What's New

Over the last seven days, the internet has been full of unwelcome nostalgia: Here's some nuclear brinksmanship! Here's Puerto Rico, decimated by a natural disaster ! Here's the Senate, planning to vote on yet another healthcare plan to repeal Obamacare! But it's not all been familiar badness; there's been some new ill-feeling torment, as well. Just look below, if you don't believe us. Learn more a...

Gaming laptops tend have a certain reputation in the design department. I guess that the teams that work on these systems do so in a vacuum, and they feed off of the designs of other gaming laptops in an attempt to one-up their competitors’ audacity with each new release. It’s the only explanation I can think of for why the recent Alienware 13 looks the way it does, and the only explanation I can...

Six months ago, in the face of tragedy, Zack Snyder stepped away from the upcoming Justice League movie. While the director and his wife dealt with the death of their 20-year-old daughter, Autumn, Joss Whedon stepped in to finish the film—and changed the conversation around Justice League considerably. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The first place I took the iPhone 8 and 8 Plus was a sticky, late-summer wedding just outside of Austin. It turned out to be the perfect way to stress-test the new devices. The iPhones 8 have new cameras designed to hack it even on a drunken dance floor. Faster processors made downtime game-playing run smoother. They’re also easier to charge, so you’re less likely to get stuck with a dead phone at...

There are two schools of thought regarding wireless headphones. There's the AirPods camp, which believes true wireless is the only wireless, and the best way to listen to music is with two individual buds shoved into your ear canals. To the other crew, wires going behind your head or around your neck aren't so bad; in fact, they might be better, since they're harder to lose and easier to manage. T...

Last Saturday I did something nearly everyone does when their friend goes to the bathroom at a bar: I checked Twitter. There, amidst the Hurricane Irma updates and breathless discussion about Hillary Clinton’s new book, was a very simple message from Darren Aronofsky . Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In most recent trailer for Thor: Ragnarok , it seems clear that Thor teams up with The Hulk, Loki, and Valkyrie—but for me, I'm mostly pumped up about seeing The Hulk again. Towards the end of the trailer, The Hulk is standing with the rest of The Revengers team (the name Thor comes up with on the spot). But there's something funny about this trailer: To me, it seems like The Hulk is much bigger i...

Jaybird's Run headphones aren't meant for you to stick them in your ears and forget about them. They're not ear-puters. Like all Jaybird headsets, they're made for runners, and I guess all exercisers, but mostly runners. They're designed to stay put in your sweaty ears for a whole trail run, blasting music until you've crossed the finish line. For $180, they'd better shave some serious time off yo...

The new iPhone X packs more new stuff into any device since the original iPhone. It's the most complete redesign of the product ever, and even offers a glimpse at what the iPhone might become when the world no longer wants smartphones. Of course, you probably won't buy one. Even if you can afford the super-high price, getting your hands on an iPhone X in the next few months will be like hunting fo...

There are some places that feel very safe. Like your bed. Or a corner booth at your favorite diner. Or Mom's kitchen table. There are some places that feel very un safe. Like in a commercial airliner in the middle of one of the most powerful hurricanes ever recorded. But that's where 173 Delta passengers, plus flight crew, found themselves Wednesday afternoon. Learn more about your ad choices. Vis...

In the beginning, nobody knew how to use an iPhone . That informed everything about the device's design: The green felt in Game Center communicated fun and gambling, the messily ripped paper at the top of the Notes app made clear that this was where you scribbled away. The music app was called iPod, not Music, because Apple deemed that more easily understood. Using an iPhone was like bowling with...

Garmin’s Fenix line has long been among the best—if not the best—multisport watches money can buy. These capable wrist-puters add performance tracking and GPS-based mapping to just about every outdoor activity. Critics have been vocal about the watches’ bulk, so there was much rejoicing earlier this year when Garmin announced multiple, slimmed-down versions of the watch, including the slender 5S....

If you're going to make a phone, you have to get a lot of things right. You need all-day battery life, a big crisp screen, thoughtful software, lots of apps, a great camera, and so much more. And here's the best part: Even if you do all that, you're still just like every other phone . Making a kick-ass, take-no-prisoners phone that does everything well just lumps you into the middle of the pack. L...

