The wackiest headlines from the week as they would appear in a Classifieds section.

Careers

REAL-LIFE BENDER: The trendiest way to make your wedding cost even more isn’t an open bar or take-home seed packets emblazoned with sayings about your love growing—it’s hiring a guy to dress up like a robot and blast drunk guests with cold air from a giant, futuristic gun.

MUSIC BEEF COUNSEL: Tupac’s lawyers are threatening to sue Drake for using the AI-generated voice of Tupac in “Taylor Made,” a diss track mocking Kendrick Lamar. The legal team said the song needs to be deleted, or they will be forced to tell their own side of the story via George Michael AI.

CRUSTACEAN CHAPERONE: 100 cases of snow crab (worth roughly $30,000) were stolen from the back of a truck in Philadelphia. Vessels carrying large quantities of melted butter will be watched closely.

Personal

FOUND—CALCULATOR: iPad users will finally be able to avoid doing simple addition with their fingers. The next iPad operating system is rumored to include the Calculator app, which has been missing from the device since its creation.

LOST—RATE HOLE: Chicagoans will have to go back to worshipping boring old street-cat paw prints in the concrete, because its famous rat hole (a celebrated imprint of a rat in the sidewalk) was removed. The city said it’s being preserved and they are deciding what to do with it.

For sale

BITCOIN HISTORY: A yellow legal pad with the words “Buy Bitcoin” scribbled on it sold for $1 million (or 16 BTC) at auction. The DIY sign was flashed behind then-Fed Chair Janet Yellen during a televised House Financial Services Committee hearing in 2017.

UNDRINKABLE PERRIER: Two million bottles of the fancy sparkling water will need to be destroyed after bacteria of “fecal origin” was discovered in one of the French wells the company uses.—MM

Photo of the week

Because the people who run the place know what they are doing, The Sphere in Las Vegas hosted Phish on the cannabis holiday of 4/20, and perhaps no one was more appreciative of the psychedelic experience than The Price Is Right host Drew Carey, who was in the audience. “Bro, I met God tonight for real. I feel like I just got saved by Jesus, no lie,” he said, along with making some very sexually explicit metaphors to describe what the show felt like.

Up next for The Sphere: a Dead & Company residency beginning May 16.

Dept. of Progress

Here are some illuminating scientific discoveries from the week to help you live better and maybe even get a diamond on-demand.

Norway’s school smartphone ban is working. In unsurprising news, middle school kids in Norway have been feeling mentally healthier and performing better academically since a public health initiative banned smartphones in schools, according to a new study. After three years of the policy, girls’ GPAs increased, while visits to mental health professionals decreased by 60%—and girls from lower-income families benefited the most. There wasn’t much effect on boys’ academic standings, but both boys and girls experienced 43%–46% less bullying after putting their phones away.

Scientists grew diamonds in less than three hours. The precious gem that adorns engagement rings and cool kids’ teeth could get a lot more accessible: Researchers from South Korea developed a new way to grow synthetic diamonds that uses tens of thousands of times less pressure than current lab methods. The breakthrough strategy also formed diamonds in just 150 minutes, much faster than the five-to-12 days it typically takes scientists to produce synthetic gems (and the billions of years Mother Nature requires). Though the new method is in its infancy, the researchers say it could significantly boost artificial diamond growth. That would be good news for quantum computing, which uses the synthetic gemstone.

‍‍For the first time in an eon, two organisms just merged into one. An incredibly rare evolutionary phenomenon that’s responsible for plant life on Earth just happened again right under our noses. Scientists observed a microscopic algae species swallow a bacterium and produce a new organelle, which allows it to build useful compounds out of elements in the air…which plants can’t usually do. The first time this happened was 2.2 billion years ago, when a single-celled organism combined with a bacterium to produce mitochondria. The second and most recent time was about a billion years ago, when chloroplasts formed. This latest product of an organic merger is called a nitroplast.—ML

Should the stock market never close?

The insomniac cabbie from Taxi Driver might soon have another self-destructive activity to occupy the wee hours—loading up on meme stocks in real time. The New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) recently asked market participants to share how they’d feel about trading 24/7.

The tradition-shattering proposal by the world’s busiest stock exchange, which operates from 9:30am to 4pm ET Monday–Friday, would make stocks no different from other assets that never stop trading, like crypto and government bonds.

The NYSE’s curiosity comes as the startup 24 Exchange, backed by Mets owner Steve Cohen, is seeking SEC permission to launch a round-the-clock stock exchange. 24 Exchange wants to cater to the growing contingent of amateur investors, some of whom prefer to trade after their kids go to bed.

If the NYSE decides to become an exchange that never sleeps, it’d likely upend the day-to-day of the pros on Wall Street. So, let’s consider what 24/7 trading would look like, who’d be in the green, and who’s kept up at night by the prospect.

Market moves in the moonlight

The NYSE currently allows people to trade stocks outside regular hours from 4am until the market opens and after the closing bell until 8pm, but there are fewer participants trading, and those transactions often come with higher fees. Meanwhile, brokerages like Robinhood and Interactive Brokers have found success in letting investors put in orders for many stocks and stock indexes overnight.

