used by mobile phone networks to assign you to the nearest cell tower, and by biologists to study how cells pack together. The Chinese money plant has been quietly drawing it on every leaf, all along. Mars [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/the-call-of-the-wild/mars.jpg] A Brazilian scientist just discovered a possible shortcut to Mars hiding in the orbital path of an asteroid. In a paper published last month in the journal Acta Astronautica, astrophysicist Marcelo de Oliveira Souza showed that if a spacecraft followed a route geometrically similar to the orbit of asteroid 2001 CA21, the trip to Mars could in theory be done in just 34 days — instead of the usual 6 to 9 months. The catch: a spacecraft would need to leave Earth at around 32.5 kilometers per second (faster than any rocket has ever launched) and would arrive at Mars going about 108,000 km/h — way too fast to land safely with today’s technology. So the shortcut is real on paper. We just need to build the rocket. MATH Math 1 [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/the-call-of-the-wild/math_1.JPG] > Fill in the missing numbers Math 2 [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/the-call-of-the-wild/math_2.jpg] > What’s the size of the shaded area? LIFESTYLE, ENTERTAINMENT & CULTURE zombie [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/the-call-of-the-wild/zombie.JPG] A 5-minute AI-made short film called Zombie Scavenger went viral around the world this week — and the director’s day job is in real estate. The film, made by a young Chinese creator who goes by MX-Shell, features a lonely robot wandering a post-apocalyptic wasteland (think WALL-E, which inspired it, but with zombies and cowboys). Here’s the wild part: he made the whole thing by himself, in just 10 days, for about 3,000 yuan (roughly $420) — paying only for AI tool credits. After the film racked up over 13 million views on X, a Hollywood AI filmmaker named PJ Ace posted a public plea: “I would love to hire him but I cannot find him.” Internet sleuths tracked MX-Shell down. He’s now in talks to turn the short into a full-length movie. Planet Earth [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/the-call-of-the-wild/planeteart.jpg] The most famous voice in nature documentaries just turned 100. On May 8, Sir David Attenborough — the British broadcaster who has narrated Planet Earth, Blue Planet, Frozen Planet, and dozens of other BBC nature series — celebrated his 100th birthday. He has been making wildlife films for over 70 years, since 1952, and his calm, half-whispered voice has introduced generations of kids to gorillas, polar bears, deep-sea creatures, and everything in between. To mark the milestone, the Royal Albert Hall in London hosted a gala concert attended by Prince William, King Charles III sent a birthday card, and scientists named a newly discovered parasitic wasp after him. Tulip [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/the-call-of-the-wild/tulip.jpg] Last weekend, the city of Albany — the capital of New York State — held its 78th annual Tulip Festival in Washington Park. Over 140,000 tulips in 150 different varieties bloomed across the 81-acre park, drawing thousands of visitors over Mother’s Day weekend. Why tulips in upstate New York? Because Albany was originally a Dutch settlement, founded by traders from the Netherlands in 1614 and called Fort Orange. The Dutch brought tulips with them — the flower is a national symbol of the Netherlands — and the tradition has continued for centuries. Every year, the festival crowns a “Tulip Queen” and features a Dutch street-scrubbing ceremony, where people sweep the streets with brooms before the celebration begins. Eurovision [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/the-call-of-the-wild/eurovision.jpg] Bulgaria just won Eurovision for the first time ever. Eurovision is one of the world’s biggest TV events — a song contest where dozens of European countries each send one song, perform live on a single stage, and then everyone votes for their favorites. Each country gets to give points from 1 to 12, and the country with the most points wins. It’s been running every year since 1956 — that’s 70 years, making it the longest-running annual TV music competition in the world. Last night in Vienna, Austria, a Bulgarian pop singer named Dara won the 70th edition with a dance song called “Bangaranga,” beating 24 other countries with 516 points. Bulgaria will get to host next year’s contest. Famous past Eurovision winners include the Swedish band ABBA, who won in 1974 with “Waterloo” and went on to become one of the biggest pop groups in history. Shakira [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/the-call-of-the-wild/shakira.jpg] The official song of next month’s FIFA World Cup dropped on Thursday: “Dai Dai,” a high-energy track by Colombian pop star Shakira and Nigerian Afrobeats star Burna Boy. The title comes from an Italian phrase that means “come on, come on,” and the song’s chorus mixes English, Spanish, Italian, French, and Japanese words for “let’s go.” The lyrics name-drop soccer legends past and present: Pelé, Maradona, Beckham, Cristiano Ronaldo, Messi, Mbappé, and Salah. It’s Shakira’s fourth World Cup song — her 2010 hit “Waka Waka (This Time for Africa)” remains one of the most recognized World Cup anthems ever. The 2026 World Cup kicks off on June 11 in Mexico City, hosted by the US, Canada, and Mexico. Summer [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/the-call-of-the-wild/summer.jpg] Get your popcorn ready — Hollywood’s summer blockbuster season kicks off next weekend with a packed lineup. First up on May 22 is The Mandalorian and Grogu, the first Star Wars movie in theaters in seven years, starring everyone’s favorite Baby Yoda. Pixar follows in June with Toy Story 5, bringing Woody and Buzz back for another