No Vibe-Watching of World Cup

No Vibe-Watching of World Cup

EDITOR’S WORDS I can do many other things while vibe-coding, such as binge-watching TV shows and listening to music. Usually after the intense planning mode with Claude Code, I would just press button “1” (OK to proceed) all the way until it one-shots the feature. That mental cruise period allows me to take an easy-going side tour elsewhere. Not for World Cup games though. I think to fully enjoy a soccer game (at the highest level such as World Cup), you really have to pay full attention, be present, and attach yourself to that roller coaster ride (did you watch that England vs Congo, or Portugal vs Croatia?). If you just watch the game while being busy on other screens, you don’t get that emotional journey, or the fun of it. In this sense, soccer is almost anti-2026, when every minute of our lives is increasingly consumed and taken over by electronics and screens. Maybe that’s exactly the real charm of soccer. TECH longchat [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/no-vibe-watching-of-world-cup/longchat.JPG] Meituan, best known in China as a food delivery app similar to DoorDash, surprised the tech world by releasing LongCat-2.0, a giant AI model built entirely on Chinese-made chips. The model has 1.6 trillion parameters, a measure of how much information it can process and learn from, putting it in the same league as the world’s top AI systems. What makes LongCat-2.0 stand out is not just its size but how it was built: earlier Chinese AI models used homegrown chips only to answer questions after training, while this one used domestic hardware for the entire training process too, on a cluster of more than 50,000 chips. That had long been considered too difficult without American-made hardware. The model performs strongly at coding and multi-step problem solving, even beating some benchmarks set by Google’s Gemini. It still trails top US models overall, but it shows China closing the gap in building AI without foreign chips. Trionda [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/no-vibe-watching-of-world-cup/trionda.JPG] Portugal beat Croatia 2-1 in the World Cup round of 32, but the game almost ended differently. Deep into stoppage time, Croatia’s Joško Gvardiol slid in to score what looked like a tying goal, and the stadium erupted. The referee sent the play to video review, and officials found that a Croatian player, Igor Matanović, had made the slightest touch on the ball just before it reached a teammate who was standing offside. That touch meant the whole move didn’t count, and the goal was wiped off the board. The proof came from inside the ball itself: the official World Cup ball, the Adidas Trionda, has a small sensor suspended in its core that tracks tiny movements 500 times per second. Matanović’s touch was so light that replays barely showed it, invisible to the naked eye, but the chip caught it instantly. Portugal held on to win and advanced to face Spain next. data center [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/no-vibe-watching-of-world-cup/datacenter.jpg] Artificial intelligence has an enormous appetite for electricity, and this year that appetite grew faster than ever. Google just reported that its electricity use jumped 37 percent compared to last year, the biggest single-year increase in the company’s history, almost entirely because of the massive computer data centers it needs to run AI systems. Those data centers alone used more than 42 million megawatt-hours of power in a year, roughly as much electricity as an entire country like Denmark or New Zealand uses in the same time. Every question typed into an AI chatbot, every image generated, and every video recommendation relies on rows of powerful computers running around the clock inside these data centers, and all of them need constant cooling and electricity to function. Google says it still buys enough clean energy to match its usage on paper, but even the company admits that AI’s growth is outpacing how fast the power grid can add clean energy sources. GLOBAL Earthquake [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/no-vibe-watching-of-world-cup/earthquake.jpg] On June 24, 2026, two powerful earthquakes struck northwestern Venezuela less than a minute apart, with magnitudes of 7.2 and 7.5, arriving only 39 seconds apart, causing widespread damage across parts of Venezuela’s northern coastline. Scientists call this rare pattern an “earthquake doublet,” where two quakes happen almost back to back with nearly identical strength and origin point. Seismologists note that the earthquakes were the strongest to hit Venezuela since 1900. The quakes hit hardest along the coast near Caracas and La