Good morning. In this edition:

• 📝 The tariff response
• 📱 TikTok ban delayed
• 🌹 YouTube—originally a dating site

Ready, Set, Go: Today’s news should be a ~4.95-minute read (1,317 words).

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“Well done is better than well said.”

–Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)

President Trump’s recent decision to enact across-the-board 10% tariffs—which took effect on Saturday—plus higher rates for other trade partners has elicited a series of reactions with major implications for the US economy.

Catch up quick

China responds in kind. On Friday, Beijing enacted a 34% reciprocal tariff on all US imports starting April 10, matching the Trump admin’s new duty imposed last week. China also effectively restricted US access to several key imports, including rare earth minerals critical for technologies like nuclear reactors, EVs, MRI scans, and more.

Many countries are open to a deal. 50+ nations have reached out to the Trump admin to start negotiations on tariffs, administration officials said on Sunday. Vietnam’s top leader, To Lam, reportedly sent a letter to Trump this weekend asking for a 45-day tariff delay to provide time for dealmaking.

Fed projections have soured, but the bank isn’t rushing to move. Fed Chair Jerome Powell on Friday predicted the US economy will face higher inflation and weaker growth in the near future compared to expectations a few weeks ago, citing Trump’s larger-than-anticipated tariff hikes. Powell also said the Fed doesn’t “need to be in a hurry” to cut interest rates over the coming months.

The stock market continued to tank. Following a steep decline on Thursday, US stocks had a near-repeat performance on Friday. All three major indexes fell at least 5.5% and the Nasdaq officially entered a bear market, down 22+% from its December high. The combined ~$6.6 trillion in lost US market value on Thursday and Friday represents the biggest two-day pullback on record.

A legal challenge to tariffs has arisen. On Thursday, a nonprofit legal group filed a federal lawsuit claiming Trump illegally used a national emergency law to justify 20% tariffs on China earlier this year. Analysts say the case could also set a precedent regarding the legality of Trump’s major tariff moves last week.

Looking ahead…The Trump admin’s elevated reciprocal tariffs on ~90 nations it considers “bad actors” on trade will take effect on Wednesday (here’s how those rates were calculated).

📊 Flash poll (long-form): In general, what are your thoughts on the current Trump administration tariff approach? The most thoughtful answers will be featured in tomorrow’s newsletter.

• Click here to leave a response.

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If life is a sandbox, A Minecraft Movie is king of its cube-shaped castle. The video game adaptation earned $157 million at the domestic box office in its opening weekend, making it not only the biggest domestic debut of the year but also the best in history for a video game adaptation.

Secrets of the ‘craft

The formula for outselling the most bullish of analysts' projections by ~75%:

• Youth appeal: ~43% of Minecraft ticket buyers were ages 18 to 24, while children ages 13 to 17 came in at ~35%, according to PostTrak.
• Lots of marketing: The promotional campaign was the largest third-party campaign in Warner Bros. history (even bigger than Barbie). The film’s team worked with 45 brands, including McDonald’s, Doritos, Oreo, and Poppi Soda.
• Popular nostalgia: Minecraft is the best-selling video game of all time, with 300+ million copies sold worldwide since its 2011 release.

Big picture: Video game-based films have proven popular in recent years, with The Super Mario Bros. Movie, Five Nights at Freddy’s, Uncharted, and the Sonic the Hedgehog movies all scoring big at the box office. In 2023, video game adaptations even gave superhero adaptations a run for their money, earning $712 million domestically vs. $1 billion for comic book movies.

Artificial intelligence doesn’t always say what it actually thinks, according to new research from AI startup Anthropic, which popped the hood on two new models and found potentially major safety and security issues.

Background: AI reasoning models, such as Anthropic’s Claude 3.7 Sonnet, obviously show their answers when prompted by a user. But the models also show how they got to that answer—this is called “Chain-of-Thought” (CoT).

Chain-of-Thought is helpful for safety researchers, since it allows them to check for things that go unsaid in a model’s answers to spot undesirable behaviours like deception.

But…can what these models say in their Chain-of-Thought be trusted? The answer appears to be no.

Fishy omissions

To test the faithfulness of AI reasoning models—aka whether they were truthful in their CoT—Anthropic researchers fed both Claude 3.7 Sonnet and DeepSeek’s R1 various types of hints about the answers to evaluation questions, then checked to see if the models “admitted” to using these hints to reach their answers.

• On average, Claude mentioned the hint in its CoT 25% of the time. R1 mentioned it 39% of the time.
• Researchers also experimented with ways to boost faithfulness, including reward hacking, but struck out more than Rafael Devers.

No omissions here: A paper published last year documented an AI model created by Meta telling premeditated lies—including “I am on the phone with my girlfriend”—to beat human players in a world conquest strategy game.

+Dive deeper: Into AI’s “black box” problem

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The White Lotus meme will be getting some use this year after all. #1-seed Duke, the betting favorite to win men’s March Madness, lost on Saturday to fellow #1-seed Houston 70-67—after being up by 14 points with eight minutes left, and six points with 35 seconds left.

