Peter Nowak

🚕 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.

🎶 Songs, like our attention spans and bank accounts, are getting shorter, according to a recent Economist analysis of ~1,200 number-one hits.

🏀 “The Thunder Rolls” = the wishful NBA Finals anthem being played at sportsbooks everywhere. As the Indiana Pacers and Oklahoma City Thunder prepare to take the court to compete for a league championship, casinos and betting platforms are pulling hard for OKC to come out with a victory. 

🍳 US consumers are cooking at home at the highest rate since early 2020, when the pandemic first started, according to Campbell's.

☢️ Journalists from the Danish Danwatch and the German Der Spiegel recently discovered Russian nuclear secrets on a publicly available procurement database, where companies bid on military projects.

📱🐟 The FBI is investigating a recent series of incidents involving an apparent impersonator who pretended to be White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles in texts and calls to her contacts, including prominent Republicans and business executives.

🥽 Yesterday, Meta and defense-tech startup Anduril announced they’ve formed a partnership to create virtual and augmented reality devices for American soldiers.

📈 The semiconductor giant yesterday reported strong quarterly results that came in above analysts’ expectations, despite headwinds to its China business.

🪙 Square, a point-of-sale system company serving 4 million sellers, yesterday launched a pilot of real-time bitcoin payments.