Good morning, and welcome back. We hope you had a wonderful holiday and Happy New Year!

2023 was a huge year for The DONUT, and we have you, dear readers, to thank for it. We can’t even communicate how much we appreciate you reading, engaging, and responding to the newsletters we send – without you, we wouldn’t exist. Thank you🙏.

Here’s to an even better 2024📈.

🚀⏰ Ready, Set, Go: Today’s news should be about a 4.92-minute read.

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“Truth is the offspring of silence and meditation.”

–Sir Isaac Newton (1643-1727)

In 2023, streaming services not named Netflix lost a collective $5 billion, according to a recent report by the Financial Times. And this is causing many streamers to put at the top of their New Year’s Resolutions: “reevaluate our strategy for 2024.”

Background: Major studios mimicked Netflix's business model of spending billions of dollars in content to attract millions of subscribers worldwide. They entered the streaming industry with low prices to gain market share, and Wall Street applauded companies that saw strong subscriber growth.

But things have changed. These days, there’s more of an emphasis on profitability > growth – something that favors Netflix, which reported a net income of $1.68 billion in Q3 – and it’s causing other streamers to focus more on being cash-flow positive.

• In 2022, prices for the 10 largest streamers increased an average of 10%. Last year through October, prices had increased another 10% on average.

This focus on profitability has tradeoffs, however. One being a higher cancellation rate. ~25% of US subscribers to major streaming services have canceled at least three of them over the past two years, per recent data reported by the WSJ. Two years ago, that number stood at 15%.

One interesting thing: Data shows people are increasingly round-robining streaming services, canceling a subscription and then picking it back up at a later date. One in four people who cancel a premium streaming service typically resubscribe within four months, and one in three do so within seven months, per the WSJ.

👀 Looking ahead… Analysts predict 2024 will be the year of streaming consolidation, as some services – like Paramount – look to combine forces or bow out of the streaming wars altogether.

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🇯🇵 Nearly 400 people were safely evacuated after a Japan Airlines plane collided with a Coast Guard aircraft. The passenger plane was cleared to land at Tokyo’s Haneda Airport on Tuesday, while the Coast Guard craft entered the runway despite being ordered to taxi, causing both planes to crash and catch fire. The pilot of the Coast Guard plane escaped, but explosions killed five of the six crew members. All 379 passengers and crew on board the passenger plane were safely evacuated following the fiery collision.

🇮🇱 Israel’s Supreme Court struck down a key part of the government’s controversial judicial reform law. In Monday’s 8-7 decision, the court narrowly voted to overturn a law passed in July that prevents Israeli judges from striking down government decisions they deem “unreasonable.” The law was the first in a planned overhaul of Israel’s justice system by PM Benjamin Netanyahu’s ruling coalition, which drew widespread public protests last year. Separately, a top Hamas leader was killed on Tuesday in an apparent Israeli airstrike, though Israel’s government declined to comment.

🇮🇷 Two bombs exploded at a memorial for former Iranian General Qassem Soleimani. The first bomb was detonated near his burial site, where people gathered to commemorate the anniversary of his 2020 death at the hands of a US drone strike, while the second blast went off about 20 minutes later near the same area. At least 95 people were killed and an additional 211 wounded, in what appears to be the deadliest militant attack to hit the country since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Iranian officials are still investigating who is responsible for the attacks.

In a legal complaint filed last week, the NY Times became the first major US media organization to sue both Microsoft and ChatGPT-maker OpenAI for alleged copyright infringement – or the legal equivalent of telling a teacher that someone else copied your homework.

The lawsuit claims the tech companies used millions of pieces of NYT content to train their AI models, and continue to draw on that material to serve up answers – all without the newspaper’s permission.

It also cites several examples where OpenAI and Microsoft’s AI products pulled a Shia LeBouf and provided near-verbatim excerpts from NYT articles that would otherwise require a subscription.

The paper says it sued after failing to reach an agreement with the tech firms on a potential commercial licensing deal, similar to ones OpenAI previously signed with the Associated Press and German media giant Axel Springer.

• The NYT is asking for “billions of dollars in statutory and actual damages,” as well as a court order forcing Microsoft and OpenAI to destroy AI models or datasets that incorporate the NYT’s work.

📸 Big picture: The NYT’s legal complaint is the latest in a series of ongoing lawsuits seeking to limit AI companies’ alleged use of copyrighted content to train their models. OpenAI is already facing copyright lawsuits from prominent authors, including George R. R. Martin, John Grisham, and Jodi Picoult. Stable Diffusion, a leading AI image generator, is being sued by Getty Images on similar grounds.

On Tuesday, Harvard President Claudine Gay announced her resignation. The move comes six months after she first took office, representing the shortest presidential term in university history.

While Gay didn’t mention a specific reason for stepping down, her resignation comes one month after receiving backlash for her congressional testimony regarding antisemitism on campus, in which Gay said it “depend[s] on the context” when deciding whether calling for the genocide of Jews violates Harvard’s code of conduct.

Days after Gay’s congressional testimony, one of her main detractors, billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, posted a 2022 investigative report claiming she had plagiarized some of her academic work. Harvard published an independent review of Gay’s research following the accusations, which found inadequate citations in a few instances but “no violation of Harvard’s standards for research misconduct.”

• On December 15, Gay initially requested corrections to two scholarly articles published in 2001 and 2017 in response to the review.
• One week later, Gay also requested an update to her 1997 PhD dissertation to correct additional instances of “inadequate citation,” which came after Harvard reviewed more of her academic work.

