Search headlines

A New Biological Clock Could Predict When You'll Probably Die

Make the most of it.

Jun 4 • 7:00 AM EDT • Science • sciencealert.com

Shohei Ohtani lowers ERA to 0.74 with 6 scoreless innings, leads NL in OBP

Only two pitchers in the history of baseball have a better ERA through their first 10 starts. You can probably assume Ohtani is better at hitting than them.

Jun 4 • 12:18 AM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

Trent Williams thinks 2027 season will "probably" be his last

Trent Williams signed a two-year, $50 million contract this offseason, with $37 million fully guaranteed.

Jun 3 • 6:02 PM EDT • Sports • nbcsports.com

The cult of objectivity has broken consciousness science

With 22 competing theories and no consensus in sight, the science of consciousness is lost. In this exclusive IAI interview, Berkeley psychedelics researcher and bestselling author of a new book on consciousness Michael Pollan insists that even though consciousness lies beyond traditional forms of scientific investigation, we should resist becoming dualists who see it as something radically different from ordinary stuff in the world. Instead, he makes the case for reimagining science itself: it must stop reaching for objective descriptions of physical reality, and instead embrace subjectivity as the indispensable core of all inquiry. Alasdair Craig: How did your experiences with psychedelics get you interested in consciousness?Michael Pollan: One of the things that happens on psychedelics is that they foreground consciousness. What formerly seemed perfectly transparent and ever present—and yet, non-existent, as water is to fish—suddenly you see it. The metaphor I use in the book is that psychedelics sponge the windscreen. Suddenly you realize: wow, there’s a windscreen, there is this phenomenon that’s mediating my relationship to reality. This is not an unusual realization on psychedelics. I think a lot of people are called to think about consciousness after psychedelic experiences. So that was the proximate inspiration for A World Appears: A Journey Into Consciousness (2026).And then there was a more specific way in which psychedelics influence the book. That was a particular experience I had on psilocybin. I had the sensation that the plants in my garden were conscious and returning my gaze, with their own point of view and agency, and I got curious as to how to evaluate an insight like that. I mean, what’s the truth quotient of insights you have on psychedelics? And I was reading William James—who, of course, wrote beautifully about mystical experience—and he said, we can’t judge the metaphysics here, but we should pay attention to two criteria: (1) How useful is it to think this is true? He was a pragmatist, of course. And (2) can we subject it to other ways of knowing to validate it? Because maybe we should treat these insights as hypotheses. And that’s kind of how I approach psychedelics, as a great generator of hypotheses, but they need to be tested against other ways of knowing. And so that led me down this long path exploring the science of plant intelligence and plant sentience.AC: I love your phrase, “smudging the windowpane of conscious experience.” So do you now start to think, actually, even when I’m not on psychedelics, I’m just seeing a screen all the time, which is not reality, but rather is my conscious experience, behind which reality is hidden?MP: Well, you know, not when I’m brushing my teeth and making breakfast! But yes, in meditation, certainly. I mean, one of the things you realize is that my experience happens to be this way now, but it could be another way. And many things can affect it. My morning coffee changes the screen in various ways, sharpens certain things.___The only tool we have to understand consciousness is consciousness.___There’s this wonderful metaphor in Aldous Huxley’s book, The Doors of Perception, where he thinks we channel consciousness, and that what the brain does is edit it, and there’s a reducing valve. And psychedelics open the reducing valve wider. I don’t know that I’m ready to buy into the idea that consciousness exists outside brains, but I do love that metaphor because there are times when you are more conscious than others. I know I’ve switched from window pane to valve, but you know, a camera aperture can open wider or narrower. And I do have a sense of that. I have a sense of when I’m being less conscious, and when I’m being more conscious, by which I mean, you know, more present, taking in more sensory information. So when you start thinking about consciousness as a matter of degree, that changes things also.I think when we scroll on social media, obviously, we’re conscious. But minimally so, because we don’t have to generate our own thoughts. We’re basically taking these little hits from other people and thinking their thoughts.The process of writing this book made me kind of relativize everyday consciousness as just one type, which is exactly what William James said. Normal consciousness is one type, separated by the flimsiest of screens from the other types.AC: If we stick with the metaphor of the smudge on the window that you get when you take psychedelics, it seems like we’re saying that consciousness has become like an object that you’re looking at, right? You’re looking at the smudge and that just is consciousness. But sometimes we’ll talk about consciousness as a state that you’re in, rather than an object you can perceive. You’re either conscious or you’re not conscious. So it’s difficult to really know what sort of thing we’re talking about when we talk about consciousness, right?MP: Yeah. When you say that consciousness is an object, what’s the subject? Consciousness also? The only tool we have to understand consciousness is consciousness. So we’re in a closed loop and when we get a perspective on consciousness, we’re not achieving any distance from it. That’s one of the problems with studying consciousness. Science is predicated on an objective, God’s eye view of things, and you never get that. There’s no such thing. SUGGESTED VIEWING The brain filters consciousness With Àlex Gómez-Marín But, yeah, there is this sense, I think, that consciousness is something you can approach. Certainly, when you’re writing and trying to recreate a conscious experience, it’s a fiction, but you’re standing back from it, and looking at it. But there’s no real subject-object distinction.AC: That’s so interesting, because when philosophers start talking about consciousness, they often talk about what they call “qualia”, which is their word for the felt experience of, say, the color red. And I think that way of speaking often makes us think of the qualia as an object, which you can see out there: the redness of red. But, as you say, we also want to collapse the subject-object distinction when we talk about consciousness. So there’s something strange going on here…MP: Oh, yeah, there are many strange things going on! *AC: Let’s talk about the varieties of consciousness. Apart from perceptions, there are, pains, emotions, thoughts, and so on. What is it that holds all this diversity together so that they all count as instances of consciousness? What is it that they all have in common?MP: Yeah, that’s a really good question. I mean, there is sensory information, right? Which we perceive coming from the world outside ourselves. And then there’s internal information, which is what’s called interoception. And this is very important too. This is where feelings come from—what are sometimes called homeostatic feelings—that are intended to get the brain to keep us in these narrow ranges of temperature and glucose and so on. That’s a very important part of consciousness. And according to some researchers, who I think are probably right, this is where consciousness begins, with these very primal feelings, like hunger and thirst and warmth and itch, and things like that. And then there’s this third thing, which is our thinking about thinking.And what holds all this together is, I think, the sense of self. Consciousness generates a self: it is probably an organizing principle. All this stuff is happening to the self. It’s a construct, I think, but it is very useful. It can connect all these different streams of consciousness to a single being or a place, metaphorically speaking.* AC: The first half of your book is about the science of consciousness. Is consciousness just another thing, like black holes or the origin of life, which we don’t yet understand, but which we should have every hope that science will one day get to the bottom of, or is there something special about consciousness that makes this unlikely?MP: It depends how you define science. As we define science now, it’s going be very difficult. Science since Galileo has had a set of rules or assumptions, which is that the proper remit of science is to deal with the objective, quantifiable, third-person world. And the physical sciences have done amazing work under that set of limitations. Galileo—for tactical reasons, not for philosophical reasons—said science should not deal with the soul, which at the time was what consciousness was considered to be. So what is subjective, what is qualitative, what is first person, we’re going to leave to the church, he said. And this was a good agreement, and it probably kept many scientists from getting burned at the stake. But it leaves science in an awkward spot, now that it wants to venture into that territory of qualities, of first-person experience. And I don’t think it has the proper tools. I think it will have to add to its toolkit in some way, and find a way to bring in phenomenology, or lived experience and introspection, which science is usually dismissive of.The challenge—we alluded to it earlier—is that the only tool you have to study consciousness with is consciousness. And what I mean by that is, the whole scientific enterprise is a manifestation of consciousness. As much as scientists like to flatter themselves with this idea that they attain a godlike perspective on what they study, when it comes to consciousness, there’s no such thing. And it’s fine for all the things you can step outside of and study from that perspective. But two areas it won’t work are consciousness and cosmology.___It could be that we live in this anomaly of not believing nature is conscious. And maybe psychedelics are teaching us something we’ve forgotten.___With cosmology, too, you have to study the universe from inside the universe. It’s not that cosmologists haven’t made progress. We know a lot about the age of the universe and expansion and things like that. But we can’t penetrate what happened before the Big Bang. We just don’t have the tools because we can’t stand outside.The fact that there are 22 full-scale theories of consciousness tells you all you need to know: we’re kind of lost. And I was surprised to find that we are more lost than I thought we were when I started this. I thought that there’d be leading theories, or that we had experiments that we could conduct that would nail some of this down. And the fact is, we don’t.So, I don’t know if science can solve it. But, of course, we can change the rules of science. A really influential book for me was a book called The Blind Spot, by two physicists, Marcello Gleiser and Adam Frank, and a philosopher, Evan Thompson. It’s a reminder that science is a social practice. It’s organized in a certain way and it can be organized in a different way. But it has this huge blind spot at the center of it, which is its failure to recognize that it is a form of consciousness itself, and it doesn’t have a good way of taking account of lived experience.AC: On the one hand, I think you want to resist traditional dualism, which would say that consciousness is something magical, something supernatural, right? But on the other hand, you’re accepting that there is this division in reality between the stuff that you can investigate objectively and measure, and so on—the stuff that science has been good at finding out about—and consciousness, which, for some reason, you can’t objectively measure. Some would take this to suggest that the dualism is actually right. Is there a way of reconciling these two strands of your thinking?MP: To call it magical is full of value judgement. I mean, you could just say immaterial. The interesting thing is, I think, that intuitively we’re all dualists. And I don’t know whether that’s because we’re children of Descartes and other cultures are less dualist than we are. Or it may be because that’s how consciousness feels. It feels different than the body. It feels separate from the body. But I don’t think we should trust that intuition.AC: So let’s think about ways that science might be changed to get at consciousness. I suppose the starting point would be the way that you begin the second half of your book. You have this nice line from William James, where he says, “We now begin our study of the mind from within.” Could you give us some sense of the ways of studying the mind from within? What does this involve?MP: I don’t know what that science looks like. But one of the points I’m making is that it depends on the humanities. I found that I learned as much, if not more, about consciousness, from reading novels and poetry. There is a sense of the fullness and complexity of consciousness that you don’t get in any scientific account. I interviewed this stream-of-consciousness writer and I approached her as an expert on consciousness, and she is. So I think that dialogue is really important.I’m reading Ben Lerner’s new novel, Transcription. Just read the first page of this novel: it’s a man falling asleep on a train, going to conduct an interview, and there is the experience of being in the train, facing backwards, there’s the view outside, but there’s a reflection of himself through which he’s seeing outside. There’s the memory of dropping his kids off at school. All this is going on in one moment of consciousness. Scientists aren’t going anywhere near that. But I think it’s useful for them to think about. That’s where we’re trying to go: like, how does such a layered experience happen? You know, it also makes you wonder, could a computer ever do this? And it gives you some doubt.*AC: Before we get to computers, perhaps we could talk briefly about plants. How did you come to feel that they are sentient?MP: Well, it was a psychedelic experience, and it’s not unusual on psychedelics. In fact, there’ve been studies about how people become animists during psychedelic experience. Their belief in animism arises after a single psychedelic experience.You know, most scientists would say this is all a myth. But we have only 400 years of the age of enlightenment and science. Before that, we were animists, and if you go around the world, most indigenous cultures are still animists, and children are animists, by and large, until they go to school. So it could be that we live in this anomaly of not believing nature is conscious. And maybe psychedelics are teaching us something we’ve forgotten.As I said, I wanted to test this idea, and see whether there was conventional scientific evidence for it. And there’s fascinating work going on in a field that calls itself—in a rather cheeky way—plant neurobiology. These are people who fully realize there are no neurons in plants, but they’re trolling conventional botanists! And they’re doing experiments that are demonstrating that plants can learn and remember, which is kind of amazing: how do you store a memory without neurons? They’re finding plants that can solve problems, that can hear and see. In fact, they have 20 senses to our five or six. For example, a bean plant looking for something to twine, and given a pole within eight inches or so of it, knows where that pole is and will aim its spiraling reach at that pole. What is that about? Is it bouncing signals off of it?One of the spookiest things is the fact that the same anesthetics that put us out put plants out. You might think that plants are already out, but they’re not. They’re just slow. If you take a plant with a fast behavior, like a Venus flytrap, and give it an anesthetic, it will stop reacting. So you have to ask yourself, what is lost when the plant is anaesthetized? Some state of alertness, of awareness, of its environment, of reactivity. I’m not prepared to call that consciousness, but maybe it’s sentience—which is a simpler form of consciousness, and involves the ability to sense what’s going on in your environment and assess what’s good and bad for you and act appropriately. That may be a universal quality of life.AC: Let’s turn from plants to AI. You point out that LLMs are trained on the internet rather than direct interactions with reality. You put this really nicely when you say the internet is not the world so much as a shadow cast by the world. So LLMs are living in this kind of shadow world, or in Plato’s cave, as you put it. What’s the significance of this for AI consciousness and moral consideration? And, to recall the beginning of our conversation, if we’re stuck behind a veil or screen of consciousness, are we also stuck in a kind of shadow world?MP: I don’t think they’re the same shadow worlds because our world includes nature and other people. And even if it’s mediated in some ways... There is a reality out there, and we are in relation to it, through consciousness. There’s friction with it. What’s missing from the LLMs is that friction with the real world. There’s more to the world than human representation, which is what they’re dealing with. And that means that so far, AI is a cultural technology for combining thoughts we’ve already had. SUGGESTED VIEWING Cracking the code for thought With Roger Penrose, Sabrina Gonzalez Pasterski, Max Tegmark, Güneş Taylor Genuine creativity is more than collage. A lot of what AI does now is tantamount to collage, putting this with that and you know, that’s part of art, certainly. But there are also genuinely new ideas that come into the world that don’t come in through manipulating the representations we already have. So it remains to be seen whether AIs can be truly creative in that more radical sense.But my arguments against AI becoming conscious have to do with the fact that the idea of AI consciousness is based on this faulty metaphor that the brain is a computer. There are dimensions in which the brain is like a computer—it certainly does its share of computation. But computers have this sharp distinction between hardware and software, and brains don’t. In a brain, hardware and software are identical. Every memory is a physical change to the brain. Brains are not interchangeable in the way computers are. So this idea that you could take the consciousness out and somehow run it on another substrate, a silicon substrate, seems foolhardy.Anyway, it’s a more extended argument, and I may be wrong. And when we move to computers that aren’t based on silicon—neuromorphic computers and things like that—all bets may be off.AC: Regarding your point about LLMs being stuck in the world of our representations—the internet or whatever—and not being able to interact with reality, are these representations, the world of the internet, themselves part of reality? We’ve created the internet, but it’s still a real thing that exists. And so while the LLMs may be trapped within that part of reality, they’re nevertheless within reality and interacting with it and so on. So it’s not obvious that there’s a barrier there to them becoming conscious and being creative.MP: Yeah, I mean, if our consciousness is built out of human culture, which is what we’re talking about with all those representations. But I tend to think consciousness comes a bit more out of nature and friction with the natural world, but...AC: So there’s a fundamental divide between the natural world and human artefacts?MP: And we lose track of that, and especially people in this computer world. You know, the people who are creating these AI systems, my guess is they’ve been into video games since the age of three, and they didn’t go outside a lot. And their own contact with nature is somewhat limited. I could be wrong, it’d be a very interesting thing to ask, all the wizards of AI, whether they like to go fishing and hiking and do things like that. Or were they on computers from a very early age? I interviewed Blake Lemoine, the Google engineer who came to believe that LaMDA, the Google LLM out at the time, was conscious and deserved personhood. It was very clear that he didn’t see a distinction between this bubble in which he lived and the real world. And I think we’ve all been distanced from the natural world, and this is taking us even further away. But it’s still there, you know, and we still have bodies, and we’re still mortal, and we don’t live in a simulation.AC: I think that’s a great place to finish. Michael Pollan, thank you very much!

