Good morning.

It's Tuesday, August 25, and August is officially entering its final lap, which means the back-to-school ads have shifted from gentle suggestion to full psychological warfare. Every drugstore is now 80% notebooks and 20% regret.

There's also a very specific late-August energy in the air — half the office is still tan and pretending to remember their passwords, the other half never left and is quietly furious about it. 

Anyway, squeeze out these last few days of pretending summer isn't ending, and let's get into it.

Today’s stories:

Stocks were little changed Monday night after a weaker session, as investors turned cautious ahead of Nvidia earnings and a key inflation report later this week.

During regular trading, the S&P 500 fell 0.28% and the Nasdaq dropped 0.76% as chip and tech stocks weighed on the market. The Dow bucked the trend, gaining 140 points, or 0.26%.

Treasury yields moved lower after reports that the Treasury Department could tap its $1 trillion General Account to support increased government bond purchases. The 10-year yield fell more than 3 basis points to 4.7%.

For now, investors are mostly waiting. Nvidia reports Wednesday after the bell, while July’s PCE inflation data lands the same day.

Translation: Wall Street has two reasons to be nervous, and both arrive Wednesday.

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YouTube is reportedly offering top creators millions of dollars to stay exclusive and skip Netflix, which has been aggressively poaching talent like Kill Tony, with Alan Chikin Chow, Nick DiGiovanni, and Hot Ones apparently in talks too. The money sounds nice, but the real leverage is the threat underneath it: creators who partner with Netflix anyway reportedly risk getting sidelined from YouTube marketing, dropped from event invites, and cut off from brand deal revenue, which is corporate-speak for "we will quietly make your career harder without technically doing anything illegal." YouTube wants first-window exclusivity so it stays the default home for creator content, since split releases dilute the ad value it can sell, while creators just want what anyone wants when two platforms are throwing money at them: to take both checks. The bigger picture is that streaming fragmentation, the exact thing that turned "what app is this on" into a universal complaint, is now coming for creator content too, meaning your favorite YouTuber's next big project might quietly require yet another subscription to actually watch.

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Harvard's biggest stock bet is now SpaceX. Harvard Management Co. revealed that SpaceX is now its single largest stock holding, with the university sitting on just under 13 million shares worth more than $2.2 billion, a stake that only became public knowledge because SpaceX itself went public back in June. Harvard, like a handful of other universities, quietly invested while SpaceX was still private, and now everyone gets to see exactly how big that bet was, which is a fun surprise for anyone who assumed Harvard's endowment was mostly boring index funds and old money. The timing is a little chaotic, though: SpaceX stock has been on a rollercoaster all August, dipping below $105 and nearly touching $150 in the same month, so Harvard's $2.2 billion valuation is basically a snapshot of a stock that refuses to sit still. Shares closed last week around $140, above the IPO price but still below where they first started trading, meaning Harvard's prized new holding is currently doing exactly what every finance department warns undergrads about: being extremely volatile.

Google just bought Spirit's emails for $10 million. Spirit Airlines, which stopped flying entirely back in May, just sold its internal data to Google for $10 million as part of its bankruptcy sell-off, meaning emails, HR records, bookings, and frequent flyer info are all headed toward Google's AI training pipeline. The data's supposedly been stripped of anything personally identifiable, so nobody's individual seat complaint email should surface in a chatbot response, though "supposedly" is doing some work in that sentence. Google says it's just an "enterprise dataset" to help improve its products, which is corporate-speak for "we bought a company's entire digital corpse." Another AI firm bid $7.5 million and lost, so apparently dead airline data is a competitive market now. What's actually unusual here isn't the bankruptcy — plenty of airlines fail — it's that Spirit didn't get absorbed by a competitor like every other airline collapse in the past 25 years. It just stopped, full stop, and instead of another airline picking up the pieces, Google picked up the paperwork.

Hugging Face might sell for $13 billion. Hugging Face has reportedly been approached about a sale at a $13 billion valuation or higher, according to Business Insider, nearly tripling the $4.5 billion price tag it fetched back in 2023. No deal is confirmed yet, but the company is apparently talking to banks to help sort through offers, which is usually a sign that "we're not selling" is more of a soft maybe than a hard no. The timing is a little ironic, given Hugging Face was recently the victim of an OpenAI system that broke out of its testing sandbox and hacked its servers, so the company somehow went from cybersecurity cautionary tale to hot acquisition target within the same news cycle. CEO Clem Delangue has been publicly emphasizing the startup's "responsibility" to its developer community and preference for long-term sustainability over quick cash, which is exactly the kind of statement executives make right before either turning down an offer or accepting one for an amount that makes long-term principles suddenly negotiable. Notably, the company already rejected a $500 million investment from Nvidia earlier this year at a lower $7 billion valuation, specifically because it didn't want one dominant investor calling the shots, so whoever's circling now will need a very convincing pitch, or just a very large number.

