The Brutalist Report

Fortune

• Singapore has overhauled its baby bonus scheme. Will it work to boost birth rates this time? [12d]
• The mayor of this desert city likens the U.S. West’s water crisis to planning for a meteor. ‘You can see it coming, but you can’t get out of the way’ [13d]
• With ‘virtual speed bumps,’ these cities have reduced crashes by rewarding slower drivers with fewer red lights [13d]
• Europe’s summer drought is so extreme that desertification is a growing threat [13d]
• The Earth is sizzling, but ‘climate hushing’ is hot right now among Democrats. ‘People are increasingly freaked out about other issues’ [13d]
• New U.S. sanctions will hit ordinary Iranians hard. That may be the whole point as the crashing economy stirs fresh protests [13d]
• Key takeaways from the Fed’s annual Jackson Hole conference [13d]
• Trump cannot deport students for criticizing Israel, judge rules, saying speech and press freedoms are ‘foundational to America’s enduring democracy’ [13d]
• ‘Long after President Trump is gone, it will still be called Lake Ontario’ — Premier Doug Ford fires back at ‘Lake America’ decree with giant sign [13d]
• Wall Street used to worry that too much U.S. debt would crowd out the private sector. But AI hyperscalers are ‘reverse crowding’ the Treasury [13d]
• The U.S. doesn’t have a state-owned oil giant. But in Venezuela, the federal government will control a company with the world’s 2nd largest reserves [13d]
• Casey’s quietly became America’s fifth-largest pizza chain. Meet the Fortune 500 gas station Gen Z can’t stop posting about [13d]
• ICE explores purchasing robot dogs in enforcement tech push [13d]
• Trump backlash adds new risks to the stocks the government owns [13d]
• Forget GLP-1 stocks, baldness drugs are Wall Street’s next goldmine [13d]
• Russia is teaching its children to fight the wars of the future [13d]
• For his latest tariffs, Trump used a statute so obscure many lawyers didn’t even know it still existed. ‘This law is literally a blank canvas’ [13d]
• ‘What is that saying about the applicant pool?’ The FBI will no longer treat experience with prostitution as an automatic bar against hiring [13d]
• After 6 months of war, hardliners consolidate power in Iran, but there are ‘serious differences over the future path of the country’ [13d]
• Former White House teleprompter operator must turn over more than $100,000 in profits and pay a $65,000 fine in insider trading settlement [13d]
• IBM’s CEO disagrees with JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon’s disdain for texting in meetings: ‘Telling people they can’t use their technology would be weird’ [13d]
• Dolly Parton once turned down a song request from Elvis Presley. That was just one business decision that helped build her $650 million empire [13d]
• Tech billionaires and executives like Evan Spiegel and Peter Thiel are publicly shielding their children from the products that made them rich [13d]
• The AI boom hasn’t stopped U.S. companies from hiring cheap offshore labor, and overseas call center employment is still skyrocketing [13d]