Curated stories and original journalism across science, psychology, history, arts, screen, sports, business, and the amusing corners of the web.
Matt Johnson's A24 biopic stakes everything on one mid-1970s Provincetown summer, splicing scenes lifted straight from Kitchen Confidential with inventions the memoir never mentions. Here is what really happened — and what didn't.
The Information reports Nvidia has agreed to acquire Hugging Face for $12.9 billion; Business Insider and Bloomberg describe talks valuing it above $13 billion, so treat the deal as reported rather than announced. Either way the logic is the same. Hugging Face is where open-source models are hosted and downloaded, and Nvidia sells the chips they run on — owning both ends of that is the point. The company was valued at $4.5 billion in 2023, and this is the latest in a year of Nvidia acquisitions.
Initial claims for the week ending August 22 came in at 203,000, down 4,000 — and the prior week was revised up to 207,000. The four-week moving average, which exists precisely to smooth out that noise, climbed to 205,500. The insured unemployment rate held at 1.2%. This is the same split we flagged a week ago: the weekly number keeps falling and the trend underneath keeps firming, and the four-week line is the one worth watching.
Grand Theft Auto VI: An Extended Look goes out to Netflix subscribers at 3 p.m. ET today, and to everyone else six hours later on Rockstar's YouTube channel and the game's own site. Netflix is calling it a first-of-its-kind partnership, and it is the first time Rockstar has given a streaming service a GTA trailer ahead of YouTube — a notable thing for a series whose trailers are events in themselves. The footage is captured entirely in-game on PlayStation 5, and the November 19 release date stands.
Just over 96% of the moon slides into Earth's shadow overnight on August 27-28, which is as close to a total lunar eclipse as a partial one gets — close enough that the lunar surface should turn the same reddish-orange as a full blood moon. It is visible across Europe, Africa and both Americas, and the Americas get the whole thing from start to finish. Nothing this deep happens again until December 31, 2028.
The 70-centimetre sculpture was found on a bench against the wall of a circular structure at Karahantepe, the Neolithic site near Sanliurfa in southeastern Turkey. Turkey's culture minister called the style unlike anything previously identified there. The interesting part is the reversal: earlier figures at the same site show leopards riding on human backs. This one has the human on top. Whatever the people at Karahantepe believed about their relationship to dangerous animals, it appears to have changed — and they recorded the change in stone.
It began as an advertisement given away in pubs, and it never stopped being one. What Guinness sells now is not the record — it is the adjudication.
The 76-square-kilometre slab left Petermann Glacier's floating ice tongue on August 4 — the glacier's biggest loss since 2012 and the largest Arctic calving event since 2020. It may be 150 metres thick. What makes it unusual is that nobody was surprised: researchers have tracked the tongue by satellite since 2019, and ESA's Sentinel-1 caught clear deterioration along its centreline the day before it went. They expect two more sections to follow, taking roughly 22 percent of what remains.
The Ludwig Institute's True Rate of Unemployment counts something the headline number doesn't: people who want full-time work and can't find it, and people working full time for less than $26,000 a year. By that measure nearly a quarter of American workers are "functionally unemployed," and the figure has climbed four months running. Gene Ludwig's summary is that functional unemployment is rising while workforce participation falls, which is the opposite of what a strong labor market does. Not everyone buys it: EY-Parthenon's Gregory Daco says a rate in the 20s "does not line up with anything we see." The gap between the two numbers is the argument.
Twenty-nine states accused Meta of designing Facebook and Instagram to addict children and misleading the public about it. The trial opened August 18 and was expected to run six weeks; Meta settled in the second week. Beyond the money, the deal forces product changes the company resisted for years: limits on how long teens can scroll, parental consent before minors can switch off safety settings, stronger age verification, and restrictions on beauty filters and visible like counts for teen accounts. It lands three days after TikTok settled its own children's-privacy case for $400 million.
