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Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge, Getty Images

When the Department of Justice released its more than 70-page lawsuit against Apple, its narrative read more like a docu-drama than a stodgy legal document. It dropped the reader right into a 2010 exchange between an Apple executive and then-CEO Steve Jobs, who were just beginning to recognize how easy it was for customers to switch to their rivals’ products — unless they did something to stop it. This kind of writing, sometimes called a speaking complaint, is a far cry from the rote retelling you often find in lawsuits.
That’s not a surprise once you know that Hetal Doshi, lead of the nascent litigation program within the Antitrust Division, sees her job, in part, as that of a storyteller.
“Storytelling matters a lot in litigation, because it’s the way that we communicate as human beings,” Doshi says, speaking to The Verge in April. (She spoke generally about the litigation program but declined to comment on any pending litigation, including against Apple.) The first lawyer in her family, Doshi often considers how she’d describe a case to her loved ones. “I have to really focus on: Who are the actors? What’s the issue and why does it matter?” For her, it’s not just about a dry regurgitation of the facts. “It meets this moment in terms of expressing to courts and to the American people what’s at stake with consolidation and concentration of power,” she says.
“Competition reflects our democratic values”
To Doshi, what’s at stake is the ability of the American people to have sufficient choices available to them — whether that’s in choosing an airline seat or a publishing house to sell a book. When Doshi talks about antitrust, she talks about economic liberties and the American Dream. “Competition reflects our democratic values,” she says. “That’s why people have to be at the center of our cases.”
That’s the sort of lens that Doshi and her team are bringing to a range of cases at the Antitrust Division. Her unit just got its start under the current administration but is already helping increase the division’s capacity to bring complex litigation and a litigator’s eye to investigations. And perhaps even more importantly, it’s preparing the division to take on more courtroom challenges in the years to come.
That’s important when you think about the scale of the litigation the division is tackling, even as its budget has failed to grow commensurate with its ambitious goals. In the tech sector alone, the division has major monopoly cases ongoing against Apple, Google (which faces two separate lawsuits), and just recently, Ticketmaster and its owner, Live Nation. In the 20 years before the first Google case was filed, the division had exactly zero tech monopoly cases. Now, two of its opponents — Apple and Google — are each worth more than $2 trillion, giving them ample resources to hire a boatload of lawyers.
The creation of the litigation program reflects the larger goals of the Antitrust Division’s leadership: to bring more cases to trial to advance the application of century-old antitrust laws for modern times. It follows a movement that has gained steam in recent years, advocating for more vigorous enforcement of the laws, particularly in digital markets, which don’t always look like traditional antimonopoly cases because they offer products for free or benefit from network effects. That movement has seen many of its hopes fulfilled under the Biden administration, which empowered reform-minded enforcers. But that could change if Joe Biden isn’t reelected as president in November, though antitrust politics don’t always fall along partisan lines in the modern era. (The Antitrust Division under the Biden administration, for example, took Google to trial in a case that was investigated and filed during the Trump administration.)
In the tech sector, where businesses change rapidly with new advancements, the pace of antitrust litigation can easily fall far behind
Time is of the essence when it comes to building up a deep bench of courtroom expertise. Especially in the tech sector, where businesses change rapidly with new advancements, the pace of antitrust litigation can easily fall far behind. That can make it even more difficult to determine an effective remedy to correct a years-old harm if a court finds the company liable for it in the first place. After years of investigations, the division is now poised to face several tech companies one after the other in court, and the litigation program is helping to ensure the government has the tools to do that now and in the future.
“Not all resources are necessarily the same,” says Doshi. “Our secret weapon is the fact that we have public servants who choose to be here in this particular moment to enforce our antitrust laws. They are moved by a strength of character and a sense of purpose that candidly elevates their advocacy in ways that are truly remarkable.”
Antitrust expertise with a prosecutor’s eye
DOJ Antitrust Division chief Jonathan Kanter began building up the program in 2022 and put Doshi at the helm, calling her in a statement “one of the nation’s elite trial lawyers. She is a visionary leader, generous mentor, and brilliant legal strategist.” The program operates like a center of litigation resources that staff throughout the division can work with in crafting their cases, even beginning at the investigation stage. While the civil and criminal programs within the division also have their own litigation staff, the program offers an extra set of dedicated resources from a variety of backgrounds with deep in-courtroom experience. Staff in the litigation program tackle things ranging from prepping to advocate for a case in court to training and mentoring.
When Kanter was confirmed to lead the Antitrust Division in 2021, he wanted to reinvigorate antitrust enforcement, which included litigating more cases the division might not have previously brought to trial. But that also required having the staffing and expertise to make more arguments in front of judges and juries, rather than in negotiations over consent decrees. He “wanted to have the ability to litigate a lot of cases at the same time,” recalled Richard Powers, who served as acting assistant attorney general at the Antitrust Division prior to Kanter’s confirmation. The problem was, they didn’t have the volume of staff with a depth of courtroom experience to carry out that vision. That’s because, historically, it’s been difficult to gain trial experience at the Antitrust Division.

When people complain about the government moving slowly, it’s sometimes because of the kinds of structural roadblocks that Kanter encountered in this area. Due to the lengthy and complex nature of antitrust cases, it’s not uncommon for attorneys in the division to have limited trial experience because of how long it takes to get to trial in the first place. “You can work at the Antitrust Division as a trial attorney for ten years and have all your cases settle, and you don’t really get the litigation experience that you’re looking for,” Powers says. Take the first Google antimonopoly complaint over Search: DOJ filed it in October 2020, and the trial didn’t start until September 2023. And that’s after the entire process of investigating the company, including poring over millions of documents from Google.
So after Kanter joined the division in 2021, Powers recalled, “We had to figure out, what do we have in terms of capabilities? … Especially on the civil side, we just hadn’t tried that many cases. And so there just wasn’t necessarily the bench that you would need to do what [Kanter] wanted to do, people with true in-courtroom litigation experience.”
That was the seed of what would later become the litigation program — a team of experienced litigators that could bring what Powers called a “prosecutor’s eye” to conduct cases like illegal monopolization — the kinds of charges that are now leveraged at three different tech companies at one time.
That expertise can be useful in negotiations. “While not everything is going to go to trial, you have to be prepared to go to trial in order to have credibility with the company or the merging parties,” says Bill Baer, who led the Antitrust Division during the Obama administration.

Glimmers of that prosecutor’s lens might be found in several choices the division has made in recent cases, including the accessible style of the Apple complaint, for example. Though Doshi says the division’s actions always start with the law itself, “we can’t forget that competition serves people.” She pointed to the DOJ’s successful case against Penguin Random House’s proposed acquisition of Simon & Schuster, where the government argued the deal would harm competition for publishing rights in the US. While on its surface, the case was about a jargon-y term called monopsony — where there’s a lack of competition of buyers for a product — Doshi said the division was really arguing a “common sense notion” that having more employers able to compete for labor would help workers see the true value of their work recognized. “That’s the American Dream that’s wrapped up in the principles of labor monopsony that that case was about.”
Strong litigation expertise can also show through in the efficiency of staffing cases. “Historically there has been a perspective that more was better when it came to staffing these trials,” Powers says. But more streamlined staffing can actually lead to clearer arguments, where it’s easier to “get to the heart of what the cases are about,” while freeing up other attorneys to work on different matters.
Litigation expertise likely also comes into play with decisions to bring cases in front of a jury versus a judge. DOJ has pushed to have antitrust suits like the Google ad tech and Ticketmaster cases tried before a jury. (A judge recently denied DOJ’s request for a jury trial in the Google ad tech case.) Before Kanter’s tenure, Powers says, “you might have heard, ‘Oh, this is too complicated for a jury … And I think anybody who ever says that has never been in front of a jury. Juries are smart. They get it. They understand the issues.”
“Settlements do not move the law forward”
The litigation program represents a new approach spearheaded by Kanter when it comes to antitrust enforcement. In public remarks, he has said that bringing cases to trial — rather than settling — is important in order to have courts weigh in on important questions that can advance antitrust law.
“Settlements do not move the law forward,” Kanter said in a speech before the New York State Bar Association in 2022. “We need new published opinions from courts that apply the law in modern markets in order to provide clarity to businesses. This requires litigation that sets out the boundaries of the law as applied to current markets, and we need to be willing to take risks and ask the courts to reconsider the application of old precedents to those markets.”
During a separate antitrust enforcers gathering in 2022, Kanter discussed his initial steps to ramp up litigation talent, which, at the time, included designating Doshi and experienced trial attorney Carol Sipperly as acting deputy assistant attorneys general overseeing litigation. “Our goal is simple: we must be prepared to try cases to a verdict when we think a violation has taken place,” Kanter said at the time. “And that means that our capacity for litigation must grow with the demands of modern antitrust enforcement. In other words, the division must have the scale to litigate multiples of our current docket.”
In the past, Powers recalled that the Antitrust Division wouldn’t often seek help outside its own unit “unless it was a mega case.” That meant drawing on the expertise of a handful of experienced litigators within the division. While he said those attorneys were strong, “you need more than three people who can be the lead trial attorney for all of your cases.” The problem is, when there aren’t many trials happening at the same time for a very long period, “it’s not as pressing an issue” to find more or train others up to be ready for big trials, Powers says.
The litigation program “has redefined what it means for enforcers to bring antitrust cases to trial,” Kanter said in a statement. “We have amassed the talent, resources, and infrastructure to bring — and win — many transformational antitrust cases at once.”
“We have amassed the talent, resources, and infrastructure to bring — and win — many transformational antitrust cases at once.”
While it’s early to see this in case filing trends, Lex Machina found in a recent report that civil enforcement cases filed by the DOJ or Federal Trade Commission where defendants contested the lawsuit rose from five to eight between 2022 and 2023.
But Kanter himself and others who’ve worked in the division say this period of antitrust litigation is unlike any other in the recent past. In March 2023, Kanter said in a speech that the division had brought more cases under Section 2 of the Sherman Antitrust Act (the antimonopoly law) in the last year than in the previous 25. And that seems to be having a deterrent effect. “We’re seeing more anticompetitive deals either fall apart or not come to us in the first place,” Kanter told The Verge.
Doshi says the litigation program “is about an investment in the future.” That means, “we’re not focusing on a specific case or a specific industry or a specific moment even,” she says. “But instead, building the litigation program is an investment in the idea that building rich expertise will vindicate competition for decades to come.”
Baer says the volume of major litigation the division has going on at the same time now is much higher than it was in recent administrations. As much as the resources of the litigation program are being put to use now, their impact in the future could be even more important. “One of the things that will come out of this period, whenever it ends, is you have a generation of trial attorneys at the Antitrust Division who have serious trial experience,” Powers says. “And this is the kind of thing that literally will resonate for ten-plus years.”

Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge, Getty Images

When the Department of Justice released its more than 70-page lawsuit against Apple, its narrative read more like a docu-drama than a stodgy legal document. It dropped the reader right into a 2010 exchange between an Apple executive and then-CEO Steve Jobs, who were just beginning to recognize how easy it was for customers to switch to their rivals’ products — unless they did something to stop it. This kind of writing, sometimes called a speaking complaint, is a far cry from the rote retelling you often find in lawsuits.

That’s not a surprise once you know that Hetal Doshi, lead of the nascent litigation program within the Antitrust Division, sees her job, in part, as that of a storyteller.

“Storytelling matters a lot in litigation, because it’s the way that we communicate as human beings,” Doshi says, speaking to The Verge in April. (She spoke generally about the litigation program but declined to comment on any pending litigation, including against Apple.) The first lawyer in her family, Doshi often considers how she’d describe a case to her loved ones. “I have to really focus on: Who are the actors? What’s the issue and why does it matter?” For her, it’s not just about a dry regurgitation of the facts. “It meets this moment in terms of expressing to courts and to the American people what’s at stake with consolidation and concentration of power,” she says.

To Doshi, what’s at stake is the ability of the American people to have sufficient choices available to them — whether that’s in choosing an airline seat or a publishing house to sell a book. When Doshi talks about antitrust, she talks about economic liberties and the American Dream. “Competition reflects our democratic values,” she says. “That’s why people have to be at the center of our cases.”

That’s the sort of lens that Doshi and her team are bringing to a range of cases at the Antitrust Division. Her unit just got its start under the current administration but is already helping increase the division’s capacity to bring complex litigation and a litigator’s eye to investigations. And perhaps even more importantly, it’s preparing the division to take on more courtroom challenges in the years to come.

That’s important when you think about the scale of the litigation the division is tackling, even as its budget has failed to grow commensurate with its ambitious goals. In the tech sector alone, the division has major monopoly cases ongoing against Apple, Google (which faces two separate lawsuits), and just recently, Ticketmaster and its owner, Live Nation. In the 20 years before the first Google case was filed, the division had exactly zero tech monopoly cases. Now, two of its opponents — Apple and Google — are each worth more than $2 trillion, giving them ample resources to hire a boatload of lawyers.

The creation of the litigation program reflects the larger goals of the Antitrust Division’s leadership: to bring more cases to trial to advance the application of century-old antitrust laws for modern times. It follows a movement that has gained steam in recent years, advocating for more vigorous enforcement of the laws, particularly in digital markets, which don’t always look like traditional antimonopoly cases because they offer products for free or benefit from network effects. That movement has seen many of its hopes fulfilled under the Biden administration, which empowered reform-minded enforcers. But that could change if Joe Biden isn’t reelected as president in November, though antitrust politics don’t always fall along partisan lines in the modern era. (The Antitrust Division under the Biden administration, for example, took Google to trial in a case that was investigated and filed during the Trump administration.)

Time is of the essence when it comes to building up a deep bench of courtroom expertise. Especially in the tech sector, where businesses change rapidly with new advancements, the pace of antitrust litigation can easily fall far behind. That can make it even more difficult to determine an effective remedy to correct a years-old harm if a court finds the company liable for it in the first place. After years of investigations, the division is now poised to face several tech companies one after the other in court, and the litigation program is helping to ensure the government has the tools to do that now and in the future.

“Not all resources are necessarily the same,” says Doshi. “Our secret weapon is the fact that we have public servants who choose to be here in this particular moment to enforce our antitrust laws. They are moved by a strength of character and a sense of purpose that candidly elevates their advocacy in ways that are truly remarkable.”

Antitrust expertise with a prosecutor’s eye

DOJ Antitrust Division chief Jonathan Kanter began building up the program in 2022 and put Doshi at the helm, calling her in a statement “one of the nation’s elite trial lawyers. She is a visionary leader, generous mentor, and brilliant legal strategist.” The program operates like a center of litigation resources that staff throughout the division can work with in crafting their cases, even beginning at the investigation stage. While the civil and criminal programs within the division also have their own litigation staff, the program offers an extra set of dedicated resources from a variety of backgrounds with deep in-courtroom experience. Staff in the litigation program tackle things ranging from prepping to advocate for a case in court to training and mentoring.

When Kanter was confirmed to lead the Antitrust Division in 2021, he wanted to reinvigorate antitrust enforcement, which included litigating more cases the division might not have previously brought to trial. But that also required having the staffing and expertise to make more arguments in front of judges and juries, rather than in negotiations over consent decrees. He “wanted to have the ability to litigate a lot of cases at the same time,” recalled Richard Powers, who served as acting assistant attorney general at the Antitrust Division prior to Kanter’s confirmation. The problem was, they didn’t have the volume of staff with a depth of courtroom experience to carry out that vision. That’s because, historically, it’s been difficult to gain trial experience at the Antitrust Division.

When people complain about the government moving slowly, it’s sometimes because of the kinds of structural roadblocks that Kanter encountered in this area. Due to the lengthy and complex nature of antitrust cases, it’s not uncommon for attorneys in the division to have limited trial experience because of how long it takes to get to trial in the first place. “You can work at the Antitrust Division as a trial attorney for ten years and have all your cases settle, and you don’t really get the litigation experience that you’re looking for,” Powers says. Take the first Google antimonopoly complaint over Search: DOJ filed it in October 2020, and the trial didn’t start until September 2023. And that’s after the entire process of investigating the company, including poring over millions of documents from Google.

So after Kanter joined the division in 2021, Powers recalled, “We had to figure out, what do we have in terms of capabilities? … Especially on the civil side, we just hadn’t tried that many cases. And so there just wasn’t necessarily the bench that you would need to do what [Kanter] wanted to do, people with true in-courtroom litigation experience.”

That was the seed of what would later become the litigation program — a team of experienced litigators that could bring what Powers called a “prosecutor’s eye” to conduct cases like illegal monopolization — the kinds of charges that are now leveraged at three different tech companies at one time.

That expertise can be useful in negotiations. “While not everything is going to go to trial, you have to be prepared to go to trial in order to have credibility with the company or the merging parties,” says Bill Baer, who led the Antitrust Division during the Obama administration.

Glimmers of that prosecutor’s lens might be found in several choices the division has made in recent cases, including the accessible style of the Apple complaint, for example. Though Doshi says the division’s actions always start with the law itself, “we can’t forget that competition serves people.” She pointed to the DOJ’s successful case against Penguin Random House’s proposed acquisition of Simon & Schuster, where the government argued the deal would harm competition for publishing rights in the US. While on its surface, the case was about a jargon-y term called monopsony — where there’s a lack of competition of buyers for a product — Doshi said the division was really arguing a “common sense notion” that having more employers able to compete for labor would help workers see the true value of their work recognized. “That’s the American Dream that’s wrapped up in the principles of labor monopsony that that case was about.”

