Hello! Feeling old yet? Our first story on the hip-hop genre turning 50 may not help:
If you needed a reason to throw a party this week, your excuse is ready-made as it's hip-hop’s birthday. Indeed, August 11th marks the 50th anniversary of the disco-rap genre — with celebrations including free street concerts in NYC and a series of cultural events fronted by hip-hop’s very own Ice-T.
To the hip, hip-hop, you don’t stop…
In August 1973, a party in the Bronx saw DJ Kool Herc pioneer the predecessor to modern-day hip-hop sampling: a technique of playing a vocal-less break from one record while queuing up the next percussion break on another turntable.
Since then, hip-hop has moved from the underground to the mainstream. Off the back of trailblazers such as Jay-Z, Tupac, and Nas, hip-hop has hustled to become the most popular music genre in the US, with nearly one third of Americans counting themselves as fans. In fact, according to MRC Data, 2021 saw R&B / hip-hop account for 28% of the total volume of music listened to globally.
While hip-hop has mastered digital audio streaming, rock fans like to keep things a little more old school. If you zoom in on just physical albums, rock remains the largest genre by some distance — accounting for nearly 50% of all sales, more than triple the 15% that R&B / hip-hop recorded.
Note from the editor: This is what we believe to be the only acceptable use of a pie chart: when it depicts something round (like a CD or vinyl)!
Mega billions
The jackpot for tomorrow’s Mega Millions draw is expected to stand at $1.55 billion, marking the third-largest lottery prize in US history and exceeding the current Mega Millions record of $1.537 billion that was set back in October 2018.
The prize pot has been building since April and, if a winning ticket is drawn, the lucky player could be offered a $757.2 million lump-sum cash option. If it feels like lotto jackpots have been getting bigger recently, that’s because they have — there's been four $1 billion jackpots in 2023 so far, as many as all the previous years combined.
Lotto luck
Higher ticket prices and interest rates have played a big part in the jumbo jackpots, as did changing the odds in 2019, with the likelihood of your Mega Millions ticket scooping you millions or billions of dollars going from 1 in 258.9 million to 1 in 302.6 million. This has meant that more than 115 days have passed since the last jackpot winner — though a lucky few did get richer after Friday’s draw, when seven $1 million prizes were handed out for matching 5 balls.
The $1.55 billion prize pot would be the highest in Mega Millions history, around $13 million more than the jackpot collected by an anonymous player in South Carolina 5 years ago. Even so, you're more likely to hit the billion figure playing Mega Millions compared to Powerball, as we charted in November — only two jackpots have met the threshold, compared to Mega Millions’ five.
Last week was the busiest for second-quarter earnings season, and corporate America didn’t have much good news. Indeed, companies in the S&P 500 are currently on track to report the worst operating quarter since 2020, with data cited by the Wall Street Journal revealing that earnings for the flagship S&P 500 Index are down 5.2% on this time last year.
Same energy
In 2022, energy was the bright spot in the market. Soaring oil prices may have hurt your wallet when you filled up your tank, but it was a boom time for oil companies like ExxonMobil and Chevron. This year, the going isn’t quite so easy for the sector. ExxonMobil, for example, reported net income for the second quarter of $7.9 billion, less than half of the remarkable $17.9 billion it reported in the same quarter last year. Chevron, a smaller rival, also reported a leaner quarter, with a 28% decline in revenue.
However, even if the earnings aren’t quite as ludicrous as they were last year, energy stocks as a whole have broadly held onto their gains — rising more than 60% since the start of 2022.
Taking stock
Beyond energy, the performance of America's stock market has been fairly underwhelming since Jan 2022. Industrials have been the second-best performer, with a modest 6% increase, and while the headlines have been dominated by AI — propelling Nvidia, Microsoft, Alphabet, Apple, Amazon, and Meta to add a total of $3.1 trillion in market cap this year — the tech sector as a whole hasn't gained since 2022. Meanwhile, the real estate sector has been the hardest hit, grappling with fears of rising mortgage payments and empty office spaces.
• Greta Gerwig’s Barbie just became the first movie solely directed by a woman to gross over $1 billion at the global box office, currently ranking as the 45th highest-grossing movie of all time.
• In one of the more ironic instances in the cacophony of return-to-office calls, Zoom is now asking workers to come in 2 days a week.
• Warren Buffett's company Berkshire Hathaway has ended the latest quarter with a $147bn cash pile, just below the all-time high of $149bn the company had on its balance sheet in 2021.
• Charting the declining rate of twin births on the back of the annual Twins Days Festival in Twinsburg, Ohio.
• A great viz deep dive on Singapore’s 1.4 million migrant workforce.
Off the charts: A convention in Niagara Falls last month saw more than 40 women gather to raise awareness for what previously popular female name, which topped the list of names back in the 1940s? [Answer below].
