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Good morning and welcome to Tuesday.
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⏰🚀 Ready, Set, Go: Today’s newsletter takes 4.72 minutes to read. (With the 360° view: +3.27 minutes.)
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🍩 Daily Sprinkle
"Happiness is not the absence of problems, it's the ability to deal with them."
–Steve Maraboli (b. 1975)
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👇📰 Quick Bits
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🍻 Alcohol delivery is booming…
Image: Giphy
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🎁 ...and DoorDash wants a bigger piece of the pie. The delivery app is expanding its alcohol delivery service to 20 new states, D.C., Canada, and Australia, the company announced yesterday.
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Before the pandemic, DoorDash was only delivering in southern California. With the new changes, its alcohol delivery service will reach 100 million adults worldwide.
🚗 Driving the news (hehe)… CEO Tony Xu expects the move to result in larger app orders, which means restaurants can sell more and gig workers can earn more (plus, DoorDash makes more). “Alcohol really presents a win, win, win for all of our audiences,” he told CNBC’s TechCheck.
📸 The bigger picture: According to a recent Nielsen report, alcohol is the fastest growing e-commerce vertical across all consumer packaged goods. International Wine & Spirit Research expects the total value of alcohol e-commerce across 10 global markets, including the U.S., to exceed $40 billion by 2024.
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Which doesn’t seem all that crazy... until learning the market in 2019 was around $3 billion, meaning we’re smack-dab in the middle of an expected 1,200%+ increase over five years.
+What we’re watching: Regulators. Since many restaurants were closed to in-person dining during the peak of the pandemic, some states temporarily relaxed rules around alcohol delivery to provide eateries with a much-needed revenue source.
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While some states, like California, approved alcohol to-go through 2026, many states, cities, and local municipalities still have to decide whether to extend this new legality or not – and DoorDash’s move could force their hand.
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Take New York for example: it ended its 15-month-long alcohol to-go allowance in June, but is one of the markets listed in DoorDash’s announcement.
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📉 Market Mania
Image: WSJ
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☝️ All three major U.S. stock indices experienced their worst session in at least two months yesterday. All three are down roughly 4% so far this month.
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The declines were felt across the entire market, with all 11 of the S&P 500 sectors losing ground on the day.
👉 Who (or what) is to blame ?... Economists and experts pinned the sell-off on a few things:
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Investors are worried about the collapse of Chinese property developer Evergrande affecting other financial markets. Some analysts argue the sell-off is a sign that market participants increasingly believe Beijing will not bail out Evergrande. (Read up on the situation.)
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The Fed begins a two-day meeting today to discuss monetary policy, and investors are worried the central bank will signal an end to pandemic-era stimulus measures.
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COVID cases remain at January levels due to the Delta variant, with colder weather on the horizon. What’s more, September has the worst track record of any month, historically averaging a 0.4% decline per the Stock Trader’s Almanac.
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The U.S. is quickly approaching the debt ceiling and could default on its debt as soon as next month (potentially setting off a global financial crisis).
👁 Looking ahead… The Fed ends its two-day meeting with an announcement tomorrow. Many analysts believe the central bank won’t begin winding down its bond-buying program - a move known as ‘tapering’ - until the next meeting in early November.
From the Left: CNBC
From the Right: WSJ
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🍩 DONUT Holes…
Image: Simon Wohlfahrt, AFP
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☝️ You’re on #CrimeTok: A Rwandan court convicted Paul Rusesabagina, a U.S. resident immortalized by Hollywood in Hotel Rwanda for saving more than 1,200 people during the 1994 genocide, on a string of charges including terrorism; he was sentenced to 25 years in prison. | The FBI executed a search warrant on the Florida family home of Brian Laundrie yesterday, his whereabouts are still unknown; the autopsy on remains believed to be Gabby Petito's should be completed today. Get the latest in the case.
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💉 COVID/Vaccines: Pfizer said Monday that trials show its Covid-19 vaccine was “safe” and “well-tolerated” by children ages 5 to 11 and generated a "robust" antibody response at one-third of the dosage for teens and adults; the company will soon request emergency use authorization for this age group. | The Biden administration will allow fully vaccinated foreign travelers from 33
countries (including the EU member nations) to enter the U.S. starting in November, easing restrictions that have been in place since March 2020.
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⚖️ Abortion Laws: A Texas doctor who publicly said he performed an abortion was sued twice in state court, handing Texas a test of its new abortion law. (From the Left | From the Right) | The Supreme Court will hear Mississippi’s Roe v. Wade challenge on December 1. (From the Left | From the Right)
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🐦 Twitter agreed to pay $809 million to settle a 2016 class-action lawsuit that alleged the tech giant misled investors about user metrics.
+Bonus: Apple’s iOS 15 operating system dropped yesterday, with updates to Safari and FaceTime and new features to help with focus and protect privacy. See what else is new.
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🔥 The Hot Corner
💬 Heard Through the Grapevine… “People are going to read our paper and go, ‘How? How could Mars do that? How can such a tiny planet melt enough rock to power thousands of super eruptions in one location?’” said Patrick Whelley, a geologist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
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Whelley is referring to recently published evidence that a region of northern Mars has experienced thousands of volcanic “super eruptions” over 500 million years, blasting the equivalent of 400 million Olympic-sized swimming pools of molten rock and gas into the atmosphere.