Guaira, collapsing more than 250 structures and trapping people inside. Rescue teams from countries including the US, Jordan, and El Salvador have been digging through rubble for over a week. One father was pulled out alive after five days trapped under a collapsed shopping mall. As of early July, more than 2,500 people had died, thousands were injured, and tens of thousands remained unaccounted for. Venezuela’s government says clearing the debris alone could take years. Verde [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/no-vibe-watching-of-world-cup/verde.jpg] Cape Verde is a tiny archipelago off the coast of West Africa with about 525,000 people, yet its World Cup squad this year was built almost entirely from players scattered across 14 different countries. Coach Bubista recruited many of them straight from Cape Verde’s diaspora, sometimes in unusual ways. Defender Roberto Lopes, born and raised in Ireland, first got the offer through a LinkedIn message written in Portuguese, which he initially ignored, thinking it was spam. Once he ran it through Google Translate, he immediately said yes. Cape Verdeans call their scattered communities abroad the “11th island,” since ten islands make up the actual country. That global roster shocked the world by holding European champions Spain to a scoreless draw, then tying Uruguay 2-2, and going undefeated through the entire group stage, before finally being eliminated by Argentina. It’s the best World Cup run ever by a nation this small. ECONOMY & FINANCE Price [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/no-vibe-watching-of-world-cup/price.jpg] Every World Cup team’s roster carries a price tag, based on what buying all its players on the open market would roughly cost. France leads this year at around 1.5 billion euros, followed by England, Spain, and Portugal, all above 1 billion. So far, money has mostly matched performance: France, England, Spain, and Portugal all advanced to the round of 16 without much trouble. But not always. Germany, the fifth most expensive squad in the tournament, was knocked out by Paraguay on penalties, and the Netherlands, ranked eighth, lost to Morocco the same way. Meanwhile Cape Verde, whose entire squad is valued at a small fraction of what a single top European star costs, went undefeated through the group stage and reached the knockout rounds anyway. Jordan fields the cheapest squad in the tournament at just over 20 million euros, less than the price of one average Premier League midfielder. SpaceX [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/no-vibe-watching-of-world-cup/spacex.jpg] SpaceX crashed the stock market party on June 12, 2026, in the largest IPO in history, briefly overtaking Amazon and Microsoft in value and making CEO Elon Musk the world’s first trillionaire almost overnight. Shares opened at $150 and rocketed to $225 within days, a nearly 50 percent surge before the company had even filed a single earnings report. Then gravity caught up. The stock cratered, sinking below its original $150 price and erasing roughly $1 trillion in value in barely a week, one of the fastest wealth wipeouts in market history. Analysts point to a pile of new debt, a $25 billion bond sale to fuel SpaceX’s AI ambitions, and a valuation that had investors paying over 100 times the company’s actual sales, more than triple what Nvidia commands. NATURE & ENVIRONMENT Rock [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/no-vibe-watching-of-world-cup/rock.jpg] A famous natural rock arch off the island of Comino, near Malta, collapsed into the sea on the evening of June 27, 2026. The arch, nicknamed the “Kissing Elephants,” was a limestone formation on Malta’s coast popular with boat tours and photographers, large enough for small boats to pass beneath. It gave way suddenly in calm weather with no storm, just as a tourist jumped from the top into the water below. A jet ski happened to be passing underneath at that moment, and the falling rock struck it, killing one rider. Geologists say a crack in the rock had been spotted two weeks earlier, and years of erosion had already weakened the structure. SCIENCE Flu [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/no-vibe-watching-of-world-cup/flu.jpg] For decades, most flu shots have been made the same way: growing weakened flu virus inside chicken eggs, a slow process that takes months. Scientists have now developed a new kind of flu vaccine that skips eggs entirely and uses mRNA technology instead, the same approach behind many COVID-19 vaccines. Instead of growing a virus, the vaccine gives cells a short set of instructions to build a harmless piece of the flu virus themselves, teaching the immune system to recognize it. In