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All change at the US State Department again, as the Calibri font is replaced by Times New Roman for official documents. CC-licensed photo by Stephen Coles on Flickr.
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A selection of 10 links for you. Capital! I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.
Same cart, different price: Instacart’s price experiments cost families at checkout • Groundwork Collaborative
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Two shoppers walk into the exact same grocery store, at the exact same time, and pick up the exact same box of Cheerios. Then, they head to the cash register to check out. This sounds like the opening to one of those “three guys walk into a bar” jokes — but there is nothing funny about this punchline.
The first shopper is charged $4.99. She pays and leaves the store with her box of cereal. The second customer steps up to the register and is charged $6.12. He’s ticked and tells the cashier that he, too, should pay $4.99, just like the woman in front of him. His response is understandable. Customers expect to pay the exact same price, for the exact same item, and his experience violates our shared understanding of how pricing for essential products like groceries is supposed to work.
But increasingly, this scenario is no longer hypothetical, it’s real. In fact, the proliferation of new pricing practices and technologies has upended pricing transparency. Fair pricing is no longer a guarantee in the cereal aisle or anywhere else. Our research suggests that companies like Instacart — the focus of this study — are developing, acquiring, and perfecting technology to experiment with pricing, at scale.
These new strategies are pervasive in the growing online grocery sector, with $10bn in sales in a single month in 2025 and more than 60% of US households reporting they have purchased groceries online. At a time when food price inflation outpaces overall inflation, and Americans report that the price of groceries is their number one cost concern, pricing experiments used by companies like Instacart are making the situation worse.
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This sort of algorithmic rinsing was always expected, almost anticipated, but to see that it’s being used now is as dismaying as you would expect. The research finds that yes, it is really happening, and it could generate a price difference of up to $1,200 annually.
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Rubio stages font coup: Times New Roman ousts Calibri • Reuters via Huffington Post
Humeyra Pamuk:
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US Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Tuesday ordered diplomats to return to using Times New Roman font in official communications, calling his predecessor Antony Blinken’s decision to adopt Calibri a “wasteful” diversity move, according to an internal department cable seen by Reuters.
The department under Blinken in early January 2023 had switched to Calibri, a modern sans-serif font, saying this was a more accessible font for people with disabilities because it did not have the decorative angular features and was the default in Microsoft products.
A cable dated December 9 sent to all US diplomatic posts said that typography shapes the professionalism of an official document and Calibri is informal compared to serif typefaces.
“To restore decorum and professionalism to the Department’s written work products and abolish yet another wasteful DEIA program, the Department is returning to Times New Roman as its standard typeface,” the cable said.
“This formatting standard aligns with the President’s One Voice for America’s Foreign Relations directive, underscoring the Department’s responsibility to present a unified, professional voice in all communications,” it added.
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It would not have surprised me if this story had come out on April 1, but no, it’s real. Can’t honestly disagree with Rubio though – serif faces are significantly more legible in print. The argument is about whether they’re more legible on screen. This reverses Blinken’s move of January 2023 (best headline at the time: Politico’s “Who Shot the Serif”) – which was then not popular, so this is an easy win for Rubio.
If we were being honest though this administration’s written communications would use Comic Sans with occasional Gothic.
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Sperm from donor with cancer-causing gene was used to conceive almost 200 children • BBC News
James Gallagher and Natalie Truswell:
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A sperm donor who unknowingly harboured a genetic mutation that dramatically raises the risk of cancer has fathered at least 197 children across Europe, a major investigation has revealed.
Some children have already died and only a minority who inherit the mutation will escape cancer in their lifetimes.
The sperm was not sold to UK clinics, but the BBC can confirm a “very small” number of British families, who have been informed, used the donor’s sperm while having fertility treatment in Denmark.Denmark’s European Sperm Bank, which sold the sperm, said families affected had their “deepest sympathy” and admitted the sperm was used to make too many babies in some countries.
The investigation has been conducted by 14 public service broadcasters, including the BBC, as part of the European Broadcasting Union’s Investigative Journalism Network.
The sperm came from an anonymous man who was paid to donate as a student, starting in 2005. His sperm was then used by women for around 17 years.
He is healthy and passed the donor screening checks. However, the DNA in some of his cells mutated before he was born.
It damaged the TP53 gene – which has the crucial role of preventing the body’s cells turning cancerous.
Most of the donor’s body does not contain the dangerous form of TP53, but up to 20% of his sperm do. However, any children made from affected sperm will have the mutation in every cell of their body.
