Good morning and welcome to Wednesday. For the past few days we’ve been racking our brains, wondering exactly how good the Muffin Man’s baking must've been to warrant its own nursery rhyme.

On an unrelated note: please email contact@thedonut.co ASAP if you have any information on the existence of a Donut Man. We're trying to acquire his recipe.🙏🍩

In today’s edition:

• 💊 Adderall is in short supply
• 💔 How America feels about civil war
• 📸 The latest James Webb x Hubble collab

… and more.

🚀⏰ Ready, Set, Go: Today’s news takes 3.87 minutes to read.

“How you think when you lose determines how long it will be until you win.”

–Gilbert K. Chesterton (1874-1936)

Teachers in Cassville, MO, a small town in the southwestern part of the state, will be allowed to spank unruly children on the butt with paddles this fall – with parental consent – when “other means of discipline have failed,” parents were notified this week.

🏫 More deets… If parents initially opt-in to the practice, commonly known as corporal punishment, they can change their mind at any time by writing a letter to their child’s school.

• A memo sent to parents this week said spankings wouldn’t happen in front of other kids, and would be done by two workers – one who would do the spanking, and the other to serve as a witness. ​​
• Children are typically hit with a wooden paddle that’s two feet long, three inches wide, and half-an-inch thick.

🇺🇸 The big picture: Corporal punishment was declared constitutional in a 1977 Supreme Court decision letting each state decide its own rules.

The practice is currently legal in all private schools across the country, with the exception of Iowa and New Jersey. It’s also legal in public schools across 19 states, and actually practiced in 15 of them. (See which ones.)

• Nearly 70,000 children were physically punished during the 2017-2018 school year, per the most recent Education Department data that’s available.
• Boys were corporally punished more often than girls by a ratio of about 5-to-1, and Black students and those with disabilities were also disproportionately more likely to be punished.

📊 Flash poll: Do you think teachers should be allowed to corporally punish their students – with parental consent – when other discipline options have failed?

Yes

No

Unsure/other

FedNow, the Federal Reserve’s new platform that would enable nearly instant payment settlement within the US, is set to launch between May and July of next year, Vice-Chair Lael Brainard announced on Monday.

🏦💳 A deeper dive… While many financial transactions, such as buying an item at the store, may seem instantaneous to the consumer, some payment methods actually take days to reach recipients and settle in their accounts. But that’s not the case with FedNow.

At its most basic level, FedNow aims to allow consumers, merchants, and financial institutions to pay friends and customers, settle bills, and transfer money immediately – at any time, any day of the year (a process called Real-Time Payments, or RTP).

• For example, proceeds from a house sale or your paycheck would be available immediately. You could also load money into an online broker account and have the funds ready to trade within seconds, or even get a cashiers check after all the bank branches have closed.

✋ Yes, but… There’s no guarantee the Fed’s new payments platform will catch on – and we don't really know what it'll eventually look like. The central bank is leaving it up to third parties to build their own services on top of FedNow, or incorporate it into existing or new products.

+In the know: Every time you swipe your debit card under the current payments system, it costs the merchant an average of $0.23 (which is usually passed on to the consumer). The FedNow platform will cost ⅕ of that price to make a transaction, per Axios.

It’s a rough time to be one of the ~160,000 people living in Jackson – Mississippi’s largest city. After being “plagued with problems for years,” per Mississippi Today, the city’s drinking water system is failing.

Officials declared a state of emergency on Monday when pumps at the city's water-treatment plant failed after days of rainfall, leaving residents with little to no water pressure. And per state authorities, it’s unclear when service will be restored.

• “Until it is fixed, it means we do not have reliable running water at scale,” Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves said during an emergency briefing on Monday evening. “It means the city cannot produce enough water to fight fires, to reliably flush toilets, and to meet other critical needs.”

🚰 In the meantime: The National Guard was activated yesterday to help distribute bottled water, as crews work to get the treatment plant back online. People were seen waiting in lines more than a mile long at Hawkins Field Airport, CNN reports – all for just one case of water.

