We’ve got another special episode of Decoder today, recorded at the Cannes Lions advertising festival in the South of France. I’m talking with Ali Berman and Raina Penchansky, who run the Creators division at United Talent Agency. UTA is an enormous talent agency. Half the people you’ve ever heard speak or perform or who show […]
One hundred dollars will buy you 8 pounds of glitter; 10 Domino’s pizzas; 406 miniature disco balls from Temu; or 100 cans of Coors Light. For a friend’s birthday party one year, Ayla D’Silva spent $100 on sour candy and made a “sour candy salad.” Even sweeter was that she didn’t have to foot the […]
Microsoft is laying off 4,800 employees today, and more than 30 percent of the job losses are in the company’s Xbox division. The significant gaming cuts will affect nearly every part of Xbox and also involve four game studios being spun off to be run independently from Microsoft. Today’s layoffs, which are being described as […]
A year after cutting around 9,100 employees, Microsoft is making further layoffs today as it begins its new financial year. The software maker is laying off around 4,800 employees today, approximately 2.1 percent of its workforce. Most of the employees affected by today’s cuts are in Microsoft’s commercial sales business or the company’s Xbox division. […]
Britain’s foreign secretary has a stark analogy for artificial intelligence. Do not wait for its Hiroshima moment before writing the rules. Yvette Cooper will warn that AI could become the “greatest security challenge of the next decade,” according to …
“Group project, but make it 1776.” That’s how a new commercial for Google Workspace opens. And things only get cringier from there. The clip imagines what it would be like if the founding fathers turned to Google’s collaboration tools and Gemini to help them draft the Declaration of Independence. Ben Franklin texts Thomas Jefferson to […]
Baking sourdough bread is inherently old-fashioned, relying on natural fermentation and wild yeast instead of the simple, predictable commercial stuff. So it might sound anathema to bring a gadget into the mix. The trick to the Sourdough Sidekick – backed and branded by King Arthur flour – is that it promises to automate the boring […]
Before Keurig, the coffee in your office was almost certainly terrible. Old, burned, made by someone who would rather poorly eyeball than properly measure. Just altogether gross. After Keurig? You could make your own coffee, a cup at a time, exactly when you needed it. The single-cup brewer was an elegant solution to an extremely […]
When I first started testing Vizio’s 65-inch Mini LED Quantum TV, I thought the big story was that Vizio was back and that it had a quantum-dot TV for under $398 – the cheapest on the market. Vizio’s been pretty quiet since it was acquired by Walmart in 2024, so putting out a TV with […]
This is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more on the bleak state of the video game industry, follow Andrew Webster. The Stepback arrives in our subscribers’ inboxes on Sunday at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here. How it started Microsoft closed out Summer […]