Off the court: This nine-point swing in the closing seconds netted a $1 million win for artificial intelligence. AI site 4C Predictions bet a professional gambler that its program could do a better March Madness bracket, and it all came down to the Duke-Houston game.

On the court: Houston—which has never won an NCAA basketball championship and also hasn’t been to a final since 1984 (a team featuring NBA Hall of Famers Clyde Drexler and Hakeem Olajuwon)—will now face #1-seed Florida tonight with a title on the line.

On the women’s side…UConn rolled past South Carolina on Sunday to win its record 12th women's basketball national title.

BUSINESS & MARKETS

• 💼 The US economy added 228,000 jobs in March, above analysts' projections of ~140,000; the unemployment rate ticked up to 4.2%.
• 🛢️ US crude oil dropped below $60/barrel on Sunday; it marks its lowest price since April 2021.
• 📱The TikTok ban, set to take effect this past Saturday, was delayed for another 75 days by President Trump.

SPORTS, MEDIA & ENTERTAINMENT

in partnership with Surfshark VPN

• 🚔 UK actor Russell Brand was charged with multiple counts of rape, indecent assault, and sexual assault by London’s Metropolitan Police.
• 🏒 Washington Capitals forward Alex Ovechkin passed Wayne Gretzky to become the NHL’s all-time leading goals scorer.
• 📚 Amazon announced Kindle Recap; the feature uses AI to recall plot points and character arcs in popular series for readers. | 🎮 30 new games are coming to Xbox next week. See them all here.

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SCIENCE, SPACE & EMERGING TECH

• 🤖 Meta released the first Llama 4 AI models; they’re now integrated across apps including Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp. | 🎮 Microsoft unveiled a fully AI-generated demo of the classic ’90s video game Quake II.
• 🙏 A second child died from measles-related complications in Texas as part of an ongoing outbreak that features 500+ cases and has spread to other states; both children who died weren’t vaccinated.
• 🛰️ Miso, a popular Japanese dish featuring fermented soybean paste, has a different taste when prepared in space, according to a new study involving ISS astronauts.

US, WORLD & POLITICS

in partnership with Dyce Games

• 🌧️ An ongoing storm system that’s brought heavy rain and flooding across the South and Midwest US has killed at least 18 people, per official tallies yesterday evening.
• 🇸🇻 A Maryland resident who was deported to El Salvador due to an "administrative error" must be returned to the US by the Trump admin by midnight tonight, a federal judge ordered. | 🧑‍⚖️ Four Texas gov’t whistleblowers who were fired after reporting Texas AG Ken Paxton to the FBI were awarded ~$6.6 million by a federal judge.
• 🎖️ President Trump fired Gen. Timothy Haugh as NSA director and head of US Cyber Command; it’s part of a wider purge of top security officials that started after far-right activist Laura Loomer visited Trump and reportedly pressed him to fire specific security staffers. | 🎓 The Trump admin is reportedly planning to freeze $510 million in grants to Brown University over antisemitism concerns; Trump officials also ordered Harvard to make several changes to maintain $9 billion in federal funding, including eliminating its DEI program.

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👆 Millions of Americans, by organizers' count, reportedly attended a combined 1,200+ "Hands Off!" demonstrations across all 50 states on Saturday to protest the Trump admin.

🤔 Did You Know? YouTube was originally created as a dating site. The initial idea for the website, launched on Valentine's Day 2005, was that users would upload videos talking about themselves and what they were looking for in a relationship. There was even a dating tagline: "Tune in, hook up.”

📰 Worth a Read: Being alone has its benefits

🖱️ Clickbait: Sicily farmer seeks to revive a biblical superfood

Monday: Chili’s opens first restaurant in Scranton, PA

Tuesday: The 6th and final season of The Handmaid’s Tale arrives on Hulu

Wednesday: US to impose higher reciprocal tariffs on 90+ countries

Thursday: The 2025 Masters Tournament tees off in Augusta, GA; Consumer Price Index for March; 100th anniversary of The Great Gatsby

Friday: The Amateur hits theaters

🐢 A 97-year-old Galápagos tortoise named Mommy just became her namesake for the very first time. The nearly-centenarian hatched four baby tortoises at the Philadelphia Zoo, providing future hope for the endangered species.

🔋 15-year-old Nihal Tammana has recycled 625,000+ batteries through his nonprofit, Recycle My Battery. Since founding the organization at 10, Nihal has placed 1,000+ battery-recycling bins in schools, libraries, and businesses.

🐈‍⬛ Mr. Pugsley Addams, a spoiled Maine Coon from Mound, Minnesota, is the proud owner of the world's longest tail on a domestic cat.

Guess the definitions of the following Greek/Latin root words:

1. Foss
2. Mol
3. Nihil
4. Omni
5. Serp

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1. Foss = Dig (e.g., fossil)
2. Mol = Grind (molar)
3. Nihil = Nothing (annihilate, nihilist)
4. Omni = All (omnivore, omnipotent)
5. Serp = Creep (serpent)

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