Terrence O'Brien

In June, the New York state legislature passed a bill requiring social media companies to display warnings about the potential mental health harms of using their products. Now the governor has officially signed the bill into law. The announcement of the signing says that:

There’s a proposal making the rounds in California to levy a 5 percent wealth tax on anyone worth more than $1 billion. The proposal isn’t guaranteed to make it to the ballot next year. Just like when Zohran Mamdani was elected mayor of New York, lots of the ultra-wealthy are having a hissy fit. But it seems highly unlikely that Larry Page is going to take his $258 billion (more than the GDP of most countries) and leave his longtime home for the corn fields of Nebraska. The New York Times points out that:

Just like writing cursive, it seems that reading an old-school analog clock is the sort of skill that has fallen by the wayside in our smartphone age. That lapse was revealed when NYC public schools instituted a smartphone ban. The education department says students are taught to read a clock in first and second grade, but if it’s not a skill they’re using regularly, it could atrophy. According to Gothamist:

Most of us have been rolling our eyes at the (likely illegally) renamed The Donald J. Trump and The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts. But Toby Morton, a comedian who has written for Mad TV and South Park, saw the move coming and snatched up trumpkennedycenter.org and trumpkennedycenter.com a while back. Morton told the Washington Post:

The Justice Department posted a large trove of documents relating to Jeffrey Epstein on Friday. But on Saturday afternoon, some previously available files were suddenly missing. The desk photo, in which two photographs of Trump were visible, has now been restored. The DOJ says it was removed to make sure it didn’t show any of Epstein’s victims.

Amazon’s next-gen voice assistant has been rolling out slowly but surely, shipping on new Echo devices, and hitting the web for some users. Now Prime members with older Echoes can get Alexa Plus by saying “Alexa, upgrade.” The only question is, is it really an upgrade?

Superman: Man of Tomorrow is scheduled to hit theaters in 2027, and James Gunn has found his big bad. Lars Eidinger is relatively unknown in the US, but he has been nominated for a European Film Award and appeared in Noah Baumbach’s White Noise.