Andy McMillan and Andy Baio:

Today, over 10 years later, and almost two full years after we retired the festival for good, we’re finally launching that website. Named after what we thought would be a throwaway title for a short-lived GitHub repo, allow us to introduce XOXO Explore. [...]

And, for the first time ever (!) on an XOXO website, we now have an actual About page, where we’ve attempted to explain what XOXO actually was, documenting the 12-year history of the festival and its related projects, and featuring a bunch of our favorite quotes from press and attendees over the years.

You’ll also notice the entire site is littered with floating visual ephemera: design artifacts, illustrations, animations, photos, and videos, all pulled from our vast archive of commissions and collaborations.

Conferences come and conferences go. But when they go, they tend to disappear. What a remarkable library, a record, XOXO Explore is.

Eva Corlett, reporting for The Guardian in 2023:

New Zealand’s new government will scrap the country’s world-leading law to ban smoking for future generations to help pay for tax cuts — a move that public health officials believe will cost thousands of lives and be “catastrophic” for Māori communities.

In 2022 the country passed pioneering legislation which introduced a steadily rising smoking age to stop those born after January 2009 from ever being able to legally buy cigarettes. The law was designed to prevent thousands of smoking-related deaths and save the health system billions of dollars. [...]

The laws were due to be implemented from July 2024. But as part of its coalition agreement with populist New Zealand First, National agreed to repeal the amendments, including “removing requirements for de-nicotisation, removing the reduction in retail outlets and the generation ban”.

It’s interesting that this law passed in the first place, but I would argue that there are no lessons to be learned from it given that it was repealed before it ever went into effect. And it seemingly was repealed solely along left/right political lines after a change in the country’s parliament, not because the public had turned against this specific not-yet-in-effect law.

Ephrat Livni, reporting for The New York Times (gift link):

Britain aims to raise a “smoke-free generation” by permanently banning the sale or supply of tobacco to anyone born in 2009 or after, with a bill that was approved by Parliament on Tuesday.

The bill applies to people currently 17 years old or younger and aims to keep them from ever picking up the habit in their lifetime. The proposal is expected to soon go into law after the final formality of approval by King Charles III.

Lawmakers say that in practice, the measure means the age of sale for tobacco products will rise over time as the targeted demographic group grows older and could lead to a smoke-free society. The law will apply in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

I’ve never smoked and I’m strongly in favor of most — maybe all? — of the smoking bans and tobacco-related public health measures that have been passed in my lifetime. I can’t imagine going back to when smoking was permitted in restaurants, bars, airplanes, and public spaces. I’m also strongly in favor of stiff taxes on tobacco products to discourage their use.

But this U.K. law seems bonkers to me. To me, something ought to be either legal for adults or not. The idea that if you’re already 18 years old you can buy tobacco products for the rest of your life, but if you were born in 2009 or later, you’ll never be permitted to, is so contrary to my sense of fairness that I’m finding it hard to put my objection into words. All adults should be equals under the law. That’s my take in a nut. If smoking should be illegal, it should be illegal for everyone. I’ve never heard of a law like this anywhere in the world. It’s like they’re enshrining in law that everyone in the U.K. who is today a child is forever a child when it comes to tobacco. If there are examples of similar laws I’m unaware of, I’d love to hear about them. [Update: Brookline Massachusetts passed a town ordinance like this in 2021, and after it was upheld by the state supreme court in 2024, a few other MA towns have too. My cynical guess is that the only effect of this law is to annoy young Brookline smokers by making them drive a few miles to buy smokes, but if the actual effect is that fewer young Brooklinites (sp?) smoke, that’s great. But I also doubt that anyone in Brookline’s municipal government is going to commission a study to see if the law had any practical effect on smoking rates.]

Maybe the British are different, but there’s no way this law would work in America. First, I don’t think such a law would ever gain popular traction. But even if it did, it would just create a black market. At least when we banned booze, we banned it for everyone.

Russ Choma, reporting for Mother Jones:

Devin Nunes was not an obvious choice to run a fledgling social media network, but after $1.1 billion in losses, the former dairy farmer and congressman is out as the head of Truth Social.

Donald Trump Jr., a board member at Trump Media + Technology, the parent company of Truth Social, said on Tuesday night that Nunes would be replaced by another executive who formerly worked at Hulu. Nunes confirmed the move in a Truth Social post of his own.

The company, which is majority owned by Donald Trump, has seen its stock plummet 84 percent under Nunes’ leadership, from its debut price of $58 back in 2024. The current share price of around $9.80 is arguably still optimistic for a company that has lost $1.1 billion since it went public, and recorded just over $10.6 million in revenue in the same time.

Like a well-oiled Atlantic City casino.

When Trump Media was first announced as a concept, the Trump family said it would include: Truth Social, streaming television services to rival Netflix and Amazon and web-hosting that would rival Amazon’s AWS business. And all of it would be devoted to fighting the “woke” media and corporate culture that Trump said had blacklisted him following Jan. 6. Truth Social would be a redoubt for freedom of speech, the streaming services would have wholesome non-“woke” content that America craved and the web-hosting would provide a home for any company that dared to challenge Amazon’s alleged anti-free speech motivations.

I’m sure the rest of that has merely been delayed, temporarily, while Trump Media’s best and brightest minds continue working on the cell phone they started selling last summer but still haven’t shipped.