MIT Dethrones Princeton as America’s Top School & The Viral Debate Over Bringing Iced Coffee to Job Interviews

September 23, 2026

AI Summary

5 min read

MIT Dethrones Princeton & The Iced Coffee Interview Debate

A six-year-old girl in China just set the women's world record for solving a Rubik's Cube in under 4.5 seconds over five solves. She practices two to three hours daily and has mastered over 1,300 algorithms. That improbable feat, as Morning Brew Daily hosts Neal and Toby riff on it, sets up a broader question running through the episode: what do we actually value when we evaluate people, institutions, and behaviors—and how much of that evaluation is just arbitrary convention dressed up as rigor?

The Rankings Shuffle

Princeton has been dethroned as the number one college in the United States after 15 years atop the U.S. News and World Report list. MIT now holds the top spot, but the change had less to do with any dramatic shift in educational quality and more with a tweak in methodology. U.S. News introduced a new metric evaluating graduates' earnings by major—something MIT particularly excels at, given its engineering and computer science focus. The change is part of the magazine's ongoing shift toward measuring how students perform after graduation rather than what their high school resumes looked like coming in.

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What you'll learn

1 Morning Brew Daily — Timestamped Outline
2 (00:00) **Show Open & Speed Cubing Record** - A six-year-old girl in China sets the women's world record for solving a Rubik's Cube, averaging under 4.5 seconds.
3 (02:52) **Trump Rebrands AI as "Superintelligence" (SI)** - President Trump tells the UN the U.S. will start calling AI "superintelligence" or "SI," arguing the term "artificial" makes the technology sound fake.
4 (06:23) **Trump's UN Speech: Iran, Diesel Exports & Greenland** - A quick rundown of other major announcements from Trump's combative 37-minute address.
5 (08:16) **MIT Dethrones Princeton as #1 College** - U.S. News & World Report ranks MIT as America's top school for the first time in 15 years, pushing Princeton to #2.
6 (10:48) **A16Z Launches Alternative to College** - Andreessen Horowitz invests $35 million in a San Francisco-based two-year program called the Horwitz and Reason Academy, targeting ages 16-22.
7 (13:20) **Peloton Pivots to Running with Cheaper Treadmill** - The struggling fitness company releases its cheapest treadmill ever ($2,195), the Tread Flex, which folds upright to save space.

+ Full timestamped outline available in the app

Show Notes

#939: Trump wants to rebrand AI as “super intelligence” on all US official documents. M.I.T. surpasses Princeton as the top college in the country. Peloton is launching new treadmill models as it leans into running vs. cycling. A debate is brewing over whether bringing an iced coffee to a job interview is unprofessional or not. Finally, Ella Langley’s hit song ‘Choosin’ Texas’ breaks the all-time Hot 100 record with 23 straight weeks at No. 1.

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