Our very own Mark Dent wrote a book about one of the world’s best athletes, and it’s available starting today! If you want to be entertained by a story about NFL quarterback Patrick Mahomes, football, and how American cities became the way they are — or if you just feel like showing some love to one of our writers — you should totally buy a copy.
In today’s email:
Have an ice day: Luxe ice cubes are taking off online.
“Bachelorette” business: Do contestants’ jobs impact their odds of finding love?
Feel the rhythm? A backpack that lets you feel music.
Around the Web: A very complicated art project, the real story behind a lost dino museum, the perfect playlist, and more.
👇 Listen: Put yourself on a slippery slope toward buying a $500+ ice maker.
The big idea
On the rocks, please: Luxury ice is in
Americans are looking to cool off in style with high-end ice cubes.
2023-08-22T00:00:00Z
Sara Friedman
If you’ve ever been the friend in charge of bringing ice to a BBQ, you know that people are serious about their frozen water.
Like, really serious: In a 2020 Bosch survey, 51% of Americans reported being “ice obsessed.”
But gone are the days of cloudy gas station cubes — upscale ice is having its moment in our glasses and on our social feeds.
And businesses are ready to help customers cool off:
Disco Cubes makes custom ice — etched and filled with fruit and flowers — for corporate events and private parties.
Lux Ice sells clear, slow-melting spheres by the bagful.
In addition to cubes, Okamoto offers ice sculptures, live ice carving for events, and ice team-building activities.
Plus, an endless online array of silicon molds lets shoppers get their heart, flower, and diamond-shaped ice cube fix delivered.
Why the freeze?
Many — when not hunched over sourdough starters — tried their hands at bartending during the height of the pandemic with upgraded equipment and Zoom cocktail classes.
Plus, popular appliance brands have capitalized on the fad, bringing pricey ice solutions home:
GE’s $500+ nugget ice maker is a social media darling.
Meltdown’s ice ball press starts at a cool $1k and promises perfect spheres.
LG has developed refrigerator models with “craft ice” capabilities.
And, like all other trends…
… TikTok had something to do with it.
The hashtag #icetok has amassed 1.6B+ views, with videos ranging from ice drawer restocks to powder ice recipes.
The icing on top? Record-breaking heat has people searching for new ways to cool down.
If you’re still questioning how much people care about their cubes: Our country nearly split in two when Starbucks announced its switch to nugget ice.
Looking to buy a new car in the US? Expect to pay up. The $19.2k Mitsubishi Mirage is the only model priced under $20k — for now. It’s reportedly being discontinued, so let’s all expect Americans’ average new-car costs, now up to $48k+, to keep climbing.
SNIPPETS
Meta is upping “accountability” for its return-to-office plans, threatening termination for employees who do not show up in person at least three days a week.
Meanwhile… Meta will make it easier to waste away a day spent sitting at a desk, with a web version of its X/Twitter rival Threads expected to launch this week, though Instagram head Adam Mosseri said it was “a little bit buggy” as of Friday.
Today in AI: Singapore topped LinkedIn’s list of fastest countries to adopt AI skills. Joining Singapore in the top five are Finland, Ireland, India, and Canada.
The Biden administration announced $667m in new federal funding to expand high-speed broadband access in rural areas that lack “sufficient” internet speeds, defined as at least 100 Mbps down and 20 Mbps up.
Russia’sLuna-25 spacecraft crashed into the moon while en route to the moon’s south pole on a water-finding mission. This was the country’s first attempt at a lunar landing since 1976.
Let’s-a retire: Mario and Luigi voice actor Charles Martinet is retiring after ~30 years, but will become Ninentendo’s Mario Ambassador, traveling the world to share “the joy of Mario.”
Today’s reminder to reset your passwords comes from a former NBA employee who slammed the league on its own Facebook page, claiming it has social media staff working 14-hour shifts without breaks, all for sub-$50k take-home pay.
