👋 You can do hard things. If you need a little inspiration, just look at Nigel Richards, the New Zealand man who won Scrabble’s Spanish-language world title even though he doesn’t speak Spanish. It’s not the first time — Richards has won the French-language Scrabble world championship twice despite not speaking French.
🎧 On the pod: A Macy’s employee’s snowballing mistake.
NEWS FLASH
🧳 No one wants to lose their luggage traveling for the holidays, but it might be getting slightly easier to get it back. United and Air Canada are partnering with Apple to launch its new Share Item Location feature. The tool lets AirTag users share a link to the location of their lost bag with the airline’s customer service system to, hopefully, locate the luggage faster. Location sharing is encrypted, can be stopped by the customer at any time, and automatically ends after seven days.
🍗 Spicy: BuzzFeed sold production company First We Feast — maker of the “Hot Ones” web series, where celebrities are interviewed while eating increasingly spicier chicken wings — for $82.5m to a fund led by George Soros and his family. BuzzFeed used the funds, plus cash on hand, to pay ~$90m of its $124m in debt. Soros’ son Alex has made several media deals in recent years, perBusiness Insider, including buying a minority stake in Crooked Media and a controlling stake in Audacy.
📚 AI for all: Harvard’s Institutional Data Initiative will release a dataset of ~1m public domain books that anyone can use to train AI models. It’s ~5x bigger than the dataset Meta’s Llama and other models used, and includes plays, fiction, poetry, dictionaries, and textbooks in multiple languages. The idea is to “level the playing field” among smaller researchers and startups that need training data, but lack access to the same repositories as Big Tech — though OpenAI and Microsoft are funding this effort.
MORE NEWS TO KNOW
Elon Musk’s net worth reached $400B, making him the first person to reach that mark. Musk — the richest person in the world — has seen his fortune increase 77% since Donald Trump’s presidential victory.
Warner Bros. Discovery shares jumped 15% Thursday morning after the company said it’s restructuring its business into a linear division — for its news, sports, scripted, and unscripted programming — and a streaming division for film studios, HBO, and Max.
Calendlylaid off 70 employees — 13% of its workforce — on Wednesday after laying off 60 in 2023. The startup was worth $3B in 2021, but has faced competition from Google and Microsoft’s new scheduling features.
TOOLBOX
Before you slam your laptop shut for the weekend, we have some links worth your time:
Scrambling to plan your team’s holiday party? Here are 21 hybrid and remote options that don’t suck.
Billion-dollar advice: HubSpot founder Dharmesh Shah dishes on going from $4/hour to a $1B net worth.
How can you tell a distraction from an opportunity?By learning what to look for.
THE BIG IDEA
Young people are returning to their rightful stomping grounds: The mall
Shopping malls were once the center of the universe for suburban teens, until the internet made it easier to shop and socialize from right at home.
But Gen Z is rejecting the online obsessions of Gen X and millennials by returning to the once-forsaken halls of shopping malls.
It’s part of…
… a general trend of shopping in person, rather than online, which has also contributed to the revival of bookstores.
The mall revival is a different beast, though.
Gen Z shoppers want items quicker, to spend time with their friends, and to share their shopping adventures on social media.
Nearly 63% of Gen Zers plan to shop at physical stores this holiday season, per CNBC, while only ~50% plan to use retailers’ apps and websites.
Take mall staple Abercrombie & Fitch: 60% of sales for its millennial-skewing mainline brand come digitally, but only 30% of sales for its Gen Z-friendly Hollister label are online.
Malls are courting these shoppers with more experiential offerings (mini golf, Instagram photo ops, etc.), plus hotter retailers that attract more attention than dying anchor stores.
Too online as it is
Gen Z was raised on the internet, even before covid killed a lot of in-person bonding experiences. Roberta Katz, a Stanford University researcher who studies Gen Z, suggests they want to embrace the real world’s advantages.
They have also become jaded by the digital retailers that supposedly “killed” malls the last time around.
39% of Gen Z shoppers are “tired of hearing about Amazon,” per data from research firm Mintel.
60% of Gen Z shoppers believe Amazon is “too powerful.”
Nearly 50% of Gen Z shoppers try to actively avoid Amazon, compared to 20% of boomers and 40% of millennials.
After growing up with the toothless smile on Amazon boxes and the cold sterility of Zoom classrooms, Gen Z seems happy to touch the proverbial grass.
If you want to build trust with customers — which you should — follow these important steps.
Did OpenAI make a huge mistake? Here’s what went wrong with Sora’s rollout.
NEWSWORTHY NUMBER
Sentences commuted by outgoing US President Joe Biden. This, plus 39 pardons, mark what the White House reports is the largest number of single-day commutations and clemencies. All who were pardoned committed “non-violent” crimes, and those who will have their sentences shortened have been on home confinement for at least one year.
The previous single-day record was held by President Barack Obama, who commuted 330 sentences in 2017 and, over his entire eight-year presidency, granted clemency 1,927 times.
Who granted the most clemencies? President Franklin D. Roosevelt (1933-45) with 3,796. He’s also the only president to serve more than two terms, the limit now mandated by the 22nd Amendment.
The least? President George Bush Sr. (1989-93) with 77.
AROUND THE WEB
🚀 On this day: In 1962, NASA launched Relay 1, the first satellite to broadcast TV from the US to Japan. Though it was meant to be an address from President John F. Kennedy, the first broadcast was of his assassination, which took place that day, Nov. 22, 1963.
🍇 That’s interesting: The “fruit detective” who examines old paintings for clues about produce and how it’s changed — or disappeared — over time.
🌛 That’s cool: The moon phases of 2025, as viewed from the Southern and Northern hemispheres.
💀 Haha: It’s Hamlet, but it’s in “Grand Theft Auto.”
