If, as they say, dogs look like their owners, then the pup parent of a six-year-old pug that just picked up the 2026 World’s Ugliest Dog title may have mixed feelings about their pooch taking the top prize at the competition, which has now run for 50 years at the Sonoma County Fair in California. 

Jinny Lu, whose underdog back story involves being found in a wooden box in freezing conditions in South Korea, was runner up at the 2025 event before taking top spot this year. The competition is actually a little more wholesome than its name betrays, with organizers and attendees rejoicing in the supposed imperfections of the entrants, “celebrating wonderful characters and showing the world that these dogs are truly beautiful.”

The S&P 500 rose about 0.2%, lifted by a plan from the US Treasury to buy back longer-dated bonds, while the Nasdaq 100 dipped just over 0.2%. 

You hardly need to be a federal judge in Oakland or the lawmakers in a top court in France to have met with the idea that a lot of young people — and many of the rest of us too, to be fair — have a slight overdependence on social media in 2026. Still, it’s nice to have more data to confirm it.

According to new data in a report from Adam Blacker at apptopia, Americans between 17 and 25 years old are the only age group where monthly social media app usage is still hitting new highs, while other demographics have seen their doom scrolling hours slide from previous peaks… even if only by a little.

As of July, the youngest demographic that the apptopia data covers notched an average of 246 minutes, or just over four hours, of daily social media screentime across apps like Instagram and TikTok. Meanwhile, the 26- to 35-year-old cohort of Americans spent three hours (enough time to watch Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey” with a quick refreshment break) on social media apps every day in the US.

The report confirms another long-postulated idea, too: social media has come to fill the role of streaming – the activity formerly known as “watching TV” – for vast swaths of the nation. The apps that dominate the largest share of users’ time are “increasingly being used as a means of video entertainment,” with TikTok and YouTube performing particularly well across the various age groups that apptopia observes.

Although Americans are broadly spending more time on social media — overall monthly usage has receded from its March peak, but quarterly figures still reflect a record high — an interesting fact, as Blacker observed, is that social media now takes up less of our total screen time, as the time we spend on our phones overall outpaces even the growth of social scrolling. 

— Tom Jones

That’s the share of Americans aged between 18 and 29 who say they are now “more concerned than excited” by the rise of AI use in daily life, per a new survey from Pew Research Center.

In 2022, the year when ChatGPT launched to the public, just 29% of that cohort said the same, and the only group of US adults who are now more concerned overall are the over-65s, some 59% of whom reported feeling the same way.

While comparing the revenue run rate figures for Anthropic and OpenAI put out by various sources might not be an exact science, not least because the companies may have different measurement methods — as Bloomberg noted in its coverage on the latest two sets of numbers — the difference in acceleration is still worth a look.

According to anonymous sources cited by Bloomberg, Anthropic’s annual revenue run rate has now reached a whopping $65 billion, marking an increase of more than 600% since the figure was reported at the end of 2025. 

Using information from a presumably separate set of unnamed sources, Bloomberg reported earlier this month that OpenAI’s run rate had recently passed the $40 billion threshold — more than double the $20 billion point the ChatGPT maker itself confirmed it crossed in 2025.

Again, while the leaked figures don’t exactly make for an apples-to-apples comparison, they do reflect the broader narrative that the company behind Claude appears to be pulling ahead, with OpenAI’s reported $6.7 billion Q2 revenue lagging the $11.6 billion that Anthropic posted over the same period… per yet more “sources familiar with the matter” cited recently in the WSJ.

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