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Odd: Hannah Devlin at The Guardian had a version of this story in May, when the numbers were 67 children confirmed as born via the sperm, and 10 with cancer. Clearly more information has been unearthed, but this also raises the question of limits. As reported at the time:
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“We need to have a European limit on the number of births or families for a single donor,” said Dr Edwige Kasper, a biologist at Rouen university hospital in France, who presented the case at the annual conference of the European Society of Human Genetics in Milan.
“We can’t do whole-genome sequencing for all sperm donors – I’m not arguing for that,” she added. “But this is the abnormal dissemination of genetic disease. Not every man has 75 children across Europe.”
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I’ve been watching the original Swedish/Danish series The Bridge, and this feels like a subplot from one of them.
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Judge finalizes remedies in Google search antitrust case • CNBC
Jennifer Elias:
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A US judge on Friday added new details to the remedies resulting from Google’s antitrust case, finalizing the consequences the company faces after its defeat last year.
In mid-2024, Google was found to hold an illegal monopoly in its core market of internet search, and in September of this year, US District Judge Amit Mehta ruled against the most severe consequences that were proposed by the Department of Justice, including a forced sale of Google’s Chrome browser.
Google was, however, ordered to loosen its hold on search data.
Mehta on Friday issued additional details for his ruling. “The age-old saying ‘the devil is in the details’ may not have been devised with the drafting of an antitrust remedies judgment in mind, but it sure does fit,” Mehta wrote in one of the Friday filings.
Mehta wrote that Google can’t enter into any deal like the one it’s had with Apple “unless the agreement terminates no more than one year after the date it is entered.” Google pays billions of dollars per year to Apple to be the default search engine on the Safari browser on iPhones, Macs and iPads.
The judge’s ruling includes deals involving generative artificial intelligence products, and any “application, software, service, feature, tool, functionality, or product” that involve or use genAI or large language models. GenAI “plays a significant role in these remedies,” Mehta wrote.
Mehta on Friday also included requirements on the makeup of a technical committee that will determine with whom Google must share its data. Committee “members shall be experts in some combination of software engineering, information retrieval, artificial intelligence, economics, behavioral science, and data privacy and data security,” the filing says.
The judge went on to say that no committee member can have a conflict of interest, such as having worked for Google or any of its competitors in the six months prior to or one year after serving in the role.
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Sounds like Apple is going to be able annually to ratchet up the amount it gets from Google.. unless search starts going south as people use chatbot apps more and more, in which case the next payment from Google might be to be the default chatbot app. Could we see a return to Apple preinstalling Google apps, as it did back in 2007?
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Foreign tourists could be required to disclose five years of social media histories under Trump administration plan • NBC News
Julia Ainsley and Phil Helsel:
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The Trump administration plans to require all foreign tourists to provide their social media histories from the last five years to enter the country, according to a notice published Tuesday in the Federal Register.
The data would be “mandatory” for new entrants to the US, regardless of whether they are entering from countries that require visas, according to the notice from Customs and Border Protection.
Residents of the United Kingdom and Germany are among the countries from which visitors do not require visas to visit the US, which, according to the notice, could add an extra hurdle for travellers. British citizens and people of other waived countries currently can complete “Electronic System for Travel Authorizations” in lieu of obtaining visas.
The Trump administration has increased restrictions on people entering the US, and President Donald Trump ran a campaign that focused on border and immigration crackdowns.
In addition to social media histories, Customs and Border Protection would add other new data collection fields, including email addresses and telephone numbers used in the last five years, as well as the addresses and names of family members, the notice reads.
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What really adds the piquancy is that you have absolutely no idea what would be deemed unacceptable. Would posting memes about Trump get you turned around and put on the next plane? Reposting them? Saying he’s mad, bad, and dangerous to know? Or is it other political topics, such as support for some foreign country which is presently out of favour? It’s an amazing piece of tourism advocacy – for every other destination in the world.
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What editing magazine stories taught me about writing • Oliver Franklin-Wallis
Oliver Franklin-Wallis:
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Personal News, as they say: I’ve left GQ, and am freelance again.
I have complicated feelings about being freelance in 2025. (Nervous doesn’t cover it.) But I am genuinely excited to be out reporting again, after spending the last four years almost exclusively editing long magazine stories. My intention is for that to include much more regular posting on this Substack — which for now I’m calling, appropriately, Personal News — until I figure out what this newsletter should be. Ideas in the comments, please.
For now, partially prompted by a recent seminar I gave to some students at Johns Hopkins, here are a few things that more than a decade of editing magazine stories has taught me about writing.
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The advice that follows is deadly accurate. And includes this most modern (and true) recommendation: “Never, ever watch the Google Doc edits in real time.” Unless, that is, you like watching your darlings being murdered.
