Good morning. Here’s a wild one – humans are the only animals to cry as a way of expressing emotion. All other animals apparently just cry to lubricate their eyes.

In fact, many human men still claim they’re simply “lubricating their eyes” after bawling at the end of Frozen.

And now, NEWS.

🚀⏰ Ready, Set, Go: Today’s news takes 4.96 minutes to read.

“Let us rather run the risk of wearing out than rusting out.”

–Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919)

Yesterday, the Human Rights Campaign, the country’s largest gay rights organization, declared a state of emergency for all LGBTQ+ people living in the US. It marks the first time the org has made such a warning in its 43-year history.

⏩ Driving the move... In a press release, the HRC said its declaration came in response to an "unprecedented and dangerous spike in anti-LGBTQ+ legislative assaults sweeping state houses this year."

The organization cited 525 bills it classifies as anti-LGBTQ+ that have been introduced across 41 different state legislatures so far in 2023.

• These include 220 pieces of legislation explicitly targeting transgender people, as well as dozens of bills that would ban LGBTQ+ content in schools, outlaw drag performances, and exclude LGBTQ+ folks from non-discrimination laws, among other things.
• A total of 76 such bills have been signed into law this year, per HRC data. That figure is more than double the amount enacted in all of 2022, which was previously the highest year on record.

Alongside its declaration, the HRC also released a guidebook for LGBTQ+ Americans that includes health and safety resources, a summary of state-by-state laws, and “know your rights” information for those traveling to or living in states with restrictive laws.

⚖️ Judicial review: Over the past week, a pair of federal court rulings have halted the enactment of two such anti-LGBTQ+ laws cited by the HRC.

• A federal judge on Saturday ruled that Tennessee’s recently-enacted ban on drag shows in public or where children are present is unconstitutional.
• And yesterday, a separate federal judge temporarily blocked the portion of a new Florida law that bans transgender minors from receiving puberty blockers or other non-surgical forms of gender-affirming care.

📊 Flash poll: In general, do you agree with the Human Rights Campaign’s declaration that the recent spike in anti-LGBTQ+ legislation represents a state of emergency for all LGBTQ+ Americans?

Yes

No

Unsure/other

🇺🇦 A major dam partially collapsed in Russia-occupied Ukraine. Thousands of residents in eastern Ukraine were evacuated yesterday, with President Volodymyr Zelensky saying a total of 80 towns and villages may be flooded following the breach of the Kakhovka dam (which upheld the country’s largest water reservoir by volume). Ukrainian officials accused Russia of sabotaging the dam, while the Kremlin said the collapse occurred due to Ukrainian shelling – though neither side’s claims could be independently verified as of last night. Targeting dams is considered a war crime under the Geneva Conventions because of the danger to civilians.

🇺🇳 Five new countries were elected to the UN Security Council yesterday. The Security Council is the only UN body that can make legally binding decisions like imposing sanctions and authorizing use of force. It has five permanent, veto-wielding members – the US, UK, China, Russia, and France – along with ten additional members that are voted in every two years. Algeria, Guyana, Sierra Leone, and South Korea all ran unopposed for four of the open council spots, while Slovenia handily defeated the Russian-allied Belarus in the only contested election.

🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 English think tank Autonomy unveiled the country’s first universal basic income pilot program. The plan will give an unconditional ~$2,000 per month to 500 English residents who have spent time living in the care system (aka a children’s home or foster family), then evaluating their physical and mental health over the two years of UBI income and comparing it to a control group who didn’t receive any money. It mirrors similar pilot programs currently being conducted in a handful of other countries, including the US, Wales, and Kenya.

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The PGA Tour has apparently been getting served self-development TikToks with the overall message to “LIV more.” Because yesterday, it announced a merger with the Saudi-backed LIV Golf.

The agreement, which was reportedly negotiated in secret over lunch meetings and a round of golf, combines the formerly-bitter-rivals into a larger golf enterprise. And it comes as a surprise to many fans, players, and personnel.

⛳️ Quick background: When LIV Golf, backed by billions from the Saudi Arabia Public Investment Fund, burst onto the scene in 2021 as a direct competitor to the PGA Tour, it caused more chaos than when Happy Gilmore beat Shooter McGavin on the 18th hole. 