👀 Looking ahead… To understand the next steps, we have to quickly revisit the problems. The city is currently plagued with two water issues: 1) quantity and 2) quality.

• Quantity refers to the recent water pressure issues (which will be fixed when the pumps start working again), but the quality issue runs a bit deeper… and may cost billions to fix, according to Jackson Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba.

🤠 Texas Modern… aka a style perfected by Petrified Design that uses modern design to preserve and accentuate the natural characteristics of materials. It’s what’s made them the go-to for businesses in Austin that want a perfectly fitting custom buildout that adds that beloved Texas flair.

🪵 Petrified Design also lets you bring that same natural aesthetic into your home with custom furniture. Their team of designers, woodworkers, and craftspeople thoughtfully execute every project to ensure quality and longevity. They can create unique custom pieces for your business or home, whether it’s furniture or larger build-outs and installations.💪⚒️

👍 If you want your dream kitchen, a custom chair, or a build-out that perfectly suits your business and like to deal with trusted professionals with a great track record, Petrified Design has you covered.

Bring Texas Modern style to your business/home today with Petrified Design.

So if classroom attention spans have been shrinking as of late, there’s a good reason. According to a survey published earlier this month by the National Community Pharmacists Association, 64% of pharmacists have had trouble getting enough Adderall this year to fill prescriptions.

💊 A deeper dive… Prescriptions for Adderall, a stimulant used to treat ADHD, are increasing fast (by 9.4% last year, per medical-data firm IQVIA). But manufacturers are unable to produce enough to meet demand.

• And that’s not because of supply chain issues or labor shortages. Rather, the DEA is to blame, since it controls manufacturing levels and hasn’t lifted its annual quota.

🤔 So why doesn’t it just approve an increase?... The answer is complicated. Telehealth medicine has exploded in recent years, allowing for increased access to a wide variety of drugs, from those treating men’s performance issues, to hair loss, to ADHD. This has led to massive investments and valuations for telehealth startups, which then manifests into a marketing explosion.

We’re seeing this rn from companies like Done and the SoftBank-backed Cerebral, both of whom have spent big money on TikTok campaigns – in fact, after the latter added ADHD treatment to its suite of products in early 2021, sales reportedly increased tenfold.

But there appears to be some, ehrm, shadiness happening on the marketing and prescribing front.

• Cerebral is currently being investigated by the DOJ for possible violations of the Controlled Substances Act.
• A recent study in the Canadian Journal of Psychiatry analyzed 100 TikTok videos about ADHD. It found more than half of them were misleading, and only a fifth were considered “useful.”

📸 The big picture: ~10% of children are being diagnosed with ADHD, per CDC estimates. And over the past two years, adderall prescriptions for Adderall and its generic equivalents have increased by ~25% for those ages 22-44.

💬 Quoted…​​ “If it were an athlete, people would call it ‘The GOAT.’”

Jim Crotty, deputy chief of staff at the Drug Enforcement Administration from 2019 to 2021, speaking on fentanyl to the WSJ. The synthetic opioid is cheaper and simpler to produce than heroin, leading Mexican cartels and other illicit organizations to build their operations around it.

• A record ~108,000 Americans died of a drug overdose last year, the majority due to fentanyl (~71,000).

😳 Stat of the Day: A new YouGov poll found that 43% of US adults believe a civil war is at least somewhat likely within the next decade.

🌎 Around the World: Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet Union’s last leader before its fall, died yesterday at 91. As Soviet president, he presided over the Iron Curtain’s removal and helped bring about the end of the Cold War – but was unable to prevent the country’s collapse in 1991.

🤯 Did You Know?... Pirates aren’t the only ones who bury treasure. Squirrels are responsible for planting millions of trees each year, simply because they can’t find previous acorn stashes.

📖 Worth a Read: Wild Secrets I Never Knew About Fitness Trainers Until I Worked as One → (Bloomberg)

• ☝️ The James Webb and Hubble space telescopes joined forces to capture this multi-spectrum image of what’s known as the Phantom Galaxy.

