Good morning. Today’s tip: be on the lookout for some angel numbers. The Powerball jackpot just surpassed $1 billion, its second-highest total ever.

Though if you do end up beating the 1 in 292.2 million odds of winning, the three-comma club will still have to wait. Winners can choose to take the full jackpot amount, paid out over 30 years, or take a lump sum worth ~51% of the jackpot total. And taxes don’t exactly add to the overall amount.

But still… a few hundred mil wouldn’t be too bad. At least then we’d be able to comfortably make rent🤷‍♀️.

In today’s edition:

• 🏠💰 Speaking of rent: JPMorgan wants to be included in your payments
• 💧 The water situation on Mars
• 🤔 How old were the Founding Fathers?

Ready, Set, Go: Today’s news takes 3.84 minutes to read.

“Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom.”

–Aristotle (384 B.C. – 322 B.C.)

Many of the 100+ million Americans currently renting a home or apartment could see changes to how they pay rent starting next year — and we're not talking about a new job or roommate.

According to CNBC, JPMorgan has launched a public beta test of its very-own online rent invoicing and payment platform, called Story. The platform, built to eventually become an all-in-one property management tool, also comes with features like tenant screening and market metrics to help landlords set rent levels, and will go live sometime in 2023. Landlords using the program won’t have to be JPMorgan customers.

📈👀 The opp JPMorgan sees… 78% of the US’ $500 billion in annual rent payments are made using old-school checks or money orders. The reason? While digital payments have been on the rise in many other sectors of the economy, the rental market is highly fragmented. The US has about 12 million landlords, most of whom are responsible for small portfolios with fewer than 100 units and use inefficient systems to manage their properties.

And although JPMorgan isn’t the only software solution aimed at solving this problem for landlords, it’s arguably the best-positioned.

• The bank is the largest lender for multifamily property owners in the country, reporting over $95 billion in such loans as of June 2022.
• Overall, JPMorgan has 33,000 clients in the sector – each of whom is a potential user.

📸 Big picture: Story is just one part of JPMorgan’s bigger push into tech. Under CEO JP Dimon, the bank has committed to spending $12 billion/year on technology.

🇮🇱 Israel will hold its fifth election in four years today. Unlike US elections, Israelis vote for a party, not an individual candidate. And preliminary polls show the front-running blocs, led by incumbent Prime Minister Yair Lapid and former PM Benjamin Netanyahu, locked in a dead heat, with neither projected to win an outright majority. Though even if one side narrowly wins, they'll have to form a coalition – and the resulting government would be fragile and unstable since every lawmaker in the ruling coalition would have strong leverage to make demands, per the WSJ. Israel’s previous ruling coalition collapsed after less than a year under similar circumstances.

🇨🇳 Visitors to Disney's Resort in Shanghai, China, are now trapped inside until testing negative for Covid. Chinese officials announced yesterday morning that all people are barred from entering or exiting the park without a negative test result. The move is part of China’s zero-Covid strategy, which entails completely locking down any areas with positive tests. An estimated 232 million Chinese residents are currently under lockdown – equivalent to about 1 in every 35 people in the world.

🇨🇭 The longest passenger train in history traveled through the Swiss Alps over the weekend. The 1.2-mile-long train, conducted by Rhaetian Railway, comprised 100 carriages carrying 150 total passengers. Rhaetian CEO Dr Renato Fasciati said the voyage was intended to celebrate the 175th anniversary of Swiss railways and draw attention to the train’s scenic route (☝️), which was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2008.

🏀🏈 Box scores, rivalries, traditions, athlete interviews… there's a lot to keep tabs on with college sports.

• But you can get the gist of all that and more in just a few minutes, 3x a week, with The GIST college sports newsletter. The GIST gives equal coverage to the biggest headlines in sports while providing a refreshing female perspective. And it's FREE – forever and always!

🚺🏅 The GIST is leveling the playing field of sports journalism – join the 500,000 entertained subscribers staying informed on the world of college sports today.

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Two men, wrongfully convicted and imprisoned for two decades over the murder of civil rights leader Malcolm X, will receive a combined $36 million from NYC and the state of New York, per a new agreement announced late Sunday.

📅 Background: Malcolm X gained national prominence in the 1950s as the voice of the Nation of Islam, calling for Black people to claim their civil rights “by any means necessary,” per APNews. Near the end of his life, he started to split with the Nation of Islam and advocate for racial unity.

In 1965, Malcolm X was shot dead while he gave a speech at the Audubon Ballroom in Manhattan. Two men, Muhammad A. Aziz and Khalil Islam, were soon arrested and found guilty of first-degree murder. Both men consistently maintained their innocence.

• Aziz was released from prison on parole after 19 years, while Islam was released on parole after 21 years (and later died in 2009).
• Last November, the two men were officially exonerated after an investigation by the Manhattan DA – inspired by a 2020 Netflix doc Who Killed Malcolm X? – found the NYPD and FBI had suppressed evidence pointing to the two men being innocent.

⚖️ That brings us to this summer… when Aziz and the estate of Islam both sued NYC, seeking $40 million in damages. Under the recently-agreed-upon settlement, Aziz and Islam’s estate will each receive $13 million from NYC, and $5 million from New York state.

Mars may have once been home to a large northern body of water that experienced sea-level rise consistent with an extended warm and wet climate, not the harsh, frozen landscape it is today, per a new peer-reviewed study.

