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Good morning and welcome to Wednesday.
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⏰🚀 Ready, Set, Go: Today’s newsletter takes 4.16 minutes to read. (With the 360° view: +3.67 minutes.)
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🍩 Daily Sprinkle
“Nothing in this world is worth having or worth doing unless it means effort, pain, difficulty. No kind of life is worth leading if it is always an easy life."
–Teddy Roosevelt (1858-1919)
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👇📰 Quick Bits
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📺 Gen Z’s Reality TV
 Images: TechCrunch/TikTok
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🎁 FourFront, a media startup, raised $1.5 million in seed funding to popularize their network of individual actors performing scripted short-form serialized stories on social media, TechCrunch reports. For you TikTokers, think of it like couch guy but scripted.
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📱 How it works: The startup creates characters and crafts soap-opera like storylines, then hires actors to film “vlogs” that are then posted to TikTok. A handful of these characters have racked up hundreds of thousands of followers apiece.
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The company says they’re not trying to mislead anyone but are focused on entertainment. Each profile bio highlights the fictional nature of the stories and each video includes a #fictional tag.
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FourFront’s most popular character, “Sydney”, debuted in June and has nearly 500k followers. She posts videos like “watch us confront my sister’s cheating fiance LIVE” and has also discussed the stresses of her roommate breaking her lease early and the lessons she’s learned working in customer support for a dating app.
👁️ Looking ahead… FourFront’s team of writers and social media strategists have settled on nine characters and plan to create an interconnected reality-tv “universe” where the actors organically cross paths with each other.
+Zoom out: Following the breakaway success of content houses and creator collectives like Team 10 House, Hype House, Sway House, and whatever that wall trampoline house is, expect media and production companies to continue to try and capitalize on influencer culture.
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🏈 The NFL’s Dirty Laundry
 Image: Rick Scuteri/AP
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🎁 Las Vegas Raiders Head Coach Jon Gruden resigned late Monday after the New York Times published a report detailing numerous emails from 2011-2018 in which he used misogynistic and homophobic language.
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Gruden’s email correspondence was with Bruce Allen, who at the time was president of the franchise now called the Washington Football Team (WFT). In some cases, other individuals were on the email chains.
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Among other things, Gruden and other participants shared photos of topless women – including two WFT cheerleaders – and used gay slurs to refer to Commissioner Roger Gooddell and others in the NFL.
📝 Meanwhile, in Washington… Gruden’s messages were from a trove of 650,000 emails uncovered during a year-long investigation into the WFT prompted by allegations from dozens of women detailing a culture of sexual harassment. They're the only documents that have been made public so far.
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In particular, WFT employees were reportedly asked to create a behind-the-scenes video for team owner Dan Snyder featuring clips of partially nude team cheerleaders pulled from a 2008 swimsuit calendar shoot, per WaPo.
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An earlier report from the NYT interviewed WFT cheerleaders from the 2013 calendar photoshoot in Costa Rica, who said they had their passports collected upon arrival and were forced to pose topless in front of a group of all-male sponsors and season-ticket holders.
Washington eventually received a $10 million fine in July as a result of the investigation, which was presented to the NFL in the form of an oral report “due to the sensitivity of the allegations.”
👁️ Looking ahead: The NFL Players Association said it plans to petition the NFL to release the remainder of the 650,000 emails related to the WFT investigation.
+While we’re here: WFT assistant athletic trainer Doug Quon was placed on administrative leave over the weekend, a few days after head athletic trainer Ryan Vermillion was also placed on leave pending a DEA investigation into the distribution of prescription drugs. It’s unclear if the two are connected in the investigation.
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🍩 DONUT Holes…
 Image: Blue Origin
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☝️ William Shatner & Co. are headed to space today.
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💉 Moderna asked the FDA to give an emergency use authorization for a half-dose booster shot to be administered at least six months after a second dose; FDA scientists declined to take a stance, saying two doses protects against severe disease.
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👋 More Americans quit their jobs in August than in any other month since at least 2000, according to the Labor Department; may help further explain September’s jobs report.
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✈️ Boeing aircraft orders outpaced cancellations for the eighth consecutive month.
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🚫 Southwest canceled 87 flights, or 2% of its schedule on Tuesday.
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🪙 Coinbase is launching a marketplace for NFTs.
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🔥 The Hot Corner
💬 Heard Through the Grapevine… “They are a bunch of bureaucrats who have no imagination.” – Ian Brackenbury Chennell, the Wizard of New Zealand.
- Here’s a summary we never thought we’d write: The Christchurch City Council has been paying The Wizard $16,000 a year for more than two decades to “provide acts of wizardry” for the city – and recently pulled the plug.
🔢 Stat of the Day: 7,258:1 – the ratio of residents to publicly available bathrooms in New York City.
📖 Worth Your Time… A predatory culture, a viral reckoning—and now what?
