Original reporting on history, economics, science, film, television, music, and sports, plus an arcade of browser games, white noise and ambient music, and classic TV.
Leon Bridges says his role on his fifth album is "to be light." Made with Jungle, Happiness Anytime delivers the grooves while its lyrics stay slight, and a flash of frustration inside "Illusion" suggests the happiness took work.
NOAA says this year's El Niño has a 75 percent chance of becoming the strongest observed since 1950 by the end of 2026. The event is already unusually powerful, but its eventual peak, duration, and regional effects remain matters of probability rather than certainty, with implications ranging from a wetter winter in parts of the Southeast and reduced Atlantic hurricane activity to weaker Asian monsoon rainfall and potentially another record-setting year for global temperatures in 2027.
A24's Primetime gets the broad strokes of the 2006 Texas sting right, then invents a producer and a police chief, reshapes the raid, and moves a 2011 tabloid scandal. Here is what's real, what isn't, and why the distortion may be the point.
Sony's PlayStation outsold it three to one and took Final Fantasy VII with it. Thirty years after the North American launch, every controller has the N64's analog stick, every action game has Ocarina of Time's lock-on, and Nintendo is about to sell the same 1998 game again.
Saturn reaches opposition on October 4th with its rings tilted back into view, and two mornings later a crescent Moon swallows Jupiter before dawn over parts of North America. Add two meteor showers, one of them from Halley's Comet, Venus slipping between Earth and the Sun, and the Hunter's Moon.
Fresh off a championship, Jalen Brunson became only the fifth NBA player to host SNL, opening season 52 alongside Katseye, two new featured players, and a cast in transition. The night's real subject was what happens when someone at the top of one profession agrees to be a beginner at another.
Most TV sequels take years. Slow Horses, back for season six, has delivered a season every year since 2022, and the reason is a production line as unglamorous as Slough House itself.
The 10-year Treasury yield just had its biggest one-day jump in a year and a half, to a level last seen in 2007. Four pressures hit at once, and mortgages, business loans, stocks, and the federal budget are all being repriced.
For 30 years, a hit game became a film and the film embarrassed the game. Now Sega says a movie saved Sonic, a nine-year-old Fallout game topped Europe's charts after its TV show, and one producer alone has 20 more adaptations in development.
Berlin, Washington, Cambridge, and Zurich have all handed Benin Bronzes back to Nigeria. The British Museum, which holds more of them than anyone, cannot. A 1963 Act of Parliament forbids it, a judge ruled that no moral obligation overrides it, and Parliament just spent two years making sure it stays that way.
The General Assembly opened in January 1946 in a Methodist hall still scarred by the Blitz, with 51 delegations and the UN emblem hung back to front. Eighty years and 142 members later, it is meeting this week in a building the organization can barely afford to run.
Zach Cregger kept the games' dread and dropped their characters. His reboot opened to $60 million in North America and $108.3 million worldwide, both franchise records, and holds a 96 percent Rotten Tomatoes score.
Her sixth album is named for the phase when a female mammal is in heat, it runs half an hour, and it treats being unresolved as a finished thought rather than a stage to grow out of. Released the same Friday as Miley's, on the label Tove Lo owns, it argues the opposite case.
Her tenth album is the first credited to Miley alone, the first on Atlantic, and the first made while she was content. It was written in under a year with her fiancé in the producer's chair, and the early reviews split on whether she took enough risks. The case that they are grading the wrong record.
A glacier collapse on August 26th killed more than 1,400 people in Nepal. The country's warning system was built to watch glacial lakes, and this flood had no lake, wiped out the upstream sensors, and began across a border where data sharing had been agreed but never switched on.
Companies will spend $2.59 trillion on AI this year, and productivity has barely moved. Economists have seen this before, with computers in 1987 and electricity a century earlier, and history says the payoff depends on redesigning the factory.
Sinner withdrew, Djokovic lost in the first round, and Alcaraz fell at 3:33 a.m. The titles went instead to Alexander Zverev and Elena Rybakina, two players in their late twenties who had spent years coming close.
A living president on a dollar coin violates a rule everyone knows, except that the rule people cite is about banknotes, was written in 1866 because a Treasury bureaucrat put himself on the five-cent note, and never covered coins at all. Coolidge, two senators, and a governor got there first.
Fiji now adds five percent to a resort bill. Venice charges admission on 60 days a year. Amsterdam taxes a hotel stay at a third of its price and wants fewer visitors anyway. Where the money goes says more about a destination than any tourism campaign.
Ten new head coaches, a former No. 1 pick released and signed for the league minimum, and a three-time Defensive Player of the Year working out in a helmet he has not officially put back on. A survey of the NFL offseason, the morning after Seattle won the Super Bowl rematch 13-10 with a backup at quarterback.
Nintendo gave one franchise a full 30 minutes and spent it on restraint. A movie announced with no trailer, an Ocarina of Time remake that leaves Hyrule Field as empty as it was in 1998, a concert tour, and a console that ships without the game.
Star Trek was never a hit on NBC, and the network cancelled it twice. What carried it from a failing Friday-night drama to a sixty-year institution was a mimeographed letter, a chain of fans told to copy it ten times, and a third season that made the show worth syndicating.
More than 160 countries honor workers on May 1st, commemorating a strike, a bombing, and a trial in Chicago in 1886. The country where it all happened marks Labor Day in September instead, and the distance between the two dates was the point.
Friday's payroll figure will move markets within minutes. It is also a preliminary estimate built from about two-thirds of the survey responses, carrying a margin of roughly 120,000 jobs, and scheduled to be revised twice before next year's benchmark resets it again. The revisions are not the scandal. They are the system working as designed.
"This mirror weighs a ton, but at least we act sudden." Paul Banks says the line came out of automatic writing and does not really mean anything. Interpol named its best-reviewed album in twenty years after it — a record about reflection and surveillance, titled by the one moment its songwriter stopped controlling his words.
For nearly three decades nobody could prove who ordered the killing of Tupac Shakur. Police had held a confession since 2009 and could not use a word of it. What convicted Duane 'Keffe D' Davis was the second confession — the one he sold to a documentary crew and a publisher.
After every museum heist comes the same question: what will the thieves do with it? The answer is a lesson in what value actually is — and it has three exits, none of them a sale.
Politics swings, and both sides feel it — backlash to one, correction to the other. The philosopher the pendulum is named for never used the famous formula, and what he actually described is stranger and more hopeful: a swing over ground that keeps turning.
No eclipse, no drama — and that's the point. September's sky is Venus at its blinding best, a Harvest Moon that rises early for a week straight, and the Milky Way's last good month before it leaves for the year.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
A former No. 1 pick working for scraps, a retired legend circling the practice field, and the question underneath both of them.
Every central bank on Earth defends a 2% inflation target as if it were a law of nature. It began as a New Zealand finance minister's offhand remark on a 1988 TV broadcast — the Reserve Bank governor later admitted the figure was "plucked out of the air." How an improvisation became the world's monetary constitution, and why nobody can change it now.
Sixty years ago the biggest band on Earth played a half-empty stadium and never performed again. No farewell, no reunion, no tour — and it made them permanent. The screaming, the death threats, the cracks already forming, and how close John and Paul came to walking back on stage for $3,000.
An AI firm says two famous panels aren't Van Eycks — with 91 percent certainty. The scholars who have spent careers on the painter say the model can't know that. While they argue, forgers found a better use for the machines: fake provenance for paintings that never existed.