The Verge

Photo by Dieter Bohn / The Verge Motorola’s 5G-equipped Razr is being sold unlocked, which means you can buy it straight from Amazon. (It’s even on sale for $400 off the usual $1,399.99 price.) But if you do order the foldable flip phone from Amazon, you’ll be greeted by an unusual sight when you open the box: someone else will have already unboxed your new phone and folded it for you.(That deal is also available from Best Buy and B&H, which will presumably not get their grubby mitts all over your new phone before shipping.)As Amazon’s product listing explains:

What Remains of Edith Finch is one of the more high-profile indie projects Annapurna has produced. | Image: Annapurna Interactive Annapurna, an independent media production company best known for producing award-winning video games and films, is forming an in-house game development studio to create its own projects.The company already operates a publishing business started back in 2016 under the name Annapurna Interactive, and it’s responsible for helping fund and market some of the most beloved indie games of the last decade. Those include What Remains of Edith Finch, Kentucky Route Zero, and Outer Wilds, among many others.Annapurna produced hits like ‘What Remains of Edith Finch’Annapurna Pictures, the film side of the company, is even more well known, earning countless Academy Award nominations and wins for films it has co-produced like Her, American Hustle,... Continue reading…

Halloween is almost here, and if you plan to spend your day playing video games and perhaps need a spooky game to play, Valve has kicked off its 2020 Halloween sale on Steam. PC Gamers can save on a number of titles until November 2nd at 1PM ET / 10AM PT. In these standout deals, Control Ultimate Edition is down to $28 (usually $40), Doom Eternal is down to $30 (usually $60), Hades is down to $20 (usually $25), Half-Life: Alyx is down to $45 (usually $60), and Resident Evil 3 is down to $30 (usually $60). We’ll highlight a few more deals below, but you can jump to the full list here.While most of the deals in here are for horror games, a few games that have some spooky-themed elements incorporated are also discounted. There are even a... Continue reading…

The Fire TV Cube is the most capable of Amazon’s streaming devices, and can act as an Echo speaker and control some home entertainment gear. | Photo by Chris Welch / The Verge Alexa, Amazon’s voice assistant, has turned another year old, and to celebrate, several Echo and Fire TV products have been discounted to their lowest prices. Most of the current products available are represented, including the range of Fire TV streaming devices, Echo speakers and smart displays, and other Alexa-powered gadgets — though, not everything is here (looking at you, Echo Studio, along with the new, spherical Echo speakers). Perhaps we’ll see even deeper price cuts the closer we get to Black Friday, as many of these deals match the Prime Day offers.Streaming devices

Photo by Asa Mathat / Recode Even if you’re trying to keep costs down, you’ll probably want to replace your old phone eventually. Whether it’s because the battery is no longer keeping a decent charge or because the operating system is no longer being updated, smartphones usually start losing their usefulness around their third year (or sometimes earlier).The best way you can figure out your next phone is to check out the reviews and use them to decide what features are most important to you, and balance that against the cost of the device. Here are some recent reviews of budget smartphones to help you make that choice. Read the summary, and click on the title to get the whole story. Google Pixel 4A GOOGLE PIXEL 4A REVIEW: BACK TO BASICS FOR... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Netflix is introducing price hikes for its US subscribers today, increasing its standard plan to $14 a month and its premium tier to $18 a month.The new pricing for the standard plan is a $1 price increase (from $13 a month), while the new premium tier cost is a $2 increase (from $16 a month). New subscribers will have to pay the updated monthly fees, while current subscribers will see the new prices over the next few weeks as they roll out with customer’s billing cycles.Industry insiders have long anticipated another round of price hikes at Netflix, which last increased subscription fees in the United States in January 2019. Recently, Netflix increased the cost of some plans in Canada. Netflix rolls out price changes on a... Continue reading…

Colie Wertz, with the MSI GE66 Raider Dragonshield Edition. | MSI It was not too long ago that most gaming laptops were bulky, garish desktop replacements full of flashy RGB nonsense. The first Razer Blade, released in 2011, was almost seven pounds and it was considered sleek for the time.The last few years have seen many popular laptops converging on similar design trends. Bezels are shrinking, screens are growing, and chassis are getting thinner and lighter. But few tech product categories have seen such a radical transformation as gaming laptops in the past few years. The introduction of Nvidia’s Max-Q platform in 2017 allowed gaming laptops to run AAA titles in thinner form factors than we’d ever seen before — and AMD’s Ryzen 4000 series has upped the ante even more. With shrinking chassis have... Continue reading…

