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 S3What Would Society Look Like if Extreme Wealth Were Impossible? - The Atlantic (No paywall)   Endowing an underfunded medical school is clearly a better use of money than buying yet another super-yacht. But it’s also staggering that a decision as society-shaping as dissolving the debt load of thousands of potential doctors could depend on the whims of one individual, and that one person has the resources to implement such a policy on their own, needing no one else’s input or approval.Gottesman’s fortune is comparatively modest next to those of the growing group of ultrawealthy individuals. Her estimated $3 billion isn’t even high enough to crack the top 100 wealthiest on the Forbes list, where characters such as Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Bernard Arnault cavort in the 12 figures. If Gottesman has the power to change so many lives, the power held by those with 10 or 50 times her fortune is hard for the mind to even grasp. Maybe we should be asking whether she—or anyone else—should have that much wealth at all.
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Editor's Note: And it's that government and its citizens on which any fortune depends. "Take any multimillionaire or billionaire, and put them on a desert island," Robeyns writes. "They still have all the same talents and personal traits as before. How rich could they become? Not very rich, obviously."
S1Lead keeps showing up where it's not supposed to be  Lead might seem like something we left behind in a past era. By the 1990s, nearly every country had eliminated leaded gasoline, once easily the most ubiquitous source of lead pollution when we spewed it into the open air. The US and Europe also instituted more stringent rules for another common source of exposure, lead paint, by greatly restricting or outright banning its use. You can see the improvements in the numbers: From 1978 to 1991, the average level of lead in the blood for Americans younger than 75 dropped by 78 percent.Lead is linked to a wide range of neurological and development problems, and exposure is especially dangerous for children. Research has found kids with elevated levels of lead in their blood experience a range of effects, from speech and hearing problems to learning and behavioral issues. They develop more slowly, physically and mentally.
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Editor's Note: When the applesauce ingredients passed through Ecuador, they were contaminated there with lead before they moved for sale to the US, where there have been more than 500 confirmed or suspected cases of acute lead poisoning related to the recalled products. The FDA believes the lead may have been added intentionally for economic reasons. The Ecuadorian government has named one individual as a suspect in its own investigation.
S2So You Think You've Been Gaslit - The New Yorker (No paywall)  When Leah started dating her first serious boyfriend, as a nineteen-year-old sophomore at Ohio State, she had very little sense that sex was supposed to feel good. (Leah is not her real name.) In the small town in central Ohio where she grew up, sex ed was basically like the version she remembered from the movie "Mean Girls": "Don't have sex, because you will get pregnant and die."With her college boyfriend, the sex was rough from the beginning. There was lots of choking and hitting; he would toss her around the bed "like a rag doll," she told me, and then assure her, "This is how everyone has sex." Because Leah had absorbed an understanding of sex in which the woman was supposed to be largely passive, she told herself that her role was to be "strong enough" to endure everything that felt painful and scary. When she was with other people, she found herself explaining away bruises and other marks on her body as the results of accidents. Once, she said to her boyfriend, "I guess you like it rough," and he said, "No, all women like it like this." And she thought, "O.K., then I guess I don't know shit about myself."
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Editor's Note: The term "gaslighting" comes from the title of George Cukor's film "Gaslight," from 1944, a noirish drama that tracks the psychological trickery of a man, Gregory, who spends every night searching for a set of lost jewels in the attic of a town house he shares with his wife, Paula, played by Ingrid Bergman.
S4Ro Khanna Wants to Be the Future of the Democratic Party - The Atlantic (No paywall)  In January, as the 2024 primary season got under way, Representative Ro Khanna stood in the middle of a spacious New Hampshire living room and marveled at the dozens of Democrats who had crammed in. “What enthusiasm for President Biden!” Khanna said as the crowd cheered. The California progressive wasn’t in the land of would-be presidents to promote himself—at least not directly. He came here to boost his party’s flagging 81-year-old incumbent.Khanna represents Silicon Valley, but he’s lost count of how many times he’s been to New Hampshire; a local Democrat introduced him to the room as “the fifth member of our congressional delegation.” He told me he initially felt “sheepish” about coming back after he stumped here for Bernie Sanders four years ago, worried that people would assume he wanted to run for president. He’s gotten over that.
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Editor's Note: He wants to marry the forward-looking spirit of the companies founded in and around his district - Google, Apple, Tesla - with the traditional middle-class values of his suburban upbringing in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. And he wants to inspire a "new economic patriotism" to rebuild America's industrial base with climate-friendly technology - a project that he hopes will bring manufacturing jobs back to the Rust Belt, and working-class voters back to the Democratic Party.
