Peter Nowak

🚂 The biggest freight railroad in the country, Union Pacific, is purchasing fellow rail giant Norfolk Southern for $85 billion, the companies announced yesterday, forming America's first truly transcontinental railroad.

📺 In a move that would make Patches O'Houlihan proud, ESPN networks are once-again transforming into ESPN8: The Ocho, a programming bonanza that involves showcasing competitive activities that are almost sports.

📝 Uncle Sam has appointments with basically every major economic indicator over the next several days, with new data set to shed more light on the country’s economic health.

Move over, Belichick: There’s a new most-important bill in college sports. 

The Student Compensation and Opportunity through Rights and Endorsements (SCORE) Act, the most comprehensive bill connected to college athletics in decades, is set to be put up for a vote in the US House of Representatives

 Shares in department store chain Kohl's surged as much as 105% yesterday morning before trading was temporarily halted due to volatility (a Kohl-down cool-down), in a wild ride echoing the retail investor-driven rallies of recent years.

De Beers, the world’s largest diamond producer, is starting a marketing campaign to push natural mined diamonds, at a time when they’re being outshined by consumers' new crush: lab grown bling. 

Beware: winter is coming, and the Unsigned are massing like the Unsullied. As NFL teams prepare to kick off their respective training camps before the end of the month, 30 of the league’s 32 second-round draft picks still remain without contracts.

💼 The experiment, published by Boston College and the 4 Day Week Foundation earlier this month, encompassed ~1,000 employees across 17 UK companies and other organizations.

Buc-ee’s multi-state expansion plans have hit a dam in Colorado: The Texas-sized gas station-chain known for its brisket, beaver swag, and bathroom bragging rights is facing serious resistance over a new location it’s planning to build near Palmer Lake, a city between Denver and Colorado Springs.

🤑 Meta this week poached Apple’s top AI executive, Ruoming Pang. He’ll now join CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s superintelligence team, which is getting P.A.I.D.

🏛️ A bipartisan push led by House reps from Texas and Nevada is emerging to reverse a provision in the megabill recently signed into law by President Trump that could kill sports gambling in America.

The Transportation Security Administration’s (TSA) shoes-off policy for all travelers will soon be coming to an end, according to multiple sources, who cite a memo the TSA sent out to employees last week regarding the policy change.

Like the product it shills, the pistachio industry is coming out of its shell. New data from Yelp shows demand for the nut is going, well, nuts.

🚀📺 Netflix and NASA this week announced a partnership that will allow users of the streaming platform to tune into rocket launches, astronaut spacewalks, mission coverage, and views from the International Space Station.

🤖 “Artificial intelligence” and “successful entrepreneur” wouldn’t be overlapping on a Vend Diagram, according to a recent experiment performed by Anthropic that gave an AI agent complete control over an office vending machine to test how well it performed as a business owner. 

🎥 CA legislators voted on Friday to more than double the cap on the state’s film and TV tax incentives, from $330M/year to $750M/year, in a bid to entice fleeing studios to once again film in the Golden State, where production has tanked.

💰 College students are increasingly being asked to help pay the Piper—last name Williams, an incoming five-star 6-ft-5 women’s basketball center from Bloomington.

🏟️The MLB’s Oakland Sacramento Athletics this week broke ground on a new 33,000-seat, $1.75B stadium in Las Vegas, in a ceremony featuring club, city, and league officials.

🤔 Hint: It’s not a wearable.

💼 The age-old dance between prospective employer and employee is undergoing a refresh.