adventure. July is the biggest month: Minions & Monsters takes the little yellow troublemakers to 1920s Hollywood; Moana gets a live-action remake with Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson reprising his role as Maui; legendary director Christopher Nolan releases The Odyssey, an epic adaptation of the 3,000-year-old Greek poem starring Matt Damon; and Spider-Man: Brand New Day swings into theaters with Tom Holland and Zendaya. With ticket sales already 16% higher than last year, 2026 might be the biggest movie year since before the pandemic. calling [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/the-call-of-the-wild/calling.jpg] You may have seen viral videos this month of grown men in green hunting jackets blowing into giant curved horns, making haunting calls that echo through a German trade hall. That’s the German National Deer-Calling Championship, held on January 30 in Dortmund — but clips from it went viral worldwide this May. Contestants imitate the sounds of red deer using only their voices or specially crafted horns, judged on accuracy and emotional realism. The tradition dates back over 800 years to medieval hunters, who used these calls to lure deer during mating season. This year’s winner was Fabian Menzel, who has now claimed the title five years in a row. There’s also a kids’ version called the Kidsfiep World Championship. SPORTS Man City [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/the-call-of-the-wild/mancity.jpg] [Soccer] Two of Europe’s biggest clubs lifted trophies on Saturday. In Munich, Bayern Munich collected the Bundesliga trophy at home after thrashing Köln 5-1, sealing their 35th German league title — a championship they’d already mathematically locked up a month earlier. England striker Harry Kane scored a hat-trick (three goals in one game) to finish the season with 36 Bundesliga goals, winning the top-scorer prize for a third year in a row — something no one had ever done in their first three Bundesliga seasons. The same afternoon at Wembley Stadium in London, Manchester City beat Chelsea 1-0 in the FA Cup final, England’s oldest football competition, dating back to 1871. The winning goal was a thing of beauty: winger Antoine Semenyo flicked the ball past Chelsea’s goalkeeper with the back of his heel. For City, it’s their 8th FA Cup title. Pep Guardiola’s side now turn their attention to chasing Arsenal in the Premier League. messi [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/the-call-of-the-wild/messi.jpg] [Soccer] Lionel Messi keeps finding new ways to break records. On May 13, Inter Miami beat FC Cincinnati 5-3 on the road, and Messi was at the center of it — scoring twice and setting up a third goal. It capped a wild week. Four days earlier, in a 4-2 win at Toronto, the 38-year-old Argentine became the fastest player in MLS (Major League Soccer) history to reach 100 regular-season goal contributions, hitting the mark in just 64 games. The previous record, held by Toronto’s Sebastian Giovinco, took 95 games. Miami have now won six road games in a row, and Messi is heating up just one month before he leads Argentina at the World Cup. THIS DAY IN HISTORY NYSE [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/the-call-of-the-wild/nyse.jpg] 234 years ago today, on May 17, 1792, 24 stock traders met under a buttonwood tree (a type of sycamore) outside 68 Wall Street in New York City and signed a short, two-sentence agreement promising to trade only with each other and at fair, fixed prices. That handshake deal, known as the Buttonwood Agreement, is the founding moment of the New York Stock Exchange — today the biggest stock market in the world. What’s a stock exchange? It’s a marketplace where people buy and sell tiny pieces of companies, called shares. If you own a share of NVIDIA, you own a tiny slice of NVIDIA. When lots of people want to buy a company’s shares, the price goes up; when they want to sell, the price goes down. The exchange is the place where all that buying and selling happens — back in 1792, under a tree; today, mostly on computers. ART OF THE WEEK Jackson Pollock [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/the-call-of-the-wild/pollock.jpg] Tomorrow at art auction house Christie’s in New York, a painting called Number 7A is expected to sell for around $100 million. It was made in 1948 by an American artist named Jackson Pollock, who had a wild way of working: instead of putting a canvas on an easel and using a brush, he laid the canvas flat on the floor and dripped, splattered, and flung paint at it from above, walking around all sides. Critics laughed at first — one magazine nicknamed him “Jack the Dripper” — but Pollock’s drip paintings are now considered some of the most important American art of the 20th century. The funny part? Number 7A was once discovered hanging in someone’s kitchen, covered in years of cooking smoke and grime, before being recognized as a masterpiece. FUNNY Yes But - iPhone [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/the-call-of-the-wild/yesbut_iphone.JPG] Yes But - Line [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/the-call-of-the-wild/yesbut_line.JPG] ---------------------------------------- PREVIOUS ISSUES ---------------------------------------- May 10, 2026, Double Wins for Arsenal in 2026? [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/double-wins-for-arsenal-in-2026] May 03, 2026, The Way You Make Me Feel [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/the-way-you-make-me-feel] April 26, 2026, Game Is No. 1, Friendship is No. 14 [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/game-is-no-1-friendship-is-no-14] ---------------------------------------- Thanks for reading! If you enjoy this newsletter, please share it with friends who might also find it interesting and refreshing, if not for themselves, at least for their kids.