S5How an iPhone Powered by Google's Gemini AI Might Work - WIRED (No paywall)  Apple and Google are reportedly in cahoots to integrate features from Google's Gemini generative AI service into iOS. Bloomberg broke the news, which was later corroborated by The New York Times. If the deal pans out, it will be a huge collaboration between two tech giants who have long duked it out in the hardware and software space.There's also the possibility that the deal could fall through, seeing as how the hype around such a collaboration is drumming up some unwanted attention. "In the past, this leak would have killed the deal," says Michael Gartenberg, a technology analyst and former director of marketing at Apple. "The first rule of doing a deal with Apple is don't talk about Apple."
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Editor's Note: Image creation capabilities will probably be on the table, like something generated with Dall-E or Midjourney. Moorhead suggests Apple could even incorporate this kind of feature into Siri, such as using a voice command to ask the digital assistant to 'make that background blue' or to 'make this picture a sunny day,' and then see the results right there in your photo roll.
S6The Incognito Mode Myth Has Fully Unraveled - WIRED (No paywall)  Google has agreed to delete “billions of data records” the company collected while users browsed the web using Incognito mode, according to documents filed in federal court in San Francisco on Monday. The agreement, part of a settlement in a class action lawsuit filed in 2020, caps off years of disclosures about Google’s practices that shed light on how much data the tech giant siphons from its users—even when they’re in private-browsing mode.Under the terms of the settlement, Google must further update the Incognito mode “splash page” that appears anytime you open an Incognito mode Chrome window after previously updating it in January. The Incognito splash page will explicitly state that Google collects data from third-party websites “regardless of which browsing or browser mode you use,” and stipulate that “third-party sites and apps that integrate our services may still share information with Google,” among other changes. Details about Google’s private-browsing data collection must also appear in the company’s privacy policy.
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Editor's Note: Critics of Incognito, a staple of the Chrome browser since 2008, say that, at best, the protections it offers fall flat in the face of the sophisticated commercial surveillance bearing down on most users today; at worst, they say, the feature fills people with a false sense of security, helping companies like Google passively monitor millions of users who've been duped into thinking they're browsing alone.
S7Editor's Note: Until recent years, running a furnace on electricity was considered too expensive. But electricity prices have become more competitive, so glass makers are looking at making the switch.
S8Why Northern Lights viewing is about to get more magical  Before satellite technology brought us answers, the Northern Lights were a mysterious and unexplained phenomena, long woven into the legends of Arctic communities. Occurring in the polar regions, this colourful light show is caused when particles from the Sun hit the Earth's atmosphere. Around this year or next, it is anticipated that the solar cycle will peak and a period of more intense and complex Northern Lights will follow.
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S9AI could make better beer. Here's how - MIT Technology Review (No paywall)  What if artificial intelligence could help lighten the load? New AI models can accurately identify not only how highly consumers will rate a certain Belgian beer, but also what kinds of compounds brewers should be adding to make the beer taste better, according to research published in Nature Communications today.The researchers then combined these detailed analyses with a trained tasting panel’s assessments of the beers—including hop, yeast, and malt flavors—and 180,000 reviews of the same beers taken from the popular online platform RateBeer, sampling scores for the beers’ taste, appearance, aroma, and overall quality.
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Editor's Note: To train their AI models, the researchers spent five years chemically analyzing 250 commercial beers, measuring each beer's chemical properties and flavor compounds - which dictate how it'll taste. S10How ASML took over the chipmaking chessboard - MIT Technology Review (No paywall)  On a drab Monday morning in San Jose, California, at the drab San Jose Convention Center, attendees of the SPIE Advanced Lithography and Patterning Conference filed into the main ballroom until all the seats were taken and the crowd began to line the walls along the back and sides of the room. The convention brings together people who work in the chip industry from all over the world. And on this cool February morning, they had gathered to hear tech industry luminaries extol the late Gordon Moore, Intel’s cofounder and first CEO. Craig Barrett, also a former CEO of Intel, paid tribute, as did the legendary engineer Burn-Jeng Lin, a pioneer of immersion lithography, a patterning technology that enabled the chip industry to continue moving forward about 20 years ago. Mostly the speeches tended toward reflections on Moore himself—testaments to his genius, accomplishments, and humanity. But the last speaker of the morning, Martin van den Brink, took a different tone, more akin to a victory lap than a eulogy. Van den Brink is the outgoing co-president and CTO of ASML, the Dutch company that makes the machines that in turn let manufacturers produce the most advanced computer chips in the world.
