Good morning. In today’s edition:

• 📝 America has a healthcare problem
• 🏀 Recapping the WNBA’s monster season
• 🤔 Which animal has the slowest heartbeat on the planet?

… and more.

🚀⏰ Ready, Set, Go: Today’s news should be a ~4.86-minute read (1,294 words).

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“Whoever is happy will make others happy too.”

–Anne Frank (1929-1945)

In recent years, Uncle Sam has taken a page from Biggie when it comes to healthcare spending: the mo’ money America shells out, the mo’ problems it ends up seeing relative to other wealthy countries.

America ranks dead last in comparison to its peer countries on overall healthcare performance, despite spending significantly more money on such services in terms of GDP, according to a new study by the Commonwealth Fund.

• Their research, which used WHO data going back to the onset of the 2020 pandemic, ranked 10 high-income nations across five key healthcare measures: health equity, access to care, care process, administrative efficiency, and health outcomes. The US placed last in each of these measures except care process – a category including prevention, safety, coordination, and patient engagement – where it ranked second.
• At the same time, the US spent ~$13,500 per resident on healthcare in 2022, with the combined sum ($4.5 trillion) making up 18% of its GDP – nearly twice as much compared to the other nine high-income nations.

Driving the trend: The report found America’s issues with healthcare performance versus spending can be largely chalked up to a few explanations: poor overall access to healthcare, low quality of health insurance, and a historical lack of investment in primary care that would reduce the need for costly emergency services. It also attributes a significant portion of America’s higher costs to the complex system of hospital bills, insurance disputes, and out-of-pocket requirements that patients and doctors are forced to navigate.

Zoom out: US regulators are increasingly targeting companies they see as responsible for the outsized costs associated with the healthcare industry. The latest example came on Friday, when the FTC sued America’s three largest pharmacy benefit managers – CVS Caremark, Cigna's Express Scripts, and UnitedHealth's OptumRx – accusing them of steering millions of diabetes patients towards higher priced insulin in exchange for rebates from pharma companies.

📊 Flash poll (long-form): What steps, if any, should the US government take to address the disconnect between relatively high healthcare spending and relatively poor health outcomes for Americans?

• Click here to leave a response.

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🇨🇳 A Chinese zoo is drawing attention – and backlash – for its “panda dogs” exhibit. In recent weeks, the Taizhou Zoo in Jiangsu, China, has gone viral on the country’s social media sites over videos showing an exhibit in which a pair of dogs are painted white and black to look like panda bears. Zoo officials say the animals are a breed of dog called Chow Chows, and that they’re clearly advertised as “panda dogs,” not true pandas. Nonetheless, some Chinese state media sources have criticized the zoo for misleading visitors and mistreating the dogs.

🇱🇰 Sri Lanka has elected a new president. Anura Kumara Dissanayake, a Marxist lawmaker whose pro-working class and anti-political elite campaigning made him popular among youth, defeated incumbent President Ranil Wickremesinghe and other challengers on Saturday’s ballot, per Sri Lanka’s Election Commission. The election came as Sri Lanka is experiencing an ongoing five-year economic crisis widely described as its worst since gaining independence in 1948.

🚢🇬🇧 The late UK tech tycoon Mike Lynch’s sunken superyacht may contain sensitive intel. Italian prosecutors believe the sunken yacht may have a watertight safe containing highly sensitive data tied to a number of Western intelligence services, and are asking for heightened security to guard the sunken vessel over concerns foreign governments might try to access it, multiple sources told CNN. Lynch was associated with UK, US, and other intelligence services through Darktrace, the cybersecurity firm he founded.

Women’s professional basketball and Charlie Sheen in his Two and a Half Men-prime both have something in common: they’re #winning.

The WNBA playoffs tipped yesterday, capping off a potentially transformative regular season for the league that saw massive increases in attendance and viewership.

• Overall attendance was up 44% year-over-year, largely driven by fans who had a Fever and the only prescription was Caitlin Clark.
• The Indiana Fever wasn’t the only franchise putting up numbers, however: six teams recorded an average attendance of 10,000+/game, something that hadn’t been done since 1998, the league’s second season.
• ESPN said TV audiences for WNBA regular-season games increased 170% over last year. Ion said viewership jumped 133% annually to reach a total of 23.7 million viewers, with young girls (ages 2-17) and male (ages 25-54) viewership both increasing 181%.

These eyeballs are starting to translate into $$$. This past July, the WNBA signed an 11-year media rights deal worth $2.2 billion. This marks a 6x increase over the previous agreement – but the deal, which is up for renegotiation after three years, has drawn criticism from the WNBA Players Association, who says it undervalues the league (the NBA negotiated the arrangement and keeps ~60% of the proceeds; each WNBA franchise will receive ~$421,428/year toward roster compensation, per The Next).

🏀 In other WNBA news: A’ja Wilson was declared the league’s unanimous MVP to cap off a record-breaking season, while Caitlin Clark took home Rookie of the Year honors.

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“Before it was prematurely shuttered due to poor economics, this plant was among the safest and most reliable nuclear plants on the grid.”

On Friday, Constellation Energy, owner of the shuttered Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania, announced plans to restart the infamous reactor under a new 20-year agreement to supply Microsoft’s data centers with carbon-free electricity. Said Constellation to Satya Nadella: “Mr. President CEO, the nuclear option is on the table.”

Background: Three Mile Island is best known as the site of the most serious nuclear accident in US history. ​​In 1979, ​​a mechanical failure caused a partial meltdown of the facility’s Unit 2 reactor, which has been closed ever since – though Unit 1 remained in operation until 2019.

