Good morning. Last night the Golden State Warriors defeated the Boston Celtics in six games to win the NBA championship, which just so happens to be the same exact outcome we predicted in this newsletter when the series started a few weeks ago. That's how you build trust as a news organization, folks. —Matty Merritt, Max Knoblauch, Neal Freyman, Rohan Iruthayaraj, Joe Abrams (this one took a village) | | | |  | Nasdaq | 10,646.10 | | | | | S&P | 3,666.77 | | | | | Dow | 29,927.07 | | | | | 10-Year | 3.201% | | | | | Bitcoin | $20,780.63 | | | | | Home Depot | $273.46 | | | | *Stock data as of market close, cryptocurrency data as of 2:00am ET. Here's what these numbers mean. | - Markets: The euphoria on Wall Street that followed the Fed's interest rate hike lasted all of…a few hours. Stocks took a big tumble yesterday over recession concerns, and blue-chip companies such as Home Depot, Intel, Walgreens, and JPMorgan touched 52-week lows.
- Global economy: It's rate hiking szn. European central banks including the Bank of England, the Swiss National Bank, and the National Bank of Hungary increased interest rates yesterday (some by shocking amounts) to tame inflation.
| | | | North Entrance Road between Gardiner, Montana, and Mammoth Hot Springs. Doug Kraus/NPS Since Monday, record-breaking floods have inundated Yellowstone National Park and surrounding areas in Montana and Wyoming, forcing 10,000+ visitors to evacuate just as the park's busy season was about to kick off. Fortunately, no one has been injured or killed, but you'll likely see the impacts on your Yellowstone vacay for the next several years. What caused it: A combo of unseasonably heavy rain and delayed snowmelt led to a once-in-500-years flood event. Some radar estimates showed that an entire month's worth of rain fell on the park in just a few days. What's the damage? We won't know just how many miles of roads or how many bridges (potentially hundreds!) the water washed away until next week. But park officials said the northern road loop, which includes Mammoth Hot Springs, Lamar Valley, and the Grand Canyon of Yellowstone, won't be able to reopen this summer. - This will create massive problems as the park tries to accommodate the ~4 million people who visit each year with just half the space.
- Plus, national parks like Yellowstone were already strapped for resources as a result of the boom in visitors during Covid. Nearly 1 million people visited Yellowstone in June 2021, up 64% from June 2020 and 20% from June 2019.
Outside the park: Local towns and businesses that rely on tourism to Yellowstone are also scrambling to figure out how they'll rebuild during what they hoped would be a gangbusters summer. The acting governor of Montana, Kristen Juras, asked President Biden on Wednesday for federal resources to help recover from an estimated $29 million in flood damages. Big picture: This probably isn't the last time you'll see devastating weather disasters upend your camping trip. Whether it's wildfires creating a "graveyard" of 1.3 million Joshua trees or saguaro cacti dying from extreme heat, scientists say almost all of our 423 national parks will be hit with more extreme weather due to climate change. Because many parks sit at higher elevations, temperatures at national parks are rising at double the rate of the rest of the US, according to a 2018 report.—MM | | We're hosting our first-ever Emerging Tech Brew Summit, and trust us you won't want to miss it. We'll be chatting with leaders and innovators from some of the biggest organizations in the industry to ask the question: What technology is unfolding today to help us solve challenges across food, energy, and health tomorrow? Join us September 29 in NYC for a day of conversations and insights with the best and brightest minds in the space. Don't miss out on our early-bird pricing and snag your ticket today. | | Alexey Furman/Getty Images  "One of us! One of us!" The leaders of France, Germany, Italy, and Romania traveled to Ukraine yesterday in order to a) take an extremely awkward photo with President Volodymyr Zelensky and b) support Ukraine's bid to join the EU. It's a long road ahead: Ukraine first needs the unanimous support of all the leaders in the 27-nation bloc, which will kick off a process that could take years. No country has joined the EU since Croatia nearly 10 years ago.
 Mortgage rates spike. The average rate of a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage has jumped to 5.78%. For context, that's the biggest weekly increase since 1987 and the highest level since November 2008. Okay, here's some more context: Mortgage rates were 3.11% at the end of 2021. The rise in borrowing costs, which has come in tandem with the Fed's interest rate hikes, threatens to slow down what has been a white-hot housing market during the pandemic.