a study published in Nature Immunology, researchers found this new vaccine triggers a broader immune response than traditional flu shots, meaning it helps the body recognize and fight a wider range of flu strains at once. An FDA advisory panel voted unanimously in June to recommend the vaccine for adults 50 and older, with a final approval decision expected in early August. Scientists hope the technology could eventually lead to a single flu shot effective against nearly every strain. MATH poisson [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/no-vibe-watching-of-world-cup/poisson.jpg] Soccer goals are rare and scattered, which makes them a perfect example of something mathematicians call a Poisson distribution, a formula for predicting how often random events happen in a fixed amount of time. It works because goals in a match are mostly independent: scoring one goal in the 20th minute doesn’t make another goal in the 70th minute more or less likely. The same math describes meteor showers, since seeing one meteor doesn’t change the odds of seeing another one later, or how many customers walk into a store each hour. If a team averages 1.5 goals per game, the Poisson formula can calculate the exact odds of them scoring 0, 1, 2, or even 5 goals in their next match, without knowing anything about the opponent. Statisticians use exactly this math to build the betting odds and score predictions seen before every World Cup game. LIFESTYLE, ENTERTAINMENT & CULTURE July 4 [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/no-vibe-watching-of-world-cup/july4.jpg] This year’s Fourth of July was extra special in the United States, marking exactly 250 years since the signing of the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia in 1776. The milestone, known as the Semiquincentennial, has been celebrated all year with museum exhibits, historic document displays, and events across the country. To mark the day, the US Mint mixed 250,000 special quarters into circulation, each stamped with a tiny “July 4th” mark, giving people a chance to find a piece of history in their everyday change. The date also overlapped with the World Cup, which the US is co-hosting with Mexico and Canada this year, adding matches and international visitors to the mix of fireworks, parades, and barbecues that usually mark the holiday. The Declaration of Independence itself was formally adopted by the Continental Congress on July 4, 1776, explaining why the 13 American colonies were breaking away from British rule. spiderman [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/no-vibe-watching-of-world-cup/spiderman.jpg] Every year, Independence Day weekend marks the unofficial launch of Hollywood’s biggest summer movie season, and studios save some of their splashiest releases for it. This year’s frontrunner is “Minions & Monsters,” which opened July 1 aiming for around $80 million over the holiday weekend. But the movie everyone is really waiting for is Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey,” arriving July 17. Based on Homer’s ancient Greek epic, it stars Matt Damon as the hero Odysseus trying to sail home after the Trojan War, battling a Cyclops, sirens, and sea monsters along the way. Nolan filmed the entire movie on special IMAX cameras, a first in movie history, and the story itself is nearly 3,000 years old, one of the oldest tales still being retold today. Disney’s live-action “Moana” and a new Spider-Man film also arrive this month, making July one of the most packed movie months of the year. SPORTS bicycle [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/no-vibe-watching-of-world-cup/bicycle.jpg] [Soccer] The World Cup’s round of 32 brought big surprises this week. Germany, a four-time champion, was eliminated after losing to Paraguay in a penalty shootout, the first time Germany has ever lost a shootout at a World Cup. Brazil beat Japan 2-1 to move on, while France cruised past Sweden 3-0 behind two goals from Kylian Mbappé. England beat DR Congo 2-1 after falling behind early, with captain Harry Kane scoring both goals late in the game to complete the comeback. and Spain routed Austria 3-0. Argentina survived a scare against Cape Verde, winning 3-2 in extra time after Lionel Messi opened the scoring. Norway, playing in just its second World Cup ever, beat Ivory Coast 2-1 on a late goal from star striker Erling Haaland to reach the round of 16 for the first time in the tournament’s modern era. Now Brazil faces Norway, France takes on Paraguay, England travels to Mexico, and Argentina meets Egypt. THIS DAY IN HISTORY trinity [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/no-vibe-watching-of-world-cup/trinity.jpg] On June 5, 1661, an 18-year-old