Strong litigation expertise can also show through in the efficiency of staffing cases. “Historically there has been a perspective that more was better when it came to staffing these trials,” Powers says. But more streamlined staffing can actually lead to clearer arguments, where it’s easier to “get to the heart of what the cases are about,” while freeing up other attorneys to work on different matters.

Litigation expertise likely also comes into play with decisions to bring cases in front of a jury versus a judge. DOJ has pushed to have antitrust suits like the Google ad tech and Ticketmaster cases tried before a jury. (A judge recently denied DOJ’s request for a jury trial in the Google ad tech case.) Before Kanter’s tenure, Powers says, “you might have heard, ‘Oh, this is too complicated for a jury … And I think anybody who ever says that has never been in front of a jury. Juries are smart. They get it. They understand the issues.”

“Settlements do not move the law forward”

The litigation program represents a new approach spearheaded by Kanter when it comes to antitrust enforcement. In public remarks, he has said that bringing cases to trial — rather than settling — is important in order to have courts weigh in on important questions that can advance antitrust law.

“Settlements do not move the law forward,” Kanter said in a speech before the New York State Bar Association in 2022. “We need new published opinions from courts that apply the law in modern markets in order to provide clarity to businesses. This requires litigation that sets out the boundaries of the law as applied to current markets, and we need to be willing to take risks and ask the courts to reconsider the application of old precedents to those markets.”

During a separate antitrust enforcers gathering in 2022, Kanter discussed his initial steps to ramp up litigation talent, which, at the time, included designating Doshi and experienced trial attorney Carol Sipperly as acting deputy assistant attorneys general overseeing litigation. “Our goal is simple: we must be prepared to try cases to a verdict when we think a violation has taken place,” Kanter said at the time. “And that means that our capacity for litigation must grow with the demands of modern antitrust enforcement. In other words, the division must have the scale to litigate multiples of our current docket.”

In the past, Powers recalled that the Antitrust Division wouldn’t often seek help outside its own unit “unless it was a mega case.” That meant drawing on the expertise of a handful of experienced litigators within the division. While he said those attorneys were strong, “you need more than three people who can be the lead trial attorney for all of your cases.” The problem is, when there aren’t many trials happening at the same time for a very long period, “it’s not as pressing an issue” to find more or train others up to be ready for big trials, Powers says.

The litigation program “has redefined what it means for enforcers to bring antitrust cases to trial,” Kanter said in a statement. “We have amassed the talent, resources, and infrastructure to bring — and win — many transformational antitrust cases at once.”

While it’s early to see this in case filing trends, Lex Machina found in a recent report that civil enforcement cases filed by the DOJ or Federal Trade Commission where defendants contested the lawsuit rose from five to eight between 2022 and 2023.

But Kanter himself and others who’ve worked in the division say this period of antitrust litigation is unlike any other in the recent past. In March 2023, Kanter said in a speech that the division had brought more cases under Section 2 of the Sherman Antitrust Act (the antimonopoly law) in the last year than in the previous 25. And that seems to be having a deterrent effect. “We’re seeing more anticompetitive deals either fall apart or not come to us in the first place,” Kanter told The Verge.

Doshi says the litigation program “is about an investment in the future.” That means, “we’re not focusing on a specific case or a specific industry or a specific moment even,” she says. “But instead, building the litigation program is an investment in the idea that building rich expertise will vindicate competition for decades to come.”

Baer says the volume of major litigation the division has going on at the same time now is much higher than it was in recent administrations. As much as the resources of the litigation program are being put to use now, their impact in the future could be even more important. “One of the things that will come out of this period, whenever it ends, is you have a generation of trial attorneys at the Antitrust Division who have serious trial experience,” Powers says. “And this is the kind of thing that literally will resonate for ten-plus years.”

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Illustration: The Verge

Google is considering spending $23 billion to buy Wiz, a cloud cybersecurity startup with partners that include Amazon and Oracle, reports The Wall Street Journal. At close to twice what it spent for Motorola Mobility in 2012, it would be the most Google has ever paid for another company.
The New York City-based Wiz offers “siloed security tools and scanners” for the enterprise space, according to the company. Wiz writes that it secures corporate cloud infrastructure “by creating a normalizing layer between cloud environments,” letting businesses “rapidly identify and remove critical risks.” Buying such a company feels particularly targeted at an increasingly vulnerable-looking Microsoft that’s recently weathered multiple high-profile security breaches.

Google Cloud boss Thomas Kurian has been the driving force behind the acquisition attempt, according to The New York Times. If successful, it could help solidify Google’s reputation as a secure cloud platform. That seemed to be the idea behind its half-billion dollar purchase of another cloud security startup in 2022 and the $5.4 billion acquisition of Mandiant, the company that discovered the SolarWinds hack later that year.
The deal “looks likely,” according to the Times, but it could fall through and risks triggering reviews from US regulators. The Biden administration has presided over significant antitrust action, including the Department of Justice’s lawsuit over Google’s Search deal with Apple and the Federal Trade Commission’s failed effort to block Microsoft from buying Activision.

Illustration: The Verge

Google is considering spending $23 billion to buy Wiz, a cloud cybersecurity startup with partners that include Amazon and Oracle, reports The Wall Street Journal. At close to twice what it spent for Motorola Mobility in 2012, it would be the most Google has ever paid for another company.

The New York City-based Wiz offers “siloed security tools and scanners” for the enterprise space, according to the company. Wiz writes that it secures corporate cloud infrastructure “by creating a normalizing layer between cloud environments,” letting businesses “rapidly identify and remove critical risks.” Buying such a company feels particularly targeted at an increasingly vulnerable-looking Microsoft that’s recently weathered multiple high-profile security breaches.

Google Cloud boss Thomas Kurian has been the driving force behind the acquisition attempt, according to The New York Times. If successful, it could help solidify Google’s reputation as a secure cloud platform. That seemed to be the idea behind its half-billion dollar purchase of another cloud security startup in 2022 and the $5.4 billion acquisition of Mandiant, the company that discovered the SolarWinds hack later that year.

The deal “looks likely,” according to the Times, but it could fall through and risks triggering reviews from US regulators. The Biden administration has presided over significant antitrust action, including the Department of Justice’s lawsuit over Google’s Search deal with Apple and the Federal Trade Commission’s failed effort to block Microsoft from buying Activision.

Read More 

This probably isn’t Paramount’s new logo. | Image: Paramount

If you didn’t know Paramount Global is set to merge with Skydance, then the logo included in their recent investor presentation would like to share an important update. Under its traditional mountain and stars, it shouts PARAMOUNT, using the all-caps styling and arched text of the Skydance logo instead of a more gently whispered Paramount.
It’s… not good. But, like the very bad Warner Bros. Discovery logo that appeared in 2021 when their merger was announced but disappeared by the time the deal closed a year later, it’s unlikely this is the final version of whatever redesign Paramount might cook up. If and when the deal gets done, the logo at that time probably won’t look like some poor shmoe had to jam out a quick synergistic symbol twenty minutes before an investor presentation.

Images: Paramount / Skydance
Paramount’s quick symbolic redesign is a clear nod to the Skydance logo.

And with any luck, also like the Warner Bros. Discovery logo that eventually popped up in 2022, it won’t be nearly as bad.

Images: Warner Bros. Discovery
The graphic announcing Warner Bros. Discovery’s new name (left) was bad, but the eventual logo (right) was more sensible.

At least one hopes not.

Images: Disney
The Disney Plus logo didn’t survive the Hulu transition.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve been seeing some version of Paramount’s logo in front of films for four decades. Movies that I bonded over with people I cherished or escaped into when life was too hard to deal with. Those images end up tied to that logo screen, then both to whatever sentimental experience I had watching them. It’s like visual comfort food.

Image: Paramount
The original Paramount logo.

This probably isn’t Paramount’s new logo. | Image: Paramount

If you didn’t know Paramount Global is set to merge with Skydance, then the logo included in their recent investor presentation would like to share an important update. Under its traditional mountain and stars, it shouts PARAMOUNT, using the all-caps styling and arched text of the Skydance logo instead of a more gently whispered Paramount.

It’s… not good. But, like the very bad Warner Bros. Discovery logo that appeared in 2021 when their merger was announced but disappeared by the time the deal closed a year later, it’s unlikely this is the final version of whatever redesign Paramount might cook up. If and when the deal gets done, the logo at that time probably won’t look like some poor shmoe had to jam out a quick synergistic symbol twenty minutes before an investor presentation.

Images: Paramount / Skydance
Paramount’s quick symbolic redesign is a clear nod to the Skydance logo.

And with any luck, also like the Warner Bros. Discovery logo that eventually popped up in 2022, it won’t be nearly as bad.

Images: Warner Bros. Discovery
The graphic announcing Warner Bros. Discovery’s new name (left) was bad, but the eventual logo (right) was more sensible.