Nvidia’s RTX 3000 series | Photo by Tom Warren / The Verge On Thursday, Nvidia opened up preorders for the GeForce RTX 3070, the least-expensive of the three Ampere-powered graphics cards Nvidia announced during its September event. It’s a very good card. But if you’ve been following the RTX 30 series the last couple of months, you will know it’s also been very difficult to get your hands on one, and it will likely remain difficult well into next year.I knew I wanted to upgrade my graphics card this year, and I was dead set on buying the RTX 3080, but it literally sold out as soon as preorders went up. (Damn bots.) So I decided I’d be okay with a 3070; It’s not like I have a 4K monitor yet anyway. This morning, I decided to shoot my shot.Wait for it...I fired up two monitors with 20... Continue reading…

Photo by Matt McClain/The Washington Post via Getty Images Elon Musk was among the celebrities that Trump administration officials tried to woo for a “Helping the President will Help the Country” taxpayer-funded ad blitz that never got off the ground, according to documents released by the House Oversight Committee.The $300 million campaign was pitched as a way to “defeat despair and inspire hope” over the coronavirus. “We must film them ASAP — we need content in the can now,” one official wrote in an email to contractors who worked on the ad campaign on September 13th.Like many of the more than 250 celebrities screened, Musk’s status on the “Celebrity Participant Status Chart,” first reported by Politico, shows as “pending answer.” An additional note by the Tesla and SpaceX CEO’s name reads... Continue reading…

Hackers reportedly stole $2.3 million from the Wisconsin Republican Party just weeks before the election using a scheme involving manipulated invoices, the Associated Press reports. The group noted the theft on October 22nd; Wisconsin Republican Party Chairman Andrew Hitt says that the FBI is currently investigating the case.According to Hitt, hackers used faked invoices from several vendors the campaign was working with for things like election mailings and Trump merchandise. Instead of featuring the vendor’s payment information, the documents relayed the money to the hackers.This kind of hack is actually a fairly common scam: Facebook and Google were hit by a similar phishing scheme in 2017 to the tune of $100 million. Scammers... Continue reading…

Illustration by William Joel | Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images Brendan Carr is next in line to run Trump’s FCC. His first task? Regulating social media. Continue reading…

Illustration by Ana Kova Federal agencies warned hospitals, health care providers, and public health groups Wednesday that they were at risk of an “increased and imminent cybercrime threat” from ransomware, which could paralyze their computer systems and make it hard for them to deliver care. At least four hospitals have reported cyberattacks this week, and hundreds more could be at risk.This could be “the biggest attack we’ve ever seen,” Allan Liska, an intelligence analyst for the firm Recorded Future, told CNN.The attacks come as hospitals across the country are struggling to handle spikes in COVID-19 cases. Ransomware attacks shut down hospital computer systems, often forcing them to turn to pen and paper charts and sometimes locking them out of systems... Continue reading…

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge In case you missed it, Best Buy launched several new Black Friday deals overnight. There’s a little bit of everything in there, including OLED TV deals, price drops on wireless noise-canceling headphones, laptops, and more. And wouldn’t you know, Amazon is price-matching most of those deals, giving you more options on where you can buy new stuff. You can find the link to Best Buy’s deals here, but we’ll be adding notable deals that Amazon price-matched as well as new ones below for you to check out.First off, here’s a heads-up to people who are hoping to get the best-ever price on AirPods that include a wireless charging case. At 7PM ET, Walmart will offer them for just $108 — but to only select US states. If you’re reside in Indiana,... Continue reading…

Illustration by Simon Stålenhag The Labyrinth’s ash-covered landscapes were ‘the only thing that felt relevant’ Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Facebook supports rewriting Section 230, and it’s starting to lay out the changes it wants. That’s the big takeaway from a nearly four-hour grilling of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. The point was quickly lost in a pre-election political scuffle — but in the coming months, it’ll be one of the most important things to watch.Yesterday, the Senate Commerce Committee held a hearing about Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a foundational internet law. The event was supposed to examine whether Section 230 protections — which protect web services and sites of all sizes — “enable Big Tech Bad behavior.” Witnesses came prepared with arguments against that premise. Dorsey cited... Continue reading…

