Things look a little different around here today and it’s all your fault. Many of you kindly responded to our recent reader survey and told us what you wanted out of The Hustle. Some common threads emerged: a faster read, a more informative kickstart to your day, and all the funny, offbeat morsels we can muster. Well, we could never say no to your precious faces, so here we are.
🎧 On the pod:Billionaires keep trying to build “tech utopia” cities. It isn’t going great.
NEWS FLASH
🛒 The sad story of Kmart somehow gets sadder: Once a big-box chain of 2.3k+ stores, Kmart willbid farewell to its last full-size store. When the retailer’s Bridgehampton, New York, location closes next month, the only Kmart left will be in Miami, Florida. We said it gets sadder and we weren’t joking: The lone Miami store is crammed into its old garden department — Kmart sublets the majority of the space to another home goods brand.
👋 Sorry, it ain’t called the S&P 503: As part of its quarterly rebalancing, the S&P 500 addedthree new membersthis week with Palantir Technologies, Dell Technologies, and Erie Indemnity all joining the index. But when the Standard & Poor’s gods giveth, they must also taketh away: American Airlines, Etsy, and Bio-Rad Laboratories were ejected from the cool kids’ table and moved to other indexes better aligned to their current market caps. ⏰ TikTok’s new subscription program is here and it’s… basically just Patreon?: Expect to start seeing more appeals to subscribe on your TikTok feed — the preferred social platform of teens and brands that desperately want to be liked by teenslauncheda redesigned subscription program in select markets that’ll let eligible creators share exclusive content with paying subscribers.
MORE NEWS TO KNOW
The US Commerce Department proposed a ban on Chinese- and Russian-made car parts, specifically connected hardware and software, citing a threat to national security.
Cloudflareannounced a marketplace for website owners to sell AI providers permission to scrape their content, with tools to see why and when models are crawling their sites.
US billionaire Dan Friedkin, who already owns Italian soccer club AS Roma, will also buy English Premier League squad Everton F.C. pending regulatory approval.
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Finally, emoji will make it easier to say you’re eating beets while playing the harp
Emoji have revolutionized online communication, allowing us to transcend language barriers by using a picture of a taco instead of painstakingly typing out the word “taco.”
Next year, a new batch of emoji will do it all over again, especially if: your soul has been crushed, you live on a tiny island in the English Channel, and/or you enjoy root vegetables.
Who calls the shots on emoji?
The nonprofit Unicode Consortium oversees universal emoji standards.
That’s why Apple and Android devices have the same basic symbols — though each operating system determines what the symbols actually look like.
The organization is funded through emoji sponsorships (like putting your name on a brick at the zoo, but your money is used to maintain the database instead of buying another tire swing for pandas).
Buffalo Wild Wings sponsors the drumstick, Ballantine’s sponsors the whisky glass, and Red Lobster somehow found the money to sponsor the lobster.
Also, for some reason: Google sponsors the hamburger, the Oakland A’s have both the elephant and a tree, and someone named Scott Spears is writing checks he better be able to cash by putting his name on the eggplant.
The 2025 emoji…
… include a highly requested face with under-eye bags, plus a beet, a harp, and a shovel — perfect for saying, “Bring your harp to the beet field, I need to bury a body.”
Less obviously useful are the purple splatter and the fingerprint, but they’re a dream compared to the new flag and the leafless tree.
The flag is for Sark, one of the Channel Islands, known for outlawing cars and having no light pollution.
The tree, while seemingly a perfect pairing with spooky emoji like the bat, was actually introduced to raise awareness about droughts and climate change.
We can’t even put a fun button on this. That’s just a downer.
20 AI prompts worth using: And then reusing. Here’s your guide to getting to the point, for branding, campaigns, and landing pages.
We all have bad habits: Some of us bite our nails, some of us eat junk food, and some of us work in sales and exhibit tendencies that undermine us professionally — see nine examples of that last one.
DATA POINT
Sign on the dotted line: Even though hiring has cooled down, signing bonuses are heating up, perThe Wall Street Journal.
On job search site Indeed.com, nearly 4% of jobs listed in July advertised signing bonuses, up from 1.7% during the same period in 2019.
Some employers are using signing bonuses to lure candidates to hard-to-fill jobs. Jobs in health care — an industry still facing talent shortages — were most likely to advertise signing bonuses, with some reaching $100k.
AROUND THE WEB
📅 On this day: In 2016, the National Museum of African American History and Culture opened on the National Mall. Despite proposals dating back to 1915, the museum didn’t receive funding until 2003.
📸 That’s cool:See the winners of Nikon’s 14th annual Small World photo contest.
🎈 That’s interesting: Scientists finally figured out static electricity.
In the spirit of transparency, our reader survey revealed zero bad feelings about this section, so until someone launches a Toolbox rebellion, these tips and tricks are here to stay:
👁 Looking for inspiration: Winning at visual storytelling isn’t easy, but it’ll get a little easier when you scope out these great examples.
🔑 From broke to millions: Entrepreneur Isaac French shares how he journeyed from a $2k investment property to a $7m business renting cabins on Airbnb.
💪 Stay resilient:Some clutch tips for navigating failure and overcoming rejection on your way to building that unicorn.
WEIRD PATENTS
Bovine breakthrough: They say you shouldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth, but it could be really useful to look up a cow’s nose. In 2006, Markus Donald Herrema patented a “process for the utilization of ruminant animal methane emissions.” The system converts methane exhaled by ruminant animals (e.g., cows, sheep, goats) into a source of energy — not only curbing methane emissions, but also transforming a greenhouse gas into a useful resource.
SHOWER THOUGHT
Whether it’s an elevator or a lift, they both really only describe half of the story.SOURCE
