Android 📱

Luis von Ahn could have retired to a beach somewhere years ago. Best known as the CEO of the learning app Duolingo, von Ahn in the early 2000s invented the captcha, those infuriating little online tests that force people to prove they’re not robots. But after selling his creation to Google in 2009, von Ahn didn’t waste any time launching his next venture: a company borne of his experience growing up in Guatemala, one that’s now among the most prominent education platforms in the world.

wired

New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani, who rode a social media-fueled campaign to Gracie Mansion, is reversing an Eric Adams–era directive barring TikTok from government-owned devices. Local agencies will now be able to post about their projects on the app, though with new guardrails to protect city networks.

wired

Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 presidential race wasn’t just a prelude to mass deportations and geopolitical chaos. The MAGA faithful also saw it as the final, definitive rebuke of “woke” ideology.

wired

The second trump administration was barely a week old when Rafael Concepcion came across the Facebook post that would upend his life. Its author was Maria Hernandez, the owner of a Mexican grocery store popular among Latino residents of New York’s Finger Lakes region. She wrote that several of her best customers had already gone into hiding. With sales plummeting, she offered to make free deliveries of food to anyone too scared of Immigration and Customs Enforcement to leave their home.

wired