Good morning. Tesla has found a new way to make parallel parking everyone else’s problem.

Also inside: KFC changes its drink order, and Norm Macdonald gets another turn at the microphone.

Let’s ride. 🤠

The Roadster at Thursday’s reveal. Tesla livestream image, via Car and Driver.

🧠 THE BIG PICTURE

A Roadster with less road involved

Tesla revealed its next-generation Roadster Thursday, nine years after introducing the original concept. The show included a prototype driving upside down on a curved ramp, then using SpaceX cold-gas thrusters to lift off, roll and land.

Tesla claims a 0–60 mph time of 0.8 seconds. That’s a company claim, not an independent road test; production is now promised for 2028, and pricing remains unannounced.

The spectacle is terrific. A car launch ought to occasionally make you wonder whether someone accidentally booked a stunt show, especially when the product has spent this long existing mostly in the future tense.

The commercial question is simpler: can Tesla turn that demonstration into a car people can actually buy? For now, enjoy the engineering theater and keep a little distance between the launch footage and your household transportation budget.

🚀 HEADLINES THAT MATTER

KFC changes sides in the soda wars

KFC’s U.S. restaurants are switching to Coca-Cola. The transition starts in January 2027 and should reach all U.S. locations by spring, bringing Coke, Sprite and other Coca-Cola drinks to the chicken chain.

For customers, this is a small change with unusually strong opinions attached. The fountain drink is part of the meal people order on autopilot; somewhere, a loyal Pepsi drinker is about to discover that even their lunch has a transfer portal.

AI-generated editorial cartoon. A peaceful transfer of carbonation.

Meta releases the weights, with a large hardware appetite

Meta released Muse Spark Open, a model for coding and multi-step tasks that accepts text, images, audio and video. Developers can download its weights, modify it and run it under Meta’s license.

That gives builders another serious option for custom applications. Self-hosting still takes substantial hardware: Meta lists at least 700GB of GPU memory for its compressed version, or two M5 Ultra Mac Studios; third-party APIs offer an easier starting point.

Norm tells the Norm story

Norm: The Tale of Norm Macdonald arrives on Netflix today. Judd Apatow directs the documentary, using Macdonald’s book, sketches, stand-up and interviews to let the late comedian narrate his own life.

That sounds like the right structural choice for someone whose delivery was half the joke.

If your weekend watchlist has become an unpaid administrative job, here’s a specific addition: a portrait assembled from the work itself, with the person who knew exactly where to pause still doing the talking.

The startup prize went to a tiny intestine

Intero Biosystems won Startup Battlefield’s $100,000 prize Thursday. Its product, GastroScreen, uses miniature human intestinal tissue grown in a lab to study how drugs and other compounds affect the gut before human testing.

The company says the models include supporting cells, nerves and muscle, giving researchers more to work with than a flat layer of cells. It’s an encouraging business built around a specific scientific need—and a pitch where “we have guts” is unusually literal.

Space has excellent handwriting

Chandra researchers have explained the “Treble Clef”, a radio-wave formation shaped like the musical symbol. Their likely sequence: a supermassive black hole expelled material, then a collision between galaxy clusters compressed or reenergized it.

The new composite combines X-ray, radio and infrared observations to expose structures hidden behind our own galaxy. The pink squiggle is radio emission; the blue glow is hot gas.

Space hasn’t written us a tune, but the album cover is ready.

X-ray: NASA/CXC/INAF-IRA/A. Botteon et al.; infrared: UKIDSS-GPS; radio: ASTRON/LOFAR; processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/N. Wolk.

Bluesky wants more people making things

Bluesky showed new app-building capabilities for Attie at Disrupt Thursday. The assistant previously helped people create custom feeds; the new feature lets users build games, apps and other experiences with AI.

That’s a promising use of the technology: give people with a specific community or hobby a way to make something for it. The interesting test is whether those small creations become places people return to.

A neighborhood game night would be a pleasant change from another argument feed.

⚡ RAPID FIRE

Ask your inbox aloud. Gmail Live is rolling out to eligible U.S. Workspace users on mobile, with spoken answers and source-email cards. Availability expands gradually.

AI seats for research labs. OpenAI’s Rosalind Academic Plan offers eligible U.S. university labs up to 30 sponsored seats for up to 12 months, subject to approval.

Milwaukee is going back. The Brewers swept the Dodgers to reach their first World Series since 1982. Thursday’s clincher ended 6–4.

Art with a Newark address. Dreamtime in Newark opens today, bringing together 46 artists to trace Aljira’s journey from artist-led space to influential contemporary-art institution.

Redecorate the command line. Terminal Themes puts free palettes for iTerm, Ghostty and other terminals in a browsable web app. Your unfinished project can look terrific.

Find a bigger backyard. Unfenced maps land for sale bordering public forests and wilderness, using official boundary data. A useful starting point for cabin daydreams.

🤪 THE WEIRD BIT

International timekeepers voted to retire leap seconds Thursday, allowing a much wider gap between atomic time and Earth’s rotation. The change is planned for May 2027.

After decades of adjusting the clocks to accommodate the planet, we’ve essentially told Earth to keep its own hours. Unfortunately, your Monday meeting remains at nine.

— Michael

P.S. Which lunch switch would cause more trouble in your house: the soda brand or the fries? I suspect this is how family group chats become constitutional conventions.

🎧 Podcast archive · September 4: Nvidia Buys the AI Community for $13B, an earlier Beyond Brief Daily episode in under five minutes.