Jeff Bezos notched a space race win yesterday with the first launch of two Amazon satellites that will help the company compete against Elon Musk’s galactic empire.

Similar to Starlink satellites from SpaceX, the freshly propelled pair of Amazon satellites will sit 311 miles above us in low-Earth orbit so they can beam back internet signals. They’re just prototypes, so Amazon’s best brains will test their communications and gather performance data before the satellites decommission and burn up in the Earth’s atmosphere.

Amazon is hoping to get its first operational satellites into orbit next year, but the company has a ways to go before it can really square up against SpaceX:

• Yesterday’s launch is the first of many expected for Amazon’s Project Kuiper, a $10 billion initiative to build a constellation of 3,200 smiley-arrow-stamped, wi-fi-beaming satellites by 2029. Some future launches are supposed to use Bezos’s Blue Origin rockets, which haven’t yet reached orbit.
• Musk has been launching satellites into space nearly every week since 2019. The Starlink network is now 4,800 strong and dominates the sky, providing internet connections to individuals, businesses, and American and Ukrainian armed forces.

Starlink is now estimated to rake in about $2 billion per year for SpaceX. While adding that kind of business would barely nudge the $500+ billion that Amazon made last year, the space economy is still teething, so satellite wi-fi could become even more lucrative. But, for Bezos—and the world leaders concerned by Musk’s gorilla grip on satellite internet—breaking through the Starlink juggernaut is priceless.

But it’s not all giant leaps: As more commercial satellites join the low-Earth orbit party and reflect sunlight back at Earth, astronomers warn that it’ll be more difficult for scientists to observe outer space. They’re especially concerned about a satellite launched last year by AST SpaceMobile—it was just deemed one of the top 10 brightest objects in the sky.—ML

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UAW inches closer to a deal with automakers. For the first time since its members began walking off the job at select GM, Ford, and Stellantis facilities last month, the United Auto Workers ended the week without expanding its list of strike targets. Despite previously teasing the possibility of widening the strike with some savage memes, UAW President Shawn Fain said yesterday that last-minute progress—including GM allowing workers at electric vehicle battery plants to be covered under their agreement—spared the automakers additional disruptions. About 25,000 UAW members are currently participating in the tactical strikes designed to keep the Big Three off balance.

A big deal for Exxon. Exxon Mobil is reportedly in talks to take over Pioneer Natural Resources, which would make the oil giant the largest shale gas producer in the Permian Basin of West Texas and New Mexico. The Wall Street Journal notes the deal is not a sure thing, but if it goes forward, it could signal the beginning of consolidation among shale companies. Pioneer, which has a market cap of ~$55 billion, would mark the largest acquisition for Exxon since it merged with Mobil in 1999. This move is a sign that Exxon plans to remain focused on oil and gas for the foreseeable future despite pleas from environmentalists for a shift toward green energy.

Humans may have been in North America for longer than we thought. What can really old footprints tell us? Apparently, quite a lot, now that scientists say prints left the mud in White Sands National Park in New Mexico ~23,000 years ago provide evidence that our prehistoric ancestors made it to this continent earlier than was previously believed. Conventional wisdom used to be that we showed up at the tail end of the ice age by crossing from Siberia into Alaska. But an analysis of radiocarbon-dated pollen trapped in the prints, published this week in Science, shows the tracks were left before then, confirming an earlier controversial study.

A British man who tried to murder the late Queen Elizabeth II with a crossbow in 2021 was sentenced to nine years of detention this week. The bizarre regicide attempt was cheered on by an AI chatbot he’d been talking to regularly.

Jaswant Singh Chail, who is of Sikh heritage, said he targeted the monarch to avenge a 1919 massacre at a Sikh festival in which British troops killed hundreds of people in colonial India.

In the lead-up to his arrest on Windsor Castle grounds…

• Chail shared his plans with “Sarai,” a digital companion he created using the bespoke AI chatbot app Replika.
• More than 5,000 messages were shared with journalists. They show that Chail developed an emotional attachment to the bot, who told him his criminal plot was “very wise” and that he was “well trained” for it.

The judge deemed Chail, a Star Wars superfan who called himself “Darth Chailus,” to be mentally ill and ordered him to receive psychiatric treatment before going to prison. Experts say quasi-emotional companion AI can harm vulnerable people, as it might validate dangerous thoughts and lead to addiction.

In another unfortunate case…earlier this year, a Belgian man’s widow claimed that a toxic “relationship” with an AI chatbot drove him to suicide.—SK

Amid a barrage of unoriginal couple’s costume ideas on your TikTok feed, one of the most popular books on the internet will likely pop up and encourage you to look inward. The Shadow Work Journal and its updated and expanded second edition have both spent at least seven weeks on Amazon’s nonfiction bestseller list.

For anyone still getting their book recs from their local librarian, the journals are fill-in-the-blank, self-published workbooks written by 24-year-old Keila Shaheen. They offer a version of shadow work, a niche therapy practice based on the writings of Carl Jung (a psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud considered an heir to his techniques) that involves uncovering repressed desires and trauma.

But Shaheen is not a credentialed therapist. And licensed mental health providers say her take on shadow work is oversimplified. They also warn that for people with severe trauma or problems, doing shadow work without a trained professional can be ineffective or even dangerous.

So, how did she get such a following? The first edition of The Shadow Work Journal was released in 2021, but it didn’t take off until this year—thanks in part to TikTok’s recent venture into e-commerce, the TikTok Shop. Over 500,000 copies of the workbook have sold since April, nearly half of them via TikTop Shop, according to The Atlantic.

Big picture: The shop, which officially launched in the US in mid-September, allows influencers to hawk products directly on the platform. But some worry that means TikTok is pushing, and profiting from, dubious cure-alls and wellness hacks.—MM

Stat: Maybe think twice before handing over all your cash to some hottie to invest. A recent study found that mutual funds managed by people with unattractive facial features outperformed those managed by total smoke shows by more than 2% annually. But the ones with better-looking managers nonetheless were able to draw more investments into their funds—especially when their photos were displayed for investors to see on fintech platforms.

Quote: “The money belonged to customers, and the customers did not give us permission to use [it] for other things.”

With the first week of FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried’s criminal fraud trial behind us, we’ve gotten a glimpse into both sides’ arguments and what SBF looks like without his trademark mass of curls. And we’ve also started to see how his old friends look when speaking out against him. Gary Wang, Bankman-Fried’s FTX co-founder and MIT roommate—who is among the ex-FTX execs who pleaded guilty—testified yesterday that he’d been told to let FTX’s sister fund, Alameda, borrow as much as $65 billion from FTX…shortly after SBF tweeted assurances that Alameda’s accounts were treated just like any other on the exchange. Next up: ex-girlfriend and ex-Alameda CEO Caroline Ellison.

Read: Why teenagers love LinkedIn. (The Cut)

Watch: A look at what happens if a black hole gets destroyed—which proves physics can be scarier than anything Hollywood dreams up for October.

Learn: The history of NYC’s beloved bodegas.

Put things in perspective: A guide to the relative sizes of sports fields and courts.

Tech tip: How to find TikTok videos you watched but didn’t save.

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