Hi! Art of the deal: One lucky Parisian is taking home “Head of a Woman,” a Picasso painting worth more than €1 million, or nearly $1.2 million, after winning a charity raffle he entered for just €100. Today we’re exploring:

Will a resolve to reduce screen time see a revival of landline telephones?

When the Chatter Telephone toy was released in the 1960s, it gave children the opportunity to play pretend phone calls, imitating their parents on the household landlines of the era. Six decades later, and kids are now being given actual landlines for amusement... while a few nostalgic adults are themselves turning to functioning Bluetooth versions of Fisher-Price’s plastic rotary dial. 

Last week, the Wall Street Journal published details of how some American parents are attempting to minimize their families’ screen time by installing low-tech landlines. The shift comes even as telecom companies have already made moves to phase out copper wire, the cable network that’s conventionally been used to service landlines, in favor of fiber optic or wireless providers (though some traditionalists are pushing back). 

Per the latest National Health Interview Survey, the landline is a dying breed in the US. At the end of 2024, almost 79% of American households reported only using wireless telephone services, in stark contrast with the 0.9% that were landline-only — a significant decline from roughly 40% only two decades before.

Owing to sinking demand and the reduced availability of copper networks, installing and running landlines has become costlier for screen-averse families, the WSJ reported. Happily, though, companies like Tin Can have created Wi-Fi compatible, kid-friendly screenless phones, which are proving so popular that its website crashed last Christmas.

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Parents’ concerns about their kids’ screen times are well founded, as a growing pile of data points to the rise of a digitally dependent generation. Last May, a survey found that 57% of US children own their own smartphone by the age of 12, while nearly 40% of kids under two interacted with the devices, according to their parents.

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World-leading AI models are now “nearly indistinguishable” and getting better all the time

China has closed the gap with the US in the global competition for AI model superiority, and any talk of an AI performance plateau is flat-out wrong. Those are two big takeaways from this year’s AI Index Report from Stanford University’s Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence.

Models are continuing to make impressive leaps in performance, and the pace is accelerating, the 2026 edition of the report finds. But it also carefully examines this rapid acceleration to show that it may not be exactly what it seems. 

Last year’s class of AI models have been steadily approaching or surpassing human baseline scores on benchmarks, with AI’s ability to operate a computer independently jumping from near zero to above 75% of human performance in a single year.

However, all of the major frontier models are clustered at the top of the benchmark charts together, separated by just a few points between them. The authors of the report say “leading models are now nearly indistinguishable from one another.”

That could mean that the ecosystem of benchmarks — the yardsticks used to measure the models’ capabilities — may not be keeping pace with the rapidly evolving models’ skills. For example, the report notes that AI models can win a gold medal in the International Mathematical Olympiad, but are hilariously bad at telling the time by reading a clock face. 

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Michael and Mary are America’s most popular male and female names

New data published Tuesday by the US Census Bureau has revealed the most common names provided in the 2020 Census, in the first release to include forename data since 1990.

As described in the brief, Michael was the most popular name for males in the US, with roughly 3.5 million American men reporting having this name or a close variant. This is up from fourth place in the 1990 Census, when the top US male name was James — though there were still 3 million Jameses in 2020’s tally.

Despite a three-decade gap, Mary remained the top name for American females in both censuses, with the 2020 survey counting almost 1.8 million females with this given name. Interestingly, Mary was one of just two predominantly female names that broke the top 10 given names in the US, with the overall list dominated mostly by male monikers.

In all, American females had far more first-name diversity than male counterparts: 16% of US males had one of the top 10 most frequent names among men, compared with 7.8% of women. Zooming out, almost 3x as many given names were needed to cover a quarter of the US female population than that of males.

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Off the charts: Which two of the world’s largest airlines are now at the center of reported merger talks? [Answer below].

Answer here.

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