Regular readers know I’ve been asking for this: Apple finally has a folding iPhone. The iPhone Duo landed Wednesday at the company’s highly anticipated fall event. And while it looked pretty much like all the leaks we’ve seen, it’s the first major redesign of the iPhone in nearly 20 years. It was also the center of the first keynote for CEO John Ternus, who just took over from Tim Cook. Passport-sized when closed, it opens like a book to a roughly 7.6-inch iPad-like display. The matte finish helps hide the fold in the middle of the screen. The only downside, it seems, is that it really will cost you two grand.

The rest of the lineup went the way these things usually go: up. The iPhone 18 Pro runs $1,199 and the 18 Pro Max $1,299, both $100 more than last year’s models, both carrying the new A20 Pro chip. Apple Watch Series 12 is $399, the Ultra 4 is $799 and AirPods 5 come in at $129. Those ship next week.

Ternus leaned hard on the in-device AI and a rebuilt “Siri AI” with access to your messages, email and calendar. You might say it’s the assistant Apple has been promising for years, now the pitch for a $2,000 phone. Whether it delivers is the open question, and the one worth watching before you pre-order anything.

For context, foldables are still roughly 2% of global smartphone sales. Apple is the last major player to ship one, which is the usual playbook. Let everyone else eat the early hinge failures, then arrive with the polished version and a price that assumes you’ll pay for the wait.

Honestly, the foldable iPhone I wanted snapped closed to become smaller and more pocketable. Not open wider, making it even bigger. So I’m still on the fence … careful what you wish for.

Missouri now has two congressional maps and two courts telling it which one to use … a mere eight weeks before Election Day. On Tuesday, Justice Brett Kavanaugh denied an emergency application from Missouri Republicans in a six-word order, leaving intact a Missouri Supreme Court ruling that the Trump-backed 2025 map never took effect because opponents submitted referendum petitions. Minutes later, a federal judge ordered the state to use it anyway.

That judge is U.S. District Judge Stephen Clark, a Trump appointee, who issued a 14-day restraining order in a separate case requiring the new lines, according to PBS NewsHour. The 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals declined to stay Clark’s order on Wednesday, which left the state simultaneously barred from and required to run the map. The voting rights group People Not Politicians appealed straight back to the U.S. Supreme Court, and Kavanaugh asked for a response by this morning. On the other track, the state’s high court set Thursday arguments on whether to hold Secretary of State Denny Hoskins in contempt, a wrinkle Vox flagged as the sharpest test yet of who actually controls Missouri’s ballot.

The map itself redraws Rep. Emanuel Cleaver's Kansas City-area 5th District, swapping in roughly 59% new voters by The Associated Press’ estimate. In a House this closely divided, that single district is a plausible margin of control—which is why an obscure procedural scrap over referendum petitions is now sitting on the Supreme Court's emergency docket.

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Brain rot isn’t laziness. It’s a distress signal. At least, that’s the argument in a The New York Times opinion piece framing the endless TikTok and Instagram Reels scroll not as a character flaw but as a rational response to a world asking too much of you.

Which reframes the whole guilt cycle, right? The usual take treats your screen time report as evidence of a broken will—just delete the apps, buy the dumbphone and reclaim your attention. The counterargument: the scroll is the pressure valve, not the disease. If the numbness feels good, ask what you’re numbing.

”In its own meme-driven way, brain rot refuses to participate in the attention economy on that economy’s terms. The joke is that there is no joke. The meaning is that there is no meaning.” Then again, the same participants who described brain rot as liberating also described feeling drained and guilty, and referred to the practice of watching until they fell asleep as “death scroll.”