Google searches for “VPN” have skyrocketed in Utah this week for one reason: You can no longer visit Pornhub from a Utah IP address.

To protest a new age restriction law that goes into effect today, MindGeek’s adult sites, including Pornhub, blocked access to its content in Utah. The state’s legislation requires porn sites to verify users are over 18.

If you fire up Incognito Mode and head to Pornhub with an IP address in the state of Utah, you’ll be diverted to a page that has an adult performer (SFW) reading a statement from the site that claims “giving your ID card every time you want to visit an adult platform is not the most effective solution for protecting our users.”

Louisiana implemented a similar law in January, but unlike Utah, it has a digital ID program that residents can use to verify their age and access adult sites.

Pornhub puts up numbers: Despite how many people insist they aren’t regulars, Pornhub had more than 76 million US visitors a day in February, making it the fourth most popular website in the country, according to Semrush.

States are cracking down on kids’ internet use

Lawmakers nationwide are pushing forward legislation that aims to protect the youths from the alleged harmful effects of social media on mental health.

• Two other laws in Utah setting limits on kids’ screen time will go into effect in 2024 (one blocks kids under 18 from logging on to social media between 10:30pm and 6:30am).
• Arkansas, Texas, Ohio, and New Jersey are discussing similar bills.

Counterpoint: Social media companies warn that restricting access to their sites would limit free speech and push younger users to less safe, more-fringe corners of the internet—an argument echoed by Pornhub in its opposition to the Utah bill. Some policy experts also caution that adding age and identity verification would only hand Big Tech companies even more user data.—MM

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Biden is sending active-duty military to the border. The Department of Defense is deploying 1,500 troops to the US–Mexico border to assist with non-law enforcement responsibilities such as providing support for the detention and processing of migrants. The timing is not a coincidence: Title 42, the Covid-era policy that allowed authorities to swiftly expel migrants from the US, expires next week, and the Biden administration is expecting a spike in border crossings.

Layoffs jump to the highest level since late 2020. The number of job openings in the US dropped to a nearly two-year low in March, and layoffs increased to their highest point since December 2020, the Labor Department revealed yesterday. In this “bad news is good news” economic environment, the Fed will be pleased that the boiling-hot labor market is cooling off. It means less pressure on inflation and more justification to pause hiking rates.

Hindenburg gives Icahn a taste of his own medicine. Short-seller Hindenburg continued its scorched-earth attacks on billionaires by accusing Carl Icahn of operating a “Ponzi-like” structure at his investment firm and inflating the value of some assets. It was a bold move for Hindenburg to go after Icahn, a famous “corporate raider” who made his fortune going after other companies. But much of that fortune evaporated yesterday: Shares in Icahn Enterprises tumbled a record 20%, lopping off 41% of Icahn’s net worth, according to Bloomberg.

Chegg, the popular one-stop shop site for all things schoolwork, is worried students increasingly view ChatGPT as their go-to study buddy, and that warning brutalized its stock price yesterday.

After CEO Dan Rosensweig mentioned on an earnings call Monday that the chatbot is making it harder to recruit new subscribers, Chegg’s stock plunged nearly 50%. It’s the first instance of a company warning that ChatGPT was eating into its business that we know of.

The AI anxiety spread to other education companies: Shares in publisher Pearson and language-learning app Duolingo dropped about 15% and 10%, respectively.

So, how to combat ChatGPT disrupting your business? By using ChatGPT, of course.

• Chegg has partnered with ChatGPT-creator OpenAI to develop its own conversational AI tool Cheggmate, which it’ll start testing this month.
• Meanwhile, Duolingo released a subscription tier that lets users practice their language skills with an AI bot and has an AI-powered tool to explain mistakes.

Zoom out: Chegg’s warning about ChatGPT stands in stark contrast to the companies mentioning AI to excite investors: On their earnings calls last week, Meta, Alphabet, Microsoft, and Amazon collectively dropped “AI” 168 times, according to Insider.—SK

Late-night jokes are going to be even staler than usual. Yesterday, the shows hosted by Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Fallon, Jimmy Kimmel, and Seth Myers began airing reruns after 11,000+ writers from the Writers Guild of America went on strike late Monday night. Saturday Night Live is also shutting down, meaning this Saturday’s planned Pete Davidson-hosted episode will be replaced by a rerun.

What does TV look like without its writers?

We can look at the last writer’s strike, which occurred 15 years ago, for clues. It got weird:

• Conan O’Brien filled airtime by seeing how long he could spin his wedding ring on his desk. With help from an MIT physicist, he hit an impressive 51 seconds.
• Quantum of Solace was not the finest work in the James Bond series, partly because the script was never completed due to the strike. Daniel Craig tried to rewrite scenes but, in his words, “A writer I am not.”
• More than 60 TV shows shut down production, leading to shortened seasons and awkward endings for series like Gossip Girl, Pushing Daisies, and, most heartbreakingly, Girlfriends.
• While the boom in reality TV was underway before the previous strike, the lack of competition from scripted series helped juice the genre’s ratings: Over 31 million people tuned in to watch their crush David Archuleta lose to David Cook in the American Idol finale in 2008.

Looking ahead…with endless TV already available on streaming platforms, the fallout from this writer’s strike will look different than it did in the aughts. And the impact on TV programming will ultimately depend on how long the work stoppage lasts.—CC

Stat: The risk of premature death from being socially disconnected is equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes a day and represents an even higher mortality impact than a lack of physical activity and obesity, according to US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy. In an advisory yesterday, he warned that being persistently alone presented “profound threats” to Americans’ health: Time spent with friends fell by 20 hours a month from 2003–2020…and that was before the pandemic kept all of us apart more.

Quote: “The dynamics of the downtown San Francisco market have changed dramatically over the past several years.”

The hits keep coming to downtown SF. Nordstrom said yesterday that it was closing its two stores in the center of the city—the one located in the Westfield Mall and a nearby Nordstrom Rack—leaving 357,500 square feet of retail space vacant, according to the San Francisco Business Times. Last month, Whole Foods also announced it was closing up shop in downtown SF after making 568 emergency calls in the 13 months it was open, the NYT reported.

Read: The radical reinvention of the English language. (Inside Higher Ed)

A library of visual techniques: Here are all the methods filmmakers use to keep you on the edge of your seat.

 Tipping culture is out of control: This TikTok could almost be real.

  Have superhero fatigue? Here are the best indie movies of the 20th century.

 The world’s highest-paid athletes: Money from the Gulf helped boost the earnings of Cristiano Ronaldo, Dustin Johnson, and more. Check out the list.

 Make awkward work convos less awkward: Our one-week sprint, Difficult Conversations at Work, will help you tackle the tough convos. Reserve your seat now—it starts May 15, and spots are filling fast.

Knee-deep in potential: Monogram’s surgical robots could revolutionize knee replacements. Invest before their planned Nasdaq listing—last day to get in is May 10.*

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Word Search: Today’s puzzle is all about famous bridges. Think you can tell your George Washington Bridge from your Charles Bridge? Try it here.

Black and white and read all over

On World Press Freedom Day, let’s see how well you know your newspapers. We’ll give you the name of the leading newspaper of a US city, and you have to name the city. It’s not easy, so this will be graded on a curve.

1. Plain Dealer
2. Journal-Constitution
3. Star-Ledger
4. Union-Tribune
5. Post-Dispatch
6. Post-Gazette
7. Courant

Global startup funding hit a February low this year. Find out why VCs are investing less and what it means for the startup landscape here.

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