Ford will unveil the all-electric version of its popular Transit delivery van on November 12th, the automaker announced Thursday. The vehicle won’t go into production until 2021, but Ford is hoping to get out ahead of an expected wave of new battery-powered delivery vans.At the unveiling, Ford is expected to share specifics about the van’s battery pack size, estimated range, and other performance characteristics. Range, in particular, will be an important metric considering delivery vans need to stay on the road for as long as possible in order to make the most money. Ford previously teased the electric Transit van and also announced an electric Transit for the European market in 2019. The automaker did reveal the name of the new... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge NBCUniversal’s Peacock streaming service has hit almost 22 million users just over three months after its launch, Comcast announced today as part of its Q3 2020 earnings release. The company didn’t say how many of those signups were for its free, ad-supported plan versus its more premium paid tiers, however.Comcast also boasted that Peacock is “exceeding our expectations on all engagement metrics,” although it neglected to give more details on that front. Unsurprisingly, the company also saw big success in its broadband internet business over the last quarter, adding 633,000 new internet customers — a record for the company.Disclosure: Comcast, which owns NBCUniversal, is also an investor in Vox Media, The Verge’s parent company.It’s... Continue reading…

Microsoft is rolling out a new update to the Xbox Game Bar on Windows 10 this week, and it now lets you track what apps are taking up precious RAM, CPU, GPU, and disk resources. While there are a number of overlays and apps that can do this already on PCs, Microsoft’s Xbox Game Bar is built into Windows 10, and it’s fairly flexible and lightweight as a result.The new resources widget keeps track of the top tasks and their associated impacts, rating them low, medium, or high. You can either monitor them by pinning the widget to your desktop or even close off apps without ever tabbing out or leaving a game. The Xbox Game Bar resources widget. This resources widget is different to the performance one, which lets you... Continue reading…

Photo by Tom Warren / The Verge The $499 RTX 3070 is available now, though the retailers that stock the new GPU appear to be mostly sold out at this point. If you’re still looking for one of Nvidia’s Founders Edition (FE) GPUs, try looking at Best Buy and Micro Center. If your hunt for the GPU isn’t limited to the FE version, several third-party graphics cards made by OEMs like Gigabyte and PNY are also officially on sale from a few other retailers like Amazon, Newegg, and B&H Photo, in addition to Best Buy and Micro Center. And like past launches, most of these cards sold out very quickly. But keep trying, as you might get lucky.Compared to the 4K-capable RTX 3080 and 3090, this card is an especially good choice if you have a 1440p gaming monitor or see yourself... Continue reading…

Photo by FREDERIC J. BROWN/AFP via Getty Images Uber can continue to send messages in its app to drivers about a California ballot measure that would exempt gig economy companies from having to classify workers as employees, a judge ruled late Wednesday. A California state superior court judge rejected the drivers’ request for a temporary restraining order blocking the messages, which drivers claim is “pressuring” them to support the ballot measure, Prop 22.In his ruling, Judge Richard Ulmer called the drivers’ request for injunctive relief “belated,” noting that Uber’s campaign started in August. He also noted that the vote on Prop 22 on November 3rd would render the company’s barrage of in-app messages about the ballot measure “effectively moot.”A judge criticized drivers for... Continue reading…

They fit better than any consumer earbuds I’ve ever tried, but they aren’t without shortcomings Continue reading…

Photo Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge The rare bright spot in a terrible year Continue reading…

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / Composite by Grayson Blackmon Julian Jagtenberg’s first experience on QVC was incredible. In minutes, he sold nearly 60 units of his $600 Somnox sleep robot, an unprecedented sales experience for him.“Within the minute there was like [a] beep beep, we’re out of stock,” he says. “And the salesperson [said], ‘Okay, well hold up, you can’t order anymore, there’s no stock.’ And I was like, ‘Wait, is this a dream? Can someone pinch me, like wake me up? Is this real?’”Naturally, he doubled-down on QVC the next time he went live. Instead of projecting to sell around 60 units, he planned for 240. But this time, the segment didn’t deliver like he expected. He appeared on the segment from afar because of the pandemic, and instead of selling out almost instantly, he got... Continue reading…

