💼 September’s Jobs Report Swings…

Image: Gifer

• But, but, but: The unemployment rate dropped to 4.8%, its lowest level since March 2020. And the July and August numbers were revised up by a combined 169,000 jobs.

🤔 What’s going on ?... Short answer: no one knows for sure. As the Bureau of Labor Statistics report puts it, “Recent employment changes are challenging to interpret...”

Long answer:

• Delta variant: From January through July this year, employers added an average of more than 640,000 jobs a month – then delta hit. August’s report missed analysts’ expectations.
• Seasonal adjustments in education: The report shows the loss of 144,000 jobs at local public schools. But schools actually were hiring (albeit less than they usually would), the drop just reflects how the Labor Department adjusts the numbers to account for seasonal fluctuations.
• Less people are looking for work: The number of people reporting they were employed jumped by 526,000 – but 183,000 people stopped looking for work last month and are no longer counted among the jobless.

📝 Bottom line: Whether it’s fear of infection, lack of childcare, early retirement turned permanent, or something else – people are staying on the labor market sidelines. September saw the lowest number of women employed or looking for a job since February.

• “Labor availability remains the biggest challenge to hiring right now,” Wells Fargo economists Sarah House and Michael Pugliese said in a research note.

From the Left (Opinion): The September jobs report in one word: ‘Oof’

From the Right (Opinion): Where Did All the Workers Go?

🎁 We’re nearly a quarter of the way into the NFL season, and viewership is up 17% compared to last year, with an average of 17.3 million people tuning in to each game, per Nielsen.

As you can probably guess by the name “The DONUT”, we’re pretty morning-routine oriented folks.

Meditation, workouts, yoga, brushing your teeth opposite-handed, cold showers, mirror mantras, rolling out of bed just in time for your first Zoom meeting – you name it, we probably have someone who’s incorporated it into their mornings.

✋ Except for one thing, that is… We’ve traded in our morning coffee for matcha green tea from Matcha.com. Why ? Because it just makes sense.

🍵 Matcha has:

• A rich & storied history: Its essence is rooted in a ceremonial process handed down by master tea practitioners for a millennium. Matcha.com has long supported family-owned farms in Japan.
• Crazy stress & health benefits: Among other health benefits, matcha includes amino acids for stress relief and chlorophyll to naturally detoxify the body.
• A prolonged caffeine boost: AKA no jitters and a longer period of sustained energy.

So when you’re drinking matcha from Matcha.com, you’re preserving this enriching history and practice, caring for yourself, and experiencing longer periods of sustained energy… coffee, ye have been checkmated.

Use the code DONUT at checkout for 25% off anything in store.

Incorporate matcha into YOUR morning routine.

Image: NBC News

📜 Background… NYC’s G&T program for grades K-5 is considered a fast track for students to secure a spot in the most competitive middle and high schools.

• The highly selective program – which admits ~2,500 pupils out of 65,000 kindergartners each year – has also been criticized for worsening inequality in the nation’s largest public school district.
• A 2019 report commissioned by Mayor de Blasio found just 18% of children in kindergarten gifted programs were Black or Latino, although they made up 65% of kindergartners citywide.

📝 Details, details… Under de Blasio’s new plan, NYC will stop administering a screening test to identify 4- to 7-year-old students eligible to apply for the G&T program starting next school year.

• Instead, the city is implementing a program called “Brilliant NYC” that involves waiting until the third grade to sort out which students should be put in accelerated classes based on an evaluation of their schoolwork and input from their teachers.
• NYC also plans to train all kindergarten teachers to provide accelerated learning as part of the new program, covering a range of areas from robotics and computer coding to community organizing.

👁️ Looking ahead… Because of term limits, de Blasio will leave office at the end of the year, leaving much of the heavy lifting in this area to his successor (AKA the ‘group project special’).

• A spokesman for the city’s presumptive next mayor, Democratic nominee Eric Adams, declined to say whether he would overhaul any of de Blasio’s changes if elected. But he did emphasize that Adams “has said consistently he would keep the G&T test and provide more resources, classes and support to lower-income students to ensure fairer outcomes.”

🕴️ Real-Life Holograms

Concept art of SolidLight display; Image: Light Field Lab

☝️ First things first… “Big deal, I’ve seen holograms for years,” you might be thinking. Well, yes and no.

• The vast majority of visual effects used today are simply tricks and techniques used to make an image seem like a hologram, rather than something that appears in space just like a real object would.

💡 How it works… Essentially, Light Field Lab’s SolidLight technology causes waves of light to interact at a certain point in space. By doing this a lot – like, a LOT – it can create objects visible to the human eye without the need for any special glasses.

• Their 28-inch diagonal panel contains a staggering 2.5 billion pixels. For reference, a 4K TV has about 8.3 million pixels. The company also has future plans for holographic video walls with more than 245 billion pixels.

See it in action.

Images: CNN

Nyla Covington won the coveted title of Homecoming Queen last month at Forrest County Agricultural High School in Mississippi – but that wasn’t the highlight of the night.

• After receiving the jeweled crown, Nyla walked straight over to her competitor Brittany Walters, who had recently lost her mom from cancer, and placed it on her head instead.

💬 What she's saying: “[I know] she'd rather have her mom than a crown,” shared Nyla. “But the point was, I was telling her that she was her mom's queen and I was just letting her know that she was loved by many and especially me."

An adult human has how many teeth ? (Wisdom teeth included)

A) 26
B) 28
C) 30
D) 32

(keep scrolling for the answer)

Americans' trust in the media has dipped to the second lowest on record.

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D) 32

There are 32 adult teeth in total, 12 more than in the baby set. The last 4 of these are called wisdom teeth since they usually emerge later than the others, often between the ages of 17 and 21.