Peter Nowak

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.

🚕 Tesla’s long-awaited robotaxi service went live in the Texas state capitol yesterday.

🔵 Zyn cans at sororities could soon outnumber those at frat houses, if nicotine pouch companies have their way.

🤖 Prediction markets operator Kalshi recently aired a fully AI-generated ad during the NBA Finals, the culmination of a goal to create “the most unhinged…commercial possible," according to its prompter-in-chief, YouTuber and filmmaker PJ Ace.

🌍 Pentagon Pizza Report reported a huge spike in pizza orders on Thursday evening, about an hour before Iranian state TV first reported explosions in Tehran, as Israel carried out strikes against Iranian nuclear and military sites, along with Iran's top military officials and nuclear scientists.

🪙 Walmart and Amazon, the world’s two largest retailers, are exploring issuing their own stablecoins for US customers to use at checkout instead of credit or debit cards, according to a new Wall Street Journal report.

🍿 The production studio behind Ex Machina, Eighth Grade, Moonlight, Uncut Gems, Everything Everywhere All at Once, Warfare, and more has greenlit science-fiction horror film The Backrooms, based on the popular YouTube horror series that bears the same name.

⚾️ Lip readings of closed-door offseason meetings are about to go crazy: Major League Baseball has acquired an equity stake in Jomboy Media, the pair announced this week, in what’s believed to be the league’s first direct investment in a creator-led content company.

🛻 2026 Ram 1500 pickup trucks will once again have a 5.7 liter Hemi V-8 engine option, Stellantis announced yesterday, saying its resurrection was due to customer demand.

🤖🎶 Timbaland, music artist and producer extraordinaire, last week launched Stage Zero, an entertainment company with the stated goal of blending AI with human creativity to create a new brand of music called “A-pop” (or “AI pop”).

🇯🇵Japan recently started banning certain nontraditional baby names, in a change widely seen as a crackdown on kirakira (translates to “glittery”) names, which started gaining popularity in the late 1980s and morph to align with trends in pop culture.

🤖🏫 OpenAI is increasingly approaching universities with the goal of securing deals that embed its AI tools in every facet of campus life, according to a new NY Times report.

🧊💪 If you’re looking to build muscle, frigid baths immediately after a workout just ain’t it, according to a study recently published in the journal Medicine & Science in Sports and & Exercise.