MIT Technology Review’s weekday newsletter The Download put the UK’s new generational tobacco sales ban at the top of its agenda, with biotech writer Jessica Hamzelou arguing that the policy is unproven but still worth backing.
Hamzelou described the UK measure as an “endgame” policy: a public-health tool aimed at ending tobacco use rather than only pushing consumption down. Older tobacco controls, including higher taxes and graphic warning images, try to make smoking less attractive or less affordable. The generational sales ban goes further by cutting off legal sales to future cohorts.
The catch, as Hamzelou noted, is that this type of policy is new enough that there is no clear evidence yet that it will work. Her case for supporting it rests less on certainty than on the social shift around smoking. She wrote that her own children see cigarettes with disgust, a contrast with a childhood in which smoking had a more central place in culture.
The piece was promoted from The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter, and framed the UK law as part of a broader move toward policies that once looked politically extreme and now look more plausible. That is the policy story: lawmakers are no longer only trying to discourage smoking. They are testing whether governments can legislate a market out of existence over time.
A fiction issue with memory politics
The Download also featured “You do your own time,” a short story by award-winning speculative fiction writer Elizabeth Bear. The excerpt centers on librarians protecting prohibited digital records, including a solid-state drive containing biographies and case studies of people who had been held in labor camps or chattelhood.
In Bear’s setup, government agents use automated systems to find and destroy copies of the material. The librarians’ answer is archival and dramatic: send a copy beyond Earth so names erased from official systems might still survive somewhere. The story appears in MIT Technology Review’s latest magazine issue, which the publication says focuses on engineering.
The rest of the queue
The newsletter’s technology roundup was unusually dense, and not in the pleasant way. It included a Wired report that Citizen Lab found Pegasus spyware on the phone of Stelios Kouloglou, an EU lawmaker investigating spyware. The Guardian was cited saying the EU “looks the other way” on spyware abuses.
Other items included the Financial Times reporting that Anthropic is trying to block Chinese access to Claude through VPNs, relay services and overseas accounts, and The Wall Street Journal reporting that a Tesla driver was charged with manslaughter after a fatal crash in which court records show automated driver-assistance was in use.
The Download also cited Engadget on Donald Trump buying up to $5 million in technology stocks on the day he announced his AI Action Plan, 404 Media on companies limiting employee AI use because of cost, and The New York Times on the Energy Department wanting data centers to use backup power during heat waves to leave more grid capacity for air conditioning.
Other briefs covered the BBC’s report that Meta’s “Conversation Focus” feature for its glasses will move behind a $19.99 monthly subscription, New Scientist on a theory involving random changes in time to reconcile gravity and quantum mechanics, CNN on Peter Thiel’s claim that the pope is “working for the Chinese Communists” by supporting stricter AI rules, and Ars Technica on regulators considering legal supersonic flight over land if aircraft are quiet enough.
The newsletter closed with a Yann LeCun quote to the BBC: “We don't have robots that are nearly as good at understanding the physical world as a rat.” For a day packed with AI policy, subscriptions and surveillance malware, that was the least delusional sentence in the pile.
This story draws on original reporting from MIT Technology Review.