LIV enticed many of the Tour’s golfers with its deep pockets and new format, though many also criticized the league for attempting to "sportswash" the country's image in light of its human rights record – including Tour commissioner Jay Monahan, who just one year ago accused LIV of (among other things) being “a foreign monarchy that is spending billions of dollars in an attempt to buy the game of golf.” 

💰🤑 Which brings us to the deal points: Any ongoing litigation between the two organizations is hereby halted. The PGA Tour’s and LIV Golf’s commercial businesses rights will be combined into a new, yet-to-be-named for-profit company. And Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund is reportedly prepared to invest billions of dollars into this new entity as its exclusive investor.

Other details – like what happens to the players who defected to LIV for nine-figure bonuses – are sparse, but expected to be hashed out over the coming weeks.

There’s only so many times you can scream “turn it up!” at the TV before you become an always-on subtitle user.

And while it may be an old-person trope, it's actually the younger generations that are using subtitles the most. Per data from Roku and UK-based captioning company Stagetext, about two-thirds of millennials, as well as 80% of viewers ages 18-24, regularly use subtitles. That’s compared to only 23% of folks ages 56-75.

The Atlantic’s recent deep dive into the subtitle phenomenon provides a few reasons for the disparity:

• TikTok: Most TikTok videos have captions (the app auto-generates them). And the average user of the app spends about two hours on it daily. Meaning, TikTok’s users, 70% of whom are under age 34, are learning that text-with-video is the norm.
• Foreign content: Led by the rise of shows like Squid Game, demand for foreign content (aka content with subtitles) increased to 8% in 2022, up from 6% in 2020.
• The specs: Streaming platforms use a scale called the LKFS (Loudness, K-weighted, relative to full scale) to determine loudness. In HBO’s case – notorious for having poorly mixed audio – the scale used to be anchored to dialogue. That all changed when AT&T bought the streamer in 2018 and overlaid its own, less sophisticated standard.

🍿🎥 The other side: Filmmakers aren’t exactly psyched about the whole “subtitles are the default” situation. Director Hannah Fiddell, for example, said that subtitles can flatten – or even contradict – an actor’s nuanced performance of the dialogue.

💬 Quoted… “This photo was taken 11 years ago.”

What if our phone’s apps told us what we actually wanted to know? Well, that’s the premise behind designer Soren Iverson’s viral (and fake) “satirical UI” series, which imagines how our favorite apps might look with some… interesting improvements.

• These include suggested features like Tinder notifying you how long ago a photo was taken, an Uber driver sending you a “bite request” (exactly what it sounds like), LinkedIn providing a “Nepotism Warning,” and iMessage telling you how many times someone has viewed your message.

👪 Stat of the Day: The median sale price of a home in Southern California is around $785,000. Which makes the Los Angeles 450-square foot, one bedroom house that sits atop a bridge currently going for $250,000 an absolute steal.

• Usually, homeowners would own the land underneath their house. Not so in this case, since the bridge and stream under the house are both public land. But that’s not proving to be much of a deterrent – the real estate agent managing the property said he’s hosting open houses that see between 40 and 50 people per day.

🤯 Did You Know?... There’s nothing better (or more available) for heating a space than the human body itself. If it's -49°F outside, body-heat can keep an igloo nice and toasty at an internal temperature between 19-61°F.

📖 Worth a Read: Lost Illusions: The Untold Story of the Hit Show’s Poisonous Culture → (Vanity Fair)

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• ☝️ You’re looking at the winners of the sixth annual Milky Way Photographer of the Year competition, hosted by travel blog Capture the Atlas.

