Good morning. The 2023 Pulitzer Prize winners were announced yesterday and… checks notes well this is odd – it appears somehow The DONUT didn’t win? Hmmm…

Now, were we nominated? No. But we should have been! We even emailed Paul Pulitzer himself and said: “Paul, please: do what the people want and create a category for ‘Coolest daily newsletter that provides bite-sized, nonpartisan, and easy-to-understand news.’ Sure it’s a funky category, but so is the MTV Awards’ Best Kiss which, by the way, was awarded to two people named Madison Bailey & Rudy Pankow last night for Outer Banks? Please reply, Paul."

So weird how Paul hasn't responded, right? He's probably just busy, they did announce the winners yesterday. Speaking of: we’ve got a recap of the Pulitzer Prize winners below, along with a whole lotta pre-Pulitzer-winning NEWS.

🚀⏰ Ready, Set, Go: Today’s news takes 4.84 minutes to read.

“Know yourself and you will win all battles.”

–Sun Tzu (544 B.C. - 496 B.C.)

In yesterday’s The Week Ahead section, we mistakenly said the Ben Affleck-led film Air is coming to theaters on Friday, instead of coming to Amazon Prime.

This is the 40th correction out of the 337 newsletters we’ve published since January 2022.

Now it’s time for the highly-anticipated sequel: “Snakes on a Rocketship.” Yesterday, NASA unveiled a new 16-foot-long snake robot that the space agency is sending to one of Saturn’s 83 moons to search for extraterrestrial life.

The moon in question, Enceladus, is known for its icy surface, which is the most reflective in the Solar System. It also features an average temperature of minus 330°F.

🌕🌊 Behind the mission: NASA scientists believe there’s large amounts of liquid water on Enceladus, hidden beneath the ice, that may contain evidence of alien life – so they invented a snake-shaped robot that’s designed to slither its way into vents on Enceladus' surface, then enter the supposed ocean below.

• The self-propelled Exobiology Extant Life Surveyor (or EELS for short) is equipped with a wide array of sensors, allowing the robot to capture the world in 3D and send real-time video back to Earth.
• It’s also capable of deploying a payload of scientific instruments to measure the pressure, electrical conductivity, and temperature of the subsurface ocean.

But much like a white dress in Wednesday Addams' closet, EELS will have to wait for quite some time before it can be put to use. A launch date for NASA’s Enceladus exploratory mission has yet to be announced – and even after EELS blasts off into space, it’s expected to take another 12 years to reach Saturn’s orbit.

🪐👽 Zoom out: NASA isn’t the only space agency searching for signs of extraterrestrial life in our Solar System. Last month, the European Space Agency launched its $1.7 billion JUICE probe that’ll investigate three of Jupiter’s largest moons for evidence of alien life once it arrives there in 2031.

🇦🇺 A missing woman survived on wine and lollipops for five days in the Australian bushland. Local authorities said the 48-year-old woman got lost after taking a wrong turn and getting her car stuck in mud. For the next five days, the only liquid the woman – who doesn’t drink – had with her was a bottle of wine she had bought as a gift for her mother. After nearly a week of searching, a police helicopter spotted the woman’s car last Thursday in Mitta Mitta, nearly 40 miles from the nearest town. She was taken to a nearby hospital for dehydration treatment, but otherwise appeared to be unharmed.

🇨🇳 China arrested a man for allegedly using ChatGPT to write fake news. The man’s news operation was reportedly brought to authorities’ attention late last month, when a report falsely claiming that nine people died in a local train accident was simultaneously posted by 20+ accounts on Baijiahao, a blog-style platform run by Chinese search-engine giant Baidu. The man is accused of violating a new Chinese law that came into effect in January requiring all “deepfake” technology, including content generated by AI, to be clearly labeled as such.

🇧🇷 Brazil’s government created six new Indigenous territories where mining will be banned. The new decree from President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva covers a total of roughly 2,400 square miles – including a large swath of the Amazon rainforest – to which Indigenous groups now have exclusive rights. The move marks a departure from the policies of Brazil’s previous president, Jair Bolsonaro, who promoted mining on the land in question.