“Having a TV show gives you carte blanche to say whatever you want about any other TV show,” says The Kid Mero, one half of Viceland’s raucous late-night talkfest Desus & Mero . Co-host Desus Nice takes it a step further: “If you don’t have a TV show, you shouldn’t be allowed to comment on TV shows. This is my new, one percent way of living. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.c...

Every smart speaker has its advantages. With Amazon Echo , you get access to tens of thousands of "skills," the mini-apps that start a game of Jeopardy or help you mix a cocktail. With Google Home , you have the full power of Google search at your beck and call. And when Apple's HomePod comes out later this year, it'll be by far the best-sounding voice-enabled speaker of the bunch. Sony doesn't ha...

Surprise, everyone! Apple's going to launch a new iPhone. Crazy, right? You had no idea. You definitely know nothing about the device itself, or the screen it'll use, or whether it'll use your face to unlock, or if there's going to be a home button. Will there be bezels? Gosh, who could really say. Here's what we do know: The event's going to be September 12, starting at 10 am California time. Lea...

The nice thing about being a digital hoarder is that all of your stuff doesn’t accumulate in scattered piles around your living room. The downside? There’s never enough space. And while SanDisk’s new 400GB microSD card may still not satiate the most extreme storage hounds, good lord is that a lot of room in a teeny tiny package. The SanDisk microSXDC USH-I, which sounds like it was named after a l...

Here's something creative types will be eager to take for a spin: Logitech's newest keyboard , which has a wheel on it. The Logitech Craft is a sturdy and comfortable wireless keyboard for Mac and Windows that has a wheel in the upper-left corner, just above the escape key. This wheel—or the "Crown input dial," as the company calls it—works straight out of the box with Adobe's Creative Cloud apps...

Yossi Wolf, the CEO of robot-maker Roboteam, almost didn't want to call his newest product a robot . When people think of robots, he says, they expect the stuff of science fiction—machines with faces and personalities indistinguishable from humans. Temi, the rolling robot Wolf hopes you'll soon have in your home, looks more like a tablet on wheels. Wolf knows a thing or two about robots, though. L...

Well, as we hoped would happen , Game of Thrones celebrated the coming of winter by bringing some serious heat. At nearly 80 minutes, “The Dragon and the Wolf” was the series’ longest to date, and it packed in what it could from the very beginning. Most of that was revelation rather than spectacle, but by the time the credits rolled, much of the show’s ambiguity had fallen away, leaving viewers wi...

A metal frame, dome and a lot of pink fabric make up Pink Heart Camp by John “Halcyon” Styn. The SF Bay Area Airpusher Collective dubbed their structure "The Airpusher." The Dome of Dough is made up of 850 loaves of bread. It's inspired by the Wildrose Canyon charcoal kilns in Death Valley, California. This giant duck is the brainchild of Isaiah Martin, David Shields and Tandy Nill. Learn more abo...

More than 600 people climb Mount Everest every year, and not one of them could do it without an army of Sherpas, porters, and others guiding them every step of the way. Steve Brown celebrates these people in The Business of Everest . Some have climbed the world's tallest mountain a dozen times, risking their lives with every trek and getting little credit for it. “All the people who are so famous...

When I met Andy Rubin, the founder of Android, earlier this year to talk about his new company, he showed me a PowerPoint deck from 2009. His team put it together just before the debut of the Motorola Droid, Android’s first real chance to take on the iPhone. The campaign slogan was “Droid Does,” and Motorola planned to harp on all the things the iPhone couldn’t do. It crowed about multitasking, “r...

Having nearly run out of eye-­rolling Avengers conjoinings and bastardized reboots, Hollywood execs have landed on an even lazier way to sell movie tickets: 3-D releases of beloved classics. The latest victim of this desecration? Terminator 2 : Judgment Day . Twenty-six years since Arnold Schwarz­enegger launched his motorcycle off a culvert wall and into our hearts, the ultimate action flick is b...

I'd like to cut the cord. It sounds fun! I picture myself wielding cartoonishly large gardening shears, poised to sever the nearest coaxial cable. I rejoice in the thought of my newfound freedom, of sending my Charter Spectrum account to that great big cancellation form in the sky. And then, the very instant I allow myself to picture what life looks like after that figurative snip , my reverie com...