Jun 3 • 8:00 AM EDT • Science • iai.tv

Happy Harry's RibFest brings heat to summer entertainment lineup

“It’s probably our strongest four nights of entertainment," said Fargodome Director of Marketing & Sales Sarah Dykema.

Jun 1 • 8:53 AM EDT • Entertainment • inforum.com

Science reveals the one simple habit that keeps couples together for life

You probably did something small for your partner today. Maybe you made coffee before they woke up, or handled an errand they forgot about. And chances are, it went completely unnoticed. We tend to assume that love is sustained by grand gestures – the vacations, the surprise gifts, the big declarations. But what if the...

May 31 • 2:00 PM EDT • Science • graziamagazine.com

Fantasy Baseball Winners and Losers from Week 9 2026

Jacob Misiorowski set a record that probably should not be possible. The week that was in fantasy baseball featured a 451-foot exclamation point from a man who had been making contact with the baseball at an elite level while somehow watching all of it stay inside the park, a 26-year-old pitcher who threw 57 pitches at 100 miles per hour or faster in a single game — a number that had never been achieved in the pitch-tracking era — and a Saturday afternoon at Citi Field that produced two of the purest moments of the season in the same box score.

May 31 • 11:09 AM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

'Rucking' Is The Walking Trend You Need To Try. Here's Why.

Bonus: You probably have the necessary gear in your closet right now.

May 31 • 7:33 AM EDT • Technology • huffpost.com

No more expensive roaming: the data trick business travelers swear by - Futura-Sciences

Stay connected across borders—without the roaming bill shock If you’re a frequent flyer for work, your data needs are probably sky-high. Between video meetings, sending files on the go, and keeping your cloud tools synced, staying online isn’t just convenient—it’s essential. Traditional mobile plans and public Wi-Fi networks often leave...

