Good morning. After dozens of adorable head-to-head matchups, tens of thousands of votes cast, and only a few tears shed, the final results are in.

The winner of The DONUT’s third-annual Pet Playoffs – aka “The One Pet to Rule Them All” – is… 🥁🥁🥁… Harold the Pug! (@haroldpug_life)

A big congrats to Harold and his human, who will be taking home $250 in cold, hard cash in addition to other pet-themed prizes.

A quick note: While the aim of Pet Playoffs is to keep animals at the front-and-center, without opposable thumbs it’s pretty hard to fill out forms and participate in the voting. So we’d like to extend a big THANK YOU to all the hoomans who took part in this year’s competition and made its success possible.

Any suggestions for how we can improve next year? Hit reply and let us know.

🚀⏰ Ready, Set, Go: Today’s news should be about a 4.79-minute read.

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"Life is a succession of lessons, which must be lived to be understood."

–Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)

In his annual address at the Federal Reserve’s summer gathering in Jackson Hole on Friday, Fed Chair Jerome Powell said US inflation is still too high for the central bank’s liking, and suggested additional interest rate hikes could be seen in the coming months.

• He also said the Fed plans to keep baseline interest rates elevated for an extended period of time, until inflation is closer to the central bank’s long-term goal of 2%.

Powell’s comments come as the US economy has largely defied predictions that growth would cool over the past few months:

• GDP increased at a faster-than-expected pace in Q2. The US economy grew at an annualized pace of 2.4% last quarter, per federal data published late last month, higher than the 1.8% pace economists surveyed by Bloomberg had forecast.
• Consumers are proving more resilient than projected. The Commerce Department’s July retail sales report showed an overall increase of 0.7%, nearly double what economists had predicted.
• Job growth is slowing, but the labor market is still tight. The US economy added 187,000 jobs last month, slightly under analysts’ estimates of 200,000, while the unemployment rate fell to 3.5%. There are currently 1.6 job openings for every unemployed American, per the most recent federal data.

✋ Yes, but… If the US economy were an airplane, the “Fasten Seatbelt” light would be on – because it seems more turbulence is ahead. Core inflation remains relatively high (4.7% last month), meaning consumers are still seeing elevated prices for transportation, medical services, housing, and other essential products.

And, since it typically takes at least 12 months before interest-rate hikes have their full impact on the US economy, consumers are also starting to feel the pain of higher rates for mortgages, loans, credit cards, etc.

• Defaults on both credit cards and auto loans rose past pre-pandemic levels in Q2 2023, per a Fed report this month.

🎓 Another point not in the future economy’s favor: The upcoming restart on student-loan payments is projected to have a ripple effect across the US economy, as billions of dollars each month start flowing towards student debt and away from retailers, credit card balances, medical debt, and other sectors.

📊 Flash poll: To all working professionals: would you consider the growth outlook in your industry/sector of the economy to be positive or negative over the next 12 months?

Positive

Negative

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🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿🦕 The largest Loch Ness monster hunt in 50+ years was held in Scotland this weekend. Hundreds of visitors from around the world joined in a two-day hunt for Scotland’s fabled monster on Saturday and Sunday. Some volunteers were stationed at locations around the 23-mile-long lake, while others patrolled in boats equipped with hydrophones to detect any underwater sounds. The search’s leader told Reuters that the boats “heard four distinctive 'gloops'” from the hydrophones, after which they “ran to go make sure the recorder was on and it wasn’t plugged in."

🇪🇸⚽ The Spanish women’s soccer team pledged not to play in any more matches until federation president Luis Rubiales resigns. Team members say they want to “express their firm and resounding condemnation" of an event that took place following their World Cup victory, in which Rubiales kissed forward Jenni Hermoso without her consent. The team’s statement late Friday came hours after Rubiales refused to resign, calling the kiss consensual and accusing his critics of “false feminism” and a “social assassination” of his character.

