Good morning. Yesterday we asked the great people of DONUT Nation for your go-to question to ask when engaging in small talk. And the submissions were, to put it lightly, amazing. Here are a few of our favs:

• “If you were a dog, what breed would you be?” –Kenton F.
• “What’s a topic you could give a 30 minute presentation on without any preparation?” –Madalyne C.
• “Nobody ever asks what their favorite dinosaur is anymore. So, what's yours? Mine is a stegosaurus.” –Andrea T. (Side note to her other 110,000+ friends: Isn’t it just like Andrea to come in HOT with her answer? “Stegosaurus.” That’s why we love her.)

And now, NEWS.

🚀⏰ Ready, Set, Go: Today’s news takes 5.03 minutes to read.

"Good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment."

–Rita Mae Brown (b.1944)

On Monday, Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker (D) signed a first-of-its-kind bill that will cut off state funding for libraries attempting to ban books due to “partisan or doctrinal” reasons.

📖 Technically speaking… The Democrat-backed bill, which takes effect in 2024, wouldn’t require every book to remain in every public library. Instead, it would give each local librarian sole discretion to decide which books should be banned, and which should stay in circulation.

🚫📚 Big picture: Illinois’ new law comes as states across the US have seen a sharp uptick in book ban efforts. The American Library Association identified 1,269 such attempts last year – the highest mark since it began tracking that data in 2001, and nearly twice as many compared to 2021 (the previous all-time high).

ALA officials say a majority of the book ban efforts focused on stories about people of color and LGBTQ+ individuals, as well as depictions of race, racism, and sexuality. In addition, a handful of attempts were aimed at keeping potentially age-inappropriate religious texts away from younger children.

A few examples:

• Residents of a rural western Michigan town voted in November to defund a local library over a dispute related to LGBTQ+ content.
• In Texas and Tennessee, laws banning critical race theory in public schools have been used to remove books that discuss racism from school districts inacross both states.
• A Utah school district has banned the Bible from its elementary and middle schools for containing too much “vulgarity or violence” – and is also considering doing so for the Book of Mormon.

📊 Flash poll: In your opinion, is there ever a time when a book or novel should be banned from being made available in a public library or public school classroom?

Yes

No

Unsure/other

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🇲🇽 Mexico City Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum is resigning from her position to launch a bid to become the country’s first female president. Sheinbaum, who became Mexico City’s first female mayor in 2018, is a member of the country’s ruling Morena Party, which is heavily favored to win the June 2024 election to replace current President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (who can’t seek reelection due to term limits). The Morena Party recently agreed to announce the winner of its internal presidential selection process – which features Sheinbaum as one of two favorites – on September 6.

🇺🇦🛢️ The CIA reportedly warned Ukraine not to attack the Nord Stream pipelines last summer, three months before the pipelines were blown up. That’s according to a newly-published WSJ report, which cites multiple officials with knowledge of the exchange between the two countries. The Journal says Ukraine was initially planning to blow up the Nord Stream pipelines in concert with a nearby NATO exercise in mid-June, but ended up scrapping the mission after the CIA notified a group of allied countries about Kyiv’s secret plans. The Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines, which represent the main energy connection between Russia and Europe, were ultimately damaged in late September due to a series of underwater explosions for which no group has claimed responsibility.

🇷🇴⚖️ Romanian prosecutors upgraded their criminal charges against social media influencer Andrew Tate. The British-US citizen, his brother Tristan, and two others are now being charged with human trafficking in continued form, which represents a more serious crime than separate counts of trafficking, per local Bucharest officials. The four suspects are currently under house arrest pending a criminal investigation for suspected human trafficking, rape, and forming a criminal gang to sexually exploit women – accusations they have all denied.

If the Consumer Price Index, America’s most widely-used measure of inflation, was a balloon, it’d be filled with the normal kind of air and not helium. Because after rising for a while, it keeps floating down, down, down.