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🗣👂 Dose of Discussion
🎤 The Chappelle Show
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 Image: Netflix
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🎁 Ted Sarandos, the co-CEO of Netflix, sent a memo to staff Friday in which he defended the company’s decision to launch Dave Chappelle’s most recent standup special, The Closer, according to Variety. The memo also offers guidance on how managers should respond to upset employees.
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⏩ Driving the news: Some employees and groups are angry because, in his special, Chappelle says the trans community has “thin skin,” defends J.K. Rowling’s tweets that many have called transphobic, and labels himself “team TERF,” or a trans-exclusionary radical feminist.
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Three employees crashed Netflix’s quarterly exec meeting last Friday in protest. All three were suspended for allegedly attending a meeting they weren’t invited to, including a software engineer named Terra Field who had previously bashed the company on Twitter.
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Jaclyn Moore, the trans co-showrunner of Dear White People, said she’s cutting ties with the company over its Chappelle decision. According to Sarandos’ memo, the company expects more high-profile talent to call for The Closer’s removal.
💬 What they’re saying: “As with our other talent, we work hard to support their creative freedom — even though this means there will always be content on Netflix some people believe is harmful, like Cuties, 365 Days, 13 Reasons Why or My Unorthodox Life,” Sarandos wrote. “Several of you have also asked where we draw the line on hate. We don’t allow titles on Netflix that are designed to incite hate or violence, and we don’t believe The Closer crosses that line.”
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Others say the content does cross the line. GLAAD responded to Sarandos’ memo on Monday: “Netflix has a policy that content ‘designed to incite hate or violence’ is not allowed on the platform, but we all know that anti-LGBTQ content does exactly that.”
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🎓 The Grass Isn’t Always Greener
 Image: Giphy
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🎁 It’s been proven time and time again that college graduates, on average, earn more money than those without a college degree.
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But according to a new study from Georgetown University, there are also a lot of exceptions.
📝 Details, details… From 2017-2019, an average of 16% of high school graduates, 23% of people with some college, and 28% of associate degree holders earned more money than half of all workers with a bachelor's degree.
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Some U.S. occupations require only a high school degree but pay workers as much – or more than – the median bachelor's degree holder, including air traffic controllers, respiratory therapists, and cardiovascular technicians. (Search for yourself.)
💬 The bottom line: Tony Carnevale, one of the report’s authors, said the findings support the idea that "you have to go to college" isn't always the best advice for high schoolers.
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📣🗣💬 This Week's Poll Question
In your opinion, should Dave Chappelle’s new special The Closer be removed from Netflix ?
Yes
No
Unsure/Other
+Note: Results and the most thoughtful responses will be featured in tomorrow’s newsletter.
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🛸🌄📲 Calling from the Future…
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🚫🦠 It’s Time To End Lyme
 Image: Northeastern University
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🎁 A team of researchers at Northeastern University in Boston discovered a chemical compound that’s deadly to the bacterium that causes Lyme disease – and completely harmless to animals.
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Lyme disease is caused by the bacterium Borrelia burgdorferi, which is found in wild mice. Ticks that feed on the mice become infected and can then infect other animals, including people.
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Currently, humans with the disease are treated with antibiotics that kill a wide range of bacteria, which often disrupts the gut microbiome and leads to unpleasant side effects like diarrhea.
🔬 Easy ‘A’… The researchers identified a compound called Hygromycin A that’s completely harmless to animals and has little effect on most bacteria, but is extremely deadly to a special class of microbe that includes Borrelia burgdorferi.
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The compound was originally discovered in 1953 but quickly dismissed by scientists as ineffective against the known bacterial diseases at the time.
👁️ Looking ahead: “Lyme disease is well-positioned to be eradicated,” said Kim Lewis, the biology professor who led the study. “We are gearing up, the first field trial will be next summer.”
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Lewis’ team is also studying whether Hygromycin A will be able to treat other diseases caused by bacteria similar to Borrelia burgdorferi, such as syphilis.
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🤗 Daily Dose of Positive
🐵 Monkey Mystery
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 Images: Abe Wachsman
For the past 20 years, a grey and yellow stuffed monkey has accompanied 73-year-old Abe Wachsman wherever he drove.
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The monkey first came into Abe’s possession on September 11th, 2001, when he helped a couple and their young child escape the soot and ash falling in downtown NYC.
The toddler left the monkey behind in the chaos, and Abe made a silent promise that he would one day reunite with the family and return it.
📱 The culmination: Twenty years later, he’s using social media to do just that.
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“I have no reasonable expectation that a reunion will happen, but why not try?” he said. “It must have been traumatic for the child to lose the monkey. Twenty years later, I’d love to give it back.”
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💡 Dose of Knowledge
🇨🇦 King In The North
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What's the capital of Canada ?
A) Toronto
B) Calgary
C) Montreal
D) Ottawa
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(keep scrolling for the answer) |
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💡 Dose of Knowledge Answer
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D) Ottawa
Toronto is Canada's largest city by population, with over 2.7 million people, but Ottawa is the country's capital.
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