🇬🇧🏛️ Around 2,000 British Museum artifacts are believed to have been stolen by an insider. The museum’s director announced his resignation on Friday, apologizing for failing to properly act on a warning that museum artifacts were being sold on eBay. Officials say the evidence points to an inside job, since many of the missing artifacts weren’t properly cataloged and registered. Since its founding in 1753, the British Museum has amassed a collection of roughly 8 million artifacts, though only ~80,000 of them are on public display at a time.

A piece of space debris targeted for cleanup in 2026 was recently Hulk-smashed into pieces by another piece of space debris, per the European Space Agency.

And, in addition to being rather ironic, this example of debris-on-debris crime highlights a growing problem for satellites, spacecraft, and NASA astronauts – orbiting space junk left over from past launches and missions.

Simply put, things orbiting Earth move pretty fast – between 15,700 mph and 17,500 mph – and, as you can probably imagine, collisions at those speeds aren’t too pretty (a number of windows on space shuttles and the ISS have needed to be replaced due to damage caused by paint flecks😳). They’re also getting harder and harder to avoid.

• More than 27,000 pieces of space debris are currently being tracked by the US Department of Defense, a number that continues to grow alongside the space industry.
• And muchhhhh more exists that can’t be traced. In fact, untraceable millimeter-sized orbital debris represents the highest mission-ending risk to most robotic spacecraft operating in low Earth orbit, according to NASA.

👀 Looking ahead… Current ideas on how to clean up the space debris surrounding Earth include: what’s basically a spaceship with a giant claw that can grab space junk and fling it into Earth’s atmosphere to burn up (a method that was supposed to clean up the piece of just-destroyed space junk as a test), as well as a type of “braking sail” designed to guide decommissioned satellites into Earth’s atmosphere to burn up.

💬 Quoted… “Losses from theft are at historical highs."

The above is a direct quote taken Thursday night from Erik Nordstrom, the CEO of (you’ll never guess it) Nordstrom, whose company now joins a growing number of retailers blaming “shrink,” or loss due to theft or damage, for an unexpected drop in profits. Dick’s Sporting Goods, Dollar Tree, Macy's, Home Depot, Target, and Walmart have also called out shoplifting (sometimes in organized fashion) for negatively impacting last quarter’s earnings.

• Yes, but: these numbers are just estimates, and executives are under pressure to explain worse-than-expected earnings reports. Walgreens’ CFO revealed in January that the company had overstated the impact of shrink to its Q4 earnings.

🍿 Stat of the Day: The second annual National Cinema Day, held yesterday, saw attendance at movie theaters nationwide increase by an estimated 700% compared to Saturday, based on preliminary data. A major reason why? Ticket prices for all shows and formats at many major theater chains were temporarily set at $4.

🤔 Did You Know?... Some countries and territories operate on uneven time zones compared to the rest of the world, using offsets that differ by 30 or 45 minutes from the usual interval. For example: India Standard Time is 9 hours and 30 minutes ahead of Eastern Daylight Time.

📰 Worth a Read: Why Tribalism Took Over Our Politics → (WSJ)

However, you wouldn’t know it if you’re going by most news! But if you’re ready for change, “What Could Go Right?” from The Progress Network is a weekly newsletter with a healthy dose of optimistic ideas from smart people.

🎓🧠 Thoughtfully arranged by a collective made up of 100+ scholars, writers, and innovators, The Progress Network speaks to a better future in a world dominated by negative voices. If you’ve had enough doomscrolling, here's your lifeline.

Subscribe to the “What Could Go Right?” newsletter for free.

• ☝️ Thousands of people gathered at the National Mall in D.C. on Saturday to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the March on Washington led by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., during which he delivered his “I Have A Dream” speech.

