Good morning and welcome to the first day of fall. ‘Tis the season of sweaters, hayrides, Halloween, apple cider, and DONUTs (😉). Plus, the holiday music countdown is now on like Donkey Kong.

In today’s edition:

• 🎥📱 YouTube takes aim at TikTok
• 🏦 The Fed raises interest rates again
• 🐜 Ants – tiny, and fascinating

… and more.

🚀⏰ Ready, Set, Go: Today’s news takes 3.76 minutes to read.

“The pain of parting is nothing to the joy of meeting again.”

Charles Dickens (1812-1870)

YouTube fired a warning short, er, shot at TikTok earlier this week, releasing an announcement outlining changes the Google-owned company is making to support individual creators. The two big takeaways:

1. Welcome to Miami the Partner Program: Shorts-focused creators that meet certain requirements can apply early next year to be part of YouTube’s Partner Program, which will pool together all of the ad revenue from Shorts, then dole out 45% of the overall pie to individual channels based on video views. This makes Shorts the first short form video platform to unveil any sort of rev-sharing.
2. More music is coming to videos: YouTube also unveiled Creator Music, which gives channels the ability to purchase music licenses directly from studios. So you can kiss goodbye to demonetization – and say hello to more dances and trends.

The driving idea behind these moves is that they’ll draw more original content to YouTube, instead of somewhere else, which in turn gives users more of a reason to open the app.

🤔 Why that’s a big deal: At the moment, original content seems to flow from TikTok → other platforms (case in point: ~1/3 of Instagram Reels originated elsewhere).

• But the Bytedance-owned app is earning a reputation as not being very creator-friendly. Critics usually point to its Creator Fund, which doles out a finite amount of money to an ever-increasing number of creators – meaning the pie actually gets smaller by the day.

🎥 The bottom line: YouTube’s new moves seem bound to leave it wearing the pants… er, shorts when it comes to original content.

Trilogies are all the rage these days – and not just in Hollywood. The Federal Reserve’s policy-making committee announced its third consecutive rate hike of 0.75% yesterday. Before June, the Fed hadn’t raised rates by that much at a single time since 1994.

⏩ Driving the move… Yet another trilogy: Inflation, inflation, inflation. In a press conference following the announcement, Fed Chair Jerome Powell said US prices have remained elevated despite the central bank’s expectation that they’d be falling by this point.

• Powell also reiterated the Fed’s commitment to bringing annual inflation down to 2% (it’s currently 8.3%).

👀 Looking ahead… Officials indicated they plan to raise interest rates by at least another 1.25 percentage points by the end of this year. There are two remaining committee meetings.

📉📈📉 The market reacts… All three major US indexes seesawed in the two-and-a-half hours following the Fed’s rate announcement, before closing down across the board. (Dow: -1.7% | S&P: -1.7% | Nasdaq: -1.8%)

+In the know: The decision to continue raising interest rates affects borrowing costs throughout the entire US economy. You can expect to keep seeing higher rates on mortgages, credit cards, student loans, saving accounts, corporate debt, and more. How much those rates increase will depend on how investors, businesses, and households respond.

🇷🇺 Russia drafted up to 300,000 of its reservists into active service. President Vladimir Putin announced the move in a 15-minute speech yesterday, saying he's ordering the mobilization to support a "special operation" in Ukraine. And a lot of folks didn't react all too well: one-way flights out of Russia sold out shortly after Putin's speech, 1,300+ Russians have been arrested over anti-war protests so far, and Google searches like "How to break an arm" and "How to get out of Russia” shot to the top of the country’s trending lists.

🇮🇷 Iranians are protesting over a woman who died in the custody of ‘morality police.’ The demonstrations, which began on Saturday, have spread to dozens of cities across the country and Internet access has been restricted following the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, who was taken to a hospital last Tuesday shortly after being arrested by Tehran’s morality police. She allegedly had her trousers too tight and violated Iran’s law that all women cover their heads in public. Amini suffered multiple blows to the head before she died, per London-based broadcaster Iran International, which reported she was arrested while sitting in her brother’s car on a visit to see family members. Police say she suffered a heart attack and fell.

🇮🇱🇵🇸 Israeli PM Yair Lapid is expected to back a two-state solution to the Palestinian conflict. Senior government officials confirmed Lapid would deliver the news as part of his address to the UN General Assembly later today, marking the first time since 2017 that the country’s PM has publicly supported such a solution. Though the officials did emphasize that agreeing to establish Palestine as a state would require certain security arrangements for Israel.

