| A new era of US tariffs officially began just after midnight, and you’d be forgiven if you were uncertain what exactly that meant for your life given all the back and forth since President Donald Trump first unveiled his proposal in April. The Bloomberg tariff tracker has all the details on the rates now applied to various countries. For Bloomberg Businessweek, Stacey Vanek Smith writes about when consumers might feel the effects. You can find an excerpt of that story below. And then, something fun if a little dark, as editor Bret Begun writes about the enduring appeal of Nine Inch Nails. Plus: Burglary tourists are traveling to the US to rob star athletes’ homes, and short-term rental properties are changing a Colombian city. If this email was forwarded to you, click here to sign up. One of the reassuring things about the laws of physics is that they’re immutable. They create a stable, predictable physical world, where balls roll downhill, parked cars stay put, and the lawn chair you’re sitting in doesn’t vanish into thin air underneath you. The laws of economics, however, aren’t always so reliable. Take tariffs. Back on April 2, Trump announced the most draconian set of tariffs the US has seen in decades. World leaders panicked, markets tanked, and economists of all stripes took to the airwaves, warning that we’d see drastically higher prices as Trump’s import taxes rippled through the economy. The Yale Budget Lab predicted clothing prices would spike 64% in the short run. Most of the Trump administration’s “Liberation Day” tariffs have been in flux over the past several months, but the average tariff on goods coming into the US has been more than 13% and rises to more than 15% with the rates that went into effect today, according to Bloomberg Economics. But so far the impact has been difficult to see. Company earnings, for the most part, have been strong, markets have been ebullient, and the monthly inflation reports have remained pretty sleepy. (Clothing prices have actually ticked down a bit.) So … where did the tariffs go? Keep reading: It’s Only a Matter of Time Until Americans Pay for Trump’s Tariffs These Are the Times for Nine Inch Nails |  A Nine Inch Nails concert in July at the Accor Arena in Paris. Photographer: Jacques Julien/Alamy Stock Photo Nine Inch Nails started the North American leg of its tour on Wednesday in Oakland, California. Perhaps you knew this and already have tickets. Perhaps you didn’t and are wondering, “Why is Businessweek Daily writing about a band from the ’90s?” That’s a fair question. In the 1990s, NIN was considered an “alternative” band in the industrial genre; it skewed too dark, too hardcore, too amelodic for most mainstream tastes. One of its best known songs, “Closer” from 1994’s The Downward Spiral, sounds like a nightmarish version of the bleeps and bloops you’d hear if you were hooked up to machines in the ICU, and the music video looks like a precursor to the Saw movies. Even though it got play on MTV—the album was a commercial success and a mostly critical one too—the band never fully grew out of its underground status. Pop punk music of the same era hasn’t aged as well. Dookie, Green Day’s massive hit, came out a month before Downward Spiral. To me, it’s kind of a hollow listen now. NIN has tapped into the comfortable, and I guess lucrative, market of what I’ll call the graceful goth niche. Moments of head-banging pop are surrounded by moody, glitchy churning on 1999’s “We’re in This Together”; the lyrics to 2005’s “Every Day Is Exactly the Same” tackle existential ennui. One can get away in the 2020s with copying lead singer Trent Reznor’s black wardrobe at a job in Midtown Manhattan as, say, an editor for a business magazine. It doesn’t hurt that Reznor shows up on red carpets wearing leather jackets or black-on-black-on-black ensembles for his second career as an award-winning film composer. No matter his successes, Reznor’s default mode has always been disaffection, including in politics. His first hit, “Head Like a Hole,” is an ode to resistence—“Head like a hole/ Black as your soul/ I’d rather die than give you control”—and the George W. Bush-era album Year Zero imagines a dystopian future (in this case, 2022) where there’s no longer a separation between church and state. His commentary has become less subtle in recent years. He called out Taylor Swift by name for not speaking up more about social and political issues in President Donald Trump’s first term. He said he told Texas Senator Ted Cruz to “f--- off” when he tried to get on a guest list. (Cruz replied that “NIN is not my music taste.”) Reznor endorsed Joe Biden in 2020. I don’t want to probe too deeply into what my affection for NIN says about me. But I’m not alone in finding enduring appeal. Due to demand, the band added second arena shows in Chicago, Brooklyn and Los Angeles. In a way, these are NIN-appropriate times—Year Zero plus four. There’s a sizable population of liberally minded people whose mood is more Reznor-y anger than Green Day’s signature apathy. Seeing NIN live can offer a cathartic act of resistance. Or a night of nostalgia. Or a few hours to reflect on questions, such as the one Reznor (and later Johnny Cash) asks in “Hurt”: “Beneath the stains of time/ The feelings disappear/ You are someone else/ I am still right here/ What have I become?” | 