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Editor's Note: Van den Brink says the way world leaders are now discussing lithography was unimaginable when the company began: "Our prime minister was sitting in front of Xi Jinping, not because he was from Holland - who would give a shit about Holland. He was there because we are making EUV."The real question, perhaps, is not who will make the machines, but whether Moore's Law will hold at all. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has already declared it dead. But when asked what he thought might eventually cause Moore's Law to finally stall out, van den Brink rejected the premise entirely. S11Silicon Valley used to reward innovation. Now it strives to sabotage it. - Business Insider (No paywall)  Received wisdom in the tech world is that big, legacy companies are bound by inertia. The more established they are, the more they get set in their ways — and the more vulnerable they are to disruption by a nimble startup. Silicon Valley was founded on the principle that newcomers can move fast and break things — leading to world-transforming innovations.For the most part, though, that's not how it works anymore. Last year, a couple of economists found that venture-capital-backed startups almost never lead to a new company listing on a public stock exchange. They don't replace the tech giants — they just get bought by the tech giants. That's been true in Silicon Valley for at least a decade. And the vast majority of startups have been acquired by the same five companies: Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, and Microsoft.
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Editor's Note: Co-opting startups is a clever strategy. It's way easier - and less obvious - than buying up a competitor and shutting it down. And if it doesn't work, the nuclear option is always available. "If all those other strategies fail - investments, taking a seat on the board, playing hardball with data networks, and regulation - if none of them prevents a competitor from growing, then the tech companies can buy it off," Wansley says. "It's a little subtle, right?" S12The soft life: why millennials are quitting the rat race  Rose Gardner did everything right. Straight As at school and college, a first-class degree from a top university, a master’s. She got a job in publishing and rose through the ranks of some of the industry’s most prestigious companies before getting a job with a media organisation. Eventually, she bought her own flat in London.It wasn’t that there was anything particularly bad about the job, it was more that as time went on, she says she didn’t feel driven by the consumerism that the companies she worked for depended on. She’d lost her sense of materialism and didn’t get much from going to bars, clubs or parties. On top of that, she had attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, which made working in an open-plan office with a strict 9-5 policy incredibly hard. Gardner, 42, works best in isolation, early in the morning and in the evening, and she didn’t feel her workplace was prepared to accommodate that. Pushing through her afternoon “crashes” for years had become exhausting. So, five years ago, she had what she called her “Jerry Maguire moment”. She quit. She sold her flat and moved back to her parents’ house in Wiltshire, where she now works part-time in hospitality and handcrafts jewellery and ceramics from a shed in the garden. She has little income, but also very few outgoings.
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Editor's Note: .I remember walking into my flat, and this might make me sound so ungrateful, but I felt scared,. she says. .I knew I was going to have to keep working at this job that I hated to pay the mortgage.. S13Etiquette as a Luxury Brand-Building Tool  On 19 January 2024, André Terrail, owner and CEO of the legendary restaurant La Tour d’Argent in Paris, was a happy man. The sale of part of the tableware and elements of the historic décor of his establishment raised over €720,000 in just a few hours. What motivated people to obtain parts of a restaurant? Buyers aimed to acquire a piece of the magic the brand built over time through etiquette. Let’s take a step back. A few centuries ago, every European court had its own rules, whether Tudor etiquette in England or that of Louis XIV in France, to cite just two examples. These rules precisely governed social relationships, rituals and dress codes. Beyond the royal houses, they influenced, through a rapid trickle-down effect, the daily life of European high society.
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S14Why New York Restaurants Are Going Members-Only - The New Yorker (No paywall)  On a recent Tuesday evening at 4 Charles Prime Rib, in the West Village, shortly after my party of four had settled in for dinner, a man who bore the gentle air of owning the place arrived at a neighboring table. As our server delivered our cocktails, she gestured at him and said, with a wink, “This is Gary. He’s a regular. I’m so sorry you have to sit next to him. Let me know if you want me to put up a curtain to block him out.” Everyone laughed. “Gary’s full of wisdom,” the maître d’ added as he passed by. Gary—round but trim, with a shaved, shiny pate and a distinct Long Island accent—smirked and said, “Yeah, like, drink a Martini if you’re driving, and tequila if you’re not.”Gary is more than a regular at 4 Charles; he’s one of only a few people who can get a table there at all. The restaurant is ostensibly open to the public, but if you’re not Gary—or Taylor Swift, whom Gary told me he’d been seated next to a few nights prior—you’re probably not getting in. According to more than one thread on Reddit, your chances of booking a reservation even the instant a batch of them is released on Resy, at 9 A.M. each day, are slim to none. By the restaurant’s calculations, you’d be competing with anywhere from nine hundred to fifteen hundred other hopefuls. Moreover, nearly half the tables in the very small dining room are already reserved, for “standing guests,” like Gary.
