Kim Mackrael and Sam Schechner, reporting for The Wall Street Journal (News+ link): The European Commission, the EU’s executive body, had initially planned to announce cease-and-desist orders targeting the tech giants on Tuesday and had informed at least one of the compa...

Brian X. Chen, in a column at The New York Times headlined “Why a Tariff-Inflated $2,000 iPhone Is Nothing to Fear”: Don’t panic. Even if tariffs did cause the iPhone’s price to surge, we would have plenty of cheaper options, like buying last year’s phone model instead o...

Josh Kovensky, reporting for TPM: In a withering 46-page opinion on Wednesday, D.C. Chief Judge James Boasberg laid out how he came to believe that the Trump administration was acting in bad faith during its Alien Enemies Act removals. Boasberg set the stage for potenti...

Dennis McLellan, writing for the Los Angeles Times (News+ link): Over the decades, according to his website, Martindale either hosted or produced 21 game shows, including “Words and Music,” “Trivial Pursuit,” “The Last Word” and “Debt.” “That’s a lot of shows,” he acknow...

Wes Davis, The Verge: During Meta’s antitrust trial today, lawyers representing Apple, Google, and Snap each expressed irritation with Meta over the slides it presented on Monday that The Verge found to contain easy-to-remove redactions. Attorneys for both Apple and Snap...

Dana Mattioli, reporting for The Wall Street Journal (main link is a gift link; also, here’s a News+ link): Musk has had at least 14 children with four women, including the pop musician Grimes and Shivon Zilis, an executive at his brain computer company Neuralink. Multip...

Jessica Lyons, reporting for The Register: US government funding for the world’s CVE program — the centralized Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures database of product security flaws — ends Wednesday. The 25-year-old CVE program plays a huge role in vulnerability manage...

You will recall that in September 2022, Figma entered into an agreement for a $20 billion acquisition by Adobe, but abandoned the deal 15 months later.

Glenn Fleishman: The book Six Centuries of Type & Printing briskly tells the story of the evolution of type and printing, starting with early documented efforts and surviving artifacts from China and Korea, and introducing Gutenberg and his innovations. It then takes...

Samuel Axon, writing for Ars Technica: Some time ago, OpenAI added a feature called “Memory” that allowed a limited number of pieces of information to be retained and used for future responses. Users often had to specifically ask ChatGPT to remember something to trigger ...

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Seth Godin:

You can’t.

That’s because toddlers don’t understand what an argument is and aren’t interesting in having one.

Toddlers (which includes defensive bureaucrats, bullies, flat earthers, folks committed to a specific agenda and radio talk show hosts) may indicate that they’d like to have an argument, but they’re actually engaging in connection, noise, play acting or a chance to earn status. It can be fun to be in opposition, to harangue or even to use power to change someone’s position.

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New features they launched just last month include:

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Bill Maher personifies the difference between a liberal (which he is) and a leftist (which he isn’t). But he’s been a stridently vocal critic of Trump since long before Trump even ran for president. Maher was the first person on television to correctly predict that Trump, if...

Crackerjack essay by Chuck Wendig:

Maybe it’s like turbulence on an airplane, you think. Just a bumpy unpleasant awful experience you gotta get through. But when turbulence hits it’s not because the pilot is a guy who doesn’t “know planes,” when turbulence hits they don’t disappear the ninth row people out the airlock because they “look different” and are “probably causing the problem.” Planes don’t have airlocks, do they? Whatever. My brain is spray cheese.

Vanity Fair published an excerpt from Chris Whipple’s new book on the final years of Joe Biden’s presidency, under the headline “Did Aides Cover Up His Mental State — or Was It Group Delusion?” (News+ link): The president’s wobbly state should have been a flashing warnin...

Jamelle Bouie, writing at The New York Times (gift link): There is a hypothetical president with a hypothetically similar agenda who could answer these questions. This actual president cannot. He did not reason himself into his preoccupation with tariffs and can neither ...

Warren Buffett’s annual shareholders letters are always a must-read. The honesty, clarity, and striking humility of his prose stands out in a world where corporate communications — from companies of any size — tend to be bland and obfuscating. This year’s letter, published b...

Auzinea Bacon, CNN: Electronics imported to the United States will be exempt from President Donald Trump’s reciprocal tariffs, according to a US Customs and Border Protection notice posted late Friday. Smartphones, computer monitors and various electronic parts are among...

Reuters:

China’s Anker, one of Amazon’s largest sellers offering products from power banks to phone cases, has raised prices on a fifth of its products on the U.S. platform since Thursday, in a sign that tariffs on Chinese goods are being passed on to U.S. shoppers.

Some 127 Anker products have seen an average increase of 18% since Thursday last week, with the majority of those occurring after Monday, April 7, when U.S. President Donald Trump added an extra 50% import duty on Chinese goods, according to data from e-commerce services provider SmartScout.

Tariffs driving up consumer prices is as sure a thing as rain making you wet. But it’s worth pointing to the evidence as it comes in, because unlike rain’s wetness, the “emperor sure does have clothes” MAGA contingent is trying to argue that tariffs don’t have this obvious effect.

Financial Times reporter John Burn-Murdoch has a summary on Bluesky of his co-bylined report for the Financial Times: Visitors from western Europe who stayed at least one night in the US fell by 17 per cent in March from a year ago, according to the International Trade A...

Reuters: “The U.S. side’s imposition of excessively high tariffs on China seriously violates international economic and trade rules, runs counter to basic economic principles and common sense, and is simply an act of unilateral bullying and coercion,” China’s Finance Min...

Blockbuster report by Wayne Ma for The Information (paywalled and pricey, alas): But an equally important factor was the conflicting personalities within Apple, according to multiple people who worked in the AI and software engineering groups. More than half a dozen form...

Ben Thompson: The problem with these tariffs is that their scale and indiscriminate nature will have the effect of destroying demand and destroying the capability to develop alternative supply. I suppose if the only goal is to hurt China then shooting yourself in the foo...

Chance Miller, writing at 9to5Mac: Ahead of that, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said today that Trump firmly believes that Apple can move iPhone manufacturing to the United States. In response to a question from Maggie Haberman of The New York Times about ...

I think it’s a good start, and I couldn’t be happier that the WebKit team is even tackling the problem at all. As Simmons notes, line-wrapping layout in web browsers has, until now, been very crude — and the web has been around a long time.

This sounds like one of those puzzles job interviewers often ask, but there’s a practical relevance at the moment.

President Trump, in a post on Truth Social, which is apparently how the world’s financial markets now run: Based on the lack of respect that China has shown to the World’s Markets, I am hereby raising the Tariff charged to China by the United States of America to 125%, e...

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Chance Miller, writing for 9to5Mac: According to senior Indian officials cited in the report, Apple flew five planes full of iPhones and other products from India and China “in just three days during the final week of March.” “Factories in India and China and other key ...