Good morning. With only 17 days left this year, we’re officially in the ‘Best Of’ season – top shows, best albums, most epic sports plays, etc.

But what about those tiny moments that somehow occupied the lion’s share of our brainspace this year? It’s funny you mention it, because…

Here’s our Top 5 Super Small Yet Mega Big Moments list:

1. Dogecoin
2. THE SLAP!
3. Pete Davidson dating… everyone?
4. West End Caleb
5. That time Heidi Klum dressed up like a giant worm for Halloween and her husband dressed as a fisherman with a… bloody eye?

No real way to follow that up so let’s just dive in!

🚀⏰ Ready, Set, Go: Today’s news takes 4.18 minutes to read.

“The greatest work that kindness does to others is that it makes them kind themselves.”

–Amelia Earhart (1897-1939)

Yesterday, we wrote that a member of Canada's Supreme Court allowed a lawsuit brought by parents against Fortnite-maker Epic Games to proceed, when it was, in fact, a Superior Court judge in Quebec that did so. Apologies for the error and any confusion, and a big thank you to everyone who wrote in to let us know about the mistake.

It’s been two weeks since ChatGPT was made public via OpenAI’s website. Since then, the AI chatbot has already garnered more than one million users, who have prompted the tech to do everything from pen essays, to write and debug code, to create a biblical verse in the style of the King James Bible explaining how to remove a peanut butter sandwich from the VCR (read that one here).

And the list could keep going for, well, almost infinity. Its use cases as a chatbot are basically limitless – if you can dream up a prompt, ChatGPT can carry it out.

🤔 How does it work?... While the bot’s interface is simple – just type in a request, question, etc. and you’ll promptly get a response – the underlying tech is anything but. ChatGPT is built on top of OpenAI’s GPT-3, which is one of the largest and most powerful language processing AI models created to date, with 175 billion parameters.

Language models operate on probability, constantly trying to guess the next word in a sentence. And GPT-3 is what’s referred to as a “neural network,” a mathematical system loosely modeled on the network of neurons in the brain. This type of tech, also used by Google Translate, learns skills by analyzing data.

• GPT-3, for instance, was trained using 570 GB worth of text – or 300 billion words – obtained from books, Wikipedia, articles, forums, and other pieces of writing on the internet.

😬 Though as you may imagine, being trained on a mound of data found on the internet – the glorious cesspool that it is – ChatGPT has some… issues. It can pick up biases and stereotypes, and its responses aren’t always accurate. And even though OpenAI has tossed up some guardrails to stop the bot from turning to the dark side, it can still be tricked into becoming DarthGPT.

🤖🗣 Zoom out: ChatGPT isn’t the only AI language generator out there – though most aren’t available to the public. Similar tech has been created by Microsoft, Amazon, Stanford, and Google (remember the sentient AI debate?).

🇪🇺 Four people, including a high-ranking EU official, were arrested by Belgian police for allegedly participating in a bribery scheme. Prosecutors didn’t reveal the names of those arrested, but sources say they include Greek politician Eva Kaili, one of the EU Parliament’s 14 vice-presidents. Officials seized $630,000+ in cash as part of the arrests, and accused the four individuals of having received bribes from “a Gulf state” to influence decisions in Parliament. According to multiple sources, that Gulf state is Qatar – though the country has officially denied the claims.

🇮🇩 Indonesia’s ban on sex and cohabitation outside of marriage won’t be applied to foreigners, per officials. Last week, the country’s parliament approved new laws that criminalized premarital sex or cohabitation for all residents and foreigners – but Indonesia’s minister of human rights clarified yesterday that non-citizens won’t be prosecuted under those articles. The country received 16+ million tourists in 2019, with the industry accounting for nearly 5% of its overall GDP.

🇮🇷 Iran carried out its second execution of an anti-government protester yesterday, with more on the horizon. 23-year-old Majidreza Rahnavard was arrested on November 19, and sentenced to death for allegedly killing two Iranian security officials and wounding four others during a protest. The director of nonprofit org Iran Human Rights said that a public execution so soon after an arrest indicates the other 23 protesters who’ve already been sentenced to death could also be executed soon. Iran is the world’s second-most prolific user of the death penalty after China (and excluding North Korea).

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The US Department of Energy will announce later today that its scientists have produced a nuclear fusion reaction that creates net energy for the first time in history, per the Financial Times, which cited three internal sources.

⚛️⚛️ Why it's a big deal: The achievement brings scientists one step closer to the holy grail of energy production: nuclear fusion, aka the smashing of two atoms together to produce one, which promises immense amounts of clean energy. On a pound-for-pound basis, fusion generates nearly 4 million times more energy than coal, oil, or gas. It’s also how the sun generates 100% of its power.

Scientists have been experimenting with fusion since the 1950s. But until now, they hadn’t been able to create a reactor that produces more energy than it takes to start up.

• To achieve this breakthrough, researchers at the federal Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory bombarded a tiny pellet of hydrogen plasma with the world’s biggest laser, reportedly producing 2.5 megajoules of energy via fusion vs. 2.1 megajoules from the laser.
• For context, the amount of net energy generated (0.4 megajoules) is enough to power an LED lamp for ~40 hours.

⚡️👀 Looking ahead… While this breakthrough can be looked at as a historic milestone, like the highway exit sign pointing to Abe Lincoln’s birthplace, there’s still a long way to go before large-scale fusion power stations can become a reality. And even if scientists figure out a way to replicate this fusion experiment on a massive scale, engineers still have yet to develop machinery capable of affordably turning said reaction into electricity that can be used to power any grid.