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Editor's Note: Chodorow is wary of club-ifying his own businesses, despite the clear financial incentives. .The premise is so uninteresting to me.to go hang out with the same three hundred rich people for the next ten years?. he told me, at Rao.s. It was a funny thing to say, given where we were, but part of that restaurant.s appeal is a lack of conspicuous status markers. S15Editor's Note: As one senior executive at a global auto company told me, if the Chinese sell an EV that is just as good as a western car, but cheaper, that is one thing. But if they sell a better car that also undercuts the west, it.s impossible to catch up. S16The new science of death: There's something happening in the brain that makes no sense  Patient One was 24 years old and pregnant with her third child when she was taken off life support. It was 2014. A couple of years earlier, she had been diagnosed with a disorder that caused an irregular heartbeat, and during her two previous pregnancies she had suffered seizures and faintings. Four weeks into her third pregnancy, she collapsed on the floor of her home. Her mother, who was with her, called 911. By the time an ambulance arrived, Patient One had been unconscious for more than 10 minutes. Paramedics found that her heart had stopped.After being driven to a hospital where she couldn't be treated, Patient One was taken to the emergency department at the University of Michigan. There, medical staff had to shock her chest three times with a defibrillator before they could restart her heart. She was placed on an external ventilator and pacemaker, and transferred to the neurointensive care unit, where doctors monitored her brain activity. She was unresponsive to external stimuli, and had a massive swelling in her brain. After she lay in a deep coma for three days, her family decided it was best to take her off life support. It was at that point - after her oxygen was turned off and nurses pulled the breathing tube from her throat - that Patient One became one of the most intriguing scientific subjects in recent history.
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S17S18S19 Solving Real User Problems With Generative AI: Slack's Jackie Rocca  The spring 2024 issue's special report looks at how to take advantage of market opportunities in the digital space, and provides advice on building culture and friendships at work; maximizing the benefits of LLMs, corporate venture capital initiatives, and innovation contests; and scaling automation and digital health platform.The spring 2024 issue's special report looks at how to take advantage of market opportunities in the digital space, and provides advice on building culture and friendships at work; maximizing the benefits of LLMs, corporate venture capital initiatives, and innovation contests; and scaling automation and digital health platform.Like many product leaders in the technology space, Jackie Rocca took a somewhat circuitous path to that role. After beginning her career in management consulting with Bain, she earned her MBA at Stanford and then worked at Google, where she helped launch YouTube TV. Now, she serves as vice president of product at Slack, where she focuses on the collaboration platform's Slack AI product.
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S20PlayStation Plus Just Quietly Released the Best Marvel Game You've Never Played  Part tactical RPG and part deckbuilder, here's why this overlooked title is more than just another licensed superhero game.No one would blame you if you said you were sick of superhero games. Comic book universes are inescapable in today's pop culture climate, and it's not always clear which game adaptations are worth playing. After all, for every Spider-Man 2, there's a Suicide Squad.
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S219 Years Later, Marvel Still Hasn't Outgrown Its Worst Instincts  After fighting tooth and nail for more inclusive stories, the MCU could find itself right where it started. It took an entire decade for Marvel’s Cinematic Universe to put a female hero center stage. As the story goes, that was largely due to skepticism from Ike Perlmutter, then-CEO of Marvel Entertainment. Perlmutter served as the head of Marvel through its acquisition with Disney in 2009, and oversaw development on every film from Iron Man to Avengers: Age of Ultron. He was also infamously averse to the idea of diversity and inclusion, for the fear that a female action hero (or anyone that wasn’t a straight, white man, honestly) would fail to turn a profit.
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S2240 Years Ago, Two Incredible Lost 'Dune' Scripts Almost Beat Star Wars to the Punch  Imagine if the director of the James Bond smash-hits Dr. No, From Russia With Love, and Thunderball directed a Dune movie in 1974. Now imagine that same Dune movie, which would be fairly faithful to the book and designed for mainstream audiences, hit theaters in 1975, two full years before Star Wars. In 1972 and 1973, two different screen treatments were written with this exact goal in mind. And both predate the bonkers attempt from Alejandro Jodorowsky and the David Lynch scripts by years. Outside of the more infamous attempts fans have heard about, there have been many attempts to turn Dune into a movie over the decades. And among many of those efforts, these two screen treatments stand out as being the most viable of all the never-made Dune movies.
