Duolingo has seen a ~216% YoY increase in US users learning Mandarin, with the sharpest uptick in mid-January, coinciding with Chinese social media app RedNote's sudden popularity.
Will Bezos return to the office? In a leaked letter, 400+ Washington Post staffers asked the paper's owner, Jeff Bezos, to visit Washington, DC, to discuss the newspaper's leadership issues. The staffers wrote they're "deeply alarmed by recent leadership decisions" and the loss of some of the paper's top staffers. Since William Lewis' appointment as publisher and CEO in November 2023, the paper has broken a decades-long tradition by refusing to endorse a presidential candidate and laid off ~100 employees.
Other quick news:
- Nintendo announced the Switch 2 with a larger screen and new controllers
- Blue Origin successfully launched its New Glenn rocket
- The Department of Transportation is suing Southwest Airlines
- AT&T dropped its 5G home internet service in New York
It looks increasingly likely the US government's long-looming TikTok ban will take effect this weekend. But don't worry! If you're one of America's 170m TikTok users, the internet still has plenty of ways to completely destroy your brain.
Alternatives include:
- AI services that read PDFs over Minecraft footage
- Magibook, which simplifies classic literature
- Chirper, a social network completely populated by AI
$855k: How much scammers bilked out of a 53-year-old French interior designer who thought she was dating Brad Pitt through an elaborate AI-assisted romance scam.