At least one hopes not.

Images: Disney
The Disney Plus logo didn’t survive the Hulu transition.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve been seeing some version of Paramount’s logo in front of films for four decades. Movies that I bonded over with people I cherished or escaped into when life was too hard to deal with. Those images end up tied to that logo screen, then both to whatever sentimental experience I had watching them. It’s like visual comfort food.

Image: Paramount
The original Paramount logo.

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Illustration by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

AT&T paid a hacker about $370,000 to delete customer data that was stolen from it as part of a hacking spree earlier this year. The hacker then provided a video to prove they had deleted the data, according to a Wired report today.
AT&T reportedly negotiated through an intermediary, called Reddington, acting on behalf of a member of the ShinyHunters hacking group. The hacker originally asked for $1 million before AT&T talked them down to the amount, which it paid on May 17th in bitcoin, Wired writes.

The outlet reports that Reddington, whom AT&T paid for his part in negotiations, said he believes the only complete copy of the data had been deleted after AT&T paid the ransom, but that it’s possible excerpts are still in the wild. Reddington also reportedly said he negotiated with several other companies for the hackers, too.
Before AT&T announced the breach, it was reported that Ticketmaster and Santander Bank were also compromised, via the stolen login credentials of an employee of third-party cloud storage company Snowflake. Wired reports that, after the Ticketmaster attack, hackers used a script to hack potentially more than 160 companies simultaneously.

Illustration by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

AT&T paid a hacker about $370,000 to delete customer data that was stolen from it as part of a hacking spree earlier this year. The hacker then provided a video to prove they had deleted the data, according to a Wired report today.

AT&T reportedly negotiated through an intermediary, called Reddington, acting on behalf of a member of the ShinyHunters hacking group. The hacker originally asked for $1 million before AT&T talked them down to the amount, which it paid on May 17th in bitcoin, Wired writes.

The outlet reports that Reddington, whom AT&T paid for his part in negotiations, said he believes the only complete copy of the data had been deleted after AT&T paid the ransom, but that it’s possible excerpts are still in the wild. Reddington also reportedly said he negotiated with several other companies for the hackers, too.

Before AT&T announced the breach, it was reported that Ticketmaster and Santander Bank were also compromised, via the stolen login credentials of an employee of third-party cloud storage company Snowflake. Wired reports that, after the Ticketmaster attack, hackers used a script to hack potentially more than 160 companies simultaneously.

Read More 

Photo by Tom Warren / The Verge

Alderon Games, the maker of dinosaur MMO Path of Titans, says it’s swapping out its Intel 13th and 14th Gen-based servers for AMD and urges others hosting the game’s servers to do the same. The developer has had “significant” instability issues that none of the fixes so far have reversed, wrote Alderon founder Matthew Cassells in a blog post last week.
Cassells wrote that Alderon has recorded “thousands of crashes” on gamers’ CPUs using its crash reporting tools and says the processors can also corrupt SSDs and memory. He added that in his team’s experience, 100 percent of the affected CPUs “deteriorate over time, eventually failing.” On the contrary, Unreal Engine decompression tool maker RAD Game Tools, which Cassells cites in the blog, says that “only a small fraction” of the processors are affected.

Suggestions that Intel’s i9-13900K and i9-14900K CPUs are corrupting storage and memory and causing servers using them to crash is a new turn in this saga, which started in April with the company investigating game crashes on home computers using the chips. Motherboards with improper overclocking settings were cited by Intel as an apparent culprit at one time, but as Level1Techs points out in the above video, that doesn’t account for crashes seen on server hardware, which should be set more conservatively.

Image: [DE]Glen / Warframe forums

Intel’s chips eat up most of this Warframe developer’s crash chart.

Earlier in the week, a Warframe developer wrote on the game’s forums that “almost all” of the crashes it recorded came from driver failures in 13th- and 14th-Gen Intel processors. He did note that failures seen on a staff member’s gaming rig stopped after he installed a recent BIOS update, even though Intel said in June that the problem it addresses isn’t the root cause of instability.

Photo by Tom Warren / The Verge

Alderon Games, the maker of dinosaur MMO Path of Titans, says it’s swapping out its Intel 13th and 14th Gen-based servers for AMD and urges others hosting the game’s servers to do the same. The developer has had “significant” instability issues that none of the fixes so far have reversed, wrote Alderon founder Matthew Cassells in a blog post last week.

Cassells wrote that Alderon has recorded “thousands of crashes” on gamers’ CPUs using its crash reporting tools and says the processors can also corrupt SSDs and memory. He added that in his team’s experience, 100 percent of the affected CPUs “deteriorate over time, eventually failing.” On the contrary, Unreal Engine decompression tool maker RAD Game Tools, which Cassells cites in the blog, says that “only a small fraction” of the processors are affected.

Suggestions that Intel’s i9-13900K and i9-14900K CPUs are corrupting storage and memory and causing servers using them to crash is a new turn in this saga, which started in April with the company investigating game crashes on home computers using the chips. Motherboards with improper overclocking settings were cited by Intel as an apparent culprit at one time, but as Level1Techs points out in the above video, that doesn’t account for crashes seen on server hardware, which should be set more conservatively.

Image: [DE]Glen / Warframe forums

Intel’s chips eat up most of this Warframe developer’s crash chart.

Earlier in the week, a Warframe developer wrote on the game’s forums that “almost all” of the crashes it recorded came from driver failures in 13th- and 14th-Gen Intel processors. He did note that failures seen on a staff member’s gaming rig stopped after he installed a recent BIOS update, even though Intel said in June that the problem it addresses isn’t the root cause of instability.

Read More 

Image: Samar Haddad for The Verge

Humans are terrible at remembering things. We forget things over time; we fail to remember them in the first place because we’re also not great at paying attention; we misremember things because of our inherent biases and the way we perceive the world. There’s a lot going on, and we don’t keep much of it for long.
Maybe AI can fix that. It sure looks like we’re about to find out. Microsoft, for instance, is making a big bet on Recall, an app that promises to use AI to collect, store, organize, and resurface everything you do and see on your computer. (Imagine just being able to ask your computer, “What was that article about bees I read the other day? What was the timeline it mentioned?”) At this year’s Google I/O, the most impressive AI demo was a way to remember where you left your glasses. Apple thinks you might use AI to make photo albums and even emotional videos to remember great moments. And companies like Notion and Dropbox are building AI into their own tools to help you find and remember all your meetings and tasks. They all promise the same thing: don’t worry about remembering things because the computer will do it for you. And it’ll do it faster and better.

On this episode of The Vergecast, we talk to one of the people who has been working on this problem for a very long time: Dan Siroker, the CEO of Limitless. We talk about what it takes to build a great memory aid, how we might use them in the future, and why it’s so tricky to get right.
We also talk about the human side of it all — what does it change about our lives when we stop forgetting things? Is remembering your friend’s birthday different when it’s actually an AI model doing the remembering? And will these tools ever really work outside of work? Tools like Limitless are coming fast and improving quickly, and we’re going to have to figure out how to live with them.
If you want to learn more about everything we discuss in this episode, here are a few links to get you started:

From The New York Times: Can’t See Pictures in Your Mind? You’re Not Alone.

Limitless AI: a new wearable gadget, and app, for remembering your meetings
Recall is Microsoft’s key to unlocking the future of PCs
Microsoft’s all-knowing Recall AI feature is being delayed
The Pixel 9’s ‘Google AI’ is like Microsoft Recall but a little less creepy
Apple announces iOS 18 with new AI features and more customizable homescreen
Notion AI can automatically write your notes, agendas, and blog posts for you

Image: Samar Haddad for The Verge

Humans are terrible at remembering things. We forget things over time; we fail to remember them in the first place because we’re also not great at paying attention; we misremember things because of our inherent biases and the way we perceive the world. There’s a lot going on, and we don’t keep much of it for long.

Maybe AI can fix that. It sure looks like we’re about to find out. Microsoft, for instance, is making a big bet on Recall, an app that promises to use AI to collect, store, organize, and resurface everything you do and see on your computer. (Imagine just being able to ask your computer, “What was that article about bees I read the other day? What was the timeline it mentioned?”) At this year’s Google I/O, the most impressive AI demo was a way to remember where you left your glasses. Apple thinks you might use AI to make photo albums and even emotional videos to remember great moments. And companies like Notion and Dropbox are building AI into their own tools to help you find and remember all your meetings and tasks. They all promise the same thing: don’t worry about remembering things because the computer will do it for you. And it’ll do it faster and better.

On this episode of The Vergecast, we talk to one of the people who has been working on this problem for a very long time: Dan Siroker, the CEO of Limitless. We talk about what it takes to build a great memory aid, how we might use them in the future, and why it’s so tricky to get right.

