Talking Points Memo

Sometimes when I'm bored I will just go to the Wikipedia page for whatever day it is and see what was going on in the past, on today's date. Eventually what you realize if you hadn't reasoned it out ahead of time is: every single day is packed with insanely important events, which makes sense because there are only 365 days and humans have been around for 200,000 years. And we have recorded history going back many thousands of years. A random sampling of April 8th events:

• 217 – Roman emperor Caracalla is assassinated
• 1232 – The Mongols begin their siege on Kaifeng, the capital of the Jin dynasty
• 1605  – Mary Stuart is born. Wikipedia says her "birth was much anticipated." Her death a mere two years later due to complications from pneumonia, was not
• 1820 – The Venus de Milo, which I have seen in person, is discovered on the Aegean island of Milos
• 1859 – Edmund Husserl, philosopher who established the school of phenomenology, is born
• 1959: Grace Hopper leads a group of people who develop the computer programming language we know today as COBOL and which Musk and DOGE seem to not understand
• 1974 — Hank Aaron hits his 715th home run, passing Babe Ruth to become the all-time leader
• 1987 – Elton John, the Trinidadian footballer, NOT the world renown musician, is born
• 2013: The Iron Lady, Margaret Thatcher, dies
• 2024: A total solar eclipse is visible across much of North America. This was literally last year and I already forgot about it
   

What is my point here? Well I guess part of my point is that I had a dead period around 3 p.m. and so this is what I was doing. But my real point is: A lot of stuff happens every single day! How do you know if you are catching the most important stuff? It's tough in 2025 when there's social media spewing nonsense and politicians making stuff up and your neighbors saying they heard X about Y from Z. That's why at TPM, we're not only transparent, but we emphasize and take pride in not trying to cover everything. We say it explicitly in the Morning Memo but it also is an ethos that runs through our entire org: A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM's Morning Memo.
 

Paradoxically, though time is finite, the number of things happening at any given time can feel infinite, and infinity is pretty scary. But that is why we're here, to sort through infinity and give you the most important stuff you need to make decisions about your life and win some arguments with the noobs you encounter when picking your kids up from school. So make April 8th the day you join TPM.