 The saga of Kim Kardashian and the "Happy Birthday, Mr. President" dress. Kardashian has come under criticism for allegedly damaging the iconic dress Marilyn Monroe wore while serenading JFK on his birthday in 1962. After Kardashian borrowed the dress from the "Ripley's Believe It or Not!" museum to wear to the Met Gala in May, it suffered "permanent damage," according to a Marilyn Monroe collector, including stretched fabric and missing crystals. Ripley's, which bought the dress at auction for $4.8 million (setting a Guinness World Record), asserted that it's not damaged "in any way."
| | Photo Illustration: Dianna "Mick" McDougall, Photo: Getty Images/Frederic J. Brown An update on the longest-lasting news story of our time: Elon Musk took questions at an hour-long virtual meeting with Twitter's ~8,000 employees on Thursday, directly interacting with the company he plans to buy but seems to distrust. Musk, who agreed to acquire Twitter for $44 billion in April, called in from a cell phone in a hotel room 10 minutes late and addressed a host of major topics employees had concerns about. - On remote work: Musk, who's insisted Tesla staff return to the office, said Twitter employees who are "exceptional at their jobs" may WFH, but that the priority should be working in person. In May 2020, Twitter told employees that they'd be able to work remotely forever.
- On "free speech": Musk said he believes users should be able to say "pretty outrageous things" on the platform, as long as they don't violate the law.
- On his immediate goals: Musk wants to 4x Twitter's user base to 1 billion, and integrate payments into the app.
- On aliens: At one point Musk reportedly stated that he hasn't seen evidence of aliens. Okay!
Meanwhile…earlier in the day, SpaceX employees wrote a letter denouncing their boss/the world's richest man, claiming that his behavior online and in public detracts from the company's work and embarrasses employees.—MK | | DALL-E Mini If you've spent too many hours on social media this week, you've probably seen photos of Yoda in line at KFC or Joe Biden marrying Shrek. That's because DALL-E mini, a new artificial intelligence tool, has gone viral. It works like this: You input any bizarre scenario you can think of, and the software will create a collage of images that (sometimes) faithfully depicts that text. - Unfortunately, typing in "the one that got away" doesn't show you that cutie you locked eyes with in Starbucks three years ago.
Why it matters: While DALL-E Mini itself is pretty janky, it's just one of several new AI image tools that offer revolutionary promise, and peril, for the art world and beyond. The most famous of those is OpenAI's DALL-E—the inspiration for the Mini tool. The second iteration of DALL-E, released this April to a limited number of users, was so impressive that it got a bunch of tech experts buzzing about its potential use cases, such as building objects for the metaverse, or helping chefs dream up new plating ideas. Creative or creepy? Critics warn that AI-generated imagery could supercharge the amount of misinformation on the internet, not to mention produce harmful material like pornography and hate speech. Bottom line: Watch this space. The first AI-generated portrait sold for $432,500 at Christie's in 2018, and the technology has improved a lot since then. Want to go deeper? Read how art is moving to the metaverse.—JA, NF | | Illustration: Grant Thomas, Photos: Getty Images Stat: FIFA announced the 16 host cities for 2026 World Cup matches, which will be played across North America. They are *takes a deep breath*: Guadalajara, Monterrey, and Mexico City in Mexico; Vancouver and Toronto in Canada; Seattle, Santa Clara, Los Angeles, Dallas, Houston, Kansas City (!), Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Atlanta, and Miami in the US. Quote: "They do it because of the love of the swimming. They do it because of the love of protecting people." When asked about strategies that NYC could employ to alleviate a lifeguard shortage, Mayor Eric Adams argued that raising wages for lifeguards would not be effective. Lifeguards, in Adams's view, are simply obsessed with the responsibilities of the job, like informing moms the pool's closed for a "fecal incident." Read: The future of fitness might be a Ponzi scheme. (Morning Brew) | | | Today you took a simple quiz and matched with the right therapist. That's how easy finding someone who can help you feel happier should be. BetterHelp understands that compatibility and expertise are a pretty big deal when it comes to therapy, and their free quiz can match you with the right therapist from the get-go. Take the quiz and get 20% off your first month here. | | The feeling of getting a 5/5 on the Brew's Weekly News Quiz has been compared to opening your fridge to find your Brita is filled. It's that satisfying. Ace the quiz. | | - WNBA superstar Sue Bird said that this season, her 21st, will be her last.
- A fisherman in a remote area of the Amazon confessed to killing a British journalist and an Indigenous expert who had gone missing while on a reporting trip there.
- Revlon filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection because of too much debt and mangled supply chains.
- Beyonce announced that her new project, "Renaissance," will drop on July 29. It will be her first solo studio album since 2016.
- Headline of the day: "Convicted scammer Anna Sorokin says she is now selling NFTs."
| | | What number, when written out in English, contains all five vowels (a, e, i, o, u) and has no repeated letters? (By write out a number, we mean something like, "two hundred and thirteen.") | | | If anyone knows where function meets form, it's Excel Dictionary. Shop her Shortcut Guide Mouse Pad, designed to make every day an efficient work day. | | | Written by Neal Freyman, Max Knoblauch, Matty Merritt, Rohan Anthony, and Joseph Abrams Was this email forwarded to you? Sign up here. WANT MORE BREW? Industry news, with a sense of humor → - Emerging Tech Brew: AI, crypto, space, autonomous vehicles, and more
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