Image: SteelSeries SteelSeries’ new Aerox gaming mouse lineup marks a few firsts for the company. It claims both its $60 Aerox 3 wired mouse and the $100 wireless version that will be available on November 10th are the first gaming mice to receive an IP54 rating, giving them a fighting chance against water and dust.They’re also the company’s first mice to adopt the ever-popular honeycomb shell design, popularized by more niche peripheral makers like Finalmouse and Glorious PC Gaming Race, to name a couple of examples. And with that see-through design, they’re aimed at people who want a lightweight mouse. The Aerox 3 Wireless weighs 66 grams, while the wired version weighs 57 grams (minus the weight of the cable).For the wireless Aerox 3, it’s... Continue reading…

Photo: Lucasfilm / Disney The Mandalorian’s second season is almost here. And if the trailers and rumors are any indication, it seems like the armor-clad hero’s quest to reunite Baby Yoda (née “The Child”) is going to get even more complicated and tied up in Star Wars lore than ever before.While it may seem odd to think about it this way, after decades of additional lore, background history, TV shows, and movies, the original Star Wars film is extremely accessible. It had to be. No one walking into the theater for the first time had any idea what a lightsaber or an X-wing was or who Darth Vader, Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, or Princess Leia were.The Mandalorian has never had that benefit. From the first episode, it expects you to know that the Mandalorian is... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Spotify now has 320 million monthly active users and 144 million paid subscribers, an increase of 29 and 27 percent respectively year-over-year, the company announced in its latest earnings release. User growth was driven by marketing campaigns in India, as well as the service’s launch in Russia and 12 surrounding markets. The company called Russia its “most successful new market launch to date.”The service’s user and subscriber growth puts it comfortably ahead of rivals services from Amazon and Apple. As of January this year, Amazon Music said it had 55 million customers, of which “nearly all” were paying subscribers, according to the Financial Times. Meanwhile, Apple reported last year that it had 60 million paying subscribers, and... Continue reading…

The light can now adjust its colors automatically. | Image; Eve Eve’s smart light strip can now adjust its colors automatically throughout the course of the day thanks to iOS 14’s new Adaptive Lighting feature, the company announced. The light strip is the first product to support the new Apple HomeKit feature, according to Eve, but first requires a firmware update that owners can perform via the Eve app.Adaptive Lighting is a new HomeKit feature introduced this year which allows compatible smart bulbs to adapt their colors to the time of day, showing warmer hues in the morning and evenings, or cooler ones at midday. Other manufacturers also appear to be working to support the feature, with iphone-ticker reporting (via MacRumors) earlier this month that Philips Hue beta testers in Germany were able... Continue reading…

The Beolit 20 features a Qi wireless charging pad for keeping other devices topped up with power. | Image: Bang & Olufsen Bang & Olufsen’s latest portable Bluetooth speaker is the Beolit 20, a lunchbox-sized successor to 2017’s Beolit 17. The big upgrade this time around is a new Qi wireless charging pad that can be found on top of the speaker, which can charge other devices like phones or earbuds.According to Bang & Olufsen, the Beolit 20 can also play for 30 percent longer than its predecessor. The company says the speaker’s 3,200mAh battery offers 37 hours of listening at low volumes, but this reduces to a little over 8 hours if you’re listening at typical levels, or just under 4 hours at max volume. Image: Bang & Olufsen There’s a USB-C port for charging. Image: Bang & Olufsen Buttons atop the... Continue reading…

Samsung Electronics has announced quarterly earnings for the July-September 2020 period, making 66.96 trillion won (~$59 billion) in revenue and 12.35 trillion (~$11 billion) in operating profit. That’s the highest quarterly revenue figure ever for the Korean electronics giant, which says that it was able to meet a boost in customer demand following COVID-19 disruption.“Even as the COVID-19 pandemic continues around the world, reopening of key economies led to significant increase in consumer demand,” Samsung says in a statement. “Samsung Electronics was able to respond aggressively through flexible global supply chain management, reporting its highest-ever quarterly revenue.”Urgent Huawei orders boost memory businessSamsung says that... Continue reading…

