The 39.4 million people who live in California now have a new tool where they can request that data brokers delete their personal information. That may include their online search histories, social security numbers and where they work, among other identifying data.
The tool is called the Delete Request and Opt-Out Platform (DROP). It was mandated by a 2023 state law called the “Delete Act.” Data brokers have until August to start processing these requests. Nicol Turner Lee, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, says it could limit the sale of our information.
In recent weeks, the Defense Department has tussled with Anthropic over how its artificial intelligence could be used on classified systems. That fight became bitter and negotiations fell apart. And war in the Middle East has made it increasingly clear how much the U.S. military has been relying on A.I.
Sheera Frenkel, who covers technology for The New York Times, explains the standoff and what it reveals about the future of warfare.
Guest: Sheera Frenkel, a New York Times reporter who covers how technology affects our lives.
Iran’s clerics choose a new ayatollah. American officials face questions over a strike at a girls’ school. And New York police say a pair of men threw improvised explosive devices during a clash with anti-Islam protesters.
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cattrs also focuses on functional composition and not coupling your data model to its serialization and validation rules.
When you’re handed unstructured data (by your network, file system, database, …), cattrs helps to convert this data into trustworthy structured data.
Batteries Included: cattrs comes with pre-configured converters for a number of serialization libraries, including JSON (standard library, orjson, UltraJSON), msgpack, cbor2, bson, PyYAML, tomlkit and msgspec (supports only JSON at this time).
“I teach a couple of introductory Python courses and I've been thinking about which advice to give to my students, that are studying how to program for the first time. I have collected my ideas in these blog posts”
Why learning to program is as useful as ever, even with powerful AI tools available.
How to use AI as a tutor rather than a shortcut, and why practice remains the key to real understanding.
What the real learning objectives are: mental models, managing complexity, and thinking like a software developer.
President Donald Trump wants to dramatically change how Americans vote, and to make that happen he’s holding all other legislation hostage until Congress passes the SAVE America Act. The bill would require that Americans prove citizenship via a passport or a birth certificate to register to vote. Make no mistake: Trump wants America to pay the price for the election he lost to Joe Biden in 2020. Nevada Attorney General Aaron Ford joins us to explain how states are ready to fight Trump’s next moves to restrict voting.
And in headlines, Iran finds a new supreme leader in the son of the former one, a federal judge wants to reverse layoffs at the Voice of America, and the Trump administration threatens intervention in Cuba.
Kate, Leah, and Melissa break down the oral arguments in United States v. Hemani, a Second Amendment case which challenges a law prohibiting “unlawful users” of controlled substances from possessing a firearm. Then, they cover two truly heinous shadow docket rulings–a case out of New York where SCOTUS’s conservatives seem to have found an impermissible racial gerrymander they believe in, and another on the outing of transgender children–before speaking with California Attorney General Rob Bonta about standing up to the Trump administration on issues like tariffs, federal law enforcement overreach, and antitrust. They also pour one out for Krispy Gnome’s (née Kristi Noem) generationally awful tenure at the Department of Homeland Security. This episode was recorded live at the Herbst Theatre in San Francisco.
Paleontologists have often determined how old a dinosaur was by counting the growth rings in its bones. Just like with trees, it was thought that each ring corresponded to a single year of age. But researchers who studied crocodiles at an outdoor recreation center near Cape Town appear to have poked a hole in that approach. In the crocodiles, which are some of the closest living relatives of dinosaurs, there was more than one growth ring laid down per year. The results contribute to a growing debate over the best way to age animals.
Read more of freelance science reporter Ari Daniel’s story here.
Interested in more on the future of science? Email us your question at shortwave@npr.org.
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As California’s governor – and a topic of discussion among some as a possible 2028 presidential candidate – Gavin Newsom is an exceedingly public figure with a busy schedule to match. His new memoir, Young Man in a Hurry, provides a glimpse into Newsom’s rise to political prominence and his ongoing goal of self-discovery. In today’s episode, Newsom sits down with NPR’s Ailsa Chang to discuss his book, the question of his own relatability, and why he uses “playground insults”’ on social media to push back against the Trump administration.
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A July ICE protest ended with a police lieutenant shot, 19 people arrested and nine people now on trial. For Trump’s Department of Justice, it’s a chance to see how calling groups “domestic terrorist organizations” performs in a courtroom.
Guest: Leeja Miller, lawyer and YouTuber based in Minneapolis.
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Podcast production by Elena Schwartz, Paige Osburn, Anna Phillips, Madeline Ducharme, and Rob Gunther.