🤔🐩 What is (likely) your furry friend’s favorite time of day? Snack time! And now, you can make it even better for your BFF with a wall-mountable raised feeder from Katio Dogio. By elevating your furry friend’s food, you elevate their life…

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For nearly three weeks, journalists from The Associated Press were the only non-Ukrainian reporters on the ground covering Russia’s attack on the Ukrainian city of Mariupol.

Yesterday, those journalists won the Pulitzer Prizes’ top honor, the Public Service award, for their coverage of Maripoul as they tried to escape the country. The AP also won a breaking news photography Pulitzer for its coverage in Ukraine.

🏆 Background: The Pulitzers are considered to be the most prestigious awards in journalism, and have been awarded every year by Columbia University since 1917. Honors in Books, Drama, and Music are also given.

Other national publications that won this year include the WSJ, the LA Times, and the NY Times.

• One out-of-the-ordinary winner was the NYT’s “9 Ways to Imagine Jeff Bezos’ Wealth,” a purposefully tongue-in-cheek look at how crazy-rich Bezos is (one of the illustrations, titled “Let Them Eat Cake,” represented Bezos’ wealth via slices of cake).

📚 Books win, too: The fiction prize was given to two books – Barbara Kingsolver's Demon Copperhead, a modern retelling of the Dickens masterpiece David Copperfield, and Hernan Diaz’s Trust, a 1920s New York story exploring class, power, and capitalism.

• On the nonfiction front, His Name Is George Floyd: One Man’s Life and the Struggle for Racial Justice won the nonfiction general prize, while the biography nonfiction award went to Beverly Gage’s G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century.

Yesterday, the Biden administration proposed a new rule that would require airlines to provide compensation beyond refunds to US passengers whose flight plans are altered due to causes within the airlines’ control.

✈️🤑 Let’s break it down: The first-of-its-kind rule would mandate that airlines refund all US travelers’ expenses – including meals, taxis/rideshares, hotels, and rebooking – in cases where the airline has caused a cancellation or significant delay.

This definition covers all flights scrubbed due to mechanical issues with the plane or lack of enough available crew, which collectively accounted for half of all cancellations last year (per a recent federal analysis). Though it excludes any delays from weather, heavy traffic volume, or air traffic control issues.

• The proposed rule represents a departure from current airline industry laws, where US passengers are only entitled to a refund of their unused ticket plus any additional fees – though many airlines already reimburse extra expenses for significant flight disruptions.

👀 Looking ahead… The process to implement the Biden admin’s new rule will likely take months or years. Airlines are expected to challenge the proposed changes, having argued in the past that such laws would make travel more costly for all US passengers, since carriers would be forced to hike ticket prices.

💬 Quoted… “It completely took us all by shock.”

• A Utah woman who wrote a children’s book on how to deal with grief following the “unexpected” death of her husband last year has been charged with his murder, after a police investigation discovered she gave him a fentanyl-laced drink.

🤧 Stat of the Day: More than 1 in 4 US adults have been diagnosed with seasonal allergies, per the National Center for Health Statistics. And if yours have been especially bad this spring, you’re not alone – allergists and pollen counters nationwide are reporting a historically intense season that’s even affecting those without diagnosed allergies.

🤯 Did You Know?... Peer-reviewed research has shown that killer whales, aka orcas, are able to imitate human speech – sometimes in their first attempt.

📖 Worth a Read: The woman who saved the Statue of Liberty → (Smithsonian Magazine)

• ☝️ You’re looking at a member of the newly-created butterfly genus Saurona, which can be found in the southwestern Amazon rainforest; Saurona was named after the main villain in Lord of the Rings due to dark spots on the butterflies’ wings that look like fiery eyes.

