Twitter is due for a major shakeup. 

So appears to be the thinking of the company’s vice president of design and research, Dantley Davis, who on Monday announced a series of changes that could come to the platform as early as next year. Well, maybe. 

Davis laid out his ideas on, of course, Twitter — prefacing them all with the disclaimer that they are merely “features that [he’s] looking forward to in 2020.” Still, they represent a possible sweeping change to how users interact with the platform. 

The proposed new features are: “Remove me from this conversation,” “Don’t allow RT of this tweet,” “Don’t allow people to @mention me without my permission,” “Remove this @mention from this conversation,” and “Tweet this only to: hashtag, interest, or these friends.” Read more…

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A member of New Zealand’s Parliament beautifully dropped “OK, Boomer” during a speech on the climate crisis. 

Chlöe Swarbrick, a 25-year-old MP, delivered a speech on the Zero Carbon Bill, a proposal that would set the target for New Zealand completely eliminate the nation’s carbon emissions by 2050.  

“In the year 2050, I will be 56 years old,” she said in her speech. “Right now, the average age of this 52nd Parliament is 49 years old.” 

That call out garnered some disgruntled reactions from (presumably older) members of Parliament. Without missing a beat, she flawlessly shut down a National MP heckling her with, “OK, Boomer” before continuing with her speech. Read more…

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Any beauty enthusiast who’s had a crush, seen A Star Is Born, or listened to a Phoebe Bridgers song knows that truly good makeup holds up through a monsoon of violent tears. They’ll also appreciate this dataset created by programmer, artist, and student Connie Ye, which identifies references to crying in Sephora reviews to point you to the weep-proof products you want. 

The dataset lives on one of Ye’s websites, where users can refresh repeatedly to see dozens of makeup reviews that mention crying, sobbing, or tears. Reading them is a frequently funny and occasionally poignant experience: Some share an affecting amount of personal detail, making them read more like digital-age flash fiction than opinions about products. In fact, product names and usernames aren’t visible on Ye’s site, so that’s pretty much what they are. Read more…

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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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