Isaac Newton walked through the gates of Trinity College, Cambridge, and quietly began one of the most consequential educations in human history. He arrived as a “subsizar,” working as a servant to wealthier students just to afford his tuition. The official curriculum was still stuck on Aristotle, whose 2,000-year-old ideas about motion and the universe were treated as settled fact. Newton followed the coursework just enough to pass, but in a private notebook he titled “Certain Philosophical Questions,” he began tearing apart the old assumptions himself, on motion, light, and the nature of infinity. Within five years of walking through those gates, working largely in isolation during a plague outbreak that shut down the university, Newton had sketched out calculus, decoded how white light splits into colors, and started piecing together the theory of gravity. Few doorways in history have led to more. ART OF THE WEEK painting [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/no-vibe-watching-of-world-cup/rain.jpg] Utagawa Hiroshige was a Japanese artist who spent much of his early life as a fire warden in Edo, the city now known as Tokyo, before turning to art full time. In 1832, he traveled the Tokaido, the road connecting Edo to the imperial capital of Kyoto, and turned the journey into a series of 55 woodblock prints covering the start, the finish, and all 53 rest stops along the way. The series became an instant bestseller and made Hiroshige famous. One of its standout prints is Shono, station forty-five, where Hiroshige skipped the area’s real scenery entirely and invented a sudden summer rainstorm instead. Two palanquin bearers lean into the wind climbing uphill while two other travelers dash downhill, all caught bracing against slanted sheets of rain carved directly into the wood. Behind them, bamboo bends sideways in the wind, fading into gray. It remains one of the series’ most famous images. FUNNY > Why is a soccer stadium the coolest place to be? > > > * Because it’s filled with tens of thousands of fans! > > > Why do soccer players do so well in school? > > > * Because they know how to pass! > > > My boyfriend made a save in a soccer game > > > * That’s how I knew he was a keeper! > > > What’s the best state to shop for a soccer uniform? > > > * New Jersey! ---------------------------------------- PREVIOUS ISSUES ---------------------------------------- June 28, 2026, A Hot Week for the World Cup and Europe [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/a-hot-week-for-the-world-cup-and-europe] June 21, 2026, Wonderwall and Other Wonders [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/wonderwall-and-other-wonders] June 13, 2026, Who Will Win the 2026 World Cup? [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/who-will-win-2026-world-cup] ---------------------------------------- Thanks for reading! 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A Hot Week for the World Cup and Europe

EDITOR’S WORDS Early last year when I started writing the Sunday Blender, I was using X.com as the primary source of the latest stories on all subjects, especially in tech, science, and sports. I followed all the major media accounts and grew an ever expanding watch list for KOLs in various disciplines. I was methodical. I wanted to catch news when they’re still fresh and for a long time that place was X.com (Twitter). I don’t do that so much anymore. For the past few months, WeChat has quietly become the go-to source for stories featured in the Sunday Blender. I don’t even have to search high and low for high-impact public accounts. Interesting stories just appear on my timeline. The more I read, the more relevant those stories have become, for the themes of the Sunday Blender. All these media platforms create an echo chamber in the end. X.com is becoming quite noisy and losing its signal impact. WeChat, on the other hand, may not be the best place for early signals yet, but at least it’s got diversity and surprisingly is serving me well curating stories from around the world. TECH referee [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/a-hot-week-for-the-world-cup-and-europe/referee.jpg] At the 2026 World Cup, the referees are wearing some seriously high-tech gear. For the first time ever, every referee at all 104 matches has a tiny HD camera mounted near one ear, giving fans at home a referee’s-eye view of the action. The camera is part of a three-piece kit. A microphone keeps the referee talking to the assistant referees, the fourth official, and the video review team, and it can even broadcast the referee’s decisions out loud to fans in the stadium. An earpiece lets the rest of the officials feed information back instantly. The footage