The TikTok situation in the US has become so legally and politically tangled that a clear summary is genuinely useful.

Congress passed a law requiring ByteDance, TikTok’s Chinese parent company, to divest its US operations or face a ban. The law survived a Supreme Court challenge. The deadline passed. TikTok went dark briefly in the US, then came back when the incoming Trump administration signaled it would not enforce the deadline immediately, seeking instead a negotiated outcome. The app has been operating in a legal grey zone since.

Self-driving cars have been “two years away” for almost fifteen years. Something has genuinely changed in the last eighteen months. Understanding what still needs to happen is more useful than the hype in either direction.

The technology itself has cleared important thresholds. Waymo’s fully autonomous robotaxi service is operating commercially in multiple US cities with safety records that compare favorably to human drivers. Tesla’s Full Self-Driving software handles an increasingly wide range of scenarios without intervention. The question has shifted from “can this be done” to “can this scale.”

Most tariff coverage focuses on the geopolitics. Here is the part that affects you directly.

When the US imposes a 25% tariff on imported goods, the foreign country does not absorb the cost. The importer does. And the importer passes it to the retailer. And the retailer passes it to you. Tariffs are, in practical terms, a consumption tax paid by domestic buyers — not a penalty paid by foreign exporters.

Something structurally significant is happening in European defense spending, and it is moving faster than most foreign policy watchers expected.

Germany, which for decades treated its post-war pacifism as a near-constitutional value, has committed to defense spending above 2% of GDP — a threshold it avoided for thirty years. Poland is on track to reach 5%. The UK announced its largest defense budget expansion since the Cold War. These are not incremental adjustments. They represent a fundamental reassessment of the security environment.

Nuclear power was supposed to be a fading technology. Expensive, politically toxic after Fukushima, outcompeted by renewables. The reversal now underway is genuine and worth understanding.

The driver is AI. Data centers powering large language models and the infrastructure they require consume enormous and rapidly growing amounts of electricity. Unlike residential or commercial demand, these loads are constant — 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Solar generates during the day. Wind generates when the wind blows. Nuclear generates all the time, regardless of conditions. For a tech industry trying to guarantee power availability at scale, nuclear has become newly attractive precisely because of the attribute that made it economically awkward in a grid context: it does not stop.

The debate about social media and mental health has been running for a decade. The research has caught up, and the picture is sharper than it used to be.

The harm is not social media use broadly. It is specific: heavy algorithmic feed consumption, particularly among adolescent girls, correlates meaningfully with depression, anxiety, and disordered eating. The correlation survives controls for pre-existing conditions and reverse causality in the most rigorous studies now available. It is not a proven causal chain in every case, but it is strong enough that the “no evidence of harm” position is no longer defensible.