By Walt Hickey

Have a great weekend! We’re off on Monday in observation of Labor Day. The Sunday interview is going out to everyone this weekend — we’ve got a pretty good get!

Maple

Fall is incoming, judging by both the date on the calendar as well as the onslaught of pumpkin spice stuff already available, which means it’s time to discuss the newest flavors of autumn. One new beverage that’s been making huge strides is maple water, which is the stuff extracted from maple trees that is eventually boiled down into syrup. It’s not exceedingly sweet — it takes 40 gallons of maple water to make a gallon of syrup, and the stuff that comes out is just pure water with about 2 percent sugar — and in 2021 the sale of maple water beverages was worth $335 million. That’s projected to grow to $3.1 billion by 2030, a massive increase riding an eye-popping 32 percent projected annual growth rate. An increasing number of healthy maple trees in the U.S. and Canada is the all-clear for the industry to move ahead with the product.

Alexandra Frost, Food Dive

Antimony

Most prices for rare earth metals have declined substantially as China has ramped up production, but two metals in particular — antimony, which is used in solar cell cover glass, and gallium, which is used in all kinds of semiconductors — have seen prices spike as China’s announced export controls. China currently produces 48 percent of the world’s antimony, with the other major producers including Myanmar and Russia, and those restrictions have sent prices to $25,000 per tonne, up from $12,000 per tonne at the end of last year. China’s 90 percent market share in the gallium business has already made supplies of the metal tight, with the export licenses announced in July 2023 sending prices up 20 percent over the course of a month. The unexpected export licenses for antimony — voted “element most likely to sound like the first name of a YA novel’s protagonist” 10 years running by the American Chemical Institute — have people fretting it’s in for a similar shock.

Shugo Yamada, Nikkei Asia

Ya got trouble my friend, right here in Rio City.

Police in Rio di Janeiro are cracking down on claw machines, carrying out 16 search warrants targeting the popular arcade games in a citywide sweep after officials alleged the machines defraud users who are convinced that skill is involved. They’re investigating whether the machines are mobbed up, linked to the organized crime groups that operate slots and the lottery in the city. This follows a May crackdown where 80 claw machines stocked with — gasp — counterfeit plushies turned up information that the machines were, in fact, programmed to only actually work after a certain number of attempts, which would remove skill from the games and make them chance-based. Police detained 13,000 stuffed animals in that May raid, which were spared destruction by a judge and instead donated to families that lost their homes in a flood.

David Biller, The Associated Press

College

Kids in high school are frustrated over how much they hear about college, which it seems like is all they’re ever made to think about, with 68 percent of high school respondents to a Gallup survey saying they’ve heard “a lot” about college. For the sake of comparison, 19 percent said they hear a lot about jobs that don’t require college, and 23 percent said they’ve heard a lot about apprenticeships and vocational programs. Lots of this gets across in terms of learning things for the sake of college prep exams or standardized testing: In 2023, 68 percent of respondents agreed with the prompt, “In the last seven days I learned something interesting at school,” a figure which slipped 10 percentage points this past year to 58 percent.

Cory Turner, NPR

Coffee

There are about 40 countries that produce coffee in serious quantities, but more than half comes from Brazil and Vietnam, which is a bit of a problem for the long-term stability of supply given that bad weather in two countries is enough to send the global caffeine habit reeling. Overall, 39.7 percent of coffee comes from Brazil, followed by 16.5 percent from Vietnam, good for a little over 56 percent. That’s prompting some coffee buyers to both invest in other significant suppliers like Colombia (now 7 percent of supply), Indonesia (6.2 percent), Ethiopia (4.7 percent) and Uganda (3.6 percent), as well as explore wholly new investments in countries where coffee production is now more marginal, like Cuba and Rwanda.

Ilena Peng and Tarso Veloso, Bloomberg

If It Bleeds It Leads

Americans get their crime news from lots of places, but mostly their families and friends (71 percent often or sometimes get news from there) or local news outlets (70 percent), with a healthy dash from social media (53 percent). About 34 percent of Americans said they often get and follow news about local crime in general. Most Americans who get news about local crime reported feeling concerned or angry about it, and the more that a given respondent consumed news about local crime, the more likely they were to say they’re concerned about crime in their community affecting them or their family. This is potentially one reason that people’s perception of crime tends to not align with actual crime statistics (it’s way down, generally speaking, especially since the 1990s) given that there’s the same amount of 6 o’clock news every night regardless of the aggregate crime.

Kirsten Eddy, Michael Lipka, Katerina Eva Matsa, Naomi Forman-Katz, Sarah Naseer, Christopher St. Aubin and Elisa Shearer, Pew Research Center

I Consider Mids Loud

Weed is getting stronger, with the THC content of cannabis reaching newer, higher highs. The level of tetrahydrocannabinol in samples of marijuana seized by the DEA in 2022 was 16 percent, triple the 5 percent level consistently measured 25 years earlier. Indeed, there are all sorts of strains on the (occasionally legal) market today that have been bred to field even higher levels of THC, with many touting 20 percent to 30 percent THC by weight and vape concentrates blowing that out entirely. This means that lots of lightweights — be they people trying for the first time, or revisiting the drug after years of not smoking — are getting zooted right out the gate. While the reason this happened in the first place is that the market demanded it, with heavy pot users preferring stronger stuff, it does have the potential to make it harder to reach new or returning customers.

Malcolm Ferguson, The Atlantic

This week in the Sunday edition, I spoke to Allegra Rosenberg, who wrote “Heavy baggage: The most luxurious luggage is the kind you don't have to carry” for Sherwood News. Granted, I do run the website this was printed on, but I was fascinated by this story and was so interested in both what provoked it — an interest in why we can’t just send luggage ahead of us anymore like we could in Victorian novels — as well as what it found. We spoke about how the rise of the automobile impacted how we travel, what existed before the suitcase, and what luggage forwarding systems look like today. Rosenberg can be found on X or at AllegraRosenberg.com.

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