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

Careers

WELL-CONNECTED JUDGE: A 50-year-old Oklahoma judge who was sworn in this year is already bored with her job. Video surfaced of her texting and looking at Facebook during a murder trial.

DIVINE INTERVENTION: A historical drama series about Jesus Christ, The Chosen, was granted approval to keep filming during the SAG-AFTRA strike since it’s an independent production. It doesn’t hurt that the show is based on a pretty popular guy.

Personal

FOUND—CELTIC COINS: Well, not all of them. Authorities arrested four men they believe stole over 400 Celtic gold coins from a German museum last year and melted some of them into a golden lump. Police are checking nearby laundromats and fountains for the rest.

LEARN TO PRESS OLIVES: Stock up now or learn the art of juicing those salty fruits because the European heat waves are sending the olive oil industry into a full-blown crisis. Your fall pasta might have to go drizzle-less.

For sale

BREAKFAST BEERS: Hoboken, New Jersey, changed its liquor laws so bars can start serving alcohol at 5am for Women’s World Cup games. Just what Hoboken needs—more drinking.

SOUP FOR YOU: A woman in Bushwick, Brooklyn, has been simmering a “perpetual stew” for more than 40 days and has been inviting everyone in the neighborhood to come grab a bowl. She’s the anti-Soup Nazi.

ROYAL BOVIDAE FASHION: Princess Diana’s black sheep jumper (that’s “sweater” for our American readers) is up for auction at Sotheby’s and could bring in up to $80,000. This is the perfect gift for someone who already has the Princess Di Beanie Baby.—MM

Park rangers at Death Valley National Park took a picture with the Instagrammable thermometer in Furnace Creek last Sunday. The joke is that typically in extremely hot weather, you wear fewer layers, but the rangers decided it would be funny to put on jackets and act cold.

Btw, this particular thermometer is known for overstating temps—it didn’t actually reach 132 degrees Fahrenheit. But a more legitimate preliminary measure did record a temperature of 120 degrees at midnight in Death Valley last week.

Here are some illuminating scientific discoveries from the week to help you live better and maybe even get your blood pumping today.

An underdog story from the dino age. Dinosaurs weren’t always king of the hill: Fossils uncovered in northeastern China show a badgerlike mammal chomping down on a plant-eating, Labrador-sized triceratops relative. Scientists say the discovery of this preserved battle from 125 million years ago contributes to mounting evidence that prehistoric ecosystems were complicated, with mammals sometimes turning the tables on larger reptilian neighbors. But nobody won this particular round—the mid-conflict preservation likely means the animals were too busy fighting to dodge the volcanic ash mudslide that entombed them.

It’s okay to only exercise on weekends. Squeezing in your recommended 150 minutes of moderate activity into one or two days a week is about as effective at staving off heart disease and stroke as regular exercise, according to a new study. By analyzing 90,000 people’s medical records and biometrics, researchers found that relative to couch potatoes, weekend warriors had a 27% lower risk of heart attack and a 21% lower risk of stroke. Meanwhile, regular exercisers saw the same risks lowered by 35% and 17% compared to the sedentary. Heart failure numbers were even more impressive: a 38% risk reduction for weekend exercisers, compared to 36% for people who hit the gym on workdays.

Schools still call mom more than dad. Now there are numbers to back up what mothers have long complained about: In straight couples, schools phone them more than fathers. Researchers emailed over 30,000 US principals and asked them to call one of two numbers, for a fictitious mom or dad, to discuss potentially enrolling their imaginary child. When principals responded, they called mom 59% of the time. Even when researchers specified that mom was busy, she was still called 26% of the time, compared to just 10% for dads who were said to be busy.—ML

Even Oppenheimer hypebeasts have to admit: Its creators had more extensive source material to work with than branded plastic doll lore.

Christopher Nolan’s sprawling, star-studded thriller centers on the life of theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, aka the father of the atomic bomb. The three-hour IMAX spectacle draws from a correspondingly hefty tome: the 721-page biography American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin.

To sum up (with no spoilers for anyone who’s taken a US history class): It chronicles Oppenheimer heading the Los Alamos Laboratory responsible for executing the Manhattan Project during World War II, his troubled postwar years grappling with the terrifying implications of his work, and his falling out with the government during the Cold War.

Who was Oppenheimer, really?

Oppenheimer’s internal conflicts and tumultuous circumstances make his life the perfect fodder for dramatic depiction. Despite being just one (very influential) person, he fits into a large number of roles.

The troubled genius: In his college days, Oppenheimer suffered from mental health challenges, including severe depression. He also experienced deep jealousy and acted on it, once poisoning an apple and putting it on his professor’s desk at Cambridge.

The underdog: Though he was an accomplished scientist, Oppenheimer was an unlikely choice to lead a massive lab tasked with developing cutting-edge weapons of mass destruction before Nazi Germany did. One colleague said he wouldn’t trust Oppenheimer to run a hamburger joint, Bird and Sherwin wrote in American Prometheus.

The national hero: In 1943, Brigadier General Leslie Groves took a gamble and appointed Oppenheimer as the lead scientist on the Manhattan Project, putting him in charge of a research dream team composed of brainiacs including Richard Feynman, Enrico Fermi, and Niels Bohr. Oppenheimer finally said “I guess it worked” in the summer of 1945, after witnessing the first successful detonation of a nuclear weapon in history during a test in the New Mexico desert. Atomic bombs were soon dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, leading to Japan’s unconditional surrender.