May 30 • 1:30 PM EDT • Business • futura-sciences.com

Brandon McGinley: Allegheny County can support parents without chasing away business

If Pittsburgh’s maternity wards offered a punch card, my wife and I would probably have earned a freebie by now. Though we might have to argue with...

May 29 • 12:00 PM EDT • Business • post-gazette.com

First Look at iPhone 18 Pro Color Options Revealed by Dummy Models

Leaker Sonny Dickson today shared images of iPhone 18 Pro dummy models in the device's four rumored colors, offering the first real-world look at what to expect from the lineup visually. Corroborating previous rumors, the dummies show the iPhone 18 Pro Max in Light Blue, Black, Silver, and Dark Cherry. Dickson said "Cherry will probably be the next hit, orange did very well". Cosmic Orange was the signature color of the iPhone 17 Pro and proved popular with customers.

May 29 • 7:50 AM EDT • Technology • macrumors.com

Apple reportedly trying to distill Google's multi-trillion-parameter Gemini AI to run on iPhone

As Apple tries to shrink Gemini for the iPhone, a cloud component is probably inevitable.

May 28 • 2:30 PM EDT • Technology • arstechnica.com

31 hours with the spit-shined Mina the Hollower (and 34 with the four games that came before it)

To truly appreciate Mina The Hollower, an extraordinary new throwback of a game, I sent myself to Yacht Club University. That’s not a real institution of higher learning, but it’s the best way I can explain much of the past several weeks as I prepared to play Mina by playing the four biggest game previously made by studio Yacht Club Games. I had expected Mina the Hollower, in development for six years for PC and consoles, to potentially be something special. A demo I tried in March had felt great. Mina the Hollower had an old-school premise: a singular move for its hero that felt so good to control and so rich with possibilities that, in the hands of skilled designers, it could be riffed on in various ways for the length of a full game. Mina’s core maneuver, her hollowing, made her sort of an upside down Super Mario. Nintendo’s hero jumps through the air, discovering power-ups at the apex of his jump by bonking overhead blocks, then defeating enemies by landing on them. Mina essentially jumps into the ground, digging (“hollowing”) into the earth to fetch buried treasure, then burrows for a short distance to emerge on the other side of a wall that hides treasure or an enemy that needs some battering. I wanted to understand how good Yacht Club was at making games. I wanted to see how far they’d come. If Mina was terrific—as I predicted it might be—I wanted to feel how they got there, one button press at a time. On May 6, 21 days before the writing of this review, I checked with Yacht Club Games co-founder and programmer David D’Angelo, to ask which of the studio’s games I should play to truly appreciate the new one’s design. “Hmmm all of them?” he wrote back. “Starting with Shovel Knight definitely is helpful,” he continued, referring to Yacht Club’s first game. He gave me a link to a spreadsheet of over 400 cheat codes that could help me out, if I found the game too tough.1 “Most folks say Specter of Torment is the least difficult and quickest to finish in terms of playtime, and [it] refines much of Shovel Knight,” he told me. “King of Cards is a big celebration of everything we did in [the Shovel Knight compilation] Treasure Trove— might work for you better if you’re a fan of shorter, Mario-style courses. And it’s probably the closest to Mina in terms of polish.” So that was that. Four games, none of which were required. Mina is a whole new game in a whole new world, best I can tell. I’d barely played that first Shovel Knight before and never the other three. I just thought it’d help. It did. It turns out that playing a game studios major works before their latest is very illuminating.

May 27 • 7:55 PM EDT • Technology • gamefile.news

Cubs' losing skid reaches 10 games as team's streaky -- and unprecedented -- season continues

Chicago improbably has three streaks of at least 10 games this season

May 26 • 9:46 PM EDT • Sports • cbssports.com

Josh Sweat trade rumors: Back to the Eagles?

Probably not.

May 26 • 6:55 PM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

Science Says You're Probably Making Smoothies Wrong, and I've Never Felt More Validated

A new study suggests adding a banana to berry smoothies may significantly reduce flavanol absorption, a victory for one banana skeptic.

May 26 • 4:00 AM EDT • Science • inc.com

Z386: An Open-Source 80386 Built Around Original Microcode

There are many ways you can implement an Intel i386 CPU on an FPGA, with the use of original microcode probably being one of the most interesting approaches. This is what [nand2mario]’s z386 …

May 25 • 7:00 PM EDT • Technology • hackaday.com

Fallout: Siege of New Vegas Trailer Drops Action-Packed Reveal

Fallout: Siege of New Vegas is probably the best example we'll get of what a full Fallout: New Vegas remaster would look like.

May 25 • 9:51 AM EDT • Technology • insider-gaming.com

‘Galaxy Z Fold 8 Ultra’ leaks, but it’s probably not for the foldable you thought

One of Samsung’s upcoming foldable phones seems to exist mainly as a counter to Apple’s rumored “iPhone Ultra” and, with...

May 25 • 7:00 AM EDT • Technology • 9to5google.com

No, that probably wasn’t Pixel 11’s ‘Glow’ at I/O – ‘Pixel Ultra meeting’ anyone?

Amid leaks and rumors of “Pixel Glow” on the Pixel 11, many are pointing to a specific shot at Google...

May 24 • 11:20 PM EDT • Technology • 9to5google.com

Geoff Keighley Teases Summer Game Fest With A Steam GIF, And Half-Life Fans Are Taking It As Well As You'd Expect

Geoff Keighley posted a GIF of some steam, and no, it's probably not a Half-Life 3 tease. Lest we all forget wishlist-gate.

May 24 • 10:27 AM EDT • Technology • thegamer.com

The Team Behind The Flipper One Needs Your Help

You’ve probably heard of the Flipper Zero, a pocket-sized device that packs in lots of great hacking potential. The team behind it has now turned their efforts towards developing the Flipper …

May 23 • 1:00 AM EDT • Technology • hackaday.com

Whole Hog Politics: Blue MAGA? Yep. Democrats’ Tea Party? Probably not.

[Watch Whole Hog Politics live: Join us today at 9 am ET at TheHill.com as Chris Stirewalt and host Bill Sammon break down this week’s political news and answer questions from a live online audienc…

May 22 • 8:00 AM EDT • Politics • thehill.com

It Feels Like Google Is Downplaying Smart Glasses With a Screen in Them

Probably for the best if it's trying to avoid comparisons to Google Glass.

May 20 • 9:11 PM EDT • Technology • gizmodo.com

Will the Braves regret parting ways with Jonah Heim?

Battle of the probably negative fWARs!

May 20 • 9:00 AM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

Plex is tripling the price of a lifetime pass to $750 after doubling it last year

FOMO is probably the point.

May 19 • 7:03 PM EDT • Technology • theverge.com

You probably don't need a 1,000 Hz gaming monitor

LG's latest hits one frame per millisecond at a full 1080p resolution.

May 19 • 12:26 PM EDT • Technology • arstechnica.com

Whoa! Netflix is Sending Narnia Heading to Theaters...What This Means for the Future of Film