from a sprinting referee would normally be far too shaky to watch, so the technology company Lenovo built software that smooths it out in real time. One thing that hasn’t changed: the referee still blows an ordinary whistle to stop play. The camera just lets everyone finally see what made them blow it. Age of Empire [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/a-hot-week-for-the-world-cup-and-europe/aoe.jpg] Adrian de Wynter, a scientist at Microsoft, did something gloriously strange: he built a working neural network inside the 1999 strategy game Age of Empires II, using goats. A neural network is the kind of system that powers modern AI like chatbots. In the game’s map editor, he set up the tiny on-off switches that computers use to think. Grass meant a 0, a bridge meant a 1, and goats wandered through the maze acting as the signals moving between switches. Step by step, this goat machine could actually learn a simple logic task. But this wasn’t just for fun. De Wynter wanted to make a point about AI. People often feel that chatbots are alive or have feelings, mostly because they talk in smooth human language. His goats do the exact same math without any of that, which suggests the “human” feeling comes from the packaging, not real thoughts. Lineshine [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/a-hot-week-for-the-world-cup-and-europe/lineshine.jpg] China just built the fastest supercomputer on Earth. The machine, called LineShine and housed in the city of Shenzhen, was announced as number one on the TOP500, the official list ranking the world’s most powerful computers. It can perform more than two quintillion calculations every second, that’s a 2 followed by 18 zeros, beating the previous champion, an American machine called El Capitan, by about 20 percent. It’s the first time China has held the top spot since 2017. What makes it especially notable is that the United States has blocked China from buying the most advanced computer chips, so Chinese engineers designed and built every part of LineShine themselves, using only their own technology. Supercomputers like this aren’t for playing games or browsing the web. Scientists use them for huge, complicated jobs like predicting weather, designing medicines, and modelling how the climate is changing. GLOBAL Railway [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/a-hot-week-for-the-world-cup-and-europe/railway.jpeg] On the night of June 23, 2026, every single train in Germany stopped at once. Deutsche Bahn, the national railway, had to freeze all traffic because the system drivers use to talk to control centers, called GSM-R, suddenly failed across the whole country, and trains aren’t allowed to move when they can’t communicate. GSM-R is a railway version of 2G, the same basic mobile phone technology people used around the year 2000, and Germany still runs its entire network on it. The failure was triggered by something tiny: a routine swap of one technical component during scheduled maintenance, which somehow knocked out the system nationwide. Thousands of passengers were stranded at stations like Berlin and Frankfurt for hours. Deutsche Bahn runs one of the busiest railways in the world, moving more than 5 million passengers a day across 5,400 stations. Its network has never been frozen nationwide for a technical reason before, only for storms. ECONOMY & FINANCE Aircon [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/a-hot-week-for-the-world-cup-and-europe/aircon.jpg] As Europe bakes through its record heatwave, Chinese air conditioner makers are selling units faster than they can ship them. Companies like Midea, Gree, and Hisense have seen demand surge, because air conditioning, normal across much of Asia, has always been rare in Europe. Only about one in five European homes has it, so when temperatures shot past 40°C, millions of people scrambled to buy one at once. Midea’s popular portable model sold out in some shops, and demand was so intense that second-hand units were being resold for more than the price of new ones. Even after buying one, though, many Europeans find it hard to set up. Lots of countries have strict rules about attaching the outdoor part of an air conditioner to a building, especially in old historic town centres where it can spoil the look, and getting a permit can take weeks. China makes nearly 40% of the world’s air conditioners, NATURE & ENVIRONMENT Heat wave [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/a-hot-week-for-the-world-cup-and-europe/heat.jpg] Right now a brutal heat wave is baking western Europe, and scientists are calling it the worst the continent has ever recorded. The cause is a “heat dome,” a giant lid of high pressure that traps hot