260,000 NYC delivery workers just got made whole

Happy Monday. New York City just collected $131 million from DoorDash for 260,000 delivery workers who were underpaid, paid late, or not paid at all. Workers don't even have to file a claim — the city found them. That's today's lead.

We also have Phil Knight giving $1 billion to the University of Oregon in what may be the largest single donation to a public university in American history, a San Diego nonprofit that's been turning felony records into machinist certifications for over a decade, and California teenagers who just broke a Guinness World Record recycling sports balls.

Good week ahead.

—Stephanie S

The New York City Department of Consumer and Worker Protection launched an investigation after dozens of delivery workers filed reports about unpaid wages. What they found was systematic: DoorDash had failed to pay thousands of workers at all, paid thousands more late, and underpaid more than 260,000 workers total — all while reporting $13.7 billion in revenue in 2025, a 28% increase over the prior year. It is the largest worker settlement in New York City history.

The settlement delivers more than $115 million directly to workers and $16 million in civil penalties. Workers owed money and never paid receive triple — a worker owed $1,000 who received nothing gets $3,000 back. Workers paid late receive double. And nobody has to file a claim: the city identified every affected worker through its own analysis of DoorDash's records and will send personalized emails this fall.

"DoorDash underpaid more than 260,000 workers, and today we are getting that money back," said Mayor Mamdani. "When a worker earns a wage, they deserve to be paid that wage, on time and in full." A Princeton University partner is now building software that gives workers a direct role in flagging future violations — find out how the new monitoring system works and what DoorDash is now required to change.

Phil Knight co-founded Nike alongside his track coach Bill Bowerman at the University of Oregon, and the school has never been far from his heart or his checkbook. He and his wife Penny have given more than $1 billion in combined gifts to Oregon over the decades — the campus already bears his name on the law center, sports complexes, and library. When Oregon president Karl Scholz received a call from Knight earlier this month while sitting in a San Francisco airport, he had no idea what was coming.

Knight told him he and Penny were giving $1 billion more. The gift will fund an entirely new College of Engineering in a state experiencing a significant shortage of engineers, and the New York Times believes it is the largest single donation to an American public university in history. "One of the most successful businesspeople in the history of humanity has said higher education is worth an investment of this magnitude," said Scholz.

Knight's own words cut to the heart of why: "To make an audacious dream a reality requires more than a vivid imagination. It also requires the sort of opportunity that our great American universities have historically provided." Read about the budget crisis the university was facing — and how this gift changes everything.

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In a converted machine shop in southeastern San Diego, Rise Up Industries has spent more than ten years helping men trade prison time for paid apprenticeships as machinists. The program pairs hands-on CNC training with therapy, case management, and a real paycheck from day one — the shop fills actual contracts for aerospace parts, medical devices, automotive components, camera hardware, BMX parts, and fishing lures. Only 3% of graduates re-offend, compared to a national rate of roughly 66% over three years.

Komisi Savaiinaea served more than two decades in prison before joining the program. He's now a supervisor on the shop floor, a cancer survivor, and has been married for more than 30 years. Anthony Walkens was sentenced to 55 years to life in 1998 for gang-related homicide; he did 47 years, was paroled in 2025, and walked through Rise Up's doors not long after. "When I first came through the door, I was overwhelmed," he said. "But the welcome I got here — it started being more comfortable."

"Someone can leave incarceration with a certificate and still face the same isolation, trauma, and instability that contributed to incarceration in the first place," said Executive Director Jonathan Yackley. "Sustainable change happens when demanding career training is combined with behavioral health care and a community in which people know they belong." Read Komisi's full story — including the moment he realized this program might actually work for him.

Five hundred million tennis, pickle, and racquet balls are sold in the United States every year. Between 95 and 99% of them end up in landfills, where they take roughly 400 years to decompose. A group of California teen environmentalists decided to do something about that, and last weekend they collected approximately 22,000 balls — weighing 2,675 pounds — in a single day, setting a Guinness World Record for most racquet sport balls recycled in one day.

The teens operate under the name Another Bounce, working beneath the 501(c)3 Habits of Waste. Their recycling partner Ridwell will turn the collected balls into pelletized resin used in nursery pots, carpeting, and packaging. Community members who donated a grocery bag of balls got free ice cream; Selkirk donated free pickleballs to every donor. LA City Councilmember Traci Park showed up to cheer them on, and Malibu's mayor invited the group to draft an actual city ordinance.

"This record is a powerful visual reminder of the enormous amount of waste generated by sports," said Habits of Waste founder Sheila Morovati. "By diverting more than 20,000 balls from landfills, we're showing what's possible when we rethink the systems we've come to accept as the norm." Read about the founder's previous Guinness World Record — and what she's aiming for next.

