🚨HERO: On April 22, 2018, James Shaw Jr. walked into a Waffle House in Antioch, Tennessee, expecting nothing more than breakfast. Minutes later, gunfire erupted inside the restaurant. Four people had already been killed, and the gunman was still holding an AR-15-style rifle. Most people ran. Shaw made a split-second decision. Unarmed, he charged the shooter, grabbed the rifle by its burning-hot barrel with his bare hands, and fought until he wrested the weapon away. His hands were severely burned, but he did not let go. The gunman fled. Shaw’s actions almost certainly prevented further loss of life. The country called him a hero. Shaw refused the title. He said he was simply trying to survive and protect the people around him. Instead of seeking attention, he launched a fundraiser that raised more than $200,000 for the victims’ families. He continued speaking about healing and supporting communities affected by violence. The headlines have long since faded. Many no longer remember the name. But courage like James Shaw Jr.’s should never be forgotten.

Have you ever noticed we live in a country where a 95-year-old man can walk into a mud pit in Chicago, call his band The Fuckers, and start reciting “Enter Sandman” like he’s giving a TED Talk from the afterlife? William Shatner. Ninety-five. Riot Fest. Douglass Park. Thirty-five minutes. Spoken-word heavy metal. In the mud. With people cheering like this is normal. It is not normal. It is magnificent. He did “Crazy Train.” He did “Ace of Spades.” He did Metallica. Not sang them. Talked them. Like Captain Kirk got trapped in a guitar amp and decided to negotiate with Satan instead of the Klingons. Behind him: actual musicians. Marcus Nand. Phil Soussan. Grown men who have paid rent with real notes while a nonagenarian stands there going, “What the F is heavy metal?” and somehow makes it a question worth answering. Brian May is on the record. Tony Iommi is on the record. The album is called *What the F Is Heavy Metal?* which is the most honest title in music since someone first admitted most of it is just louder complaining. The crowd ate it up. Of course they did. We will watch a man old enough to remember radio as furniture stand in wet dirt and dare death to tap him on the shoulder. Death probably took one look, said “I’m not dealing with this today,” and went to find someone easier. You’re never too old to live out your dreams. That’s the line they always use. The real line is: most people quit the second it gets embarrassing. Shatner waited until embarrassing became the whole act, then sold tickets. Follow @wickedsmaahht before the rest of the timeline figures it out. #WilliamShatner #RiotFest #WhatTheFIsHeavyMetal #NeverTooOld #SpokenWordMetal #LiveLongAndGetLouder #CaptainKirkHasEnteredTheChat

Seattle drafted Vinnie Johnson seventh overall in 1979 out of Baylor, where he'd averaged 24 points a game and once dropped 50 on TCU. Two years later the Sonics traded him to Detroit, and he spent the next decade doing the same job every night. Coming off the bench. Thirteen NBA seasons and he was never the guy. He was the guy who came in when the guy needed a rest. He was spectacular at it. In the 1985 playoffs he scored 22 points in the fourth quarter against Boston. Danny Ainge came out of that game and gave him the name that stuck forever. "If that guy in Chicago is the Refrigerator, then Vinnie Johnson is the Microwave." In Game 5 of the 1990 Finals he hit a 14-footer with 0.7 seconds left to beat Portland and clinch Detroit's second straight championship. After that they called him 007 too. Two rings. 11,825 career points. Number 15 hanging in the rafters in Detroit. Total career earnings: about $6 million. His best season paid him $1.4 million, at the very end, in 1990. He retired in 1992. Three years later he started a company in Detroit that made packaging supplies for automakers. Here's what he said the point of it was. "I really wanted to get into business and create some jobs and opportunities. I wanted to do something different outside of basketball, but the main thing was giving back to the city of Detroit for all the support they have given me." General Motors gave him his break. He shifted the company from packaging into automotive assembly, which meant building whole systems for car manufacturers instead of shipping them parts in boxes. Then he just kept going. Piston Group today does more than $3 billion in annual revenue. It employs over 10,000 people across the United States, Mexico and Canada, in about three and a half million square feet of plant space. It supplies Ford, GM, Honda, Toyota and Chrysler. It is one of the largest minority-owned businesses in the world. Vinnie Johnson is worth somewhere around half a billion dollars. He made $6 million in thirteen years of professional basketball. His company now generates roughly 500 times that, every single year. And he built it in the city that watched him play, specifically so people there would have somewhere to work.

