💬 Quoted: “WE the People of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union…”

In 2022, while appraising the value of items in a historic house in North Carolina, Ken Farmer opened a folder he came across in a file cabinet and saw these words👆 at the top of a creased, old-looking sheet of paper. He was looking at a carbon copy of the US Constitution dating back to the late 1700s, which had been sent to the state’s governor around the time of its ratification.

Now, it’s up for auction and expected to fetch millions.

Background: After a complete draft of the Constitution was finalized in 1787, the founders needed to get it ratified by at least nine of the original 13 colonies in order to make it binding to the government of a new nation, the NY Times reports.

• Since email wasn’t yet a thing, Congress printed out 100 copies and sent them around the country so states could read the document and discuss it.
• The document Farmer found in the North Carolina house, which used to belong to Samuel Johnston, governor of North Carolina from 1787–1789, is one of those copies, according to an Asheville auction house handling the document’s sale.

👀 Looking ahead… The starting bid for the copy is $1 million, and could go as high as $40 million, according to experts. An earlier copy of the Constitution was purchased by billionaire hedge fund manager Ken Griffin in 2021 for $43.2 million.

🍿😱 Stat of the Day: The end of October is fast approaching – but in Hollywood, it’s spooky season all year ‘round. Over the past decade, horror movies have captured a growing share of the North American box office and now regularly account for ~$1 billion in annual ticket sales, or 10% of the entire domestic industry, per a new Bloomberg report. Overall, data shows the movie industry has mainly prioritized big-budget action films and low-budget horror films since the early 2010s.

🤔 Did You Know? Termite queens have the longest known lifespan of any insect in the world, at up to 50 years for some species.

📰 Worth a Read: America's secret opinions → (Axios)