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S23This Map Shows How Climate Change Has Already Impacted Your Garden  With the arrival of spring in North America, many people are gravitating to the gardening and landscaping section of home improvement stores, where displays are overstocked with eye-catching seed packs, and benches are filled with potted annuals and perennials.But some plants that once thrived in your yard may not flourish there now. To understand why, look to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s recent update of its plant hardiness zone map, which has long helped gardeners and growers figure out which plants are most likely to thrive in a given location.
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S24iOS 18 Could Take the AI Craze Mainstream  AI is the buzzword in tech right now, but Apple’s ecosystem is likely what will introduce millions to automated and generative AI.The stakes for Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference have never been higher. Well, at least not since last year, when the iPhone maker proposed the Apple Vision Pro as the next generation of computing. But the expected flavor of this year’s conference is different. It’s finally Apple’s turn to say something about artificial intelligence.
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S25Hands Down the 70 Weirdest, Most Clever Things on Amazon Under $35  If you’ve ever been scrolling and wondered how people find those clever products that instantly go viral, this is the list you’ve been hoping for. These 70 weird and clever things on Amazon range from a tap-to-dim nightlight shaped like an exhausted duck to a gadget that helps you carry in all the groceries at once. Not only are these the hands-down weirdest products out there, but they’re also all under $35 — with items starting at just $5.This squishy little night light looks like an adorable duck that has plopped itself on your bedside table. The quirky design will look trendy in any room, and it comes with three dimmer settings to make it even more versatile. Simply tap this USB-rechargeable duck to control how bright it is on your nightstand.
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S26The Year's Best Superhero Movie Delivers the Shakeup the Genre Needs  The People’s Joker accidentally stumbled into a real-life superhero movie plot. A semi-autobiographical, low-budget Joker parody movie borne out of the early days of the pandemic, it became an unlikely underdog in a battle against a fearsome Hollywood titan when Warner Bros. sent a concerning letter that led to the title being pulled right before its Toronto International Film Festival premiere. But two years after The People’s Joker’s very existence was threatened, it has triumphed, with a surprisingly wide release courtesy of distributor Altered Innocence. But while its behind-the-scenes drama may make a classic superhero story, the actual movie itself is anything but traditional. Its distinct style and coherent worldbuilding make for a movie that can’t really be compared to anything else, despite the fact so much of it is borrowed from the works of Batmen past — and it’s exactly what jaded superhero fans need to witness.
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S27You're Probably Drinking Too Much Water -- Here's Why  Staying hydrated is a Sisyphean task. The water bottle craze only exemplifies the never-ending demand for drinking enough water. While the axiom that everyone needs to drink 8 ounces of water 8 times a day has been debunked many times over, nobody will dispute that getting enough water is vital for everything from good bowel movements to proper body temperature and healthy joints.But there’s a way to hydrate without lugging around a trendy Stanley tumbler. Tweaking the way you eat and adding certain foods accounts for more water than you might realize.
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S28S29Exploding Stars Made of Dark Matter Could Finally Confirm a 47-Year-Old Hypothesis  Dark matter is a ghostly substance that astronomers have failed to detect for decades, yet which we know has an enormous influence on normal matter in the universe, such as stars and galaxies. Through the massive gravitational pull it exerts on galaxies, it spins them up, gives them an extra push along their orbits, or even rips them apart.Like a cosmic carnival mirror, it also bends the light from distant objects to create distorted or multiple images, a process which is called gravitational lensing.
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S30Peacock Just Quietly Added 2024's Most Underrated Sci-Fi Movie  There are some movies that just don’t do well in theaters, but find the audience they are meant for later in their life cycles. These cult classics often go on to have more relevance than traditionally “successful” movies. A great example is Jennifer’s Body, written by Juno writer Diablo Cody and directed by Karyn Kusama. It had an underwhelming box office release in 2010 but has gone on to become a feminist cult classic with a second life on streaming. This year, a spiritual successor to Jennifer’s Body is following a similar path, releasing earlier this year to underwhelming reviews and even more underwhelming box office returns. But thankfully, Lisa Frankenstein can still find the audience that would appreciate its twisted, gothic teenage love story for what it is: a movie for the weirdos.
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S31Xbox Game Pass Just Quietly Released the Most Satisfying First-Person Shooter  This underrated title combines everything fun about the first-person shooters of yesteryear. And it’s on Game Pass now.If one were to ask my grandmother “What are video games like?” she’d probably described a bloody romp through corridors and mazes, one with an endless variety of unsightly demons and heretics rushing a macho, armored-clad protagonist whose muffled, borderline blasphemous declarations about a fictional holy emperor would have left her shaking her head in confused disapproval.