We also talk about the human side of it all — what does it change about our lives when we stop forgetting things? Is remembering your friend’s birthday different when it’s actually an AI model doing the remembering? And will these tools ever really work outside of work? Tools like Limitless are coming fast and improving quickly, and we’re going to have to figure out how to live with them.

If you want to learn more about everything we discuss in this episode, here are a few links to get you started:

From The New York Times: Can’t See Pictures in Your Mind? You’re Not Alone.

Limitless AI: a new wearable gadget, and app, for remembering your meetings
Recall is Microsoft’s key to unlocking the future of PCs
Microsoft’s all-knowing Recall AI feature is being delayed
The Pixel 9’s ‘Google AI’ is like Microsoft Recall but a little less creepy
Apple announces iOS 18 with new AI features and more customizable homescreen
Notion AI can automatically write your notes, agendas, and blog posts for you

Read More 

Image: David Pierce / The Verge

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 45, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, sorry I love productivity apps so much, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.)
I’m back from a few days off, feeling rested and sunburned and ready to rumble. Thanks to everyone who sent birthday wishes! This week, I’ve been reading Made for Love and stories about AI gamers and AI musicians and Ferrari EVs, watching Turning Point, replacing my weather app with Lazy Weather, raging at Ira Glass for listening to podcasts at 2x speed, and spilling all my feelings to the Dot AI bot.
I also have for you a new phone, a new smart ring, a new / old podcast reunion, a sci-fi show everyone seems to love, a nice update to a great recipe app, and a wild new AI pod to check out. A lot going on for the middle of July! Let’s dig in.
(As always, the best part of Installer is your ideas and tips. What are you into right now? What should everyone else be reading / watching / playing / eating / downloading / storing for winter? Tell me everything: installer@theverge.com. And if you know someone else who might enjoy Installer, tell them to subscribe here.)

The Drop

The CMF Phone 1. A nice-looking, long-lasting Android phone for $200? With an OLED screen and interchangeable backplates and a bunch of really cool accessories, one of which is a kickstand? Yes. Please. In orange, of course.

The Samsung Galaxy Ring. I’m still a fan of Samsung’s Fold and Flip phones, even though the new models are very same-y and even more expensive. But I’m most excited about the Galaxy Ring, which seems to have pretty much nailed the smart ring hardware — and even has some interesting ideas about gesture control.

“The Diggnation Reunion Part 1.” If you’re a tech lover of a certain age, there’s a strong chance you grew up watching Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht drink and make jokes about tech while sitting on a couch. Watching the guys get back together was a delightful blast from the past. And there’s a part two, too!

Delta 1.6. Delta’s game emulation is on the iPad! I’m actually not sure how much I’ll use this given how much of my retro gaming is on an iPhone with a Backbone controller. But this update, with a bigger screen and support for multiple games at once, does sound pretty great.

Amazon’s new Echo Spot. To me, this is the exact right balance of things for an Alexa speaker. It’s small, it’s $45 (for now), it has a touchscreen but no camera, and it’s the right size for a nightstand. I keep promising to leave my phone out of my bedroom, and maybe this’ll replace it.

Sunny. A woman loses her husband but gets a robot from his tech company to help her through it. Strangeness ensues. Such a good premise! And by all accounts, this show continues Apple TV Plus’ run of great sci-fi stuff. I’ll definitely catch up before episode 3 drops on Wednesday.

Openvibe. Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads, and Nostr, all in one timeline in one app. This is basically a clever hack, not the interconnected social universe of my dreams, but it’s a pretty good hack! And I like that it basically hides which network people are using; it’s just people, in a timeline.

Pestle. I love a good recipe app. I mostly use Crouton and Mela, but Pestle’s new ability to import recipes from Instagram Reels is pretty awesome. Just drop in the link, give it a name, and it’ll turn a video into a bunch of ingredients and steps.

Screen share
A million years ago, I was an intern at Wired, and one of the stories I got to help work on was this wild thing where a writer had decided to completely disappear and see if the internet could find him. The story turned out awesome, and the writer was Evan Ratliff, who has been one of my favorite journalists ever since. He cofounded The Atavist Magazine and did a ton of great work there, created the terrific Persona podcast, and until recently, was one of the cohosts of Longform, the journalism podcast I always dreamed I might one day get invited on. Alas.
Now Evan has a new podcast out, called Shell Game, in which he uses an AI clone of his voice to cause all kinds of chaos in his own life. The first episode is awesome, and I’m very excited for what’s next. I asked Evan to share his homescreen with us to see if he had any podcasting tricks I might steal from him and to see how AI-ified his life had become.
Here’s Evan’s homescreen, plus some info on the apps he uses and why:

The phone: iPhone 13 Mini.
The wallpaper: The one I’ve sent here is my cat Henry, an 18-year-old icon who was once a mini-celebrity on Vine and is the sweetest creature on earth. (Normally it’s my kids, but I don’t allow photos of them on the open internet.)
The apps: Google Maps, Photos, Apple Notes, Slack, Settings, Clock, Phone, WhatsApp, Signal, Freedom, Google Translate, CloudBeats, Scrivener, Instapaper, Spotify, TuneIn, Libby, Gmail, Google Calendar, Messages, Brave.
My homescreen rules are no social media, no news. I’m a certified news junkie, but I at least want it a little out of view. And no Twitter app on the phone, ever. As for some apps:

Kids [group]: A thing they don’t tell you about parenting in the 2020s is how many school, camp, and bus apps you are forced to acquire and check.
Ships / planes: The only AR apps I’ve ever used. I feel like a wizard just pointing Flightradar24 at the sky or MarineTraffic at the sea to see where ships and planes are coming from and going to. My father studies logistics and instilled in me a curiosity about how things get from place to place.

CloudBeats: Essential for listening to podcast drafts while running and walking around; with Shell Game in production, I’m on this thing for hours a day sometimes.

Libby: Any New Yorker who doesn’t have it is missing out. You can grab ebooks and audiobooks from the library and listen to them right here!

Instapaper: Anyone else still using Instapaper out there? I don’t even know who owns this thing anymore. But it’s still how I read longform stuff I’ve saved.

I also asked Evan to share a few things he’s into right now. Here’s what he shared:

Moss. Made a moss garden this year and I’m into all things moss-related. Websites on how to maintain it and its incredible properties, moss gurus (e.g., Mossin’ Annie). Moss!
The new Charley Crockett album. Just a genius songwriter and singer, with an incredible story. Perfect listen while walking on your moss (which you must).
Currently revisiting The Braindead Megaphone, George Saunders’ essay collection, parts of which feel very Shell Game-relevant to me.
My sister-in-law, who is 50x more culturally aware than I, turned us on to this British comic game show, Taskmaster. The perfect decompression after a day working alongside your AI doppelganger.

Crowdsourced
Here’s what the Installer community is into this week. I want to know what you’re into right now as well! Email installer@theverge.com or message me on Signal — @davidpierce.11 — with your recommendations for anything and everything, and we’ll feature some of our favorites here every week. For even more great recommendations, check out the replies to this post on Threads.
“I just wanted to share an app that (and it is a shock for me) no one knows about. It’s called Slick Inbox. The idea is very simple: it allows you to create your own inbox only for newsletters. I hate reading newsletters in my personal Gmail box, and this is a very convenient solution to my problem.” – Denis
“I just binged all six episodes of Netflix’s Supacell. It’s like Heroes but grimier, set in South London, with an almost entirely Black cast and made by Rapman. It’s one of the best things I’ve seen this year and such a fresh show in a genre that is basically monopolized by Marvel.” – Guilherme
“Currently reading The Singularity is Nearer by Ray Kurzweil. We are lucky to see human evolution in real time.” – Matthew
“Best Ball drafts on Underdog Fantasy. What was once a niche version of fantasy football is now an (absurdly?) popular sports betting format where players draft an entire team within an hour or less and then compete against strangers. It’s kind of like trying to win a March Madness bracket but you draft a fantasy football roster.” – Noah
“Using the VR Exercise Tracker app created by the VR Health Institute. They use science-backed measurement of VR activity to help you measure your VR workouts. Connects with Apple Watch and other Bluetooth fitness devices.” – Dan
“As a new dad, Dungeons & Daddies resonates with me in a special way. This (self-described non-BDSM) podcast puts a hilarious twist on D&D, following four dads navigating a fantastical realm to rescue their lost sons. It’s made me laugh harder than I have in a long time and made me cry more than once. I’ve binged the first season three times already (that’s more than 180 hours of listening) and am relistening to the second season now.” – Mark
“Just bought a Boox Go 10.3 E Ink tablet and am really enjoying it. Very slim, nicely designed, no front light, and fairly great to write on when needed. It’s meant more as a competitor to the Remarkable 2 (i.e., a note-taking device), but I’m enjoying it for reading articles via Omnivore.” – Patrick
“I’ve recently started reading a book called Deep Work by Cal Newport on the merits of dedicating time to focus on a task with minimal distractions. My attention span, along with many others in recent years, has been obliterated, hence me picking up this book to try and rectify my ability to focus deeply.” – Dave
“Apple PenLite: The iPad Before the iPad.” I have been watching Colin Holter’s channel for a few years now and really love his stuff, but this video is really something different for him. He interviewed several former Apple employees, and I thought it was really well done. I was really young during the time period this is about, so I don’t remember any news about this stuff, but it was so interesting to get this kind of perspective from the engineers and product managers working at Apple at the time.” – Ian

Signing off
I sincerely believe that “Every Frame a Painting” is the best YouTube series of all time. If you haven’t watched them, watch all of them. (If you only watch one, watch this one on Edgar Wright. Or this one on David Fincher. Or this one on the sound of Marvel movies. Just watch them all!) So when the channel dropped its first video in seven years — a short trailer for a new limited series and short film — I immediately started refreshing the page every 10 minutes and rewatching every single thing on the channel all over again. It’s like going to film school at warp speed, and I can’t recommend it highly enough. Chairs, y’all! Chairs!
See you next week!