💧 Background: In 2008, NASA announced that its Phoenix Mars lander had confirmed the existence of small amounts of frozen water on the red planet. In the years since, scientists have discovered evidence pointing to the past presence of large bodies of liquid water on Mars.

🪐 In this most-recent study… a team of scientists charted out more than 4,000 miles of ridges – identified through numerous satellite images – that appear to have been carved out by a large body of water ~3.5 billion years ago, in a manner similar to natural formations on Earth.

• “One of the most significant points here is that the existence of an ocean of this size means a higher potential for life," said Benjamin Cardenas, a geoscientist from Pennsylvania State University and the study’s lead author.

📝 Bottom line: We're seeing an increasing number of signs that water was once abundant on Mars. But as for life? We’ll just have to keep looking👽👀.

💬 Quoted…​​ “The King family paid for my hospital bills... And so, they just all became friends [with my parents] and they helped us out of a jam."

The quote above comes from a recent interview that actress Julia Roberts gave for a History Channel documentary series. The King family in question? None other than civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and his wife Coretta Scott King, who the actress revealed paid for her parents’ hospital bill in 1967 – the same stay during which she was born.

📝 Stat of the Day: More than a third of the ~850 million user profiles on LinkedIn contain “inaccurate or misleading information,” including false employment history, degrees earned, and certifications received, per a recent survey from LendEDU.

🤯 Did You Know?... Many of America’s founding fathers were surprisingly young. As of July 4, 1776, Marquis de Lafayette was 18, Alexander Hamilton was 21, James Madison was 25, Thomas Jefferson was 33, and George Washington was 44.

📖 Worth a Read: 1991: The Most Important Year in Pop-Music History → (The Atlantic)

• ☝️You’re looking at a giant space jack-o’-lantern – aka the Sun – in an actually real image captured by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory.

BUSINESS & MARKETS

• 🏢 Self-driving startup TuSimple’s board of directors fired CEO Xiaodi Hou amidst an FBI investigation into his ties to China.
• 🐦 Twitter updates: Elon Musk dissolved Twitter’s board, leaving himself as sole director; Musk wants to charge users $20 per month for Twitter Blue, which will become the only way to retain a blue checkmark, per The Verge; Musk assigned a team to reboot Vine by the end of this year, per Axios; Some employees from Musk’s other companies – including Tesla, the Boring Company, and Neuralink – are now authorized to work at Twitter, per CNBC.

SPORTS, MEDIA & ENTERTAINMENT

• 🏆 Taylor Swift became the first artist to occupy every spot on the Billboard Top 10 yesterday; all 10 songs came from her new album Midnights.
• 🍿 James Cameron’s upcoming “Avatar: The Way of Water” is reportedly 3 hours and 10 minutes long; the film hits theaters starting December 16.
• 📚 Penguin Random House was blocked from acquiring rival book publisher Simon & Schuster yesterday by a federal judge.

SCIENCE, SPACE & EMERGING TECH

• ⌛ A team of Swedish scientists discovered a new way of measuring time on a quantum scale.
• 🫀​​ A genetically modified pig heart transplanted into a terminally ill person earlier this year took longer to generate a heartbeat than those of typical pig or human hearts, per new peer-reviewed research; it represents a potential challenge for doctors aiming to conduct similar clinical trials. (Background)

EVERYTHING ELSE

• ⚖️ The 42-year-old man who attacked Paul Pelosi is facing federal criminal charges of assault and attempted kidnapping. (Background)
• 🎓 The Supreme Court heard arguments yesterday in a case challenging the use of affirmative action in colleges and universities; we’ll be covering more details in tomorrow’s Dose of Discussion. (From the Left | From the Center | From the Right)
• 🧾 President Trump asked the Supreme Court to block the House Ways and Means Committee from accessing his tax returns. (From the Left | From the Center | From the Right)

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Yesterday, we asked what you all think is most responsible for the recent increase in political threats/violence in America.

• 🏛️ Growing distrust in public institutions: 11%
• 📱 Echo chambers and radicalization fueled by social media algorithms: 24%
• 🗳️ The “Primary Problem” (increasingly partisan candidates & politicians): 12%
• 🧠 A rise in mental health issues: 10%
• ☝️ All of the above: 35%
• 🤷‍♀️ Unsure/other: 8%

See the full 360° view.

The owners of Bookbugs and Dragon Tales, a small local bookstore in Norwhich, England, started a fundraiser campaign to help expand their outreach program for kids. 

• They were shocked when a £5,000 donation came in. They were even more shocked when they saw the name next to it: Russell Ira Crowe.

🙏 Thanks, Russ... With the store barely staying afloat through the pandemic – and resulting rent increases – owner Leanne Fridd said the donation is "going to have a huge impact."

• "Every donation makes us really hopeful for the future and the message is really clear - we are valued," Leanne shared. "And to have a celebrity has added that bit of sparkle."

Can you guess the definitions of these Greek/Latin root words?

1. Calli
2. Fric
3. Mol
4. Mont
5. Oid

(keep scrolling for the answers)

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Start referring.👇

1. Calli: beautiful (e.g., calligraphy)
2. Fric: rub (friction, dentifrice)
3. Mol: grind (molar)
4. Mont: mountain (Montana)
5. Oid: like (android, asteroid)