Hi! Putting a price on Memories… Snapchat has announced that it will charge users for keeping over 5GB worth of photos and videos on the app, with storage plans starting at $1.99 per month. Today we're exploring: |
- Power off: The US federal government has shut down.
- Here we D'oh again: A date for "The Simpsons Movie 2" has been announced — two decades after the first film.
- Wendy's tendys: The chain joins McDonald's and Taco Bell in adding chicken strips to its menu this year.
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OK, so when was the longest shutdown in US history? |
The US government officially shut down at 12:01 a.m. EDT this morning, after senators failed to agree on a last-minute funding bill. Despite initially shrugging off the threat of a shutdown during yesterday's session, stocks were mildly in the red on Wednesday as investors reacted to what is now the 11th shutdown in the government's history. Until this latest shutdown, there had been 20 government funding gaps since 1976 — though not all ended in a full shutdown, with crisis averted in half of those cases. Indeed, prior to the 1980s, funding gaps didn't typically have major effects on government operations, with agencies continuing to operate on the basis that the funding would come eventually. However, a more stringent interpretation of the rules led to a stricter appropriations process from the early 1980s onward, with many subsequent funding gaps resulting in a shutdown of affected agencies (unless the gaps were quickly fixed or occurred over a weekend). Obviously, the duration of the latest shutdown is still unclear, but it will continue until Congress passes a funding bill — most likely via a "continuing resolution," which has ended every shutdown since 1990. Data analyzed by USAFacts suggests that it might not be a one- or two-day affair, as funding gaps have lengthened in recent years. |
Indeed, the last shutdown, which began in December 2018, ended up becoming the longest in history, at a whopping 34 days. By the time the government reopened in January 2019, about $3 billion (in 2019 dollars) had been wiped from the GDP in Q4, per data from the Congressional Budget Office, with approximately $18 billion in "federal discretionary spending" delayed over the roughly five-week stretch. |
"The Simpsons Movie 2" set for release two decades after first film |
In his silver screen debut back in July 2007, Homer Simpson told audiences: "I can't believe we're paying to see something we get on TV for free. If you ask me, everybody in this theater is a giant sucker..." Now, the world's most iconic TV cartoon is returning for a second movie spinoff — almost exactly 20 years after the original (though frugal fans might now be able to wait out the theatrical release for the flick to land on Disney+). And, in prophetic Simpsons fashion, it seems they'd already predicted this premiere date after the first film's release. |
The yellow-tinted town of Springfield has been televised since 1989, making "The Simpsons" one of the longest-running TV series ever. And, in the midst of its 37th season with nearly 800 episodes to-date, it's still going... albeit with far fewer viewers than in its 1990s heyday. |
Inspired by this 2016 deep-dive by Todd Schneider, and using ratings data collated on Wikipedia's extensive list of the show's episodes, it appears that viewership has been on a downward trajectory in the US. Only five episodes in the show's history have topped approx. 30 million viewers — they all aired before 1991. Some notable outliers could have more to do with timing than being timely. For example, Episode 343, "Homer and Ned's Hail Mary Pass," aired directly after Super Bowl XXXIX and had a viewership of ~23 million, more than double the Season 16 average. That said, the stark ratings decline may say less about the diminishing popularity of "The Simpsons" than the demise of cable TV more broadly (any series as prolific would certainly have a chart with a very similar shape to it). Still, even if TV viewership continues slumping, capitalizing on the growing market for animated family-friendly movies could be a perfectly cromulent way for the franchise to recapture the "Bartmania" seen in decades past. |
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Have chicken strips become the fast-food panic button of 2025? |
Strips and tenders, like sandwiches and wraps before them, seem to be the latest battleground on which the never-ending fast-food chicken wars are being fought. Or, maybe, they are just a new lever to pull when chains have run out of other ideas. In April, McDonald's announced its first new permanent addition to American menus in four years, releasing the McCrispy Strips — a move that some correctly saw as a signal of the subsequent return of its popular Snack Wrap. Just two months later, it was Taco Bell getting in on the crispy chicken craze, with the cheap, Mexican-inspired chain rolling out new strip-loaded tacos and burritos as part of its summer menu. |
Not to miss the party (though happy to arrive a little later), Wendy's yesterday announced its new "Tendys," along with six accompanying sauces for dipping. Clearly, the chain is hoping that hopping onto the strips and tenders trend will help it claw back some of the ground it's lost to McDonald's and Taco Bell in recent quarters. |
In its second quarter, Wendy's saw global same-restaurant sales fall 2.9%, with things looking particularly bleak in the US, where they had slumped 3.2% in the first six months of the year. Taco Bell, meanwhile, has continued to look like one of the few consistently growing players in the fast-food industry— while McDonald's had a Q2 bump itself, with the company's CFO highlighting its new McCrispy Strips as a key driver at the time. Whether Wendy's decision to hit the strip-shaped panic button is enough to turn its 2025 around, or whether it's too (chicken) little, too late, only time will tell. |
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- OpenAI brought in an eye-watering $4.3 billion worth of sales in the first half of 2025 — 16% higher than the total revenue it reported for all of 2024.
- Café society: Handbag maker Coach is planning to open 12 to 15 coffee shops attached to accessory-selling stores every year to build on its success with Gen Z customers.
- "Reading Rainbow" — one of public television's most watched shows, averaging 670,000 weekly viewers — returns on Saturday. (Read also: American kids' literacy skills keep getting worse).
- Denmark's GDP growth has been revised down to 1%, as key exporter Novo Nordisk's slower-than-expected sales growth continues amid mounting competition in the weight-loss drug space.
- 32 Chunk was just crowned the winner of Katmai National Park and Preserve's Fat Bear Week, beating 11 other challengers after receiving nearly 100,000 votes.
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- Visualizing all the rockets, debris, and unknown objects floating around the low Earth orbit.
- Sine Rider: Test your math knowledge with this Line Rider-inspired illustrated game.
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Off the charts: Which country's adults are the most online — with 56% of adults reporting using the internet almost constantly, per a Pew survey? [Answer below]. |
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