Image: David Pierce / The Verge

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 45, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, sorry I love productivity apps so much, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.)

I’m back from a few days off, feeling rested and sunburned and ready to rumble. Thanks to everyone who sent birthday wishes! This week, I’ve been reading Made for Love and stories about AI gamers and AI musicians and Ferrari EVs, watching Turning Point, replacing my weather app with Lazy Weather, raging at Ira Glass for listening to podcasts at 2x speed, and spilling all my feelings to the Dot AI bot.

I also have for you a new phone, a new smart ring, a new / old podcast reunion, a sci-fi show everyone seems to love, a nice update to a great recipe app, and a wild new AI pod to check out. A lot going on for the middle of July! Let’s dig in.

(As always, the best part of Installer is your ideas and tips. What are you into right now? What should everyone else be reading / watching / playing / eating / downloading / storing for winter? Tell me everything: installer@theverge.com. And if you know someone else who might enjoy Installer, tell them to subscribe here.)

The Drop

The CMF Phone 1. A nice-looking, long-lasting Android phone for $200? With an OLED screen and interchangeable backplates and a bunch of really cool accessories, one of which is a kickstand? Yes. Please. In orange, of course.

The Samsung Galaxy Ring. I’m still a fan of Samsung’s Fold and Flip phones, even though the new models are very same-y and even more expensive. But I’m most excited about the Galaxy Ring, which seems to have pretty much nailed the smart ring hardware — and even has some interesting ideas about gesture control.

“The Diggnation Reunion Part 1.” If you’re a tech lover of a certain age, there’s a strong chance you grew up watching Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht drink and make jokes about tech while sitting on a couch. Watching the guys get back together was a delightful blast from the past. And there’s a part two, too!

Delta 1.6. Delta’s game emulation is on the iPad! I’m actually not sure how much I’ll use this given how much of my retro gaming is on an iPhone with a Backbone controller. But this update, with a bigger screen and support for multiple games at once, does sound pretty great.

Amazon’s new Echo Spot. To me, this is the exact right balance of things for an Alexa speaker. It’s small, it’s $45 (for now), it has a touchscreen but no camera, and it’s the right size for a nightstand. I keep promising to leave my phone out of my bedroom, and maybe this’ll replace it.

Sunny. A woman loses her husband but gets a robot from his tech company to help her through it. Strangeness ensues. Such a good premise! And by all accounts, this show continues Apple TV Plus’ run of great sci-fi stuff. I’ll definitely catch up before episode 3 drops on Wednesday.

Openvibe. Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads, and Nostr, all in one timeline in one app. This is basically a clever hack, not the interconnected social universe of my dreams, but it’s a pretty good hack! And I like that it basically hides which network people are using; it’s just people, in a timeline.

Pestle. I love a good recipe app. I mostly use Crouton and Mela, but Pestle’s new ability to import recipes from Instagram Reels is pretty awesome. Just drop in the link, give it a name, and it’ll turn a video into a bunch of ingredients and steps.

Screen share

A million years ago, I was an intern at Wired, and one of the stories I got to help work on was this wild thing where a writer had decided to completely disappear and see if the internet could find him. The story turned out awesome, and the writer was Evan Ratliff, who has been one of my favorite journalists ever since. He cofounded The Atavist Magazine and did a ton of great work there, created the terrific Persona podcast, and until recently, was one of the cohosts of Longform, the journalism podcast I always dreamed I might one day get invited on. Alas.

Now Evan has a new podcast out, called Shell Game, in which he uses an AI clone of his voice to cause all kinds of chaos in his own life. The first episode is awesome, and I’m very excited for what’s next. I asked Evan to share his homescreen with us to see if he had any podcasting tricks I might steal from him and to see how AI-ified his life had become.

Here’s Evan’s homescreen, plus some info on the apps he uses and why:

The phone: iPhone 13 Mini.

The wallpaper: The one I’ve sent here is my cat Henry, an 18-year-old icon who was once a mini-celebrity on Vine and is the sweetest creature on earth. (Normally it’s my kids, but I don’t allow photos of them on the open internet.)

The apps: Google Maps, Photos, Apple Notes, Slack, Settings, Clock, Phone, WhatsApp, Signal, Freedom, Google Translate, CloudBeats, Scrivener, Instapaper, Spotify, TuneIn, Libby, Gmail, Google Calendar, Messages, Brave.

My homescreen rules are no social media, no news. I’m a certified news junkie, but I at least want it a little out of view. And no Twitter app on the phone, ever. As for some apps:

Kids [group]: A thing they don’t tell you about parenting in the 2020s is how many school, camp, and bus apps you are forced to acquire and check.
Ships / planes: The only AR apps I’ve ever used. I feel like a wizard just pointing Flightradar24 at the sky or MarineTraffic at the sea to see where ships and planes are coming from and going to. My father studies logistics and instilled in me a curiosity about how things get from place to place.

CloudBeats: Essential for listening to podcast drafts while running and walking around; with Shell Game in production, I’m on this thing for hours a day sometimes.

Libby: Any New Yorker who doesn’t have it is missing out. You can grab ebooks and audiobooks from the library and listen to them right here!

Instapaper: Anyone else still using Instapaper out there? I don’t even know who owns this thing anymore. But it’s still how I read longform stuff I’ve saved.

I also asked Evan to share a few things he’s into right now. Here’s what he shared:

Moss. Made a moss garden this year and I’m into all things moss-related. Websites on how to maintain it and its incredible properties, moss gurus (e.g., Mossin’ Annie). Moss!
The new Charley Crockett album. Just a genius songwriter and singer, with an incredible story. Perfect listen while walking on your moss (which you must).
Currently revisiting The Braindead Megaphone, George Saunders’ essay collection, parts of which feel very Shell Game-relevant to me.
My sister-in-law, who is 50x more culturally aware than I, turned us on to this British comic game show, Taskmaster. The perfect decompression after a day working alongside your AI doppelganger.

Crowdsourced

Here’s what the Installer community is into this week. I want to know what you’re into right now as well! Email installer@theverge.com or message me on Signal — @davidpierce.11 — with your recommendations for anything and everything, and we’ll feature some of our favorites here every week. For even more great recommendations, check out the replies to this post on Threads.

“I just wanted to share an app that (and it is a shock for me) no one knows about. It’s called Slick Inbox. The idea is very simple: it allows you to create your own inbox only for newsletters. I hate reading newsletters in my personal Gmail box, and this is a very convenient solution to my problem.” – Denis

“I just binged all six episodes of Netflix’s Supacell. It’s like Heroes but grimier, set in South London, with an almost entirely Black cast and made by Rapman. It’s one of the best things I’ve seen this year and such a fresh show in a genre that is basically monopolized by Marvel.” – Guilherme

“Currently reading The Singularity is Nearer by Ray Kurzweil. We are lucky to see human evolution in real time.” – Matthew

“Best Ball drafts on Underdog Fantasy. What was once a niche version of fantasy football is now an (absurdly?) popular sports betting format where players draft an entire team within an hour or less and then compete against strangers. It’s kind of like trying to win a March Madness bracket but you draft a fantasy football roster.” – Noah

“Using the VR Exercise Tracker app created by the VR Health Institute. They use science-backed measurement of VR activity to help you measure your VR workouts. Connects with Apple Watch and other Bluetooth fitness devices.” – Dan

“As a new dad, Dungeons & Daddies resonates with me in a special way. This (self-described non-BDSM) podcast puts a hilarious twist on D&D, following four dads navigating a fantastical realm to rescue their lost sons. It’s made me laugh harder than I have in a long time and made me cry more than once. I’ve binged the first season three times already (that’s more than 180 hours of listening) and am relistening to the second season now.” – Mark

