Good morning. In this edition:

• 📝 New 2024 Election postmortem
• 💧 Water from thin air
• 🧠 Is your brain aging faster than you?

…and much more.

Ready, Set, Go: Today’s news should be a ~4.36-minute read (1,159 words).

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"Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear – not absence of fear."

–Mark Twain (1835-1910)

“Artificial intelligence” and “successful entrepreneur” wouldn’t overlap on a Vend Diagram, according to a recent experiment performed by Anthropic that gave an AI agent complete control over an office vending machine to test how well it performed as a business owner.

The agent, Claudius, a version of the company’s Claude chatbot, decided what to stock, how to price its inventory, and how to reply to customers, whom it interacted with via an email address (really a Slack channel containing Anthropic employees).

If you give AI a vending machine

…things will often go off the rails. In the experiment, Claudius:

• Refused a customer’s offer to give it $100 for a six-pack of Irn-Bru, a Scottish soft-drink that can be purchased online for $15.
• Hallucinated a Venmo account, resulting in customers sending money to the wrong place.
• Became obsessed with tungsten metal cubes after one customer’s suggestion to stock them.
• Forgot it was an LLM for a while, telling employees and Anthropic security it would deliver products “in person” while wearing a blue blazer and red tie. Then, after realizing its mistake and that it was actually April Fool’s Day—this coincidentally occurred on/around April 1, 2025—tried to pass that off as an excuse for its identity crisis (the robot version of “i WaS jUsT jOkInG gEeZe”).

A counterintuitive conclusion: While Claudius successfully identified certain suppliers and pivoted several times based on customer suggestions, Anthropic says it ultimately wouldn’t hire the AI agent if it had the goal of building a vending machine empire to rival Smokey’s in F is For Family. But that could soon change. The team says many of the model's mistakes could be corrected by tweaking the underlying system prompts and adding easier-to-use business tools, and predicts AI middle managers could plausibly be on the horizon.

In fact…Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, told Axios in May that AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs in the next one to five years.

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President Trump’s victory over former VP Kamala Harris in the 2024 election was fueled by gains among key pillars of the Democratic Party’s voting coalition, according to a new in-depth study from Pew Research that matched all ~9,000 survey respondents to their official voter registration records to reveal new details about the makeup of each party’s voters:

• Trump almost won the Latino vote. Harris beat Trump by a 51%-48% margin among Hispanic voters, a stark difference from Biden's 61%-36% margin of victory in 2020. Trump’s showing among Latinos in 2024 was the best of any GOP candidate in the modern era (dating back to 1960), per Axios.
• Black voters also moved towards Trump. Between 2020 and 2024, Trump nearly doubled his support among Black voters—though that only amounted to 15% in 2024, compared to 83% for Harris.
• Trump made further gains among men. Men voted for Trump by a 55%-43% margin, up from 50%-48% in 2020. Trump also narrowly beat Harris among men under 50, a major shift from 2020 when they favored Biden by 10 points.

We’ll see what happens…The 2026 midterms will reveal how Trump’s performance in his second term as President, as well as the Democrats’ performance and campaign strategy, has impacted the ongoing shift in political affiliations across America. Trump’s approval rating among Latino voters has fallen significantly since he took office, according to multiple polls.

MIT researchers have developed a new bubble wrap-like device that can produce clean drinking water out of thin air in some of the harshest conditions on Earth—all without requiring an external power source.

How it works: The device is made from a highly water-absorbant material called hydrogel that’s encased between two layers of glass.

• At night, the hydrogel absorbs water from the surrounding air. The water evaporates during the day, condensing on the cooler glass, where it then drips down to a collection system.

The device is making a splash

Until now, all attempts at harvesting water from thin air have been limited by a very low rate of water production (a few milliliters/day), and the risk of contamination from high levels of salt, lithium, or other materials used for the harvesting.

But when the new MIT device was tested in Death Valley, California—one of the driest places on Earth—it successfully extracted between 0.3-0.7 cups/day of safe-to-drink water.

• While that isn’t enough to sustain a person, let alone an entire household, the harvesters are small enough to set up multiple panels in one spot.
• They’ll also collect more water in places with higher humidity.

Big picture: ~26% of the world’s population lacks direct access to safe drinking water, according to a 2023 UN report.

