"Reading this book reminded me of watching a cat lick a dog’s eye goo."

As I’m sure you’ve heard by now Andreessen Horowitz announced Monday that it’s cutting its largest individual check ever — $350 million — in WeWork founder Adam Neumann’s new real estate company Flow. Andreessen Horowitz co-founder and Netscape internet icon Marc Andreessen is leading the deal and taking a board seat. (Andreessen Horowitz previously led a $70 million investment in Flowcarbon, a crypto company tied to Neumann.) I spent Monday checking in with sources to see what they know and puzzling over the Flow investment. When I asked rival investors whether they kicked the tires on Flow, I received answers like “hahaha” and “No — it’s good to know there’s still a place for utter insanity though.”

Sources told The Times the procedures for returning documents were ignored during the chaotic final days of Trump's presidency.

Residents of the Upper East Side luxury building are “terrified” of being egged.

On Monday, federal prosecutors announced the arrest of a Pennsylvania man for allegedly threatening on Gab to kill Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents. Gab users are apoplectic. They feel betrayed by the far-right platform and its founder Andrew Torba, who often touts his commitment to “free speech,” and has no qualms with Gab being a haven for racists and other extremists. According to the arrest affidavit, upon request, Gab gave the FBI records including a user’s email, IP addresses, and chat logs. The FBI then used this information to identify Adam Bies of Mercer, Pennsylvania. Bies is allegedly among the many people who took to social media to agitate against the FBI over its search of former President Donald Trump’s residence in Florida last week. The complaint asserts that he posted numerous threats against the FBI such as, “My only goal is to kill more of them before I drop,” and “If you work for the FBI then you deserve to die.” It’s not known whether Bies has issued a plea in the case. News of Gab cooperating with the feds launched a volley of angry posts on the platform. People likened Torba to Judas, the disciple who betrayed Jesus, and accused Gab of betraying its users and commitment to free speech. Many take particular issue with Torba cooperating with the feds without a subpoena. According to the arrest affidavit, Gab handed over the chat logs and other identifying information upon request that led to Bies’ arrest

DC announces crossover with Marvel, rolls out Damage Control

An appeals court Monday upheld a decision by a Northwest Florida circuit judge to block a teen from having an abortion without notification and consent of a parent or guardian. The teen, described by one appellate judge as almost 17 years old and “parentless,” sought court approval to bypass notification and consent requirements in state law. Escambia County Circuit Judge Jessica Frydrychowicz denied the bypass request, and a three-judge panel of the 1st District Court of Appeal upheld that decision. “The trial court found, based on the non-adversarial presentation below, that appellant (the teen) had not established by clear and convincing evidence that she was sufficiently mature to decide whether to terminate her pregnancy,” said the ruling, fully shared by Judges Harvey Jay and Rachel Nordby and partially joined by Judge Scott Makar.

If you were born in the United States within the last 50 or so years, chances are good that one of the first things you did as a baby was give a DNA sample to the government. By the 1970s, states had established newborn screening programs, in which a nurse takes a few drops of blood from a pinprick on a baby’s heel, then sends the sample to a lab to test for certain diseases. Over the years, the list has grown from just a few conditions to dozens. The blood is supposed to be used for medical purposes—these screenings identify babies with serious health issues, and they have been highly successful at reducing death and disability among children. But a public records lawsuit filed last month in New Jersey suggests these samples are also being used by police in criminal investigations. The lawsuit, filed by the state’s Office of the Public Defender and the New Jersey Monitor, a nonprofit news outlet, alleges that state police sought a newborn’s blood sample from the New Jersey Department of Health to investigate the child's father in connection with a sexual assault from the 1990s. Crystal Grant, a technology fellow at the American Civil Liberties Union, says the case represents a “whole new leap forward” in the misuse of DNA by law enforcement. “It means that essentially every baby born in the US could be included in police surveillance,” she says.

That buzzy "Dimes Square" opinion piece left out some important context.

Pennsylvania Republican gubernatorial candidate Dr. Oz roasted over a resurfaced video of him grocery shopping for crudité.

“We didn’t want to be a one-trick pony.”

“I think I think about it more than my patients do,” says one expert.

In January, Celsius Network boss Alex Mashinsky gathered his investment team to tell them he would be taking control of the crypto lender’s trading strategy ahead of an upcoming US Federal Reserve meeting. Prices of popular cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin and ether had fallen from their all-time highs and the former telecoms entrepreneur said Celsius needed to protect itself from further declines. A hawkish outcome, he was convinced, could crash crypto prices. In the days before the Fed met, Mashinsky personally directed individual trades and overruled executives with decades of finance experience, according to multiple people familiar with the matter. In one case, Mashinsky ordered the sale of hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of bitcoin, refusing to wait to double check Celsius’s often unreliable information on its own holdings. Celsius — which at the time held $22bn of customer crypto assets — bought the bitcoin back a day later at a loss.

Nobody expects the asteroid to hit Earth, but it's the closest the space object will come for the next two centuries, according to NASA projections.

After seven years and an ambitious plan to open 880 outlets, US chain’s local franchise files for bankruptcy

According to Michael Wooldridge, a professor of computer science at the University of Oxford who has spent the past 30 years researching AI (in 2020, he won the Lovelace Medal for contributions to computing), LaMDA is simply responding to prompts. It imitates and impersonates. “The best way of explaining what LaMDA does is with an analogy about your smartphone,” Wooldridge says, comparing the model to the predictive text feature that autocompletes your messages. While your phone makes suggestions based on texts you’ve sent previously, with LaMDA, “basically everything that’s written in English on the world wide web goes in as the training data.” The results are impressively realistic, but the “basic statistics” are the same. “There is no sentience, there’s no self-contemplation, there’s no self-awareness,” Wooldridge says.

The Cincinnati Zoo has announced a name for the newest member of the hippo bloat.

We followed unarmed emergency responders with MACRO to see their groundbreaking program at work on the Oakland streets.

A team of computer experts directed by lawyers allied with President Donald Trump copied sensitive data from election systems in Georgia as part of a secretive, multistate effort to access voting equipment that was broader, more organized and more successful than previously reported, according to emails and other records obtained by The Washington Post. As they worked to overturn Trump’s 2020 election defeat, the lawyers asked a forensic data firm to access county election systems in at least three battleground states, according to the documents and interviews. The firm charged an upfront retainer fee for each job, which in one case was $26,000. Attorney Sidney Powell sent the team to Michigan to copy a rural county’s election data and later helped arrange for them to do the same in the Detroit area, according to the records. A Trump campaign attorney engaged the team to travel to Nevada. And the day after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol the team was in southern Georgia, copying data from a Dominion voting system in rural Coffee County.

Adam is a visionary leader who revolutionized the second largest asset class in the world — commercial real estate — by bringing community and brand to an industry in which neither existed before. Adam, and the story of WeWork, have been exhaustively chronicled, analyzed, and fictionalized – sometimes accurately. For all the energy put into covering the story, it’s often under appreciated that only one person has fundamentally redesigned the office experience and led a paradigm-changing global company in the process: Adam Neumann. We understand how difficult it is to build something like this and we love seeing repeat-founders build on past successes by growing from lessons learned. For Adam, the successes and lessons are plenty and we are excited to go on this journey with him and his colleagues building the future of living.