Good morning. And happy Thursday, a day sandwiched between Wednesday and Friday, named after Thor, the Norse god of thunder, lightning, and strength.

Feel free to channel some of that chaos-storm, big-hammer energy into your day.

And if anyone asks, just say, “it’s Thor’s day!”

NEWS.

🚀⏰ Ready, Set, Go: Today’s news takes 4.88 minutes to read.

“You'll never find rainbows if you're looking down.”

–Charlie Chaplin (1889-1977)

The 11,000+ writers in the Writers Guild of America (WGA) have been on strike for 73 days.

And, as of this morning, they’re joined by the more than 160,000 performers of the Screen Actors Guild – American Federation of Television and Radio Artists.

🔝 From the top…SAG-AFTRA’s three-year contract with Hollywood’s studios, the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP), was set to expire on July 1. However, in a surprising twist that mirrored a classic Hollywood narrative, the parties agreed to a two-week extension just one day before the deadline.

On July 10, with just two days remaining until the extended deadline, a federal mediator was brought in to help. But a happily-ever-after resolution was not in the cards, as SAG-AFTRA and the AMPTP ultimately failed to come to an agreement.

• Most shows still in production will now have to shut down as actors are mandated to walk off the job. Actors will also be discouraged from attending premieres and events like ComicCon.

🤔 The asks: Actors are going on strike to demand better pay and fair residuals that consider streaming revenue (current residuals are based on how often content is re-aired, a concept that doesn’t map onto streaming TV). They’re also concerned about the unregulated use of AI in reproducing their likeness or performances.

🏆 Zoom out: While the vibe in Hollywood is anything but celebratory, the 75th annual Emmy Awards did announce their nominations yesterday. Succession led the pack with 27 noms, followed by The Last of Us (24) and The White Lotus (23). All three shows are made by HBO.

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🇸🇪 Sweden announced plans to build the world’s largest wooden city. The project, known as Stockholm Wood City, is a $1.4 billion development set to break ground in 2025. Spanning over 60 acres near the country's capital, it’ll encompass 2,000 residential units and 7,000 office spaces. By swapping out steel and concrete for wood, developers hope to reduce the amount of carbon emitted during the building process by around 25%. And while some skeptics point to the obvious fire safety risks associated with wooden buildings, proponents say those fears are misinformed and wood buildings aren’t inherently unsafe.

🇨🇳 A Chinese hacking group recently gained access to US government email accounts. The breach was first reported late Tuesday by Microsoft, with the US State and Commerce Departments each confirming yesterday that they were targeted by the hack, but declining to provide any further details. According to Microsoft, the hackers’ level of sophistication, combined with the specific email accounts they targeted, indicates they either belong to Beijing’s intelligence service or were hired to work for it. US officials say the hack appears to be far smaller in scale than other recent major intrusions like Russia’s 2020 SolarWinds hack.

🇪🇺 EU lawmakers narrowly approved the bloc’s first major piece of legislation protecting biodiversity in three decades. The bill, which passed by a 336-300 margin in the European Parliament, requires each of the EU’s 27 member-countries to restore at least 20% of all degraded nature areas within their respective borders. The measure was opposed by the European People’s Party, the EU’s largest parliamentary group, which argued it would harm farmers and endanger food security.

If the Consumer Price Index, America’s most widely-used measure of inflation, was an amusement park ride, it’d be the world’s tallest roller coaster: the Kingda Ka. Because after ascending to a historic height, it’s rapidly falling back down to Earth.

According to Labor Department figures published yesterday, US inflation stood at 3.0% over the year-long period ending in June, down from 4.0% in May and 6.0% in February. It’s the CPI’s lowest annual figure in over two years – and less than a third of the index’s recent peak exactly one year ago (9.1%).

• The core index, a separate reading that excludes often-volatile food and energy prices, rose 4.8% in June compared with a year earlier. That’s down from 5.3% in May.
• The overall CPI remains lower than the core index (a historic anomaly), largely due to a sharp annual decrease in energy costs – especially the average price of gas at the pump ($3.68 vs. $5.03 a year ago).

👀 Looking ahead… There’s still a gap between the current core inflation reading (4.8%) and the Fed’s target rate of 2%. As a result, the US central bank is widely expected to raise interest rates when its policy-making committee meets later this month.

However, many economists say yesterday’s inflation report calls into question whether the Fed will hike interest rates again after July – a move most central bank officials endorsed as recently as last month.

On June 12, Grimace, McDonald’s fuzzy purple mascot, turned 52 years old. To celebrate, the fast food giant started offering the Grimace Meal and Shake “while supplies last.”

Well, supplies didn’t last too long, thanks to social media. And if you’ve opened TikTok over the past few weeks, you know exactly what we’re talking about.

📱 The trend: In a play on Grimace’s villainous origin story, TikTokers are pretending to die in violent and strange ways after drinking the Grimace Shake. Creators typically wish Grimace a happy birthday, taste the drink, and then the video cuts to a clip of them playing dead or injured with the purple milkshake oozing out of their mouth, nose, or head (#Grimacestrikesagain).

And this doesn’t appear to be a meticulously-planned marketing stunt. According to a LinkedIn post published yesterday by McDonald’s marketing director, Guillaume Huin, the company has nothing to do with creating the trend – Huin attributed its existence to “peak absurdist Gen Z humor.”

• One of the earliest Grimace posts came from a 28-year-old Knoxville-based social media manager named Austin Frazier – and things snowballed from there.
• On TikTok, the hashtag #grimace has amassed 2.5 billion views. #grimaceshake isn’t far behind, with 2.4 billion views.

🟣💰 Big picture: These virtual views translated into very real dollars. Demand surged when the trend picked up, and millions of Grimace Shakes and Meals were sold between June 12–June 30, according to McDonalds – who’s been hush-hush on whether Grimace will return in 2024.