The conscientious campaigner: After the war, the violent destruction Oppenheimer’s invention caused in Japan weighed on him. Recalling his thoughts upon seeing the bomb successfully explode, he famously quoted Hindu scripture: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” He also told President Truman he felt he had blood on his hands—a conversation that reportedly didn’t go well. He advocated for arms control and, in 1949, opposed Truman’s plan for a more powerful hydrogen bomb.

The tragic figure: Postwar America was a bad time to campaign against weapons of mass destruction as the government became obsessed with building more of them to counter the Soviet Union. Oppenheimer’s leftist sympathies and Communist Party-affiliated wife aroused suspicions of disloyalty at a time when many people were accused of being communist spies. He was stripped of his security clearance after a voluntary hearing at the US Atomic Energy Commission (it got posthumously restored in 2022).

The pariah: The entire ordeal left Oppenheimer severely depressed and feeling like his legacy was tarnished. He spent many of his remaining years in self-imposed exile, splitting his time between Princeton and the tiny US Virgin Island of St. John until he died in 1967 at age 62.

What role does Oppenheimer play today?

Understanding why Oppenheimer’s story resonates now is certainly much easier than figuring out what’s going on in Inception. The parallels to artificial intelligence, another technology that scares its own creators, aren’t exactly subtle. Nolan himself said he believes the film is a “cautionary tale” for Silicon Valley.

Kai Bird, coauthor of the book the film is based on, wrote in an Op-Ed for the New York Times that Oppenheimer’s legacy should push the government to heed the warnings of tech trailblazers urging caution, like OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. Nolan claims he’s heard AI researchers talking of being in their own “Oppenheimer moment,” and he hopes the film could teach them a thing or two about taking responsibility for their inventions.

Meal prep: Make sheet pan pancakes, so you can spend less time flipping flapjacks and more time sipping mimosas.

Book rec: If you know what ACOTAR stands for, go buy Fourth Wing. It’s the first book in a new series by Rebecca Yarros filled with dragons and love triangles.

Buy: Earrings that 1) look cool and 2) will keep you from losing your AirPods.

Watch: Thirty-Nine is a show about three friends turning 40 that will make you look like the face-holding-back-tears emoji. Stream all episodes on Netflix.

Follow: A doorman in Brooklyn takes photos of the dogs he sees throughout the day.

Regarding the heat: The good people at Wirecutter have a nifty guide to cleaning fans and AC units.

Get seen: Morning Brew engages a community of 22m+ (who are 1.7x more likely to have a household income of $150k+, btw ). Wanna tap in? Explore our B2B paid advertising opportunities.

It’s a big world out there. In this section, we’ll teleport you to an interesting location—and hopefully give you travel ideas in the process.

Watching Oppenheimer in a standard movie theater is kind of like eating “New York-style pizza” in a Dallas strip mall. It gets the job done, but it’s not the pinnacle of the experience.

For that, you’d have to travel to one of 30 IMAX theaters around the world equipped to project Nolan’s 70-millimeter print of the film. Nineteen of those screens are in the US, while 11 are abroad in Canada, the UK, Australia, and the Czech Republic. The one I’m trying (and failing) to get a ticket to, the AMC Lincoln Square 13 in New York City, measures 97 feet wide and 76 feet tall.

Nolan told the AP that seeing Oppenheimer on one of these 30 screens makes for the “best possible experience” because they’re the only ones with the aspect ratios that can faithfully capture the resolution he shot the film in. An IMAX devotee since The Dark Night, Nolan used 65mm cameras for Oppenheimer that are among the highest-resolution cameras in existence. Consider: The HD screen on your home TV has 1,920 pixels of resolution per frame, while the IMAX resolution has 18,000 pixels.

But all that clarity takes up a lot of physical space, making the film stock a logistical challenge for theaters to project. The Oppenheimer film stock weighs about 600 pounds and spans more than 11 miles; at NYC’s Lincoln Square, they used a forklift to pick it up.

Which is why most people who see Oppenheimer will catch the standard digital presentation. And that, according to Nolan, will be just fine.—NF

Last week we asked: If you could only see one movie among choices of Barbie, Oppenheimer, and the new Mission: Impossible, which one would you pick? Here is the breakdown.

And here are some of our favorite explanations.

• “It’s summer, I’m hot, and I’m about to turn 62. I would rather spend my time and money watching Tom Cruise flex than endure movies that make my brain hurt or my eyes roll.”—Linda from TX
• “This is a cultural reset. There will always be more movies about men and wars. There is only one Barbie.”—Maddy from Chicago, IL
• “The missions never seem to be impossible from the last few movies I’ve seen (Jeremy Renner and Henry Cavill were the best parts of those movies), so Oppenheimer it is.”—Yzael from Plant City, FL
• “I’d pick Barbie just because if you want a cinematic masterpiece about a fundamentally world-changing, culturally significant thing, it’s def Barbie dolls. Not bombs or whatever.”—Zeinab from Senegal

This week’s question

What’s a special phrase or acronym you use with your friends that other people should know?

Matty’s answer to get the juices flowing: “My friends and I can’t stop saying things are ‘coded,’ like, ‘Oh, that hat is so Matty-coded,’ which just means it’s something I would like.”

Share your answer here.

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