"Absurd": Google, Amazon rebuked over unsupported Chromebooks still for sale

Google resisted pleas to extend the lifetime of Chromebooks set to expire as of this June and throughout the summer. Thirteen Chromebook models have met their death date since June 1 and won't receive security updates or new features from Google anymore. But that hasn't stopped the Chromebooks from being listed for sale on sites like Amazon for the same prices as before.

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The Next Big Abortion Fight

Republicans are trying to make it harder to enshrine abortion rights in Ohio. Will voters go along?For the 150 or so people who filled a church hall in Toledo, Ohio, for a Thursday-night campaign rally last week, the chant of the evening featured a profanity usually discouraged in a house of God.

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Asahi Linux's new "flagship" distro for M-series Macs is a Fedora Remix

Asahi Linux, the project aiming to bring a fully functional Linux system to Apple computers running on that company's own M-series chips, has announced that its new "flagship distro" is Fedora Asahi Remix.

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Reading in the Dog Days of Summer

This is an edition of the revamped Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.The last book I read may be the perfect summer novel, one that almost seems engineered to hit every pleasure center in the brain: Ingredients include a feel-good romance, a bucolic setting, a narrator slowly spilling a story full of bittersweet nostalgia under a beating sun, afternoon swims in a lake, and lots of ripening fruit. I’m thinking of Ann Patchett’s newest novel, Tom Lake. The book was one of my contributions to our summer reading list, which we updated this week with some new titles that are out this month.

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You Might Like

The Surprising Profundity of The Righteous Gemstones

Danny McBride’s show about a flawed evangelical family is goofy on its face but unusually eloquent on the subject of forgiveness.Though it uses the register of low comedy rather than moody character study or tragicomic caper, HBO’s The Righteous Gemstones, which follows a family of materialistic and vaguely corrupt religious showpeople, is prestige TV in the classic mold. Like Succession or Better Call Saul, it centers on a richly flawed antihero as he builds his empire, and, in the process, studies the workings of American power and money. The popularity of these shows has led some critics to suspect that closely attending to such protagonists—especially when they are lent the glamour of handsome, high-budget production values—doubles as a form of subtle approval. In applying this storytelling model to a specifically Christian milieu, though, Gemstones upends it. Its characters are also flawed, and also vividly rendered. But for their bad behavior, they expect—and are granted—absolution, a worldview that foregrounds how strange and arbitrary the act of forgiveness is in the first place.

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Putting Trump on the Couch

A new novel from the psychiatrist famous for Listening to Prozac imagines a Trumplike president’s sessions with a shrink.This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here.

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Argue smarter, not harder, with Harvard's former debate coach Bo Seo

Bo Seo, a two-time world debate champion and author, believes that our public conversations are in a state of crisis. In his book, Good Arguments, Seo aims to foster a culture of productive conversations instead of divisive disputes, emphasizing the need for training in argumentation, the importance of format in debates, and nurturing relationships beyond differences.

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Voyager 2 phones home and says everything is cool

NASA lost contact with its Voyager 2 spacecraft—the second-most distant object ever built by humans and flung into space—nearly two weeks ago due to an errant command sent to the probe. This caused Voyager to point its antenna slightly away from Earth.

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FCC prepares $75 monthly broadband subsidies for "high-cost" areas

The Federal Communications Commission is paving the way for $75 monthly subsidies to make broadband service more affordable for low-income households in certain "high-cost" areas.

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The case for "dusking": In a world of light and noise, embracing the dark can be healing

Watching dusk fall can be an act of resistance — against the absurd idea that every second must be spent usefully, against thinking in black and white, against the addiction to growth that dominates our lives. A short hour of producing or consuming nothing, not chasing likes or responses. Simply sitting and watching darkness rise, lines blur, and daily life as it unravels.Dusking, it is called. A verb stemming from a time when people preferred to leave the lights off as long as possible and wait for darkness in the early evening. It was a way to save energy but also, most importantly, a communal end to the day. A tiny rite of passage in which work was released and rest began.

