Good morning. Today’s newsletter will be the last normal DONUT of the year, and we just wanted to take a second to say:

Thank you.

The newest writer on staff recently said, “It feels like our readers are here in the writing room with us” – and he’s right. Y’all make us better, period. Your feedback keeps us honest, and your responses teach us more about the nuances of a situation than any article ever could.

It sounds cliché, but it’s true: we do what we do because of you.

Onwards and upwards into 2023.

–Kyle, Kailyn, Alex, Peter, and the rest of The DONUT team.

P.S. We have a special Year in Review edition that’ll hit your inbox tomorrow morning, then we’ll be off from this upcoming Monday through the New Year.

🚀⏰ Ready, Set, Go: Today’s news takes 3.83 minutes to read.

"The meaning of life is that it stops."

–Franz Kafka (1883-1924)

If you’ve been channeling Bing Crosby and dreaming of a White Christmas, you may just get your wish. As of yesterday morning, around 215 million Americans across 37 states were under winter weather warnings or advisories due to a major storm system, which is forecast to hit every US region except the Southwest.

🥶 What to expect: The coming cold front is forecast to drop 5 to 9 inches of snow across the Midwest and Plains regions over the next few days, potentially impacting travel.

More than 80% of the contiguous 48 US states will experience sub-freezing temperatures this week, with thermometers dropping… rather quickly as the cold front rolls in. Some notable examples:

• The temperature in Dillon, Montana, fell by 26°F in just three minutes when the cold front passed through early Wednesday, per the National Weather Service.
• The NWS is also projecting Denver will go from a high of 47°F yesterday to a low of -14°F this morning, which would mark the city’s coldest day since 1990.

👀 Looking ahead… The storm system is expected to turn into a “bomb cyclone” late today/early tomorrow after undergoing a process called bombogenesis, which is when a storm rapidly intensifies and drops 24 millibars (a term that measures atmospheric pressure) in 24 hours.

This coming bomb cyclone is forecast to reach the pressure equivalent of a Category 3 hurricane as it hits the Great Lakes, with the NWS describing it as a “once-in-a-generation” event.

🇵🇪 Archaeologists in Peru have discovered 168 "geoglyphs" thought to be more than two thousand years old. The new findings add to the 190 known geoglyphs located along the southern coast of Peru, which is also an UNESCO World Heritage site. Ancient humans created these markings by removing black stones from the ground to expose the underlying white sandy surface, using this process to draw 100+-foot portraits of humans, birds, killer whales, cats, snakes, and more.

🇺🇦 Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky visited Washington D.C., yesterday and gave a speech before Congress. It marked Zelensky’s first known trip outside his home country since Russia invaded in late February. During Zelensky’s visit, President Biden officially announced that the US will supply Ukraine with a Patriot missile defense battery as part of a new $1.85 billion support package. Congress is also poised to approve $45 billion in additional military aid to Ukraine as part of its $1.66 trillion omnibus spending package.

⛽ This week, a plant in Chile began producing a climate-neutral “e-fuel” aimed at replacing gasoline. E-fuels are a type of synthetic methanol produced via a complex process that includes water, hydrogen, and CO2. The plant is a joint venture that includes Porsche, Siemens, Exxon Mobil, and Chile’s state energy company. The companies said their e-fuel product – priced around $8/gallon – will enable gas-powered engines to operate with nearly zero carbon emissions. The site plans to scale up production from 34,000 gallons this year to 145 million gallons by 2026. For context, Peru consumed ~710 million gallons of conventional gasoline in 2019.

🥂🚺 Whether it’s an all-out bash or a cozy night-in, make this NYE one to remember with The WMarketplace, home of real brands ran by real female entrepreneurs.

🥳🍩 And DONUT readers get the first peek at The New Year's Glam Guide, featuring just what you need to ring in this new year in style…

• 🤩 Luxurious, yet comfortable heels that scream fabulous from Blondish.
• 🔥 Spice things up with lingerie from Cinderella's Closet.
• 👌 And enchant your lucky date with exquisite scents from Molly Ray Parfums.

🙌 Real brands. Real people. Every product/service on The WMarketplace is woman-owned, and every purchase supports them and their dreams. There are no membership fees, no minimum order amounts, and shipping is included in every price.

Click here to see The NYE Glam Gift Guide from The WMarketplace. 

It seems America needs more lessons from Dora the Explorer – because swipers keep swiping.

According to the newly-published annual Safewise Package Theft report, around 260 million delivered packages were stolen in the US over the past year, up from 210 million last year. Which (to use another TV analogy) would probably make Matthew McConaughey’s character in Wolf of Wall Street proud – those aren’t exactly rookie numbers.

