ENERGY

Laissez les Mal Temps Rouler

After crashing through Caribbean, two major storms are expected to hit Louisiana within 48 hours of each other. First up is Marco, which made landfall near the mouth of the Mississippi River yesterday. 

Close behind is Laura, a tropical storm that’s expected to morph into a Category 2 hurricane before thrashing Louisiana in the coming days. 

Back-to-back storms are as far on the freak weather event spectrum as fire tornadoes, and their arrival in the middle of a pandemic spells trouble for one of the U.S.’ most important oil and gas regions. 

The Gulf is home to almost half of U.S. refining operations. When Hurricane Harvey hit in 2017, about a quarter of the country's refining capacity was paused, sending gas prices soaring. This time around, oil and gas companies shut down roughly 82% of offshore oil production and almost half of natural gas output. 

But a price spike hasn’t followed

The U.S. oil benchmark was up <1% Monday afternoon. While Marco and Laura will disrupt production, refiners were already running under capacity as the pandemic cramped demand and excess supplies neared record highs. 

Zoom out: It’s revealing that a historic dual-storm event in the Gulf Coast doesn't appear to be enough to muster a rally in gasoline and diesel prices. 

Then again, it’s been a topsy turvy year

The international crude oil benchmark was down last week after major producers said recovery from COVID-19’s suckerpunch has been “slower than anticipated.”  

Two things to blame are rising cases in Europe, which is hurting demand, and OPEC+ producers relaxing this summer's output cuts, which is boosting supplies.

Big picture: Marco and Laura could do some serious damage in Louisiana. But 2020’s potpourri of unexpected macroeconomic conditions means the impact to supplies and prices should be limited.

MARKETS

Major Shakeup at the Dow

Who’s in: Salesforce, the biotech Amgen, and manufacturing heavyweight Honeywell

Who’s out: Exxon Mobil, pharma giant Pfizer, and defense company Raytheon

The 30-stock index best known for being quoted by dads at breakfast tables is getting its biggest makeover in seven years...and it’s all Tim Cook’s fault.

Last month, Apple said it would split its stock 4-to-1, which means its influence (and the role of the information technology sector as whole) would be significantly reduced in the Dow’s calculations, which gives companies with higher share prices more weight. The Dow’s overseers believe that weighting wouldn’t accurately reflect the composition of the American economy (which, you know, runs on a lot of tech), so they decided to bring the likes of Salesforce on board. 

• This is a big facepalm moment for Exxon, which was the world’s biggest company less than a decade ago and has been a proud Dow member for nearly 100 years.

Looking ahead…the changes will go into effect next Monday.

EDUCATION

Zoom Gets the First Day Jitters

The de facto communication tool of pandemic life experienced widespread outages in the U.S. yesterday morning, disrupting remote learning sessions as students across the country logged on to start the new academic year.  

• The outages spanned both coasts and even some spots overseas. The Atlanta public school system, Penn State, Howard University, and many more institutions were hit.  

With great bandwidth comes great responsibility

What was once an enterprise communications platform is now being tasked with helping teach America’s youth. While there are no official figures around how many schools are using Zoom this fall, yesterday's disruption shows the platform is already an integral part of the country's educational infrastructure. 

• At the college level: In a Morning Brew survey, 64% of students said their schools are implementing a hybrid model of both in-person and online learning this fall. 32% are going fully remote.

Bottom line: Zoom was up and running by noon yesterday, but with more schools still to open and competitors galore, the pressure is on to perform.

SPONSORED BY BRIGHT CELLARS

Noir Favorite Wine Scientists Are Back

Vino there are a bunch of delivery services out there these days, but trust us: Bright Cellars is made of different grapes. 

Founded by two wine-crazed MIT grads, Bright Cellars is the monthly wine club that uses serious science to match you with wine you’ll love.

You take their palate quiz, creating your own unique taste profile in Bright Cellars’ online wine laboratory. Then—in true MIT fashion—Bright Cellars’s algorithm takes your taste profile, picks out a bunch of wines you’ll love, and sends those bottles your way.

But when you sign up for Bright Cellars, you’re not just adding a gaggle of genius wine scientists to your entourage; you’re getting an all-out wineducation. With wines from all over the world and tasting cards to explain them, you’ll be on your way to wine-scientist status yourself.

Start sippin’ with 50% off your first 6-bottle box here.

VIDEOGAMES

Start. Your. Videogame Engines.

While Fortnite creator Epic Games was going toe-to-toe with a $2.2 trillion Apple over its App Store fees, one of its chief rivals, Unity Software, was gearing up for an IPO. Yesterday, Unity filed to go public on the NYSE. 

What does Unity do?

Imagine if Tesla started selling its batteries and software systems to other car manufacturers. Unity does something similar, licensing out its software so game developers can...develop games. 

• And boy do a lot of developers use it: Unity estimates more than half of the 1,000 most popular games on Google’s and Apple’s app marketplaces last year, including Pokémon Go and Call of Duty: Mobile, were built with its platform. 