“Just bought a Boox Go 10.3 E Ink tablet and am really enjoying it. Very slim, nicely designed, no front light, and fairly great to write on when needed. It’s meant more as a competitor to the Remarkable 2 (i.e., a note-taking device), but I’m enjoying it for reading articles via Omnivore.” – Patrick

“I’ve recently started reading a book called Deep Work by Cal Newport on the merits of dedicating time to focus on a task with minimal distractions. My attention span, along with many others in recent years, has been obliterated, hence me picking up this book to try and rectify my ability to focus deeply.” – Dave

“Apple PenLite: The iPad Before the iPad.” I have been watching Colin Holter’s channel for a few years now and really love his stuff, but this video is really something different for him. He interviewed several former Apple employees, and I thought it was really well done. I was really young during the time period this is about, so I don’t remember any news about this stuff, but it was so interesting to get this kind of perspective from the engineers and product managers working at Apple at the time.” – Ian

Signing off

I sincerely believe that “Every Frame a Painting” is the best YouTube series of all time. If you haven’t watched them, watch all of them. (If you only watch one, watch this one on Edgar Wright. Or this one on David Fincher. Or this one on the sound of Marvel movies. Just watch them all!) So when the channel dropped its first video in seven years — a short trailer for a new limited series and short film — I immediately started refreshing the page every 10 minutes and rewatching every single thing on the channel all over again. It’s like going to film school at warp speed, and I can’t recommend it highly enough. Chairs, y’all! Chairs!

See you next week!

Read More 

Illustration: The Verge

Conspiracy theories about the shooting at a Trump rally began surfacing on X shortly after the news broke this afternoon, with the platform promoting topics including “#falseflag” and “staged” to users. X owner Elon Musk has staunchly advocated for “free speech” on social media platforms — which can include misinformation like the above.
After the shooting, Musk posted that he would “fully endorse” the former president. Bloomberg reported yesterday that Musk donated to a super PAC supporting Trump, giving a “sizable amount” to reelection efforts. Musk has taken on increasingly conservative views in recent years, promoting the “great replacement” conspiracy theory and endorsing support for white pride. His support adds to a growing rank of powerful voices in Silicon Valley that are promoting his campaign.
Other major platforms largely seemed to avoid promoting misinformation
On X, neither trending topic about the shooting is flush with particularly robust or coherent conspiracies; clicking through, you’ll largely find short posts from X users saying that the shooting looks fake or is a stunt. (There is no evidence of either.) But by placing the subjects into X’s trending topics area, the conspiracies are elevated to more people.
Other major social media platforms seemed to be handling the situation better in the immediate aftermath of the shooting. YouTube surfaced news clips and largely directed search results toward news reports and verified creators. Facebook’s search results primarily pointed to news outlets; the platform removed its trending topics section in 2018 over constant complaints about its curation. Threads occasionally displayed conspiracy-related posts atop its trending topic for the incident, but they didn’t appear to surface consistently.
X did not return a request for comment. An email to its press team returned an auto-reply saying, “Busy now, please check back later.”
The company seems to be embracing its role as a center of discussion, though — accurate or otherwise. Even as conspiracy subjects continued to trend, X’s official account posted a short note this evening saying simply, “global town square.”

Illustration: The Verge

Conspiracy theories about the shooting at a Trump rally began surfacing on X shortly after the news broke this afternoon, with the platform promoting topics including “#falseflag” and “staged” to users. X owner Elon Musk has staunchly advocated for “free speech” on social media platforms — which can include misinformation like the above.

After the shooting, Musk posted that he would “fully endorse” the former president. Bloomberg reported yesterday that Musk donated to a super PAC supporting Trump, giving a “sizable amount” to reelection efforts. Musk has taken on increasingly conservative views in recent years, promoting the “great replacement” conspiracy theory and endorsing support for white pride. His support adds to a growing rank of powerful voices in Silicon Valley that are promoting his campaign.

On X, neither trending topic about the shooting is flush with particularly robust or coherent conspiracies; clicking through, you’ll largely find short posts from X users saying that the shooting looks fake or is a stunt. (There is no evidence of either.) But by placing the subjects into X’s trending topics area, the conspiracies are elevated to more people.

Other major social media platforms seemed to be handling the situation better in the immediate aftermath of the shooting. YouTube surfaced news clips and largely directed search results toward news reports and verified creators. Facebook’s search results primarily pointed to news outlets; the platform removed its trending topics section in 2018 over constant complaints about its curation. Threads occasionally displayed conspiracy-related posts atop its trending topic for the incident, but they didn’t appear to surface consistently.

X did not return a request for comment. An email to its press team returned an auto-reply saying, “Busy now, please check back later.”

The company seems to be embracing its role as a center of discussion, though — accurate or otherwise. Even as conspiracy subjects continued to trend, X’s official account posted a short note this evening saying simply, “global town square.”

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There’s a bit of a theme of payoff in this week’s trailers. Anthony Mackie finally takes the lead on the big screen after 10 years in the MCU; Ridley Scott’s two-decade-plus plan for a Gladiator sequel is coming to fruition; and we finally get to find out what happens next to the macrodata refinement team in Severance.
There’s a lot to go through this week, from big-budget tentpole movies to whimsical TV, so let’s get down to it, starting, naturally, with the MCU.
Captain America: Brave New World

In the trailer for Captain America: Brave New World, Thaddeus Ross (Harrison Ford) wants to make Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie) part of the US military once more. He’s clearly put off by the idea, but is forced to jump into the fray after super soldier Isaiah Bradley attacks the President.
Mackie’s first MCU film as the lead character (and, it seems, the first appearance of Red Hulk!) hits theaters on January 14th, 2025, so you have time to catch up on The Falcon and the Winter Soldier before its debut.
F1

Apple and Warner Bros’ expensive new F1 isn’t due in US theaters until June 27th, 2025, but it’s already got a teaser trailer with plenty of racing footage. Brad Pitt stars as Sonny Hayes, a veteran driver who’s been out of the game since a bad crash in the 1990s but is convinced to return to the circuit as a mentor for Joshua Pearse (Damson Idris).
The movie sounds like it’s every bit as bombastic as director Joseph Kosinski’s Top Gun: Maverick. Not only did Pitt and Idris actually drive cars for the movie, but much of the filming took place at actual Formula 1 races.
Gladiator II

Ridley Scott’s long-awaited Gladiator sequel sees Lucius Verus (Paul Mescal), the nephew of Emperor Commodus from the first film, grown up and with no memory of his mother, Lucilla (Connie Nielsen) — though he does remember the rebellion of Russell Crowe’s Maximus. Now enslaved himself and inspired by Maximus, Lucius takes up with Macrinus (Denzel Washington) to carry out his own uprising, his goal nothing short of the fall of Rome.
Gladiator II also stars Pedro Pascal, Joseph Quinn, Fred Hechinger, and opens on November 22nd.
Time Bandits

Taika Waititi’s take on Time Bandits looks like it’ll have the fantastical pseudo-realism of the Terry Gilliam movie it’s based on, but with some changes to the formula — the biggest one being that the Time Bandits themselves are no longer played by little people.
Otherwise, the premise is basically the same: a young boy finds himself flitting across time on an adventure with a band of time-hopping thieves. Lisa Kudrow, Rune Temte, Kal-El Tuck, Tadhg Murphey, Kiera Thompson, and more star in the Apple TV Plus series, which premiers on July 24th.
Agatha All Along

In WandaVision spinoff Agatha All Along, Rio Vidal (Aubrey Plaza) helps Agatha Harkness (Kathryn Hahn) emerge from an illusion that had her believing she was a detective trying to solve a mysterious murder. Yet she finds that the witchy powers she had in WandaVision are gone, and she needs to pull together a coven to regain them. Agatha All Along starts streaming September 18th on Disney Plus.
Severance

Severance season two is finally coming. It’s been over two years since the cliffhanger ending of the bizarro sci-fi office thriller’s first season. Now, the new season is set for a January 17th premiere on Apple TV Plus. If you haven’t seen the show, don’t worry: the teaser that Apple released earlier this week shows characters Mark (Adam Scott), Helly (Britt Lower), Dylan (Zach Cherry), and Irving (John Turturro), but doesn’t spoil anything about it.

There’s a bit of a theme of payoff in this week’s trailers. Anthony Mackie finally takes the lead on the big screen after 10 years in the MCU; Ridley Scott’s two-decade-plus plan for a Gladiator sequel is coming to fruition; and we finally get to find out what happens next to the macrodata refinement team in Severance.

There’s a lot to go through this week, from big-budget tentpole movies to whimsical TV, so let’s get down to it, starting, naturally, with the MCU.

Captain America: Brave New World

In the trailer for Captain America: Brave New World, Thaddeus Ross (Harrison Ford) wants to make Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie) part of the US military once more. He’s clearly put off by the idea, but is forced to jump into the fray after super soldier Isaiah Bradley attacks the President.