In fact, an estimated $19.5 billion was lost to package theft in 2022. And per the report:

• 79% of Americans have been a victim of package theft over the last 12 months, up 15 percentage-points over last year. And of that total, more than half had multiple packages stolen.
• The top three metro areas where porch thieves struck the most were 1) San Francisco-Oakland-San Jose, CA, 2) Seattle-Tacoma, WA, and 3) Austin, TX.
• The top three metros where porch thieves struck the least were 1) Miami-Ft. Lauderdale, FL, 2) Tampa-St. Petersburg, FL, and 3) Raleigh-Durham, NC.

📦🥊 Recourse: Unlike your favorite snapback, dealing with package theft as a victim isn’t one-size-fits-all. Retailers have different policies in place across-the-board, but many just eat the loss, refunding or replacing the lifted item. Stolen packages are also covered under some homeowners or renters insurance policies.

And legally, states are beginning to crack down on package theft. Over the past three years, Texas, Michigan, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Tennessee, Georgia, Kentucky, and New Jersey have all passed laws increasing the penalties for package theft from a misdemeanor to a felony, and another five have introduced similar legislation.

NASA postponed a spacewalk outside the International Space Station early yesterday morning, and Russian space junk is to blame.

👩‍🚀 Here’s what happened: Two US astronauts were – and we don’t use this word lightly – literally about to step out of the space station’s airlock to install external solar arrays, when the mission’s ground control team radioed them to halt. Immediately.

The space station then proceeded to perform an emergency maneuver, firing its thrusters for 10+ minutes to successfully avoid an 11-foot piece of debris from a Russian spacecraft hurtling through space at ~17,500 mph.

💥Zoom out: Space debris is a growing problem for satellites, spacecraft, and NASA astronauts. Simply put, things orbiting Earth move pretty fast – between 15,700 mph and 17,500 mph – and as you can probably imagine, collisions at those speeds aren’t too pretty. A number of windows on space shuttles and the ISS have even had to be replaced due to damage caused by paint flecks (!).

• More than 27,000 pieces of space debris are currently tracked by the DOD’s global Space Surveillance Network (SSN) sensors.
• And muchhhhh more exists that can’t be traced. In fact, untraceable millimeter-sized orbital debris represents the highest mission-ending risk to most robotic spacecraft operating in low Earth orbit, according to NASA.

💬 Quoted…​​ “Unusually close."

• On Tuesday, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory revealed that multiple telescopes recently watched a black hole roughly 10x the mass of our sun "tearing apart an unlucky star that wandered too close"; the black hole event took place about 250 million light-years from Earth, making it the fifth-closest ever recorded.

⚽ Stat of the Day: The World Cup final drew nearly 26 million US viewers across Fox and Telemundo, the second-highest total for a soccer match in history behind the 2015 Women’s World Cup final (26.7 million).

🤯 Did You Know?... Purple-colored Skittles are blackcurrant flavored in Europe and Australia, instead of the usual grape that’s sold everywhere else.

📖 Worth a Read: How Ada Lovelace used embroidery to create the first computer program → (Inverse)

📈🥳 Short Squeez is giving away 25 SIGNED copies of the best finance book ever written, The Psychology of Money. As the title suggests, it's a must-read for anyone interested in finance and money.

Case in point: Over the last year, Short Squeez has recommended over 300 books in its newsletter. And the most valuable (intel-wise, of course)? The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel.🙌

🧠💵 In The Psychology of Money, Housel argues that handling money is taught as a quantitative field (math/finance). However, the way we make decisions about money is unique; at the dinner table, while traveling, in a meeting room, with perspective, experience, ego, pride and marketing. AKA there’s a lot that goes into decision making – and a lot to unpack.

Housel reinforces his findings with 19 short stories that explore how people think about money, and teaches us some timeless lessons along the way.👍

The first 25 people to sign up here get the signed book and 1-month of Short Squeez Insiders membership, for FREE!

• ☝️ Some of the best science images of 2022, according to Nature.