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With "thanabots," ChatGPT is making it possible to talk to the dead

Since its public launch last year, the artificially intelligent chatbot ChatGPT has simultaneously wowed and frightened the world with its deep knowledge, its surprising empathy, and its undeniable potential to change the world in unforeseen, possibly miraculous or calamitous, ways. Now, it’s making it possible to digitally resurrect the dead in the form of “thanabots”: chatbots trained on data of the deceased.Developed by OpenAI, ChatGPT is an AI program called a large language model. Trained on more than 300 billion words from all sorts of sources on the Internet, ChatGPT responds to prompts from humans by predicting the word it should use next based on both its training and the prompt. The result is a stream of communication that’s both informative and human-like. ChatGPT has passed difficult tests, written scientific papers, and convinced many Microsoft scientists that it actually can understand language and utilize reason.

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GameStop, citing "regulatory uncertainty," winds down its crypto and NFT wallet

GameStop will still sell you NFTs, but you now have to store and secure them yourself. The game store is ending the wallet app it offered for iOS devices and Chrome browsers as of November 1 and is telling customers to double-check their "Secret Passphrase."

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Dude, what are those humongous plasma waves in Jupiter's atmosphere?

There are waves on Jupiter, but not exactly the kind surfers can ride. These plasma waves are much more intense than anything that crashes onto a beach.

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What Happens When a Carnival Barker Writes Intellectual History

Christopher F. Rufo is what is sometimes known as a shit-stirrer—a particular type of troublemaker whose game is to find something stinky, then waft its fumes toward the noses of those mostly likely to be outraged by it. In the past several years, controversies over race, gender, and campus leftism have ripened in part due to his publicity. Often the so-called antiracists, trans activists, and tenured radicals at the center of the controversies are self-discrediting. All Rufo has to do is quote them or post their videos on his Twitter feed—a teacher fanatically devoted to a trendy form of social justice, say, or someone preening about their identity. Even those who find their behavior outrageous often find Rufo’s tactics distasteful as well. (Many of his targets strike me as mentally unbalanced.) But the thing about shit-stirrers is that even if they are distasteful or loathsome, they’d be out of work if there were not already raw material to stir.Rufo’s new book, America’s Cultural Revolution, is in this context surprisingly hygienic. It is not about the raw material but about the manufacturers of the porcelain vessels in which it is found. He curates a gallery of activists, academics, and Communists active in the mid- and late 20th century, and he describes how their ideas slowly took over campuses, HR departments, and leftist political circles. These figures are well known, and it is ethically refreshing to see him focus his revilement on public figures in full command of their rhetoric and ideas, rather than on possibly disturbed nobodies.

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DNA Links 42,000 Living People to Enslaved and Free African Americans Buried in Maryland

The research, initiated by the local African American community, could be a roadmap for future genealogy studiesA first-of-its-kind DNA analysis has connected 27 free and enslaved African Americans buried in a Maryland cemetery to their 42,000 living relatives. The new research opens up a “historical gateway,” for Black Americans whose ancestors were stolen during the transatlantic slave trade, their family histories lost over the centuries of enslavement, reports Scott Maucione for NPR. The team published their findings Friday in the journal Science.

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Jeanette Epps will finally go to space six years after being pulled from flight

NASA confirmed on Friday that Jeanette Epps, a former CIA technology intelligence officer selected as an astronaut in 2009, will finally launch into space in early 2024 on a SpaceX flight to the International Space Station. The crew assignment comes six years after NASA pulled Epps from what would have been her first spaceflight, just months before her scheduled launch to the space station on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft.

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Cortana, once a flagship feature of Windows phones, is slowly being shut down

Microsoft is working to cram its new ChatGPT-powered Bing Chat service into every product it makes, and starting this fall it will be a built-in feature of Windows 11. It makes sense, then, that Microsoft is also working to shut down its last stab at an automated virtual assistant—the standalone Cortana app in Windows 10 and Windows 11 is going to stop working this month, and Microsoft is pointing users toward Bing Chat and Windows Copilot instead.

