After years of flying in everything from almost criminally ugly sweatpants to very uncomfortable jeans, I’m still seeking an answer to a question that’s as old as commercial air travel: What should I wear on a flight?

It’s the subject of frequent debate. One side finds casual flight attire offensive, lamenting the old days of dressing up for flights. The other side has no issue with sweatpants, not wanting to forfeit comfort for what has become less of an “experience” than an often-unpleasant means to an end.

The person to settle the debate, I decided, was Vanessa Friedman, fashion director and chief fashion critic at The New York Times for more than a decade.

In her column Critic’s Notebook, she breaks down the meaning of public-figure fashion statements, from red-carpet looks to politicians’ outfits. In her advice column, Ask Vanessa, she offers practical answers to questions like: What should you wear to protest a dress code? Can you wear brown shoes with blue pants?

Friedman also has plenty of personal experience with airport ensembles. She frequently flies to fashion shows, sometimes heading straight from the airport into a meeting.

So what does she wear to the airport? And, uh, does she have any advice for the rest of us?

the hairshirt doldrums

About my last few months.

After we finished up The Power Broker, a bunch of people were asking us what other books we’d been reading. A group of us got together and presented some of our recent favorites, and the choices were so good and surprising and charming, we're now sharing it widely.

Here are the books covered in this episode:

• Lasha's book: Usha's Pickle Digest by Usha R Prabakaran
• Chris's books: What It Takes by Richard Ben Cramer (and The Power Broker by Robert Caro 😁)
• Vivian's books:  Orbital by Samantha Harvey, Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar, Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman, and How to End a Love Story by Yulin Kuang
• Jayson's books: Hoppity Frog by Emma Parrish (for the kids),  Scattered Snows, to the North: Poems by Carl Philips, and Blackouts by Justin Torres
• Joe's book: Plunkitt of Tammany Hall by George Washington Plunkitt
• Roman's book: The Pine Barrens by John McPhee

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What We're Reading

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Jess Weatherbed, reporting for The Verge:

iPhone and Android users will be able to exchange end-to-end encrypted (E2EE) RCS messages in the near future thanks to newly updated RCS specifications. The GSM Association announced that the latest RCS standard includes E2EE based on the Messaging Layer Security (MLS) protocol, enabling interoperable encryption between different platform providers for the first time. [...]

“End-to-end encryption is a powerful privacy and security technology that iMessage has supported since the beginning, and now we are pleased to have helped lead a cross industry effort to bring end-to-end encryption to the RCS Universal Profile published by the GSMA,” said Apple spokesperson Shane Bauer. “We will add support for end-to-end encrypted RCS messages to iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and watchOS in future software updates.” [...]

“We’ve always been committed to providing a secure messaging experience, and Google Messages users have had end-to-end encrypted (E2EE) RCS messaging for years,” Google spokesperson Ed Fernandez told The Verge. “We’re excited to have this updated specification from GSMA and work as quickly as possible with the mobile ecosystem to implement and extend this important user protection to cross-platform RCS messaging.”

This is nothing but good news. But it’s wrong to frame this along Google’s lines, that they’ve been there waiting for Apple to support E2EE for RCS. They’ve been waiting for Apple to support RCS at all, yes, and Google has also implemented their own proprietary E2EE layer for RCS. But until now, there was no E2EE specification in the open RCS spec. Now there is. That’s why it’s not just Android ↔︎ iOS RCS messaging that wasn’t able to use E2EE, but even Android ↔︎ Android, unless both devices were using Google’s own Messenger app.

I have also noticed recently that Google Messages and Apple Messages now do a pretty good job of supporting each other’s tapbacks. And that hasn’t done anything to really change the green/blue messaging dynamic. Both things are true: RCS makes cross-platform messaging way better and iMessage remains vastly superior to RCS.

What I’m most interested about with Apple’s implementation of RCS encryption is how they’ll indicate it visually in chats. It’s not going to be with blue bubbles. Blue means “iMessage”, not “encrypted” — it just happens to be that iMessage started as a protocol based on end-to-end encryption. There’s no such thing as a non-encrypted iMessage — it’s part of the protocol, and always has been. But what happens when new/updated Android phones support the new RCS encryption spec, and older devices don’t? A lock icon for the encrypted chats? If it were up to me, iOS would drop support for non-encrypted RCS — iOS should use RCS with E2EE for every device that supports it, and fall back to dumb old no-encryption-at-all SMS for all devices that do not.

The biggest YouTuber in the world is looking beyond videos to build a multibillion-dollar empire. 

For the last several months, Jimmy Donaldson, aka MrBeast, has been talking with investors about raising $200 million in a funding round that would value his holding company, Beast Industries, at more than $5 billion. An investor pitch deck I’ve obtained gives an unprecedented look at the fast-growing, money-losing business of MrBeast and his future plans. (Bloomberg’s Lucas Shaw first reported that MrBeast is raising money last week.)

To justify that eye-popping valuation of at least $5 billion, investors are betting that the future of MrBeast’s business will be selling physical products, not making videos. Beast Industries and its roughly 500 employees see future revenue growth coming from a series of consumer packaged goods (CPG). Revenue from the company’s chocolate brand, Feastables, matched the core video business in 2024 and is expected to exceed it this year. 

Meanwhile, Beast Industries has never been profitable and doesn’t expect to be anytime soon. The company lost roughly $200 million over the last few years alone. Investors are planning to buy tens of millio …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Mozilla sells ads, Google limits blocking them – it's time for stricter measures

A new, lightweight version of Pi-Hole is here. Just how easy is it to block advertising on your home network?…