BUSINESS & MARKETS

• 💰 US markets closed mixed yesterday (S&P: +0.1%; Dow: -0.2%; Nasdaq: +0.2%).
• 📰 Google will pay The New York Times about $100 million for a three-year license to feature NYT content across some Google platforms, the WSJ reported yesterday.
• ✏️🤝 Princeton Review and Tutor.com will be acquired by Primavera Capital Group, a Chinese private equity firm, which yesterday received regulatory approval to close the deal.

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SPORTS, MEDIA & ENTERTAINMENT

• 🎥📺 Amazon announced the launch of Amazon MGM Studios Distribution yesterday; the new entity will look to sell Amazon’s roughly 4,000 film titles and 17,000 TV episodes to other streamers, linear TV networks, airlines, and more.
• 🏒 The Chicago Blackhawks won the first pick in the 2023 NHL Draft, which experts say will be Connor Bedard; the ‘Hawks had a 11.5% chance to win the draft lottery.
• ❌✍️ Hollywood studios including HBO, Warner Bros. TV, NBCUniversal, and Disney will be suspending some overall and first-look deals they have with writers, Variety reported yesterday; the move comes as a response to the ongoing WGA writer’s strike, now in its second week. (Background)

SCIENCE, SPACE & EMERGING TECH

• 🐒🧠 Chinese researchers say they’ve conducted the world's first successful monkey brain-computer interface experiment, which allowed the monkeys to control robotic arms with their thoughts.
• 🏥🤰 A team of Boston-area doctors successfully repaired a malformed blood vessel in a baby's brain while she was still in the womb; the first-of-its-kind surgery was recently published in the peer-reviewed journal Stroke.
• 🇲🇽🐬 Mexico’s government set out on a mission yesterday to locate the last few remaining vaquita marina porpoises in the world; the vaquita marina is the world’s most-endangered marine mammal, with an estimated 10 individuals left.

MISCELLANEOUS

• 🌏✈️ A mysterious Chinese spaceplane touched down on Monday after spending 276 days in Earth’s orbit as part of a top-secret government mission.
• 🏫📅 Some 850 US school districts – representing thousands of individual schools – are currently operating on a four-day weekly schedule; that’s up from 650 districts in 2019, per new data compiled by Oregon St. University researchers and shared with Axios.
• ⚖️ The New York judge in the hush-money criminal case against Donald Trump issued a protective order yesterday setting limits on what evidence the former president can publicly share. (Background | From the Left | From the Center | From the Right)

CLICKBAIT

• 🤖🌌 AI reimagines "Star Wars" as a Wes Anderson film.

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Yesterday we covered recommendations from California’s task force on reparations that involve direct payments to all Black folks who can prove their or their family’s residency between a certain period of years.

❓ Our question to you: Do you agree with the task force’s recommendations for reparations to Black California residents?

• 👍 Yes: 24%
• 👎 No: 58%
• 🤷 Unsure/other: 18%

Click here to read more of the best responses from yesterday’s poll.

+Note on sample size: We received 11,587 votes and 1,099 longform responses.

You're looking at the world's longest friendship bracelet, finished in March by McKinney ISD elementary school students, teachers, staff, parents, and community members.

• Completed over the course of four months, the bracelet is 852.19m (2,795 ft. 9 in.) long.

💭 If you can dream it... The Idea for the bracelet came from Korrie Lawson, vice president of academic enrichment with the school’s PTA.

• "I just came up with this idea of like, ‘What if we just made a giant friendship bracelet? Well what if we set a record?’” she said. “And I just Googled it and was like, ‘Look there’s a record. Let’s break it.’”
• “It just sounded so great, with all the divisiveness in society these days,” Korrie continued. “We just wanted something where everyone worked together with the thoughts (of) just kindness and friendship and community and just working off of all those themes.”

❓ Trivia: What does “dachshund” mean?

🖐️ True or False?... Your metatarsals are located in your hand.

(keep scrolling for the answers)

👆 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.👇

❓ Trivia: Badger dog

🦶 T/F: False; they’re in your foot… or at least they’re supposed to be