🛋️ Are you interested in remote/freelance work, but unsure where to start or if it'll pay enough?

Prowess Project is hosting a FREE 5-day Masterclass, "Turning your Passions into Profits," to help you build a freelance, part-time and/or remote career that fits YOUR life – not the other way around.

• It isn’t just about being able to have reruns of The Office on in the background while you work. A remote career means more time doing the things you love, with the people you love – and not being stuck in traffic.🥳

Take Cory for example, who’s a stay-at-home mom. Cory took the 5-day Masterclass and credited Prowess for helping her regain confidence after just 2 days… then she then landed her dream remote client within the week!

🙌 Prowess Project has used this blueprint to help thousands of caregivers create the career they never thought possible… and now it’s your turn.

Join Prowess Project for a FREE Masterclass beginning Sept 26.

SpinLaunch, a startup aiming to launch payloads into space via centrifuge, announced a $71 million Series B round earlier this week at an undisclosed valuation.

💫 How it works… Essentially, SpinLaunch uses kinetic energy instead of rocket fuel to launch its payloads. This is done using a large vacuum-sealed centrifuge with a hypersonic tether, which spins the launch vehicle at a high enough velocity to escape Earth’s atmosphere (~5,000 miles per hour, or ~6.5x the speed of sound). Think: a discus launched into outer space, but by a machine instead of a human.

• By 2026, SpinLaunch plans to launch satellites into space that are custom-built to withstand the incredible amount of force generated during launch – up to 10,000 Gs, or 10,000x Earth’s gravity.
• The company has already completed eight successful test launches, most recently sending a 10-foot projectile about 25,000 feet into the air after attaching a camera to it. And the first seven must’ve gone fairly well, considering SpinLaunch signed an agreement with NASA earlier this year to conduct further testing.

🚀 Zoom out: The global space launch industry was valued at nearly $13 billion last year, and is projected to grow to ~$32 billion by 2029, per research firm Fortune Business Insights. And those figures don’t even include the valuations of companies like Blue Origin or SpaceX – the latter of which ranks as the most valuable startup in the US (~$127 billion).

💬 Quoted…​​ "Donald Trump falsely inflated his net worth by billions of dollars."

NY AG Letitia James filed a civil lawsuit yesterday against former President Trump, three of his adult children, and his company, alleging they engaged in a decade-long scheme to inflate their assets. The suit seeks to wrest back $250 million in “ill-gotten gains,” as well as bar the four individuals from serving as an officer or director of a business registered in NY state.

• Trump called the case a witch hunt in a social-media post, while his lawyers said the lawsuit’s claims were meritless. A spokeswoman for the Trump Organization called it “the culmination of nearly three years of persistent, targeted, unethical political harassment.”

+Dig deeper: From the Left | From the Center | From the Right

🤑 Stat of the Day: About 5.2 million people around the world became millionaires last year, per the latest annual wealth report from Credit Suisse, with ~2.5 million of them located in the US.

🤯 Did You Know?... Babies have ~300 bones in their body at the time of birth; some of them fuse together as they grow older, resulting in 206 bones by adulthood.

📖 Worth a Read: ​​Chess Is Just Poker Now → (The Atlantic)

📊 Poll results: Yesterday, we asked which type of work schedule y’all would prefer if it was up to you.

• 16% said fully in-person, 59% said a hybrid schedule, and 25% said fully remote.
• Among those who preferred a hybrid schedule: two or three days per week in the office were tied for most preferable arrangement (at 38% apiece), followed by four days per week (13%), then one day per week (11%).

See the full 360° view here.

• ☝️ Rescue efforts are underway after ~230 pilot whales were found washed up on Tasmania's west coast — half of whom were presumably alive as of yesterday, per the country’s Parks and Wildlife Service.

BUSINESS & MARKETS

• 🏘️📉 Existing US home sales fell in August for the seventh straight month, per new data from the National Association of Realtors.
• 🏘️📈 At the same time... mortgage demand rose last week for the first time since early August, the Mortgage Bankers Association revealed yesterday.
• ⛽ The nationwide average price for a gallon of gas at the pump rose yesterday for the first time in 99 days, from $3.674 to $3.681, per data from AAA.

SPORTS, MEDIA & ENTERTAINMENT

• 🏀 Phoenix Suns/Mercury owner Robert Sarver said he’s begun the process to sell both pro basketball teams; last week, the NBA suspended Sarver for a year and fined him $10 million after an independent investigation confirmed he used racist language, made sex-related comments to and about women, and mistreated employees.
• 🏈📺 Amazon Prime Video’s first Thursday Night Football broadcast last week broke the all-time record for Prime sign-ups over a three-hour period, per CNBC.
• 🥊 Raul Rosas Jr., 17, became the youngest fighter ever to sign with the UFC on Tuesday night.