Saharan air over France, Spain, the UK, Germany and beyond, suppressing clouds so the sun cooks the ground for days on end. France just had its hottest day in recorded history, Spain saw its warmest June since at least 1950, and Britain broke its own June record. Some French towns topped 42°C (108°F). The effects have been serious: dozens of people have died, schools shut, and Paris closed the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre early to protect visitors. Belgium’s power grid was so strained that electricity briefly cost over €1 per kilowatt-hour as air conditioners ran flat out. Europe is warming faster than any other continent on Earth. SCIENCE India [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/a-hot-week-for-the-world-cup-and-europe/indiea.JPG] A new scientific study has revealed how deadly extreme heat really is in India, one of the hottest and most crowded countries on Earth. Researchers estimated that a single day of extreme heat causes about 3,400 more deaths across the country than would normally happen, and a five-day heatwave nearly 30,000. These aren’t deaths counted on one particular day; they’re estimates of the hidden toll heat takes, calculated using temperature and population data. The study’s big finding is that India’s official records badly undercount heat deaths. When someone dies during a heatwave, the cause written on the certificate is often a heart attack or kidney failure rather than heat itself, so the real danger stays invisible in government statistics. India has been baking through brutal summers, with temperatures in some northern areas passing 48°C. The researchers say better tracking and warning systems could save thousands of lives each year. MATH round robin [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/a-hot-week-for-the-world-cup-and-europe/roundrobin.jpg] In the World Cup group stage, 48 teams are split into 12 groups of 4, and every team plays each of the others once. How many games is that per group? You know the answer is 6, and here’s how to work it out. Each of the 4 teams plays 3 others, so that’s 4 × 3 = 12. But this counts every game twice, since Brazil playing Spain is the same match as Spain playing Brazil, so you divide by 2: 12 ÷ 2 = 6. The formula is n × (n − 1) ÷ 2, where n is the number of teams. Try it yourself: a group of 3 gives 3 × 2 ÷ 2 = 3 games, a group of 5 gives 5 × 4 ÷ 2 = 10, and a group of 6 gives 6 × 5 ÷ 2 = 15. It’s the same math as counting how many handshakes happen when everyone in a room shakes hands once. LIFESTYLE, ENTERTAINMENT & CULTURE Sia [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/a-hot-week-for-the-world-cup-and-europe/sia.jpg] Walk into any World Cup stadium and you’ll hear far more than the official tournament songs. Crowds have their own playlist, a handful of old hits that tens of thousands of strangers somehow all know by heart. The biggest is “Seven Nation Army” by The White Stripes, whose wordless “oh, oh-oh-oh” chant rings out after almost every goal. There’s also Bon Jovi’s “Livin’ on a Prayer,” with a chorus so big the whole stadium roars it together, and “Titanium” by David Guetta and Sia, whose powerful “I am titanium” line makes a perfect victory song. Queen’s “We Will Rock You,” with its stomp-stomp-clap beat, has been uniting crowds since the 1970s, and Blur’s “Song 2” delivers a joyful “woo-hoo!” everyone shouts at once. What these songs share is simple: a part so catchy and easy that you don’t need to know the words, or even the language, to join in. Hunter [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/a-hot-week-for-the-world-cup-and-europe/hunter.jpg] This month, the Nebula Awards, one of the top honors in science fiction and fantasy writing, announced their winners in Chicago. The prize for Best Novel went to The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones, a chilling horror story by a writer known for tales rooted in Native American history. The other top fiction prizes went to authors all working in the strange and imaginative space between sci-fi and fantasy. Amal El-Mohtar won Best Novella for The River Has Roots, a fairy-tale-like story about two sisters and magic. Thomas Ha won Best Novelette for “Uncertain Sons,” and Effie Seiberg took Best Short Story for one with the playful title “Laser Eyes Ain’t Everything.” There was also a prize for younger readers: Michelle Knudsen won the Andre Norton Award for Into the Wild Magic. The Nebulas are chosen by working authors themselves, which makes winning one a real mark of respect from fellow writers. Sofi [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/a-hot-week-for-the-world-cup-and-europe/sofi.jpg] One of the surprise stars of the 2026 World