🍷  Boxed wine grows up

👋  Good morning. Happy 90th birthday to Oscar Mayer's Wienermobile. The 27-foot-long hot dog on wheels has spent decades gracing parades, parties, and weddings, and now it's finally getting its own celebration. Oscar Mayer teamed up with Milk Bar on a limited-edition Wiener Cake — a two-tier cake ringed in 20+ actual hot dogs — available in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago from July 31 to Aug. 2. As though that's not enough, if you're turning 90 this summer, you can even enter to have the Wienermobile crash your birthday party. 

NEWS FLASH 

💘 All is fair in love and entrepreneurship: Startup founders may have cultural cachet, but a survey of 600+ users of dating app The League found only 36% would choose one over someone in a traditional career. Nearly 70% said they'd only date a founder with a solid plan and financial runway, while self-awareness ranked as the most attractive trait — far ahead of startup momentum, fundraising, or exits — and work obsession was one of the biggest relationship dealbreakers.

🎢 Plunging from new heights: New Jersey’s Six Flags Great Adventure unveiled Bakunawa, a 382-foot-tall spinning roller coaster that promises a different ride every time and is expected to break six world records — including world’s fastest and tallest spinning coaster — when it opens in 2027. We’re nauseous just reading this.

🚁 Your takeout is cleared for takeoff: DoorDash unveiled DoorDash Air, its new drone delivery business, after receiving air carrier certification from the FAA to operate a commercial drone service in the US. But don’t expect your pad thai to hit you in the head anytime soon: The company still needs to obtain approval for its Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS) operations and will likely start with smaller pilot programs before flying autonomously over long distances.

MORE NEWS TO KNOW

• The World Cup is for sale: Kinda. FIFA wants to spin the World Cup into a new company valued at $20B and sell investors stakes of up to 20%, a plan that's already sparked backlash from soccer leaders.
  

• Putting the “no” in Nobel: Google is disbanding AlphaFold, scattering its staff across the company’s other AI research projects. Why AlphaFold mattered: it won a Nobel Prize for its work predicting protein structures in 2024.
  

• Cleaning up the slop: Startup Pangram raised $9m to identify AI-generated text and images with 99.99% accuracy to help publishers and universities weed out slop.
  

• An ambitious lesson plan: Coursera co-founder Andrew Ng is building another edtech player: LearnVector, which builds AI agents masquerading as individual tutors. Ng will now have $100m more to grow it.  

FROM OUR FRIENDS AT MINDSTREAM 

Your AI chat isn't as private as you think

Hundreds of Claude conversations — including resumes, work files, and personal discussions — were reportedly searchable online after users generated public share links.

Anthropic has since removed them from search results, but the incident is a reminder that "public" on the internet usually means exactly that.

👉  Read more on Mindstream.

THE BIG IDEA

The bougie evolution of boxed wine

Boxed wine, long the low-class domain of broke college students, has (like many of us) graduated from its trashy undergrad days and matured into something… more palatable.

Today, it’s showing up in high-end hotels and private social clubs as much as it is on grocery store shelves, thanks to upstart beverage companies, who are rebranding the bag-in-a-box format for a new generation of drinkers, per Inc.

• Boxed wine is one of the fastest-growing segments within an otherwise languishing alcohol industry, with sales up more than 144% YoY in June.

What’s different?

It’s still bagged and in a box (and probably eliciting eye rolls from traditionalists), but unlike its predecessors, these new iterations combine premium wines with some very aesthetic packaging.

• Gratsi, a D2C brand with a subscriber retention rate of 50%, sells premium natural wines priced at $34+ a box. Since launching in 2020, its sales have grown from ~2k cases of wine to 375k in 2025, with sales expected to pop 60% this year.
  
• Some brands have done away with the box entirely, like Medley, another D2C brand offering organic Mediterranean wines for ~$54, and My Dear Friends, which sells 1.5-liter “bagnums” of South African varieties for ~$30.

Why now?

For budget-conscious consumers, value is one factor: one box is equal to about four standard bottles. Part of those savings are passed down from the packaging, which is cheaper to produce and ship.

It’s also more environmentally friendly: Even with the plastic bag, one expert told Glamour, boxed wine has just a tenth the carbon footprint of a standard 750-milliliter glass bottle.

Plus, the spigot design limits the wine’s exposure to oxygen, keeping it fresher for longer and meaning you can enjoy a glass here and there over a couple weeks instead of having to commit to finishing a whole bottle…

… perfect for moderation-minded Gen Zers, who probably aren’t trying to “slap the bag,” though that’s still an option for those of us feeling nostalgic.

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No kidding: This LinkedIn group went from a TikTok joke to 5k members in 60 days. 

NEWSWORTHY NUMBER

Share of US college students reading at or below a fourth-grade level, according to a survey of 160k people across 38 high-income countries by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, nearly 2x above the average found across all surveyed countries. What’s behind the academic failings of the world’s wealthiest country?

Potentially, several things, Futurism suggests, including pandemic-related learning gaps, lower college admission standards, slashed public school budgets, and — who’d have guessed? — AI. Apparently there are consequences to relying on ChatGPT to “explain it like I’m 10.”

AROUND THE WEB

📅  On this day: In 1974, President Richard Nixon released White House recordings subpoenaed by the US Supreme Court, thought to prove his guilt in the Watergate scandal.

🎟️  Did you know? Hustle readers get 10% off UNBOUND tickets with code “GEM-HUSTLE.” And it’s not just the go-to-market conference — Aziz Ansari and Kyle Cooke are now slated to perform. See you in Boston.

🎨  Game: Test your color memory.

🌱  Bored?: Watch grass grow.

🐶  Aww: Hi, Henry!

SHOWER THOUGHT

A billionaire probably has the same phone as you. SOURCE

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