American Airlines finally adds seatback screens. American Airlines is finally bringing back seatback screens, over a decade after ripping the idea out in favor of "just use your phone," and the new 4K displays will start showing up on new Boeing and Airbus deliveries in 2028, with full fleet installation not wrapping until the early 2030s, so don't hold your breath for your next flight. The airline's chief customer officer admitted the old logic simply hasn't aged well, which is corporate speak for "we were wrong, and it took us ten years and a profit gap to admit it." That gap is real: American posted $71 million in profit last quarter, compared to United's $805 million and Delta's $1.6 billion, numbers that explain exactly why American suddenly cares about customer satisfaction generating revenue. The rest of the plan leans hard into premium seating — more first class, more extra legroom, refurbished business suites on its Dreamliners — because coach passengers apparently aren't where the money is, given a JFK-to-Dallas round trip runs $447 in coach versus $1,161 in first class. So the strategy is basically: charge more for the front of the plane, and eventually, several years from now, give everyone else something to stare at besides the seatback in front of them.

Merck and Moderna's personalized cancer vaccine, paired with Merck's immunotherapy Keytruda, hit its main goals in a Phase 3 trial of over 1,100 melanoma patients, significantly extending the time patients stayed cancer-free compared to Keytruda alone. Investors reacted like it was the best news of the decade: Merck's stock jumped 12%, while Moderna's soared 177%, reflecting just how much smaller and more desperate Moderna's $25 billion market cap was heading into the announcement compared to Merck's $333 billion. The vaccine works by mapping the unique mutations in each patient's specific tumor and training the immune system to hunt them down, which is a genuinely clever approach after decades of "one-size-fits-all" cancer treatment mostly meaning "we'll try this and hope." Melanoma is a good proving ground since it's rare among skin cancers but disproportionately deadly, and most recurrences hit within the first few years post-surgery, so extending that cancer-free window matters a lot. The companies are also testing the same approach on lung, bladder, and kidney cancers, so this isn't just a one-off win — it's Moderna trying to prove that the mRNA technology that made it famous during COVID wasn't a one-trick pandemic pony after all.

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Walmart finally discovers tap-to-pay. Walmart is finally rolling out tap-to-pay, including Apple Pay and Google Pay, at select stores and Sam's Club locations starting Monday, ending years of forcing customers to fumble through QR code scans via Walmart Pay like it's still 2015. The company says it's all about giving customers "choice," which is a generous way of describing catching up to technology every other major retailer adopted roughly a decade ago. Walmart isn't saying which stores get it first, but plans to have it everywhere by year-end, with gas stations trailing behind until mid-2027, because apparently pumping gas is the last frontier of payment innovation. This has been one of Walmart's stranger holdouts — pushing its own proprietary scan systems instead of just letting people tap their phone like a normal human being — so consider this less a big leap forward and more Walmart finally admitting the QR code experiment didn't need to last this long.

You can now Lyme-test a tick at home. LymeAlert just launched the first at-home test that tells you whether a tick that bit you was actually carrying Lyme disease, and the process involves crushing the tick yourself, grinding it up in a solution, and reading a test strip in 30 minutes, which is either empowering or deeply unsettling depending on how you feel about DIY parasite forensics. The kit costs $49.99, ships end of August, and was created by a physician assistant who got tired of patients constantly asking "can you test the tick" and realizing the honest answer was usually "not easily, and not fast." Right now, testing a tick means mailing it to a lab and waiting days, assuming you even noticed the bite in the first place, since more than half of tick bites go completely unnoticed. The company's hope is fewer people get put on "just in case" antibiotics, a habit doctors already admit isn't great medicine and is quietly fueling antibiotic resistance. The CDC still doesn't officially recommend testing ticks at all, citing accuracy concerns and the fact that a negative result doesn't guarantee you're clear, so this isn't a replacement for actual medical care, just a faster way to get useful information before your doctor's appointment. Next up, apparently: a multiplex strip that tests for multiple tick-borne diseases at once, so someday you can crush one bug and get a full diagnostic report, which is either the future of preventive health or the plot of a horror movie, hard to say yet.

