How to turn $25 into $4 million, and then lose it.

Ever since autonomous vehicles became a “thing”, I’ve been saying their adoption would be driven not by consumer demand or government legislation, but by the insistence of the insurance companies. Turns out Tesla is already working with Farmers Insurance, and ultimately wants to sell their autonomous vehicles fully insured.

This is an absolutely fascinating profile on Jim “Mad Dog” Mattis, the man affectionately known as Chaos Actual among his Marines. He is a true warrior monk, and isn’t afraid to mix it up with the enemy hand-to-hand. Believe me when I tell you, it’s better to have a guy like this inside your tent pissing out, than outside your tent pissing in.

This is a beautiful story of a man with an incurable disease who wanted everyone’s final memory of him to be a happy one. I’m not sure I’ve ever read a better argument in favor of assisted suicide.

Easily the saddest thing you’ll read this week, but you should definitely read it. I’m not in the business of assigning blame, and there’s frankly too much blame to go around for outcomes like this, but I can’t help wondering when this country turned so cold.

We’re no strangers to extreme flooding here in Louisiana. But it’s getting worse all over the world, and it’s starting to hit us where it hurts most. In just one example, the arctic seed bank where we store all the emergency seeds for the continuation of humanity recently flooded when the permafrost under which it was buried melted.

Scientists believe that we are either entering or have entered Earth’s 6th mass extinction. Animal species are going extinct at an unprecedented rate, and it’s speeding up. By some estimates, most animal species (with the exception of those cultivated by humans) will be gone in the next 250 years. Here are just a few that future generations will likely never see.

You don’t have to be a vegan to find what happens in a typical slaughterhouse abhorrent. The animals often die in pain and fear, and the assembly line of death is a true horror. Unfortunately, humane slaughterhouses (where the animals are dispatched with a modicum of care and dignity) are few and far between.

45,000 years ago, early humans began showing up at a cave in Ethiopia and storing the supplies to create paint, of all things. For the next almost 5,000 years they kept coming back, making paint, and creating art. This cave was one of the first, and longest running, artist communities in human history.

Monkey ransom is a thing. These macaques have figured out that they don’t want your camera, but you probably do, and will be willing to give them plenty of snacks to get it back.