P.S. If we’re missing a writer tomorrow, you’ll know who’s responsible.

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💬 Quoted… “[Its goal is] to understand the true nature of the universe.”

Clearly unaware that the meaning of life, the universe, and everything is 42, Elon Musk yesterday announced the launch of a new artificial intelligence company called xAI.

• Comprised of experts from prominent organizations like DeepMind, OpenAI, Google Research, Microsoft Research, Twitter, and Tesla, the team behind xAI has previously worked on projects such as AlphaCode and GPT-4 chatbots. This positions the company to compete with established players like OpenAI and Google.

💻📈 Stat of the Day: According to Adobe Analytics, online spending in the US surged by ~6% on Tuesday to reach $6.4 billion, making it the single largest e-commerce sales day of the year. The cause? Amazon Prime Day.

🪵 Did You Know?.... Attention all woodchucks – home furnishing company IKEA reportedly uses 1% of the planet's lumber. That comes out to about 530 million cubic feet of wood per year.

📖 Worth a Read: → When Parents Want to Pass Down Furniture You Hate: An Awkward True Story (WSJ)

• ☝️ You’re looking at the closest star-forming region to Earth, courtesy of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope; the picture was released yesterday to celebrate the one-year anniversary of JWST’s first published image.

BUSINESS & MARKETS

• 💰 US markets closed up across the board (S&P: +0.7%; Dow: +0.3%; Nasdaq: +1.2%).
• ⌚💵 Shopify has rolled out a calculator embedded into each employees’ calendar app that estimates the cost of any meeting with three or more people; it’s part of a company push to boost productivity by removing ~322,000 hours of meetings this year.
• ✍️🐭 Disney CEO Bob Iger signed a contract extension that’ll keep him at the helm of the media and entertainment giant through 2026. | 🍻 Anchor Brewing, the oldest craft brewery in the US, is closing down after 127 years in business.

SPORTS, MEDIA & ENTERTAINMENT

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• 🏈 HBO's Hard Knocks will feature the New York Jets and newly-acquired QB Aaron Rodgers this upcoming season, per ESPN’s Adam Schefter.
• 📺 Redbox signed a deal with TikTok to feature the social media platform’s videos on more than 3,000 DVD-kiosk video screens across America.
• 📱 Apple released a public beta version of iOS 17 yesterday ahead of its official release this fall.

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SCIENCE, SPACE & EMERGING TECH

in partnership with Slumber

• 🪐⚛️ NASA's Mars Perseverance rover has discovered a wide range of organic (aka carbon-based) molecules on the red planet’s surface, per a new peer-reviewed study; while carbon is an essential building block for life as we know it, organic molecules aren’t a definitive sign of alien life, since they can also be created by non-biological processes.
• 🌊➡️🟢 More than 56% of the world’s oceans have changed color over the past 20 years due to human-related causes, with blue waters typically becoming greener over time, per a study published yesterday in Nature.
• 🏫 The average US student requires over four months of additional schooling to catch back up to pre-pandemic levels in reading and math, per a new study from the Northwest Evaluation Association.

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MISCELLANEOUS

• 🥵 More than 108 million Americans across the southern US were under a heat advisory yesterday; potentially record-setting high temps are projected to remain across the entire Southwest well into next week.
• ⚖️ Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes, who began serving an 11-year prison sentence for defrauding investors in April, is eligible for release nearly two years ahead of schedule, federal officials confirmed on Tuesday.
• 🏛️ Iowa's legislature approved a ban on nearly all abortions after six weeks of pregnancy late Tuesday; Gov. Kim Reynolds (R) is expected to sign it into law tomorrow. (From the Left | From the Center | From the Right)

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Yesterday, we covered a new AP investigation that found Supreme Court justices – especially Sonia Sotomayor – routinely use taxpayer-funded employees for private book ventures, which is one of several recent reports focused on the Supreme Court’s lack of ethics regulations.

❓ Our question to you: Do you think Supreme Court justices should adopt a code of conduct?

• 👍 Yes: 87%
• 👎 No: 6%
• 🤷 Unsure/other: 7%

❔ Follow-up for “Yes” folks: In your opinion, who should be in charge of establishing the SCOTUS code of ethics?

• 🧑‍⚖️ The justices themselves: 5%
• 🏛️ Congress: 18%
• 👨‍💼 The president: 1%
• 🤝 Congress and the president: 22%
• 3️⃣ A combination of all three US gov’t branches: 41%
• 🇺🇸 All 50 states: 9%
• 📊 Other: 4%

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

+Note on sample size: We received 14,720 votes and 1,409 longform responses.

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

• US Government Debuts ‘Speak Now (FBI’s Version)’ Encouraging Taylor Swift Fans to Report Crimes → (Billboard)
• Robots say they won't steal jobs, rebel against humans → (Reuters)
• Machine Gun Kelly Fulfills Fan’s Wish to Be Punched in the Face → (Yahoo! Entertainment)
• Underwater music show in the Florida Keys promotes awareness of coral reef protection → (APNews)
• Website offers $1,000 to watch 16 animated Barbie movies → (UPI)

🎂🐶 Happy birthday to you... These beagle siblings celebrated their first birthday together last week, thanks to Washington, D.C., animal shelter Homeward Trails. 

And while they may be celebrating now, the dogs had a tough start; they're part of a group of 4,000+ beagles rescued last July from an abusive facility.

• It took a lawsuit and a six-week rescue process to get the dogs out of the testing facility and into animal shelters across the country – but nearly all of pups have since been adopted into loving homes.

Which Asian country, pictured above, used to be called Siam prior to 1948?

(keep scrolling for the answer)

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