Optimism is a club.

White House says Trump and Putin won’t meet officially in Vietnam. Putin’s staff says they’ll meet “on the sidelines.” 1/20

Profiles of six new stars in the Democratic party, who were inspired by Mr. Trump to run for office and won big this week. 2/20

A breakdown of Trump's 2,461 tweets since the election, and a breakdown of what people say when forced to name the best thing and the worst thing done by Trump in the last year. 3/20

“OH MY GOD THERE IS AN OPENING STATEMENT. THIS IS THE GODDAMN GIVING TREE.” An entertaining, meme-laden narration of Trump’s former foreign policy adviser Carter Page setting himself on fire. 4/20

Trump gives in to China's insistence on no questions from the press—like about the detained wife of Nobel winner Liu Xiaobo. 5/20

And now your moment of Zen: in which a man paints parking lot signs. 6/20

Nearly half of white millennials believe that white people face as much discrimination as black people and other minorities. 7/20

Video: How beef goulash impacts you and your neighbors economically. 8/20

Renegade booze makers use chemistry to make single-malt aged whiskeys in a matter of weeks. 9/20

One solution to California's legal-pot banking problem: marijuana tax money could ride around in armored cars. 10/20

Thanks to home-wrecking fires, rents in Santa Rosa, Calif., are surging, as high as $13,000 a month. 11/20

“As for money, if May insists she can’t make any further commitments, EU will not trigger trade talks in December. It’s that simple.” An inside-baseball look, told in tweets, on the current state of Brexit. It doesn’t look good. 12/20

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The Ritz-Carlton Riyadh, currently Saudi Arabia’s newest jail, has a 4 1/2 star rating on TripAdvisor. (Here's a quick primer on wtf the crown prince is up to.) 13/20

Some good analysis here: The Middle East faces civil war, divided societies, and unstable governments, all thanks to Iran and Saudi Arabia. 14/20

And here’s an experimental short film, nicely animated, to help make sense of our warring world: Tanzonk by Sasha Svirsky. 15/20

Interviewed about “the Anthropocene,” sci-fi writer Kim Stanley Robinson is pleasantly irate. 16/20

Word of the day: a "he’s-at-home" was the name for a dildo kept by 19th-century whalers' wives in New England. 17/20

“1975 is a new world, somehow. Everybody gets a haircut that year, and no one can say exactly why. Psychic emanations are big; you can feel change peeling off the walls but can’t really name the form of that change. The year is a laboratory. Anything is possible.” The great Luc Sante relives (with footnotes) the music scene in 1970s New York City. 18/20

And in case you forgot what it looks like to have fun, here are some Australians partying at a horse race. 19/20

And here’s a short snowboarding film about Scotland’s marvelous “right to roam.” 20/20

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