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January 22, 2026

High Stakes as Country’s First Social Media Addiction Trial Nears and Snap Settles

“This is a case about minor Plaintiffs’ alleged addiction to Defendants’ social media platforms and the alleged adverse effects flowing from that addiction.” That’s how California Superior Court Judge Carolyn B. Kuhl recently distilled about three years’ worth of litigation involving more than 1,000 coordinated cases from across the nation, as jury selection—barring last-minute delays…

By Clay Calvert

January 21, 2026

Compelling Platforms to Convey State-Sponsored Speech: First Amendment Lessons from Colorado

A federal court recently blocked Colorado from enforcing part of a new law that compels social media platforms “to provide non-commercial disclosures to minors about the alleged health impacts of using their platforms.” In issuing a preliminary injunction in NetChoice v. Weiser, Senior US District Judge William Martinez concluded the measure would likely fail the…

By Clay Calvert

January 20, 2026

What Using AI for My Mom’s Cancer Taught Me

The most profound way I used AI in 2025 came during one of the harder stretches my family has faced: My mother’s cancer came back. In the past, navigating this diagnosis meant late‑night Googling, scattered notes, and a nagging sense that I did not fully understand the medical language in front of us. Second opinions…

By John Bailey

January 20, 2026

What a Year of Living With AI Taught Me

A year ago, I shared some reflections on how I was using AI and suggested that it’s helpful to think of these tools as competent interns working remotely: earnest and sophisticated, but still in need of direction and supervision. In 2025, those interns grew up. What surprised me wasn’t the pace of technical progress but…

By John Bailey

January 16, 2026

CES 2026 Marks the Shift From AI Features to AI Coordination

For many years, the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) displayed the potential for smart technology to transform our daily lives. At CES 2026, the reality of smart devices came to life as AI improved how individual tasks are performed. The real breakthrough isn’t just AI-enabled devices: It’s how AI enables collaboration with systems that recognize that…

By Shane Tews

January 16, 2026

Two Cheers for Abundance: Tech Policy and the Politics of Growth

Over the last year, the Abundance movement has gained traction in American political discourse. Driven by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s book of the same name, Abundance challenges the progressive left to focus on overcoming scarcity by rebuilding America’s capacity to build. The framework breaks down in places, and its prescriptions should not be accepted…

By Daniel Lyons

January 15, 2026

Global Tropical Cyclone Landfalls

Back in 2012, Jessica Weinkle, Ryan Maue, and I published the first peer-reviewed paper presenting a time series of global tropical cyclone landfalls of hurricane strength. In that paper we concluded: From currently available historical TC records, we constructed a long-period global hurricane landfall dataset using a consistent methodology. We have identified considerable interannual variability in the frequency of…

By Roger Pielke Jr.

January 15, 2026

Data Centers Make Easy Targets For Rising Energy Bills, But They Are Poor Scapegoats

If we’re going to fix electricity pricing problems, we need to understand what’s actually causing them. Blaming data centers for rising electricity bills is easier than reforming how we allocate infrastructure costs, but only one of those approaches will actually help ratepayers.

By Will Rinehart

January 15, 2026

What Makes an App Succeed? Lessons from Competing on Apple and Google Platforms

In today’s digital economy, mobile apps are everywhere—and so are the entrepreneurs trying to build them. Over 3.8 million apps are available in Apple’s App Store, with new ones entering every day. But what determines whether an app breaks through to success—or quietly fades into the background? In our new research, we analyze over 400,000…

By Mark Jamison

January 13, 2026

Getting Serious About Improving Biosafety

Response to Better Biosecurity for the Bioeconomy by David Gillum. David Gillum makes a compelling and urgent case for improving oversight of high-risk biological research and proposes a National Biosafety and Biosecurity Agency to coordinate what is currently a fragmented federal process. His call for reform comes at a critical moment. As he notes, COVID-19 has created…

By Anemone Franz