Plus: The European Union commits to a $105 billion loan to Ukraine, that doesn’t include tapping frozen Russian assets. And, Sony continues to beef up its entertainment business by taking control of the ‘Peanuts’ franchise. Luke Vargas hosts.
The suspected gunman behind the shooting at Brown University and the killing of an MIT professor has been found dead. The Justice Department faces a deadline to release files related to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. And the board of the Kennedy Center has voted to change the name of the cultural hub to the Trump Kennedy Center. Want more analysis of the most important news of the day, plus a little fun? Subscribe to the Up First newsletter
Today’s episode of Up First was edited by Robbie Griffiths, Megan Pratz, Jay Vanasco, Lisa Thomson and Alice Woelfle.
It was produced by Ziad Buchh, Nia Dumas and Christopher Thomas.
We get engineering support from Stacey Abbott. Our technical director is Carleigh Strange.
Building artificial intelligence tools requires a lot of graphic processing units, and those GPUs need huge amounts of ultra-fast memory to feed them data. Micron Technology is one of a handful of memory chip makers that has been selling a whole lot of memory, thanks to the AI boom.
Plus, cloud company Oracle's data center debt is coming under scrutiny. And Merriam-Webster names the word of the year for 2025: slop.
Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Anita Ramaswamy, columnist at The Information, to learn more on this week’s Marketplace Tech Bytes: Week in Review.
We're back to break down a month's worth of shadow docket activity -- three recent summary reversals, plus the stay in the Texas gerrymandering case (Abbott v. LULAC). We also discuss the launch of the SCOTUSblog "interim docket blog."
A.M. Edition for Dec. 19. Europe throws Kyiv a fiscal lifeline in a move officials say could give Kyiv more leverage in negotiations over ending the war, but fail to agree on a plan to tap frozen Russian assets. Plus, OpenAI aims to raise as much as $100 billion to pay for its ambitious growth plans in a market that has started to cool on the artificial-intelligence boom. And WSJ Tokyo bureau chief Jason Douglas explains how interest-rate rises in Japan could push up borrowing costs in the U.S. Luke Vargas hosts.
With anxieties building over affordability, President Trump made a push to reassure Americans just as the government released long-awaited data that raised new questions about the economic health of the nation.
Tony Romm, who covers economic policy for The New York Times, discusses how Mr. Trump is trying to take control of the issue, and Ben Cassleman, The Times’s chief economics correspondent, explains what the latest numbers tell us about why people are still so frustrated.
Guest:
Tony Romm, a reporter in Washington covering economic policy and the Trump administration for The New York Times.
Ben Casselman, the chief economics correspondent for The New York Times.
The hunt for a mass shooting suspect ends with a self-inflicted gunshot wound, but not before police connect him to a killing at MIT. Today is the deadline for the DOJ to turn over its files on Jeffrey Epstein. And President Trump downgrades the criminal classification of marijuana.
What will America’s story be after President Trump? My colleague David Leonhardt did a great series on that question this year, talking to a number of leading politicians. I thought two of those episodes, with Senator Bernie Sanders and with Senator Ruben Gallego, would be of particular interest to you.
And they’re great to listen to as a pair. Sanders and Gallego have strong views about where the Democratic Party went wrong and how it can win back working-class voters in particular — views that have a lot of overlap but also some interesting shades of difference. So I wanted to share both conversations.
You can learn more about our sister show “The Opinions” here — and subscribe wherever you find your podcasts.