🔢 Stat of the Day: Almost 70% of millionaires are worried about leaving ‘too much’ money to their kids, according to a recent Motley Fool survey.
📖 Worth Your Time… The Other Afghan Women
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🗣👂 Dose of Discussion
🔎📄 The Facebook Files
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Image: Elena Lacey/Wired
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🎁 The Wall Street Journal released the Facebook Files last week, a series of five articles alleging “Facebook Inc. knows, in acute detail, that its platforms are riddled with flaws that cause harm, often in ways only the company fully understands.”
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The news org’s claims are based on a review of internal Facebook documents, including research reports, online employee discussions, and drafts of presentations to senior management.
🤿 A deeper dive… Each of the five WSJ articles covers a different angle:
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Facebook says it judges all users by the same set of standards but has secretly created a system that exempts millions of high-profile users from some or all of its rules.
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Internal researchers have repeatedly found that Instagram is harmful to young users, especially teen girls, but the company has downplayed those negative effects in public and refused to share data with academics or lawmakers.
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Facebook made a public change to its algorithm in 2018 designed to improve its platform. But when staffers warned CEO Mark Zuckerberg the change was having the opposite effect, he resisted some proposed fixes for fear of losing engagement.
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A number of employees raised alarms about how Facebook was being used by drug cartels, human trafficking groups, and other criminals in developing countries. In many instances, the company’s response was inadequate or nothing at all.
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Zuck made promoting COVID-19 vaccines “a top company priority” in March. Instead, internal researchers discovered a large percentage of comments on vaccine-related posts contained anti-vaccine rhetoric aimed at undermining their message.
🗣️ Facebook’s response… The company’s head of global affairs published a statement Saturday saying the WSJ series contains “deliberate mischaracterizations” of Facebook’s actions and “conferred egregiously false motives” to its leadership and employees.
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He pointed to other stats showing Facebook’s policies lead to positive change, such as how vaccine hesitancy among U.S. users has declined by ~50% since January.
🏛️ On Capitol Hill… The FTC filed a new version of its antitrust lawsuit against Facebook last month after a federal judge in June threw out a previous case brought by the commission and 40+ states.
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Proposed legislation to curb the market power of tech giants like Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Apple is currently making its way through Congress (but don't hold your breath).
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🛸🌄📲 Calling from the Future…
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💊 Breast Cancer Breakthrough
A vial and packaging of Enhertu; Image: AstraZeneca
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🎁 A new drug from Astrazeneca called Enhertu has shown “remarkable” results in extending the life of patients with an extremely aggressive and difficult-to-treat form of breast cancer (compared to the current standard of care).
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🎗 Why it matters… Breast cancer is the most common form of cancer found in U.S. women, and is the second-leading cause of cancer death.
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Roughly one-in-five breast cancer patients are positive for the HER-2 gene, a modification that makes the disease much more aggressive.
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Most HER2-positive patients respond well to the first line of treatment (a pair of drugs called trastuzumab & taxane), but others are forced to rely on another drug called TDM1 to reduce the disease’s progression in the body.
🎓 Best in class… Enhertu was shown to be twice as effective as TDM1 in freezing the progression of HER2-positive breast cancer in new trial data published Sunday.
📝 The takeaway: "The outcome of this trial is very clinically meaningful for HER-2-positive breast cancer patients," Dr. Sara Tolaney, Director of Breast Oncology at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, who was part of the research team, told ABC News.
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"This potent antibody drug ... will dramatically change the treatment for HER-2 positive breast cancer."
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🤗 Daily Dose of Positive
🏫🛒 Gunna & Goodr’s Grocery Garage
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Images: Twitter
An average of 67% of the students at Ronald McNair Middle School in Georgia live below the poverty line.
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With many families surviving paycheck to paycheck, it’s not always easy to guarantee food on the table or new clothes for the school year ahead.
✋ But not anymore… Grammy-nominated Atlanta rapper “Gunna,” a McNair alumnus, recently teamed up with Jasmine Crow, founder and CEO of local nonprofit Goodr, to change that.
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The duo transformed one of the school’s storage closets into a grocery store for the student body; anyone is able to shop at the store and take what they need for their family, completely free of charge.
The free food store features three stocked fridges, a dry food pantry, clothing closet, and basic home goods.
+Want more stories like these ?... Positive DONUT hits inboxes for the first time ever around lunchtime. This brand-new newsletter from the DONUT aims to find and elevate the good in the world, as well as provide simple tools to improve our collective mental health. Sign up here for free.
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💡 Dose of Knowledge
🚦 Just A Small Town Girl...
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Where is the smallest town in America?
A) Kansas
B) Maine
C) Nebraska
D) Alaska
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(keep scrolling for the answer) |
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💡 Dose of Knowledge Answer
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C) Nebraska
The village of Monowi in Boyd County, Nebraska, owns the title of smallest town in America, covering an area roughly the size of 50 football fields.
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Monowi has another unique quality – there's only one resident. Eighty-seven-year-old Elsie Eiler serves as the town's mayor, librarian, clerk, and bartender.
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