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S32Why 'Call of Duty: Warzone Mobile' Doesn't Do Cross Play  Verdansk is back, baby. Activision’s senior vice president of mobile, Chris Plummer, tells me about the iconic, blood-streaked map — as he simultaneously snipes at players from Chile during a game of Warzone on his iPhone, pre-launch. Verdansk’s fame is as well-known as the classic Fortnite map is, from the chaos of Tilted Towers to the slightly more relaxing Loot Lake. So for Warzone’s mobile launch, Activision is reviving the beloved, easily recognizable locales.“One of the things that made Warzone successful when it first launched is the map for Verdansk – that was the debut map. It’s got this legendary status in the community. It has a very unique design, where, first of all, it’s massive, but it has these points of interest that are nicely positioned,” Plummer says. “You can really just look around and see everything, like, oh there’s a dam over here, there’s downtown over there, oh there’s the airport, there’s the hospital. The really, really well known Superstore. And if you’re not familiar with it, you drop in and can get to know your way around quite easily.”
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S3330 Years Later, the Writer Behind TV's Most Mind-Bending Sci-Fi Show Is Ready to Move On  The creator of the seminal sci-fi series has officially parted ways with his claim to fame and returned to his original passion: art.There’s a reason why The X-Files never continued beyond its 2016 revival. Long-term fans didn’t take well to the reboot of the ‘90s classic, but producers at Fox knew what they had. The X-Files in its prime was the rare left-of-field procedural, one that would go on to inspire everything from Supernatural and True Detective to Breaking Bad and Homeland. It would also make the studio exorbitantly rich, so Fox was prepared to greenlight the series for another season, ratings be damned. It was Chris Carter, the creator and longtime steward of The X-Files, who put his foot down.
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S34This Tiny Robot Wants To Turn Your Phone Into A Desktop R2-D2  At-home robots with wheels have had a rough go. Amazon’s Astro. Samsung’s Ballie, whatever the hell this thing is — none of them, even those backed by tech giants, have taken off. But maybe it’s because they missed the point — maybe it’s not a robot we want, but a pair of slick wheels for our phones.If anything I just described sounds cool to you, I’m happy to introduce Looi, a very strange accessory that turns your smartphone into a “desktop robot.”
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S353 Years Later, the Oldest Sci-Fi Show is Already Revisiting a Canon-Shattering Event  Doctor Who has done a lot in its six decades. Rebooting the universe? No problem. Completely rewriting the origin story of the Doctor? That’s child’s play. But after a while, it can be hard to come up with new ideas. The Doctor is over a billion years old — saving the Earth or any other planet is now his bread and butter. In the trailer for Season 14 (confusingly called Season 1 in the US), we finally get a glimpse of what the next era of Doctor Who looks like — and it seems oddly familiar. In the new trailer, we see clips from episodes that have been teased since the season was announced, like the Beatles-themed episode (which appears to contain evil manifestations of music and The Doctor singing) and the Bridgerton-themed episode, but there are also some great reveals, like an entire episode about talking Space Babies. Check out the full trailer below.
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S36Xbox Game Pass Just Quietly Released a Great Mystery-Thriller You Can Play In One Night  There’s nothing like a road trip to really test the strength of a relationship. Spending hours together in a car watching the scenery roll by can be a great bonding experience, but it can, just as easily, end with both parties needing a long break from each other. Add to that the stress of moving and the passing of a loved one, and Open Roads’ mother-daughter protagonists seem primed for a bumpy ride. But while Open Roads ultimately takes too safe of a path to its conclusion, its two leads and a wealth of well-observed details of the difficulties of daily life still make it a trip worth taking. Open Roads started development at Fullbright, creator of Gone Home and Tacoma, but after developers alleged mistreatment by co-founder Steve Gaynor, some of the developers spun off a group simply called The Open Roads Team to finish the project. There’s a clear shared lineage to the team’s previous games, especially Gone Home, running through Open Roads.
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S3721 Years Later, An Underrated Body-Swap Remake Is Getting A Surprising Sequel -- With A Twist  When you think of iconic sci-fi fantasy, Freaky Friday is likely the last movie on your mind. But Disney’s 2003 remake of the classic story has become pretty seminal in its own right. Whether you know the film’s most iconic lines by heart (“Oh, I’m like the Crypt-Keeper!”) or recognize its importance to the body-swap subgenre, Freaky Friday is a hard film to forget.Still — and not to make anyone feel old — there’s an entire generation that only has a faint understanding of the film’s impact. Fortunately, the same might also be said for the millennials who first saw Jamie Lee Curtis switch bodies with Lindsay Lohan 21 years ago. Their Freaky Friday was one of many: The story has been repackaged for one generation after another, from its first film adaptation in 1976 to a musical in 2016. A 2020s reboot would effectively be a no-brainer, but Disney is actually going the sequel route instead, reuniting Curtis and Lohan after two decades apart.
