SCIENCE SAYS, IF YOU’RE PRETTY DON’T TAKE REMOTE CLASSES: Student beauty and grades under in-person and remote teaching. “Grades of attractive females declined when teaching was conducted remotely. For males, there was a beauty premium even after the switch to online teaching.” Pretty privilege is a thing.

SUPPLY CHAIN: How Wood Goes From a Tree to the Inside of a Bentley. Um, expensively?

NEWS THEY DON’T WANT US TO HEAR: Illegal Alien’s Purchase Of 170 Guns Raises Eyebrows.

PLUG-INS ARE THE FUTURE: Kia Targeting 60-Mile PHEV Range Within “the Next Couple Years.”

ANSWERING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Mayonnaise is the most popular condiment in the U.S. So why does it have a bad rap? I love mayo, but I’m annoyed that, in a variant of “shrinkflation,” Kraft’s “Avocado Oil Mayonnaise” is now “Mayonnaise with Olive Oil,” meaning that it’s basically 34% Avocado oil and the rest soybean and canola oil. You can buy fancy brands that are all avocado oil, but they’re (much) more expensive. And to my taste, not quite as good.

WHAT THE WELL-DRESSED POOCH WEARS? Five reasons your dog might really benefit from canine clothing.

WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: 3D-printed hydrogel enables continuous drug delivery via contact lens.

FASTER, PLEASE: Scientists discover way to deliver medicines across brain’s protective barrier.

TO BE FAIR, THAT’S NOT EXACTLY A MAJOR TRANSFORMATION FOR HER: JD Vance Has MSNBC’s Joy Reid Turn Into A Mumbling Mess With A Simple Meme.

TRUMP CAN DO A LOT: Higher ed accreditors emphasize nonpartisanship after Trump’s ‘radical left’ remark.

FREAKSHOW DEFUNDED, FREAKS FREAK OUT: University of Michigan Board of Regents targets DEI office for ‘defunding’ or major changes, faculty senate freaks out.

WELL, BERKELEY IS IN BAD ODOR NOWADAYS: Berkeley Professor Says Even His ‘Outstanding’ Students With 4.0 GPAs Aren’t Getting Any Job Offers — ‘I Suspect This Trend Is Irreversible.’ It’s also true that the Biden economy has consisted of a recession being covered up with a froth of government spending. That may change, even for Berkeley students.

DELUSIONS OF OWNERSHIP: In August of 2019 the new Commandant of the Marine Corps, issued his Commandant’s Planning Guidance where he plainly said he would not allow others to interfere with his new plans for the Marine Corps.

MINDS DO CHANGE:

For people who think I am close-minded and unbending: I have done a 180° on assisted suicide, and I changed my mind by reading and thinking with disabled scholars and activists https://t.co/ChS9hWkhHq

— 🍉 Dr. Thrasher 🔻 (@thrasherxy) November 29, 2024

CHANGE: DePaul Professor Who Wrote Anti-Palestinian Article, Was Censured by Faculty Council, Loses Contract, Defamation, and Discrimination Claim.

MAJOR DISCOVERIES: “Cooking at home really saves lots of money. Guys, it just hit me that frugality can be the primary productive force.”

THE POLITICS OF CRYPTO CRIME AND PROSECUTION. “Mr Singh, who distributed millions in political donations to left-leaning organizations, walked free with only supervised release. Yet these disparate sentences tell only part of the story. Behind the headlines about financial fraud lies a more complex tale—one of political influence and strategic prosecution. The decision to focus on financial crimes while dropping political corruption charges has left a trail of tantalizing clues about a broader campaign of influence-peddling that may never be fully illuminated.”

GOOGLE DESERVES ITS PROBLEMS: Googling Is for Old People. That’s a Problem for Google.

The company’s core business is under siege. People are increasingly getting answers from artificial intelligence. Younger generations are using other platforms to gather information. And the quality of the results delivered by its search engine is deteriorating as the web is flooded with AI-generated content. Taken together, these forces could lead to long-term decline in Google search traffic, and the outsize profits generated from it, which prop up its parent company Alphabet’s GOOGL -0.17%decrease; red down pointing triangle money-losing bets on things like its Waymo self-driving unit.

The first danger facing Google is clear and present: When people want to search for information or go shopping on the internet, they are shifting to Google’s competitors, and advertising dollars are following them. In 2025, eMarketer projects, Google’s share of the U.S. search-advertising market will fall below 50% for the first time since the company began tracking it.

In responding to government antitrust inquiries, Google itself makes this point often: “Evidence at trial shows we face fierce competition from a broad range of competitors.”

This shift is due largely to users’ bypassing Google to start their search for goods on Amazon. It’s handing Amazon billions in advertiser dollars. Meanwhile, TikTok has less than 4% of U.S. digital ad revenue, but significant potential to expand its share of the pie. A recent TikTok pitch to advertisers reported on by The Wall Street Journal said that 23% of its users searched for something within 30 seconds of opening the app, and its global search volume was three billion a day.

The second threat is the rise of “answer engines” like Perplexity which, well, do what they say on the tin. OpenAI has added internet search to ChatGPT, Meta Platforms is exploring building its own search engine, and even AI chatbots that can’t search the internet are proving increasingly capable at addressing many questions. They’re also becoming ever more widespread, as Microsoft and Apple integrate them directly into the operating systems of all the devices they make or support.

The biggest problem is that Google doesn’t return good results anymore. Even similar services like Bing are better. AI tools are useful because when the significant results don’t appear on the first page, AI can read all 700 — or 7000 — pages of results to find them. Some of this is AI content, continuing what SEO did to skew Google results. Some of it — a lot, despite its low profile in this article — is Google futzing with its own results for its own purposes, both commercial and political. And many users lost faith in Google due to its deranking and demonetizing of right-leaning sources over “misinformation” that generally turned out to be true.

UPDATE: Non-paywalled version here.

SOUNDS KINDA CRAZY: She’s Chief Resident of Yale’s Child Psychiatry Program. She Also Says Her Husband Can’t Have White Friends ‘Unless They Meet Me First.’ Dr. Amanda Calhoun says psychiatry ‘is rooted in anti-Black racism.’

I don’t think her husband’s hometown friends were “avoiding” her because of race. I think it’s probably because they saw her as mean and crazy.

OPEN THREAD: My Christmas lights are up.

THE NEW SPACE RACE: Landspace puts 2 satellites in orbit with enhanced Zhuque-2 rocket.

CAN’T TRUST ANYTHING ANYMORE: Researchers Find Shocking Deficiencies and Toxic Metals in Prenatal Vitamins.

JOHN HINDERAKER ON PETE HEGSETH: Sec Def, Death Threats and Lawfare.

Related: Don’t let the left do to Pete Hegseth what it did to Brett Kavanaugh.

THE INTEL COMMUNITY AND THEIR MEDIA TOOLS WILL BE GOING AFTER HIM LIKE NOTHING BEFORE:

🚨 BREAKING: Kash Patel named FBI Director pic.twitter.com/kvYbnq3kKp

— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) December 1, 2024

The stakes are high:

FLASHBACK: Trump’s FBI Director Kash Patel calls for immediate declassification of Epstein client list:

“Put on your big boy pants and let us know who the pedophiles are.”

pic.twitter.com/eV9bXP9UyQ

— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) December 1, 2024

FASTER, PLEASE: MSNBC Meltdown Accelerates.