Image: Vizio Through Sunday, November 1st, Best Buy is giving shoppers another sliver of time to get in on some deals ahead of Black Friday later in the month. Most of these are repeats from the retailer’s Black Friday kickoff event that went up against Prime Day, though a few are newcomers. We’ll be keeping you posted on all of the latest Black Friday deals throughout the month, no matter where they’re coming from or when they actually drop, so stay tuned.If you’re hunting for a 4K TV with fantastic picture quality and contrast, the highlight deal is on Vizio’s brand-new 65-inch OLED TV. It normally costs $2,000, but it’s $500 off until the sale ends on Sunday. This model should be on your shortlist if you need a new TV that has HDMI 2.1, which... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Well, we had another hearing with the platform CEOs.The dream with this sort of thing is that Congress shows up with a full command of the issues, and asks the CEOs good-faith questions about matters of policy and law. And then I’d come along at the end of the day to walk you through the more provocative questions and productive answers, and gesture at what likely policy outcomes we could expect from this exercise in representative democracy.But “Does Section 230’s Sweeping Immunity Enable Big Tech Bad Behavior?,” a hearing of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, was not that kind of exercise. The word “sham” got kicked around a lot, especially by the participants. “Stunt,” too. Some of the Democrats declined... Continue reading…

Image: SpaceX SpaceX is replacing two engines on its Falcon 9 rocket that will soon carry four astronauts to the International Space Station. The change is being made after SpaceX found a substance in the engines that could have caused them to start earlier than planned.SpaceX found the substance after one of the company’s launches halted just before liftoff in October. One of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rockets, tasked with launching a new GPS satellite for the Space Force, shut itself down just two seconds before takeoff. “It was a good abort,” Hans Koenigsmann, vice president of build and flight reliability for SpaceX, said during a press conference. “It did exactly what we programmed it to do.”Today, SpaceX revealed the rocket had automatically stopped... Continue reading…

The Blade A3Y for Yahoo Mobile. | Image: ZTE While the ascendant Yahoo of the 1990s now only lives in our memories, its name and branding continue to shamble on zombie-like to its owner Verizon’s other products — this time, the ZTE Blade A3Y, an exclusive phone for Yahoo Mobile bearing its namesake company’s familiar shade of purple.Besides its burst of color, ZTE’s 5.4-inch 720p phone mostly flashes its Yahoo heritage on your homescreen, with a crowded collection of bloatware helpful pre-installed Yahoo apps like the ad-free Yahoo Mail Pro (yes, Yahoo Mail normally features ads), Yahoo Weather and Yahoo News. The purple back of the phone features a fingerprint sensor for unlocking the device, an 8MP camera, and a removable back plate for accessing the phone’s battery. For... Continue reading…

Image: George Buhnici (YouTube) After launching two identically sized phones — the iPhone 12 and 12 Pro — last week, Apple will next start taking preorders for the iPhone 12 mini and iPhone 12 Pro Max on November 6th. But you won’t have to wait until then to get a sense of just how “mini” this year’s smallest iPhone is. A hands-on video running over 40 minutes in length was posted to YouTube by George Buhnici, only to be removed for unclear reasons and then republished by 9to5Mac. And yep, next to the iPhone 12, it’s downright tiny. Image: George Buhnici (YouTube) This is the first real-world look at the iPhone 12 mini, which has a 5.4-inch screen, but in the more modern notched-display design first introduced with the iPhone 12. That means you... Continue reading…

Image: 3Doodler 3Doodler’s 3D-printing pens cover a wide range of potential uses, from preschool art projects to high-end professional model making. With the Pro Plus, 3Doodler is attempting to refine that professional offering, changing up how you adjust settings while drawing in 3D and offering more materials in more shapes and sizes to work with.The Pro Plus is an upgraded version of the 3Doodler Pro, and it carries over a lot of its visual design. When we covered that last version, we noted its streamlined look and more granular controls but were still left skeptical that the company would escape the “toy” association it gained with its other pens. The Pro Plus keeps a lot of what worked with the previous Pro, while slimming down the device by 50... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge T-Mobile has announced another expansion of its 2.5GHz midband 5G network, which is now available in dozens of new cities, nearly doubling the coverage of its last major midband rollout from the end of September. With today’s expansion announcement, T-Mobile says that it now has midband 5G support in nearly 410 cities and towns in the United States.The new expansion comes just after the launch of Apple’s new 5G-compatible iPhone 12 lineup, which is expected to vastly increase the number of 5G devices in the US.T-Mobile’s 5G network combines its widely available 600MHz low-band network (which offers coverage on a nationwide scale but not much in the way of speed improvements of LTE) with the faster 2.5GHz network (which it acquired... Continue reading…