Epic Games’s version of Unity is called Unreal Engine. If Epic continues to escalate its feud, Apple could disable Epic's developer account, leaving other gamemakers unable to use Unreal Engine for iOS and Mac apps. 

Bottom line: Unity timed its public filing to perfection. If Apple says Unreal Engine has to go, Unity could stand to benefit the most, capturing the engineless developers caught in the Epic crossfire.

+ While we're here: Something's in the air, because software startups Snowflake and Asana also filed to go public yesterday. 

FOOD & BEV

Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Frozen Margaritas

At least 33 states and Washington, D.C., now allow cocktails to-go because of the pandemic, the AP reports. The number before that? Just two—Florida and Mississippi. 

What’s going on: Starting in March, local and state lawmakers relaxed rules on carryout G&Ts to give restaurants and bars a lifeline after they were forced to close indoor seating areas.

Did it work? One survey from May found that 78% of restaurants and bars selling booze to-go brought back laid off employees, higher than the 62% overall rate.

Despite the economic benefit, lawmakers are trying to make sure Main Street doesn’t turn into Bourbon Street. Officials in many areas mandated lids/seals and required that food be purchased with drinks, among other regulations.

Looking ahead: Each jurisdiction has its own timeline for when these relaxations sunset...or not. Iowa has extended its to-go cocktail rules permanently, and other states could follow. 

WHAT ELSE IS BREWING

• The Wisconsin Justice Department is investigating the police shooting of Jacob Blake, a Black man, as he was getting into his car with his children in the backseat. A cellphone video of the shooting went viral Sunday night, sparking protests. 
• TikTok officially sued the Trump administration over an executive order that would effectively ban the app in the U.S.
• Jerry Falwell Jr., the president and chancellor of Liberty University, denied reports that he resigned.
• More than half of U.S. states are now approved to distribute an extra $300/week in federal unemployment benefits. 
• New York’s attorney general is investigating whether the Trump Organization inflated asset values to obtain financial and tax benefits.
• Disney’s direct-to-consumer revenue (which includes Disney+) will generate an estimated 19% of its total sales this year, per Macquarie Research. 

BREW'S BETS

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COVID-19 testing: The best place to find a local testing site is the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’s official index. You can also scan your state for drive-thru testing sites using this extensive list from GoodRx.

The sweatpants economy: It's big and it's only getting bigger. Check out the 10 fastest-growing athleisure brands by online traffic, via Retail Brew. 

Tech Tip Tuesday: Take stickers off your laptop using tea tree oil, magic erasers, or the ultimate cure-all, Windex. Here are other ideas about how to remove stubborn sticker residue, plus a guide on properly cleaning “your filthy, disgusting laptop” from the NYT. (You can replace your old stickers with Morning Brew ones by getting five friends to sign up for this newsletter.)

^{*This is sponsored advertising content. See Masterworks' important disclaimer.}

FROM THE CREW

Own the Morning: Pro Soccer Player Eric Dier

Today's Own the Morning participant is English Premier League soccer player and recent app developer Eric Dier. A quick bio for the less soccer-obsessed Brew readers out there: 

• He's made 40 appearances for England's national team and is a do-it-all defender for the English Premier League’s Tottenham Hotspur.
• He's developed a location-based food/drink recommendation app with his brother called Spotlas.

We slid into Eric's DMs to ask him how he owns the morning, what life is like as a professional soccer player, and a little bit about his new app.

3 things you do in the morning that are essential to starting your day off right.

1. Cold shower. I started trying cold showers about a year ago and I can’t imagine having a hot shower anymore. 
2. Making my bed. I had to do it as a kid and now I need to do it to start my day.
3. Mate, a South American drink that I was introduced to by my Argentinian teammates and I have it in the car on the way to training.

1 thing you do in the morning that other people definitely don’t do: I don’t think cold showers are very popular in the morning! 

1 thing about your industry no one outside of it understands: The discipline it requires from a very young age, mainly saying “no” to many things. 

1 thing that you are snobby about: Socks. I’m not proud of it, but if you ask the kit men at Tottenham they will tell you I’m a nightmare when it comes to socks! 

Which is harder: Building an app or playing in the Premier League? The Premier League is the most competitive football league in the world, but I’m just at the beginning of my journey in tech and I’m sure it’s very competitive too. Building an app is something that was completely out of my comfort zone, so it’s presented challenges that my brother Patrick, Zoe, and I [the founders] are confronting for the first time. Everyone goes to restaurants, bars, and hotels, but before Spotlas there wasn’t an interactive social app custom-built for sharing and discovering recommendations. We’re trying to solve that. 

MICROSOFT TRIVIA

Windows 95 turned 25 years old yesterday. Here’s a trivia question to mark the occasion: Under the “Accessories” tab, what were the four games you could play? 

MICROSOFT TRIVIA ANSWER

Solitaire, FreeCell, Minesweeper, and Hearts