(Welcome to the “Most Important Story of the Week”, my bi-weekly strategy column analyzing the most important (but often not buzziest) news story of the last two weeks. I’m the Entertainment Strategy Guy, a former streaming executive who now analyzes business strategy in the entertainment industry. Please subscribe.) Here’s a funny thing about the debate over whether streamers should release their movies in theaters first: Both sides think the other side represents the “conventional wisdom”. If you’ve been reading me for any amount of time, or even just scanned my front page, you know I think movies make more money by having a robust theatrical window compared to going straight-to-streaming. I’ve published thousands of words on this topic. And for years, I felt like I was standing up to a wave of opposition. See, while the “put your films in theaters to make money” take was obvious at any point before 2019, post-streaming revolution, most of the trendy thinkers took the opposite point of view. Big names argued that Netflix putting their film straight-to-streaming (“S-to-S” from here on out) actually made more money. Netflix was “disrupting” theaters, just as they disrupted Blockbuster Video, and since innovation is always good, this too was a great idea. This thinking then leaked into the mainstream business outlets like the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg. I read many articles whose take boiled down to “Netflix makes tons of money from S-to-S releases” and “theaters were in structural decline” anyways. Covid-19 shutting down theaters and the 2023 strikes shutting down film production seemingly justified this point of view, as the box office struggled to return to 2017-2019 heights. Yet I’ve also read folks arguing the opposite point: the conventional wisdom says to put films in theaters! From some writers’ points of view, “everyone” actually agrees/agreed with my “send your films to theaters” take—especially the stodgy traditional studios—and folks still didn’t understand Netflix’s genius. I feel like, for the last two years, many people have argued this point as if it’s conventional wisdom. You know what? I may have been wrong. At this point, the “S-to-S strategy makes money” might be the minority viewpoint. Especially with the news this month that Netflix will put at least one film—Greta Gerwig’s Narnia film The Magician’s Nephew—in theaters in 2027 for a full 49-day run is big news. So that’s the story of the week, but I’ll also explain why they’re making this move now and why Netflix may not completely embrace theaters, along with other topics, like how I don’t buy Disney’s “super app” strategy, the latest good news out of the unions, my take on the latest attacks against free speech, and a whole lot more. Let’s get started. Subscribe Most Important Story of the Week - Netflix Goes to Theaters! Listen, I promise not to victory lap too hard today. As I just wrote, I’ve argued against sending films straight-to-streaming for—checks calendar—eight years now. Since 2018. Yikes. That’s a long time. And for years, others painted my thinking as “conventional” in that I was standing up for the status quo against trendy, cool disruption. And that’s not cool! But math is math, and I never could make the S-to-S numbers work. The only thing that ever enabled that model was Wall Street’s brief exuberance for it. It seems like the heads of Netflix now agree with me. (There were always rumors that former head of film for Netflix Scott Stuber argued internally for theatrical releases as well.) As they announced: “The Magician’s Nephew_—the first film in a Narnia series of films—will open on 12-Feb-2027, with a 49 day theatrical exclusive run.”_ I’m a little surprised at how little coverage this big change actually got. Credit to Bloomberg for leading with it and Matt Belloni’s The Town for highlighting it with the provocatively titled podcast “Hell Hath Frozen Over”. But after that? Instead of getting as much coverage as, say, the FCC’s latest egregious crackdown on free speech, this news story got crickets. But it’s massively more important for the future business of entertainment. So let’s start with the obvious question… Why Put Your Movies in Theaters? So…why should Netflix put (some!) of their movies in theaters? Well, I’ve already written that in a very, very, very long article from 2022: [ ](https://entertainment.substack.com/p/the-data-is-in-theatrical-films-massively) [ The Data Is In: Theatrical Films Massively Outperform Straight-To-Streaming Films ](https://entertainment.substack.com/p/the-data-is-in-theatrical-films-massively) Entertainment Strategy Guy · April 5, 2023 [ Read full story ](https://entertainment.substack.com/p/the-data-is-in-theatrical-films-massively) To summarize, theatrical runs make much more money, especially blockbusters, because they earn more money per viewing,1 and that helps boost home entertainment sales. Theatrical films also perform as well or better than the streaming-only films. Now, partially this is driven by increased marketing for said films, but said marketing ultimately boosts the awareness of the movies and drives improved streaming and library performance as well. Again, I’ve made this case after reviewing the economic models and streaming data for years. Just last week, Emily Horgan also made the case for kids films! Yes, it is probably conventional wisdom, but that’s also because it’s true! I’d also argue we’ve seen a lot of data in the various studios’ behavior. As I’ve noted before, the more a studio needs to make money, the likelier they are to put films in theaters. As such, Disney, Universal, Warner Bros., Paramount and Sony all send their major films to theaters. Even if they once made a big S-to-S push (*cough* Disney *cough*), they’ve since relented and returned to theaters. The tech companies don’t need to make money, per se, so it took them years to embrace theaters. Apple doesn’t need to make money because it doesn’t disclose their (likely) Quibi-sized losses each year. (They fear bad press more than losing money.) Amazon announced two years ago that they planned to make Amazon-MGM Studios/Prime Video profitable on its own, and guess what? Now they’re putting films in theaters. That leaves Netflix. They’re in between the “no need to make money at all” and the “desperately need to make money to offset linear TV declines”, so they had less pressure to put some films in theaters. Plus, for years, they were the sexy disruptor, and Wall Street rewarded them for that. (Honestly, they still do.) Yet, even Netflix likely saw the money they were leaving on the table (I’ve estimated it at an easy billion dollars before) so they changed their course. I heard one pundit argue that, because Netflix already makes so much money, they don’t need to make more money, which sort of goes against everything I’ve ever learned about business and economics. Again, to be super-nuanced, sending “films to theaters” does not mean EVERY film. TV movies have been a thing for decades. Lifetime films, Hallmark holiday films, Disney Channel Original Movies, and so on, don’t need theatrical runs. But films above a certain budget level (say $25 to 50 million) almost certainly need theaters to maximize their revenue. The Scenarios (with a Dose of Skepticism) Now time for some skepticism: it won’t surprise me at all if Netflix re-changes course. Specifically, Netflix announced that their Narnia film will go to theaters. And I’d bet anything we see KPop Demon Hunters 2: The Huntering2 also goes to theaters, cause it’s the surest hit outside of a Disney animated sequel right now. But how much does Netflix truly commit to theaters? They’ve already tried to emphasize that this is a one-off move. I see three broad scenarios:

May 18 • 3:27 PM EDT • Entertainment • entertainment.substack.com

The NFL Will Probably Eliminate International Games Schedule Rule

The NFL is pushing more and more games overseas. The league will play a record-breaking nine international games in 2026. The league will open the year overseas, with a game in Australia, featuring the 49ers and the Rams. The NFL will also be holding games in new international cities like Rio de ...

May 17 • 2:03 PM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

The Best Android Auto Apps You're Probably Not Using

Android Auto has more to offer than just Spotify and Google Maps. There's a whole range of apps that you can use in your car. Here are a few of our favorites.

May 16 • 11:45 PM EDT • Technology • slashgear.com

Letter from the editor: Farewell from the executive science editor

Journalism was probably the last thing on my radar when I walked through the club fair as a first-year. And for most of my time at Tufts, it stayed that way. My best friend Carmen was super involved in that world, but her involvement was the closest I got to that space.

May 16 • 8:00 PM EDT • Science • tuftsdaily.com

Feature: Moore ’26 Keeps Busy with Double Science Major and Music

Luke Moore ’26 came to Kansas Wesleyan on a music scholarship. He’s graduating this weekend (May 16) with a double major in Chemistry and Physics. He’s as active on the music side as he is with his science activities — he’s played the cello for 10 years, including four years at Kansas Wesleyan. It’s common, he said, for scientists and musicians to share those interests. “I’ve spoken to plenty of musicians who would have done science if they weren’t musicians, and I’ve talked to plenty of scientists who would have done music if they weren’t scientists,” Mooresaid. He played the cello in the string orchestra, which he’s done since his first year, and as a junior and senior, sang in the Philharmonic Choir as a bass. He hadn’t sung in a choir since middle schoolin Garden City, but he found he really enjoys that aspect of his college career. Also as a junior, Moore helped re-activate the STEM Club as vice president. For two years, he helped build the club’s battlebot. Last year the bot came home from battles in Kansas City in pieces, lots of pieces. This year it came home with the first-place trophy. He’s helped make frozen nitrogen ice cream at Homecoming and other events and helped organize the STEM Club’s first gingerbread house competition for the holidays. Willing to get his hands – and face – dirty for science, he encouraged fellow musicians and scientists to smash him in the face with whipped cream pies on Pi Day (March 14) as a fundraiser for the STEM Club. His capstone project involved developing a metallic organic framework (MOF) that takes a methylene blue dye out of water. “I’m proud that I was able to design this project, and I was proud that I did end up making the MOF,” Moore said. The professors and attitudes at KWU have made all this possible. “I don’t actually have time for everything,” Moore said. “I have to prioritize things. Things inevitably fall through the cracks, but it’s hard for me to choose one over the other, because I like a lot of things. And I don’t want to not do music, and I don’t want to not do science.” Moore said that Kansas Wesleyan, as a smaller university, gives students the opportunity to try things. “If I were to want to be in a music ensemble, it would probably be a bit harder in a larger school. One nice thing about this school is that everyone’s involved in something,” he said. “Professors know that you have other things going on, and they are flexible and understanding.” Moore has applied to grad schools, with an goal of earning his Ph.D. and landing at a university big enough to allow for a small research team that also gives him an opportunity to teach. He’s off to a good start. Moore is receiving the award for Outstanding Research in the Math, Physics and Computer Studies Department at Commencement this year. Story by Jean Kozubowski

May 15 • 4:27 PM EDT • Science • kwu.edu

The fall of an MLB superstar, plus a sad day in the NBA

The Pulse Newsletter 📣 | This is The Athletic’s daily sports newsletter. Sign up here to receive The Pulse directly in your inbox. Good morning! Consider basket weaving today. Inside: ⚾ Yasiel Puig’s tough reality 🥅 Sabres grit out a win 💔 RIP, Jason Collins and Brandon Clarke There was a brief period where Yasiel Puig was probably MLB’s most talented player. His story was inspirational, that of a talented Cuban player defecting to the United States. He put together an unforgettable debut season, where pundits wondered if he should be an All-Star in his rookie...

May 13 • 6:06 AM EDT • Sports • nytimes.com

iOS, macOS, and iPadOS 26.5 updates arrive with encrypted RCS messaging and more

Probably the last big updates we'll see before the next versions appear at WWDC.

May 11 • 1:20 PM EDT • Technology • arstechnica.com

The next Stellar Blade probably won't be PS5 exclusive, as developer Shift Up reveals intention to self-publish and reach a broader audience

Korean publisher and developer Shift Up has revealed that it wants to publish the Stellar Blade sequel itself, leaving PlayStation exclusivity in question.

