Hi! On second Forts… Epic Games’ hit multiplayer survival game Fortnite just landed back on the US App Store after an almost five-year ban, thanks to a new ruling in the studio’s long-running legal battle with Apple. Today we’re exploring:

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Americans are increasingly looking up “how-tos” for basic life skills

Plucked from the same millennial handbook as “Live, laugh, love” and “But first, coffee,” anyone who went to the laundromat or filed their taxes in the early 2010s might be familiar with the adage, “Adulting is hard.”

However, for any number of reasons — from confidence in the future dwindling to losing hope about owning a home — “adulting” may have only gotten harder since then.

Concurrent with a culture where most basic needs can be instantly met for a nominal fee, everyday know-how seems to now be viewed as relatively inessential for the average American to learn at the outset of adulthood.

Skill, baby, skill

But when adults do inevitably need to know how to change a tire, or tie a tie properly, where do they turn? As reported by Axios on Sunday, Google is increasingly being used as the world’s biggest “Adulting 101” class.

Indeed, looking at search data from Google, queries regarding rudimentary cleaning techniques (like using a washing machine), basic financial knowledge (annual tax filings, using credit cards), and day-to-day practical skills (like using a hammer, which apparently needs explaining) have all reached record highs in recent months.

And it’s not just Google: YouTube and TikTok creators that offer life lessons — such as paternal guide “Dad, how do I?”, and countless how-to cleaning accounts — have boomed in popularity. Prompts on ChatGPT, which just last month hit an all-time high of 780 million visits in the US, also often revolve around tackling pillars of adult admin, like managing personal finances.

Axios suggested that the reduction in practical skills training in US schools could be driving the trend, with home economics classes on the decline. Either that, or people simply don’t want to ask their parents or teachers how to do things anymore when the internet is right there.

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Tariffs sent smartphone shipments from China down 72% last month

Smartphone shipments from China got seriously hung up in April, with exports dropping 72% last month as the (now paused) reciprocal tariffs between the two nations shocked some parts of the international supply chain to a standstill.

Immobile

According to Chinese customs data and numbers from Trade Data Monitor, cited by Bloomberg, the country sent $689 million worth of smartphones to the US in April. That figure sat at $2.46 billion the month before and $2.27 billion for the same month last year. In fact, China’s smartphone shipment value hasn’t sunk this low since August 2011, when Apple fans were still getting to grips with the first iPhone to feature FaceTime, and the American view of the East Asian nation was altogether rosier.

The monthly drop-off far outweighed the wider 21% decline seen across all Chinese exports to the US in April, with laptop and storage device shipments also showing sharp declines. Given how America has come to depend on China for its electric goods more and more — electronics was the biggest category of Chinese imports to the US last year, at $124 billion — the April figures could serve as a pretty stark wake-up call.  

Still, while the precarious world of trade war suspensions and looming tariffs has already been wreaking havoc on America’s supply of iPhones and other devices, some experts can’t see giants like Apple shifting to full American-made mode in earnest any time soon.

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Elon Musk probably won’t be dropping $290 million on next year’s midterms

In an interview with Bloomberg yesterday, the Elon Musk revealed that he’ll cut back on political spending going forward, answering, “I think I’ve done enough,” when pressed further.

The Tesla chief said a lot across the 40-minute conversation at the Qatar Economic Forum, from pointing out that he can’t be CEO if he’s dead to asserting that the EV giant’s slumping sales have “already turned around.”

While Musk didn’t completely rule out a return to political spending in the future, it seems unlikely that he’ll match the bumper $292 million bill he racked up between 2023-24.

It only took the South African billionaire about six months to become the biggest donor of the cycle, after his first $5 million contribution to America PAC landed on July 3, per data from OpenSecrets.

According to the nonprofit’s list of top political donors from 2023-24, all of Musk’s donations went to Republican causes and campaigns, like the majority of the contributors on the ranking. Indeed, Michael Bloomberg and Facebook and Asana cofounder Dustin Moskovitz were the only majority Democrat donors to break the top 10.

Along with his recent shift away from DOGE responsibilities, Musk’s political spending pullback will likely be music to the ears of stakeholders at his companies, whose concerns about the CEO’s attentions have been well reported.

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Off the charts: Options trading and retail involvement in which headline-grabbing health stock has soared in the last week? [Answer below].

Answer here.

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