Major League Pickleball, the pro circuit that counts Anheuser-Busch, Tom Brady, LeBron James, and Kevin Durant as team owners, announced a new format and schedule yesterday.

Starting in 2023, the MLP plans to double its total number of teams to 24, split into two separate leagues (12 teams in each). Each year will consist of six total tournaments with $5 million in combined prize money, spread across two separate “seasons.” Before each season, teams will draft brand-new rosters made up of four players apiece – two men and two women.

• Next year’s events are essentially one giant audition for 2024, when each team will be assigned either to a higher or lower league based on 2023 results.
• This system, known as promotion and relegation, is the same one used by the English Premier League, Spain’s La Liga, and other top European soccer leagues.

📈 Zoom out: Pickleball is the fastest-growing sport in America, per a report from the Sports & Fitness Industry Association. The number of players nationwide rose nearly 40% from 2019 to 2021 (3.4 million → 4.8 million), while the number of courts has more than doubled over the past five years to reach 35,000.

💬 Quoted…​​ “SBF’s arrest followed receipt of formal notification from the United States that it has filed criminal charges against SBF and is likely to request his extradition.”

• FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried was arrested in the Bahamas yesterday after a NY federal attorney shared a sealed indictment with Bahamian officials; the SEC said the criminal charges will be made public later this morning. (Background)

📈 Stat of the Day: Since 2018, the total volume of data across the world has nearly doubled in size every two years; it currently sits at ~94 trillion gigabytes and is projected to reach 175 trillion by 2025.

🤯 Did You Know?... Public relations professionals outnumber reporters 6 to 1 in the US.

📺 Worth a Watch: The science of falling in love → (Shannon Odell’s Ted-Ed talk)

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• ☝️ You’re looking at one of the finalists for the annual Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards.

BUSINESS & MARKETS

• 📈 All three major indexes closed up across the board (Dow: +1.5% | S&P: +1.4% | Nasdaq: +1.2%).
• 💰 Amgen agreed to buy rare disease drug company Horizon for $27.8 billion yesterday; it’s the largest healthcare acquisition of 2022. | Weber, the grillmaker, is going private through a $3.7 billion deal with BDT Capital Partners.
• 📊 ☁ Microsoft bought a 4% stake in the London Stock Exchange yesterday; the deal will see the LSE spend $2.8 billion on Microsoft’s cloud service, Azure, over the next ten years.

SPORTS, MEDIA & ENTERTAINMENT

• 🏆📺 The Golden Globes announced its 2023 nominations yesterday; dark comedy The Banshees of Inisherin led the pack with eight nods while Abbott Elementary earned five, the most for any TV show.
• 🏀 Purdue rose to #1 in the latest men’s college basketball AP Top 25 poll. | University of Texas men’s basketball head coach Chris Beard was arrested yesterday on a felony domestic violence charge after allegedly strangling his fiance; Beard has been suspended indefinitely without pay.
• 🎤 Taylor Swift and Ticketmaster announced additional Eras tour tickets for “Verified Fans” who were shut out of the initial November sale. (Background)

SCIENCE, SPACE & EMERGING TECH

• 🎗️ A new experimental cancer therapy effectively treated bone marrow cancer in more than 70% of patients in its Phase 2 clinical trial. | A teenage girl with seemingly incurable cancer is now in complete remission after doctors performed a new type of gene therapy called base editing.
• 🌌 NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has identified the most-distant galaxy observed to date; the system is 13.4 billion light-years away, meaning the light detected is thought to have originated ~325 million years after the Big Bang.

EVERYTHING ELSE

• ❄️ More than 8,000 flights have been delayed over the past two days due to a large winter storm currently working its way across the Western US and into the Midwest.
• 🏛️ The Supreme Court agreed yesterday to hear a second case challenging the Biden administration’s student-loan debt forgiveness plan. (From the Left | From the Center | From the Right) | Separately, SCOTUS declined to block a California law banning flavored tobacco, clearing the way for the ban to take effect next week.

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Yesterday, we covered the congressionally-approved Respect For Marriage Act, which enshrines the right to same-sex marriage into US federal law.

❓ Our question to you: Do you support the Respect For Marriage Act?

• 👍 Yes: 70%
• 👎 No: 22%
• 🤷‍♀️ Other/unsure: 8%

See the full 360° view.

+Note on sample size: We received 8,437 votes, and 570 long-form responses.

Japan's football team, nicknamed the Samurai Blue, played an impressive World Cup, upsetting both Germany and Spain to reach the knockout round for a second straight tournament.

More than their victories on the field, however, the team received praise for their courtesy and thoughtfulness behind the scenes. 

• “After a historic victory against Germany at the #FIFAWorldCup on Match Day 4 … the @jfa_samuraiblue left their changing room at Khalifa International Stadium … Spotless,” said the soccer world governing body FIFA in a tweet. 
• The team even left a thank you note, written in Japanese and Arabic. 

🏟 Taking it a step further... Following the Samurai Blue's example, Japanese spectators began picking up trash left behind in the Qatar stadium. 

❓ Trivia: Which word is misspelled on the Lincoln Memorial?

🦗 True or False?... You can estimate the temperature outside by counting cricket chirps.

🤔 Riddle Me This: You see a boat filled with people. It has not sunk, but when you look again you don’t see one single person on the boat. Why?

(keep scrolling for the answers)

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❓ Trivia: Future (Euture)

🦗 T/F: True

🤔 Riddle: They were all married.