May 11 • 11:13 AM EDT • Technology • eurogamer.net

'Probably best Celtic performance in this tumultuous season'

Sinclair: Where did that performance come from? Fir Park is a massive massive game now, hopefully we can take Sunday into Wednesday. Topped off with a piece of individual brilliance - a goal Celtic fans will play back over and over for years to come.

May 11 • 5:36 AM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

Science Reveals the Ideal Age Gap for a Couple That Actually Lasts

You have probably scrolled past at least one debate about age gaps this week. Maybe it was a celebrity couple sparking hot takes, or a friend defending their relationship math over brunch. We all seem to have an opinion on how many years between partners is too many – or just right. But what if...

May 11 • 3:00 AM EDT • Science • graziamagazine.com

15 Gadgets & Pieces Of Tech You Probably Shouldn't Have In Your Home Office

That cheap charger, tiny mouse, or gaming handheld sitting on your desk could be making your work setup worse in ways you probably haven't even noticed yet.

May 10 • 12:30 PM EDT • Technology • slashgear.com

UFL ref interviewed during game on Fox broadcast

The UFL has come up with innovative features and unique access on broadcasts that have left fans wondering if we could see such additions to future NFL broadcasts. But something that happened on Friday night’s Fox telecast of a UFL game between the Columbus Aviators and St. Louis BattleHawks that probably won’t carry over to…

May 9 • 9:25 PM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

Game 40: Twins at Guardians

First Pitch: 1:10 pm CDTTV: Twins.TVRadio: TIBN / WCCO 830 / The Wolf 102.9 FM / Audacy Forty games of baseball is probably “enough” games of baseball to feel like you have a sense of the team you’re watching. After 40 games, my sense is roughly the same as it was after 34 games, when I remarked that […]

May 9 • 5:00 PM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

Here he finally is! The perfect right-back for Liverpool

The perfect right-back for Liverpool is finally here. Replacing Trent Alexander-Arnold has probably been Richard Hughes’ biggest challenge since arriving at Anfield.At first, it looked like Conor Br...

May 9 • 4:35 PM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

Google Pixel phones will probably let you ditch the search bar in Android 17 QPR1 [Video]

A new leak showcases an incoming ability for Google Pixel phones to turn off the built-in search bar that has...

May 9 • 8:25 AM EDT • Technology • 9to5google.com

Bigger Isn’t Better

The expanded basketball tournament means a bigger football playoff is probably just a matter of time.

May 9 • 6:08 AM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

The 'nostalgia effect': Scientists produce less disruptive work as they age

You probably know that Einstein changed the face of physics with his theory of relativity in his twenties. What you may not know is that he spent his later career on a crusade against quantum mechanics, ...

May 7 • 5:50 PM EDT • Science • phys.org

Is the FDA Really Suppressing Science? Plus. . .

It’s Thursday, May 7. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Aaron MacLean says Trump is poised to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory in the Iran war. Joe Klein on the life of CNN founder Ted Turner. Jillian Lederman on why cruise ships are here to stay. And much more. But first: Is the FDA suppressing science? On Tuesday, The New York Times published a story with an alarming takeaway. “FDA Blocked Publication of Research Finding Covid and Shingles Vaccines Were Safe,” read the headline. It is the latest in a string of stories that all have the same message: The Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and other agencies, are engaged in a cover-up—and silencing scientists trying to get the word out about the Covid vaccine. What all these stories suggest—some more subtly than others—is that the outsiders now running the public health establishment, officials such as Marty Makary at the FDA and Jay Bhattacharya at the National Institutes of Health, are on a revenge tour. That they are doing harm to the country to get back at the scientists and bureaucrats who ostracized them for deviating from the public-health consensus during the pandemic. It’s a seductive narrative. But is it true? That’s the question we address in our latest editorial. —The Editors Read [ Marty Makary's FDA Has All the Right Enemies ](https://www.thefp.com/p/marty-makary-vaccine-study-fda) [ Trump Blinks First ](https://www.thefp.com/p/iran-peace-deal-pakistan-trump-strait-of-hormuz) Aaron MacLean In return for no detectable concessions, President Trump this week gave up on forcing open the Strait of Hormuz. Now, the Trump administration looks desperate for a deal to end the war with Iran. It’s easy to understand the desire to end the war, but are they blowing the chance at victory? Aaron MacLean makes sense of the administration’s latest moves—and Iran’s response—in his column today. Read full story Aaron MacLean and Niall Ferguson: Live in New York City Join Aaron MacLean and Niall Ferguson on May 19 for a live recording of School of War at the iconic New York Historical. In a conversation as timely as it is wide-ranging, Aaron and Niall will explore the strategic stakes of the moment, including the Middle East, China, and the future of American leadership on the global stage. Get Tickets Now [ Ted Turner, the Optimist Who Built CNN ](https://www.thefp.com/p/ted-turner-cnn-tribute) Joe Klein The man who gave us CNN and the 24-hour news cycle, Ted Turner, died Wednesday at the age of 87. Today, political writer Joe Klein—who almost ghostwrote Turner’s autobiography—remembers his friend, the American media mogul who stood out for his idealism and lack of a filter—something that got Turner in trouble more than once. “His was not a traditional intelligence, but one of horizon: Ted saw things before other people did,” Joe writes. Read full story [ Nothing Can Sink the Cruise Ship ](https://www.thefp.com/p/cruise-ship-hantavirus) Jillian Lederman A viral outbreak on a cruise ship that left three passengers dead has left some people wondering: Are cruise ships on the way out? Not so fast, says Jillian Lederman, who has been on many a cruise herself. Read her piece on why 38 million people a year take a cruise—and aren’t about to stop. Read full story [ The Great Writers Who Were Terrible People ](https://www.thefp.com/p/the-great-writers-who-were-terrible) Shilo Brooks Throughout history, some of the greatest literary geniuses have also been immoral bigots. In the latest episode of Old School, Shilo Brooks is joined by Eli Lake for a conversation about those geniuses, from Voltaire to Norman Mailer and Roald Dahl—and why we should read their work despite their odious prejudices. Listen on MORE FROM THE FREE PRESS [ Inside the Digital Intifada ](https://www.thefp.com/p/digital-intifada-social-media-hamas-terror) Warren Kinsella Read full story [ This Week in American History: Trump’s Over-Arching Problem ](https://www.thefp.com/p/this-week-in-american-history-trumps-over-arching-problem) Jonathan Horn Read full story [ Humanity Is Still Evolving—and Fast ](https://www.thefp.com/p/humanity-is-still-evolvingand-fast) Razib Khan Read full story THE NEWS Thirteen D.C. Metropolitan Police officers have been placed on administrative leave and could face termination after an internal investigation found evidence that crime statistics were manipulated to make the city look safer. The Republican-led House Oversight Committee previously alleged that former D.C. police chief Pamela Smith pressured officers to skew data. Tennessee Republicans unveiled a redrawn U.S. House map yesterday that would split up Memphis’s black-majority Democratic district, the latest move in a nationwide push to redraw congressional boundaries ahead of the midterms. The effort follows a Supreme Court ruling last week on Louisiana’s districts, which Tennessee House Speaker Cameron Sexton said gave states the green light to redraw maps along partisan lines. Israel struck Beirut for the first time since a ceasefire with Hezbollah took effect last month, saying it targeted a commander of the militant group’s elite Radwan force in the city’s southern suburbs. The strikes risk destabilizing that truce at a delicate moment, as Iran and the U.S. report progress toward a deal to resolve their own standoff. The U.S. Air Force is aiming for a Fourth of July delivery of a Boeing 747 gifted by Qatar, hoping to add it to the Air Force One fleet in time for the U.S.’s 250th anniversary, Reuters reported. (For more on the controversy surrounding the aircraft, read Jed Rubenfeld’s piece “It’s a Terrible Idea, but Trump Probably Can Accept a Free Jet from Qatar.”) Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick testified privately before Congress that he has no memory of why he and his family dined on Jeffrey Epstein’s private island in 2012, according to Reuters. The admission contradicts Lutnick’s earlier claim that he had cut ties with the convicted sex offender well before that visit. Weeks before a former JPMorgan investment banker filed a lawsuit packed with explosive allegations, the bank reportedly offered him $1 million to settle his sexual assault and harassment claims, according to The Wall Street Journal. The suit, filed by Chirayu Rana, alleges he was sexually assaulted by a female colleague, subjected to racial discrimination, and forced into a degrading dynamic at work. JPMorgan says the claims lack merit, and the female colleague’s lawyers call the accusations fabricated. A new report from the Hartford Institute for Religion Research shows that, for the first time in roughly 20 years, church attendance is trending upward, with more people volunteering and clergy expressing renewed optimism. The study’s authors described the findings, based on a survey of more than 7,400 congregations, as showing signs of widespread recovery from low attendance numbers.

