Good morning and welcome to Monday. Two big announcements:

1. Today is 7/11, aka National Slurpee Day.
2. Also today, we’re beginning to implement a series of minor changes to the newsletter aimed at fostering a deeper sense of community and connectivity (more on that later). We’re pretty stoked about it.

A new update will be dropping on each day of this week, so even if you’re stuck on a yacht in Ibiza with Mike Posner you’ll still want to make sure to hit “open” every time you see the doughnut emoji in your inbox.🍩📨

P.S. Mixing all the Slurpee flavors together is the only way to go, don’t @ us.

🚀⏰ Ready, Set, Go: Today’s news takes 3.62 minutes to read.

“To belittle, you have to be little.”

–Kahlil Gibran (1883-1931)

Here’s what’s going to be changing:

1. If you don’t normally click on the “See the 360° View” button, the only difference you’ll see is the addition of a user poll at the end of each story. We'll share the results the following day, along with reader responses.
2. If you consistently click on the “See the 360° View” button, you’ll see more linked op-eds for you to explore, but we’ll no longer be curating excerpts from them.

🚗 Driving the move… A desire to deliver more relatable opinions actually representative of America. News orgs are increasingly catering to the polarized 10% on either end of the political spectrum, but most of the country lies in between – the “massive middle,” as we call it.

So if most political commentators are parroting the polarizing opinions, who’s elevating the reasonable (and more widely held) ones? The answer is us – and we’re the most uniquely positioned in the industry to do so. 

• Our most recent subscriber survey found 21.6% of our readers consider themselves politically to be in the center/Independent, 39.2% say they’re left of center, and 39.2% consider themselves to be right of center – an exactly equal distribution.

Thoughts, comments, feedback? Just hit reply.

Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson… and California? The state will invest $100M to set up the infrastructure to produce cheaper insulin under the label “CalRx.,” Gov. Gavin Newsom announced late last week.

📊 By the numbers… 8.4 million Americans with diabetes – or 2.5% of the US population – rely on insulin injections to survive. And peer-reviewed research from 2019 found that ¼ of those patients are skipping doses because they can’t afford regular treatment.

• In the US, insulin costs have tripled over the past decade to reach an average of ~$100 per unit – nearly five times the price in Chile, which ranked second among the 34 countries analyzed by the nonprofit Rand Corporation.
• Currently, just three firms account for 90%+ of the global insulin market (Eli Lilly, Novo Nordisk, and Sanofi Aventis).
• These companies also produce the US’ entire insulin supply. Per a 2018 Congressional Research Service report, this means insulin is largely protected from generic competition that often makes drugs less expensive.

📝🏛 Zoom out: A Democrat-led bill that would cap insulin prices at the federal level passed the House in March, but it’s unclear if it’ll make headway in the evenly-divided Senate.

• Since 2019, eight states – CO, IL, ME, NM, NY, UT, WA, and WV – have enacted measures capping the price of insulin at or below $100 per unit, though none have gone so far as to produce their own.

+Flash poll: What do you think of California’s move?

I support it

I oppose it

Unsure/other

Elon Musk announced plans to terminate his $44 billion deal to acquire Twitter on Friday, claiming the company is "in material breach of multiple provisions of that agreement."

💰🐦 A deeper dive… Over the past two months, Musk and his lawyers have repeatedly said Twitter’s longtime estimate that <5% of its monetizable users are bot or spam accounts is inaccurate, and that the company has “failed or refused to provide” relevant information.

• The social media company has denied the billionaire’s claims, saying it supported Musk’s requests in several ways, including explaining the process behind its bot calculations and giving his team access to its “firehose” of data to crunch the numbers themselves.

🤔 What about the exit clause?... In the original deal, Musk agreed to pay a $1 billion breakup fee if the deal falls apart – but that clause is only triggered under certain scenarios, like if his debt financing fell through (it didn’t) or the deal was broken up by regulators (it wasn’t).