In a sorry state: Hundreds of financial firms have left New York and California over the last three years and now Bloomberg News has added up the toll: each state lost companies that collectively manage ~$1T of assets.
Digital marketing 101: Cop this free, textbook-classic ebook to learn how to use emails, SEO, paid ads, and competitive analysis to grow a balanced business.
The problem: There’s too much carbon and invasive seaweed in our oceans. The answer (according to this startup): Seaweed-sinking robots.
Rose Resumes
Zachary Crockett
The most (and least) likely jobs on ‘The Bachelorette’
Since debuting in 2003, “The Bachelorette” has featured 523 contestants, all introduced via a pop-up box containing their name, location, age, and occupation.
On occasion, probably at the behest of the show’s producers, contestants put ridiculous stuff for their job title in a bid to get attention — meatball enthusiast, tickle monster, amateur sex coach, etc.
This most recent season, which ended in dramatic fashion last night, had three top finalists that were a little less odd — tennis coach, integrative medicine specialist, software salesman — but still a pretty random conglomerate of professionals.
That got us thinking: Are certain professions more heavily represented than others? And historically, do contestants’ job titles affect their success rates on the show?
To find out, we analyzed the jobs and outcome of every contestant across 19 seasons of “The Bachelorette.”
You may have felt a little magic the first time you tried ChatGPT. OpenAI’s intelligent tech gave us civilians a glimpse into our highly efficient future — where people can truly communicate with and commandeer data sets.
Aliisa Rosenthal spearheads OpenAI’s sales team and led them through the legendary flood that inevitably goes down as one of the all-time greatest growth case studies.
But what happens when awareness spins out of control, and you actually have to scale back sales? And say that so happens to be your very first task, as sales leader at a world-breaking company?
Hear Aliisa break down her moves on this slice of The Science of Scaling.
Music: Not Impossible makes backpacks and devices that allow users to feel up to 24 different sounds at once as vibrations.
2023-08-22T00:00:00Z
Juliet Bennett Ryla
People talk about feeling the music all the time, but one company wants you to really feel it.
Music: Not Impossible, an offshoot of tech company Not Impossible Labs, produces backpacks and devices that translate music into vibrations.
How it works
Haptic feedback is the use of touch to communicate. For example:
A video game controller that vibrates when your character is hit
Your phone buzzing when you “click” a button
You may have even worn a haptic vest in a VR or laser tag arcade. Music: Not Impossible uses a backpack, plus ankle and wrist bands, that receive vibrations in sync with music, per The New York Times.
But it wasn’t easy to make
Musician and Music: Not Impossible’s “Chief Vibrational Officer” Daniel Belquer spent over a year perfecting the tech, which at first was bulky and often lagged.
Collaborator Jay Alan Zimmerman, a deaf composer and musician, told NYT it felt like a bunch of cell phones going off randomly.
Now, however, users can feel up to 24 sounds at a time on different parts of their bodies. And they’re not all the same vibration, but 3.9k different frequencies across five octaves.
While anyone can enjoy the tech…
… the company specifically worked with members of the deaf community to create an inclusive experience for those users. One woman toldNPR that due to an auditory processing disorder, she never knows if she hears what other people do, “so it’s amazing to get those subtleties in my body.”
But another user told NYT that he didn’t want the packs to replace sign language interpreters for lyrics.
The company also requires that tickets to events offering the devices — which have included venues like NYC’s Lincoln Center — remain free for those who are deaf or hard of hearing.
AROUND THE WEB
😲 On this day: In 564, an Irish priest named Columba (later known as St. Columba) reported the first sighting of the Loch Ness Monster in Scotland’s Loch Ness, according to some historians.
🎶 How to: Craft the perfect playlist, according to Laura Ohls, Spotify’s rock & alternative senior editor.
🦕 That’s interesting: For over a century, people thought William “Boss” Tweed destroyed Central Park’s Victorian dinosaur museum. It was actually a very weird lawyer who also wrecked a whale skeleton.
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