Mackie’s first MCU film as the lead character (and, it seems, the first appearance of Red Hulk!) hits theaters on January 14th, 2025, so you have time to catch up on The Falcon and the Winter Soldier before its debut.

F1

Apple and Warner Bros’ expensive new F1 isn’t due in US theaters until June 27th, 2025, but it’s already got a teaser trailer with plenty of racing footage. Brad Pitt stars as Sonny Hayes, a veteran driver who’s been out of the game since a bad crash in the 1990s but is convinced to return to the circuit as a mentor for Joshua Pearse (Damson Idris).

The movie sounds like it’s every bit as bombastic as director Joseph Kosinski’s Top Gun: Maverick. Not only did Pitt and Idris actually drive cars for the movie, but much of the filming took place at actual Formula 1 races.

Gladiator II

Ridley Scott’s long-awaited Gladiator sequel sees Lucius Verus (Paul Mescal), the nephew of Emperor Commodus from the first film, grown up and with no memory of his mother, Lucilla (Connie Nielsen) — though he does remember the rebellion of Russell Crowe’s Maximus. Now enslaved himself and inspired by Maximus, Lucius takes up with Macrinus (Denzel Washington) to carry out his own uprising, his goal nothing short of the fall of Rome.

Gladiator II also stars Pedro Pascal, Joseph Quinn, Fred Hechinger, and opens on November 22nd.

Time Bandits

Taika Waititi’s take on Time Bandits looks like it’ll have the fantastical pseudo-realism of the Terry Gilliam movie it’s based on, but with some changes to the formula — the biggest one being that the Time Bandits themselves are no longer played by little people.

Otherwise, the premise is basically the same: a young boy finds himself flitting across time on an adventure with a band of time-hopping thieves. Lisa Kudrow, Rune Temte, Kal-El Tuck, Tadhg Murphey, Kiera Thompson, and more star in the Apple TV Plus series, which premiers on July 24th.

Agatha All Along

In WandaVision spinoff Agatha All Along, Rio Vidal (Aubrey Plaza) helps Agatha Harkness (Kathryn Hahn) emerge from an illusion that had her believing she was a detective trying to solve a mysterious murder. Yet she finds that the witchy powers she had in WandaVision are gone, and she needs to pull together a coven to regain them. Agatha All Along starts streaming September 18th on Disney Plus.

Severance

Severance season two is finally coming. It’s been over two years since the cliffhanger ending of the bizarro sci-fi office thriller’s first season. Now, the new season is set for a January 17th premiere on Apple TV Plus. If you haven’t seen the show, don’t worry: the teaser that Apple released earlier this week shows characters Mark (Adam Scott), Helly (Britt Lower), Dylan (Zach Cherry), and Irving (John Turturro), but doesn’t spoil anything about it.

Read More 

The Kobo Elipsa 2E lets you actually take notes directly on pages, which is one of the reasons I recommend it over the Kindle Scribe. | Image: Kobo

We’re already seeing great deals land on Amazon devices like the Kindle Scribe ahead of Prime Day next week, which makes sense as it’s an Amazon event. It’s possible we’ll see even more Kindle deals arrive soon, but it’s less certain what kind of discounts — if any — we’ll see on e-readers from rivals like Kobo. Thankfully, if you don’t want an Amazon e-reader, Rakuten Kobo has launched a new sale, dropping its top-notch Kobo Elipsa 2E down to an all-time low of $349.99 ($50 off) when you purchase it direct from Rakuten Kobo. You can also pick it up for the same price at Amazon or Target via a third-party seller.

I spent a lot of time testing both the Kindle Scribe and the Kobo Elipsa 2E, and ultimately Kobo’s is my favorite large-screen ebook reader for taking notes. For one, you can actually write directly on any page — which allows for a more intuitive note-taking experience — whereas the Scribe only lets you directly annotate select Kindle titles. Moreover, it can accurately convert handwriting into typed text while exporting notebooks and — unlike the Scribe — while you’re writing within a notebook. The ad-free e-reader also boasts double the storage (32GB) as the entry-level Kindle Scribe and features a great selection of pen styles (and shades).
The main downside is that the Elipsa 2E doesn’t natively support Kindle books, though it does support many other file formats (EPUB, EPUB3, CBZ, FlePub, etc…). Plus, if you’re willing to invest a little extra time and effort, there are ways to convert your collection so you can still read your Kindle library from your Kobo.

Some more ways to save this Saturday

The Google Pixel Watch 2 is down to a record low of $279.99 ($70 off) at Wellbots when you use promo code PDVERGE70 at checkout through July 20th. Google’s second-gen wearable is one of our favorite Android smartwatches and represents a significant upgrade over its predecessor thanks to its faster charging and longer battery life. It offers an improved array of Fitbit-powered fitness and health tracking features, too, including automatic workout tracking and abnormal heart rate notifications. It also grants access to Google services like Calendar, Gmail, Maps, and Wallet. Read our review.

Fujifilm’s Instax Mini 12 is available in multiple colors at its all-time low of around $69 ($11 off) at Amazon, Best Buy, and Target (for Target Circle members). After testing dozens of instant cameras, the Mini 12 is my top pick for most people. It doesn’t sport advanced creative settings and features that rivals like the Instax Mini Evo offer, but it’s affordable, prints shots of similar quality, and is simple to set up, making it a fun camera for all age groups.
If you’re looking for an outdoor smart plug, TP-Link’s Kasa Smart Wi-Fi Outdoor Dimmer (KP405) is matching its all-time low of $14.99 ($15 off) at Amazon when you apply the on-page coupon. Along with reliable dimming, the plug features a straightforward companion app that lets you quickly and easily schedule, adjust, and turn on the lights. It also supports Amazon Alexa, Google Home, and Samsung SmartThings, while its IP64 rating means it can withstand a variety of weather conditions.

The Kobo Elipsa 2E lets you actually take notes directly on pages, which is one of the reasons I recommend it over the Kindle Scribe. | Image: Kobo

We’re already seeing great deals land on Amazon devices like the Kindle Scribe ahead of Prime Day next week, which makes sense as it’s an Amazon event. It’s possible we’ll see even more Kindle deals arrive soon, but it’s less certain what kind of discounts — if any — we’ll see on e-readers from rivals like Kobo. Thankfully, if you don’t want an Amazon e-reader, Rakuten Kobo has launched a new sale, dropping its top-notch Kobo Elipsa 2E down to an all-time low of $349.99 ($50 off) when you purchase it direct from Rakuten Kobo. You can also pick it up for the same price at Amazon or Target via a third-party seller.

I spent a lot of time testing both the Kindle Scribe and the Kobo Elipsa 2E, and ultimately Kobo’s is my favorite large-screen ebook reader for taking notes. For one, you can actually write directly on any page — which allows for a more intuitive note-taking experience — whereas the Scribe only lets you directly annotate select Kindle titles. Moreover, it can accurately convert handwriting into typed text while exporting notebooks and — unlike the Scribe — while you’re writing within a notebook. The ad-free e-reader also boasts double the storage (32GB) as the entry-level Kindle Scribe and features a great selection of pen styles (and shades).

The main downside is that the Elipsa 2E doesn’t natively support Kindle books, though it does support many other file formats (EPUB, EPUB3, CBZ, FlePub, etc…). Plus, if you’re willing to invest a little extra time and effort, there are ways to convert your collection so you can still read your Kindle library from your Kobo.

Some more ways to save this Saturday

The Google Pixel Watch 2 is down to a record low of $279.99 ($70 off) at Wellbots when you use promo code PDVERGE70 at checkout through July 20th. Google’s second-gen wearable is one of our favorite Android smartwatches and represents a significant upgrade over its predecessor thanks to its faster charging and longer battery life. It offers an improved array of Fitbit-powered fitness and health tracking features, too, including automatic workout tracking and abnormal heart rate notifications. It also grants access to Google services like Calendar, Gmail, Maps, and Wallet. Read our review.

Fujifilm’s Instax Mini 12 is available in multiple colors at its all-time low of around $69 ($11 off) at Amazon, Best Buy, and Target (for Target Circle members). After testing dozens of instant cameras, the Mini 12 is my top pick for most people. It doesn’t sport advanced creative settings and features that rivals like the Instax Mini Evo offer, but it’s affordable, prints shots of similar quality, and is simple to set up, making it a fun camera for all age groups.
If you’re looking for an outdoor smart plug, TP-Link’s Kasa Smart Wi-Fi Outdoor Dimmer (KP405) is matching its all-time low of $14.99 ($15 off) at Amazon when you apply the on-page coupon. Along with reliable dimming, the plug features a straightforward companion app that lets you quickly and easily schedule, adjust, and turn on the lights. It also supports Amazon Alexa, Google Home, and Samsung SmartThings, while its IP64 rating means it can withstand a variety of weather conditions.

Read More