• Imoved to Italy for work, but about two years later, I learned my contract wouldn't be renewed.
• Without citizenship or savings, I had to leave the life I was starting to build behind.
• Now, I'm back in the US, working to get back to the place where I finally felt like myself.

I never really thought I'd live in Italy.

Sure, my dad was from there, but we weren't one of those families who had dual citizenship or spent summers on the Amalfi Coast. I didn't even speak Italian — but one opportunity changed everything.

Just over a month after my dad passed away, I'd been let go from my job and was cold-emailing brands I admired, when I landed a marketing role with an Italian beauty company.

The role offered the chance to relocate to Italy, and I thought, why not? What once felt like a distant dream suddenly became real, as if my dad was guiding me toward this new chapter in my life.

I slowly built a life in Italy, but just when I thought I had it all figured out, I lost it

I moved in July 2022 and spent my first few weeks in Pescara, Italy, (where the company's offices were based) getting to know my team and easing into the slower pace of life.

On hot afternoons, we'd sometimes log off early and head to the beach. It was a kind of freedom and balance I'd never experienced at work before. I didn't feel pressured to always be online, there weren't any expectations to work weekends, and my creativity felt fed by my real life.

At the end of the month, I relocated to Rome. With little to no in-office requirements, the city seemed like a great fit for me because of its public transportation system, international connections, and lively pace. Plus, if I needed to get to Pescara, I was only a two-hour bus ride away.

Living in Rome felt easy and natural, like I'd lived there in another life. I woke up early to grab treats from my local bar (what the Italians call cafés), made friends with my neighbors, and learned where the non-touristy spots were. I also got used to the nuances of daily life in the city, from public transportation strikes to a lack of strong air conditioning.

I visited my dad's family in Lombardy and Calabria, too. It was incredibly grounding to connect with relatives who spoke little English but welcomed me anyway. I felt closer to him than ever before, but it was hard not to be upset with the fact that he'd never taught me the language.

Although I'd made an effort to practice speaking with my family, took dozens of classes, and subscribed to Babbel, there were still plenty of moments when I struggled to keep up with the pace of conversations at work or sound competent at the post office.

It was intimidating, but over time, I pushed through the discomfort, asked questions when I was unsure, and slowly started to pick up more of the language. Day by day, I built a quiet resilience and confidence I hadn't expected.

Then, just when I thought I'd found my groove — I'd gotten my residency permit, was seemingly thriving at work, and wassettling into a new friend group — I learned my contract was not being renewed due to budget cuts, and I wasn't the only one affected.

Without a job, dual citizenship (my dad completely naturalized as a US citizen, preventing me from gaining automatic Italian citizenship), or a financial safety net, I couldn't stay.

So, I had to pack up the life I'd built and return to the US in January 2025.

For now, I'm back in the States and grieving the version of myself I'd found abroad

Now, I'm inNew York City, working full-time, and freelancing as I try to hold onto the version of myself I'd become in Italy — the person who understood that life doesn't always need to be rushed or optimized.

But it's not easy. Returning here has felt like starting over and trying to find my footing in a place where everyone seems to be running at a relentless pace.

So, I'm trying my best to make it back to Italy on my own terms. I'm working hard to secure my status as a dual citizen, but I'm not sure how long it will take.

Through it all, though, I'm proud of myself for reconnecting with my heritage and chasing this dream.

Food poisoning is never fun—and a lot of the time, it can seem quite forceful. Take the common gut-buster norovirus for example. It can ignite forces that might make jet propulsion researchers jealous. Victims may fear liftoff from a porcelain launch pad, or a vomitous blast with a reverse thrust that seems powerful enough to drop a military jet from the sky.

But then there are the rare illnesses that produce truly violent forces. Such was the case for one unfortunate man in China who made the near-fatal decision to eat some dubious street food.

It's unclear what the 59-year-old ate exactly—but it's a safe bet he'll never eat it again. Soon after, his innards vigorously ignited. According to a case report in this week's issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, the man, in fact, vomited with so much explosive force that he blew apart his esophagus—the muscular tube through which food passes from the throat to the stomach.

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Earlier this month, Microsoft’s Family Safety feature, primarily used by parents and schools as a set of parental controls and filters, started randomly blocking Google’s Chrome browser from opening on Windows. The first reports surfaced on June 3rd, with some Chrome users noticing the browser kept closing or wouldn’t open.

Microsoft has introduced a bug into Family Safety that specifically targets the Chrome browser and prevents it from functioning on Windows. “Our team has investigated these reports and determined the cause of this behavior,” says Chrome support manager Ellen T. “For some users, Chrome is unable to run when Microsoft Family Safety is enabled.”