With the PS5 launch roughly two weeks away, Sony has unveiled a redesign for its PlayStation App on iOS and Android, and it makes me very excited to try it out when the new console launches.Early adopters of the console will have the ability to remotely launch games, sign in to their PS5 directly from the app, and the app will even allow you to remotely manage storage on your console in case you need to make room for a new game to install. Previously, the PlayStation App would let you download games on the PS4, but the app now allows me to download and launch games, plus manage the storage on my PS5.Based on Sony’s blog post, it looks like PS5 owners will have a lot more freedom to manage their consoles without directly interacting... Continue reading…

Photo by James Bareham / The Verge Sony’s PlayStation VR headset is four years old, but the company isn’t giving up on it when the PlayStation 5 console launches next month. The headset is compatible with the new system, but you will need a special adapter. And Sony on Wednesday launched the online request form you’ll need to fill out if you want to get your hands on one for free.The adapter is actually not for the headset itself but the PlayStation Camera accessory that’s required to perform tracking while you wear the PSVR headset, as the new PS5 HD camera accessory isn’t compatible with the headset. Beyond that, everything is supposed to work, meaning you should be able to plug your PSVR headset into the PS5 and use your existing PlayStation Move controllers to play... Continue reading…

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge Facebook’s voter information center was planned as a nonpartisan push to register voters, but it ran into unexpected trouble from Republicans. A new report from BuzzFeed News reveals that six Republican secretaries of state contacted CEO Mark Zuckerberg in September to ask him to discontinue the project.“While such goals may be laudable on their face, the reality is that the administration of elections is best left to the states,” read the letter, obtained by Common Cause through a public records request. “The Voting Information Center is redundant and duplicative of what we, as chief election officials, have been doing for decades.”The letter was sent directly to Zuckerberg from the secretaries of state of Alabama, Idaho, Kentucky,... Continue reading…

The Mandalorian’s second season premiere is just two days away, and, if you’re like me, you’ve forgotten most of what happened in the first season. If you’re also like me, you’re not planning to hunker down and marathon the first eight episodes again.Fortunately, Disney has created a 99-second recap of The Mandalorian’s first season to save us all the trouble. There are plenty of cute Baby Yoda — or, sorry, The Child — shots as well as reminders of the various allies and foes Mando met throughout his journey. Considering that The Mandalorian’s first season wasn’t as narratively heavy as executive producers Jon Favreau and Dave Filoni planned the second to be, it’s a pretty breezy recap.All you need to remember: there’s Mando (Pedro... Continue reading…

The sci-fi design stands out from the crowd Continue reading…

Microsoft first revealed the Xbox Series X nearly a year ago, and the internet went wild and immediately compared it to a fridge. A meme was born, and Microsoft embraced it to reassure us all that the Series X is, in fact, smaller than a fridge. Microsoft has now embraced the meme even further and actually created... an Xbox Series X fridge.This fridge is a 1:1 scale replica of the Xbox Series X, measuring more than six feet tall and weighing 400 pounds. It even has an Xbox logo at the front that lights up, and the Xbox Series X boot sound fires up when you use the disc drive slot to open the fridge door. The fridge glows green inside, because why not. Snoop Dogg and his Xbox Series X fridge. While Microsoft values... Continue reading…

CBS Earlier this month, CBS’s Evil dropped its first season on Netflix. It arrived after what had felt for me like a listless few months; very little pop culture could hold my attention. And then out of nowhere I was transfixed.Evil is a show that surprises you, which to me makes it one of last year’s best dramas. While the show is essentially a network procedural — perhaps the least surprising genre of television — the series is interested in stretching the boundaries of what that means, starting with its premise. Evil follows Dr. Kristen Bouchard (Katja Herbers), a forensic psychologist, and David Acosta (Mike Colter), a priest in training. Together, the two work as assessors for the Catholic church, investigating claims of the... Continue reading…