The deal comes as demand for energy is booming, in large part due to AI. Data centers currently account for ~4% of all electricity use in the US – a figure that's projected to double by 2030 amid increased adoption of power-hungry AI technologies like ChatGPT. For reference: a simple 100-word email written by ChatGPT uses enough power to light up 14 LED bulbs for one hour.

👀 Looking ahead… Constellation says it hopes to bring Three Mile Island’s Unit 1 reactor back online starting in 2028.

• ☝️ Archaeologists recently discovered a 3,200-year-old bronze long sword emblazoned with the signature emblem of Ramses II, the most powerful Ancient Egyptian pharaoh of the era.

BUSINESS & MARKETS

in partnership with Arro

• 💰 US markets closed mixed on Friday (S&P: -0.2%; Dow: +0.1%; Nasdaq: -0.4%).
• 🚀 Boeing replaced its top defense and space executive on Friday; separately, the company’s machinist strike enters its second week. | 🚢🚫 The Port of New York/New Jersey began preparing for a complete work stoppage by the International Longshoremen’s Association, the largest North American union for maritime workers; 40+% of all US monthly imports could be impacted.
• 🏨 Motel 6 is being acquired by Oyo, a hotel operator based in India, for $525 million.

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SPORTS, MEDIA & ENTERTAINMENT

• SCOREBOARD: 🏈 CFB: #6 Tennessee beat #15 Oklahoma, #12 Utah defeated #14 Oklahoma State, and #18 Michigan prevailed over #11 USC; see a full Week 4 recap. | 🏈 NFL: See a full Week 3 recap. | 🏎️ Formula One: McLaren’s Lando Norris won the Singapore Grand Prix yesterday, narrowing the points gap between him and season leader Max Verstappen of Red Bull (who placed second).
• 🍿 Beetlejuice Beetlejuice earned $26 million at the domestic box office to retain the top spot for a third consecutive weekend; Transformers One placed second with $25 million in its opening weekend.
• 📱 Social media platforms collect, share, and process vast amounts of information about their users while offering little transparency and inadequate safeguards for kids and teens, per a new FTC report. | 🇧🇷📲 X (formerly Twitter) has reportedly complied with orders from Brazil’s Supreme Court to ban certain accounts in an effort to have the court lift its nationwide block on X, per new court filings.

SCIENCE, SPACE & EMERGING TECH

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• 🍺🎗️ Alcohol accounts for just over 5% of all cancers in the US, per a new report from the American Association for Cancer Research; for reference, smoking causes ~20% of cancers.
• 🌙 A new “mini-moon” will be temporarily pulled into Earth's gravitational orbit later this month; the 33-foot-long space rock will then travel around Earth in a horseshoe path through late November.
• 🦠👃 The FDA approved AstraZeneca’s FluMist, the first at-home flu vaccine in the US, which comes in the form of a nasal spray.

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MISCELLANEOUS

• 📝 The Secret Service published a report concluding that communication failures between local and federal law enforcement led to missed opportunities in stopping the attempted assassination of former President Trump at a Pittsburgh rally in July.
• 🙏 A mass shooting in Birmingham, Alabama, late Saturday killed at least four people and injured at least 17 others, some of whom are in life-threatening condition; police say there were likely multiple shooters as part of a targeted “hit,” and they have yet to make any arrests.
• 🏛️ Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) said the House will vote this week on a three-month stopgap funding bill to avoid a government shutdown deadline of October 1; the stopgap measure won’t include a GOP-backed election security proposal, as did earlier versions of the funding bill. (From the Left | From the Center | From the Right)

CLICKBAIT

• 🤔💰 Are you in the American middle class? Calculate your income.

🚗📈 Stat of the Day: Americans are driving more now than before the pandemic, per a new report. This past spring, the average number of daily vehicle miles traveled per capita increased by 12.3% across the 100 biggest US metro areas compared to the spring of 2019, according to StreetLight Data.

🤔 Did You Know? The blue whale has the slowest heartbeat of any animal on the planet, with recorded heart rates as low as two beats per minute.

📰 Worth a Read: Doctors and Health Experts Are Changing Their Minds About Whole Milk and Cheese → (Barron’s)

Monday: National Family Day

Tuesday: The 79th UN General Assembly kicks off in NYC

Wednesday: Inside Out 2 begins streaming on Disney+

Thursday: NASA hopes to launch a mission to the ISS that will return its stranded astronauts

Friday: The Biden admin’s tariff hikes on certain Chinese-made products take effect

On Friday, we covered how a growing number of US universities and companies in recent months have changed course and adopted new stances of neutrality in regard to politics and world events.

❓ Our question to you: In your opinion, should US institutions take public stances on politics and world events?

• 👍 Yes: 24%
• 👎 No: 61%
• 🤷 Unsure/other: 15%

Click here to read the most thoughtful longform responses.

+Note on sample size: We received 3,093 votes and 316 longform responses.

It was a standard day at the Shendiaoshan Wild Animal Nature Reserve in Weihai, China, earlier this year, when a toddler accidentally dropped their shoe into the elephant enclosure.

🩴 Saving the shoe... A group of onlookers, who thought the tiny sandal was lost for good, were delighted when a clever elephant named Shanmai gently picked up the shoe and extended their trunk towards the barrier, returning the shoe to its owner.

• Shanmai was rewarded with a ripe piece of watermelon for their efforts.

+Editors Note: This story first appeared in the Daily DONUT in May 2024.

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

1. Astro
2. Caps
3. Cent
4. Duc
5. Insul

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Start referring.👇

1. Astro = Star (e.g., astrology)
2. Caps = Case (capsule)
3. Cent = Hundred (century)
4. Duc = Lead (introduction)
5. Insul = Island (insulation)