Original reporting on history, economics, science, film, television, music, and sports, plus an arcade of browser games and white noise and ambient music.
Cocoa futures have fallen by more than half since their late-2024 record, yet Halloween chocolate costs more than it did last year. The beans in this year's bags were priced a year ago, the savings are due in 2027, and they are more likely to arrive as deals than as a lower sticker.
Kimi Antonelli led every lap of the United States Grand Prix at the Circuit of the Americas, and still left Texas without the championship. A top-nine finish in Mexico City next Sunday makes him the youngest world champion in Formula 1 history.
A year after thieves took eight pieces of France's crown jewels from the Louvre in less than eight minutes, four suspects are in jail awaiting trial, the museum's director has resigned, and the jewels have not been found.
Elizabeth Holmes has been the subject of an exposé, a book, a podcast, a miniseries, and a trial. Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim's documentary, filmed in the weeks before she went to prison, asks a different question, and audiences made it the biggest documentary opening in more than a decade. Noozify gives it an A−.
Twenty-five years ago, a money-losing Apple bet on a $399 music player built around a Toshiba hard drive nobody else wanted. The iPod taught the company how to lock up suppliers, sell what plays on its devices, and advertise with a pair of white earbuds, and Apple used every lesson to build the iPhone that retired it.
Cameron Winter played Carnegie Hall alone at a piano with his back to the audience while Paul Thomas Anderson filmed. The live album answers the question that has followed him for two years, whether he means it, and earns an A.
Hurricane Rachel jumped from a Category 1 to a major hurricane in a single day this fall, a week after Polo's winds rose roughly 104 mph in 24 hours. Here is what makes a hurricane intensify that fast, why Otis reached Acapulco as a Category 5 that no forecast anticipated, and how forecasters are learning to see it coming.
Three arms of the Treasury Department penalized Bank of America more than $1.21 billion on October 13th, and the bank admitted it willfully failed to report billions of dollars in suspicious transactions. Here is what the 95-page order says went wrong.
Fifty years ago this autumn, Richard Dawkins needed a name for ideas that copy themselves from mind to mind, and coined one in the last chapter of The Selfish Gene. The science built on it fizzled, the internet rewired its meaning, and the word spread anyway, which is roughly what his theory predicted.
Memory-chip prices roughly doubled in 2026 after Samsung, SK hynix, and Micron moved production toward the chips AI data centers buy. Laptops and phones are paying for it, and the forecasts run to 2028.
Sheryl Crow's new album keeps the warm, easygoing sound of "Soak Up the Sun" and changes only the subject: friendship, a later stage of life, and a country that cannot talk to itself. Seven songs in 25 minutes earn a C+.
LeBron James left nearly $53 million on the table to chase one more title in Philadelphia. The favorites, the MVP race, the rookies, and what a final run really costs.
I Love Lucy premiered on CBS on October 15, 1951. Its stars took a pay cut to film it in Hollywood and keep ownership of the film, and that deal turned the rerun into a business.
Alejandro G. Iñárritu's satire Digger buried Tom Cruise under prosthetics, split the critics, and opened to $8 million in North America. Its real audience may have been a few thousand Oscar voters.
Elia Kazan's 1955 film adapted only the last part of Steinbeck's novel. His granddaughter's seven-episode Netflix series takes on the rest, with Florence Pugh's Cathy Ames at its center.
The federal holiday began in 1892 as a gesture to Italian Americans after a New Orleans mob killed 11 Italian men. A century later, the 500th anniversary gave Native activists their alternative, and today the name on the calendar depends on where you live.
Fifty years after Ebola was identified, Congo's deadliest outbreak has reached Kenya, and the vaccine being used against it was designed for a different strain. The gap shows how the world's Ebola tools came to stop at the edge of one species.
The NHL's first 84-game season opened with a goalie goal and Alex Ovechkin's farewell announcement. Together they point at what will decide the year, from Washington's last run with its captain to a Stanley Cup race shaped by goaltending.
A.A. Milne sold the North American merchandising rights to his bear in 1930, and the century since has been spent in contracts, courtrooms, and, at one point, Disney's trash. As Winnie-the-Pooh turns 100, one bear has become three, belonging to Disney, to a New York library, and to everyone.
Lenders have paid Fair Isaac for a FICO score on nearly every American mortgage for 30 years, and the price has climbed from under a dollar to $10. Washington just put a 99-cent rival on equal footing, but the investors who buy those loans still trust FICO.
Two German biophysicists found a light-switched channel in a single-celled alga, and a Stanford psychiatrist used it to fire brain cells with light. Optogenetics has now won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
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.