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Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough is ready to spill the tea in a new newsletter. Called The Tea, Spilled by Morning Joe, the revamped newsletter for the popular morning show on the network that will soon be called MS NOW (the name change is official on November 15, the network says) took its inspiration from the world of print magazines. It’s designed to be part of a larger flywheel to grow and connect with the show’s audience. We wanted something that was visually arresting, that was simple, elegant, and that people could read and get insight from, Scarborough tells Fast Company. [Image: courtesy The Tea] The newsletter will be sent in the early afternoon, Monday through Friday, and feature daily, original illustrations from illustrator Natalie Sanders. Scarborough says if the secret to Julia Child’s cooking is butter, butter, and butter, the secret to the newsletter will be white space, white space, and white space. This isn’t meant to be a dense newsletter. I dont want picture, block of text, picture, block of text, picture block of text, Scarborough says, adding that editor Graydon Carters work at Vanity Fair and the newsletter Air Mail was a bit of an inspiration for me. I liked how he still focused on the visual, he says. As MSNBC’s outgoing parent company, Comcasts NBCUniversal, splits into two, its cable portfolioconsisting of MSNBC, CNBC, Oxygen, E!, SyFy, and the Golf Channelis becoming an independent company called Versant. That means for the first time in its 30-year history, MSNBC is operating independently from NBC News. Per the breakup agreement, the liberal-leaning cable news and opinion network has to drop the “NBC” from its name, hence the rebrand to MS NOW, an acronym for “My Source for News, Opinion, and the World.” It has built out its own Washington bureau for news gathering and signed a multiyear deal with the London-based Sky News for international coverage, and the shows are adapting to a future in which an increasing number of people watch clips online instead of on traditional TV. Standing on its own also means MS NOW shows will need to build deeper relationships with their audiences and find new revenue models at a time when cable subscribers continue to cut their cords. Already, the network is building a live events business as a new revenue line, and the Morning Joe newsletter shows how it’s building new digital products to be integrated with the show. The Tea extends the Morning Joe brand into the afternoon, with each issue including one daily video from the morning’s show, and it also gives the hosts a direct line to their audience. Subscribers will get exclusive invites to virtual town halls with Scarborough, cohosts Mika Brzezinski and Willie Geist, and others, and each issue will include a form for reader questions that the network says will be answered in future issues or shows. Scarborough says the look of the newsletter is a bit more avant-garde than any cable news show, and considering he’s no longer working for a traditional TV news conglomerate parent company, like GE or Comcast, he’s rethinking the tone and approach he can take with the newsletter. Scarborough says he told MSNBC president Rebecca Kutler that we’re going to be taking chances, and I can’t have people freaking out every day. He tested the network’s front office in a mock-up prototype newsletter that dropped an f-bomb in the daily quote section. The only questions they got back from the mock-up issue were technical, like about wrapping the text around the images, but there were no qualms about the expletive. That is like, whoa, we’re not in Kansas anymore, baby, Scarborough says. I do want something that is going to be culturally relevant, politically relevant, wherever that may be, and they’re giving us freedom to do that. He describes the mentality of Versant as that of a startup and says it’s radically different than what we’ve seen over the past 20 years. When considering names for the newsletter, Scarborough says he and his team considered names that played off Morning Joe, like The Press, but The Tea seemed to better capture the tone he was going for. Everybody said, Oh no, no, no, we can’t do that. It’s not serious enough.’ I go, ‘Exactly, Scarborough says.
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Across cultures, people often wrestle with whether having lots of money is a blessing, a burden, or a moral problem. According to our new research, how someone views billionaires isnt just about economics. Judgment also hinges on certain cultural and moral instincts, which help explain why opinions about wealth are so polarized. The study, which my colleague Mohammad Atari and I published in the research journal PNAS Nexus in June 2025, examined survey data from more than 4,300 people across 20 countries. We found that while most people around the world do not strongly condemn having too much money, there are striking cultural differences. In wealthy, more economically equal countries such as Switzerland and Belgium, people were more likely to say that having too much money is immoral. In countries that are poorer and more unequal, such as Peru or Nigeria, people tended to view wealth accumulation as more acceptable. Beyond economics, we found that judgments about excessive wealth are also shaped by deeper moral intuitions. Our study drew on moral foundations theory, which proposes that peoples sense of right and wrong is built on six core valuescare, equality, proportionality, loyalty, authority, and purity. We found that people who highly value equality and purity were more likely to see excessive wealth as wrong. The equality result was expected, but the role of purity was more surprising. Purity is usually associated with ideas about cleanliness, sanctity, or avoiding contaminationso finding that it is associated with negative views about wealth gives new meaning to the phrase filthy rich. As a social psychologist who studies morality, culture, and technology, Im interested in how these kinds of judgments differ across groups and societies. Social and institutional systems interact with individual moral beliefs, shaping how people view culture war issues such as wealth and inequalityand, in turn, how they engage with the policies and conflicts that emerge around them. Why it matters Billionaires wield growing influence in politics, technology, and global development. The richest 1% of people on Earth own more wealth than 95% of people combined, according to Oxfam, an organization focused on fighting poverty. Efforts to address inequality by taxing or regulating the rich may, however, rest on a mistaken assumptionthat the public generally condemns extreme wealth. If most people instead view amassing wealth as morally justifiable, such reforms could face limited support. Our findings suggest that in countries where inequality is highly visible and persistent, people may adapt by morally justifying their structural economic system, arguing that it is fair and legitimate. In wealthier, more equal societies, people appear more sensitive to the potential harms of excess. While our study shows that most people around the world do not view excessive wealth as morally wrong, those in wealthier and more equal