Daily Brew // Morning Brew // Update

March 26, 2026

Nice to see you. If you’ve been grumbling about getting called back into the office, know that it could be worse—at least you’re not getting a ticket in the company parking lot like some employees of automaker Stellantis. Their offense? Driving a car made by another manufacturer. Really makes your department potluck’s dietary restrictions look pretty reasonable.

—Molly Liebergall, Dave Lozo, Matty Merritt, Abby Rubenstein, Holly Van Leuven

MARKETS

Nasdaq

21,929.83

+0.77%

S&P

6,591.90

+0.54%

Dow

46,429.49

+0.66%

10-Year

4.328%

-6.0 bps

Bitcoin

$70,940.33

+1.30%

JetBlue

$4.75

+13.37%

Data is provided by

*Stock data as of market close, cryptocurrency data as of 5:00pm ET. Here's what these numbers mean.

Markets: Hope is the thing with feathers—and it helped stocks fly upward yesterday as investors pinned theirs on Iran peace talks. Meanwhile, JetBlue took off after Semafor reported that the airline is exploring selling itself to a competitor, turning the stock positive for the year.

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ONE VERDICT AFTER ANOTHER

Meta is a big ol’ loser (in court)

Apu Gomes/Getty Images

In what could be the beginning of social media’s Big Tobacco moment, Instagram’s owner just failed to beat the “you’re-harming-your-users” allegations, twice: Yesterday, Meta and Google’s YouTube lost a landmark social media addiction trial in California, one day after Meta lost a separate child safety case in New Mexico.

In California, Meta and YouTube were accused of designing their apps to be addictive through features like infinite scroll:

The jury found them negligent for running platforms that harmed adolescents and failing to warn the public about this danger.
Meta and YouTube are ordered to pay $4.2 million and $1.8 million, respectively, to the plaintiff, a 20-year-old woman who said she became addicted to Instagram and YouTube as a child, which intensified her depression and other mental health struggles.

Meta said it “respectfully” disagreed with the decision and would appeal, a move YouTube also plans to make.

This was a bellwether case, meaning it tested the waters for thousands of similar lawsuits in the pipeline. Social media giants may now feel less confident about their chances in court, especially because Section 230—a legal rule that says platforms aren’t responsible for harmful content users post on their sites—didn’t protect them from liability this time. Plaintiffs (and prosecutors) are loopholing the loophole by focusing on platform design rather than content.

Meanwhile, in New Mexico…

On Tuesday, a jury ordered Meta to pay $375 million for failing to protect its young users from sexually explicit content, trafficking, and other online dangers.

The case followed a Chris-Hansen-like operation in which state investigators set up decoy accounts of minors, which they said were overwhelmed with solicitations from predators.

Meta plans to appeal that decision, too.

More state and federal trials are coming this year, including one from school districts and parents nationwide who accuse Meta, YouTube, TikTok, and Snap of harming youth mental health.—ML

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WORLD

Tour de headlines

AFP/Getty Images

Iran rejects US proposal to end the war. Iran dismissed the Trump administration’s 15-point ceasefire plan, which Pakistani officials told the Associated Press involved the rollback of US sanctions and Iran’s nuclear program, and the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz. Instead, Iran countered with its own five-point proposal, CNBC reported, citing state media. Its demands reportedly include reparations and sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz—a condition that would likely be unacceptable to the US.

SCOTUS says internet provider not liable for music piracy. The Supreme Court unanimously ruled yesterday that Cox Communications could not be held liable for its users’ music piracy in a case that at one point involved a $1 billion judgment against the internet provider. “A company is not liable as a copyright infringer for merely providing a service to the general public with knowledge that it will be used by some to infringe copyrights,” Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in the court’s decision. A ruling against Cox might have upended the internet as we know it, but instead, providers got new protections as long as they aren’t encouraging illegal activity.

Stephen Colbert to co-write Lord of the Rings movie. To mark the anniversary of the destruction of the One Ring in the fires of Mount Doom, a new piece of LOTR lore dropped. A noted Tolkien fan, Colbert, along with his son and a writer from previous films in the series, will pen The Lord of the Rings: Shadow of the Past, which is currently in development with Warner Bros. The comedian hasn’t developed a major film before, but he should have some time to spend in Middle-earth after The Late Show, which has been canceled, ends in May.—AR

GO WEST, TALL MAN

NBA expansion to Seattle, Vegas is all but certain

Nick Iluzada

Get ready to learn coffee and desert air, buddies. The NBA’s board of governors voted unanimously yesterday to begin the vetting process to add a 31st and 32nd franchise in Las Vegas and Seattle, respectively, for the 2028-29 season.

