Calls are growing inside Congress for a formal investigation of Polymarket after another instance of anonymous traders making well-timed, well-sized bets on a major geopolitical event hours before it became public. The pattern is becoming hard to ignore: someone, somewhere, keeps knowing things before markets — or media — do.

Prediction markets have always carried this tension. Their theoretical value is as an information aggregation mechanism, surfacing the collective probability estimates of informed participants. The problem is that some participants are more informed than others, and not always because they’re better analysts. When bets arrive in size, in the right direction, in the hours before an event breaks, the question of whether markets are discovering truth or laundering inside information becomes unavoidable. Congress investigating Polymarket is probably not the most efficient path to an answer. But it may be the one that actually happens.

Microsoft, Google, Amazon and other major tech companies are locking in contracts with nuclear startups to secure reliable power for AI data centers. The rationale is straightforward: AI infrastructure runs continuously, consumes enormous amounts of electricity, and needs stable baseload power that solar and wind can’t reliably provide without storage that doesn’t yet exist at sufficient scale. Nuclear, which had been commercially stagnant for decades, is suddenly the destination of serious capital.

There’s a version of travel photography that involves light stands, permits, pre-dawn location scouting, and a pelican case full of glass. That’s not what this is. What this is — a woman moving along the marble terraces of the Bahá’í Gardens in Haifa, Sony mirrorless raised, backpack on, sunglasses pushed up into her hair because she forgot to take them off — is the other kind. The kind most people actually do. The kind that produces, against all odds, most of the photographs worth looking at.

The US Postal Service lost $9 billion in 2025 and has now warned it could exhaust its funds within twelve months. This is a structurally familiar story — mail volume declining, pension obligations compounding, the universal service mandate requiring delivery everywhere regardless of cost — but the twelve-month clock is new and specific.

USPS occupies a strange position in American infrastructure. It’s simultaneously indispensable to rural communities, pharmaceutical deliveries, ballot returns, and small-business shipping, and also chronically incapable of covering its own costs. Privatization discussions always die on the political vine because the math of profitable postal service requires abandoning the places that need it most. Subsidization discussions die because “bailing out the post office” is an easy campaign attack. The result is an institution that staggers forward indefinitely, absorbing losses, until a number like “twelve months” finally forces a decision that the political system has been deferring for a generation.

Andy Jassy disclosed in his annual shareholder letter that Amazon’s AI services at AWS are running at a $15 billion annual revenue rate. He also revealed that the company’s custom chip business — Graviton and Trainium — has crossed a $20 billion annualized run rate, roughly double what the company cited earlier this year.

Amazon stock jumped more than 5% on the news. The S&P closed at 6,824 and the Nasdaq at 22,822 on Thursday as the letter gave investors a concrete number to attach to years of capital expenditure narrative.

The Artemis II crew — Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen — are on their way home after becoming the first humans to fly around the Moon since Apollo 17 in 1972.

They’re the first humans to see parts of the lunar far side with the naked eye. That’s worth stopping to appreciate.

The mission was a crewed flyby — no landing — but the point was to prove the Orion spacecraft and Space Launch System could carry humans to lunar distance and back. By all accounts, it did.

Atlassian announced it is laying off approximately 10% of its global workforce — around 1,600 people — to redirect resources toward AI development and enterprise sales. The company estimates restructuring costs up to $236 million. It simultaneously replaced its CTO with two new AI-focused executives in the role.

This is now a recurring pattern in enterprise software. A company that built its reputation on collaborative tools announces it is dismantling some of its human workforce to build AI replacements for that workforce’s output. The framing is always “investment in the future.” The experience for the people being let go is something else.

Atlassian announced it’s laying off roughly 10% of its global workforce — about 1,600 people — to redirect resources toward AI development and enterprise sales. Restructuring costs are expected to reach up to $236 million.

The company also replaced its Chief Technology Officer with two new AI-focused CTOs. That’s not a succession. That’s a signal about where the org chart is being reorganized around.

Atlassian makes Jira, Confluence, and Trello — collaboration and project management tools embedded in tens of thousands of enterprise workflows. The play is presumably to layer AI agents into those products and charge more for the intelligence layer.

Colorado State University released its annual Atlantic hurricane forecast this week, projecting 13 named storms and 6 hurricanes for the 2026 season. The forecast arrives against an already elevated baseline: last month was the hottest March on record for the contiguous United States, by the widest margin ever recorded for any single month. A developing El Niño pattern could push temperatures further.

El Niño typically suppresses Atlantic hurricane activity by increasing wind shear — but when baseline sea surface temperatures are already this high, the suppression effect is partially offset. The models are working in territory with fewer historical analogs.

Colorado State University released its annual Atlantic hurricane forecast: 13 named storms, six of which are expected to become hurricanes.

The forecast comes as NOAA data shows last month was the hottest March on record for the Lower 48 states — the largest anomaly ever recorded for any month. A forecast El Niño could drive temperatures higher still.

El Niño historically suppresses Atlantic hurricane activity by increasing wind shear. But the baseline sea surface temperatures are so elevated that even a shear-heavy season may produce more intense storms than historical averages would suggest.