Good morning. In this edition:

• 🧠 Scientific limit to friendship
• 🤝 Gaza peace deal
• 🧑‍⚖️ Using ChatGPT in court

…and much more.

Ready, Set, Go: Today’s news should be a ~3.74-minute read (996 words).

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“It is our choices that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.”

–Albus Dumbledore (1881-1997)

Travelers across America are dealing with some serious turbulence, for reasons that have nothing to do with the weather.

Staffing shortages at US airports have caused thousands of flight delays this week, as effects from the US government shutdown, now in its ninth day, are being felt across the country.

• Delays due to a lack of air traffic controllers were reported this week at airports in Boston, Burbank, Chicago, Denver, Houston, Las Vegas, Nashville, Newark, Philadelphia, and Phoenix.
• The FAA also said staffing triggers were in effect for a dozen major US airports this week, meaning the agency reduced the number of flights in and out to adjust for lower-than-ideal staffing levels.

Delays are likely tied to the gov’t shutdown

Air traffic controllers across the US are currently working without pay because of the ongoing shutdown, leading to a “slight tick up” in sick calls since the shutdown began, according to Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy.

And since America has experienced air traffic controller staffing shortages for years—made worse by insufficient hiring, long training timelines, and high dropout rates—even a small number of sick calls can lead to widespread travel delays across the country.

But things are looking up. The fallout from air traffic controller shortages appears to have entered a controlled descent. While a combined ~10,000 flights were delayed on Monday and Tuesday, largely due to staffing issues, there were just ~3,600 flights delayed across the US yesterday, according to Flight Aware.

Zoom out: The Senate rejected dueling Republican and Democratic funding proposals to end the government shutdown for a sixth straight time yesterday, with no hint of progress toward a resolution. The GOP bill seeks to provide funding at current levels through late November, while Democrats are pushing for any funding bill to include health-care protections.

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Struggling to keep in touch with everyone from high school isn’t a character flaw—it’s a built-in scientific fact. That’s according to research and a newly published Wall Street Journal interview with British psychologist Robin Dunbar, who found the human brain has an upper limit of ~150 friendships (known as Dunbar’s number).

Background: The brain is the most power-hungry organ in the human body. It consumes ~20% of all energy despite making up just ~2% of body weight, an unusually wide gap among animals.

• Most of that power fuels the neocortex, the region of the brain responsible for memory, language, communication—and the delicate art of not saying the wrong thing in a group chat.
• Scientists think this oversized neocortex evolved to help humans manage complex social lives.

But even our big brains have limits

According to Dunbar, the human brain only has the capacity to maintain 150 friendships at once, with a breakdown as follows:

• 5 ride-or-dies (family, best friends)
• 10 additional close friends you see at least monthly
• 35 others in your “weekend barbecue crowd”
• 100 acquaintances that you’re happy to bump into

Bottom line: Even in the modern era of instant connectivity, Dunbar’s number still holds true. “If you look at the frequency of postings on social media, frequency of telephone calls, the frequency of face-to-face contacts, the frequency of texting, you see the same layers,” Dunbar told the WSJ.

BUSINESS & MARKETS

• 🏦 New Fed minutes from September reveal central bank officials were strongly inclined to lower interest rates, with the only dispute seeming to be over the number of future cuts this year.
• 💼 Alternative jobs data—attempting to fill in for the Bureau of Labor Statistics during the gov’t shutdown—show the US labor market is losing steam across the board.
• 🏢 Google places new limits on its “Work From Anywhere” employee policy enacted during the Covid pandemic.

SPORTS, MEDIA & ENTERTAINMENT

• 🎶 Taylor Swift’s The Life of a Showgirl breaks Adele’s 10-year-old record for most equivalent-unit album sales in its first week, with 3.5 million and counting.
• 📚 2025 National Book Awards announces 25 finalists across five categories, with the final winners announced November 19.
• 🏈 Stanford football receives $50 million donation from Bradford M. Freeman, a former player who graduated in 1964.

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SCIENCE, SPACE & EMERGING TECH

• 🏆 Nobel Prize in Chemistry awarded to international trio of scientists for developing a new form of molecular architecture that can store a large amount of gas in a tiny volume; discovery is likened to Hermione’s handbag in Harry Potter, with seemingly endless storage capacity.
• 🌬️ Martian dust devils seem to move much faster and are more abundant on a global scale compared to Earth, per a new analysis of 20 years’ worth of imagery by Mars orbiters.
• 🌌 Humanity may be among the first intelligent beings in the entire universe, according to new study; research notes the universe’s current star-forming era will extend ~10 trillion years after the Big Bang, yet humans exist in the first 0.1% of that window (13.8 billion years).

US, WORLD & POLITICS

• 🌍 Israel and Hamas have reached a deal for Israel to partially withdraw from Gaza, and for Hamas to release all remaining hostages, President Trump announced; it marks the first phase in Trump’s recently proposed peace plan. (Dive deeper: Gaza peace under consideration)
• 🔥 29-year-old man arrested in connection with starting the deadly Palisades Fire; the January blaze was one of most destructive and deadly wildfires in California history.
• 🗣️ Trump says Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson and Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker “should be in jail” in a social media post criticizing the two Democratic leaders for “failing to protect Ice Officers.”

☝️ More than 300 wildlife photographers recently donated their work to the 10th anniversary edition of “Remembering Wildlife.” The book series, created by British wildlife photographer Margot Raggett, has raised $1.5+ million for endangered species preservation efforts over the years.

🤔 Did you know? Jack-o’-lanterns got their start in Ireland, where people carved turnips—not pumpkins—to keep bad spirits away. The spooky custom was part of Samhain, a pagan festival marking the end of summer and the Celtic new year, which later evolved into Halloween.

📰 Worth a read: These people ditched lawyers for ChatGPT in court

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Yesterday we covered the two-year anniversary of the Gaza war, along with the details of a new President Trump-proposed peace plan—the broad outlines of which both Israel and Hamas have agreed to follow.

❓ Our question to you: In general, how do you feel about the 20-point peace plan under consideration by Israel and Hamas?

• Support: 62%
• Oppose: 9%
• Unsure/other: 29%

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

+Note on sample size: We received 749 votes and 67 longform responses.

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Budapest is the capital of which country? (Bonus points for guessing the names of the two cities that unified to form Budapest)

⛰️ One high school in Maine has started offering hikes instead of detentions to unruly students, and is seeing the positive effects on teens firsthand. 

Hungary, with the two cities formerly named Buda and Pest

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