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Don't think twice | Psyche Films

At the age of 24, John Fudge took a violent fall while climbing the white cliffs of Dover in the south of England, splitting open his head and losing consciousness. The extent of his injuries wasn’t revealed until decades later, when doctors decided to perform a brain scan after John slipped into a deep depression. The results revealed extensive brain damage, including a progressive form of dementia. Ten years on from his diagnosis, John’s wife Geraldine compares his brain to an oak tree, its limbs of knowledge being slowly trimmed away, causing John great mental anguish. His only relief comes when he’s able to live in the moment, such as when he plays guitar and sings – his musical abilities being an as-yet untrimmed branch. Don’t Think Twice offers an insight into John’s life, including visits from Jon, a young volunteer who joins him for music sessions at home. An affecting and unusually honest portrait of dementia, the UK director Harry Shaw leaves his viewers to find relief and peace, like John, in the musical moments tucked in between difficult realities.Psyche is a digital magazine from Aeon that illuminates the human condition through psychology, philosophy and the arts.

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A Movie About an Affair That Breaks With Convention

The queer drama Passages makes poignant observations about power, desire, and the psychological contours of creative life.The protagonist of Passages, an incisive new romantic drama from the director Ira Sachs, is a man obsessed with perfecting others’ movements, even as he struggles to control his own. The story opens on a Paris film set, where a director named Tomas (played by Franz Rogowski) critiques an actor’s stiff entrance into a party scene. “This is just a transition moment, but we are turning it into a huge drama moment, because you’re not able to make some fucking simple steps down the staircase!” Tomas yells, arms motioning up and down the threshold his actor can’t seem to cross with sufficient finesse.

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A Strike Scripted by Netflix

The writers are trying to roll back changes that the streaming service already made a new normal.Three months into the Hollywood writers’ strike, there is at last some sign of movement. When the writers walked off the job on May 2, the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (the organization representing the studios) ended negotiations, and no talks have happened in the 14 weeks since. But on Tuesday, the AMPTP informed the Writers Guild of America that it wanted to meet “to discuss negotiations,” as the guild told its members. That meeting is supposed to happen today.

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The 43 Best Shows on Netflix Right Now

Streaming services are known for having award-worthy series, but also plenty of duds. Our guide to the best TV shows on Netflix is updated weekly to help you know which series you need to move to the top of your queue. They aren't all sure-fire winners—we love a good less-than-obvious gem—but they're all worth your time, trust us. Feel like you've already watched everything on this list you want to see? Try our guide to the best movies on Netflix for more options. And if you've already completed Netflix and are in need of a new challenge, check out our picks for the best shows on Hulu and the best shows on Disney+. Don't like our picks, or want to offer suggestions of your own? Head to the comments below.

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Doctors Suddenly Got Way Better at Treating Eczema

Up until a few years ago, Heather Sullivan’s 14-year-old son, Sawyer, had struggled with eczema his entire life. When he was just a baby, most of his body would be covered in intensely itchy rashes that bled and oozed when he couldn’t help but scratch. His family tried steroid creams, wet wraps, bleach baths, and all of the lotions. They tore up their carpet and replaced their sheetrock in hopes of eliminating triggers. At 15 months, he went on cyclosporine, a powerful immunosuppressant usually given to organ-transplant patients. It cleared him up, but the drug comes with potentially dangerous side effects over time. Doctors, Sullivan recalls, were “just appalled that my child would be on this amount of medicine at this age”—but his eczema came roaring back as soon as he went off it.When a new eczema drug called Dupixent finally became available to Sawyer a few years ago, his turnaround was fast and dramatic. Within a week, his itchiness and redness started calming down. He felt and looked better. The condition that had dominated their lives began to fade into the background.

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Qualcomm--one of Arm's biggest customers--starts a RISC-V joint venture

Arm is facing down its biggest competition ever, with the up-and-coming RISC-V architecture threatening to unseat it as the CPU at the center of almost every portable device. Now, one of Arm's biggest customers is trying out RISC-V, as Qualcomm is getting involved in a joint venture dedicated to the architecture.