👀 Looking ahead… Twitter’s board will move forward with a Delaware lawsuit arguing that Musk has to stick to the agreed-upon deal – and the microblogging site appears to be on sounder legal footing than Musk, corporate law experts told the WSJ.

+In the know: Since Musk’s bid in April, Twitter’s stock has fallen by more than 31%… so there may be other motivating factors besides the bots. (Musk’s personal net worth is also down ~$65 billion over that same period.)

Researchers from the US and UK are teaming up to perform the first-ever archaeological excavation of a 5,000-year-old tomb believed to be connected to the legend of King Arthur.

⚔️🤺 More deets… The site, located in Herefordshire, England, is known as “Arthur’s Stone.” It’s believed to date back to between 3,700 B.C. and 2,700 B.C. – but history is far from clear.

• Some legends from before the 13th century suggest the tomb was built to mark the location of one of King Arthur's battles.
• Others say the site was the location where Arthur slew a giant that fell, leaving an indentation still seen today.

📚 Big picture: Whether the legendary King Arthur actually existed is the subject of much debate among historians, though his story is widely considered one of the most enduring of all time.

Per the British Library’s Hetta Elizabeth Howes, historical records show a man named Arthur leading a resistance against the Saxons around the fifth and sixth centuries, while some Welsh accounts reference a similarly gifted warlord.

• The glorified king and his Knights of the Round Table first began to take shape in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain (circa ~1136), which was widely popular in its day but is now considered historically unreliable.

+In the know: The soon-to-be-excavated site is also believed to have been portrayed in a pivotal scene in C.S. Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia series. (*SPOILER ALERT*: The scene in question is the one where Aslan the Lion is sacrificed on a stone slab by the White Witch.)

Back to the Future managed to correctly predict biometrics, tablets, mobile payment systems, and personal drones… impressive!

But what the movie didn’t predict was that robots would be the ones making pizza.

🤯 Did you know... Rising prices of labor and real estate have resulted in the thinnest ever profit margins for the pizza biz (5-10%)?

The solution? Robotic pizza kiosks!🍕🤖

Developed by Piestro, these kiosks:

• Eliminate labor costs
• Service high-traffic areas like malls and airports (they’re the size of a van)
• Stay open 24/7
• Maintain high-quality ingredients and produce artisanal pizzas within 3 minutes

🥁 The result??? TRIPLED profit margins for restaurants!

As if that’s not enough, Piestro has a two-headed attack to take a sizable bite out of the growing $155B pizza industry. Not only will they be selling kiosks to major pizza chains, but they’ll be operating their own units as well… and you can invest!

Interested in investing? Piestro has already secured $580M in preorders, including from well-known pizza chains like 800 Degrees Pizza. The company is still fundraising, but only until July 27th.

⏳ Learn more about investing in Piestro before time runs out.

US taxpayers paid $3–$4 for every $1 in wages and benefits received by workers in jobs saved by the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), per a new study by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.

💰🏛 Background… Like your quarantine relationship, the PPP was first enacted in April 2020 as part of the bipartisan $2.2 trillion CARES Act. Congress passed new measures in the following weeks and months adding more funding to the program.

• All told, nearly $800 billion was loaned out to businesses with fewer than 500 employees before the PPP’s operations wound down this year.
• The loans came with a condition that they would be forgiven completely if borrowers maintained certain employment targets and certified the money was spent within a specified period on payroll, utilities, or rent/ mortgage payments. More than 90% of the loans had been forgiven as of late last month, according to a recent government report.

📝 Zoom in: The Fed study reports that the PPP spent between $169,000 and $258,000 per job saved over its first 14 months of existence. For context, the average small business employee earned ~$58,200 in wages and benefits over that same period.

• ☝️ Sri Lankan protesters stormed the country’s presidential palace, leading the president and prime minister to resign on Saturday; an ongoing economic crisis has led to shortages of essential items like food and fuel. (Background)

BUSINESS & MARKETS

• 💼 The US unemployment rate remained unchanged for the fourth straight month at 3.6%, per the May Jobs Report published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics on Friday.
• 🛒 Here are the best early deals for Amazon Prime Day 2022, which starts tomorrow and ends on Wednesday.
• 🍼 Baby formula production has resumed at Abbott Nutrition’s Michigan plant; it previously closed in February over contamination concerns.