At Ground Zero, after the last living person was pulled out, the search dogs stopped eating. So the police did something nobody had written down in any manual. They climbed into the rubble, lay down, and pretended to be alive. More than 300 dogs worked the World Trade Center site. They came from every corner of the country, on trucks and in cargo holds, with handlers who had been trained to do one thing. Find people who are still breathing under the ground. That is what a search and rescue dog is built for. Not bodies. Life. They are trained on live human scent. When they find it, they bark, they dig, they light up, and the handler rewards them, and the whole thing means something. The last living person recovered from Ground Zero was a woman named Genelle Guzman-McMillan. She had been buried for 27 hours. A dog found her. She was the last. After that, the dogs kept going out on twelve-hour shifts, across sixteen acres of smoldering steel, at temperatures that burned their paws, and they found nobody. Nobody. Day after day. The handlers noticed it first. The dogs were changing. Their tails were down. They were not eating. They would come off the pile and lie flat and not look at anyone. A veterinarian named Cindy Otto, who spent ten days there working night shifts to care for the animals, put it plainly. The dogs had been sent to find life, and every day they were finding the opposite. It was breaking them. An NYPD officer named Famiglietti described what happened next. They pulled everybody off the rubble. Then they asked for volunteers. The volunteers, police officers, went out into the debris and hid themselves. Under beams. In voids. Curled up in pockets of concrete. They were told to lie down like they were hurt. Then the handlers sent the dogs in. Picture that. A grown man with a badge, a man who had spent the last week pulling friends out of that same pile, lying down in it on purpose. Face down. Holding still. Waiting for a dog. And the dog comes over the top of the wreckage, and catches the scent, and barks, and digs, and finds a person who is warm and moving and alive. And the handler says good girl, good boy, and the whole team celebrates. They called them mock finds. They did it for the dogs. They did it so the dogs would remember what they were for. One of those dogs was a two-year-old golden retriever named Bretagne. She came from Texas with her handler, Denise Corliss. It was her first deployment. They worked ten days at Ground Zero. They found no survivors. But firefighters would come off the pile, stone-faced, not speaking, and see the dog, and something would break open in them. They would kneel down. They would put their face in her fur. One day a man walked up to Bretagne and started petting her. He told Corliss his best friend loved golden retrievers. Corliss asked where his friend was. The man pointed at the pile. "He's in there somewhere." He kept petting the dog. Bretagne went on to work Hurricane Katrina and Rita. She retired at 10. She was the last known surviving search dog of 9/11. On June 6, 2016, at age 16, she was carried into a veterinary office in Texas to be put to sleep. Outside, a dozen firefighters from her fire department stood in a line in their dress uniforms, in the heat, and saluted as she went past. They draped her in an American flag on the way out. Three hundred dogs went into that pile looking for the living. They found one. And when they could not find any more, the men they worked beside laid down in the rubble and let themselves be found, so the dogs would not lose heart. That is the whole story of Ground Zero, really. Nobody could save the dead. So they saved each other. 🇺🇸

Robotaxis won’t just kill short haul flights. Once you can sleep in them, they’ll cannibalize long routes too. Imagine getting into your Tesla in Austin at 10 PM, make the lie flat seat/bed comfortable, and going to sleep. While you sleep, the car drives, charges itself, and keeps going. You wake up at 9 AM in Aspen, refreshed. The key is perceived travel time. A 10-hour robotaxi trip where you sleep for 8 hours may feel shorter than a 3-hour flight that requires an Uber to the airport, arriving early, security, boarding, the flight, baggage claim, and another Uber. Autonomous cars won’t just compete with driving. They turn sleep into transportation.

Georgia State plays at Kennesaw State this weekend. About 23 miles separate the schools. There are approximately 20 Waffle House locations between the two schools.

