In a first for presidential history, Donald Trump will be criminally charged today. The former president flew into his hometown, New York City, yesterday and is set to appear at a courthouse in lower Manhattan to plead “not guilty” this afternoon.

What will go down today?

Today’s courthouse visit is expected to be a short one: Trump will likely be released without bail soon after he’s arraigned.

The charges against him, which are currently in a sealed indictment, will be read at the arraignment—but we already know the prosecutor was investigating hush money paid to adult film actress Stormy Daniels in the final days of Trump’s 2016 presidential run. Then he’ll enter his plea.

Before the arraignment, the former president will be fingerprinted and possibly photographed for a mug shot, per the usual protocol. Mug shots aren’t released publicly in New York, and it’s unlikely that Trump will be handcuffed and perp-walked in front of the media.

• But he's certainly not camera shy: Trump plans to hold a press conference in the evening after he returns to his Florida estate, Mar-a-Lago.

One place Trump doesn't want cameras is the courtroom. Media outlets asked the judge to make an exception and let them broadcast the proceedings, but Judge Juan Merchan said no, only allowing still photographs inside the courtroom before the arraignment begins. Trump’s lawyers had opposed letting cameras in, saying it would create a “circus-like atmosphere.”

Exactly the atmosphere the Big Apple is gearing up for

Authorities barricaded the courthouse and Trump Tower (where the ex-POTUS crashed for the night) in anticipation of Trump supporter protests and his critics’ counterprotests.

“Be on your best behavior,” Mayor Eric Adams told one high-profile protester in town for the arraignment: Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA).

Looking ahead…Trump has lawyered up with some of the best names in the white-collar defense business, digging in for a long fight that will likely begin with a motion to dismiss the charges, which he claims are politically motivated.—SK

Tesla ordered to pay almost $3.2 million to a worker in a racial harassment suit. The amount a California jury decided yesterday that former employee Owen Diaz should get sounds like a lot—until you hear that a different jury two years ago said he should be awarded $137 million. Diaz, a Black man who had worked as an elevator operator at a Tesla plant and claimed he was subject to racial abuse, opted for a new trial on damages after a judge said the law required the amount be cut to $15 million despite “disturbing” evidence in the case.

Musk let the doge out on Twitter. For some users yesterday, Twitter’s bird logo was swapped out for a Shiba Inu—specifically, the Shiba Inu image best known from the “doge” meme and the volatile cryptocurrency it later inspired. Dogecoin surged 30% following the switcheroo. Notably, Musk owns a Shiba Inu named Floki and on Friday, lawyers for Musk and Tesla asked a federal court to throw out its $258 billion lawsuit about…Musk allegedly manipulating the price of dogecoin with his internet antics.

Paris to say au revoir to e-scooters. Paris is set to ban rental electric scooters as of Sept. 1, following a referendum where a whopping 89% of voters cast their ballots in favor of taking them off the streets. But the vote had a very low turnout, with just over 100,000 people participating out of Paris’s ~1.38 million registered voters—even though scooter companies offered registered voters free rides. Online voting, popular with younger voters, was not permitted. The vote was closely watched by other European cities mulling similar scooter prohibitions.

NASA revealed its team yesterday for its upcoming mission around the moon—one small step toward humankind making its first lunar footprints since 1972.

The Artemis II flight test, scheduled for 2024, will ferry its four-person crew to the moon, make a pass close to its surface, and bring them back to Earth over the span of about ten days. It’s part two of a three-part mission to land astronauts on the moon’s surface in 2025. Part one was a success last year, when an unmanned spacecraft orbited the moon.

So, who’s going to space?

The four lucky Sailor Moons are: Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Hammock Koch, and Jeremy Hansen. The crew includes the first woman, the first person of color, and the first Canadian to ever go on a lunar mission.

Why one Canadian? Hansen’s spot on the Artemis II mission cost the Canadian Space Agency an arm and a—well, actually just an arm. In 2020, the CSA sealed the deal by agreeing to give NASA a robotic arm the agency needed for its small, moon-orbiting space station.—JW

P.S. “Astronaut” was US kids’ fifth top answer to “What do you want to be when you grow up?” when Lego asked in 2019. No. 1 was “YouTuber/vlogger.”

In its latest push into audio, Apple launched a dedicated app for classical music last week. And classical music snobs…actually like it.

Here’s why: The Apple Music Classical app lets you find the classical music you want to listen to. While that doesn’t sound earth-shattering, it's a huge deal, because searching for classical music on services like Spotify was worse than using Bing pre-ChatGPT.

The issue is classical music’s metadata—how it’s labeled and categorized.

• Streaming apps are optimized for pop songs that have limited metadata (typically just song/artist/album).
• But a piece of classical music has a lot more metadata, including the composer, the orchestra, the conductor, the movement, the nickname, and the key.

So, it gets messy. Imagine sifting through more than 490 covers of a Dua Lipa track for your favorite rendition. That’s how many recordings of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 5 are on Apple, CNET notes.

To help it fix the metadata problem, Apple bought Primephonic, a Dutch startup that had built the back-end data infrastructure needed to surface the most relevant search results.

Tack on human editors curating their favorite recordings, and Apple’s hoping its new app will attract both the Lydia Tár types and newbies looking to see what all the Mozart fuss is about.—NF

Stat: Despite what the wing slingers at Hooters would have you believe, bigger isn’t always better when it comes to chicken breasts. Fast-food joints like KFC and Chick-fil-A prefer four-pound chickens to make their chicken sandwiches, but they’re in short supply as producers have shifted their focus to larger birds (they cost about the same amount to raise, but the bigger birds sell for more). Data from the Dept. of Agriculture shows that small chickens accounted for almost 30% of chickens slaughtered weekly in 2005 but only ~15% in 2023, per the WSJ.

Quote: “Any action that supports those efforts simply to retaliate for a position the company took sounds not just anti-business, but it sounds anti-Florida.”

Disney’s returned CEO Bob Iger made it clear he is back at the company’s shareholder meeting yesterday and that Mickey plans to take no prisoners in the ongoing battle with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. To recap: Disney spoke out against the so-called “Don’t Say Gay” bill, prompting the governor to install a new board to govern the special tax district that includes Disney World (the board was picked by Disney, not the state, for the previous 55 years)—but Disney outfoxed DeSantis with a legal maneuver that stripped the new board of power. DeSantis has asked the state’s inspector general to determine whether that legal move was…legal.

Listen: The cellphone is 50 years old. Here’s what its creator has to say. (NPR)

Want to use AI to do practical stuff? Here’s a helpful how-to guide.

Plumb the depths: How a team of scientists captured a video of the deepest swimming fish.

It’s a-me, Mario: An oral history of the (dreadful) 1993 Super Mario Bros. movie.

Learn where your peanut butter belongs: A food safety professor explains what should go in the fridge vs. the cabinet.

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Brew Mini: Mary is back from attending a crossword conference this weekend, and it shows in this super fun Mini. Play it here.

Origin story trivia

On this day in 1975, Bill Gates and Paul Allen founded Microsoft (microcomputer + software). Which US city were they in at the time?

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