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S38A New Game Boy Advance SP-Inspired Handheld That Can Play Dreamcast, DS, and PSP Games Is Coming  Gaming handhelds, especially restored/modded Game Boys and lookalikes, are having their moment, but it’s still rare to find an affordable remake of the classic Game Boy Advance SP. To address that, Anbernic may be working on a handheld that can live up to the glory we saw with Nintendo’s 2003 clamshell.A leaked video from X user GameboyJuntaro shows off what appears to be the unannounced Anbernic RG35XX SP. As the name suggests, it seems to be based off the Game Boy Advance SP design and has a better CPU that lets it emulate more demanding games than Pokémon Ruby and Emerald.
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S39'Doctor Who' is Borrowing a Secret Weapon From Marvel's Best Sci-Fi Show  Doctor Who Season 14 (or Season 1 if you’re on Disney+) is doubling down on the pop culture references. Not only will this season contain a British invasion-themed episode featuring the Beatles, The Doctor singing a musical number, and Ruby Sunday tied up by musical notation, but there’s also a Regency-set episode that Ruby calls “SO Bridgerton” in the trailer. But there’s more to this episode than just monopolizing on yet another smash hit British TV series, though it is worth noting Bridgerton stars Nicola Coughlan and Golda Rosheuvel both appear in other Season 14 episodes. One of the episode’s writers is responsible for one of the best Marvel Cinematic Universe shows — but she’s taking on a new role in Doctor Who.
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S40'Daredevil: Born Again' Theory Reveals a Dark Twist for a Fan-Favorite Character  Fans of Netflix’s Marvel universe had cause to celebrate when Jon Bernthal joined the cast of Daredevil: Born Again. As Frank Castle (aka the Punisher), the actor stole the show in the second season of the original Daredevil series. His own solo adventures in The Punisher were similarly engrossing, so it only made sense that the actor would make the jump from Netflix to Disney+.There still aren’t a lot of details about the Daredevil revival, though eagle-eyed fans have been closely following production via set images and videos. Thanks to the events set up in Echo, we know that Born Again will adapt the Mayor Fisk storyline from the comics. In that arc, Wilson Fisk gives up his shady enterprises and wins the mayoral race in New York. His administration takes a harsh stance against vigilantes and street-level criminals, which obviously doesn’t bode well for Daredevil, Punisher, or any of the costumed characters rumored to appear in Born Again.
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S41'Palworld's Fake Dating Sim Reveals an Outdated Video Game Stigma  Every year, you can count on video game publishers to fill their social media feeds with jokes on April 1 to delight and mostly annoy their fans. But of all the April Fools’ traditions in gaming, one that seems easiest to rely on is the dating sim hoax. Whether it’s a fake mockup or an actual released parody game, titles from Valorant to Endless Space to Nier Reincarnation have used dating sims as the butt of their April Fools’ jokes. And while many see them as harmless fun, some visual novel creators think the joke is a form of punching down on an already maligned genre.“Most April Fool's visual novels aren't made out of a sincere love and respect for the genre, but out of the tired perception that visual novels are wacky generic anime highschool hijinks and nothing more,” Mado, a spokesperson for yuri visual novel developer Studio Élan, tells Inverse. “They perpetuate the idea that visual novels are inherently less valuable or impactful than ‘real’ video games — especially if they contain romance and adult themes.”
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S42'Final Fantasy 14's Xbox Launch Is an Embarrassing Mess For Everyone Involved  Over the last decade, Final Fantasy XIV has transformed from a colossal failure to one of the most played games in the entire world. It’s been a long wait, but the massive MMORPG finally arrived on Xbox at the end of March, and what should have been a natural addition to FFXIV’s ecosystem has turned out to be anything but that. Unique problems exclusive to Xbox have popped up, because of the platform’s automated moderation systems, resulting in player bans, illegible chats, and more. It’s made an already contentious launch even more frustrating. Note: Inverse has reached out to Square Enix for comment, but hasn’t received a response as of the time of writing.
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S43Francis Ford Coppola's Impossible New Sci-Fi Movie is Even Weirder Than We Thought  A lot of filmmakers have a “one for them, one for me” mindset. They’ll make one crowd-pleasing blockbuster in order to fund goodwill — and connections — for a smaller-scale, more experimental movie. James Wan directed Aquaman, only to turn around and make Malignant. Sam Raimi directed Spider-Man and then Drag Me to Hell. Tim Burton made Batman and then Ed Wood. But one iconic director is taking “one for me” to an entirely new level, creating a project with total creative freedom. We finally have a clue as to what the movie will be like, and it sounds even weirder than we expected.