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BUSINESS & MARKETS

• 📈 S&P 500 and Nasdaq reach fresh all-time highs. | Oracle stock closes at record high after $30 billion/year cloud deal revealed in SEC filing. | Robinhood begins offering tokenized shares of OpenAI and SpaceX to users in Europe; shares rise ~13% to new all-time high.
• 🥸 US DOJ announces one arrest and charges against nine others in alleged scheme where North Koreans used stolen identities to gain employment at ~100 US firms.
• 🏡 Home Depot purchases building-products distributor GMS for $4.3 billion, as the retailer moves to make inroads with contractors and other home pros.

SPORTS, MEDIA & ENTERTAINMENT

in partnership with Dunhill Travel Deals

• 🏀 WNBA announces three new expansion teams coming to Cleveland, Detroit, and Philly; brings the league to a record 18 franchises, up from 12 in 2023.
• 📱 President Trump tells Fox News that he’s found a “group of very wealthy people” who want to buy TikTok’s US operations; will reveal their identities “in about two weeks.”
• ⚖️ Jury deliberating in Sean "Diddy" Combs’ sex-trafficking trial; note sent to judge indicating issue with one of the jurors failing to follow instructions; see live updates.

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SCIENCE, SPACE & EMERGING TECH

• 🚀 NASA will livestream rocket launches on Netflix starting this summer.
• 👚 Google releases Doppl, a new experimental app that uses AI to let you virtually try on clothes.
• 💊 Engineers develop smart pill that can monitor glucose, temperature, serotonin levels, and more after ingestion; approach may provide a cheap method for real-time monitoring of gut health.

US, WORLD & POLITICS

in partnership with Kidpreneurs

• 💰 The Supreme Court agreed to hear a GOP-backed challenge to campaign finance restrictions.
• 🎓 Trump admin says its federal investigation found Harvard University violated its Jewish students’ civil rights; US officials threaten to withhold all federal funding unless Harvard makes changes.
• ⚖️ Bryan Kohberger agrees to plead guilty to all counts in the 2022 murders of four University of Idaho students; plea deal involves four consecutive life sentences, but spares the death penalty. | The suspected shooter who ambushed a group of firefighters on the job in northern Idaho was found dead after an hours-long manhunt; he was identified as a 20-year-old man.

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☝️ A handwritten copy of the 13th Amendment was sold for $13.7 million to billionaire Ken Griffin, marking a new record for any document signed by President Lincoln. Griffin also bought a rare copy of the Emancipation Proclamation—also signed by Lincoln—at the same Sotheby’s auction for $4.4 million.

🤔 Did You Know? The first widely sold car rearview mirror wasn’t intended as a safety feature, but rather marketed as a “Cop-Spotter” to help drivers avoid the fuzz.

📰 Worth a Read: Is your brain aging faster than you? New science offers clues

🖱️ Clickbait: The world's most beautiful restaurants of 2025

Yesterday we covered Friday’s 6-3 Supreme Court ruling that imposed new limits on the ability of lower courts to issue nationwide injunctions, which pause federal policies from taking effect nationwide.

❓ Our question to you: In general, do you agree with SCOTUS’ decision to impose new limits on lower courts’ ability to issue nationwide injunctions?

• Yes: 46%
• No: 40%
• Unsure/other: 14%

Click here to read some of the most thoughtful longform responses.

+Note on sample size: We received 1,846 votes and 202 longform responses.

🍔 Trivia: Which fast food chain was founded by Glen Bell in 1962?

🦘 True or false? Kangaroos can’t hop backwards.

🤡 Riddle me this: What can you hold without ever touching?

🏠 Trinbagonian farmer Rahaman-Noronha is employing building styles that provide resilience against the island's changing climate. His construction materials help keep things cool while providing residents an opportunity to connect with their natural surroundings.

💸 It took David Clarke 10 years to decide what to do with the ~$122,000 he inherited from his late mother. He put the decision into the hands of his neighbors, blindly mailing 600 letters and using their responses to make the decision. He ended up splitting the money across four charities.

⛰️ Mind Over Mountains is an organization that hosts free well-being walks and low-cost weekend retreats to address depression, grief, and other mental health issues. Check it out here.

+Note: These stories previously appeared in a January 2025 edition of Positive DONUT, our weekly newsletter surfacing all the good things you don't hear about in the news.

🍔 Trivia: Taco Bell

🦘 T/F: True

🤡 Riddle: A conversation (or a tune)