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Why the world should worry about stablecoins • Financial Times
Martin Wolf:
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Yes, stablecoins are far more stable than, say, bitcoin. But their purported “stability” is likely to prove a “con”, relative to that of a dollar in cash or a bank.
The IMF, OECD and Bank for International Settlements (BIS) have all registered serious concerns. Interestingly, the latter welcomes the idea of “tokenisation”: thus, “By bringing together tokenised central bank reserves, commercial bank money and financial assets into the same venue, a unified ledger can harness tokenisation’s full benefits.”
Yet the BIS is also concerned that stablecoins will fail to meet “the three key tests of singleness, elasticity and integrity”. What does this mean? Singleness describes the need for all forms of a given money to be exchangeable with one another at par, at all times. This is the foundation of trust in money. Elasticity means the ability to deliver payments of all sizes without gridlock. Integrity means the ability to curb financial crime and other illicit activities. A central role in all this is played by central banks and other regulators.
Stablecoins, as now operated, fall far short of these requirements: they are opaque, easily usable by criminals and of uncertain value. Last month, S&P Global Ratings downgraded Tether’s USDT, the most important dollar stablecoin, to “weak”. This is not a trustworthy money. Private monies have often failed in crises. That is very likely to be true of stablecoins, too.
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Tether has looked extremely dodgy literally for years: it just about fulfils the elasticity requirement (the printer is busy) but on the other two, many people have big, big doubts.
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Chinese astronauts install debris protection aboard space station • Reuters
Eduardo Baptista:
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Chinese astronauts have installed protection against “space junk” aboard the permanently inhabited station Tiangong, according to China’s manned spaceflight authorities, a month after a docked vessel was damaged for the first time.
Early last month, a tiny piece of debris travelling at high velocity cracked the window of the Shenzhou-20 spacecraft’s return capsule, right before the vessel was set to leave Tiangong carrying a trio of Chinese astronauts back to Earth.
The damage was deemed severe enough that China’s space authorities made the unprecedented decision to delay the return and then send the crew back on the only other available vessel, the Shenzhou-21, which triggered the country’s first emergency launch mission as the Shenzhou-21 crew was left without a flightworthy vessel for 11 days.
The entire saga, unprecedented for China’s rapidly advancing space programme, highlighted the risks posed by space junk to countries aiming to explore, and eventually colonise, the reaches beyond Earth.
The disintegration of old, defunct satellites, mishaps with active ones and anti-satellite weapon tests can create vast fields of space debris that remain in orbit for years.
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Trains cancelled over fake bridge collapse image • BBC News
Zoe Toase and Laura O’Neill:
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Trains were halted after a suspected AI-generated picture that seemed to show major damage to a bridge appeared on social media following an earthquake.
The tremor, which struck on Wednesday night, was felt across Lancashire and the southern Lake District.
Network Rail said it was made aware of the image which appeared to show major damage to Carlisle Bridge in Lancaster at 00:30 GMT and stopped rail services across the bridge while safety inspections were carried out.
A BBC journalist ran the image through an AI chatbot which identified key spots that may have been manipulated.
Network Rail said the railway line was fully reopened at around 02:00 GMT and it has urged people to “think about the serious impact it could have” before creating or sharing hoax images.
“The disruption caused by the creation and sharing of hoax images and videos like this creates a completely unnecessary delay to passengers at a cost to the taxpayer,” a spokesperson said.
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Quite the problem: do you listen to random people on social media, or do you just assume they’re faking? Verification would have been harder if the location were further from habitation.
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How Google Maps quietly allocates survival across London’s restaurants – and how I built a dashboard to see through it • Lauren’s Data Substack
Lauren Leek:
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I needed a restaurant recommendation, so I did what every normal person would do: I scraped every single restaurant in Greater London and built a machine-learning model.
It started as a very reasonable problem. I was tired of doom-scrolling Google Maps, trying to disentangle genuinely good food from whatever the algorithm had decided to push at me that day. Somewhere along the way, the project stopped being about dinner and became about something slightly more unhinged: how digital platforms quietly redistribute economic survival across cities.
Because once you start looking at London’s restaurant scene through data, you stop seeing all those cute independents and hot new openings. You start seeing an algorithmic market – one where visibility compounds, demand snowballs, and who gets to survive is increasingly decided by code.
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She goes into plenty of detail of the how and why, and then has a food map that you can explore yourself if you find the explanation tl;dr.
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| • Why do social networks drive us a little mad? • Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see? • How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online? • What can we do about it? • Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016? Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more. |
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