BUSINESS & MARKETS

• 🏠 Existing home sales dropped 7.7% year-over-year in November to reach their lowest level since May 2020, the National Association of Realtors reported yesterday; existing home sales have now declined for 10 straight months.
• 💊👶 CVS and Walgreens both capped the amount of kid’s pain meds each customer can purchase this week (two at CVS, six at Walgreens), citing short supplies.
• ⚖️✈️ Sam Bankman-Fried, FTX's founder and former-CEO, was extradited to the US last night, per the Bahamian attorney general; SBF has been charged with eight criminal counts of wire fraud, securities fraud, and campaign finance violations and also faces civil allegations brought by regulators; if convicted on all eight criminal counts SBF could spend up to 115 years in prison. (Background)

SPORTS, MEDIA & ENTERTAINMENT

• 🏈📱The NFL and Google are nearing a deal to make NFL Sunday Ticket susbscriptions exclusively available on YouTube, the WSJ reported on Tuesday.
• 🏋️‍♀️🖥️ Netflix will add over 90 Nike Training Club workout videos to its platform, the company announced yesterday; the first batch of this content will be available on Dec. 30th.
• ⚾ Carlos Correa signed a 12-year, $315 million free-agent deal with the New York Mets yesterday, hours after reported complications over his physical caused a deal with the San Francisco Giants to fall through, per the NY Post’s Jon Heyman; the Mets’ payroll for next year now sits at ~$384 million, with an additional $100+ million in luxury-tax penalties to follow.

SCIENCE, SPACE & EMERGING TECH

• 🔎 YouTube is testing a new search feature that can find spoken words within a video.
• 🚀 Two Earth-imagery satellites developed by Airbus were destroyed Tuesday night after the European Space Agency’s Vega rocket failed shortly after liftoff.
• 🦖 Paleontologists discovered the first-ever fossil evidence showing a dinosaur eating a mammal.

EVERYTHING ELSE

• 🐺 Kansas City Chiefs' fans were concerned over the weekend when a superfan known as ChiefsAholic, who dresses up in a wolf costume to attend games, didn’t show up at last Sunday’s contest. As it turns out, he had an excuse – he was arrested on Friday for allegedly robbing a bank in Oklahoma.
• 💊 The DEA this week said it has seized a total of 379 million potentially lethal doses of fentanyl in 2022 – more than enough to kill every person in the US; a lethal dose is considered to be 2mg.

CLICKBAIT

• 🎊 ‘Please see attached moodboard’: In lieu of dress codes, party throwers send collages.

Yesterday, we covered how dozens of school districts across America are switching to a four-day week over issues with teacher recruitment and retention, as the US deals with an ongoing lack of educators nationwide.

❓ Our question to you (long-form): How would you deal with America’s teacher shortage?

• “They deserve better pay. Higher starting salaries so high school students want to be teachers. And teachers want to stay teaching. Don’t tie their evaluations to testing. Less time in the classrooms should be directed to testing.”
• “Pay teachers more, offer more clear and accessible public service student loan forgiveness programs, and reevaluate degree requirements for teaching roles (i.e. does this position require a masters and if so does it pay appropriately).”
• “I think the teacher shortage comes down to three major issues in our public education system: too much workload, plus too little compensation and community support.”
• “People behave how they are incentivized to behave, and jobs are no different. If you want more people pursuing education it needs to pay more. Especially with rising costs of college tuition, a teacher can't afford to pay off a loan to go to college.”

Click here to read more of the best responses.

+Note on sample size: We received 659 longform responses.

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

• Arizona man ticketed for driving in the HOV lane with an inflatable Grinch in the passenger seat → (CNN)
• Camel pageant is among World Cup's sidelines attractions → (APNews)
• Bear steals box of bagels from North Carolina woman's porch → (UPI)
• Tainted Baby Spinach Is Causing People To Hallucinate In Australia → (IFL Science)

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: Rachel S. from New Brunswick, NJ

💬 The experience: One time I woke up in the middle of the night and for some strange reason, I couldn't remember the alphabet. I spent around ten minutes trying to remember it before just giving up and going back to sleep. I was fine when I woke up.🤷‍♀️

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

Ta Leia Thomas, aka "Ace," works at Brooklyn Center Liquor store. 

While working her usual shift earlier this month, Ace noticed a man outside digging through the trash to make makeshift shoes out of cardboard boxes. 

• Without a second thought, the employee took her favorite purple Retro Jordans off her feet and immediately gave them to the man. She worked the rest of her shift in socks.

👟 Paying it forward.. While she was bummed to lose her favorite pair of sneakers, Ace said it was an easy decision for her.

• "I was always taught to help others," she shared. "You never know what their problem is, or what they are going through."
• Days later, Ace's manager and the rest of the employees chipped-in to give her the money for a new pair. 

There are two countries completely landlocked within Italy. One is The Vatican, and the other is pictured above. Can you name it?

(keep scrolling for the answer)

👆 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 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.👇

San Marino