May 7 • 6:20 AM EDT • Science • thefp.com

2K's NFL Game Is Dead, Take-Two CEO Rules Out Return to Baseball Games

If you were holding out hope for a return to NFL 2K or MLB 2K, you probably shouldn't hold your breath.

May 6 • 7:16 PM EDT • Technology • ign.com

Scientists program materials just by spinning them

There is something universally appealing about the slap bracelet, and the way a simple tap causes it to switch between a straight shape and a curled one. What you probably didn't know is that a slap bracelet's ...

May 6 • 3:20 PM EDT • Science • techxplore.com

BioShock, game prices, GTA, the disappearing NFL deal and more: An interview with Take Two CEO Strauss Zelnick

In 20 years of covering the video game beat, I’d probably not spoken more than 20 words with Take Two chairman Strauss Zelnick, who’s been running the company behind NBA 2K, Grand Theft Auto, BioShock and Red Dead Redemption for, you guessed it, nearly 20 years. Last week, though, ahead of a panel I was hosting at the iicon event in Las Vegas, I had about 20 minutes to interview Zelnick. I could ask one question for each year, I joked, as we settled into our seats on opposite sides of a conference table. Take Two’s longtime head of corporate communications, Alan Lewis, was seated at Zelnick’s side. I didn’t quite conduct our chat that way, but we wound up going through a lot, including… The state of BioShock The ramifications of the rising costs of game development The fate of Take Two’s recent multi-game deal with the NFL Some hints about Take Two’s mobile plans Whether Zelnick’s answer to me about Civ VII was a good one The do’s and don’t’s of NBA 2K microtransactions Take Two’s take on the Switch 2 Oh, and GTA VI (Spoiler: if Zelnick had spilled the beans on the price of the game or a release date for a PC version or whether there will be a polka radio station, that would have been this article’s headline). Before all of that, I would learn what it’s like to interview Strauss Zelnick, who is confident, calm and focused on delivering precise answers. To wit, I thought I’d start our chat with something fun, a bit insidery but maybe safe for him to share. The team at Take Two’s Rockstar label delays their games a lot, I noted. Of course, those delays, however painful, tend to be worth it. So, I was wondering how Zelnick finds out about them. Take the most recent postponement back in November 2025, when Rockstar said that GTA VI would not hit its May 26, 2026 release date (just 20 days from now!) and would instead come out on November 19, 2026. Was that news delivered via a call? An email? How does it work? “I work super closely with my team,” Zelnick said. “It's a very thin team at Take Two. The entire senior management team is six executives who sit in one hallway and share two assistants. And then, basically, there are two people who head up each of our labels.” They meet weekly to discuss their business, he said. So no one emails him about a delay? Nothing like that? Zelnick craned his neck to look at my left hand. He asked if I was married. I am, I said. “Does your partner email you to give you information?” he asked. Fair enough. I didn’t get the sense Zelnick was going to read me the minutes of the management meeting where the GTA VI delay was discussed. Slight pivot, maybe I could get some personality insights about one of the most successful gaming execs of the last 20 years, before getting to my big list of questions about specific Take Two games, franchises and policies. I asked: How do you deal with delay news like that? Go for a run? Meditate? “I tend to default to being very calm,” he said. “I’m not a person who freaks out easily.” He noted that he has a daughter with special needs due to an illness, and he shared that that situation had gotten him worked up. It was a personal, family emergency. “But, you know, business is not that,” he said. “I have no trouble distinguishing between, like, a business challenge and an emergency.” He turned to his left to ask Lewis, his colleague of 17 years, a question. “Have you ever seen me freak out?” “Never,” Lewis replied. “You’ve seen me upset,” Zelnick told Lewis. “Have you seen me raise my voice? Maybe how many times? Be honest, because we might as well be.”

May 6 • 1:58 PM EDT • Technology • gamefile.news

A medieval Scot rocked a 20-carat gold dental bridge

It probably looked as cool as you think.

May 6 • 11:22 AM EDT • Science • popsci.com

Where Did The Myth That Oil Is Made Of Dinosaurs Come From? Probably Chicago In 1933

When we first encountered oil we thought it might be a mineral deposit, which was incorrect, but absolutely nobody was suggesting it was dinosaur juice.

May 5 • 11:27 AM EDT • Science • iflscience.com

What to Know About Sony’s $7.85 Million PlayStation Settlement

Are you eligible for a payout? Probably, but it might take a while and will likely be pretty small.

May 4 • 5:22 PM EDT • Technology • wired.com

Leon Could Be '70' and Still Be a Great Character, Resident Evil Director Says

Capcom wants players to know that old age won't keep Leon Kennedy out of games set after Resident Evil Requiem because he'll probably "still be a great character" even "when he's 70."

May 4 • 1:03 PM EDT • Technology • ign.com

Android phones could get this impressive under-display face unlock tech pretty soon

Right as it’s been revealed that Google’s upcoming Pixel 11 probably won’t have new face unlock hardware, a new name...

May 4 • 12:40 PM EDT • Technology • 9to5google.com

Smart underwear detects lactose intolerance by tracking your farts

A device you attach to your underwear reveals how often you really break wind – and it’s probably more frequently than you think

May 4 • 1:00 AM EDT • Health • newscientist.com

Ultimate camera flagship to launch globally: Xiaomi Mix 5 expected to sport major upgrades

Five years have passed since the Xiaomi Mix 4. Younger readers probably will not even remember Xiaomi's China-only flagship with an under-display camera, but current code analyses suggest it may finally get a successor in 2026. Particularly interesting: the ultimate Xiaomi flagship will likely also be available in Germany and Austria.

May 3 • 10:40 AM EDT • Technology • notebookcheck.net

Yes, you should probably be nicer to your AI — here’s why that’s not as ridiculous as it sounds

You've probably felt it — that slightly hollow, going-through-the-motions quality when an AI interaction goes flat. Science is starting to explain why that happens, and who's responsible for it.

May 3 • 4:28 AM EDT • Technology • digitaltrends.com

Bug of the year (so far)? Nasty cPanel vulnerability probably exploited as a 0-day

: Emergency patches out now for those managing the millions of domains assumed to be affected

Apr 30 • 6:14 AM EDT • Technology • theregister.com

Lenovo acquires Phoenix Technologies’ BIOS business

Lenovo buys Phoenix Technologies' firmware business I guess we all saw “Phoenix BIOS” at some point in our engagement with PCs. You should probably know

Apr 27 • 8:00 PM EDT • Technology • videocardz.com

Game 29: Mariners at Twins

If Connor Prielipp averages 9 pitches per inning then we probably don’t have to see the bullpen today. Positives.

Apr 27 • 6:40 PM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

The First Look at 'Alien: Isolation 2' Calls You Back for More

You'll probably be scared to death in 'Alien: Isolation 2,' but at least there'll be payphones for you to stop and catch your breath.

Apr 26 • 12:30 PM EDT • Technology • gizmodo.com

Smart Glasses Are Eyeing the One Thing People Hate More Than Being Spied On

Hint: It starts with an "S," and you probably have too many.

Apr 23 • 11:15 AM EDT • Technology • gizmodo.com

NFL Draft 2026: Running back position may be devalued, but the safest pick is probably Jeremiyah Love

Apr 23 • 10:02 AM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

The next time your health insurance denies a medication or procedure, here’s how to appeal it. You’ll probably win.

Your insurer is betting you won’t appeal — but research shows 1 million denials could have been overturned if patients pushed back.

Apr 22 • 2:40 PM EDT • Health • marketwatch.com

NFL Draft 2026: Running back may be devalued, but the safest pick is probably Jeremiyah Love

Apr 22 • 10:00 AM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

7 Overlooked Ways to Cut Costs in Your Business Right Now

If you’re not reviewing these areas, you’re probably leaving money on the table.

Apr 20 • 3:00 PM EDT • Business • entrepreneur.com

Scientists Just Discovered an Entire Hidden Supervolcano in the Middle of Europe

Don’t cancel your vacation plans just yet, because it probably won’t erupt soon.

Apr 20 • 8:00 AM EDT • Science • popularmechanics.com

LeBron James calls playoff minutes with son Bronny 'probably the craziest thing that's ever happened' in his career

Apr 19 • 1:00 AM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

Berkshire Hathaway’s Big Utility Business Could Be Worth Close to $100 Billion

It would probably be a top five utility in the country by market value if it were publicly traded.

Apr 17 • 4:01 PM EDT • Business • barrons.com

Microsoft Finally Ups FAT32 Size Limit

You probably don’t spend a lot of time using the FAT32 file system anymore, since it’s thoroughly been superseded many times over. Even so, Microsoft has seen fit to deliver an upgrade …

Apr 17 • 7:00 AM EDT • Technology • hackaday.com

Expectations for 2026 NFL Draft: 'There'll probably be a lot of trades.' Here's who could be on move before and afterward

Apr 16 • 8:00 PM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

In Defense of Dumb Dogs

Your pet is (probably) not a genius, and that’s OK.