Other browsers like Firefox or Opera appear to be unaffected, and some users have even found that renaming Chrome.exe to Chrome1.exe works around this issue. Schools or parents who have enabled Family Safety as part of a Microsoft 365 subscription can also disable the “filter inappropriate websites” setting in Family Safety to get Chrome up and running again, but this does leave children able to access any website.

It’s unclear when Microsoft will fix the issue, which has been ongoing for more than two weeks. We reached out to Microsoft to comment on this problem earlier this week, but at the time of publication, the company hasn’t responded.

“We’ve not heard anything from Microsoft about a fix being rolled out,” wrote a Chromium engineer in a bug tracking thread on June 10th. “They have provided guidance to users who contact them about how to get Chrome working again, but I wouldn’t think that would have a large effect.”

Microsoft has a habit of doing weird things on Windows to steer people away from using Chrome. While this Family Safety issue is likely an innocent bug, Microsoft has used prompts, fake AI answers, malware-like popups, and even a poll injected on Google’s Chrome download page to try and sway people to switch to its Edge browser. Earlier this year, Microsoft even used Bing to trick people into thinking they were on Google.

Breast cancer. Colon cancer. An enlarged thyroid gland. A family history of tumors and cancers as well. It wasn't until the woman developed an annoying case of dry mouth that doctors put it all together. By then, she was in her 60s.

According to a new case study in JAMA Dermatology, the woman presented to a dermatology clinic in Spain after three months of oral unpleasantness. They noted the cancers in her medical history. When she opened wide, doctors immediately saw the problem: Her tongue was covered in little wart-like bumps that resembled a slippery, flesh-colored cobblestone path. (Image here.)

Such a cobblestone tongue is a telltale sign of a rare genetic condition called Cowden syndrome. It's caused by inherited mutations that break a protein, called PTEN, leading to tumors and cancers.

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• Google stock tumbled Wednesday after Apple's executive Eddy Cue said AI rivals were cutting into the search giant.
• Google responded by saying that's not the case.
• It's possible that both arguments are correct. The stakes are very high.

Is Google screwed?

That's the $2 trillion question the tech world is trying to understand following Wednesday's blockbuster news: A top Apple executive said search queries on the company's Safari browser were declining because people were using AI engines like ChatGPT instead.

Investors immediately acted as if Google's astonishing run at the top of the tech heap was over, and slashed the company's stock by more than 8%.

But a day later, Google's stock was climbing back up a bit, and there's a healthy debate about what Cue's statement means — as well as why he said it.

Spoiler: I'm not going to solve this one today. But let's at least look at the argument.

The most obvious way to view Cue's comments was the way Wall Street did: that Google search dominance was being eroded by AI competitors.

After all, fear of being usurped by AI is what pushed Google to fast-track its own AI efforts, even when some of those efforts created embarrassing results.

But later on Wednesday, Google put out a statement that basically said Cue was wrong, without actually saying that out loud. Instead, the company said it was continuing to see increasing searches, and "that includes an increase in total queries coming from Apple's devices and platforms."

So that looks like two of the world's most powerful and valuable companies are disagreeing over basic, knowable facts.

But people who pay attention to this stuff are focusing on three key words in Google's statement: "total," "devices," and "platforms." And the absence of another word: "Safari."

And that's leading them to translate Google's statement this way: "Maybe Apple really is seeing fewer searches on Safari, the default web browser on iPhones. But you can use Google in other ways on iPhones — namely, via the Google app, but also via Google's own Chrome browser. And people are using those more — enough to counter any decline elsewhere."

Assuming that this translation is accurate, that should reassure Google and its boosters a bit, though not completely: Cue said the searches on Safari were down for the first time ever, and that's not the kind of signal you can just wave away.

And even if Safari Google searchers are really moving to things like the Google app instead, that also underlines the fact that people who used to just type something into their iPhone browser know now they can get results other ways. And there's no reason they couldn't also be searching on Google competitors like ChatGPT.

A Google rep declined to comment; Apple hasn't responded to my request for comment.

Google investors, by the way, don't seem 100% convinced by Google's statement: The stock is up 3% on Thursday, which means Google is still worth 5% less than it was Wednesday morning, when Cue started testifying in the US vs. Google antitrust trial.

Which brings us to the second question Google and Apple watchers are speculating about: Why did Cue say what he said in court, after all?

I'm an Occam's razor guy, so my first take was that Cue answered the questions he was asked in court.

But there's also a 4D chess argument, put forth by folks like MoffettNathanson's analyst Michael Nathanson. It goes like this: Cue has an incentive to portray Google as a wounded animal.

That's because Google pays Apple at least $20 billion a year to make Google the default search engine on Safari (that's the reason Cue has insight into Google's search activity), and a federal judge has already declared that Google has an illegal monopoly in search.