Curry died Tuesday at his home in Toluca Lake, his manager of many years, Marcia Hurwitz, confirmed. No cause was given; he had lived with the effects of a severe stroke since 2012. The range is the obituary: the corseted swagger of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, the butler holding the whole plot together in Clue, and a Pennywise that frightened a generation off storm drains without a single digital effect. He is the second 80-year-old icon to die on Tuesday.
At least 160 people are dead across Nepal and Tibet after an ice-rock avalanche broke off a glacier, dammed the Lhende Khola, and released the water all at once. Nepal has recovered 157 bodies; Chinese authorities report three deaths and 265 missing in Gyirong county. More than 400 tourists are unaccounted for, 341 of them foreign nationals, along with 28 police officers. The detail that made it lethal: there was no heavy rainfall, so nothing warned anyone downstream. The same river flooded 14 months ago. Figures as of Wednesday evening and still rising.
Political theorist Geertje Bol argues that the civility we prize in public debate has always doubled as a gatekeeping device — and reaches back to the 18th century to prove it. Writers like Mary Astell and Catharine Macaulay were dismissed as zealots precisely because polite, moderate discourse was a club they weren't allowed to join; their forceful style wasn't a failure of reason but the only way in. Bol's sharper claim is that zeal serves debate itself: it takes opponents seriously enough to fight them, where politeness curdles into echo chambers of mutual flattery.
Portrait of an Old Man entered the Kunsthistorisches Museum in 1920 as a Philippe de Champaigne, then spent the next hundred years bouncing between attributions — anonymous Italian, two French painters, two Flemish ones. The museum now says it's by Gian Lorenzo Bernini, the sculptor of Baroque Rome, whose accepted paintings number fewer than twenty. The tell, fittingly, was sculptural: the curator notes the artist painted the old man's face as if "building up and modelling a face in clay." It goes on display December 2 as the star of the museum's Bernini exhibition.
Columbia researchers examined nearly half a million cells from the hippocampus — the brain's memory center and one of the only regions that keeps producing neurons into adulthood — and found that in people with major depression, that production stalls. The study, published August 21 in Nature Medicine, is the first direct evidence of the shutdown in adult human brains, and it maps molecular disruption across the whole hippocampal circuit: synaptic function, energy metabolism, inflammation. The researchers' framing is striking — without new neurons, the brain may lose the resilience to file new experiences separately from painful old ones.
During Monday night's Lynx–Valkyries game, Minnesota's Olivia Miles recorded her 225th assist of the season, moving past Ticha Penicheiro — one of the greatest passers the league has produced — on the all-time rookie list. The only name left above her is Caitlin Clark, whose 337 in 2024 may be out of reach this season. Miles, the No. 2 pick out of Notre Dame, is averaging 20 points on 50% shooting with 6.2 assists, made the All-Star team, and is the runaway Rookie of the Year favorite.
On August 25, 1916, Woodrow Wilson signed the Organic Act creating an agency to manage America's parks — places like Yellowstone had existed for decades, but nobody was formally in charge of protecting them. To mark the 110th birthday, entrance fees are waived today at every park that normally charges one, in the middle of a National Park Week timed to the country's 250th-anniversary celebrations. The mandate Congress wrote in 1916 still reads like a paradox the service navigates daily: make the parks available for public enjoyment, and leave them "unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations."
She turned a one-room cabin on Locust Ridge into 3,000 songs, 308 million donated books, and a rare kind of American consensus. Dolly Parton died Tuesday in Nashville.
The Conference Board's index eased to 89.4, a second straight monthly decline, but the details are stranger than the headline. Americans' assessment of the present improved sharply — the Present Situation gauge jumped 6.8 points, with more people calling jobs "plentiful" — while the Expectations Index dropped to 68.2, sinking further below the 80 threshold that historically signals a recession ahead. Consumers think today is fine and tomorrow isn't: dimming views of future business conditions, job availability and income prospects drove the whole decline.