Apr 15 • 10:00 AM EDT • Science • nytimes.com

Overwatch’s New Hero Is So Strong She Kills Most Heroes Instantly

Sierra’s ultimate probably needs a nerf or two

Apr 15 • 9:21 AM EDT • Technology • kotaku.com

Gov. DeSantis says Legislature should drive redistricting, acknowledges potential delays in mapmaking

'You've got to get it done probably within the next couple of weeks.'

Apr 14 • 5:08 PM EDT • Politics • floridapolitics.com

Beyond the Algorithm: The business of fun

Depending on the setting, Chris Davenport might describe his career in a number of ways, but if he had to distill it into a single phrase, he would probably say: professional risk manager. Over decades in the mountains...

Apr 14 • 2:07 PM EDT • Business • aspentimes.com

Grinnell College sports social media teams bring the game online

DJ Damazo, assistant men’s basketball coach, said that about three years ago, the basketball team didn’t have a social media page at all. “I thought we were missing out on a chance to market our program to other students at Grinnell and probably, more importantly, like recruits,” Damazo said. Damazo decided to find students to...

Apr 13 • 8:00 AM EDT • Sports • thesandb.com

Upcoming Android flagships may get a bold new look, and you can probably thank Apple

A tipster says next-gen Android flagships are preparing to copy Apple's hero color for the iPhone 18 Pro.

Apr 13 • 12:56 AM EDT • Technology • androidauthority.com

18 Secret iPhone Features in iOS 26 You Probably Didn't Know Existed

Ready to explore everything that iOS 26 has to offer? We'll be your tour guide.

Apr 12 • 6:00 AM EDT • Technology • cnet.com

“AI polls” are fake polls

A few weeks after Donald Trump’s second presidential win, I took the train up from London (where I was living at the time) to Oxford to attend a conference on polls and forecasts of the 2024 election. Most of the attendees were pollsters or academics, but I also watched presentations from Aaru and Electric Twin, two companies that do what is interchangeably called synthetic sampling, silicon sampling, or synthetic audiences. Stripped of startup jargon, that means they use large language models (LLMs) to simulate responses to public opinion polls by having AI agents take on the role of survey respondents. I had already heard of Aaru thanks to some articles with eye-catching headlines like “No people, no problem: AI chatbots predict elections better than humans” in the months leading up to Election Day. The founders were making some big, some might even say far-fetched claims, such as: “within two years, we will simulate the entire globe — from the way crops are grown in Ukraine to how that impacts production of oil in Iraq, trade through the strait of Malacca, and elections for the mayor of Baltimore.” When Semafor asked Aaru’s cofounders — Cameron Fink and Ned Koh — about my boss, they said “we respect all those who came before us.” Nate (as he so often does) shared his thoughts on Twitter: Fink and Koh were relatively good-natured about this back-and-forth when we spoke at Oxford. They even offered to mail me one of the t-shirts featuring Nate’s quote they apparently had made. I never took them up on the offer, which I now somewhat regret. These synthetic sampling companies fell off my radar for a while, but they do still exist. In fact, Aaru recently received a $1 billion valuation. Is what they’re doing anywhere close to the most important frontier in AI development? Not by a longshot, especially when Anthropic just developed a model so adept at exploiting software vulnerabilities that it’s only being released to 40 companies. Still, silicon sampling is increasingly finding its way into public polling. Axios reported in March that “a majority of people trust their own doctors and nurses” based on findings from Aaru — without mentioning that the “people” in that sentence were actually LLMs. Around the same time, the Public Sentiment Institute “boosted” their online sample of 373 real survey respondents with 114 AI agents.1 (Spoiler alert: even the co-founder of Electric Twin doesn’t think that’s a particularly defensible approach.) Polling companies like Qualtrics and Ipsos are also developing synthetic data panels. So, what should we make of these … “polls”? Let’s get one thing out of the way: whatever they are, they’re not polls in the way that term is usually defined. Subscribe You can’t replace polls with AI On one hand, using LLMs to essentially make up fake survey respondents sort of sounds like the dumbest idea ever, one that will at best imperfectly replicate real polls while introducing all sorts of biases. On the other hand, with LLMs improving at a remarkable, perhaps even alarming rate, maybe that means I’m a dinosaur at the ripe old age of 24 because I still want to rely on polls that talk to actual people. I’m not going to argue that synthetic samples are completely useless. In fact, as I’ll return to later, there is evidence that some techniques can replicate topline survey results quickly and cheaply. But the marketing from certain companies can be slightly optimistic. “No traditional poll will exist by the time the next general election occurs,” said Fink in 2024. We’re just 206 days away from the midterms, and based on the fact that I still have to collect a bunch of polls every day, I’d say he should have run that prediction by a sample of AI agents before the interview.2 To see why synthetic samples can’t replace polls, here’s a quick primer on how they work. The simplest version of these models involves taking a LLM (like ChatGPT or Claude), giving it a demographic profile (e.g., a white, college-educated woman who lives in Utah and makes $70k a year), and then asking it to respond to a survey question. You repeat that process a few thousand times using different demographic profiles and end up with a sample of synthetic survey responses. The actual models used by private companies are more sophisticated than this, usually because they incorporate more hypothesized demographic characteristics for each agent and provide them with extra information. Aaru, for example, feeds agents a diet of news and information they’d be likely to consume, while Electric Twin incorporates their customers’ proprietary data about the audience they’re trying to replicate. The way Ben Warner, the co-founder of Electric Twin, explained it to me was “we have a large amount of data on […] for instance, 5,000 people. Can we make an accurate prediction of how they would respond to another question?” Still, it should be obvious why synthetic samples can’t replace polls. Polling is fundamentally a data collection process. We might use surveys to make predictions by feeding them into election forecasts, but the main purpose of a poll isn’t prediction, it’s gathering new data about what people think and how they feel. Silicon sampling, on the other hand, produces no new data. It’s simply a model: you input LLM training data, demographic prompts, and a bunch of other information, and it spits out a prediction for what a poll would say. We love models here, but models aren’t polls. That difference is an important philosophical sticking point for most pollsters I talk to. “I think politics should stay away from [synthetic sampling], because we’re trying to […] represent the voice of the people,” said Natalie Jackson, a vice president at GQR Insights. Democratic pollster John Hagner told me: “I think I’m just incredibly skeptical of this idea. I don’t think it’s research. At that point, you’re asking the machine to tell you what you already believe.” Hagner has seen some presentations of early synthetic sampling experiments, but so far, “if it’s being used in a campaign, people are keeping it incredibly quiet.”3 But Eli, I hear you saying, aren’t polls themselves increasingly governed by modeling decisions? Indeed they are: pollsters’ choices on which sampling method to use, how to define their likely voter models, and how to weight their samples can and do lead to dramatic differences in the results they publish. Aaru even referenced these limitations in the methodology statement included with that maternal mortality “poll” — although I’m using the term “methodology statement” loosely here, because it doesn’t really explain how the model works at all. We can ignore the (frankly preposterous) implication that synthetic sampling isn’t subject to a separate set of biases. The important point is that there’s still a meaningful difference between using weighting and other statistical techniques on actual polling data and using a model to predict what a poll would say. The latter is far closer to election forecasts or techniques like MRP — potentially useful models, but not a replacement for polls.4 To be fair, other synthetic sampling companies are perfectly happy with the distinction between polls and models. Warner compared polling and synthetic sampling to different tools in a toolbox. “The mistake I think we make is we think that these new tools should either work in exactly the same way or somehow replace these old tools,” he said. “Rather than thinking of it as, okay, so we’ve always had the hammer, we’ve always had the screwdriver, now we’ve got a saw. But don’t use a saw to try [to] do the job of a hammer.” A quick comment from Nate Eli didn’t ask me for a comment — rather rude of him, don’t you think? But since I’m editing this story, I figured I’d add a few quick thoughts rather than putting words in his mouth. Beyond the frequently misleading marketing, what bothers me about the AI “poll” hype is that as AI tools make statistical inference cheaper and/or better (note that these are not synonyms) that actually increases the comparative value of collecting original data. You might be able to train a model to make a reasonable estimate of what some hard-to-reach poll respondent would say — say, a young Black man who voted for Trump. (Such a person checks a number of boxes for a voter who is usually hard to reach in surveys.) Indeed, this is closely related to what models like the Silver Bulletin forecast already do. They essentially smooth out the kinks in noisy survey data by making inferences based on past voting patterns or national polls or surveys of other states. But you don’t actually know what these voters think unless you’re reaching them directly. If there’s a shift in opinion among this subgroup, you’re not going to detect it. So if I were running a campaign, I’d invest more in going the extra mile to find a representative sample of those voters. And then I’d hire some smart quants — or Claude? — to figure out the implications for campaign strategy based on proprietary data that my competitors didn’t have access to. -Nate Silver Are these models any good? If synthetic surveys are just a new type of model, the next obvious question is whether the models are at least accurate. The answer very much depends on who you ask. On one end of the spectrum, you have the maximalist argument that synthetic sampling is more accurate than actual polls. “It’s an incredibly challenging problem to go to someone and say ‘hey, we’re going to be more accurate at predicting human behavior than you, even when you talk to your customers directly’,” Koh recently told CNBC. In his view, synthetic sampling isn’t a saw to polling’s hammer, it’s “magic.” There’s certainly evidence that synthetic samples can replicate certain survey toplines. But if Aaru does have any examples of their approach outperforming the polls, they’re keeping those to themselves.5 Aaru’s 2024 election model, for example, had Kamala Harris leading in Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin on November 4th. And although they’ve since taken down their forecast page, they gave Harris a 50.5 percent chance of winning the race on November 2nd.6 After the election, Fink told Semafor he was happy enough with those results because they were “within margin of error,” a term that is completely meaningless when applied to a “sample” of AI agents. And of course, Aaru says their models have improved since 2024, so supposedly now they’d be more accurate than the polls? Still, their stronger argument is on cost: “We are significantly faster and cheaper than traditional polling, and still more accurate,” said Fink. The first two claims are undeniably true, but the third brings us to the opposite end of the spectrum. Both Jackson and Hagner are skeptical that these models are reliable for anything beyond replicating common survey toplines. “I just […] don’t think the machines are what we want when we’re looking for nuanced views. My example on this is people in Arizona and Nevada in 2024 who voted for Trump and voted for expanding abortion in their states on ballot initiatives,” said Jackson. Hagner identified another issue. Maybe the synthetic respondents, like sycophantic LLMs, are inhuman in one important way: they’re too nice. “The reports that have come through at the meetings that I’ve been at are that the early experiments on this, they cannot get respondents to be as racist or sexist or, frankly, as negative as human respondents,” he said. Academic research mostly agrees on this point. While there are some papers that show promising results when using LLMs to replicate polling data, most show that LLMs suffer from various quirks like producing too few “don’t know” responses and can seriously overpredict the favorability of politicians like Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. They also seem to struggle with too little variation between demographic subgroups, so the difference in predicted opinion between Democrats and Republicans, for example, is too small. When I asked Warner about these studies, his response to these papers was that just because academics can’t get synthetic sampling to work doesn’t mean that the technique doesn’t work in general. “Actually, the argument is, okay, yours does not [work]. That does not mean […] for this complex set of machinery, which uses a lot of investment, a lot of time, a lot of money, you can’t get it to work.” Cards on the table, I’m somewhat sympathetic to this argument because academics aren’t exactly great at making election forecasts. Usually, the people with skin in the game are the most accurate. Warner’s argument is that the approach Electric Twin takes — which includes, for example, making multiple predictions for each synthetic respondent using different models and prompts and subsequently averaging those to get a final prediction in a sort of ensemble forecast — produces better results than the simpler academic models. Warner shared a comparison between his method and the method from a recent academic paper with me, and Electric Twin was indeed able to get more accurate replication. But even still, he acknowledged that synthetic sampling “is not a crystal ball.” “If you asked me, do I think using other data sources will be more accurate than asking somebody who they will vote for, I would probably say no. But if you asked me ‘would your system be useful for our turnout modeling today?’ I would say yes.” For better or worse, it looks like the method is already getting more popular in the market research world. Most of the clients Aaru touts these days are businesses like EY and McDonald’s. And AI will probably begin to pop up in other parts of the political polling process. Pollsters are already using it to code open-ended survey responses, and some firms, like YouGov, are testing using LLMs to ask survey respondents questions. More worryingly, one danger to actual polls is that AI agents can be used to infiltrate online surveys. Most online polls use various checks to prevent that from happening, but there’s conflicting evidence on how effective those filters are and how prevalent AI agents currently are in online panels. If those agents ever become impossible to detect, it might spell the end of online polling, but the solution isn’t to replace all of your respondents with ChatGPT. Silver Bulletin is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a subscriber. Subscribe 1 That particular poll obviously doesn’t meet Silver Bulletin standards for aggregation. But we exclude all Public Sentiment Institute polls from our averages because we classify them as an amateur polling firm. 2 You could argue that Fink meant the next presidential election, but (a) I’m also confident we’ll still have real polls in 2028 and (b) in that case he should have asked an LLM to define “general election.” 3 Quick caveat: that’s reporting from a Democratic pollster. It’s possible that Republicans are more willing to use AI in political campaigns. 4 Indeed, Silver Bulletin does not include “polls” produced by MRP in our forecasts or averages, and we think it’s extremely misleading when their practitioners describe them in a way that suggests original data had been collected among a large number of states or Congressional districts. 5 A recent report from Aaru and EY did show two examples of a synthetic estimate being closer than a survey to a real-world benchmark — but I’d take those findings with a grain of salt because the report reads more like an ad and didn’t involve any sort of prediction being made ahead of time. 6 For comparison, our odds for Harris on the same day were 48.2 percent.

