Good morning. Today is Thursday, or as we’ve just learned it’s sometimes called, “Little Friday.”

Which, if you’re Thursday, has to hurt. You work so hard to make a name for yourself between the infamous “hump day” and the undisputed champ of the weekdays, Friday, and bam, all of a sudden they’re calling you “‘Little Friday.”

What’s next, TGILF?

No, what’s next is NEWS.

🚀⏰ Ready, Set, Go: Today’s news takes 5.06 minutes to read.

"Thinking will not overcome fear but action will."

–W. Clement Stone (1902-2002)

If you’re one of the more than 100 million people who listen to podcasts on Spotify, listen up: change is probably coming, if it hasn’t hit already. Because after going on a three-comma spending spree over the past few years, the audio platform has been working to shift its podcast strategy.

🎧📈 Background: Spotify’s podcast push began in earnest in 2016, Semafor reports. Over the next few years, the company spent north of $1 billion on podcasting, acquiring exclusive shows (ex: $200 million for The Joe Rogan Experience) and podcasting-related platforms like Anchor.

Some of these moves paid off, and some are yet to be seen. But regardless, the company’s strategy has started to shift.

• Last fall, Spotify laid off dozens of Gimlet and Parcast workers and pulled 11 original shows from production.
• It then began 2023 by axing a number of ad and business jobs under Podsights and Chartable, two podcast-focused ad-tech firms it had acquired the year before.
• High-profile execs, like content chief Dawn Ostroff (who steered Spotify’s podcast operations), have departed. So have many prominent podcast creators/hosts, including Barack and Michelle Obama, Brené Brown, and Esther Perel, who all exited deals with the platform.

And much like a hemophiliac with a paper cut, the bleeding doesn’t stop there. Just last week, the company sent a memo to employees announcing an upcoming layoff of 200 people, or 2% of its workforce, as part of a “strategic realignment” of its podcast division.

👀 Looking ahead… Spotify’s focus is moving away from paying for exclusive content to drive subscriptions (à la HBO), and towards fostering user-generated content and then monetizing it with ads (similar to YouTube). Reportedly central to this strategy is Megaphone, the ad-tech platform Spotify acquired for $235 million in 2020.

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🤖 The European Parliament approved a draft of the first Western laws governing AI. Yesterday, EU lawmakers voted in favor of new legislation that would require companies to disclose when content is AI-generated, impose a near-total ban on using AI in facial recognition software, and mandate that companies publish the copyrighted data used to train their AI models, among other things. The new EU law is on track to be enacted by the end of this year, pending approval from all 27 member-countries. Separately, a four-week-old French startup called Mistral AI raised ~$113 million in Europe’s biggest seed investment round ever, per a new Financial Times report.

🌐 Google’s ad business allegedly violates EU antitrust laws, per a new lawsuit from regulators. The European Commission is claiming Google has abused its ownership of the world’s largest ad marketplace to give its own products like YouTube or Search an unfair advantage when buying or selling ads, in addition to suppressing competition from rival firms. If found guilty, Google could face a fine of up to 10% of its annual worldwide revenue – $280 billion in 2022 – and could also be forced to sell its ad marketplace or other ad-related businesses.

💰📉 And in non-EU-related news: Global economic inequality is currently at its lowest point in 150 years. That’s according to a new report from Branko Milanovic, one of the world's leading inequality researchers. The report focuses on the global Gini coefficient, a number that runs on a scale from 0 (perfect equality) to 100 (one person has all of the world's income). And by that measure, Milanovic found global inequality fell from a historic peak of 69 in 2000 to 60 in 2018, and is very likely even lower today.

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A salty ocean hidden beneath the surface of Enceladus, an Arizona-sized moon orbiting Saturn, is the only body of water beyond Earth known to contain all six elements needed to create life, according to a peer-reviewed study published yesterday in Nature. And we’ll soon find out if any extraterrestrial life is present – right here in our very solar system.

🌕🌊 Let’s dive right in (heh): There are six elements that, along with water and energy, make up the building blocks of life: carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, sulfur, and phosphorus.

But phosphorus is typically considered a “bottleneck” in the process of creating life, since it’s relatively rare in outer space. Not so on Enceladus, though, where phosphorus appears to be abundant.

• The moon, which measures 300 miles in diameter, contains a global subsurface ocean 30 miles below its icy surface. Over a 13-year period ending in 2017, NASA’s Cassini spacecraft completed a half-dozen flybys of Enceladus to collect material ejected from its subsurface ocean by cryovolcanoes at the moon’s south pole.
• Previous analysis of that ejected material had found every building-block for life present in the ocean except for phosphorus. But now, for the first time, researchers have broken that bottle’s neck and documented its presence.

🐍👀 Looking ahead… Once it arrives on Enceladus sometime next decade, a NASA-designed 16-foot-long snake robot will slither its way down into the subsurface ocean to play Marco Polo, aka explore for signs of extraterrestrial life.

Ezra Miller attended the premiere of DC’s new movie The Flash on Monday night, marking their first public appearance in almost two years (Miller is nonbinary and uses they/them pronouns).

🤔 What’s going on?... Miller, who played The Flash in 2017’s Justice League, has spent the last few years mired in controversy.

• April 2020: A video surfaced that seemingly showed Miller choking a woman in Iceland (no charges were filed in the case).
• March/April 2022: Miller was arrested in Hawaii for charges of disorderly conduct and harassment in Hawaii. They pled no contest to misdemeanor disorderly conduct and paid a $500 fine, with the harassment charge ultimately dismissed.
• August 2022: Miller was charged with felony burglary in Vermont. They are due for arraignment in September of this year.