The retailer earned $3.53 a share against the $3.78 analysts expected, on revenue that also fell short, and slashed its full-year earnings outlook to $11–$12 a share versus a $14.20 consensus — blaming a "challenging athletic footwear and apparel marketplace." The odd part: Dick's own stores grew comparable sales 4.9%, helped by World Cup demand. The drag is Foot Locker, the chain it just acquired, where comps fell 3.6%. Nike and Academy Sports slid in sympathy — the market read it less as one bad quarter and more as a warning about the American sneaker shopper.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced what he called an "economic onslaught against Iran's financial connections around the globe": new secondary sanctions covering aviation, shipping, gold, technology and digital assets, aimed at anyone who keeps doing business with Tehran. Monday's designations reached Iran's Shahr Bank, two Dubai exchange houses and shell companies in Hong Kong and Singapore, while President Trump works the phones asking world leaders to cut their own ties. It comes days after Iran declared its military doctrine had shifted from defensive to offensive. One sanctions expert's caution: without touching the Chinese banks financing Iranian oil purchases, this is not the economic D-Day it's billed as.
In Pflugdorf-Stadl, Bavaria, two competitors per round sit on opposite sides of a table, link middle fingers through a leather loop, and try to drag each other across. Matches run from a few seconds to nearly a minute. The sport originated in the Alpine region and remains a Bavarian institution. Ferdinand Seitz took the senior title and described the pain to Euronews as "excruciating."
The country's largest meatpacker is shutting its beef slaughter and processing facility in Joslin, Illinois — nearly 2,500 workers — and a packaging plant in Eagle Mountain, Utah, with 723 more, while putting its Pasco, Washington beef plant up for sale. The company points to a historic cattle shortage: the national herd has contracted to lows not seen in decades, leaving slaughterhouses without enough animals to run at capacity. Tyson has now cut more than 10,000 jobs since 2023. The shrinking herd that pushed retail beef prices to records is now working its way up the supply chain.
On August 24, 1991, Ukraine's parliament declared a state while the Soviet Union still technically existed. Two revolutions and one long war later, the harder work has been proving it meant it.
Army spokesman Brig. Gen. Mohammad Akraminia told the state news agency IRNA that the change took shape across what Iran calls the 12-day and 40-day wars. An offensive doctrine does not necessarily mean preemptive strikes, he said — though Iran struck a US base in Jordan before the US entered the last conflict — but any attack now draws an immediate response that may be broader than the original action. The statement has so far been carried mainly by outlets relaying IRNA rather than independently confirmed.
The Justice Department calls it one of the largest recoveries ever under COPPA, the law requiring parental consent before collecting data from children under 13. TikTok and ByteDance pay $300 million now and another $100 million once a 2019 consent decree against TikTok's predecessor, Musical.ly, is vacated — with no admission of wrongdoing and no further litigation. The suit was filed in 2024. This is the Justice Department's own announcement, and it lands the same week Meta stands trial in federal court over whether Instagram was built to hook children.
The cosplayer took the podium at a Public Safety committee meeting to deliver a satirical case for the license-plate-reading surveillance cameras — they would help "find the rebel scum and their hidden base on Hoth," he said, and follow children "from playground to pool, from pool to gymnasium." He suggested the council practice its Jedi mind trick on the public, proposed defunding parks, libraries and shelters to pay for Storm Troopers, and added a personal reason for wanting the cameras: "I need this so I can stalk my ex-girlfriend."
LandSpace's Zhuque-3 lifted off from the Dongfeng commercial launch zone on August 19, delivered the Honghu 03 satellite to orbit, and six minutes later set its first stage down on landing legs at a site in Gansu province — the first propulsive booster recovery on land by any Chinese rocket, and the first by a Chinese commercial company. It came eight months after LandSpace's first attempt ended in an explosion on the pad. The landing puts LandSpace alongside SpaceX and Blue Origin as the only private firms to have pulled it off.
Sinner has not played since winning Wimbledon and said after returning to the court in Monte Carlo this week that his right knee needs more recovery time than the August 30 main draw allows. Last year's runner-up and the 2024 champion will stay in Europe with his medical and performance teams and aim to be ready for the Asian swing in Beijing and Shanghai. This is the tournament's own announcement.