The franchise entrance fee is just a bit more than what you paid to join your rec league: ESPN reports that the new clubs will be expected to pay the NBA $7 billion to $10 billion for the privilege of having Charles Barkley make fun of them. However, the announcement comes at an inopportune time:

While next year’s salary cap will reportedly rise by $10 million, that’s still about $1 million lower than projections, due to a decline in local media revenue.
The tanking problem, aka intentionally losing or fielding bad teams in order to get better draft picks, is worse than usual (see: whatever the Brooklyn Nets did here). And expansion teams historically struggle at first, which could make tanking an even bigger issue.

But that depends on the NBA’s expansion draft rules. The NHL tweaked its system to benefit its recent Vegas and Seattle expansion teams: Vegas went to the Stanley Cup Final in year one, while Seattle made the playoffs in year two.

Zoom out: Despite rampant tanking and a $1 million shortfall, the NBA will survive. Overall viewership was up through last month’s All-Star break.—DL

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RIP JUICY VILLA

Finally, a fully AI-generated internet trend

Screenshot via @ai.cinema021/TikTok

A TikTok account churning out AI parodies of Love Island starring fruit (creatively named Fruit Love Island) to 3.3 million followers has been removed from the platform. Just when Kiwilo and Mangella were starting to crack on…

The TikTok channel ai.cinema021 started earlier this month and skyrocketed to viral success:

It snagged millions of views with sub-two-minute episodes in which budget-Pixar anthropomorphized fruits flirted in poorly synced audio and traversed through nonsensical storylines.
Fans then started making parody videos (of the parodies) with real fruit, and celebrities like Zara Larson posted about watching the chaotic mini-sodes. (Larson took her posts down after fans criticized her.)

As of yesterday, the channel no longer exists, but copycats and compilations have popped up on TikTok and YouTube.

Fine-tuning the slop machines. Fruit Love Island wasn’t the first time a strawberry started talking. AI-animated food videos have been flooding social platforms lately. (And they seemingly tell similar stories about fruit wives cheating on their fruit husbands?) They can largely be traced back to Object Talk, a customized permutation of ChatGPT, according to Intelligencer. The company behind the program offers tutorials on how to make what it refers to on its own website as “AI Slop.”—MM

STAT

Prime number: All Clear at the airport

Irfan Khan/Getty Images

You know who’s not mad about the airport security lines being so long you’d think there’s a viral hybrid pastry at the front? The company that makes money off people paying to avoid the lines. The Wall Street Journal reports:

The Clear app has been downloaded 289,000 times since the beginning of the month, when TSA agents began calling in sick while not getting paid due to the partial government shutdown over funding for ICE. It has resulted in longer airport queues—and more than 3x the downloads from a year ago, per Sensor Tower data.
Clear’s stock has risen about 60% over the past month.

If Clear is the winner of the shutdown, who’s the loser? Likely anyone trying to get on a plane at Houston’s Bush Intercontinental Airport, where security lines have stretched up to four hours. On Tuesday, ~40% of its security staff didn’t come to work, representing the highest absence rate in the country. The culprit is likely the fact that most TSA workers there have long commutes, making it expensive for them to come with rising gas prices and no paychecks, according to the New York Times. The Senate is working on a potential deal to restore TSA funding, but it lacks President Trump’s support.—AR

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NEWS

What else is brewing

Mailing a package will get more expensive as the US Postal Service increases its prices by 8% to cover rising fuel costs.
President Trump will travel to China to meet with Xi Jinping in May. Trump had previously pushed back plans for the meeting to focus on the war in Iran.
Meta laid off hundreds of employees yesterday, including in its Reality Labs division, as the company spends big on AI.
Mark Zuckerberg, Jensen Huang, and Larry Ellison were among the major tech players named to the Trump administration’s tech council yesterday.
Pop Mart’s shares tanked as investors fretted that it can’t keep the Labubu craze going.
Elon Musk said a Delaware judge should recuse herself from two cases involving Tesla because she showed bias by appearing to support a LinkedIn post critical of Musk with an emoji.
Savannah Guthrie sat down with a Today colleague for her first interview since her mother’s disappearance.

RECS

Walk: Comfy, cute sneakers for summer.**

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Watch: This Japanese commercial for MLB will get you pumped for the season.

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Three Headlines and a Lie

Three of these headlines are real and one is faker than the size marked on a vintage dress. Can you spot the odd one out?

An AI school, with no teachers, to open in Chicago this fall
Longest line at Philly airport? Cheesesteaks, not security
Study: 27% of college students consider pasta a sandwich
Squirrels are ‘vaping’ e-cigarettes after mistaking fruity aromas for food

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ANSWER

We made up the one about pasta as a sandwich—please don’t send us your thoughts on hot dogs.

Word of the Day

Today’s Word of the Day is: queues, meaning “waiting lines of people.” Thanks to Lynn from Woodstock, CT, for a suggestion we couldn’t wait to use. Submit another Word of the Day here.

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