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The Ghost of Privacy Past Haunts the Senate's AI Future

The recent burst of generative artificial intelligence is forcing the US Senate into a debate lawmakers have put off for years: privacy reform.While Americans' personal data is a commodity sold, traded, mined, and even "recycled," passing from second party to third party to digital banana stand, some senators believe your personal data is siloed off from the earth-altering AI work those companies, like OpenAI and Google, are testing, tweaking, and deploying daily.

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Ask Ethan: Is LK-99 the holy grail of superconductors?

Our lives, in the modern age, are dominated by the technologies of electronics and electrical energy. Our worldwide need for large amounts of continuous power underscores the need for increased efficiency across the board: from energy generation to transmission to consumption. In every step of that process, energy loss is a problem, as the very act of pushing electrons through a current-carrying wire is an energy-losing proposition, owing to the electrical phenomenon of resistance. There’s only one physical circumstance where current can be transmitted with no resistance: when your material is superconducting. Superconductors today have a wide variety of applications, from MRI machines to particle accelerators to magnetic fusion devices and many, many others.At present, however, the only known materials that superconduct do so under extreme conditions: very low temperatures. The “holy grail” of superconducting research is to find a material that would superconduct under normal conditions: at room temperature and ambient pressures. If we could discover one and implement it on a wide scale, we could eliminate all the problems of energy loss and stray heat: problems that every consumer and device manufacturer must presently reckon with. In late July of 2023, a claim that a new material — known as LK-99 — is, in fact, that long-sought-after room temperature superconductor. But is it real? Lots of you have written to me about it, including Rob Chapman-Smith and Clint Sears, who’ve asked:

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The O.G. Wearable Breast Pump Gains a Lot of Cool Tricks

If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. This helps support our journalism. Learn more. Please also consider subscribing to WIREDI remember seeing the first version of Willow’s wearable breast pumps at CES 2017. It was one of the buzziest devices to come out of the show, and while I was years from ever needing one, I was thrilled to see something that would make future motherhood a little easier.

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The Problem With 'Why Do People Live in Phoenix?'

In Phoenix, a high of 108 degrees Fahrenheit now somehow counts as a respite. On Monday, America’s hottest major city ended its ominous streak of 31 straight days in which temperatures crested past 110. The toll of this heat—a monthly average of 102.7 degrees in July—has been brutal. One woman was admitted to a hospital’s burn unit after she fell on the pavement outside her home, and towering saguaros have dropped arms and collapsed. Over the past month, hospitals filling up with burn and heat-stroke victims have reached capacities not seen since the height of the pandemic.“Why would anyone live in Phoenix?” You might ask that question to the many hundreds of thousands of new residents who have made the Arizona metropolis America’s fastest-growing city. Last year, Maricopa County, where Phoenix sits, gained more residents than any other county in the United States—just as it did in 2021, 2019, 2018, and 2017.

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Fisker Shows Off 4 New EVs, Including a Pickup Truck and a Convertible

Fresh from letting us take a first drive in its Ocean midsize electric SUV as well as making its first customer deliveries of the car, Fisker has unveiled its EV lineup for the next few years.At an event in Huntington Beach, California, on yesterday night, the company revealed four new models that will be coming soon: the Alaska pickup truck, the Ronin sports car, a final design for its previously announced subcompact Pear, and a rugged iteration of the Ocean, the Force E.

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Photos of the Week:

Widespread flooding in China, a horse cart race in India, drone training in Ukraine, a wildfire in the Mojave National Preserve, a water polo match in Japan, a trampoline championship in England, a flooded St Mark’s Square in Venice, an air show in Ireland, and much more A member of the Crane Valley Hotshots works to light a backfire as the York Fire burns in the Mojave National Preserve on July 30, 2023. The York Fire has burned over 70,000 acres, and has crossed the state line from California into Nevada. #

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Grappling With Climate Change and Overtourism, Italy Is Betting Big on Train Travel

Italy has announced a host of new trains designed primarily for tourists—who are swarming the country in increasingly unmanageable numbers.The project will introduce trains that carry visitors to “well-known destinations and destinations outside the classic circuits” alike, according to a statement from Ferrovie dello Stato Italiane (FS), Italy’s state-owned railway operator, per Google Translate.

