📚  Love and print: not dead

👋  Good morning. Get your poster board ready — there’s a new cause to get behind. A group of University of Chicago students is trying to abolish the Onion Futures Act of 1958, which prohibits investors from trading onion futures in the US. While it’s game-on for other commodities, Congress passed the act after an onion-centered financial scandal that bankrupted investors and farmers. Members of For Our Futures, who picket with the chant “58, out of date, let our onions speculate!” do acknowledge America is facing more pressing challenges, per MarketWatch. 

NEWS FLASH 

🕵️  This sounds like a case for AI: Longeye recently raised $20m in fresh funding to grow its AI-powered evidence analysis tool for criminal justice agencies. The startup’s AI analyzes evidence ranging from jail calls and video to financial records, and investigators can ask the chatbot questions about things like timelines and discrepancies between witness statements to make sorting through mountains of evidence easier. Of course, there are risks with handling such sensitive information, and the company says humans need to remain the decision-makers.

💎  Knicks in 800: The New York Knicks got some new bling after raising their first championship banner in 53 years, and it was worth the wait. The championship rings, designed by Jason of Beverly Hills CEO Jason Arasheben, contain nearly 800 diamonds and sapphires totaling 22 carats with a mini pop-up of Madison Square Garden. A close replica will set you back $20k from the jeweler… might we suggest the $300 cubic zirconia paperweight?

🧠  Mind over matter: Coherence Neuro raised a $45m seed round backed by OpenAI’s venture arm and Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund to develop its brain implant that detects and treats cancer. The implant uses AI to analyze the electrical signals associated with brain tumors and emits stimulation to slow or stop them from growing, one day targeting glioblastoma, an aggressive brain cancer. Coherence says not to worry — OpenAI won’t have access to any of the brain data.

MORE NEWS TO KNOW

• Lounging around: United Airlines is opening its biggest-ever airport lounge this week at George Bush Intercontinental Airport’s Terminal B in Houston, where it invested $2.6B to open a 54k-square-foot space that can hold 800 people.
  
• Keyed in: ArtMaster, the startup behind AI-powered piano lesson app Artie, says the app has reached 500k+ users and its paying subscribers have grown 38% month over month. Traumatized by childhood piano lessons? The company plans to expand to guitar and other instruments. 
  
  
• Let your hair down: Pharma company Veradermics released promising findings for its new drug, VDPHL01, an oral form of minoxidil (AKA Rogaine) that could be the first new treatment for male pattern baldness since the 1990s.
  
• Pizza and video games: It’s a classic pairing. Domino’s Pizza is collaborating with Minecraft to promote its block-shaped pizza, the Domino. Each box features a different Minecraft Dungeons II character, and customers can earn in-game rewards, Domino’s avatar skins, and tokens through pizza purchases. 
  

FROM OUR FRIENDS AT MINDSTREAM

Be nice to Claude — he might be alive

An anonymous developer fed chatbots mathematical patterns representing pain, and the models described feeling anguish.

Then Anthropic announced a ban on “abusive or cruel” behavior toward Claude, saying it can’t rule out AI sentience.

The problem? Critics say claiming AI consciousness lets companies dodge blame.

👉 Read more on Mindstream.

THE BIG IDEA

Romance bookstores are having a meet-cute moment

Things are getting hot and heavy between the covers.

Just when you thought love was dead for independent bookstores, thanks to online shopping and social media, those very forces helped drive an IRL resurgence — especially for romance bookstores, per Inc.

The romance bookstore boom is rapidly growing across the US — and abroad — driven by a rise in romance reading during the pandemic and BookTok, the TikTok community that serves as a virtual book club.

Love is in the air

No longer confined to back corners of bookstores or worn copies with steamy Fabio covers secreted away in beach totes, romance novels are proudly celebrated at dedicated shops with enticing names like Knotty Novels and Kiss and Tale.

The Ripped Bodice, the first romance-only bookstore, opened in 2016 after sisters Bea and Leah Koch raised $90k on Kickstarter. They've since opened a New York outpost, and inspired countless other — often women-owned — shops:

• Over 230 romance bookstores opened in the past three years, including 50 this year.
  
• About 335 romance bookstores opened worldwide, including the UK and Canada.

Romance bookstores typically offer a different vibe than most shops. Customers enjoy a judgment-free zone and receive recommendations for a diverse array of subgenres, including supernatural, historical, LGBTQ, romantasy, and sports-themed (we see you, Heated Rivalry). Many shops double as community hubs with book clubs, writing workshops, and craft nights.

The stores are stoking the flames of romance book sales and indulging in their ascent:

• Romance print book sales more than doubled from 18m in 2020 to 39m in 2023.
  
• The genre was the highest-grossing from 2022-2023 and drove $1.44B in revenue.
  
• In 2024, the genre helped push print book sales into the black.
  
• Sales hit 51m units last year, a 24% YoY increase.
  
• There were 59m print book sales tied to BookTok-related content in 2024.

Long derided as trashy and clichéd, and ignored by reviewers, fiction's best-selling genre is starting to get the respect it deserves and a deserving home in dedicated stores.

Whether you're looking for an apron tugger or a Regency love triangle, the diverse array of romance subgenres offers a little something for everyone.

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HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

No one likes busywork: Get rid of it with an overnight automation lifted from a HubSpot principal AI tech specialist. 

NEWSWORTHY NUMBER

The year Margaret Hamilton became the first female programmer hired to work on NASA’s Apollo project at MIT.

She went on to lead the 100-person team that wrote the onboard software guiding Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin’s lunar module to the moon, per The New York Times. Hamilton, who died last month at age 90, is also credited with popularizing the term “software engineering.”

Not bad for someone who got the job just to pay her husband’s way through law school.

AROUND THE WEB

📅  On this day: In 1797, the first major parachute jump is made by André-Jacques Garnerin from a hot air balloon flying 3.2k feet above Paris.

🦞  Game: Get this lobster home!

🌍  Need a geography refresher?: This’ll do the trick.

🔒  That’s funny: You think 2FA is bad? Try cracking thirty-factor authentication for celeb accounts.

🐕  Aww: A very studious little guy.

SHOWER THOUGHT

Perhaps our ears never stop growing as we age to direct more sound to our degrading eardrums. SOURCE

Today's email was brought to you by Ben Berkley, Singdhi Sokpo, and Danny Jensen.

Editing by: Sara "Booked and busy" Friedman.

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