Good morning. In today’s edition:

• 🚬 The FDA’s flavored vape ban goes before the Supreme Court
• 📖 The power of BookTok
• 🇩🇰 Danish Protest Pigs

… and more.

🚀⏰ Ready, Set, Go: Today’s news should be a ~4.85-minute read (1,290 words).

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"Correct what you can. Learn from what you can't."

–Toni Morrison (1931-2019)

On Monday, the Supreme Court heard arguments in a case challenging the FDA’s ban on flavored e-cigarette products.

Some quick background: Despite their widespread popularity, all flavored e-cigarettes sold across the US – including those from Elf Bar, Breeze, Puff Bar, and others – are technically illegal under a Trump-era FDA rule establishing an approval process for such products.

• In 2020, vaping companies Triton Distribution and Vapetasia applied to market new flavors designed to taste like fruit and candy, such as “Rainbow Road” and “Jimmy the Juice Man Peachy Strawberry.”
• The FDA denied their applications the following year, after determining the products posed a “known and substantial risk to youth.”

The agency’s refusal prompted the two companies to sue seeking to overturn the FDA’s flavored nicotine juice ban.

The arguments: The two vaping companies claim their products should be approved because they’re a less harmful alternative to traditional cigarettes. They also accuse the FDA of secretly changing its requirements for flavored products after their applications were submitted.

• The FDA argues flavored vaping products pose a significant risk of encouraging e-cigarette use among youth, outweighing any potential benefit to adult cigarette smokers.

Zoom out: The rate of vaping usage among American youths is at its lowest level in a decade, according to CDC data. Currently, 5.9% of middle and high school students use e-cigarettes, down from 7.7% last year and a recent peak of 20.2% in 2019. Among students who do vape, 87.6% report using flavored e-cigarettes.

Looking ahead… The Supreme Court, which appeared to side with the FDA in arguments, is expected to deliver its ruling before the end of its term next summer. But the situation could change entirely after Inauguration Day: President-elect Trump recently promised to “save Vaping again” in a post on Truth Social.

📊 Flash poll: How do you feel about the FDA’s ban on flavored e-cigarettes?

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🇰🇷🪖 South Korea was briefly under martial law amid a political dispute. President Yoon Suk Yeol late Tuesday declared martial law, a move that suspends democratic processes, accusing his opposing political party – which controls parliament – of threatening the country’s constitutional order and sympathizing with North Korea. Less than three hours later, South Korea’s parliament voted 190-0 to lift the martial law declaration, which was denounced by both the opposition and the leader of Yoon’s own party. South Korea’s military eventually stood down a few hours afterward, when President Yoon said he would lift his martial law order in response to parliament’s vote.

💻 Amazon Web Services is taking aim at Nvidia’s chip dominance. Amazon’s cloud computing arm yesterday announced plans for “Ultracluster,” a massive AI supercomputer featuring hundreds of thousands of its homegrown Trainium chips that will be used by Anthropic to train AI models. AWS also announced a new massive server (Ultraserver) and unveiled Apple as a chip customer. Together, experts say these moves signal Amazon’s commitment to its Trainium chips as a low-cost, yet capable option compared to Nvidia’s massively popular graphics processing units (GPUs), which currently hold ~95% market share. Fellow cloud competitors Microsoft and Google are also building their own AI chips in a bid to reduce reliance on Nvidia.

🚗 Jaguar unveiled its first concept car since rebranding. The Type 00 model won’t go into production for sale to the public since it’s a concept car. But it gives a hint at the new direction of the historic automaker, which has seen falling sales and is losing money on every car sold. Jaguar’s rebrand – which, after revealed, Chief Creative Officer Gerry McGovern told journalists: “[We have] not been sniffing the white stuff, this is real” – involves axing its entire product line and rebooting itself as a luxury EV-only company competing with the likes of Bentley and Porsche. The rebrand has divided opinion, but, per Jaguar, that’s exactly what it’s designed to do.

Reading is cool again, and it's all thanks to BookTok.

The reading resurgence started in 2020, when most people were stuck at home needing to fill their time with simple hobbies. Today, the #booktok hashtag has 243+ billion views on TikTok, and is one of the biggest and most powerful subcommunities on the app.

• A 2023 survey found the average US TikTok user reported reading 60% more books compared to before their exposure to BookTok.
• In addition, 62% of US TikTok users have read at least one book recommended to them on the platform.

Case in point: Fiction writer Colleen Hoover may be the best example of the almighty power of BookTok. Although her novel It Ends With Us was published in 2016, it became the bestselling book of 2021 after someone posted a TikTok review that went viral. 4+ million copies were sold worldwide.