Cup isn’t a player at all: it’s the giant American stadiums hosting the matches. All eleven US venues are normally home to NFL football teams, and they are enormous. The final will be played at MetLife Stadium near New York, which seats over 82,000 people and cost about 1.6 billion dollars to build. The most jaw-dropping is SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles, the most expensive stadium ever built, dug 100 feet into the ground with a see-through roof and a colossal video screen hanging over the field. But football pitches are nearly 20 metres wider than American football fields, so workers had to rip out thousands of seats at each stadium and lay down real grass over the artificial turf. A few stadiums, like the ones in Dallas, Houston, and Atlanta, even have sliding roofs and full air conditioning, keeping players and fans cool while much of the world bakes. Dragon Boat [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/a-hot-week-for-the-world-cup-and-europe/dragonboat.jpg] Every summer in southern China’s Guangdong province, rivers come alive with the thunder of drums and the splash of paddles for dragon boat racing, one of the country’s oldest traditions. The boats are long and narrow, carved and painted to look like dragons, and a team of paddlers drives each one forward in perfect rhythm while a drummer pounds out the beat and a steerer guides from the back. The races honour the Dragon Boat Festival and an ancient poet from over two thousand years ago, and this year Guangdong planned more than 500 races across all 21 of its cities. But the most jaw-dropping version happens in the village of Diejiao, nicknamed the “F1 on water.” There, 25-metre-long boats race through twisting village canals barely three metres wide, squeezing around hairpin S-bends, C-bends, and L-shaped corners with two right-angle turns. To whip around them, the crew slams the boat into a turn so fast that it actually slides sideways across the water, a real-life drift, while the steerers jam their paddles down to pivot it. Get it wrong and the whole boat smashes into the stone bank. SPORTS ball [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/a-hot-week-for-the-world-cup-and-europe/ball.jpg] [Soccer] The group stage of the 2026 World Cup is over, and the final 32 teams are set for the knockout round that starts today. This is the first World Cup with 48 teams, 16 more than usual, and for the first time the top two from each of the 12 groups plus the eight best third-place teams move on. The host nations all advanced: the United States and Mexico both won their groups, and Canada finished second. France looked strongest, winning all three games, including a 4-1 thumping of Norway in which Ousmane Dembélé scored a hat trick in the first half. Germany, a four-time champion, lost to Ecuador but still got through. Of the eight Asian teams, only two survived: Japan, who beat Tunisia 4-0, and Australia. South Korea, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Qatar, and Iraq all went home. Tiny Cape Verde, an island nation of about half a million people, reached the knockouts on its first try. Messi [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/a-hot-week-for-the-world-cup-and-europe/messi.jpg] [Soccer] The 2026 World Cup’s biggest stars have lit up the group stage, and the goals are flying in faster than at any tournament in decades. Lionel Messi, now 39 and likely playing his last World Cup, leads everyone with six goals, including a hat trick against Algeria and a free kick off the bench against Jordan. He is now the all-time top scorer in men’s World Cup history with 19 goals and the first player ever to score in seven straight World Cup matches. Three players sit just behind him on four goals each. France’s Kylian Mbappé scored in all three group games. His teammate Ousmane Dembélé, who won the 2025 Ballon d’Or as the world’s best player, matched him with a first-half hat trick against Norway. Norway’s Erling Haaland also has four, netting twice in each of his first two matches. Cristiano Ronaldo, 41 and in his sixth World Cup, scored twice against Uzbekistan to become the first player to score in six different tournaments. England’s Harry Kane managed two against Croatia, and Spain’s 18-year-old Lamine Yamal, rated the tournament’s top player beforehand, scored once after returning from injury. Brazil’s Neymar came off the bench against Scotland for his first match in nearly three years, having torn a knee ligament back in October 2023. Chess [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/a-hot-week-for-the-world-cup-and-europe/chess.jpg] [Chess] In June, a 20-year-old Indian grandmaster named Rameshbabu Praggnanandhaa won Norway Chess, one