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California's Waves Are Getting Bigger With Climate Change

Storms that produce massive swells are also occurring more frequently as the planet warms, a new study suggestsWaves along California's Central Coast are getting bigger as human-caused climate change warms the planet, according to a new study published this week in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans.

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Western Diplomats Need to Stop Whining About Ukraine

Allies can be exasperating. But try being invaded by your neighbor and lectured by everyone else.“The history of all coalitions is a tale of the reciprocal complaints of allies.” Thus said Winston Churchill, who knew whereof he spoke. This summer of discontent has been one punctuated by complaints: from Ukrainian officials desperate for weapons, and from Western diplomats and soldiers who think that the Ukrainians are ungrateful for the tanks, training, and other goods they have received.

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Researchers found the image using infrared reflectography, and they think it may depict the artist’s wife, GeorgetteRenÃ© Magritte's art is famously enigmatic: The Belgian Surrealist is best known for paintings like The Treachery of Images, a depiction of a smoking pipe with the caption that reads, "This is not a pipe." FromÂ hooded lovers toÂ food with eyes, Magritte made art meant to disrupt and distort.

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The Lunar Codex Will Archive the Work of 30,000 Artistsâon the Moon

When Samuel Peralta contacts artists about putting their work on the moon, they don't always believe him."I say, 'I'd like to put your art on the moon,' and they think this is some sort of a scam," the semiretired physicist and author tells theÂ New York Times' J. D. Biersdorfer.

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How Working with Competitors Made Jio a Telecom Giant

Jio Platforms’ unique experiment of co-opetition with global tech giants combined with its local prowess allows it to address an enormous market of price-sensitive customers. Thanks to its sheer scale, innovation, and unique collaborations, it can offer integrated solutions for retail, grocery, fintech, medical, agricultural, e-commerce, and e-payment needs, in addition to telecom services and home entertainment — at affordable prices. The resulting knowledge, access, business possibilities, and even entertainment opportunities could transform the lives of over one billion people in India. In this article, the authors unpack why Jio has been so successful and what lessons we can learn from its evolution.More than a traditional telecom business, India’s Jio Platforms is proving to be a disruptor. Jio was launched as a “freemium” service, offering free internet services to price-sensitive Indian customers to increase the adoption rate and scale up the market. Previously, Indian customers, whose average income is about $150 per month, had never had access to such a high-speed internet — bundled with so many apps and digital solutions — at such low prices.

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11 of the best TV shows to watch in August

This coming-of-age comedy about four friends on an Oklahoma reservation, made with an Indigenous cast and crew, has been acclaimed for its authenticity and its mix of wit and piercing realism. The third and final season picks up where the previous one ended, with Elora (Devery Jacobs), Bear (D'Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai), Willie Jack (Paulina Alexis) and Cheese (Lane Factor) in California, honouring their late friend Daniel's dream of visiting the state. They make their way back home, with their usual misadventures – they can steal with the best intentions – and the occasional encounter with a spirit. Sterlin Harjo, who created the show with Taika Waititi, told Variety earlier this year, "I wanted to make a show that was very culturally specific but could resonate with the world". He has accomplished that. His show joins Barry and Succession as another series whose creators chose to wrap up while it was still at its best.The endearing British series that became a global hit returns, picking up the blossoming romance between Charlie (Joe Locke) and his classmate Nick (Kit Connor), who came out as bisexual to his wonderfully supportive mother (Olivia Colman) at the end of the first season. Now Nick texts, with typical teenaged confusion, "Why is being out so complicated?" The new season promises to give us more about Charlie and Nick's friends, as well as a class trip to Paris. But the show, based on a webcomic and graphic novels by Alice Oseman, should retain its tone of matter-of-fact acceptance of its LGBTQ+ characters, as well as its warmth. The Guardian said the first season was "adorable", and Digital Spy, reviewing the second, called the series "the cosy comfort blanket of teen shows", adding "we don't mean that as a bad thing". In a television landscape where the troubled teens like those on Euphoria often dominate, who couldn't use a charming comfort blanket?

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