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Est. 2026 · Vol. I · The Daily Grievance
Grump News
"The worst thing that happened to me today that you NEED to know about. And some other news stuff."
❖ The Gripe ❖
A Personal Affront, Reported Faithfully
Mark Zuckerberg bought a nineteenth-century castle in Waterford, Ireland: four hundred and forty acres, at least eleven bedrooms, four separate tower suites, a private library, and a river running through the grounds. He paid somewhere between twenty-three and thirty-five million dollars for it, bought from a financier who had owned it for twenty-five years. A company spokesperson says he bought it to be closer to Meta's Dublin office, which is a two-hour drive away. This is his second home purchase this year, after a hundred and seventy million dollar house in Miami. Four tower suites. For a commute. I once bought a slightly better chair to make working from the kitchen table more tolerable, and I still bring that chair up like it solved something.
❖ The Damage Report ❖
Today's News, Ranked By How Much It Ruined My Mood
🔥 Most Enraging
TikTok ran an internal experiment that intentionally turned off a safety filter meant to limit exposure to content about sadness, loneliness, and suicide, for about ten percent of a fifteen-million-person test group, to see whether the filter was hurting engagement. One teenager in that unfiltered group died by suicide after being shown thousands of related videos. Two senators are now demanding answers by September first, including who inside the company knew, and they called the decision depraved. I was going to make a joke here. I don't have one.
😩 Most Exhausting
Researchers in Australia sequenced over a million immune cells and found more than a thousand genetic switches that work differently depending on whether you're a man or a woman, which may help explain why women get some autoimmune diseases at up to nine times the rate men do. Most of those switches are not even on the chromosomes that determine sex. They are scattered through the regular ones, hiding in plain sight for as long as anyone has been looking. A thousand hidden switches. Nobody consulted me either. My body appears to run on one setting, and that setting is mildly disappointed.
😤 Unreasonably Annoying
A startup called Micro1 pays doctors, lawyers, and other experts to generate training data for AI companies, along with regular people who get paid to record videos of themselves interacting with ordinary objects. In eight months the company's revenue went from a hundred million dollars a year to five hundred million. People are being paid real money to open a jar on camera so a machine can learn how a jar gets opened. I open jars for free, constantly, badly, and nobody has ever once been interested in filming it.
🤷 Somehow Also Happening
German researchers found that dozens of unrelated animal species, from marine worms to starfish to earthworms, all carry the enzymes needed to digest a natural bioplastic that bacteria make for storage. Nobody had noticed before because nobody had thought to look. The going theory now is that animals have been eating this stuff for hundreds of millions of years without anyone catching on. Hundreds of millions of years. Unnoticed. I have been doing something at the dinner table for sixty years and my wife noticed within the first week.
❖ And Some Other Stuff ❖
Briefly, And With Limited Enthusiasm
▸ An escaped sheep in Germany boarded a bus and went through a car wash — A sheep escaped in Germany, boarded a parked bus, and somehow ended up going through a full-sized car wash before anyone caught up with it. A sheep. In a car wash. I have never once had an adventure I did not plan for at least a week in advance.
▸ A dog lost for 72 days in the mountains won the Hambone Award — A golden retriever that went missing for seventy-two days in the mountains near Lake Tahoe turned up alive and was given an award for the year's strangest pet insurance claim. Seventy-two days. Outdoors. Missing. He came back more decorated than I have ever been for anything.
▸ A woman's wedding ring, flushed down a train toilet, was returned to her — A New Jersey woman accidentally flushed her wedding ring down a train toilet, and NJ Transit employees actually got it back to her. I have also come close to losing my own wedding ring more than once, though never to a toilet, and never with this good an ending.
Tomorrow will probably be worse. See you then.
— The Grump · (and Larry)
Reader-supported. Mood not included.