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Learn more about The Direct Message

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The DMNews Newsletter

Explore our content

Discover our articles through six categories, each offering a different lens on human behavior, power, culture, and technology.

  • News

Iowa’s proposed child social media ban would, by the mechanics of enforcement, require every adult in the state to verify their identity at the app store before downloading TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, or X

  • News

Baltimore Gas and Electric is asking Maryland regulators for a $156 million rate hike and a guaranteed 10.4 percent profit margin, while 290,000 of its customers were already behind on their bills as of March

  • News

East Lansing, Michigan just extended its data center moratorium with no project on the table, becoming one of the first US cities to pause hyperscale development preemptively rather than waiting for a developer to file

  • News

Memphis will vote August 18 on a temporary freeze of all new data center permits, a pause aimed at xAI’s Colossus expansion that already runs 500 megawatts on gas turbines and pays the county $25 million a year

  • News

New York just became the first state in the country to freeze large AI data center construction, pausing every project of 50 megawatts or more for a year while Governor Hochul moves to repeal the sales tax breaks operators were counting on

  • News

Marietta, Georgia just approved a second data center in a 5-2 vote despite a six-month moratorium the council passed last month, because the 18-megawatt application was filed before the freeze took effect

  • Analysis

Researchers who tracked 23 million tweets about 2.8 million research papers found women were 28 percent less likely than men to promote their own work on Twitter, and the gap grew widest among the most accomplished women at the most prestigious institutions

data center cooling towers
  • News

Volusia County, Florida just directed staff to draft a six-month moratorium on AI data centers while Edgewater inside the same county moved a permanent voter ban to the November ballot, splitting one county between a proposed study pause and a possible citizen shutdown

  • News

Ohio’s data center sales tax exemption cost the state nearly $1.6 billion last year, and Governor DeWine has now frozen it through the end of his term, leaving the next governor to decide whether taxpayers ever see a return

  • News

Fort Worth now requires proof of state grid approval before data centers can file

  • News

Douglas County, Colorado just approved a $19 million tax rebate for a Parker data center that will create 16 jobs, meaning county taxpayers are subsidizing each position at more than $1.1 million over the 35-year deal

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Psychology

One day my children will describe me to their own kids in three sentences, and I have started wondering, a little anxiously, which three they’ll choose

At twenty I thought independence meant needing no one, at thirty it means choosing carefully who I let need me, and I suspect at sixty it changes again

Thought by Carl Jung: “The persona is a complicated system of relations between individual consciousness and society, fittingly enough a kind of mask, designed on the one hand to make a definite impression upon others, and, on the other, to conceal the true nature of the individual.”

Thought of the day from Carl Jung: the things that irritate us about other people can lead us to a better understanding of ourselves

The reason some people apologize before they even speak isn’t low confidence — it’s that they were raised to make themselves small so the room would stay calm

couple dinner table

The reason long marriages go quiet isn’t that love faded — it’s that two people have finally said enough to each other that silence became a place they both live comfortably

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Politics

Congress passed its biggest housing affordability bill in decades this summer by an overwhelming bipartisan vote. It became law without Trump’s signature after he refused to sign it in protest over an unrelated bill

Texas’s app-store age-verification law remains in effect after the Supreme Court declined to block it, making it the first of four state app-store age-verification laws to actually take effect while the other three remain stalled into 2027

Texas passed a law banning targeted ads to minors, and a federal judge has now struck it down in a second ruling that went further than his first, ruling it violated advertisers’ free speech rights

Why “we’re too small for GDPR” is the most expensive assumption in marketing

White House banned Anthropic in February. Now its own agencies are negotiating classified access to Mythos.

White House banned Anthropic in February. Now its own agencies are negotiating classified access to Mythos.

Why doctors are prescribing gardening clubs instead of pills — and why some patients hate it

Why doctors are prescribing gardening clubs instead of pills — and why some patients hate it

How Trump turned provocation into a workshopped engagement strategy — and why outrage only helps

How Trump turned provocation into a workshopped engagement strategy — and why outrage only helps

With Democratic favorable views of Israel at 19%, the Iran war has accelerated a party-wide fracture

With Democratic favorable views of Israel at 19%, the Iran war has accelerated a party-wide fracture

The firehose strategy: AI-era propaganda doesn't aim to persuade — it aims to make citizens stop caring

The firehose strategy: AI-era propaganda doesn’t aim to persuade — it aims to make citizens stop caring

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Culture

10 songs from the 70s and 80s I wish I could hear again with completely new ears

I’ve interviewed 50 people who grew up without much money and many of them said they still sometimes feel surprised — genuinely surprised — when things go well

10 must-watch movie classics that may hold up better now than almost anything made in the last decade

Brands that run from public anger may not always be protecting themselves — sometimes they’re just admitting they have something to hide

A generation that grew up without seatbelts, helmets, or scheduled playdates may have learned resilience the hard way — and finds it genuinely difficult to understand why so much now requires a plan

The customer belongs to whoever earns the next conversation

anxious worker laptop

Healthcare organizations say they put patients first — their websites tell a completely different story

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Digital

California’s single deletion request now reaches more than 600 registered data brokers at once, and the best-known independent test of removal methods found that even manual opt-out, the top performer in that study, cleared only about 70 percent of the profiles researchers had found

Google’s AI Overviews now answer forty eight percent of all search queries, and more than half of all searches end without a single click, yet marketing teams are still building quarterly reports around a number that stopped meaning what it used to

Brands have spent two years handing vendors more customer data to power AI personalization, and only now is anyone asking who actually keeps the value once that data leaves the building

Meta is replacing up to ninety percent of its content review staff with AI, and the marketers most exposed are the ones who have never had to argue with a machine about why their account got flagged

Marketing automation platforms spent the first half of 2026 compressing the time from insight to campaign launch from days to minutes, and the fight nobody is naming yet is over who owns that layer of intelligence, not who owns the software

Zeta Global tracked what AI shoppers do before they buy — seven in ten still complete the purchase on the brand’s own site, but the data suggests AI has already shaped which brand that would be

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Analysis

Researchers who tracked 23 million tweets about 2.8 million research papers found women were 28 percent less likely than men to promote their own work on Twitter, and the gap grew widest among the most accomplished women at the most prestigious institutions

Indiana disclosed this year that more than 93 percent of its data center tax exemption went to a single company, with that one recipient’s share increasing by 1,011 percent in a single year

WPP left its beach at Cannes Lions this year after holding it for years and an independent AI agency took the space, which is a minor real estate story that happens to describe the entire holding company model in a single transaction

The brands earning durable loyalty stopped competing at the moment of purchase and started competing in everything the customer does with it afterward

Most Tesla owners probably aren’t flooring it at every light — and the car may be built for exactly the driving they actually do

Companies using Claude Fable 5 should know their data is being retained for 30 days with no opt-out, including enterprise plans — Anthropic says it is a condition of using the model

View all

News

Iowa’s proposed child social media ban would, by the mechanics of enforcement, require every adult in the state to verify their identity at the app store before downloading TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, or X

Baltimore Gas and Electric is asking Maryland regulators for a $156 million rate hike and a guaranteed 10.4 percent profit margin, while 290,000 of its customers were already behind on their bills as of March

East Lansing, Michigan just extended its data center moratorium with no project on the table, becoming one of the first US cities to pause hyperscale development preemptively rather than waiting for a developer to file

Memphis will vote August 18 on a temporary freeze of all new data center permits, a pause aimed at xAI’s Colossus expansion that already runs 500 megawatts on gas turbines and pays the county $25 million a year

View all

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