The Wall Street Journal: “T-Mobile to buy Ryan Reynolds’ Mint Mobile in $1.35 Billion Deal”

Ryan Reynolds used his celebrity and wit to build Mint Mobile into a low-cost competitor in the crowded wireless business.

Now, the Hollywood star and his backers are cashing in: selling the upstart brand to T-Mobile US Inc. in a cash and stock deal valued at up to $1.35 billion. Mr. Reynolds owns roughly 25% of Mint Mobile, according to people familiar with the matter. That means he stands to personally receive more than $300 million in cash and stock from the transaction.

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Mint Mobile resells service using T-Mobile’s network, so the deal will save costs but doesn’t bring new customers to T-Mobile. The companies didn’t disclose how many customers Mint Mobile has.

Over the long term, we’ll also benefit from applying the marketing formula Mint has become famous for across more parts of T-Mobile, T-Mobile Chief Executive Mike Sievert said.

It gives T-Mobile another prepaid brand, along with Metro by T-Mobile and Connect by T-Mobile, that caters to lower-income users. Mint charges as little as $15 a month. T-Mobile ended 2022 with about 21.4 million prepaid subscribers.

Will Feuer & Lauren Thomas

I’m not sure why this piece of news popped up recently on the Vergecast – the deal itself was struck more than two years ago, and completed last year – but I found it very indicative of the American economy. Mint Mobile has always operated as a MVNO on T-Mobile’s network, meaning that Mint did not own any wireless infrastructure, instead leasing access to T-Mobile’s towers and spectrum to provide service to its customers. So essentially Ryan Reynolds took T-Mobile’s services, put a different label on them, used his fame to attract customers, then sold this thing back to the owner for a hefty profit!

The Cut: “Why Don’t We Dream about Our Smartphones?”

I asked Alice Robb, author of the forthcoming book Why We Dream: The Transformative Power of Our Nightly Journey, to explain our phones’ relative absence from our dreams, and she introduced me to what’s called the “threat simulation hypothesis” of dreaming. [This theory] basically suggests that the reason why we dream is that dreams allow us to work through our anxieties and our fears in a more low-risk environment, so we’re able to practice for stressful events, says Robb. This hypothesis also posits that because our dreams are an evolved defense mechanism, we tend to dream more often about fears and concerns that were relevant to our ancestors — so, less about, say, hacking, and more about running from wild animals. People tend not to dream quite as much about reading and writing, which are more recent developments in human history, and more about survival related things, like fighting, even if that has nothing to do with who you are in real life, says Robb.

While the threat simulation hypothesis can be interpreted to support the tweet that started this whole thing, Robb tells me there’s also evidence to suggest it’s not totally accurate. (Shocking.) For instance, analyzing data from more than 16,000 dream reports, researchers have shown that cell phones appear in 3.55 percent of women’s dreams (and 2.69 percent of men’s) — not a huge number, but it’s higher than the frequency with which movies (3.18 percent), computers (1.2 percent), and airplanes (1.49 percent) appear in our dreams.

Katie Heaney

I’ve never really thought about this before seeing someone share a LinkedIn article on the topic, but I have also never dreamt about my smartphone! Or at least I don’t recall in case I have.

Financial Times: “OpenAI and Jony Ive accused of trying to ‘bury’ rival start-up”

The trademark dispute comes just a month after OpenAI revealed plans to acquire Ive’s hardware start-up in a bet on alternatives to the smartphone as the dominant device to access AI.

Over the weekend, OpenAI removed a blog post and short video about the deal, following a restraining order by a US federal judge on Friday. OpenAI and LoveFrom, Ive’s design firm, have denied any intentional trademark infringement or wrongdoing.

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In its lawsuit, filed this month, iyO detailed the meetings between Rugolo, OpenAI and Ive’s team leading up to May.

Tan requested that several team members try out the iyO device, according to emails disclosed in the suit. Tan, Welinder, and Evans Hankey — the former Apple design chief who joined Ive at io — met iyO again in May for a presentation of its product, according to the lawsuit.

They were talking about buying our company, said Rugolo. They got everything, right down to how the software stack works. I foolishly trusted them, because I thought we were collaborating and serious about working together.

The meetings came three years after an initial round of contacts. In April 2022, iyO said it met Ryan Cohen, an executive at Altman’s personal investment fund Apollo Projects, and LoveFrom team member and former Pinterest co-founder Evan Sharp. Both passed on investing at the time.

Michael Acton & Cristina Criddle

What a perfect analogy for LLMs, copying original work from others and claiming it as their own! Although in business these kind of maneuvers are well-known: walk up to a smaller company with promises of investments or even an acquisition, get them to show you their most-prized ideas to prove their worth, then walk away and launch something similar to bury them essentially for free.

