Hasta La Gadget!

Back in August, Deadline reported that Vince Gilligan was pitching his next series after Better Call Saul to around eight or nine networks and platforms. Now, the upcoming show has found a home: It will stream on Apple TV+, which has already put in an order for two seasons. The still-untitled project will star Rhea Seehorn, who also played Saul Goodman’s wife Kim Wexler in the Breaking Bad prequel. “After fifteen years, I figured it was time to take a break from writing antiheroes… and who’s more heroic than the brilliant Rhea Seehorn?” Gilligan said in a statement. 

While official details about the upcoming show have yet to be released, previous reports said it’s completely unrelated to the Breaking Bad universe. Deadline described it as something more akin to The Twilight Zone in that it will be set in our world but will bend reality as we know it. Gilligan will be heavily involved in the show’s creation as showrunner and executive producer. And while the series may not be connected to Breaking Bad and its prequel, it will still be part of Gilligan’s overall deal with Sony Pictures Television.

In his statement, Gilligan pointed out that the upcoming project will reunite him with Zack Van Amburg, Jamie Erlicht and Chris Parnell. All three used to be Sony TV co-presidents who left the company to work at Apple. The tech giant hired Van Amburg and Erlicht back in 2017 to give its TV ambitions a boost by making them its video programming division leaders. They’re “the first two people to say yes to Breaking Bad all those years ago,” Gilligan said. It’s still very early days for his next project, though, so you may have to wait a while for a streaming date.

As the country marks National Public Lands Day this weekend, the political tug of war over federal lands and waters wages on.

The ungodly surveillance of anti-porn ‘shameware’ apps

Dhruv Mehrotra, Wired

Some churches ask congregants to install activity-tracking apps on their phones in the name of accountability. Many churchgoers aren’t aware some software monitors a lot more than internet history. Some even take screenshots every minute before sending them to an “accountability partner.” When asked about the apps, Google told Wired two of the most popular ones violate its policies. 

Trump’s ‘big lie’ fueled a new generation of social media influencers

Elizabeth Dwoskin and Jeremy B. Merrill, The Washington Post

Following the 2020 election, a wave of new influencers burst on the scene, amassing big follower counts by echoing former President Donald Trump’s claims of election fraud. 

The dark side of frictionless technology

Charlie Warzel, The Atlantic

“There is a fundamental tension in the tech industry between the desire to build at all costs, because building is a universal virtue, and the less flashy value system of maintaining structures that already exist so that they may flourish,” Warzel writes in his Galaxy Brain newsletter. 

Like Hitler, Trump is “ranting and raving for more than an hour, and you have these rows of young men with their arms raised,” says Clinton.

The Nintendo Switch was a renaissance for handheld gaming, but Valve’s Steam Deck took the idea of making AAA titles playable on-the-go to the next level, with support for graphically intense games usually reserved for PCs. The only problem? It’s expensive, and still hard to get your hands on if you’re not already on…

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