A hundred thousand people, smashed windows, a fiancée collapsing on the coffin, and a press agent named Harry Klemfuss paying for a good deal of it. A century on from August 23, 1926, the hired Blackshirts are still in every retelling.
Members of SPEEA, Boeing's largest white-collar union, voted down four-year contracts on Friday — 64% against among engineers and scientists, 72% against among technical workers, on 96% turnout. The same ballot authorized a strike by 88% and 90% respectively, clearing leadership to walk out from October 7, when the current agreements expire. Members told Reuters the sticking point was a 3% cap on inflation-linked raises, which they said would all but guarantee pay falling behind prices. The union says it will survey members on what a revised offer needs before talks resume.
Six years after Punisher, Bridgers returns with an album that treats memory as something recording technology can manipulate — her late father's voicemail woven into an arrangement, her own voice run through the same machines, and a surprising debt to a 1988 computer-music composition.
Julie Angelicola was drying her hands with toilet paper aboard an NJ Transit train, crumpled it up, threw it in the toilet and flushed — then realized her wedding ring had gone with it. She reported it, and NJ Transit pulled the train from service, raised it on jacks, removed the toilet tank and opened it up. The ring was sitting on top. It dates to about 1905, bought from an antique store, and she only discovered afterward that the initials engraved inside matched the nicknames she and her husband use for each other.
Prime Air currently flies out of 11 US locations. Amazon says it will reach nearly 500 cities and towns by the end of 2026 — a sixfold expansion — starting with Chicago, Cleveland, Atlanta, Syracuse and Boise. Each site covers roughly 175 square miles, packages must weigh five pounds or less, and delivery runs half an hour to an hour. The company reports hundreds of thousands of drone deliveries so far this year and thousands a day, with an executive projecting a million by year end. This is Amazon's own announcement rather than a writeup of it.
The device is called Aletta, and it is the first standalone robot cleared to draw blood from a patient's arm without hands-on intervention. It is authorized for adults in outpatient settings and must run under the oversight of someone trained in phlebotomy — but a single phlebotomist can supervise three machines at once. That ratio is the point: blood draws are among the most common procedures in American medicine, and a shortage of trained phlebotomists has been adding delays. This is the FDA's own announcement.
NPR's Starting 5 for August 21: Jorja Smith's What Are The Odds, Brandon Flowers' THRASHER, Squirrel Flower's Say a Prayer to the Gods of Getting Going, Westside Cowboy's It Goes On, and a self-titled debut from Brennan Wedl. The lightning round adds Rapsody, Julia Holter, Elanor Moss, OK Cowgirl and a posthumous Cramps collection. Host Stephen Thompson is joined by Celia Gregory of WNXP Nashville.
The clay tablet, incised and impressed with geometric markings, emerged from a charcoal-rich layer during the third week of this year's excavation at Lucone di Polpenazze, a Bronze Age pile-dwelling settlement in northern Italy. It is the first found at the site since 2019 and the 21st from the Lucone plain, more than any other location. It belongs to a class Italian archaeologists call tavolette enigmatiche — enigmatic tablets — whose purpose remains unknown. Similar combinations of lines and impressions turn up hundreds of kilometres away, raising the possibility of a shared set of signs circulating through a society that left no conventional writing.
Freefall: A Reckoning for Boeing follows Kennedy's 2022 film Downfall: The Case Against Boeing and centers on the death of John Barnett, the quality manager who spent years reporting safety problems on the 787 line. It gathers testimony from other whistleblowers who say they raised defects with managers and were told to overlook them. It premiered on Netflix on August 19 after a world premiere at the DC/DOX festival in June.
Narragansett police said the tractor-trailer was hauling thousands of pounds of squid for processing when it overturned at the intersection of Point Judith and Galilee Escape roads, spilling what the department's news release called "a substantial portion" of its load onto the roadway. Nobody was hurt. The intersection stayed closed about eight hours on Sunday while crews scraped up the seafood with skid steers. The driver was cited for an unsecured load.
A law that made animal tests optional, a headline that said they were over, and the quiet regulatory machinery that actually decides what counts as proof.