By Walt Hickey

Football

The NFL voted to allow teams to sell portions of their franchises to private equity groups, which will allow team ownership to get money, increase valuations, and potentially make sale prices higher down the line, while allowing private equity to muscle into one of the most lucrative and previously private sports products on the planet. Teams can sell up to 10 percent of their equity to PE, and a PE firm can buy a minimum of 3 percent and maximum of 10 percent of a team. A single fund can own chunks of no more than six teams, and they have to hold for six years. I, for one, am worried about what this kind of crass commercialization, cutthroat industry, and new involvement with all manner of unsavory characters and wealthy ghouls will do to the honest sport of private equity.

Brendan Coffey, Eben Novy-Williams and Scott Soshnick, Sportico

Harder

A new survey asked teens whether or not being a teenager today is harder than it was 20 years ago, with 44 percent of American teens saying it is harder today than it was two decades ago, which incidentally is when I was a teenager. Among those teens who think it’s harder, 31 percent said there’s more pressure and expectations, 25 percent said social media makes things harder, 15 percent said the world and country have changed in a bad way, and 11 percent cited technology in general. Overall, 12 percent of teens said it’s easier being a teenager today than it was 20 years ago, with 46 percent citing technology in general as why.

Michelle Faverio, Jeffrey Gottfried, Kaitlyn Radde, Chris Baronavski and Sara Atske, Pew Research Center

Cosmere

Brandon Sanderson, the incredibly prolific fantasy writer behind the highly regarded novels of the Mistborn and The Stormlight Archive series, has embarked on several very successful direct-to-reader fundraising initiatives. The most recent is the Cosmere RPG project produced with Brotherwise Games, which is a roleplaying game set in the author’s universe that applies the magical system the writer’s spent decades developing. As it stands, the Kickstarter raised $11.2 million from nearly 39,000 backers, averaging $287 per backer. This follows an earlier Kickstarter from 2022 for four secretly written, unannounced books that set a platform record of $41.8 million.

Jeffrey Dohm-Sanchez, ICv2

Silicon Valley

Perks in Silicon Valley are somewhat notorious, but some of the more extravagant are getting curtailed. Take, for instance, the Mountain View Whisman School District, which is riding out a controversy after the San Francisco Chronicle found out the K-8 school district was paying $189,000 to keep an energy healer on retainer for 160 meditation sessions. The contract with the district was reportedly for more stress-related meditation, but there’s nothing quite so Bay Area as using the proceeds of rolling up the entire global advertising ecosystem for crystal stuff. I’m sure there are valid reasons here, but unfortunately it’s Burning Man this week so anyone willing to speak up is off the grid.

Noah Goldberg, The Los Angeles Times

GUARANTEED

There is a video on YouTube called “Sound To Remove Water From Phone Speaker ( GUARANTEED )” which claims to do precisely what it says on the tin: namely, play a low, vibrating sound from your phone’s speakers to eject water that got inside the device. It has been viewed 45 million times, so clearly people think it works. Conceptually, it’s not impossible; the Apple Watch, for instance, has a dedicated feature to eject water after one gets it wet, which works on the same sonic principle. To put it to the test, iFixit took four phones — an iPhone 13, a Pixel 7 Pro, a Pixel 3, and a Nokia 7.1 — and immersed them in an UV bath so that moisture content could be tracked. They then played the video, waited a night, and surveyed the damage. The Pixel 7 was dry, the Nokia was toast, and the other two were in between, but the evidence was in: The YouTube video definitely helped, at least a bit, with close-up video confirming that the video ejected liquid next to the speaker, even if it didn’t make it under buttons or at the SIM card.

David Pierce, The Verge

Scientific Breakthroughs

Swiss scientists have indicated that they’ve achieved a breakthrough for their nation’s $2 billion crucial industry, with researchers at Zurich’s Federal Institute of Technology developing a way to manufacture chocolate using the entire cocoa fruit, not just the bean, and without needing to add sugar. Traditional chocolate production uses just the beans and leaves the rest of the fruit to rot, but the new strategy extracts a juice from the fruit that is 14 percent sugar, distills it to a concentrated syrup, and then uses the rest of the husk to develop a cocoa gel that can replace sugar in the chocolate manufacturing process.

Imogen Foulkes, BBC

Launch

NASA is attempting to develop a mobile launch tower for the Space Launch System rocket that’s now projected by NASA’s inspector general to cost $2.7 billion, twice the cost of building the Burj Khalifa, the tallest structure in the world. In order to launch the Artemis IV mission in 2028, it will have to have the ML-2 tower done by November 2026, which both NASA and its inspector general agree is impossible. The cost for that has increased from a $383 million contract to Bechtel with a due date of March 2023 to NASA’s projected $1.8 billion price tag by September 2027, which is still well under the IG’s estimate.

Eric Berger, Ars Technica

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