And one of the remedies the judge could push for would be to prevent Google from paying Apple for that valuable real estate — which would mean Apple could lose all of that high-margin revenue.

So, the theory goes, convincing the judge that Google no longer has a stranglehold on search, because of AI competition, might allow those payments to keep flowing after all.

That theory also helps explain Google's muted response on Wednesday night, where the company tried to walk the line between tooting its own horn (which bucks up investors but could damage its legal argument) and acknowledging that it has real competition (which could help Google in court but hurt it in the market).

Which brings us back to where we started: Is Google really starting to lose out to the ChatGPTs of the world, and entering a permanent decline, just like pay-TV networks a decade ago? Or is it holding its own despite the competition? Depending on where you're asking the question, Google might give you a different answer.

Correction: May 8, 2025 — An earlier version of this story misstated which company the Safari browser belongs to. It's Apple, not Google.

The remedy phase of Google's antitrust trial is underway, with the government angling to realign Google's business after the company was ruled a search monopolist. The Department of Justice is seeking a plethora of penalties, but perhaps none as severe as forcing Google to sell Chrome. But who would buy it? An OpenAI executive says his employer would be interested.

Among the DOJ's witnesses on the second day of the trial was Nick Turley, head of product for ChatGPT at OpenAI. He wasn't there to talk about Chrome exclusively—the government's proposed remedies also include forcing Google to share its search index with competitors.

OpenAI is in bed with Microsoft, but Bing's search data wasn't cutting it, Turley suggested (without naming Microsoft). "We believe having multiple partners, and in particular Google's API, would enable us to provide a better product to users," OpenAI told Google in an email revealed at trial. However, Google turned OpenAI down because it believed the deal would harm its lead in search. The companies have no ongoing partnership today, but Turley noted that forcing Google to license its search data would restore competition.

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Google has made an unusual announcement about browser cookies, but it may not come as much of a surprise given recent events. After years spent tinkering with the Privacy Sandbox, Google has essentially called it quits. According to Anthony Chavez, VP of the company's Privacy Sandbox initiative, Google won't be rolling out a planned feature to help users disable third-party cookies. Instead, cookie support will remain in place as is, possibly forever.

Beginning in 2019, Google embarked on an effort under the Privacy Sandbox banner aimed at developing a new way to target ads that could preserve a modicum of user privacy. This approach included doing away with third-party cookies, small snippets of code that advertisers use to follow users around the web.

Google struggled to find a solution that pleased everyone. Its initial proposal for FLoC (Federated Learning of Cohorts) was widely derided as hardly any better than cookies. Google then moved on to the Topics API, but the company's plans to kill cookies have been delayed repeatedly since 2022.

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The Internet might look a bit different on Android soon. Last month, Google announced its intent to make Chrome for Android a more immersive experience by hiding the navigation bar background. The promised edge-to-edge update is now rolling out to devices on Chrome version 135, giving you a touch more screen real estate. However, some websites may also be a bit harder to use.

Moving from button to gesture navigation reduced the amount of screen real estate devoted to the system UI, which leaves more room for apps. Google's move to a "dynamic bottom bar" in Chrome creates even more space for web content. When this feature shows up, the pages you visit will be able to draw all the way to the bottom of the screen instead of stopping at the navigation area, which Google calls the "chin."

Credit: Google

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Google is hosting dozens of extensions in its Chrome Web Store that perform suspicious actions on the more than 4 million devices that have installed them and that their developers have taken pains to carefully conceal.

The extensions, which so far number at least 35, use the same code patterns, connect to some of the same servers, and require the same list of sensitive systems permissions, including the ability to interact with web traffic on all URLs visited, access cookies, manage browser tabs, and execute scripts. In more detail, the permissions are:

• Tabs: manage and interact with browser windows
• Cookies: set and access stored browser cookies based on cookie or domain names (ex., "Authorization" or "all cookies for GitHub.com")
• WebRequest: intercept and modify web requests the browser makes
• Storage: ability to store small amounts of information persistently in the browser (these extensions store their command & control configuration here)
• Scripting: the ability to inject new JavaScript into webpages and manipulate the DOM
• Alarms: an internal messaging service to trigger events. The extension uses this to trigger events like a cron job, as it can allow for scheduling the heartbeat callbacks by the extension
• :: This works in tandem with other permissions like webRequest, but allows for the extension to functionally interact with all browsing activity (completely unnecessary for an extension that should just look at your installed extensions)

These sorts of permissions give extensions the ability to do all sorts of potentially abusive things and, as such, should be judiciously granted only to trusted extensions that can’t perform core functions without them.

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