BUSINESS & MARKETS

• 💰 US markets closed up across the board yesterday (S&P: +0.2%; Dow: +0.03%; Nasdaq: +0.4%); the S&P 500 closed at Its highest level of 2023.
• 🥇 Walmart topped the Fortune 500 list for the 11th year in a row after taking in $661 billion worth of revenue in 2022; Amazon placed second for the fourth year running, with Exxon Mobil, Apple, and UnitedHealth Group rounding out the top five.
• 🪙 The SEC sued Coinbase yesterday, accusing America’s largest crypto exchange of violating federal laws that require it to register as an exchange and be overseen by the agency; the move comes one day after the SEC sued Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange, alleging that it illegally mishandled customer funds and failed to prevent US users from signing up. (Background)

SPORTS, MEDIA & ENTERTAINMENT

in partnership with Katio Dogio

• 👑⚖️ Prince Harry spent five hours on the witness stand giving testimony yesterday, as part of a lawsuit alleging that several British tabloids hacked the cell phone voicemails of dozens of high-profile UK figures; Harry is scheduled to resume his testimony today.
• ⚾ Rangers pitcher Jacob deGrom will require Tommy John surgery, cutting short his first season with Texas after signing a 5-year, $185 million deal this past offseason.
• 🍿 The Little Mermaid grossed $3.6 million in its first 10 days of release in China, by far the worst showing among Disney’s live-action adaptations; Chinese social media sites and newspapers have widely criticized Disney’s casting of Ariel, per The Hollywood Reporter.

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SCIENCE, SPACE & EMERGING TECH

in partnership with Slumber

• 🌌🦠 NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has detected the most distant complex organic molecules – aka those containing carbon – ever observed, located in a galaxy more than 12 billion light-years away, per a study published Monday in Nature.
• 🫁 Taking an experimental AstraZeneca drug called Tagrisso after lung cancer surgery reduced patients’ overall risk of death by 51%, per a new late-stage study led by researchers at Yale University.
• 🦍 The origins of masturbation can be traced back to a number of primate species who lived at least 40 million years ago, per a peer-reviewed study published yesterday in the UK journal Proceedings of The Royal Society B.

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MISCELLANEOUS

• 🌁🔥 Air quality ratings across all five of NYC’s boroughs rose above the level considered unhealthy for humans yesterday; health officials attributed the rise to smoke from ongoing wildfires in Canada; other states across the Midwest and East Coast are also warning residents to take precautions against incoming smoke.
• 💊 Pharma giant Merck filed a lawsuit against the Biden administration yesterday; it alleges Medicare’s new powers to reduce prescription drug prices under the Inflation Reduction Act are “tantamount to extortion.”
• 🗳️ Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie filed paperwork yesterday declaring his candidacy for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. (From the Left | From the Center | From the Right)

CLICKBAIT

• 🤖🎮 They plugged GPT-4 into Minecraft — and unearthed new potential for AI.

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Firefighters were called for an unusual rescue last month in Green, Ohio: a squirrel that had gotten stuck in a tree. 

🐿 Wait, what?... But this was no ordinary squirrel. Cricket is domesticated, and while climbing a tree on a walk, his leash got wrapped around a branch. The poor little guy was stuck 60 feet in the air and unable to detangle himself until firefighters arrived on the scene.

• "While this is not part of our normal response," the Green Fire Department later posted, "it was a unique situation. Great job, C-Shift!"

Doughnut-themed history

in partnership with Chrono

Place these seven doughnut-themed events in order of when they happened.

1. The Cronut was invented by pastry chef Dominique Ansel in NYC
2. The first doughnut machine was patented by Adolph Levitt, a Russian-born US immigrant
3. Dunkin’ Donuts was founded (now Dunkin')
4. Unsatisfied with the doughy consistency of the center of the fried cakes, 16-year-old Hanson Gregory invented the doughnut hole
5. The Dose Of News Useful Today was founded
6. Women in the Salvation Army created the "Doughnut Dollies", who would fry doughnuts in helmets and serve them to WWI soldiers
7. Krispy Kreme was founded

(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.👇

1. 1847 – Hanson Gregory invented the ring shaped doughnut
2. 1917 – Women in the Salvation Army created the "Doughnut Dollies"
3. 1920 – The first doughnut machine was patented by Adolph Levitt
4. 1937 – Krispy Kreme was founded
5. 1950 – Dunkin’ Donuts was founded
6. 2013 – The Cronut was invented by Dominique Ansel
7. 2019 – The DONUT was founded

+From our partners: For more puzzles like this, visit Chrono.quest.