🐘 Tanzania: Tanzania has established its first official wildlife corridor, linking the open savanna woodlands of Nyerere National Park with the high-altitude rainforests of the Udzungwa Mountains, creating a protected migratory path for endangered savannah elephants.

🐯 Nepal: Nepal's wild tiger population has tripled over 16 years, rising from 121 tigers in 2010 to 429 today, representing one of the most significant endangered species recoveries in the world, driven by sustained collaborative conservation efforts.

🐘 Kenya: Park rangers rescued a days-old elephant calf after she was separated from her mother and found hiding among a herd of zebras — the Sheldrick Wildlife Trust, which has operated the world's most successful orphan elephant rescue and rehabilitation program since 1977, led the operation.

🦧 Nigeria: Conservationist Rachel Ikemeh founded Nigeria's first locally managed marine area in a swamp ecosystem that is also home to a near-extinct monkey species unknown to science until 1993, which Ikemeh has spent years pulling back from the brink.

🦘 Australia: A tiny, elusive nabarlek wallaby — considered one of Australia's hardest animals to spot — was photographed on trail cameras for the first time in 50 years, with conservationists calling it the "ecological equivalent of finding a needle in a haystack

On September 28, 1976, Stevie Wonder released his eighteenth studio album, Songs in the Key of Life — a sprawling double LP with a four-song bonus disc that became only the third album in history to debut at No. 1 on the Billboard chart, and the first by an American artist. It sold 10 million copies in the United States alone and spent 13 consecutive weeks at the top. Two years before he began work on the album, Wonder had moved to Ghana to work with children with disabilities.

The album is widely considered the pinnacle of Wonder's career and one of the greatest records ever made. It arrived at a moment when Wonder had more creative and commercial leverage than almost any artist in history, having renegotiated his Motown contract to give himself complete artistic control. Fifty years later, it remains a masterclass in what popular music can be when an artist is given the space to reach as far as they can.

Other notable September 28 events:

1987: Star Trek: The Next Generation debuted on American television, 39 years ago today, with Patrick Stewart as Captain Jean-Luc Picard, going on to span 178 episodes over seven seasons and win 19 Emmy Awards and a Peabody Award.

1982: Carl Sagan's Cosmos debuted on American public television, 44 years ago today, becoming the most-watched TV series in the country until Ken Burns' Civil War, eventually airing in 60 countries and viewed 500 million times.

1928: Alexander Fleming returned from vacation to find a mold had killed the bacteria in his laboratory and said "That's funny!" — 98 years ago today, the discovery that became penicillin and eventually won him the Nobel Prize.

1787: The US Constitution was submitted to the 13 states, 239 years ago today, with Congress voting unanimously to do so but offering no recommendation for or against its adoption

— Winston Churchill

Every day brings amazing advances and uplifting moments that remind us just how wonderful the world can be. Here are five reasons why today is the best time ever to be alive:

🔬 Quantum Computers Are Solving What Classical Computers Can't: Scientists are using quantum computers to simulate molecular behavior at the quantum level, cracking problems in drug discovery and materials science that would take classical computers millions of years to work through. The first practical quantum advantage over classical computers in a real-world chemistry problem was demonstrated in 2025.

💡 We Crossed the Fusion Threshold: Scientists have achieved fusion ignition — producing more energy from a fusion reaction than the energy delivered to trigger it — and the first commercial fusion power plants are now under construction in the UK and US, targeting grid connection in the early 2030s. Clean, virtually limitless energy is no longer a question of whether but when.

🔭 Solar Power From Space: Engineers are developing satellites that would collect solar energy in space — where the sun shines continuously with no atmosphere to block it — and beam it to Earth as microwaves, delivering clean electricity to any point on the planet around the clock. The UK and China both have active programs targeting demonstration projects this decade.

🧬 Editing the Instructions, Not Just the Code: Scientists can now edit the epigenome — the chemical marks that tell genes when to switch on or off — potentially reversing age-related gene changes without touching the underlying DNA itself. This opens an entirely new dimension of medicine beyond what DNA editing alone can reach.

🌱 One Animal Can Rebuild an Entire Ecosystem: Rewilding projects returning wolves to Yellowstone, lynx to Scotland, and beavers to England have confirmed that a single apex predator triggers cascading changes across an entire ecosystem — reshaping rivers, regrowing forests, and restoring biodiversity in ways that would take centuries of active management to replicate. These trophic cascades are now shaping conservation policy on every continent.

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