After today, the U.S. will only have three major mobile providers.

On Tuesday, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) approved the T-Mobile-Sprint merger despite antitrust concerns and an ongoing multi-state lawsuit to block it.

The 3-2 vote giving the merger the ‘OK’ was along party lines, with both Democrats against it. 

The FCC, or at least Chairman Ajit Pai and the two other Republican commissioners, say that the merger will enable the companies to close the digital divide between rural and urban areas and help deploy a 5G network. 

T-Mobile and Sprint agreed to offer coverage to 97 percent of Americans with its 5G network within three years and 99 percent of Americans within six years of the close of the merger. The companies also committed to provide mobile broadband with speeds of at least 100 Mbps to 90 percent of Americans and speeds of at least 50 Mbps to 99 percent.  Read more…

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Some current and former AT&T customers will get a little bit of money from the company soon thanks to a settlement with the Federal Trade Commission. AT&T will distribute the $60 million settlement to anyone who fell victim to the company’s claim of “unlimited” mobile data throughout this decade.

Per the FTC’s press release, AT&T’s mistake was selling an unlimited data plan that was, well, pretty limited. The carrier would never shut off your access to mobile data, per se, but if you hit an invisible limit, your data would be throttled to the point of uselessness. According to the FTC, AT&T started doing this in 2011 and would throttle data for customers after they used 2GB of data, which is a minuscule amount. Read more…

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Created by Stanislav Shults, greensens is a sensor designed to monitor your flowers’ and houseplants’ health. Read more…

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After questioning the “good” of Twitter, the CEO left the site. However, he has now returned to discuss the latest works at his space company, SpaceX. Read more…

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For a TV show that feeds our collective obsession with some kind of impending apocalypse, ‘The End of the F***ing World’ spends little time talking about humanity’s ultimate demise. 

Luckily, stars of the British dark comedy Jessica Barden and Alex Lawther came into the studio to shed some light on this heavily existential topic.  Read more…

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Know Your Role is a card game for only the most dedicated actors.

We quizzed Jessica Barden and Alex Lawther, the stars (and anti-heroes) of The End of the F***ing World, to see how well they know some of the most compelling anti-heroes in TV history. Read more…

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Facebook’s former head of Global Elections Integrity Ops left after six months on the job — and now she’s speaking out about the problems she faced when trying to fix the company’s political ad problems. 

In an op-ed in the Washington Post on Monday, Yaël Eisenstat, who joined Facebook after working with the CIA and the White House, says she tried to sound the alarm at the company leading up to the 2016 election. Recently, Facebook said it would let politicians lie in ads in the name of “free expression.”

“I didn’t think I was going to change the company,” wrote Eisenstat. “But I wanted to help Facebook think through the very challenging questions of what role it plays in politics, in the United States and around the world, and the best way to ensure that it is not harming democracy.”  Read more…

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Longtime fans of Chrissy Teigen will remember that before she was a social media star, she was a WordPress food blogger and lowkey chef. Now, after a successful cookbook and line of cookware, Teigen is returning to the kitchen and starting her own website and YouTube cooking channel, Cravings.

On the channel you can watch clips of her family life, her favorite dishes, and flip through cookbooks with her. You can also see Teigen and husband John Legend romp around Italy digging up truffles and exploring one of their favorite cities, Florence. As a whole, the channel feels more Food Network meets HGTV than a YouTube show — but that’s not a bad thing. Read more…

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Boomers are doing what they do best: Shouting on the internet. 

The youth — and by youth I mean anyone who understands how to rotate a pdf — are firing back at disgruntled Olds with an all-encompassing “OK, Boomer.” The phrase has become a rallying cry for all who’ve had to deal with some old fart complaining about how younger generations are entitled and lazy. 

“Teenagers use it to reply to cringey YouTube videos, Donald Trump tweets, and basically any person over 30 who says something condescending about young people — and the issues that matter to them,” New York Times reporter Taylor Lorenz explained in an article about the phrase. Read more…

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In April 2016, with his granddaughter sitting on his lap, Secretary of State John Kerry signed the historic Paris Agreement on Climate Change. It was a year that would soon become the warmest on record. 

Although every nation on Earth is a signatory of the historic pact — which brought together all the world’s countries to combat climate change — one rogue superpower has now officially started the process of withdrawing from the celebrated accord: the U.S.A.

Fulfilling President Trump’s climate-denialist, anti-regulatory campaign promise, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced Monday on Twitter the United States’ exit from the Paris pact. This now-imminent withdrawal, however, becomes final in precisely one year — curiously, the day after the 2020 election — and can’t be undone unless a different president (perhaps in 2021, 2025, or later) decides to reverse course.  Read more…

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