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Good morning and welcome to July. At the end of today, a lucky few will be off on vacation through Monday – AKA us. We’ll see you back here Tuesday.
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Until then… Stay cool, stay hydrated, and stay classy. Have a great Independence Day weekend. 🇺🇸😎🍺 (Let’s pretend the last one’s a White Claw.)
⏰🚀 Ready, Set, Go: Today’s newsletter takes 4.87 minutes to read. (With the 360° view: 8.55 minutes.)
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👇📰 Quick Bits
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🗺️🧳 July 4 Weekend Travel Tips
Image: AAA
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🎁 DONUT Headline: A record number of Americans are expected to travel by car this July 4 weekend. Keep scrolling to learn the best times to hit the road. (Caveat: these are national numbers, each locale will probably vary.)
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More than 47.7M Americans are expected to travel between July 1 and 5 for Independence Day, according to AAA.
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More than 91% of those travelers, representing nearly 44M Americans, will be traveling by car – the highest on record for this time of the year.
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All those vehicles mean road travel volumes this weekend are expected to be 15% higher than normal, according to transportation analytics company INRIX.
So, how can you be sure to avoid the worst traffic bottlenecks? The key is timing, says INRIX. Here are the best - and worst - times to be on the road:
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Today – Best time: After 7 p.m. | Worst time: 3-5 p.m.
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Friday – Best time: Before 12 p.m. | Worst time: 4-5 p.m.
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Saturday – Best time: After 2 p.m. | Worst time: 11 a.m.-1 p.m.
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Sunday – Road congestion not expected on Sunday
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Monday – Best time: Before 1 p.m. | Worst time: 4-5 p.m.
More: Meanwhile, gas prices hit a seven-year high for this time of year.
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⚖️ Bill Cosby Released From Prison
Image: AP
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🎁 DONUT Headline: Bill Cosby was released from prison yesterday after his sexual assault conviction was overturned by PA’s Supreme Court. It ruled the county DA should’ve stuck to his predecessor’s agreement to not criminally charge Cosby for the incident.
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Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court threw out Bill Cosby’s sexual assault conviction and released him from prison yesterday.
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Cosby, 83, had served nearly three years of a three- to 10-year sentence after being found guilty of drugging and sexually assaulting a woman at his Pennsylvania home in 2004.
He was first arrested in 2015 when a Pennsylvania county DA, armed with newly unsealed testimony from Cosby himself, charged the comedian just days before the 12-year statute of limitations expired. Cosby's testimony came as part of a separate civil lawsuit brought by the victim.
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In a split decision, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court yesterday ruled the county DA was obligated to stand by a promise his predecessor made to not criminally charge Cosby in return for his testimony in the earlier civil case.
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The ruling comes despite there being no evidence the promise was ever put in writing. The previous county DA confirmed the promise while testifying under oath in 2016.
More: Over 60 women have made allegations against Cosby that include drug-induced sexual assault to rape, with claims dating back to 1965 (list). Cosby has denied the accusations, and the statute of limitations expired on the majority of the claims without charges brought.
Even More: Seven women who had accused Cosby of sexual assault, and then sued him for defamation when his representatives accused them of lying, settled for an undisclosed amount in 2019.
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DONUT Holes…
A panorama of the aurora borealis in Iceland made up of 20 images; Larryn Rae
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🔥 The Hot Corner
💬 Heard through the grapevine... North Korean leader Kim Jong Un said his country faces a "huge crisis" related to COVID-19 and that an unspecified "grave incident" has put the nation's safety at "great risk."
🔢 Stat(s) of the day... Newsflash: it’s hot outside. If you’re in an area suffering from high temperatures, please stay safe and cool. 🙏
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At least 63 people have died in Oregon from excessive heat since Friday. Between 2017 and 2019, there were only 12 deaths from hyperthermia (essentially overheating) in the state.
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Over 100 sudden deaths have been reported in Vancouver since Friday. Temperatures in Canada broke records three days in a row, hitting 118°F in Lytton, British Columbia, on Monday – recorded temps in Canada have never exceeded 113°F.
📖 Worth Your Time… How life has changed in Hong Kong under China’s national security law.
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🗣👂 Dose of Discussion
📰 Is National News in Trouble?
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🎁 DONUT Headline: News publishers’ audience has shrunk in the months since former President Trump left office – though that’s not exactly unexpected. So is the news actually in trouble?
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Image: Axios
A recent Axios analysis of news publishers’ readership and engagement trends found a sharp decline in numbers across all sources – especially those that “rely on partisan, ideological warfare.”
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Mainstream publishers - including the NYT, WSJ, USA Today, and Reuters - saw a combined 18% drop in aggregate traffic from February through May compared to the previous six months.