BUSINESS & MARKETS

• 💼 There were 11.2 million job openings across the US in July – nearly 1 million more than analysts had predicted – per new government data published yesterday.
• 🚢 Royal Caribbean is partnering with SpaceX to offer Starlink satellite internet onboard its cruise ships.
• 👻 Snap is laying off 20% of its workforce (more than 1,000 employees), per a report published yesterday by The Verge.

SPORTS, MEDIA & ENTERTAINMENT

• 🐦 Twitter Circle, a feature that lets you limit your tweets to a smaller audience of up to 150 followers, is now available to the general public.
• 🏌️ British Open champ Cameron Smith and five other pro golfers are leaving the PGA Tour for the Saudi-backed LIV Golf circuit, LIV officials announced Tuesday.
• 🦸‍♀️ Marvel announced that Megan Thee Stallion will make a cameo appearance in She-Hulk: Attorney At Law; it’s unknown whether she’ll be a mainstay in the Marvel Cinematic Universe

SCIENCE, SPACE & EMERGING TECH

• 🤖 French tax officials used artificial intelligence to spot 20,000 undeclared pools and collect an extra $10 million in revenue.
• 💊 A “polypill” that combines three separate heart medications into one was shown to reduce patients’ risk of dying from cardiovascular disease by 33%, per a new peer-reviewed study.
• 🚀 NASA will try its Artemis I launch again this Saturday. (Background)

EVERYTHING ELSE

• 🥉 Indian billionaire Gautam Adani became the first Asian man ever to crack the top three on Bloomberg’s Billionaire Index, with a $137 billion fortune; he sits behind Jeff Bezos ($153 billion) and Elon Musk ($251 billion).
• 🎧👩‍⚖️ A 74-year-old former high school teacher in Australia has been found guilty of murdering his wife in 1982 after popular true-crime podcast "The Teacher's Pet" renewed an investigation.
• 📅 Today marks the 25th anniversary of Princess Diana's death.

Quick recap: In this section, we’re aiming to crowdsource details about epic trips – then provide the whole playbook for the experience to y’all.

• Have you ever gone on an epic, once-in-a-lifetime trip? Tell us about it here.

🚶‍♂️ Who: Vinh N. from San Jose, CA

☀️ Length of trip: 5 days

💬 Quick recap: My girlfriend and I decided to go on a trip together for the summer. What better place to go than Disneyland and it’s new California Adventure Park. The resort was fun and we made a lot of memories. Aside from that we spent the rest of the days visiting family and eating really good food. Although the trip was only five days, the memories made were amazing.

🐭 Want to learn more?... Dive deeper into Vinh's must-dos, must-don'ts, and trip expenses here.

P.S. Have your own epic trip you’d like to share? Tell us about it here for a chance to be featured in next Wednesday’s newsletter.

🚀 Meet the Rocketman, aka Robert Maddox, a man in his sixties from Phoenix, Oregon, with a love for inventing. 

• He's best known for The Rocketman Show, his YouTube series, where he shows off his custom pulse-jet engine go-karts that are the largest of their kind in the world.  

🔥 Riding the beast... Robert's latest invention, called The Beast, can race along at up to 90 MPH. At full power, its firey red engines reach temps anywhere from 1,900°F to 2,300°F.😳

• What inspired him to start building his outrageously fast jet karts? Growing up watching Wile E. Coyote chasing the Roadrunner on Looney Tunes. 

🥜 Trivia: Which US president was a peanut farmer?

📺 True or False?... In the show, ALF, the main character’s name is short for Alfred.

🗓️ Riddle Me This: How many months have 28 days?

(keep scrolling for the answers)

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

What to do: Copy your unique link below, then send it to anyone who you think would like the DONUT. Once you hit each milestone, you'll get an email with a link to claim your prize. (Pro tip: there's no need to ration points, you're entitled to a prize at each tier.)

Start referring.👇

🥜 Trivia: Jimmy Carter

👽 T/F: False, it’s short for Alien Life Form

🗓️ Riddle: All of them