SCIENCE, SPACE & EMERGING TECH

• 🌀 Hurricane Fiona strengthened into a Category 4 storm yesterday, per the US National Hurricane Center; Fiona is expected to pass close to Bermuda by early Friday, and hit easternmost Canada by early Saturday.
• ⛏️ Archaeologists digging near Prague recently discovered a 7,000-year-old structure that’s among the oldest evidence of architecture in Europe.
• 🪐 NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope published the “clearest view of [Neptune’s] rings in more than 30 years” yesterday. | The US Space Force unveiled its official service song.

EVERYTHING ELSE

• 🎰 Almost eight weeks after the winning ticket in the $1.34 billion Mega Millions jackpot was sold, two people – who agreed to split the prize, if won – came forward to claim their reward, the Illinois Lottery said yesterday; it marks the third-biggest jackpot in US history.
• ❗ The FDA recently issued an advisory cautioning against cooking chicken with NyQuil, as seen in viral TikTok videos.
• ⚖️ More than 2 million arrests have been made at the US-Mexico border in under a year for the first time ever, per new federal data. (Background | From the Left | From the Center | From the Right)
• 🧩 Made For Math uses a multisensory approach to fill gaps left by traditional teaching in students with learning challenges. Get your child on track with their intervention program: Take this quiz to see if Multisensory Math is the right fit.*

*Sponsored post

Thanks to the new startup, Wren, you can now calculate your carbon footprint, learn to reduce it, and then offset it:

• Wren lets you be accountable for your part in the climate crisis with a monthly subscription where the fees support awesome climate projects.

Then every month, you receive updates so you can see your impact and watch it grow.🌱

Wren is 100% transparent, sharing every receipt and transaction. They also have rigorous partner vetting processes to ensure all money spent is meaningful, measurable, and long-lasting.👍

♻️ It’s Wren’s hope that the collective action of millions drives the systematic change needed to end the climate crisis – and it can all start with a simple decision today.

Calculate your carbon footprint.

We bring you the most unusual, off-the-wall and occasionally laugh-out-loud headlines from this week…

• Fecal philanthropist donates poop to save lives → (CBC)
• Tom Hardy Surprise Enters Martial Arts Competition and Wins Gold → (Variety)
• Food delivery robot rolls through LA crime scene in viral video as confused cops look on → (USA Today)
• Aggressive turkeys take over Woburn neighborhood → (CBS Boston)
• Protester who glued himself to Nanaimo bank sentenced with condition he cannot possess adhesives → (Chek News)

CROWDSOURCED

Have you ever encountered a glitch in the matrix, quirky animal behavior, or even just a hilarious first grader? Tell us about it here for a chance to be featured in next Thursday’s newsletter.

👨 Who: Joseph M. from Norfolk, VA

💬 The experience: A few years ago I had a dream of a man on a beach flying a kite with two dogs running around him. A month later on holidays in France I was on a beach and looked up to see the same man was flying the same kite with the same dogs. Was one of the weirdest experiences ever.

P.S. Don’t forget to share your odd or hilarious experience with us here.

It was the first day back at school in Uvalde, TX, and many students and teachers were understandably nervous. 

That's why 10 golden retrievers were stationed at school drop-off; the pups are all registered comfort animals, and were there to bring a little joy to everyone who walked through the doors. 

🐶 Doggos on duty... The dogs will be wandering school halls for the first three weeks of classes, and are there to help however they can. 

• “We get invited, we show up, and we let the dogs do their work,” said Bonnie Fear, crisis response coordinator for the Lutheran Church Charities K-9 Comfort Dog Ministry.
• "There was a lot of hesitancy and anxiety about getting out of the car and going into the school," she continued. "So we placed the dogs outside, and I do believe that that did help some of the kids see that dog and go, ‘OK, well, I’m going to go pet the dog.'"

Here are four 'facts' about ants. Can you pick out which one is false?

1. Ants can carry up to 100x their own weight.
2. Ants have three stomachs.
3. There are ~20 quadrillion ants living in the world today.
4. Ants first came about during the age of dinosaurs. 

(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.👇

#2 is false. Ants actually have two stomachs – one for themselves, and one to share food with other ants (the queen included). This allows for colonies to have specialized forager ants, who gather food while the rest of the group looks after the queen or nest.