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After officially hikingtariffs on Chinese electric vehicle imports earlier this month, the US government is getting even more serious about keeping China-made autos out of the country. On Monday, the US Commerce Department proposed a new rule that would ban some Chinese- and Russian-made automotive hardware and software from the US, with software restrictions starting as early as 2026.

Creed is having a moment. Actually, if we’re being precise, it’s having innumerable moments, over and over again, all across the internet.

On Instagram, the band has been repurposed as a comedic device for dunking on President Joe Biden; on TikTok, shitposters imagined what it would be like to explain the butt rock legends to an alien race; and on X, Creed is an easy punchline for commenting on political theater. All the while, those memes are collectively accumulating millions of likes, views, and shares.

Many of today’s programmers—excuse me, softwareengineers—consider themselves “creatives.” Artists of a sort. They are given to ostentatious personal websites with cleverly hidden Easter eggs and parallax scrolling; they confer upon themselves multihyphenate job titles (“ex-Amazon-engineer-investor-author”) and crowd their laptops with identity-signaling vinyl stickers. Some regard themselves as literary sophisticates. Consider the references smashed into certain product names: Apache Kafka, ScyllaDB, Claude 3.5 Sonnet.

Much of that, I admit, applies to me. The difference is I’m a tad short on talents to hyphenate, and my toy projects—with names like “Nabokov” (I know, I know)—are better off staying on my laptop. I entered this world pretty much the moment software engineering overtook banking as the most reviled profession. There’s a lot of hatred, and self-hatred, to contend with.

The original version ofthis storyappeared in Quanta Magazine.

Nearly a century ago, the physicist Erwin Schrödinger called attention to a quirk of the quantum world that has fascinated and vexed researchers ever since. When quantum particles such as atoms interact, they shed their individual identities in favor of a collective state that’s greater, and weirder, than the sum of its parts. This phenomenon is called entanglement.

Researchers have a firm understanding of how entanglement works in idealized systems containing just a few particles. But the real world is more complicated. In large arrays of atoms, like the ones that make up the stuff we see and touch, the laws of quantum physics compete with the laws of thermodynamics, and things get messy.

On June 4th, Rachel Kelly and Matt Saunders set off on the adventure of a lifetime: driving the Pan American Highway. The couple from a small town in Surrey, England, went to the same school but matched on Tinder during the pandemic lockdowns. On their third date, Saunders planted the idea of driving from Alaska to Argentina, and Kelly was sold. After saving £20,000 each, they flew out to Canmore, Alberta, to pick up a pop-top camper they got for £4,000. It broke down just four days into their trip. Further camper and car mishaps ensued, costing them £15,000 in repairs and replacements.

The new animated Transformers movie is ostensibly about the early lives of the characters from Hasbro’s 1980s toy line, but it also may be about a class uprising and civil rights. I think Transformers One even takes a jab at former president Donald Trump. Actually, it takes two: Main villain Sentinel Prime (voiced convincingly by Jon Hamm) says, twice, that the truth is what he says it is.

All of which is to say, Transformers One isn’t exactly as hokey as it looks. Sure, it’s basically a kids’ movie, but much like the Transformers cartoons of the ’80s, it does have a message.

The week was dominated by news that thousands of pagers, walkie-talkies and other devices were exploding across Lebanon on Tuesday and Wednesday in an attack targeting the militant group Hezbollah. At least 32 people were killed, including at least four children, and more than 3,200 people were injured. The covert campaign has widely been attributed to Israel, though none of the country’s government agencies have commented.

In addition to the carnage, the attacks have—seemingly by design—had the effect of sowing paranoia and fear, not just among members of Hezbollah but also in the general Lebanese public. Hardware and warfare experts say that the incident is unlikely to establish a global precedent that people’s most trusted communication devices and electronics, like smartphones, are rigged with explosives left and right. But it does create the potential to inspire copycats and puts defenders on notice that such attacks are possible.

The Shade Room pioneered a unique, if somewhat loose-lipped, brand of digital media when it launched in 2014, merging elements of fan culture around the machine of celebrity news. Across the next decade, Angie Nwandu, its founder, flipped her Instagram-only celebrity tabloid into a media company with a 40-person staff that reaches 29 million social media obsessives by tapping into their wolfish appetite for drama.

More than your run-of-the-mill gossip rag or news aggregator, The Shade Room evolved into an information hub for “the culture,” Nwandu says, “but also a reflection of it and voice for it. We’re known as a megaphone.”

Everyone, it seems, wants a piece of Moo Deng. The baby pygmy hippo is barely two months old and already famous. So beloved on TikTok, Instagram, and X is Moo Deng that workers at Khao Kheow Open Zoo, the place in Thailand where she was born, are doing all they can to keep up with her fans’ appetite for more. They post videos, photos, updates. They also welcome thousands of visitors a day and find themselves having to defend Moo Deng when tourists throw shells at her while she’s just trying to chill.

If the past five years of EU tech rules could take human form, they would embody Thierry Breton. The bombastic commissioner, with his swoop of white hair, became the public face of Brussels’ irritation with American tech giants, touring Silicon Valley last summer to personally remind the industry of looming regulatory deadlines.

Combative and outspoken, Breton warned that Apple had spent too long “squeezing” other companies out of the market. In a case against TikTok, he emphasized, “our children are not guinea pigs for social media.”