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S44105 Years Ago, This Astrophysicist Used a Solar Eclipse to Prove Einstein's Theory Of Relativity  As the Moon’s shadow creeps across the Sun on April 8, physicist Aroh Barjatya will launch a trio of 60-foot-tall rockets into the highest layer of Earth’s atmosphere.The short, sudden darkness of a solar eclipse sends changes rippling through the electrically charged layer of Earth’s atmosphere, called the ionosphere, and Barjatya’s three sounding rockets will carry instruments to measure those changes before, during, and after the peak of the eclipse.
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S4520 Years Ago, Guillermo del Toro Made the Most Underrated Superhero Movie of the Century  Hellboy was always a dark horse in the superhero genre — but 20 years later, it’s a bonafide classic.When we think of the superhero movie boom of the early 2000s, we tend to picture Sony’s cash cow Spider-Man trilogy and 20th Century Fox’s seemingly inexhaustible hunger for more X-Men films, and maybe some of the orbiting attempts at pre-MCU series (Hulk, Daredevil, Fantastic Four, etc). However, perhaps the most underrated of the crop of new comic book adaptations that emerged during this time didn’t come from the pages of Marvel or DC. Instead, it came from Dark Horse Comics. And while it wasn’t the gargantuan hit that its peers were, it did give us one of the most charming and atmospheric superhero films of all time.
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S4630 Years Ago, the Most Important Final Fantasy Game Changed RPGs Forever  Final Fantasy is a name that’s become synonymous with the RPG. Games like Final Fantasy 7, 10, and more recently 16 have been lauded for their stories, with characters that are beloved by droves of fans. But none of that would have been possible without a key turning point, one game that pushed forward both Final Fantasy and RPGs at large. Thirty years ago, Final Fantasy 6 redefined what a video game could accomplish, and paved the way for the series would accomplish. Final Fantasy 6 was first released on the Super NES in April 1994, although the game bore the name “Final Fantasy III” on its first release in North America. FF6 feels like a drastic change from the last few games, with a tremendous focus on story and characters, even Final Fantasy 4 pales in comparison. Thirty years ago it was a surprise, but even to this day, FF6 remains one of the most complex, emotional stories the series has ever told, no small feat with everything that’s come since.
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S4710 Years Later, Guillermo del Toro's Most Underrated Thriller is Getting a Big Upgrade  With Crimson Peak’s 10-year anniversary around the corner, del Toro is revisiting the gothic romance.The work of Guillermo del Toro is never that hard to categorize. The director loves a genre mash-up, but for the most part, his films skew close to one genre or another. Pacific Rim is a love letter to kaiju and gundam, Pan’s Labyrinth is a good old-fashioned fairytale. Crimson Peak is similarly assured, drawing inspiration from romantic novels like Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights — but unlike the other films in del Toro’s oeuvre, few really understood it when it first hit theaters in 2015.
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S48Spatial Personas Make Apple Vision Pro a Less Isolating Experience  Up to five people can watch movies and TV shows, play AR games, and collaborate on work together even when they’re across the planet.Apple Vision Pro is above and beyond other mixed reality headsets, but even with the highest quality passthrough camera tech to help you stay grounded in your real surroundings, there’s no way to escape the fact that donning one is a single-user experience. That changes starting today with the rollout of spatial Persona.
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S49Capitalism and (under)development in the American South | Aeon Essays  is an independent scholar and historian. Her research focuses on race, class, labour, law, poverty and power. She is the author of Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South (2017), co-editor of Reconsidering Southern Labor History: Race, Class, and Power (2018), and has a bio of Lillian Smith coming out with St. Martin’s Press in 2025. She lives in Atlanta, Georgia, US.In 1938, near the end of the Great Depression, the US president Franklin Delano Roosevelt commissioned a ‘Report on the Economic Conditions of the South’, examining the ‘economic unbalance in the nation’ due to the region’s dire poverty. In a speech following the report, Roosevelt deemed the South ‘the nation’s No 1 economic problem’, declaring that its vast levels of inequality had led to persistent underdevelopment.
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S50Cinema in Spain: a window into 500 years of history  “Who are the Spaniards?” This is the tricky, somewhat perplexing title of a culture module I inherited upon arrival at the University of Limerick. Initially, I turned the question on its head to ask “Who are the Irish?” I then decided to tackle the topic through films, presenting a potted history of Spain’s history and culture, aiming to pin down its founding myths and tumultuous history, including its dictatorship, transition to democracy and plurinational identities.
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