Apr 11 • 11:38 AM EDT • Technology • natesilver.net

1st-Round WR Enters Vikings Mock Draft Orbit

Will the Minnesota Vikings actually use their 1st-Round draft pick in two weeks on a wide receiver? Probably not. Can […]

Apr 10 • 3:45 PM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

Apple Warns All iPhone Users—Do Not Answer These Calls And Texts

You will probably be targeted by this new attack — here's what you need to do.

Apr 8 • 6:09 PM EDT • Technology • forbes.com

Podcasting meets science in interdepartmental collab

To make a podcast, you’ll probably need someone to interview. And to be a scientist,...

Apr 8 • 4:04 PM EDT • Science • boisestate.edu

Why The Double Helix is such an extraordinary but infuriating book

James Watson’s The Double Helix is probably one of the greatest science books of all time – but Michael Le Page finds he can’t recommend that anyone actually reads it

Apr 8 • 7:00 AM EDT • Science • newscientist.com

The ‘oldest fossil octopus’ is probably another animal

In 2000, researchers thought they found the oldest fossil octopus, which lived over 300 million years ago. But it may just be a half-rotten nautilus.

Apr 7 • 7:01 PM EDT • Science • sciencenews.org

The Best Endorsements Are The Ones You Can't Pay For

We'll probably never know which cameras failed NASA certification and why, but we sure will remember the ones that succeeded.

Apr 7 • 1:50 PM EDT • Technology • petapixel.com

African frogs haven’t forgotten the ice ages. Scientists can tell by where they live.

Why are frogs diverse in some parts of Africa’s rainforests and less so in others? The patterns of cooling and glaciation during the last ice age would probably not have been your first answer or even your last-ditch guess, but it is, nonetheless, correct. “When the glaciers were at their maximum

Apr 7 • 11:48 AM EDT • Science • floridamuseum.ufl.edu

45-year-old longevity researcher: How I keep my body and brain healthy—it's what 'your grandmother probably told you to do'

Jamie Justice's research focus is how to "prevent or delay the onset of functional declines, disability or chronic diseases" as people age, she says.

Apr 7 • 10:48 AM EDT • Health • cnbc.com

Well, they did it.

The Big Ten now holds the national championships in men’s and women’s basketball, as well as football and probably all of hockey, too. In a whistle-marred game, Michigan shot 21/55 from the field and 2/15 from deep, but did just enough as UConn hit just 9 of their 33 threes, part of a putrid 31% […]

Apr 7 • 1:22 AM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

Google just launched a special-edition Pixel, but you probably can't buy it

The phone celebrates a decade of Google Pixel and introduces exclusive wallpapers alongside custom-themed icons.

Apr 6 • 10:35 PM EDT • Technology • androidauthority.com

Detroit small businesses say tariff refunds could be a lifeline -- if they can clear the federal hurdles

Billions of dollars in tariff refunds could be on the way for American companies but getting that money back will be anything but simple. Experts also warn consumers probably won’t see a dime.

Apr 6 • 3:17 AM EDT • Business • clickondetroit.com

'The Super Mario Galaxy Movie' & 'Avatar 3' Leak on Twitter

If you're still hanging around on Twitter, you've probably seen 'Avatar 3' and 'The Super Mario Galaxy' leaks on there. Second verse...

Apr 5 • 2:50 PM EDT • Technology • gizmodo.com

Vivo X300 Ultra vs Sony Alpha A7 full-frame camera: Who wins?

200MP photos from what is currently probably the best camera flagship phone on the market go up against 24MP shots from a Sony Alpha A7 III setup with a Sony 24-70 lens. Which one comes out ahead in which areas can be judged by anyone based on the available original images.

Apr 5 • 1:12 PM EDT • Technology • notebookcheck.net

Heartwarming scenes: youngster gets hero’s welcome after debut

The professional debut of 19-year-old Ibai Aguirre for Real Sociedad would probably have gone unnoticed in the news... If it weren’t for his friends.The 19-year-old midfielder played only the final ...

Apr 5 • 11:33 AM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com