Good morning. In today’s edition:

• 📉 Americans lose confidence in food safety
• ⚾ MLB proposes 154-game season
• 🚨 Public execution for Fort Hood shooter

…and much more.

Ready, Set, Go: Today’s news should be a ~4.09-minute read (1,089 words).

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“Nothing gives one person so much advantage over another as to remain always cool and unruffled under all circumstances.”

–Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)

Americans are feeling a little uneasy about what's cooking in the nation's food supply.

Nearly half of Americans (~47%) are confident in the federal government's ability to ensure food safety, according to new Gallup polling published yesterday, marking the lowest level since the org began tracking the question in 1999. For comparison, that figure stood at 68% in 2019 and 85% in 2004.

• Just 65% of Americans are confident that food sold in grocery stores is safe, down from 73% last year.
• The latest results also mark the first time a majority of Americans (53%) have expressed little or no confidence in federal food safety oversight.

Baskets are looking a little empty

Gallup also found recent food recalls and government advisories have influenced Americans' shopping habits:

• 73% have avoided certain foods or brands following a recall or government advisory in the past year, up from 53% in 2024.
• 42% have worried that something they ate was contaminated, compared to 26% in 2024.
• 45% have returned or thrown away food because of a recall or advisory, up from 37% two years ago.

It comes alongside a major partisan shift. Confidence in federal food safety oversight has swung wildly based on political affiliation over the past two years. Some 70% of self-identified Republicans and 30% of Democrats express confidence today, compared with 50% of GOP voters and 74% of Dems in 2024.

A similar divide appears in the safety of food sold in grocery stores, with 77% of Republicans expressing confidence compared to 66% of Democrats and 60% of independents.

Driving the trend

Experts say several factors may be contributing to growing distrust, including concerns about federal staffing cuts and potentially lax oversight by regulators, along with a string of recent foodborne illness outbreaks.

• A Cyclospora outbreak linked to lettuce sickened 12,000+ people across 21 states, resulting in hundreds of hospitalizations and two deaths.
• A salmonella outbreak over the summer involving jalapeños affected nearly 500 people across 34 states, with 65 hospitalizations.

It’s not the first time something similar occurred. From 1999 to 2006, Americans’ confidence in the federal government to ensure food safety ranged from 76%–85%. But following a series of E. coli and salmonella outbreaks in 2007-08, public confidence fell to 71% and hasn’t recovered since.

📊 Flash poll: How confident are you that the food you buy at the grocery store is safe to eat?

• Very confident
• Somewhat confident
• Neutral
• Not very confident
• Not at all confident

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Here are five stats from this past week that made our team go “whoa.” Hopefully you will, too.

🗳️ Since the start of September, Republicans have spent $700+ million on new ad bookings in congressional races, compared to $430+ million spent by Democrats, per an NBC News analysis of data from AdImpact.

🏒 New York Rangers G Igor Shesterkin last Thursday became just the 18th goalie in NHL history to score a goal.

🚲 The average American biked 23 miles in 2024, according to research from StreetLight.

🇺🇸 21% of US voters hold an unfavorable view of both parties, up sharply from 13% in the 2022 midterms and ~12% in each of the past two presidential elections, per WSJ polling.

🏢 Wall Street firms belonging to the New York Stock Exchange earned $45.9 billion in profits over the first half of this year, 51.3% more than the same period in 2025.

BUSINESS & MARKETS

• 🤖 OpenAI's annualized revenue is $50 billion, or $18 billion less than previously reported figures, per multiple reports; discrepancy is reportedly due to inclusion of gross revenue from OpenAI’s partners, in an attempt to make a more direct comparison with Anthropic.
• ☕🌯 Starbucks is reportedly considering an acquisition offer for Chipotle, which would reunite CEO Brian Niccol with the burrito chain he led before joining Starbucks two ​years ago; it would also mark the biggest acquisition in restaurant industry history by a long shot, based on Chipotle’s ~$41 billion market cap.
• 🏛️ Labor Department suspends Microsoft, Adobe, and several other companies from its green card labor program, including H-1B visas, with officials citing “multiple active federal investigations” into Microsoft and Adobe.

SPORTS, MEDIA, & ENTERTAINMENT

• 📚 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature awarded to Canadian poet Anne Carson, whose genre-defying work often blends verse, prose, dialogue, and translation.
• ⚾ Major League Baseball proposes shortening its regular season to 154 games from 162 and expanding the Divisional Round to best-of-7, amid negotiations with players over a new collective bargaining agreement. | 🏀 Las Vegas Aces C A'ja Wilson wins record fifth WNBA MVP award, becoming the first player in league history to win three straight MVPs.
• 🎙️ Spotify and Joe Rogan renew multiyear licensing agreement for The Joe Rogan Experience, the most-listened-to podcast on Spotify, YouTube, and Apple Podcasts.

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SCIENCE, SPACE, & EMERGING TECH

• 🪐 1,000-mile-long cloud that forms each day on Mars then quickly disappears can only be explained using “exotic physics,” which has only been theorized but never observed in our Solar System, per new study.
• 🙏 Margaret Hamilton, the computer scientist who led the 100-person team that wrote the onboard software that helped land Apollo astronauts on the Moon, died at 90.
• ⚛️🕜 New atomic clock measures a second with an uncertainty level of under a ten-billion-billionth of a second, or ~4x better than anything previously recorded.

US, WORLD, & POLITICS

• 💰 US budget deficit climbs to nearly $2 trillion in the fiscal year that ended September 30, per the Congressional Budget Office.
• 🎓 Trump admin is investigating potential J-1 visa fraud at nine top universities—including Brown, Harvard, MIT, Stanford, and Yale—as part of a crackdown on foreign influence in higher education.
• 🚨 Army officer convicted in the 2009 Fort Hood shooting that killed 13 people and wounded 32 others will be executed in public, a practice that ended in the US nearly a century ago, in an event that will also be livestreamed online, the Pentagon says.

☝️ You’re looking at a newly released image of Mars captured by NASA’s Curiosity rover two months ago. The photo, taken about an hour after sunrise, shows sunlight illuminating jagged, wind-carved cliffs believed to have formed ~3 billion years ago. Curiosity is expected to reach the cliffs in 2027 or 2028, allowing scientists to study their mysterious origins up close.

🤔 Did you know? The famous cafeteria tray-catch scene from Spider-Man (2002) took 156 takes to capture with zero CGI used, according to the head of the film’s VFX team. Tobey Maguire actually caught everything legitimately—with a little help from an adhesive on the bottom of the tray.

📰 Worth a read: 'We live in grief-phobic societies': Experts on how to get more comfortable with death.

🖱️ What we’re clicking:

• Former NFL lineman solves decades-old math problem
• The new LinkedIn trick to getting opportunities: selfies
• How the world fell back in love with butter

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How well did you pay attention this week? Find out here.

1. A farmer plants 8 rows of corn with 15 plants in each row. If 20% of the plants fail to grow, how many plants survive?
2. A store sells notebooks for $4 each, or three for $10. If you need 11 notebooks, what is the least amount of money you can spend?
3. A train travels 150 miles at 50 MPH. To complete a full 250-mile journey in 4 hours, what speed must it average over the remaining distance?

(keep scrolling for the answer)

🎭 Thousands of Broadway fans braved a nor'easter late last month to get to NYC’s Broadway Flea Market & Grand Auction, raising ~$1.5 million for Broadway Cares and Equity Fights AIDS as part of the annual fundraiser.

1. 96 plants
2. $38
3. 100 MPH

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