🍪 Yankee Candle reviews say COVID's back

Good morning, party people! This is Bite Sized Beta, where we give you the scoop on all the most important stuff in life. Like the fact that today is National M&M Day.

Go get that M&M McFlurry and celebrate like a true American.

Sidebar - if you’ve ever wondered who comes up with these random holidays, get this: there’s a website where any organization can go and submit a national day. And it looks like a very patriotic 6th grader’s summer camp project.

Now don’t all rush at once to register National Bite Sized Beta Appreciation Day…

In the oven this week:

• 🕯 What Yankee candles have to do with COVID

• 🍪 Cookie crumbs: 5 bite-sized headlines

• 🍫 Chocolate chips: our 4 best finds of the week

• 😂 Snickerdoodles: Thursday memes, of course

FRESHLY BAKED

YANKEE CANDLE REVIEWS SAY COVID'S BACK

Remember COVID?

It’s like that annoying neighbor you wave at once and now just won't stop coming around. 

Welllll, don’t look up cause it’s back.

A professor recently developed a novel way to predict resurgences in COVID cases. 

Did he use conventional data sources like hospitalizations? 

Nah. That would be too normal.

He used Yankee Candle reviews on Amazon.

Apparently, we can predict COVID surges by looking at the number of 1-star reviews containing, “no smell” (i.e. COVID wiped out the reviewer’s sense of smell). 

Why Yankee Candles?

1. Yankee Candles are super popular, so you get to analyze a large sample size

2. They have a variety of scents, so you can figure out if whether the effect is specific to a scent or if it holds across scents

3. The government sucks at giving us real time data, and Amazon reviews roll in a lot faster

For every 100,000 new COVID-19 cases per week, he found that reviews containing “no smell” increased by a quarter of a percentage point in the next week.

Unfortunately, those 1 star no smell reviews are comin' in droves this week:

Guess it’s time to go get that new booster…

80,000 HOURS

THIS EDITION IS SPONSORED BY 80,000 HOURS

Did you know you'll have, on average, 80,000 hours in your career? That’s a lot of time, and it means that your career is probably your biggest opportunity to have a positive impact in the world.

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Download a free copy of their high-impact career guide.

COOKIE CRUMBS

BITE SIZED TREATS

CHOCOLATE CHIPS

BEST FINDS OF THE WEEK

• 14 strategies to be happier.

• This is freaky. An AI-generated a podcast between Joe Rogan and Steve Jobs (reminder: he’s dead), and it’s realistic af.

• The Rolex Market Index, where you can track the value of the top luxury watches in the secondhand market. If you had bought a used Rolex in March of 2022, it would have lost almost a third of its value by now. Ouch.

• We just finished The Founders: The Story of Paypal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley. It’s exactly what it sounds like, and it rocked. An inside look into the legendary PayPal mafia.

SNICKERDOODLES

THURSDAY MEMES  

That's all we got for ya this week - see ya next Thursday!!

What'd you think about this email?

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• 🍪 Undercooked, do better