Messenger RNA.

Talking with Anna Wintour.

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1. Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman, who together identified a chemical tweak to messenger RNA that laid the foundation for vaccines against Covid-19 that have since been administered billions of times globally, were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine on Monday. Together, Dr. Karikó and Dr. Weissman, who met over a copy machine at the University of Pennsylvania in 1998, transformed vaccine technology. Seven years later, they published a surprising finding about messenger RNA, also known as mRNA, which provides instructions to cells to make proteins. (Sources: nobelprize.org, nytimes.com)

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2. Consumers should be spending less by now. Interest rates are up. Inflation remains high. Pandemic savings have shrunk. And the labor market is cooling.   Yet household spending, the primary driver of the nation’s economic growth, remains robust. Americans spent 5.8% more in August than a year earlier, well outstripping less than 4% inflation. And the experience economy boomed this summer, with Delta Air Lines reporting record revenue in the second quarter and Ticketmaster selling over 295 million event tickets in the first six months of 2023, up nearly 18% year-over-year. Ally Bank, whose online platform started allowing customers to create savings buckets for different goals in 2020, says users create about one-and-a-half times more experience-oriented buckets such as travel and “fun funds” versus those associated with longer-term planning. (Source: wsj.com)