But despite Miller’s personal troubles, the team at DC Studios decided to move forward with The Flash. Insiders say the decision was largely impacted by the fact that the film’s production was mostly finished by the time the 2022 allegations occurred. And moving forward, according to James Gunn, co-head of the studio, Miller’s future as The Flash will depend largely on the actor’s mental health recovery.

🍿 Zoom out: The film, which opens across the US this Friday, is currently sitting at a 69% critic rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

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💬 Quoted… "...the Committee decided to maintain the target range for the federal funds rate at 5 to 5-1/4 percent.”

• The Federal Reserve announced yesterday that it would not be raising interest rates for the first time in 15 months, breaking its streak of ten rate hikes in a row. Though according to experts, the pause may be short-lived – the central bank’s policymakers are expected to raise rates at least one more time this year.

🎶 Stat of the Day: This year’s Billboard 200 and Hot 100 charts haven’t included one single hip-hop album or song, marking the longest such stretch since 1993.

🤯 Did You Know?... Prior to this week, the record for the fastest solve of a 3x3 Rubik’s Cube was held by Max Park – 3.45 seconds. But on Sunday, Park beat his own record by solving a 3x3 Cube in 3.13 seconds😳.

📖 Worth a Read: There’s Something Odd Going On in Bathrooms at Taylor Swift’s “Eras Tour” → (Slate)

• ☝️ A team of Swiss engineers invented a robot that can morph from a basic triangle shape into nearly any 3D object; the Mori3 robot is custom-designed to serve a variety of tasks on future missions to the Moon or Mars.

BUSINESS & MARKETS

• 💰 US markets closed mixed across the board yesterday (S&P: +0.1%; Dow: -0.7%; Nasdaq: +0.4%).
• 🧆 Cava raised $318 million in an IPO valuing the Mediterranean fast-casual restaurant chain at $2.45 billion; shares of Cava will debut on public markets this morning.
• 🛢️ Oil and gas giant Shell will increase its share dividend and stock buybacks while keeping oil production steady through 2030, CEO Wael Sawan announced yesterday.

SPORTS, MEDIA & ENTERTAINMENT

in partnership with Upway

• 🏈🚘 University of Georgia football players have been involved in at least 70 traffic-related violations – including speeding and distracted/reckless driving – since mid-2021, per a new ESPN report; a separate Atlanta Journal-Constitution report found police have charged Georgia players with nearly 300 traffic offenses since Kirby Smart became head coach in 2015.
• 🎶🐦 A group of music publishers representing thousands of artists – from Taylor Swift to Beyoncé – filed a lawsuit against Twitter yesterday seeking $250+ million in damages for alleged copyright infringement; Twitter is one of the only social-media platforms without an existing music licensing agreement.
• 🌐🚫 More than 300 Reddit communities, including popular subreddits like r/aww, r/music, r/videos, and r/futurology, announced plans to go dark indefinitely after a site-wide protest against Reddit’s new API changes ended yesterday. (Background)

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SCIENCE, SPACE & EMERGING TECH

in partnership with Pendulum

• 👣 Scientists in South Africa recently discovered what they say is the oldest known human footprint, which dates back 153,000 years.
• 🦠 Endometriosis, a poorly-understood and painful uterine condition affecting an estimated 10% to 15% of all middle-aged women, may be caused by bacteria commonly found in the gut and mouth, per a peer-reviewed study published yesterday in Science Translational Medicine.
• 🌬️☀️⚡ Wind and solar power have generated more electricity in the US than coal so far this year, per a new E&E News review of federal data; it marks the first time in US history that wind and solar produced more electricity than coal over a five-month period.

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MISCELLANEOUS

• ⛈️🌪️ About 30 million Americans across the Southeastern US were under a severe weather alert yesterday, with at least six tornadoes and tennis-ball-sized hail reported in Alabama, Georgia, and Texas.
• 🆒🚛 UPS has reached a tentative deal with the union representing its drivers to include AC in package delivery vehicles purchased after January 1, 2024.
• 🚫🍓 Multiple brands of frozen strawberries and other fruit products sold at Walmart, Costco, and HEB stores across America have been recalled by the FDA after they were linked to a Hepatitis A outbreak.

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Yesterday we covered a first-of-its-kind Illinois law that prevents all public libraries within the state from banning books, as well as a sharp uptick in book ban efforts in states across the US.

❓ Our question to you: 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: 28%
• 👎 No: 61%
• 🤷 Unsure/other: 11%

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

+Note on sample size: We received 10,496 votes and 658 longform responses.

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

• Ecuador: Woman presumed dead found alive in coffin at her wake → (CNN)
• Taichung man parks vans on house roof to avoid parking fines → (Taiwan News)
• Man wanted by police found… in prison → (The Malta Independent)
• 28-year-old woman arrested for allegedly enrolling at high school as a 17-year-old → (ABC News)
• In this youth baseball league, fans who mistreat umpires are sentenced to do the job themselves → (APNews)

19-year-old Tanishq Abraham just graduated from the University of California, Davis, possibly becoming the youngest person ever to receive a Ph.D.

• The California native, who graduated from high school at age ten, has now earned his doctorate in biomedical engineering.

🎓 Smarty pants... Tanishq said he plans to take a short break from academics before continuing his research in medical artificial intelligence.

Which country, pictured above, has the highest human life expectancy in the world? (Hint: It's also the world's second-smallest country by area.)

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Monaco, where citizens live an average of 89.4 years