The Wall Street Journal: “Pope Leo takes on AI as a Potential Threat to Humanity”

The princes of the Catholic Church listened intently as Pope Leo XIV laid out his priorities for the first time, revealing that he had chosen his papal name because of the tech revolution. As he explained, his namesake Leo XIII stood up for the rights of factory workers during the Gilded Age, when industrial robber barons presided over rapid change and extreme inequality.

Today, the church offers its trove of social teaching to respond to another industrial revolution and to innovations in the field of artificial intelligence that pose challenges to human dignity, justice and labor, Leo XIV told the College of Cardinals, who stood and cheered for their new pontiff and his unlikely cause.

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Addressing the 2024 summit of G-7 leaders, he called AI “fascinating and terrifying”. He said humanity faced a future without hope if “choices by machines” replaced people’s decisions about their lives.

In January this year, the Vatican warned in a document on AI that even if the technology had constructive uses, a handful of tech companies could gain wealth and power at the expense of the many. Militaries might race to develop autonomous weapons, lacking in human judgment or morality. Children risked growing up in a dehumanized world, with chatbots as their guides.

Margherita Stancati, Drew Hinshaw, Keach Hagey & Emily Glazer

Is this how the Butlerian Jihad begins in our timeline?

The Lightroom Queen: “What’s New in Lightroom Classic 14.4, Mobile & Desktop (June 2025)?”

Enhance without creating a DNG (Classic & Desktop)

If you’ve enjoyed using the Enhance tool to increase the size of your best photos using Super Resolution or to benefit from the AI-generated noise reduction (Denoise), you’ll be excited to find that these tools are now available directly in the Detail panel, without needing to generate a separate DNG file. This also means you can go back and change the amount of Denoise applied without having to generate another DNG file. Great news!!

Victoria Bampton

While this update introduces other tools for distraction removal, one of which being the Reflection Removal demoed late last year, the highlight is certainly the non-destructive Enhance, consisting of Denoise, Raw Details, and Super Resolution. Up until now, these features would create a new DNG file from the original RAW image, which also meant you could not adjust the amount of denoise later, so you had to start the editing process from scratch.

Deadline: “Nakoa-Wolf Momoa & Ida Brooke join ‘Dune 3’ as Twin Children of Paul Atreides”

In the new film from Warner Bros. and Legendary, the pair are set to play Leto II and Ghanima, the twin offspring of Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) and Chani (Zendaya), born after the events of the original Frank Herbert novel. The project will mark the big-screen debut of Momoa, who is expected to be joined in the cast by his father, Jason Momoa, with the latter playing a resurrected ghola of Duncan Idaho. Like Nakoa-Wolf, Brooke is a relative newcomer, who has heretofore been seen only in Apple’s sci-fi drama Silo and the film The Primrose Railway Children.

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It’s expected that Villeneuve’s third and final Dune film will adapt Herbert’s novel Dune Messiah, set 12 years after the events of Dune, which follows Atreides’ struggles with the consequences of his Fremen-led jihad upon his ascension to Emperor Muad’Dib. A release date and official title for the new film haven’t yet been disclosed.

Matt Grobar

Maybe I’m imagining things, but the tone of the second paragraph sounds steeped in sarcasm and incredulousness. Spoiler for anyone who hasn’t read Dune: Messiah and the third book in the series, Children of Dune: the twins of Paul and Chani are born at the end of the second book and are about 9 years old by the time Children of Dune starts. Casting young adults to play them implies more changes to the timeline and to characters – and I for one could very much do without Villeneuve’s paltry rewriting of the novels.

The Verge: “Apple’s new design language is Liquid Glass”

Liquid Glass is inspired by Apple’s visionOS software and can adapt to light and dark environments. When you swipe up on the iOS 26 lockscreen there’s a glass edge, and elements throughout the OS have glass edges to them. Even the camera app has the glass feel, with menus that are transparent and features that are overlaid on top of the camera feed.

Liquid Glass uses real-time rendering and will dynamically react to movement. Apple is using it on buttons, switches, sliders, text, media controls, and even larger surfaces like tab bars and sidebars. Apple has redesigned its controls, toolbars, and navigation within apps to fit this new Liquid Glass design.

Tom Warren

Speaking of Apple, the big announcement of the 2025 WWDC was… a new design language. The reactions have not been particularly favorable, since the heavy doses of transparency in every corner of the user interface can lead to low contrast and poor readability, even for people with normal vision. I have no access to a live example, but some of the screenshots I’ve seen online are borderline impossible to read. This is a long-standing argument dating back to the slick holo-screens from the movie Minority Report; while everyone loves the novelty and the cool factor on screen, the lack of anything similar in real life might serve as a clue that these effects are impractical for regular use.