• Robinhood recently said its overnight trading options are a hit, with trading outside of the NYSE’s regular hours accounting for as much as 25% of activity on the platform.
• Many customers aren’t used to waiting around for the NYSE to “ding a bell two times a day,” Robinhood’s Chief Brokerage Officer Steve Quirk told Bloomberg.

Many of these nocturnal transactions on brokerage apps happen because of the time difference with the Asia Pacific region, where investors are increasingly eager to tap into the US stock market when most Americans are asleep. The trades are enabled by organizations like Blue Ocean, which are seeing skyrocketing demand for cross-border services. Having the NYSE run 24/7 would make it easier for investors in different time zones to participate in the US stock market.

Proponents also say it could make morning trading less volatile by allowing investors to react to big news (like an Elon Musk tweet about Tesla) as soon as it happens rather than waiting for markets to open.

Many pros prefer daylight

Whatever the potential benefits of a 24/7 trading system to retail investors and overseas traders, many of the financial adrenaline addicts who are often photographed shouting into a landline on the market floor prefer to trade when the sun is up.

Institutional investors making big trades benefit from doing it at the same time as everyone else.

• Synchronized trading maximizes the number of buyers and sellers to transact with, which means more money is moving around. That reduces the discrepancy between the price stock sellers are charging and the one buyers are willing to pay.
• Under the current system, after-hours trading is more volatile and carries unique risks, including issues with settling a transaction, since the people who make markets run smoothly are off duty.

Many industry insiders believe markets that don’t stop would be more volatile. Bloomberg’s Matt Levine argued in 2021 that a 24/7 stock market would make it more difficult for companies to avoid impulsive investor reactions to news (they currently do that by making announcements outside of standard trading hours).

Others worry that round-the-clock trading could make work-life balance for career traders sound even more oxymoronic. They’d need to constantly monitor financial news and react to market-moving developments, cutting into the time they have to do research and complete other nontrading tasks. One stockbroker expressed doubts to the Financial Times that the industry can maintain the staffing needed to react to situations when most people are sleeping or at the Phish show in Las Vegas.

Equity market specialist Jesse Forster at Coalition Greenwich told the Financial Times that he thinks that even if a 24/7 NYSE does happen, most pros would probably stick with the usual trading hours.

Big picture: Whether Wall Street becomes a nightlife district depends on the enthusiasm of the tie-wearing crowd that the NYSE is surveying. But no matter what it decides, “normal trading hours” are increasingly defined as whenever you feel like it.—SK

Place to be: Antarctica’s gold-spouting volcano

It’s a big world out there. In this section, we’ll teleport you to an interesting location—and hopefully give you travel ideas in the process.

What’s the difference between a volcano in Antarctica and the person who makes bad jokes in your company’s Slack?

The volcano is the only one spitting out gold.

Mount Erebus, the planet’s southernmost active volcano, spews about 80 grams of gold dust into the air every day. At current prices, that’s ~$6,000 worth of gold scattering itself across a roughly 600-mile radius. For scientists, Erebus (named for the personification of darkness in Greek mythology) represents a “geological curiosity.”

Getting to the isolated continent as part of a get-rich-extremely-slowly scheme, as you might have suspected, isn’t easy.

• The average cost of a cruise to Antarctica is $8,000, while a flight is only slightly less expensive. But if you can brave the elements and collect enough gold dust, that trip can technically pay for itself.

Antarctica is a volcanic wonderland. It’s home to 138 volcanoes, although only two are active, and Erebus is the only one that could potentially be interested in a cash-for-gold scheme.—DL

Crowd work

Last week, we asked you to invent a word that’s missing from the dictionary and use it in a sentence. Here are our favorite responses:

• “Freshterday, meaning ‘day old.’ As the right-hand man for my friend’s bakery, I invented this term to cast a more flattering light on our day-old items sold at a discount. Consequently, we offer ‘Freshterday Bread’ and ‘Freshterday Pastries.’”—Erik from Memphis, TN
• “Fakeye, when you pretend to be interested in what your boss is saying but you are really thinking about trying to snag the best seat at happy hour later that day. ‘I gave my boss the fakeye when she was reviewing the latest HR manual with me.’”—Deb from Nixa, MO
• “Drayprage (pr. DRAY-pridge/DRAY-pur-age): loose-fitting, neutral-toned, low-anxiety, comfortable clothing for working at home remotely (no meeting day) or running quick errands. If the outfit looks *good* it becomes ‘draepragé.’ ‘As I filled my gas tank, I noticed another millennial wrapped in drayprage leaving the convenience store with a Celsius and energy bar.’”—John from Grand Rapids, MI
• “Shamplarceny...when you’re visiting a friend and taking a shower in their bathroom, and even though you have your own shampoo you try their shampoo.”—Anonymous
• “Tumblebreed: a dog that sheds long hair which morphs into tumbleweeds of hair that roll down halls and collect in corners of your house.”—Robert from Mount Airy, NC
• “Tapgap: The split second between when you tap on something on your phone screen and when the screen changes so you tap on the wrong thing.”—Joe from Portland, OR

This week’s question

If you had to eat only one meal for breakfast every single day for the rest of your life, what would it be?

Matty’s response to get the (bacon) juices flowing: “I already eat this every day anyways, but two hashbrowns, fried egg on top, and a mound of chili oil.”

Share your response here.