Constellation Energy announced plans to reopen its inactive Three Mile Island nuclear plant in 2028 and sell all of its electricity to Microsoft, which will use the electricity to power data centers from Illinois to Virginia. Importantly, the Pennsylvania plant’s receiving no government subsidies, which indicates the deal would probably not have happened without Microsoft’s business. Next, the initiative heads to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for approval. With a little luck, Microsoft will get its own nuke, Constellation will maintain these banger share prices (the stock was up 16% last week), and tech? Will get a brand new “green” status symbol that might actually improve the planet. With Amazon publicly searching for nuclear engineers, my sense is the industry’s about to get a lot more obnoxious for aging hippies who hate both nuclear power and capitalism. Seriously though, give Zuck a couple months. Facebook’s Diablo Canyon has a lovely ring to it.

Last week, a mid-90s MTV clip of a late teens / early 20s pretty stoner girl outside a Phish concert, casually smoking a cig while bashfully telling an interviewer about her experience following the band on tour, went viral. Wearing a baggy knit sweater, the girl’s hair is dreadlocked, her affect is sweet and unpretentious, and (of Friday), the clip has over 4m views, mainly because men are pining over her, though — often explicitly — unable to say why. Of course, some just miss being young, but I think there's something deeper here. Manic pixie dreadlock girl reminds us of a kind of space that no longer seems possible, in which roughly equal numbers of young men and women uncritically, unironically, enjoy something together. The reaction to the clip is the euphoria of escaping the culture war prison, even if only briefly with nostalgia. Anyway who knows, I could just be projecting.

The Head of the Chechen Republic Ramzan Kadyrov accused Elon Musk of remotely disabling his machine gun wielding Cybertruck, which had been on the front lines of Russia’s war with Ukraine. Apparently having seen the Hezbollah Beeper Boy situation in Beirut, Kadyrov insisted he too was the victim of a far away operation, claiming Elon “gives expensive gifts from the heart and then remotely switches them off,” which is “not nice” and “not manly.” Elon has denied the gift, asking on X, “Are you seriously so retarded that you think I donated a Cybertruck to a Russian general?” And while I’m not a literal warlord with turrets strapped to my Tesla, I do understand General Kadyrov’s concerns. I don’t want my computer on wheels remotely shut down either. But maybe, if your game is violence on vehicles, take a page out of the ISIS playbook and stick to the tried and true Toyota Tacoma.

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