This week’s Current Climate newsletter also looks at an audacious plan for floating, ocean-powered data centers and GM’s pursuit of cheaper battery technologies.

This is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more on aviation, air taxis, and Wi-Fi speeds at 30,000 feet, follow Andrew J. Hawkins. The Stepback arrives in our subscribers’ inboxes on Sunday at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here. How it started Last year, […]
Longtime public health professional and leader Nina Schwalbe, MPH, PhD, is running to succeed retiring U.S. Rep Jerry Nadler in Manhattan’s 12th Congressional District.
A new law limits federal loans to aspiring nurse practitioners to $20,500 a year—less than half what would-be podiatrists, chiropractors and optometrists can borrow.

Where’s the Trump phone? We’re going to keep talking about it every week. We don’t have the phones we preordered yet, but this week we received unexpected news from Trump Mobile’s media relations manager. If you’ve been following my reporting on the Trump phone, you’ll know that Trump Mobile doesn’t exactly keep open lines of […]
While some communities fight big tech, this 160-year-old HBCU has put a $400 million data center at the financial heart of its bid to revitalize its Nashville campus.

The Onion’s InfoWars officially has a launch date: On July 2nd, the conspiracy network previously run by Alex Jones will return as a comedy and media platform. The reboot comes more than a year and a half after news broke that the satirical news site was working to acquire the property owned by Jones, a […]

One messy database is threatening to disenfranchise thousands or even millions of registered voters, while leaving even more at risk of intimidation or data breaches, in the name of solving a problem that barely exists. As the 2026 midterm elections approach, election and privacy experts are sounding alarms about the Department of Homeland Security’s Systematic […]

On today’s episode of Decoder, my guest is Hayden Field, senior AI reporter for The Verge. Often when Hayden comes on the show, it’s because something has gone wrong in the world of AI. Last weekend, that something was a pretty intense mix of Anthropic, the Trump administration, and Anthropic’s new AI model, Fable 5. […]

Anthropic has spent much of this week fighting to get its newest AI models back online after the Trump administration abruptly ordered the company to cut access for all foreign nationals, including users inside the US and its own employees, forcing Anthropic to block access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for everyone. “To my […]