BUSINESS & MARKETS

in partnership with Monk Manual

• 💰 US markets closed up across the board on Friday following Powell’s remarks (S&P: +0.7%; Dow: +0.7%; Nasdaq: +0.9%); the S&P and Nasdaq snapped three-week losing streaks.
• 📱🛒 Instacart, which was founded in 2012, filed paperwork for an IPO on Friday; the grocery delivery company’s internal valuation once stood at $39 billion but was slashed to ~$13 billion in October 2022.
• 🚗 ~150,000 UAW workers employed by the Big Three automakers (GM, Ford, Stellantis) overwhelmingly voted to authorize a strike if a labor deal isn’t reached by September 14. (Background)

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SPORTS, MEDIA & ENTERTAINMENT

• 🙏🎤 Bob Barker, animal welfare activist and longtime Price is Right host, died yesterday at 99 years old.
• 🏸 The planned merger between Major League Pickleball and the Professional Pickleball Association, first announced in November, is reportedly in jeopardy due to MLP executives cooling on the deal.
• 🏈 “Week 0” of the college football season kicked off on Saturday. | The third and final week of the NFL preseason took place this weekend; the season officially kicks off the Thursday after next (Sept. 7). | 🏎️ Red Bull’s Max Verstappen earned his ninth consecutive Formula One victory at the Dutch Grand Prix yesterday, tying the all-time record.

SCIENCE, SPACE & EMERGING TECH

in partnership with Chartr

• 🧠 A team of US scientists developed a wearable headband that analyzes a patient's brain waves to detect early signs of Alzheimer’s disease.
• 🚀⚖️ The Department of Justice is suing SpaceX over allegations the Elon Musk-led company violated federal law by refusing to consider or hire job applicants who were refugees or asylum-seekers.
• 🤖 Nearly all of the 13 known trading funds that have placed AI applications in charge of managing their portfolios are underperforming benchmark indexes like the S&P 500, per the WSJ.

*From our partners: 📊🖼️ Turning data into graphical masterpieces… Chartr is the #1 visual newsletter with over 400,000 subscribers. Packed with data snacks and easy-to-remember insights on business tech, and society – it’s a gold mine for visual thinkers. Subscribe free to Chartr.

MISCELLANEOUS

• 🚗 A woman who was abducted from a Phoenix car dealership last week ended up facilitating her own rescue by slipping a note to a customer at a gas station over 160 miles away; her abductor was later arrested.
• 🙏🚁 Three US Marines were killed and 20 others were injured in an aircraft crash during a training exercise in Australia yesterday. | 😔 A 21-year-old man killed three people in a racially motivated shooting in Jacksonville, Florida.
• 👀 Take a look at the priciest zip code in the US: Newport Coast, California, where homes have sold for as high as $61 million.

CLICKBAIT

• 🧠💰 The exact age when you make your best financial decisions.

Monday: US Open begins🎾; Donald Trump’s Georgia election interference case expected to receive a trial date

Tuesday: President Biden hosts Costa Rican President Rodrigo Chaves Robles

Wednesday: A rare super blue moon will grace the night sky; final season of Archer debuts on FXX

Thursday: National Matchmaker Day; weekly unemployment claims

Friday: First day of September; August jobs report; The Equalizer 3 hits theaters

On Friday, we covered the question of whether working from home is the best situation for everyone involved, including employees, managers, companies, and the overall economy.

❓ Our question to you: In your opinion, what is the ideal working setup?

• 🏢 Fully in-person: 17%
• 🔀 Hybrid: 61%
• 🏡 Fully remote: 22%

Click here to read some of the best responses.

+Note on sample size: We received 13,811 votes and 1,342 longform responses.

Since winning the first season of American Idol back in 2002, Kelly Clarkson has experienced a wildly successful career. 

More than any of her hit singles, Grammy awards, or Emmy awards, however, the pop star is most proud of her two kids.

🎤 Because of you... Kelly's 9-year-old daughter, River Rose, and 7-year-old son, Remington joined her onstage at her Las Vegas residency show earlier this month, each performing a song of their choice with their mom. 

• River Rose chose to sing "Heartbeat Song" along with Kelly, while Remington opted to dance his heart out to "Whole Lotta Woman."

See the cuteness here.

Guess the definitions of the following Greek/Latin root words:

1. Brom
2. Cogn
3. Foss
4. Lapid
5. Mim

(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. Brom = Stench (e.g., bromide)
2. Cogn = To know (cognizant, cognitive)
3. Foss = Dig (fossil)
4. Lapid = Stone (lapidary)
5. Mim = Repeat (mime, mimic)