💬 Quoted… “Was that function [on the F-35] triggered for some reason, and punched the pilot out?... There’s a lot of unanswered questions.”

A US Marine Corps pilot was flying a single-seat F-35B fighter jet on Sunday when they experienced a malfunction and were “forced to eject,” the AP reports. And while we don’t know what the malfunction was or what caused it (and probably never will), speculation has run rampant.

• Dan Grazier, a former Marine Corps captain and the senior defense policy fellow at the Project on Government Oversight, told the AP that on the Air Force and Navy’s version of the F-35, the pilot has to initiate the ejection – but the Marine Corps’ F-35s have an auto-eject feature intended to better protect pilots in certain situations, and this is what could’ve caused the mishap.

🌐💼 Stat of the Day: The No. 1 career choice for Gen Z is online influencer, with 57% of respondents saying they would perform the job if given the chance, per a new Morning Consult survey. For context: 41% of all US adults said they would do the same.

🤔 Did You Know?... Yesterday was the 50th anniversary of the Battle of the Sexes, aka the tennis match held between the world’s best female player, Billie Jean King, and former men’s world No. 1 Bobby Riggs, who claimed he could beat King despite a two-and-a-half decade age difference (29 vs 55). King ended up beating Riggs in three straight sets in front of ~90 million TV viewers.

📰 Worth a Read: Alex Cooper Went From Raunchy Podcaster to Gen-Z’s Barbara Walters → (Rolling Stone)