Scientists turned plastic into a cookie. Researchers at Southern Illinois University created a cookie called µBites made partly from recycled plastic, using a process that breaks PET plastic and agricultural waste down into their basic carbon building blocks with heat, pressure, water, and oxygen, then feeds that liquid to engineered yeast strains that convert it into actual food components like proteins, fats, vitamins, and flavorings. The project started as part of NASA's Deep Space Food Challenge, with the idea being that these portable units could someday produce food on-demand in submarines, disaster zones, or eventually Mars, which is a genuinely cool use case dressed up in a genuinely horrifying description. The raw output before all the yeast engineering reportedly tastes about as good as cardboard, so scientists had to essentially build flavor and nutrition back in from scratch, meaning your future emergency-ration cookie is less "baked good" and more "heavily processed plastic byproduct wearing a cookie costume." Given that we're already unknowingly eating microplastics in basically everything, maybe the real twist here is that eating plastic on purpose, with actual quality control, ends up being the safer option.

Two more ancient species are in your genome. Scientists identified traces of two previously unknown ancient hominin species tucked inside modern human DNA, one that interbred directly with Homo sapiens more than 50,000 years ago, and another whose genetic material only reached us secondhand, through Denisovans, more than 200,000 years ago, essentially making it humanity's genetic great-great-grandparent nobody's ever actually met. We already knew our DNA carries bits of Neanderthal and Denisovan ancestry, with most non-African people carrying 1-2% Neanderthal DNA and some Asian and Oceanic populations carrying up to 5% Denisovan DNA, but this study is the first to map exactly where these two "ghost" species' contributions sit in our genome and when they got there. The wildest part is that researchers pulled this off using only present-day human DNA, no ancient bones or fossils required, essentially reconstructing relatives we've never physically found any trace of, purely by reading the genetic fingerprints they left behind in us. So somewhere out there, two entire species lived, died, and left no skeleton, no cave painting, nothing — except a permanent, undeniable signature quietly sitting inside your own cells.

A nonprofit called Gotham Whale just documented the 500th humpback whale identified in New York waters, tracking each one by its tail fluke, which is apparently as unique as a fingerprint, so somewhere there's a very detailed whale ID database that nobody asked for but everyone should appreciate. The bigger story here isn't really a cute milestone, it's a symptom: before 2018, the group spotted maybe 10 to 30 whales a year, and now it's up to 100, because warming ocean temperatures up in New England and Canada are pushing whales south into New York's waters, which is a very on-brand way for New York to end up with more of something everyone else didn't want. So congratulations to the city on gaining a genuinely impressive marine wildlife population.

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NYC's next giant public art piece. High Line Art released 62 proposals for its next two big public art commissions, set to loom over Tenth Avenue in 2029 and 2030, and the shortlist reads like a fever dream: giant fruit, fragmented bodies, glowing signage, and a clock that's permanently stuck at 88:88. Kathleen Ryan's proposing a jewel-encrusted apple core the size of a small building, while Ali Cherri went with a bowl of oversized bronze apples visibly rotting, because apparently the theme of the season is "the Big Apple, but make it existential." Kelly Akashi wants to blow up two doilies into a 25-foot rusted steel walkway, turning grandma's table decoration into actual load-bearing public infrastructure. Laure Prouvost's entry is a seven-armed terrazzo figure holding a clementine, a flag, and an infant, which sounds less like a sculpture and more like a very specific fever. And Ryan Gander's contributing a fluorescent digital clock that never tells the correct time, on purpose, presumably so commuters can finally have a public monument as confused about the passage of time as they are. Nothing here arrives before 2029, so New Yorkers have a few years to prepare for a skyline that includes a giant decomposing apple.

Nike wants you to sprint for rent money. Nike is hosting a 100-meter street race in New York on August 29, offering the two fastest finishers up to $4,000, marketed as "one month of rent paid," which is a genuinely fun stunt until you check what rent actually costs in the city where the race is happening. Median rent for a market-rate Manhattan apartment hit $5,000 last month, meaning the fastest sprinter in New York could still come up $1,000 short on their own victory lap. 

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TikTok of the day: watch here

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