Two female entrepreneurs are finding new ways to help employees tell their stories Continue reading…

Image: CD Projekt Red The creators of Cyberpunk 2077, one of the most anticipated video games of the last few years, are having a rough go of it in the lead-up to launch, complicated by yet another delay announced yesterday to help the CD Projekt Red developers finish polishing the game before it launches across nine platforms on December 10th. Now, senior game designer Andrzej Zawadzki has taken to Twitter in the aftermath of the delay announcement to plead with fans to exercise some basic human decency by not continuing to send the Polish studio death threats.“I want to address one thing in regards of the @CyberpunkGame delay. I understand you’re feeling angry, disappointed and want to voice your opinion about it. However, sending death threats to the... Continue reading…

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Like most shared scooter companies, Lime was hit hard by the coronavirus pandemic.“We saw a 95 percent drop in ridership,” Lime CEO Wayne Ting says in an interview. “We’re a mobility company. And one of the things with mobility companies, when communities shut down, riders shut down.”But while the world still remains in the grip of COVID-19, Lime’s scooter business has begun to rebound. In May, the company made a crucial investment deal with Uber and others for $170 million to take over the ride-hailing company’s bike and scooter business Jump. That deal also saw Ting, then Lime’s global operations head (and former chief of staff to Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi), replace Brad Bao as CEO.Now, Ting says that Lime’s riders are coming... Continue reading…

Sony has announced more details about how its PlayStation Plus Collection will work in a new blog post. The service will launch alongside the console in the US on November 12th, and it’ll offer PS5 owners over a dozen classic PS4 titles. The titles will be available for PS Plus subscribers at no additional cost, and they’ll remain accessible for as long as a subscription is active.The service’s launch date varies globally depending on when the console itself will be available. It’ll be available on November 12th in the US, Japan, Canada, Mexico, Australia, New Zealand, and South Korea, and on November 19th in Europe, the Middle East, South America, Asia, and South Africa. The collection is not available in China, Sony says, and it seems... Continue reading…

AMD’s new Radeon RX 6000 graphics cards. AMD is introducing three new Radeon RX 6000 Series graphics cards today that will take on Nvidia’s latest RTX 3000 Series of GPUs. There’s the Radeon RX 6800 XT ($649), which goes up against the RTX 3080; the Radeon RX 6800 ($579), which can be compared to the RTX 2080 Ti or RTX 3070; and finally the Radeon RX 6900 XT ($999), which is pitted against Nvidia’s giant RTX 3090.All three are based on AMD’s latest RDNA 2 technology that’s also found inside the PS5 and Xbox Series X. These latest Radeon cards will support hardware-accelerated ray tracing for next-gen games, and AMD is promising to go head to head with Nvidia in 4K and 1440p PC gaming.The new $649 Radeon RX 6800 XT is aimed at Nvidia’s RTX 3080 specifically, promising... Continue reading…

Photo: Joe Rogan Joe Rogan’s podcast has only been available on Spotify since September, and already, the host is inviting controversial guests to appear. This week, he chatted with Infowars host and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones as well as comedian Tim Dillon. The episode’s audio and video are available both on Spotify and YouTube, and this comes after Spotify employees expressed concern over Rogan’s prior episodes and transphobic content.During this most recent interview, Dillon wore a shirt that says “Free Ghislaine,” in reference to Ghislaine Maxwell, an associate of Jeffrey Epstein who was charged in July with helping Epstein recruit and groom girls to sexually abuse. Dillon claims during the three-plus-hour show that Democrats want to use... Continue reading…

The Apple Clips video app is finally getting its most-requested feature: different aspect ratios. With the 3.0 update rolling out today, Clips can record in 16:9, 4:3, and square — and do all three of those in either vertical or landscape orientations on both iPhones and iPads.It’s a long-overdue feature for Apple’s clever little unsung video creation app, which until today only shot and exported in square. That might have made sense when it was first released three years ago, but it meant Clips couldn’t really participate in the rise of vertical video story formats in apps like Snapchat, TikTok, and Instagram.The new version of Clips also has a refined interface. Where before you would have to open up an effects pane and swipe... Continue reading…