A VP Debate playbook, fighting bears, and Mexico's climate-scientist president

… plus curiosities from Moo Deng's nap schedule, a nuclear stronghold, and more

Welcome back to another edition of The Detour! My name is Kelly, and I’m the newsletter’s founding writer. Before I get to the good stuff, I wanted to share some Frame Media lore: On a cold weekday in January earlier this year, I sat down with colleagues Ben Moe and Jeremy Siwik to create something we knew our readers deeply valued: An honest, dynamic, and engaging news product that would cut through the noise of the internet and deliver journalism that sparks curiosity from all corners of the globe. We wanted to build a space that illuminated the consequential ripples of the world’s major news events while highlighting Frame’s award-winning feature storytelling.

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Without further ado, here’s what’s on deck:

🗒️ A journalist’s notes from the Vance-Walz face-off

👀 Mexico’s woman president, Arctic spy games, and a loss of words from the rangers of Katmai National Park

🧠 Forgot what you came into the kitchen to do? A niche psychological concept explains why.

Kelly Kimball for Frame. // Source: Canva Illustrations, Wikimedia Commons

10,000+ — The number of visitors on any given weekend at Thailand’s Khao Kheow Open Zoo — up from 3,000 — since the start of the stratospheric internet popularity of two-month-old pygmy hippo Moo Deng in September. On Monday, the zoo launched a 24-hour livestream of the baby hippo’s enclosure, perhaps in efforts to make the moist, brazen, and delightfully expressive calf more accessible to her global fanbase.

Left: Visitors of Khao Kheow Open Zoo in Thailand gather around the pygmy hippopotamus enclosure on September 10. Right: Pygmy hippo Moo Deng rests at the feet of her mother, Jonah. // Wikimedia Commons

When is the best time to catch a glimpse of Moo Deng online? According to Khao Kheow Open Zoo's official X account (translated from Thai), here’s a day in the life of the internet darling and her mother, Jonah:

08.00-09.00 | Zookeepers clean the enclosure, Moo Deng takes a shower and waits for her mother to eat.

09.00-10.00 | Moo Deng walks around and shows off to zoo guests, eventually dipping into the pond to sleep.

10.00-12.30 | Moo Deng sleeps in the pond.

12.30-13.00 | Depending on the day, Moo Deng may wake up and walk around, or climb out of the pond to sleep some more on land.

13.00-13.30 | Moo Deng sleeps on land.

13.30-14.00 | Moo Deng sleeps in the water.

14.00-14.30 | Moo Deng waits with her mother for dinner.

14.30-17.30 | Moo Deng's mother eats grass provided by zookeepers while Moo Deng lies down, then Moo Deng may run a little. After running, Moo Deng sleeps until evening.

23.00-24.00 | Moo Deng plays with mom in the water.

01.00-02.00 | Moo Deng receives milk in the pond and rests with her mother.

02.00-07.00 | Bedtime.

Moo Deng joins the ranks of other zoo animals gone viral, like Pesto the inordinately large baby king penguin at Sea Life Melbourne Aquarium in Australia.

200 — The number of years since Mexico has had a female president. That is, until Monday, when the scientist turned breakout politician Claudia Sheinbaum was sworn in as president of Mexico following her landslide election victory in June.

As a former climate scientist, is Sheinbaum a friend or foe to lessening the impacts of climate change? It’s unclear. Some environmental activists fear her lack of a net-zero commitment in her political roadmap, as well as her support for new oil refineries, complicates things.

“She prioritizes social policy. … The environmental side is there, but the motive of economic growth has more weight in her decision-making,” Claudia Campero, an environmental activist at Conexiones Climáticas, said to Earth.org in June.

President-elect Sheinbaum at a press conference in Mexico on July 10. // Source: Ernesto Toboa via Wikimedia Commons

And yet, her scientific background is unmatched by any president in Mexico’s history. In the 1990s, she studied carbon emissions from buildings and the environmental impacts of Mexico City’s transport sector at UC Berkeley. She then obtained a PhD in energy engineering at National Autonomous University of Mexico. In 2007 and 2014, she contributed to two major reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a body that would later win the Nobel Prize for the connections the reports made “between human activities and global warming". As mayor of Mexico City from 2018 to 2023, she spearheaded major reforms in green public transport, solar energy, and water security in the name of sustainable development.

Mexico’s highest office may present challenges for Sheinbaum if she plans to continue on the course she has built.

“In one of the [presidential] debates, she [Sheinbaum] expressed that she envisioned the country becoming a global climate action leader. However, Mexico is still far from that trajectory, and Sheinbaum would need to shift the country away from oil reliance, which would be a significant break from her predecessor,” the assistant professor at the Universidad de los Andes, Sandra Aguilar-Gomez, told BBC news in June.

There’s much more to The Detour this week. Further down, I decode the history of past VP debates to better understand Tuesday’s Vance-Walz face-off. Subscribe below for a free seven-day trial to keep reading.