Bookstores love the trend. Many have created dedicated “BookTok” shelves featuring popular online titles front and center. However, critics argue this results in the same tropes and genres being recommended repeatedly, leading to a lack of general literary analysis and diversity of genres in popular culture.

🤑 Zoom out: The TikTok commerce engine goes brrrr – both off platform and on. TikTok Shop is expected to facilitate $50 billion in sales this year, more than double the dollar value of items sold on the marketplace in 2023.

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• ☝️ 🖼️ Jasleen Kaur won the 2024 Turner Prize, an annual award given to an up-and-coming visual artist from Great Britain.

BUSINESS & MARKETS

in partnership with Tuft & Needle

• 📊 US markets closed mixed (S&P: +0.05%; Dow: -0.2%; Nasdaq: +0.4%).
• 🤔 Enron, the defunct energy company synonymous with corporate fraud, has seemingly been resurrected as a joke. |🍸 Vodka-maker Stoli Group filed for bankruptcy in the US.
• 💼 Cargill, America's biggest private company, is laying off ~8,000 people, or 5% of its workforce. | 💳 BlackRock is buying private credit manager HPS Investment Partners for $12 billion.

*From our partners: 💤 Bring innovation to your nightly routine with great deals… Don’t miss Tuft & Needle’s Cyber Week Sale including 30% off pillows, protectors, toppers, duvet inserts, percale bedding, hemp bedding, quilts, and Snooz White Noise Machines. Save at Tuft & Needle here until Dec. 6th.

SPORTS, MEDIA & ENTERTAINMENT

• 🏈 Amazon’s Black Friday NFL game between the Chiefs and Raiders drew an audience of 13.5 million, a 41% increase from the company’s first such broadcast last year.
• 🥊 Israel Vázquez, three-time world boxing champion from Mexico, died at 46 from cancer.
• 🍿 A24's A Different Man won Best Feature at the Gotham Awards; see a full list of winners from the event.

SCIENCE, SPACE & EMERGING TECH

in partnership with Nuts.com

• 🦠🧠 Bacteria can thrive in the brains of healthy vertebrates (fish, specifically), per a new study; there’s currently conflicting evidence regarding whether human brains have microbiomes.
• ☄️ A small asteroid burned up over Siberia last night, sparking a natural light show for local residents.
• 🌌🔭 NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope recently discovered five galaxy candidates dating to just 200 million years after the Big Bang, making them the earliest ever detected.

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MISCELLANEOUS

• ⚖️ A Florida woman who pleaded guilty to leading a ~$200 million Ponzi scheme was sentenced to 20 years in prison.
• 🇺🇦🇷🇺 Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has indicated he would accept a cease-fire with Russia and allow ~20% of Ukraine to remain under Russian control in exchange for his country obtaining NATO membership.
• 🇨🇳 China banned the export of several rare minerals to the US in response to recent American sanctions limiting semiconductor-related exports to China.

CLICKBAIT

• 🤔👽 12 strange reasons humans haven't found alien life yet.

🍿 Stat of the Day: Add family friendly movies next to low-rise jeans on the list of things making a resurgence in 2024. PG-rated films have made up ~33% of ticket sales at the domestic box office this year, the highest percentage since 1995, according to Axios. But while the box office is losing its edge, it’s not losing its edge – the recent record five-day Thanksgiving weekend was powered by PG-rated films Moana 2 ($221 million) and Wicked ($118 million), while the animated Inside Out 2 set multiple records in its $155 million domestic debut earlier this year. The only R-rated film to reach the top 10 in domestic ticket sales so far this year has been Disney's Deadpool & Wolverine.

🤔 Did You Know? In the early 1900s, Danes living under Prussian rule were outlawed from displaying the red-and-white Danish flag – so a group of separatist farmers secretly bred pigs to display a similar color pattern as the banned flag, called the “Danish Protest Pigs.”

📰 Worth a Read: How the world’s biggest laser smashed a nuclear-fusion record → (Nature)

Duncan McCabe spent ten months running around the same few Toronto neighborhoods for multiple hours a day. 

But he wasn't training for a marathon. No, Duncan had a different goal in mind with his demanding runs – create GPS art of a cartoon stick figure dancing. 

🏃 And that he did. The finished product is a 30-second video of a hat-wearing stick figure boogying to the song “Purple Hat" on a map of Toronto. It took Duncan 120 runs to complete.

📈 Follow along: With the Robin Hood Foundation Pick-A-Ticker Stock Investing Contest, where some of the biggest names in finance are competing in a stock-picking contest for charity.

🥒 Rock salt can kick rocks: According to Jalopnik, which suggests using pickle brine as a road de-icer instead.

🎁 ‘Tis the season: The best holiday movies to stream on Netflix, Disney+, and more.

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What are the three most-popular TV shows of 2024? (Source: IMDb)

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1. True Detective
2. The Boys
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