'Talking about politics at our family gatherings can be like smoking a cigarette at a gas station'there's a good chance it will make the whole place explode,' the journalist Elizabeth Harris wrote last year. So she tried to approach these conversations like a reporter: 'I wasn't looking to have a back-and-forth; I was looking for information. I wanted to know what they thought and why.' Politics isn't the only topic that can feel impossible to discuss. Families struggle to talk about their history, about what they need from one another, about the things they regret or haven't forgiven one another for. The holidays can sometimes feel like the powder keg Harris described, where everyone is trying to avoid saying the wrong thing. But maybe there's another way. Today's newsletter explores how to approach even the hardest family conversations. I recently asked readers to share a photo of something that sparks their sense of awe in the world. Today's submission is from Karen P., who describes her view of 'life in retirement at Sunrise Beach in Marshfield, Massachusetts.'...

Electricity prices are becoming an outsize issue in American politics because they themselves are legitimately outsize. Compared with the cost of consumer goods, which have been rising rapidly over the past few years, electricity prices are climbing even faster, an estimated 13 percent nationwide since 2022. This year, roughly half of households making less than $50,000 struggled to pay their electricity bills. In California, where the rise has been particularly steep, rates have essentially doubled over the past decade. When electricity was first commercialized, utilities were allowed to operate as monopolies for one main reason: to deliver lower costs. For a century, it worked. Companies spread the fixed costs of growing the system across their locked-in customers, and prices dropped precipitously. In 1890, a kilowatt-hour was $9.48 on average nationwide in today's dollars; by 1950, it had dropped to 41 cents and, by 1990, to 21 cents. But recently, this century-long trend has reversed in many states; utilities are failing to keep prices low....

India has backed away from its plan to force smartphone makers to preinstall a government app on all devices, following backlash and mounting concerns that the mandate would expand state access to users' devices and weaken privacy protections. On Wednesday, the Indian telecom ministry said Sanchar Saathi, an anti-theft and cybersecurity protection app, would remain voluntary and that smartphone makers would no longer be required to preload it on devices they sell. The new notice effectively reverses a directive issued to manufacturers last week (and circulated online on Monday) that had instructed manufacturers to bake the app into all devices and prevent its features from being disabled. News of the mandate soon ignited concerns over privacy and state overreach. However, the government has not yet issued an official notification to smartphone makers reflecting the withdrawal, and manufacturers are still waiting for formal instructions, two manufacturer sources involved with the proceedings told TechCrunch....

If you use a mobile phone with location services turned on, it is likely that data about where you live and work, where you shop for groceries, where you go to church and see your doctor, and where you traveled to over the holidays is up for sale. And U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is one of the customers. The U.S. government doesn't need to collect data about people's locations itself, because your mobile phone is already doing it. While location data is sometimes collected as part of a mobile phone app's intended use, like for navigation or to get a weather forecast, more often locations are collected invisibly in the background. I am a privacy researcher who studies how people understand and make decisions about data that is collected about them, and I research new ways to help consumers get back some control over their privacy. Unfortunately, once you give an app or webpage permission to collect location data, you no longer have control over how the data is used and shared, including who the data is shared with or sold to....