countries are far more likely to condemn it. That contrast raises a sharper question: When people in privileged societies denounce and attempt to limit billionaires, are they shining a light on global injusticeor projecting their own sense of guilt? Are they projecting a moral principle shaped by their own prosperity onto poorer countries, where wealth may represent survival, progress, or even hope? What still isnt known One open question: How do these views change over time? Do attitudes shift when societies become wealthier or more equal? Are young people more likely than older generations to condemn billionaires? Our study offers a snapshot, but long-term research could reveal whether moral judgments track broader economic or cultural changes. Another uncertainty is the unexpected role of purity. Why would a value tied to cleanliness and sanctity shape how people judge billionaires? Our follow-up study found that purity concerns extended beyond money to other forms of excess, such as disapproving of having too much ambition, sex or fun. This suggests that people may see excess itselfnot just inequalityas corrupting. Whats next Were continuing to study how cultural values, social systems, and moral intuitions shape peoples judgments of fairness and excessfrom views of wealth and ambition to knowledge and AI computing power. Understanding these gut-level, moral reactions within larger social systems matters for debates about inequality. But it can also help explain how people evaluate technologies, leaders, and institutions that accumulate disproportionate, excessive power or influence. The Research Brief is a short take on interesting academic work. Jackson Trager is a Ph.D. candidate in psychology at USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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Below, Zelana Montminy shares five key insights from her new book, Finding Focus: Own Your Attention in an Age of Distraction. Zelana is a behavioral scientist who is pioneering a transformative approach to mental health and resilience. She has built a career advising and speaking for Fortune 500 companies, global organizations, and academic institutions. Her recent clients include American Express, Coca-Cola, Estee Lauder, Bank of America, UCLA, and Big Brothers Big Sisters. She appears regularly on The Doctors, Good Morning America, The Today Show, and Access Hollywood. Whats the big idea? We live in a world that is quietly, relentlessly unraveling our attention and, with it, our capacity to think clearly, feel deeply, and live purposefully. Finding Focus is about how to come home to yourself and what matters most. Focus isnt about what we pay attention to; its about how we move through the world. Listen to the audio version of this Book Biteread by Zelana herselfbelow, or in the Next Big Idea App. 1. Focus is not about forcing attention. Focus is about creating the conditions for attention. We treat focus like a musclepush harder, power through, tune outbut attention doesnt work that way. Its more like breath. The more we grip it, the more it slips away. Think of a snow globe. When you stop shaking it, the flakes settle. Clarity rises. Focus works in the same way. The real work of harnessing attention is not about willpower, but rather its about the conditions. Its about clearing the clutter mentally, physically, and emotionally so that your attention can finally exhale. 2. We are addicted to avoiding discomfort. Lets be honest, most of us dont pick up our phones out of curiosity. We pick them up to escape boredom, stillness, and that quiet ache just beneath the surface. One study found that people preferred electric shocks to sitting alone with their thoughts. Thats how intolerable stillness has become. But if we want to reclaim our attention, we must reclaim our capacity to stay with the pause, the discomfort, the urge, because distraction isnt random. Its patterned, protective, and emotional. If we want to change it, we have to start in the discomfort. 3. Do you remember how it feels to focus? We talk about focus like its purely mental: a task, a strategy, a checkbox. But real focus is also a state. Its a sensation, and when youre in it, you feel lit up and anchored, calm but alive. The problem is that weve been so overstimulated, scattered, and flooded with inputs that we hardly even recognize that feeling of focus anymore. Its a sensation, and when youre in it, you feel lit up and anchored, calm but alive. Thats why I created something called The Focus Baseline. Its a guided process to help re-attune to your own internal clarity and remember what being present feels like in your body, not just your brain. Once you feel it, you can find it again because you know what to access. That becomes your compass through the noise, chaos, and overwhelm. 4. Theres no clarity without grief. This is the quiet truth underneath so much of our distraction. When we finally slow down, put down the phone, close the tabs, and turn off the noise, the first thing that rises is not peace. Its grief and loss. Grief over how long weve been on autopilot. Grief over what weve missed, what weve buried, and what we didnt let ourselves feel. One reader wrote to me after finishing the book and said, When I stopped distracting myself, I realized Id been numbing the ache of being alive. Thats it right there. Focus asks us to sit with that ache, not to fix it or outrun it. In making room for it, we give that ache less power over us, and slowly, over time, it dulls. That room and that honesty are what clear the fog. Its what makes space for something real, and in that realness, we can reconnect with our attention and focus. 5. Hold focus and tenderness at the same time. Weve been taught that focus means grit and control. But the most powerful, grounded people arent the ones who shut down their feelings to get things done. Theyre the ones who know how to hold both clarity and compassion, direction and depth, presence and heart. Thats the new frontier. Not just the laser-sharp minds that are super productive, but also steady nervous systems that can handle the task switching that comes with tender focus. We dont need more control. We need more coherence. People who can stay regulated under pressurewho can stay human under stressare the ones who will lead us forward. We dont need more control. We need more coherence. If your focus feels fractured, if your mind feels foggy, and if your days feel like a blur, know that youre not broken, failing, or alone. Its literally all of us, and youre responding wisely and humanely to a world that has been at odds with our biology for far too long. But there is another way. You dont have to outsource your attention to the loudest thing in the room. You dont have to perform productivity while feeling completely numb. You can build a different rhythm that feels less like chasing and more like coming home. So much becomes possible when you quiet the noise inside and out and return to your life. Stay grounded, stay human, and above all, stay close to what matters. Enjoy our full library of Book Bitesread by the authors!in the Next Big Idea App. This article originally appeared in Next Big Idea Club magazine and is reprinted with permission.
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