Dude here. This is what I imagine the interview of the lone hero on that jury said to those harpy bitches: “You know what I keep hearing? That she was overwhelmed. Overwhelmed. Three children are dead, and somehow that word is supposed to make the room softer. She was overwhelmed. She was depressed. She was exhausted. Her hormones were wrong. Motherhood was difficult. Her drugs were wrong. Nobody understood what she was going through. Fine. Then stop telling me she was my equal. No—don't look away now. That's the bargain you've been demanding from us for fifty years. Women can do anything men can do. Women can command armies. Women can run corporations. Women can govern nations. Women can control nuclear arsenals. Women belong everywhere decisions are made because sex has nothing whatsoever to do with judgment, temperament, resilience, or responsibility. Remember? You don't get to abandon that argument the instant responsibility becomes unpleasant. This woman didn't forget her children in a hot car. She didn't make one catastrophic mistake in ten seconds of panic. She created time. She got her husband out of the way. She killed one child and still had time in which the universe could have screamed at her to stop. Then another. Then another. And afterward we're supposed to look at the bodies and discover that adulthood has a fucking asterisk next to it. Because she was overwhelmed. Do you understand what you're saying? If a woman can be entrusted with a nation when she's thriving but cannot be held responsible for her actions when she's collapsing, then you haven't described equality. You've described privilege. Authority without equivalent accountability. Power without equivalent consequences. Adulthood with an escape hatch. And America built an entire culture around that escape hatch. For decades we were told that holding women to different standards was sexism. Then whenever a woman failed spectacularly, suddenly treating her differently became compassion. Her emotions mattered. Her hormones mattered. Her childhood mattered. Her relationships mattered. The pressure mattered. The expectations mattered. Every conceivable circumstance marched into the courtroom ahead of responsibility and begged us to understand. But understanding isn't acquittal. Explanation isn't innocence. And compassion isn't the abolition of consequence. If a man deliberately sent his wife away, murdered their three children one by one, and afterward told us fatherhood had simply become too overwhelming, would eleven people in this room be searching for a vocabulary sophisticated enough to make him the fourth victim? Of course not. We'd call him a monster. Maybe that's exactly what equality looks like. Maybe equality means a woman gets to be a monster, too. And that's the thing this country became terrified to say. We spent half a century insisting women were strong while constructing an entire moral architecture around their fragility. We called them independent and rushed forward to explain their failures. We called them powerful and treated consequences as cruelty. We handed them authority while increasingly regarding judgment itself as some barbaric relic invented by men. Then we congratulated ourselves for achieving equality. Bullshit. Equality isn't believing women can succeed. Any coward can applaud success. Equality is believing women can fail. Equality is believing women can be selfish, calculating, cruel, incompetent, corrupt, cowardly and evil—and that when they are, they don't become helpless children merely because acknowledging what they did makes us uncomfortable. And before somebody gives me the inevitable speech: no, this woman does not prove that every woman is unstable. One murderous father wouldn't prove every man is unstable either. That's not my argument. My argument is that your defense of her proves something about you. Because you've spent decades telling me sex is irrelevant to whether somebody can shoulder the greatest responsibilities imaginable. President. General. Judge. Surgeon. Commander. Fine. Then sex is irrelevant here, too. You cannot tell me a woman is psychologically robust enough to have her finger on a nuclear arsenal on Monday and tell me on Tuesday that murdering her own children must be excused because the pressures of ordinary life shattered her. Pick one. If women are adults, treat them like adults. If women possess the resilience necessary to wield power, then demand the resilience necessary to bear responsibility. And if your answer is that we cannot demand that—if somewhere underneath all the slogans you really believe women are uniquely vulnerable to emotion, hormones, stress, motherhood, relationships, or whatever explanation we're using this week—then have the courage to follow your own argument to its conclusion. Because you don't get both. You don't get equality when power is being distributed and fragility when consequences arrive. That's not liberation. That's aristocracy. And maybe that was America's great mistake. Not giving women equality. Equality would have been easy. Equality has rules. We gave certain people something much more poisonous: the expectation that somebody else would always be responsible for what happened to them—and eventually, even for what they did to somebody else. Three innocent, loving children had to die before anybody in this room was forced to confront where that road ends. Eleven of you looked at those bodies and still found reasons she shouldn't pay for them. So call me cruel. Call me backward. Call me a misogynist. Christ, you've been waiting all afternoon to use the word. But I'm voting guilty. Because those children don't get another trial. They don't get a newspaper profile explaining their trauma. They don't get professors discussing the social forces acting upon them. They don't get another morning. She made sure of that. And if equality means anything at all, it has to mean that the person who took those mornings away from them doesn't escape responsibility because she's a woman. Otherwise stop calling women equal. Call them what you've actually made them: untouchable.”