🎓🏛️ Zoom out: Of the three university leaders who received backlash for their congressional testimony regarding antisemitism on campus, MIT President Sally Kornbluth is the only one still in their position. Former UPenn President Liz Magill resigned four days after her testimony.

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💬 Quoted… "We just wanted to have fun with it all. I mean it's 'Steamboat Willie''s Mickey Mouse murdering people. It's ridiculous. We ran with it and had fun doing it and I think it shows."

• The copyright on Disney's 1928 short film Steamboat Willie expired in the US on New Year's Day. This means the film and its characters are now in the public domain and free for anyone to use or build upon – so naturally, Disney’s beloved Mickey Mouse is getting the horror movie treatment. Not just one but two Mickey Mouse horror films – one set in an arcade and the other set on a boat in NYC – were announced hours after the copyright expired. The arcade-focused film is slated to debut in March.

🚗📈 Stat of the Day: What do General Motors and Taylor Swift have in common? They both had a great 2023. GM’s sales in the US increased 14% last year to reach 2.6 million vehicles, representing the company’s best year since 2019. Another interesting data point: sales at GM’s Buick brand increased 61% year over year.

🤔 Did You Know?... According to a 2018 study performed by Jeffrey Hall, a professor of communication studies at the University of Kansas, it takes between 40-60 hours of hanging out for an acquaintance to become a casual friend, then an additional 140-160 hours together to move from casual friends to close friends. However, how that time is spent matters – deep conversations, sharing feelings, and being a good listener can reduce the 200 hours to become close friends to as little as 45 minutes (!).

📰 Worth a Read: We used AI and satellite imagery to map ocean activities that take place out of sight → (The Conversation)

• ☝️ NASA published new images showing its Juno spacecraft completing its closest-ever flyby of Jupiter’s fiery moon Io, which the space agency describes as “the most volcanic world in our solar system.”

BUSINESS & MARKETS

in partnership with Scott Kemper Imagery

• 💰 US markets closed down across the board yesterday (S&P: -0.8%; Dow: -0.8%; Nasdaq: -1.2%).
• 🕵️⚖️ Google agreed to settle a $5 billion lawsuit alleging the tech giant secretly tracked the internet use of millions of people who thought they were browsing privately in “Incognito” mode.
• 💼 Xerox is laying off 3,000 employees, or 15% of its workforce, as part of a larger restructuring aimed at boosting its core print business.

*From our partners: 💼🚀 GIVEAWAY ALERT… Scott Kemper is giving away 10 free 2024 calendars featuring his “Beautiful Southwest” Collection. To enter, just subscribe free to his newsletter, The Wanderlust Chronicles, by January 8th. Enter FREE here.

SPORTS, MEDIA & ENTERTAINMENT

• SCOREBOARD: 🏈 CFB: No. 1 Michigan defeated No. 4 Alabama in overtime, while No. 2 Washington beat No. 3 Texas; the two winners will face off in the National Championship on Monday. | 🏈 NFL: Read a full Week 17 recap. | 🎯 16-year-old Luke Littler fell just short in his bid to become the youngest winner of the World Darts Championship, losing 7-4 in the finals to Luke Humphries.
• 🥳 ABC's "Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve" special drew 22.2 million viewers, a 35% increase over last year.
• 🍿 Universal was the highest-grossing studio at the 2023 box office, marking the first year since 2016 that Disney hasn’t occupied the top spot.

SCIENCE, SPACE & EMERGING TECH

in partnership with Sabavi Home

• 📸🤖 Sony, Canon, and Nikon are developing digital signatures for photographs in an effort to distinguish human-captured shots from AI-generated images.
• 🚫💉 Global health regulators – including the FDA, WHO, and European Medicines Agency – are warning of a rise in counterfeit versions of the popular weight-loss drug Ozempic.
• ☀️🌱 The process of photosynthesis had evolved on Earth as early as 1.75 billion years ago, per a new peer-reviewed study published in Nature.

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MISCELLANEOUS

• 🏛️ Capitol buildings in at least nine states were placed on lockdown or forced to evacuate yesterday after receiving bomb threats in a “mass email.”
• 📝 A US court began revealing the names of dozens of people with ties to deceased financier Jeffrey Epstein yesterday.
• 🗳️ Maine’s Secretary of State issued a ruling barring former President Trump from the state GOP primary due to the 14th Amendment’s insurrection clause, mirroring a similar decision from Colorado’s Supreme Court; Trump is appealing the Maine decision in state court, and officially appealed the Colorado decision to the US Supreme Court yesterday. (From the Left | From the Center | From the Right)

CLICKBAIT

• 🗓️ The best way to make New Year's resolutions, according to science.

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

• Passengers attempt to celebrate NYE twice on time traveling flight but land in wrong year → (FOX13 Tampa Bay)
• Body Lotion Accused of Attracting Giant Spiders Goes Viral → (Newsweek)
• Cobra dies after being bitten by Indian boy → (The National News)
• 3-year-old boy opens entire family’s Christmas presents at 3 a.m. → (Boston 25 News)
• Brazilian YouTubers build world's tallest Popsicle stick structure → (UPI)

Ghanaian woman Afua Asantewaa Aduonum loves to sing. 

While not a professional musician, Afua has always had a heart for music. And when she started singing through her repertoire at midnight on Christmas Eve this year, she didn't stop until she broke the world record for longest singing marathon – five full days later.    

• Afua was allowed a five-minute break each hour, or a 20-minute break every four hours under Guinness World Records rules.
• The singer ended up breaking the previous record – held by professional vocalist Sunil Waghmare – by 21 hours.

Which country, pictured above, has the least coastline out of any in the world?

(keep scrolling for the answer)

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Monaco, which has just 3.5 miles of coastline along the French Riviera