SPORTS, MEDIA & ENTERTAINMENT

• 🎾 Novak Djokovic won Wimbledon for the fourth straight time, defeating Nick Krygios to notch his 21st Grand Slam title; he's now second all-time behind Rafa Nadal (22). | Elena Rybakina took home the crown on the women's side; she's the first Kazakhstan winner of a Grand Slam singles title.
• 🤌 Actor Tony Sirico, best known for playing Paulie Walnuts in The Sopranos, died at age 79.
• 🦸‍♂️ Marvel’s Thor: Love and Thunder earned $143 million across North America over the weekend, good for the third-biggest opening of 2022.

SCIENCE, SPACE & EMERGING TECH

• 🌎 MIT scientists proposed a way to fully reverse climate change by using a “cloud” of small spacecraft to shield Earth from the Sun’s radiation, like a makeshift ozone layer.
• ⚛️ The world’s most sensitive dark matter detector – located a mile underground in an abandoned South Dakota gold mine – was recently tested for the first time.

EVERYTHING ELSE

• 🇨🇦📵 Roughly 10 million Canadians were left without internet or cell service on Friday due to an outage at telecom giant Rogers Communications, the company’s second major outage in the past 15 months.
• 🏛️ President Biden signed an executive order on Friday that takes incremental steps to preserve access to abortion and contraceptives (From the Left | From the Right); separately, a Louisiana judge lifted an order that temporarily blocked the state’s abortion trigger ban from taking effect. (From the Left | From the Right)

💬 Quoted… ​​“[We] passed the test.”

Ukraine’s defense minister told the WSJ yesterday that his country’s military had successfully used some of the new American long-range missile systems, but said the high attrition rate on the front lines means more next-gen Western supplies are needed to hold off Russia's attack.

🏘 Stat of the Day: ​​May was the most expensive month to buy a home since 2006, per the most recent National Association of Realtors' Housing Affordability Index.

🌎 Around the World: The political party of former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who was assassinated on Friday, won a supermajority in the country’s parliamentary elections held over the weekend.

🤯 Did You Know?... An adult male grizzly bear can consume up to 200,000 berries per day.

📖 Worth a Read: The Most Critical Ingredient in Leadership → (Stanford Social Innovation Review)

Monday: 7/11 reminder: Make sure to grab that free Slurpee!

Tuesday: NASA releases first full-color images from the JWST; House Jan. 6 committee holds its next public hearing; Emmy nominations released

Wednesday: Consumer price index drops

Thursday: Bastille Day; The British Open tees off in St. Andrews, Scotland

Friday: President Biden meets with Saudi Arabian leaders as part of his Middle Eastern trip

After a heavy storm left the streets of Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, completely flooded, dog-dad Peter Rosen and his pup Bo took to the waves, surfing down the streets with ease.⬆️

🏄🐕 Everybody's learning how... Bo has been glued to his dad's side since they found each other about three years ago in the Cayman Islands, typically riding in the sidecar of Peter's Vespa or nestled in a papoose as he skateboards.

• Street-surfing is the duo's latest adventure... and the daredevil pup loves every second.

Disclosure: This story first appeared in last week’s Positive DONUT, a weekly newsletter delivering awe (and awww) inspiring stories you won't hear in the news. Sign up for free here.

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Guess the definitions of the following Latin and Greek root words.

1. Schem
2. Lum
3. Pac
4. Terr
5. Tim

(keep scrolling for the answers)

👆 Check out the referral prizes you can get just for introducing people you know to little old us. 

What to do: Copy your unique link below, then send it to anyone you think would like the DONUT.

1. Plan (e.g., scheme or schematic)
2. Light (luminate)
3. Peace (pacify)
4. Earth (terrain)
5. To fear (timid)