Archive

Clifford Wilson, an economist who specializes in transportation and microeconomic policy, writes in the New York Times about the death of the “econobox,” cheap, reliable vehicles that helped working people get around. Detroit stopped making these vehicles about 20 years ago, but Wilson thinks a possible solution is to open the floodgates to inexpensive EVs and hybrids from China. With lots of caveats, of course.

Along with the launch of a new season tomorrow, Overwatch is also getting an update for Nintendo’s latest console. It doesn’t sound like a huge change, but Blizzard says that the Switch 2 version will feature “better visuals, higher fidelity audio, and up to 60 FPS in both docked and handheld mode.”

An analysis from Originality AI, an AI detection company, found that 23 big news sites block the Internet Archive’s crawler, Wired reports. A USA Today spokesperson told the publication that the move “is not about specifically blocking the Internet Archive” but about attempting to block other scraping bots.

The civil rights organization and 75 other groups published an open letter to Mark Zuckerberg, urging him to “immediately halt and publicly disavow” plans for a reported facial recognition feature on its Ray-Ban smart glasses. It’s unsurprising that privacy advocates are wary, especially since documents show Meta originally planned to launch the feature during public unrest.

Prezzy T filed a $10 billion defamation suit against the Wall Street Journal after it published Trump’s birthday letter to Jeffrey Epstein, but the judge just dismissed the case, saying Trump had “not plausibly alleged that the Defendants published the Article with actual malice.” (“Actual malice” here is a specific legal term that means publishing something you know is false.)

Okay: almost nobody wants a year-end “wrapped” for most things we do — food delivery, subscriptions, you name it. It’d be too embarrassing to look into that mirror. But this one seems legitimately useful to help Americans understand how their taxes are being spent. Enter Tax Wrapped, from Riley Walz. Find out how much of your money is going to health, war, and more.