Engagement on social media has taken an even bigger dive, according to data from NewsWhip. Mainstream publishers have seen social interactions on stories dip by 42% over that same period.
Yes, but… Something similar happened to cable news ratings following the 2016 presidential election – though not nearly on the same scale.
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“Historically, what we’ve seen in past [election] cycles is that these networks lose, essentially, all of those short-term gains after the election is over. And, they go back to a more normalized audience level and advertising revenue level.” –Paul Sweeney, Bloomberg Intelligence analyst, after the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
📸 The Big Picture
The time period of the compared data and fundamental changes to the media landscape may be responsible for at least some of the drop-off in engagement. Axios’ graph only measures website traffic.
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For Example: Five out of the top 10 most listened-to podcasts in May 2021 were daily news shows, with three from Left-leaning sources (NPR & NYT) and two from the Right (The Ben Shapiro Show & The Dan Bongino Show).
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📣🗣💬 This Week’s Poll Responses
Real-world – "Simply put, I am a woman of earthly pleasures. I have nothing against progress and diving into worlds of virtual reality, space exploration, AI, robots, etc... but it just isn't something I'm interested in personally. I wish time would stop and it would stay pre-2000 forever, but I know that's not a thing. So, I will be perfectly content making bread from scratch, finding enjoyment in candles and hot showers, and spending days doing nothing but laying on a beach and swimming in the river while the rest of the world is experiencing Mars either IRL or VR. Happy for them, home they come to my throwback party here in "the real world". There will be Jell-O shots and card games."
VR – "Imagine being the master of your own universe… how would that not be cool?"
Unsure – "Like in Ready Player One, I think VR is the next evolution on bridging the gap so people can "go to work" and collaborate without having to actually commute to work. It can also be a way to explore parts of this world that costs thousands of dollars to get to or even worlds and universes imagined. If my normal gaming and work are in VR I imagine that it could overtake my non-VR waking hours. But I am also scared of the prospect of being glued to that device for everything and so would want to limit that use for myself."
+Note on Sample Size: We received 820 responses. 👏🥳 Some may have been lightly edited for grammar or clarity.
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🛸🌄📲 Calling from the Future…
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🚘 Fly, Baby, Fly
Image: Klein Vision
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🎁 DONUT Headline: A flying car prototype successfully completed a 35-minute test flight between two airports in Slovakia. (Great Scott!)
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Equipped with a BMW engine and powered by standard gasoline, the hybrid car-aircraft - called the AirCar - reached a cruising speed of approximately 105 mph.
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Klein Vision, the company behind the flying automobile, said the vehicle is capable of flying distances of up to 600 miles and could ascend as high as 8,500 ft.
A different kind of hybrid... While on the road, the flying car’s wings remain folded along the side of the vehicle. It takes just two minutes and 15 seconds to transform from car into aircraft.
Keep reading.
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🤗 Daily Dose of Positive
🤱 The Joy of (Co-)Motherhood
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Image: Carolyn P.
Carolyn and her husband were high-school sweethearts who knew from the very beginning they would one day be married and have a family.
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But what they didn’t know was that none of their four children would be biologically theirs.
Shortly after getting married, the couple was sitting in church when they heard about the need for foster families in their home state of Colorado, and decided to sign up.
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After eight weeks of training and months waiting for their first child, Carolyn and her husband finally received a call about a three-year-old boy named N.
What makes this story so inspiring isn’t just the Colorado couple’s willingness to foster – it’s the relationship they began to forge with N’s mother.
Keep reading.
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💡 Dose of Knowledge
🍔 Return of the Mac
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Before it was called the Big Mac, McDonald's signature sandwich went by what name?
A) Behemoth Burger
B) Big Stack
C) Arch Rival
D) Aristocrat
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(keep scrolling for the answer) |
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🍩 Share The DONUT
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Access exclusive rewards and even an all-expenses-paid round trip to Austin, TX, just for sharing this newsletter.
Simply:
1. Copy your unique referral link.👇
2. DM said link to a friend or two, drop it in your family group chat, send it to your ex, etc. (On second thought, delete the last suggestion... just like those drunk texts. 😉)
3. Watch the rewards roll in.
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Ambassador Rewards and Progress → |
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💡 Dose of Knowledge Answer
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D) Aristocrat
The Big Mac was first created by McDonald’s franchisee Jim Delligatti, who originally called it the "Aristocrat” as a nod to the size of the sandwich.
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The company ended up ditching the name in favor of “Big Mac” - which was proposed by 21-year-old advertising secretary Esther Glickstein Rose - before rolling the sandwich out nationwide.
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🍩 Daily Sprinkle
“Do I not destroy my enemies by making them my friends.”
–Apocryphal (not Abraham Lincoln, as commonly attributed).
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