Hey Snackers,
Usain Bot was right there… Tiangong Ultra, the robot developed by the Beijing Humanoid Robot Innovation ​Center, finished a 100-meter race in a staggering 9.39 seconds in a heat at the World Humanoid Robot Games, now into its second year in the Chinese capital.
Tiangong Ultra’s time recorded on Saturday puts it almost .2 of a second quicker than the World Record time Usain Bolt clocked in Berlin 17 years ago. Admittedly, the bot’s performance after completing the race — it skidded clumsily into a blue sponge wall at the end of the track — pales in comparison to Bolt’s more composed post-run celebration.
The S&P 500 fell just under 0.3% and the Nasdaq 100 dropped almost 1% Monday as a decline in chip stocks pulled the major indices lower despite Treasury yields moving lower.Â
The American sobriety movement still shows no signs of slowing down
As summer’s denouement hurtles ever closer, with the final few cookouts of the season just around the corner given Labor Day is only a couple weeks away, typical all-American scenes of friends and families relaxing in back yards and cracking open a few cold ones will begin to fade into the backs of minds and further down Instagram feeds.
A new summer 2026 Gallup survey, like a host of other data releases in the past, suggests that such scenarios (or at least the element of alcohol within them) have already been getting increasingly rare anyway, as American alcohol consumption continues to stagnate at record-low levels.
The amount of articles devoted to Gen Z’s reported turn away from/embrace of/mixed feelings toward drinking culture has been, frankly, sobering. The youngest generation’s apparent abstention has probably been a consistent headache for execs at top alcohol brands like Constellation and AB InBev, too, and it’s not just Zoomers who may have pulled back on the booze a little.
According to Gallup figures, in 1978, a record-high 71% of Americans said they had occasion to use alcoholic drinks, while almost one in four conceded that they thought they drank more than they should at times in the same year. As of July 2026, those figures sat at just 54% and 13%, respectively, as more adults in the US change their drinking (and overdrinking) habits.Â
The TakeawayÂ
Wherever you land on the seemingly unending Gen Z drinking-not-drinking debate likely depends on how many of them you know; how many of them you know well enough to tell you their weekend activities honestly; and how many Gen Z-ish hangouts you yourself frequent.Â
More broadly though, there’s no getting away from fact that the population at large just aren’t drinking like they used to — a trend that will undoubtedly be a boon for the nation’s health moving forward, but is already proving to be a bane for bars, breweries, and the titans of the alcohol industry.Â
— Tom Jones
Snacks Shots
🎾 US Open M: With Jannik Sinner withdrawing from the U.S. Open over an injury, it’s a particularly competitive men’s event this year, with markets pricing Carlos Alcaraz as the lead contender with a 33% percent chance* of winning the singles tournament, followed by Alexander Zverev (20%) and Novak Djokovic (10%).
🎾 US Open W: And over on the women’s side, Aryna Sabalenka leads with a 23% chance of victory, followed by Iga Swiatek (17%) and Coco Gauff (15%).Â
*Event contracts are offered through Robinhood Derivatives, LLC — probabilities referenced or sourced from KalshiEx LLC or ForecastEx LLC.
By this point, whether you knew it or not, it’s likely that you’ve landed on a webpage that was almost entirely written or edited by AI. From a monthly analysis of the Common Crawl web archive, Pew Research found that 9.6% of all web pages in July 2026 showed “significant AI editing or authorship,” while that figure rose to a whopping 35% for sites that were created after the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022.
What else we’re Snackin’
Yesterday’s date (August 24) is apparently America’s “sickest day” on average, with 0.9% of employees taking the day off with illness, per data from PTO-manager Flamingo. Unlike the day after the Super Bowl, there doesn’t seem to be an obvious explanation.
We got six consecutive days of GTA leaks before we got GTA 6… There have now been ten separate videos purporting to show gameplay from Take-Two’s long-awaited next installment, with the account behind the clips even running a poll on what to show next.Â
Tops of the table: With the return of the Premier League, Reuters has a great viz-led deep dive on the sea of soccer jerseys England’s biggest sides release each year.
Snack Fact of the Day
According to a survey by workforce management software company TEAM Software, 57% of US workers took fewer than two full days of sick leave in 2025, while some 67% said that they worked while they were ill.Â
Tuesday
Dick’s Sporting Goods scheduled to release quarterly results ahead of the open, while Intuit, Zoom, and Semtech are all due out postmarket