Last week, Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, released Threads, a social media platform to compete with Twitter. In just 16 hours, Threads was downloaded more than 30 million times.

Mike Isaac, who covers tech companies and Silicon Valley for The Times, explains how Twitter became so vulnerable and discusses the challenges Meta faces to create a less toxic alternative.

Guest: Mike Isaac, a technology correspondent for The New York Times.

Background reading: 

• Threads is on pace to exceed 100 million users within two months, a feat achieved only by ChatGPT.
• Here’s what to know about Threads and how it differs from Twitter.

For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.

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The wave of scandals that would engulf Spain began with a police raid on a wooded property outside Madrid. It was Nov. 3, 2017, and the target was José Manuel Villarejo Pérez, a former government spy. Villarejo’s name had been circulating in the Spanish press for years. He was rumored to have had powerful friends and to have kept dirt on them all. The impressive variety of allegations against him — forgery, bribery, extortion, influence peddling — had earned him the nickname “king of the sewers.”

For many decades, Villarejo’s face had been known to almost no one. He was, after all, a spy — and not just any spy, but one who had started his career in the secret police of the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco. In those years, he would dress in overalls from Telefónica, the national telephone company, as he conducted surveillance operations in the mountains, and on several occasions he even wore a priest’s collar in order to infiltrate the Basque separatist group ETA. More recently, Villarejo had taken to simply introducing himself as a lawyer who ran a private-investigation firm, offering those he met to dig up compromising material on their enemies. His formal connection to the government was increasingly ambiguous. Of all of the identities he assumed over the years, this was perhaps the most powerful one. It made him rich through the hefty fees he charged, and it opened a door into the worlds of business tycoons, government ministers, aristocrats, judges, newspaper editors and arms traffickers — all of whose trust he gained, all of whose private words he taped.

Villarejo was handcuffed and taken to Madrid. But as he sat in jail awaiting trial, the question left hanging over Spain was this: What happens to a country’s secrets when they have all been recorded by one man? And what happens when that man finds himself suddenly backed into a corner?

This story was recorded by Audm. To hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.

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Last week, the Supreme Court struck down President Biden’s sweeping plan to cancel billions of dollars in student loan debt.

Stacy Cowley, a finance reporter for The New York Times, explains what the decision means for borrowers now facing their first payments since a coronavirus pandemic-related pause and how an alternative plan could still ease their burden.

Guest: Stacy Cowley, a finance correspondent for The New York Times.

Background reading: 

• The proposed debt cancellation of more than $400 billion would have been one of the most expensive executive actions in U.S. history.
• Millions will now have to repay debts that the Biden administration had promised to eliminate.

For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.

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Last month, a rebellion inside Russia left lingering questions about what really happened and about what the ramifications would be for President Vladimir V. Putin.

Anton Troianovski, the Moscow bureau chief for The Times, discusses what Mr. Putin has done since the mutiny and looks at how those actions might reveal how vulnerable the president is.

Guest: Anton Troianovski, the Moscow bureau chief for The New York Times.

Background reading: 

• Mr. Putin is rewarding loyalty among the ruling elite and showering his most important constituency — the men with guns — with cash.
• The mutiny gave a glimpse of a post-Putin Russia. Is the window still open?

For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.

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Jimmy Donaldson, better known as MrBeast, has become a sensation on YouTube for ostentatious and sometimes absurd acts of altruism.

Today, Max Read, a journalist and contributor to The Times, discusses what the rise of one of YouTube’s most popular star tells us about the platform and its users.

Max Read is a contributor to The New York Times Magazine and writes about technology and internet culture in his newsletter “Read Max.”

Background reading: 

• Why do so many people think Mr. Donaldson is evil?
• MrBeast is out to become the Elon Musk of online creators.

For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.

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The patients in this story came to the Yale Fertility Center to pursue pregnancy. They began their I.V.F. cycles full of expectation and hope. Then a surgical procedure called egg retrieval caused them excruciating pain.