According to Labor Department figures released yesterday morning, inflation stood at 4.0% over the year-long period ending in May, down from 4.9% in April and 6% in February. It’s the index’s lowest annual figure in over two years – and about half of its peak of 9% last summer.

• The core index, a separate reading that excludes often-volatile food and energy prices, rose 5.3% in May compared with a year earlier. That’s above the 5.2% economists expected, but down from 5.5% the previous month.
• The core index remains higher than the overall index due to an earlier rise in rent prices (shelter costs collectively make up over one-third of the entire CPI) – but is also on its way down. Apartment-rent growth has cooled significantly since May, the WSJ reports, and this should be reflected in next month’s core inflation reading.

😬☝️ Zoom out: The Fed’s Open Market Committee, which has raised interest rates for 10 meetings in a row in a bid to tame inflation, ends its two-day meeting later today. The central bank is widely expected to not raise interest rates this time around – a move which officials are framing as a skip, not a pause, as they assess whether the bank’s policies are driving sufficient downward pressure on prices.

You’ll only need three things: headphones, an audio version of your textbook, and a comfy bed. Because according to a recently unveiled preprint study, humans can learn foreign words while we’re sleeping.

Though this does come with a caveat – you can’t exactly become fluent in a new language just by listening to words in your sleep. But it sure does seem to help.

💤 A sleeper, ehrm, deeper dive… The study’s researchers monitored 30 German speakers as they slept in a lab, focusing on each participant during their first cycle of deep sleep. This cycle consists of peaks and troughs of brain activity each lasting around half a second, New Scientist reports (hold onto that fact for a sec).

The sleeping participants were then broken up into two groups. Half simultaneously heard simple (and completely made-up) foreign words + their translations during the peaks of brain activity, while the other half were fed this information during the troughs. Each word corresponded to one of three categories: animals, places, or tools.

• 12 hours later – and awake this time – the participants were told the made-up words and asked to recall their respective categories. The peak group answered correctly no better than chance (33% of the time), while the trough group was right 37% of the time, a figure that could also be attributed to chance.

🧠📈 But, but, but: In another test, performed 36 hours after hearing the words in their sleep, those in the trough group were able to answer correctly 41% of the time, with a statistical analysis suggesting this wasn’t a chance finding. The peak group still scored no greater than chance.

No, it isn’t having your dog present for workouts (unfortunately).

🧊💪 It’s cold therapy, and all the cool kids are doing it – pun intended. Why? It's been shown to:

• Reduce inflammation and result in better sleep
• Stimulate the nervous system and improve circulation
• Help to better manage stress

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(And with Father’s Day coming up, have you considered the dad jokes/music references this thing opens the door for? Do you kids know what’s cooler than being cool?🙎‍♂️)

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💬 Quoted… "They tell the machine: ‘That’s the voice. This is a guitar. Lose the guitar.’”

With a little help from his AI friends, Paul McCartney recently recorded a new and final Beatles song… with John Lennon? McCartney used AI to “extricate” Lennon’s voice from an old demo that he made shortly before his death in 1980.

• The idea for the recording was inspired by the custom-AI used to isolate each Beatles’ voice for Peter Jackson’s eight-hour documentary series on the group, Get Back.

🚗🔋 Stat of the Day: Yesterday, Toyota announced plans to create an EV with a range of about 620 miles per charge (most current EVs can drive for about 300 miles on a single charge). The car, which Toyota has slated for a 2026 release, would likely require a solid-state battery rather than the liquid-based lithium-ion battery used by most of today’s EVs.

🤯 Did You Know?... Over the last 10 years, Nvidia's shares have risen ~10,614% – the best performance of any company in the S&P 500 over that period.

📖 Worth a Read: The neurons that make us feel hangry → (Knowable Magazine)

• ☝️ Thousands of dead fish appeared on the shores of multiple Texas beaches over the weekend due to a lack of dissolved oxygen in the nearby ocean waters; state wildlife officials said the event could be a result of human activities – but in many cases, it’s a natural occurrence.