of the most prestigious tournaments in the sport, held in Oslo. He did it the hard way. After losing two games in the middle of the event, he sat in last place out of six players, then won four classical games in a row to finish first, ahead of a field that included Magnus Carlsen, the world number one, and Gukesh Dommaraju, the reigning world champion. Twice during the tournament he beat Carlsen, who happens to be Norwegian and was playing in his home country. The key was a change in strategy: Praggnanandhaa started playing his opening moves quickly, which left him far more time to think later on. In the deciding games his opponents were down to under five minutes while he had over twenty, and the pressure forced them into mistakes. Carlsen said afterward he never thought it possible. cycling [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/a-hot-week-for-the-world-cup-and-europe/cycling.JPG] [Cycling] In June, an ultra-endurance cyclist named Dr. Sarah Ruggins rode the entire length of mainland Europe faster than anyone in history. She started at Tarifa, the southern tip of Spain, and finished at Nordkapp, the northern tip of Norway, covering more than 6,000 kilometres across 9 countries in 13 days, 20 hours, and 27 minutes, beating the previous record, held by a man, by over three days. To do it she rode up to 22 hours a day, slept only about three hours a night, and ate roughly 11,000 calories daily, pushing through 35°C heat in Spain and below-freezing cold inside the Arctic Circle, climbing some 35,000 metres along the way. What makes it extraordinary is where she started. As a 15-year-old in Canada, Ruggins was a promising runner with Olympic ambitions when a rare neurological illness left her unable to walk or use her hands and dependent on full-time care. Her recovery took about ten years. She only got on a bike in 2023, and three years later she holds two outright world records in the sport. She rode to raise money for World Bicycle Relief, a charity that gives bicycles to people who need them to reach school, work, and healthcare. THIS DAY IN HISTORY Radiohead [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/a-hot-week-for-the-world-cup-and-europe/radiohead.jpg] On this day, June 28, in 1997, the British band Radiohead reached number one in the UK with their album OK Computer, now considered one of the greatest records ever made. What makes it remarkable is how far ahead of its time it was. Back when most people didn’t own a mobile phone and the internet was brand new, the band wrote songs about feeling lost and anxious in a world being taken over by machines, computers, and constant information. Singer Thom Yorke later said the “information overload” he worried about then is far worse now, in the age of smartphones and AI. You might know Radiohead better from their earlier song “Creep,” a far more famous and easy-to-sing tune about feeling like an outsider that became a worldwide hit. But the band grew uncomfortable being known for just one catchy song, so they deliberately made something stranger and deeper. The gamble worked, and OK Computer made them legends. ART OF THE WEEK Sunrise [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/a-hot-week-for-the-world-cup-and-europe/sunrise.jpg] Sunrise was painted by the French artist Claude Monet in 1872. It shows a misty harbour in early morning, with a small orange sun glowing through the haze and a few dark boats sketched in loose, quick strokes. Look closely and the water is just smudges and squiggles of paint, but step back and your eye blends it into shimmering light on the sea. That was Monet’s goal: not to copy every detail, but to capture the feeling of a single passing moment before the light changed. The painting also gave a whole art movement its name, and it began as an insult. When Monet showed it in Paris, a critic sneered that it was only an “impression,” not a proper finished picture. Instead of being offended, Monet and his friends embraced the word, and Impressionism became one of the most loved styles in all of art. FUNNY Haaland [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/a-hot-week-for-the-world-cup-and-europe/haaland.jpg] Haaland has single-handedly contributed many viral emojis from this World Cup. ---------------------------------------- PREVIOUS ISSUES ---------------------------------------- June 21, 2026, Wonderwall and Other Wonders [https://weekly.sundayblender.com/p/wonderwall-and-other-wonders] 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] ---------------------------------------- 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.

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! 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