Some of the patients screamed out in the procedure room. Others called the clinic from home to report pain in the hours that followed. But most of the staff members who fielded the patients’ reports did not know the real reason for the pain — a nurse at the clinic was stealing fentanyl and replacing it with saline.

Today, we’re sharing the first episode of “The Retrievals,” a five-part narrative series from Serial Productions and The New York Times, reported by Susan Burton, a veteran staff member at “This American Life” and author of the memoir “Empty.”

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The Supreme Court delivered another major decision this past week, ruling in favor of a web designer who said she had a First Amendment right to refuse to create wedding websites for same-sex couples.

Adam Liptak, a Times correspondent who covers the court, explains what the ruling might mean for all kinds of different groups of Americans.

Guest: Adam Liptak, who covers the United States Supreme Court for The New York Times.

Background reading: 

• The justices settled a question left open in 2018: whether businesses open to the public and engaged in expression may refuse to serve customers based on religious convictions.
• Here’s what to know about the free speech decision.

For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.

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HF0, or Hacker Fellowship Zero, is a start-up accelerator that provides 12-week residencies for batches of fellows from 10 different start-ups. Their experience, which culminates in a demonstration day, is supposed to be the most productive three months of the fellows’ lives. Dave Fontenot, one of HF0’s founders, was inspired by the two years he spent living in monasteries in his 20s: While monastery life was materially ascetic, he found that it was luxurious in the freedom it gave residents to focus on the things that really mattered. And this year at the Archbishop’s Mansion in San Francisco, the home of the fellows, almost everyone has been monastically focused on what has become the city’s newest religion: artificial intelligence.

The A.I. gospel had not yet spread in 2021, when Fontenot and his two co-founders, Emily Liu and Evan Stites-Clayton, started the accelerator. Even a year ago, when HF0 hosted a batch of fellows at a hotel in Miami, six out of the eight companies represented were cryptocurrency start-ups. But at the mansion in San Francisco, eight of the 10 companies in HF0’s first batch this year were working on A.I.-based apps.

That generative A.I. has largely supplanted crypto in the eyes of founders and venture capitalists alike is not exactly surprising. When OpenAI released ChatGPT late last year, it set off a new craze at a time when the collapsing crypto and tech markets had left many investors and would-be entrepreneurs adrift, unsure of where to put their capital and time. Suddenly users everywhere were realizing that A.I. could now respond to verbal queries with a startling degree of humanlike fluency. “Large language models have been around for a long time, but their uses were limited,” said Robert Nishihara, a co-founder of Anyscale, a start-up for machine-learning infrastructure. “But there’s a threshold where they become dramatically more useful, and I think now it’s crossed that.”

This story was recorded by Audm. To hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.

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On Thursday, the Supreme Court overturned decades of precedent by striking down affirmative action and declaring that the race-conscious admissions programs at Harvard and the University of North Carolina were unlawful.

Adam Liptak, who covers the United States Supreme Court for The New York Times, explains the ruling, and what it means for American society.

Guest: Adam Liptak, who covers the court for The New York Times.

Background reading: 

• The Supreme Court’s vote to reject affirmative action programs was 6 to 3, with the liberal justices in dissent.
• In 2016, in its last major case on affirmative action in higher education, the Supreme Court upheld an aspect of an idiosyncratic admissions program at the University of Texas at Austin.

For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.

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In a San Francisco courtroom, federal regulators are fighting to block one of the biggest deals in the history of Silicon Valley. 

David McCabe, who covers technology policy for The New York Times, talks about Lina Khan, the F.T.C. chair who is the architect of the lawsuit, and the growing campaign to finally rein in big tech.

Guest: David McCabe, a New York Times correspondent covering technology policy.

Background reading: 

• The Federal Trade Commission sued Microsoft to stop the company from closing its purchase of the video game powerhouse Activision Blizzard, escalating government efforts to stymie the largest consumer technology deal in decades.
• Satya Nadella, the chief executive of Microsoft, appeared in federal court on Wednesday to defend the deal by pledging support for open platforms and consumer choice.

For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.

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