BUSINESS & MARKETS

• 💰 US markets closed up across the board yesterday (S&P: +0.7%; Dow: +0.4%; Nasdaq: +0.8%).
• 🍲 Instant Brands, maker of the Instant Pot and Pyrex, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy amid slowing demand.
• 🚘 Toyota is working on a new EV that behaves as if it has a stick shift, which could be rolled out as soon as 2026; the automaker’s simulation software features revving sounds, faux gear shifts, and even car stall-outs if the stick shift controls are fumbled.

SPORTS, MEDIA & ENTERTAINMENT

in partnership with Spleash

• 🍿📅 Disney announced a new movie release schedule yesterday that includes delays for all of its upcoming Star Wars and Avatar movies, as well as most of its Marvel slate except Deadpool 3 (which moved up to May 2024).
• 🏒🏆 The Vegas Golden Knights beat the Florida Panthers 9-3 in Game 5 of the NHL Finals last night, clinching the team's first Stanley Cup trophy in its six-year history. | 💰 The NHL’s Ottawa Senators are reportedly being sold to Toronto-based billionaire Michael Andlauer for ~$1 billion; if confirmed, it would set a new record as the highest price paid for a NHL team.
• 💼 The media industry has announced at least 17,400 job cuts so far this year, representing the industry’s highest year-to-date level of cuts on record; that’s according to a new report from outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

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SCIENCE, SPACE & EMERGING TECH

in partnership with Slumber

• 🪰 Fruit flies begin to age faster after seeing the dead bodies of other fruit flies, per a peer-reviewed study published yesterday in PLOS Biology.
• 🦴 Our species, Homo sapiens, arrived in Southeast Asia as early as 86,000 years ago, per a human shin bone fragment found deep within a cave in Laos; previous research had only uncovered human remains up to 70,000 years old in Southeast Asia.
• 🚀 SpaceX successfully landed a reusable Falcon 9 rocket for the 200th time on Monday; the company initially began using the Falcon 9 in December 2015.

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MISCELLANEOUS

• 🙏📚 Cormac McCarthy, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of No Country For Old Men and The Road, died in his Santa Fe home yesterday at the age of 89.
• 🏛️ White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre violated the Hatch Act – a law intended to prevent federal employees from using their office to influence elections – when she repeatedly referred to “mega MAGA Republicans” in the run-up to the 2022 midterms, per a new government watchdog agency report. (From the Left | From the Center | From the Right)
• ⚖️ Former President Trump pleaded not guilty yesterday to 37 charges of illegally retaining classified information. (Background | From the Left | From the Center | From the Right)

CLICKBAIT

• 🚰 Here’s how many glasses of water you should really be drinking a day for “peak health.”

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Seven-year-old Sofiia loves music. The young girl has been playing violin for a few years, and when her family fled Ukraine last year to build a new life in Colorado, her violin was one of the only things she brought with her.

🎻🇺🇦 A sense of home... When they arrived to America, Sofiia received a grant for three months of free music lessons. 

"The first time we came here, and she was with a new teacher... I started just crying," her mother Eugenia said. "It felt like we're again in a safe place. I just brought my child to classes. Everything is safe."

• The grant soon ran out, however, and Sofia was also quickly outgrowing her beginner's violin. Upon hearing her story, Denver local Troy Behrends set up a fundraiser in hopes of purchasing a new violin and a year's worth of lessons for Sofiia. 

💸❤️ Happy ending: The local community quickly showed up for their new neighbors, raising enough money to buy the items – and then some🥰.

Name the movies described by the following poorly-explained plots:

1. Group of friends decides to spend less time online.
2. Intoxicated gentleman keeps losing his transportation.
3. Small-town doctor brings 3 people closer together.

(keep scrolling for the answers)

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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. The Matrix (1999)
2. Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003)
3. Human Centipede (2009)