America This Week: News Digest

Please help me keep this job.

Clockwise from top left: Trader Joe’s raises banana prices, Trump and Greenwood, Air Force secretary to risk life in AI-powered flight, a Mount Everest clean-up effort, Blackwater PMC in Iraq, Elon Musk in front of the letter X.

Hello, esteemed Racket readers! My name is Samuel Fogel. You can call me Sam. I’m a new addition to this site’s team and being subjected to numerous quasi-legal punishments during my trial period (different levels of hazing applied for each misstep). My first task has been to revive a weekly news digest feature. If you come upon anything interesting during your doomscrolling, any compelling news item, newly released government statistic, college course description, or deleted New York Times or Washington Post comment; if you see a particularly depraved/humiliating tweet, quote, or Note, or create an amusing AI-generated image from Microsoft’s impenetrable black-box, or have any other idea for content you’d like to share with fellow Racket readers, make sure to let me know.

This feature is slated to be filed ahead of the Thursday taping of America This Week, so if you see a story or video you think might be good fodder for commentary by Walter and Matt, this is the place to shoot that flare gun earlier in the week.

As part of the audience participation component, we’ll be giving away merch for things like the “caption contest,” among other sections to come. In the meantime, if you want to argue with me about anything, issue abuse, or offer helpful suggestions, please fire away in the comments section. I’m Gen Z, which means every granular detail of my life is published online somewhere. Go nuts. News of late: