7 stories to know: Trump loses it, elephants have names, and flying cars—really

“7 stories to know” is a new Monday series showcasing stories that may have been ignored in the crush of news over the past few weeks, and stories that have continued to evolve over the weekend. Expect to read coverage about health, science, and climate that frequently take second chair to what’s happening at the top of the page, plus information from local sources that the national media may have overlooked.

1. Donald Trump challenges Joe Biden to a cognitive test, then forgets his own doctor’s name

Donald Trump challenged President Joe Biden to take a cognitive test on Saturday night, saying that he had “aced” such a test. Then, one sentence later, Trump forgot the name of the White House doctor who administered the test.

“I think [Biden] should take a cognitive test like I did,” Trump told the audience at the Turning Point Action convention in Detroit. “I took a cognitive test and I aced it. Doc Ronny. Doc Ronny Johnson. Does everyone know Ronny Johnson, congressman from Texas? He was the White House doctor, and he said I was the healthiest president, he feels, in history, so I liked him very much indeed immediately.”

It’s a fair bet that the answer to Trump’s question is “no.” No one knows Ronny Johnson. Because the person he is referring to is Rep. Ronny Jackson, who was a doctor in Trump’s pill-pushing White House. 

Based on how often he mentions it, nothing makes Trump prouder than the results of the cognitive fitness test Jackson administered to him in 2018. That test, which gifted the world with the immortal phrase, “person, woman, man, camera, TV,” was not what Trump seems to believe it was. As The Washington Post explained in 2020:

Experts say the president’s fixation on the Montreal Cognitive Assessment—or MoCA, as it is sometimes called—is particularly puzzling because the test is normally administered only if someone is concerned that they or their loved ones may be experiencing dementia or other cognitive decline. Getting a perfect score—as Trump has repeatedly claimed he did—merely signifies that the test-taker probably does not have a cognitive impairment as measured by the exam.

Since Trump is still referring to “a test” administered to him by “Dr. Ronny Johnson,” it seems likely he hasn’t taken any other test since then. So Trump is citing a test that he took six years ago to screen for dementia as proof that he‘s a smart guy.

Biden certainly knows what inflation means. But Trump doesn’t know the meaning of the test he took, or the name of the man who gave it to him. 

And the man who said that Trump’s test was “perfect” way back then was the same doctor who, in the same exam, adjusted Trump’s height and weight just enough to keep Trump from being classified as obese. 

Asked how someone with Trump's diet and no known exercise routine could achieve such relatively strong physical results, Jackson said there was no definite answer.

"It is called genetics. I don't know," Jackson said. "Some people have just great genes. I told the president that if he had a healthier diet over the last 20 years, he might live to be 200 years old. I don't know."

The same doctor who said Trump could live to be 200 and fudged the numbers to make his physical health seem better reported his “perfect” score on a cognitive screening test. That makes it difficult to accept the reliability of these results from six years ago.

There are mounds of evidence that Trump has declined significantly since the time of that test. Even stories that Trump has told for months at his rallies have recently disintegrated into gibberish. His appearance before Republicans on Capitol Hill last week turned to Trump daydreaming about both Taylor Swift and Nancy Pelosi. A later meeting with CEOs confirmed that Trump was “remarkably meandering, could not keep a straight thought [and] was all over the map,”

Before Biden agrees to anything, at least one reporter should pin Trump down on exactly what kind of test he took, and whether he’s taken another in the last six years.

2. Celebrity news may not mean what you think it means

It’s no surprise that when younger Americans look to social media platforms, a lot of the news they see involves the antics and accomplishments of celebrities. But TikTok users aren’t just getting news about celebrities—they’re getting their news from celebrities.

In a new poll from Pew Research, most TikTok users say that, even if they didn’t come to the platform specifically to find news, they’re running into news stories, with 57% of posts connected to news articles and 55% devoted to breaking news.

But it’s the source of those posts that may be surprising.

TikTok news consumers are equally likely to get news from influencers or celebrities as they are from news outlets or journalists. About two-thirds of those who regularly get news on TikTok (68%) say they ever get news from influencers or celebrities, and 67% get news from news outlets or journalists. An even higher share (84%) say they get news from other people they don’t know personally (beyond influencers, journalists, advocacy groups, and friends, family and acquaintances).

Influencers can certainly bring attention to stories that might otherwise be getting little play or provide fresh angles to content that would otherwise seem stale. But someone who likes to review cars or is an expert on applying makeup doesn’t always make the best source of general advice, as this story from Mother Jones makes clear. 

If you go on TikTok or Instagram, you’ll see legions of wellness influencers promoting the benefits of unpasteurized “raw” milk, which hasn’t been heated to kill off illness-causing microorganisms. Raw milk is risky business at the best of times, and despite what some influencers claim, there are no nutritional benefits to drinking it, according to the CDC. But it’s now also a vector for H5N1, the new bird flu spreading through cows.

3. More women in college isn’t translating into more equal salaries

For decades, there have been reports that women outnumber men in American universities and that more women are getting college degrees. Some have fretted about what this means for American men and speculated that it would upend the economic gender gap.

But those fretting over poor, undereducated men need not worry. As NPR reports, despite women collecting more college degrees than men since the 1980s, it turns out that three whole generations of women outperforming men still haven’t leveled the playing field.

But those fretting over poor, undereducated men need not worry. As NPR reports, despite women collecting more college degrees than men since the 1980s, it turns out that three whole generations of women outperforming men still haven’t leveled the playing field.

Women still earn 82 cents, on average, for every dollar earned by men, Pew reports—a figure that is nearly unchanged since 2002.

And after steadily increasing for more than a decade, the proportion of top managers of companies who are women declined last year, to less than 12%, according to the credit ratings and research company S&P Global.

Women are working harder and outperforming men in college by a higher margin than ever, and their reward for this is still to be considered second class in the workplace. 

But please, let’s not stop the flood of articles crying for the poor American male. 

4. Call me by my elephant name

A new study in Nature ecology & evolution indicates that African elephants may have something that is a universal feature of human languages that hasn’t previously been identified in other species: names.

Here we present evidence that wild African elephants address one another with individually specific calls, probably without relying on imitation of the receiver. We used machine learning to demonstrate that the receiver of a call could be predicted from the call’s acoustic structure, regardless of how similar the call was to the receiver’s vocalizations. Moreover, elephants differentially responded to playbacks of calls originally addressed to them relative to calls addressed to a different individual.

After noticing what seemed to be special sequences in sounds directed at specific elephants, researchers tested a series of hypotheses, such as whether elephants respond more strongly to signals that include their name and whether the same name was used by more than one elephant when signaling the same individual. All of the tests seemed to indicate that these are names, used in much the same way that humans use names.

In addition to the news about elephants, there’s also some fascinating context: Both dolphins and parrots seem to create “names” of a different type by repeating portions of the statement of the individual they are addressing. Those names may be more transient, but they do seem to recognize that their speech is directed at specific members of their species rather than being an all-points broadcast. That’s pretty cool, too.

5. That guy in “The Graduate” was right—plastics, plastics, plastics

Just about the only thing more ubiquitous than stories about microplastics are microplastics. They’re in the air we breathe. They are in the water we drink. They're in our blood, our bones, and our organs. They’re in the testicles of every human male tested and in every sample of sperm.

In March, a study linked microplastics to serious health problems for the first time. We don’t yet know if these tiny plastic particles are behind rising rates of aggressive cancers in young people, but there are very good reasons to think there is a connection.

Plastics have been around since the early 20th century, but their use really accelerated after the 1970s, as many products that had once been packaged in glass, wood, or metal began to be shipped in inexpensive single-use plastic containers. That led to a rapid rise of plastic in landfills and waterways. Over time, that plastic has gradually coated our planet in a layer of particles that gradually get smaller, but never really go away.

As The Washington Post points out, it’s not just the seemingly immortal plastics themselves that are a problem.

Not only can those tiny particles infiltrate many parts of the body, causing inflammation, but plastics also have a laundry list of chemical additives: flame retardants, lubricants, solvents. These chemicals, in turn, can leach out of particles that have reached some of our most vulnerable organs.

There’s no doubt that plastics are an extraordinarily useful material. But single-use packaging plastic is nothing but a convenience. It is definitely not a convenience worth dying over. And it is possible to do without.

6. You may finally be about to get your flying car. Really

Blame George Jetson. For decades, flying cars have topped the list of things that people associate with the future, but after dozens of false starts and hollow promises, they never seem to get any closer. But don’t look now, because it seems like flying cars—or at the very least, flying electric taxis—might be sneaking up on you. 

As Scientific American explains, getting to this point has involved a lot of unexpected challenges for manufacturers who seemed to think the answer was to just take a camera drone and embiggen it. Now, after years of struggles, it looks as if the future may finally arrive.

More than two dozen major eVTOL builders have been founded in the past decade, and a few are nearing commercial certification from the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration or its European counterpart, the European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA). Each company is working on its own homegrown aircraft design, but all have the same goal: to provide on-demand air trips no longer than 18 to 25 miles—the “sweet spot” range for first-generation, battery-electric eVTOL taxis. These short, high-speed hops could carry commuters between city centers and airports or transport cargo and packages.

The variety of designs and approaches are bewildering, from ones that really do appear to be scaled up drones, to hybrids of conventional planes and helicopters. They should be quieter, cheaper, and more easily automated than helicopters, and the first to market, CityAirbus NextGen eVTOL, is expected to show up in European cities later this year.

But none of the vehicles in this generation look small enough to fit in a garage, and absolutely none of them fold up into a briefcase.

7. Using man handed down from a god to locate a lost temple

In 1997, I wrote a novel that was nominated for the World Fantasy Award, earning me a trip to London. I didn’t win, but neither did George R.R. Martin, who was nominated that year for a little thing called “A Game of Thrones.” And no, I’m not contractually obligated to tell this story once a year. I just do.

After I was officially a loser, I went off on a day in the city accompanied by a world-traveling writer with the wonderful name of Felicity Savage. She led me into the British Museum through a back door, and we wandered past what seemed like an endless array of Wedgewood porcelain before we turned a corner into what I’ve thought of ever since as The Spoils of Empire Room—a vast space packed with an absolutely jaw-dropping array of things hacked off, sawed away, or simply packed up and carted back to London.

It’s immoral. It’s indefensible. Holy shit is it impressive.

So is the series of “curator’s corners” videos they do on everything from how to write cuneiform to how ancient saxon swords were made.

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