For today’s high schoolers, a typical school day from a decade ago must seem like something from the Dark Ages. These days, students are issued digital textbooks instead of physical ones, they learn how to conduct chemistry experiments through apps that simulate a science lab, and they take standardized tests on a Chromebook. All of this is the result of many years of frenzied investment in ed tech, capped by a pandemic that forced virtual learning. The overwhelming majority of schools nationwide provide each student with their own laptop or tablet.

All of these screens have changed the dynamic of the classroom. When a student is supposed to be using their school-issued iPad to diligently take notes during math class, they might instead be messaging a friend. Across the country, some parents and teachers are mounting a backlash against screens in the classroom. In April, the Los Angeles school board voted to stop giving devices to its youngest students and implemented screen-time limits for all grades.

But other schools are pulling back on ed tech for an entirely different reason. Chromebooks, like essentially all other consumer electronics, need RAM, or random-access memory. So do the data centers that power every conversation with a chatbot. The AI industry is using so many memory chips that it’s led to a global shortage, making gadgets much more expensive. For an individual consumer, the memory crunch—RAMageddon, if you will—means having to spend a few hundred dollars more on a new computer. But school districts, many of which are already cash-strapped, buy hundreds or thousands of computers every year. The administrators I spoke with for this story told me that they have had to scramble to acquire all the electronics they now need. As RAMageddon drags on, they said, something has got to give.

[Read: If you need a laptop, buy it now]

Schools started picking up on the memory shortage last winter, months before most of the country. They have to figure out bulk orders for laptops and tablets long before the academic year begins. Many of them turn to third-party vendors, which have typically provided quotes that are locked in for a month, giving technology directors time to secure the funds from their districts to make purchases that can run millions of dollars. As memory prices have soared, Mark Samberg, the chief technology officer of Chatham County Schools in North Carolina, is hearing a different message from his vendors. “Now quotes are going to be good for 48 hours, a week, or 14 days,” he told me.

Samberg scooped up the Chromebooks he could find. Other districts have been less lucky. In March, a Chromebook vendor warned Homewood-Flossmoor High School in Illinois that its prices would be going up soon. Steve Richardson, the district’s IT director, quickly placed an order, only to be eventually told it couldn’t be fulfilled because memory chips were on back order. “We were kind of in dire straits,” Richardson told me. In 2023, Chromebooks cost the school $353 a piece. The price rose to $400, then $412, and then $427. The most recent batch that Richardson purchased, in August, cost $508 each. But the district needed them to ensure that every student had a Chromebook ahead of the PSAT, which is now entirely digital.

So far, schools have been willing to stomach the costs to continue giving every student a device. Districts initially decided to implement “one to one” policies on the premise that technology can be an equalizing force in the classroom; many educators and administrators still believe that. Dorann Avey, the board chair of the State Educational Technology Directors Association, told me that she is concerned that RAMageddon will widen the digital divide. Devices are not for “just writing papers,” she said. “We’re trying to prepare students to learn different software that is workplace- and workforce-appropriate.”

That has meant making difficult trade-offs. Because of the extra spending on laptops for students, Homewood-Flossmoor didn’t buy any new smart whiteboards or computers for teachers this year. In Texas, the Paradise Independent School District has considered asking students to bring in their own laptop or tablet, Director of Technology Doug Bryant told me.

A common solution has been to extend the lifetime of a laptop. Instead of replacing a device every four years, schools are opting for seven or eight to reduce how many units they need to purchase in a given year. But that introduces new problems: Older computers sometimes aren’t able to update to the latest operating system, which could create cybersecurity risks. Schools are already a top target for hackers, because they store lots of sensitive personal information but have limited resources. Plus, as a device gets older, its battery degrades and may ultimately need to be replaced. That costs “time and money,” Avey said. “But it’s still less money than buying brand-new devices.”

All of this may not be enough. Multiple administrators told me that they are already considering rolling back their one-to-one device policies because of RAMageddon, and the challenges for schools are poised to mount. Heading into this school year, some districts were able to skirt the worst of the memory shortage by buying Chromebooks before prices really started to soar. Aaron Smith, the CTO of Loudoun County Public Schools, told me that he sought special permission from his school board to commit to purchasing nearly 24,400 Chromebooks in February instead of May. Memory prices jumped so quickly over that time span that the decision ultimately saved the district $1.66 million, he said. But Smith and other technology directors may not have the same luck as they begin looking to purchase gadgets for the next school year. An executive at Micron, one of the world’s largest RAM manufacturers, recently warned that there’s “no line of sight” to the end of the memory shortage. If schools wait to buy, prices could end up going up even more. But buying early might mean devices will languish in storage for months as the warranty clock ticks away.

RAMageddon will force schools to scrutinize which tech purchases actually improve learning, and which don’t. The fallout will reach far beyond Chromebooks. “We’re not going to be able to afford the servers that we thought we were,” said Samberg, the Chatham County Schools CTO. Those servers power functions such as security cameras, badge readers, and account logins—and every one of them needs RAM.

© Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty

For today’s high schoolers, a typical school day from a decade ago must seem like something from the Dark Ages. These days, students are issued digital textbooks instead of physical ones, they learn how to conduct chemistry experiments through apps that simulate a science lab, and they take standardized tests on a Chromebook. All of this is the result of many years of frenzied investment in ed tech, capped by a pandemic that forced virtual learning. The overwhelming majority of schools nationwide provide each student with their own laptop or tablet.

All of these screens have changed the dynamic of the classroom. When a student is supposed to be using their school-issued iPad to diligently take notes during math class, they might instead be messaging a friend. Across the country, some parents and teachers are mounting a backlash against screens in the classroom. In April, the Los Angeles school board voted to stop giving devices to its youngest students and implemented screen-time limits for all grades.

But other schools are pulling back on ed tech for an entirely different reason. Chromebooks, like essentially all other consumer electronics, need RAM, or random-access memory. So do the data centers that power every conversation with a chatbot. The AI industry is using so many memory chips that it’s led to a global shortage, making gadgets much more expensive. For an individual consumer, the memory crunch—RAMageddon, if you will—means having to spend a few hundred dollars more on a new computer. But school districts, many of which are already cash-strapped, buy hundreds or thousands of computers every year. The administrators I spoke with for this story told me that they have had to scramble to acquire all the electronics they now need. As RAMageddon drags on, they said, something has got to give.

[Read: If you need a laptop, buy it now]

Schools started picking up on the memory shortage last winter, months before most of the country. They have to figure out bulk orders for laptops and tablets long before the academic year begins. Many of them turn to third-party vendors, which have typically provided quotes that are locked in for a month, giving technology directors time to secure the funds from their districts to make purchases that can run millions of dollars. As memory prices have soared, Mark Samberg, the chief technology officer of Chatham County Schools in North Carolina, is hearing a different message from his vendors. “Now quotes are going to be good for 48 hours, a week, or 14 days,” he told me.

Samberg scooped up the Chromebooks he could find. Other districts have been less lucky. In March, a Chromebook vendor warned Homewood-Flossmoor High School in Illinois that its prices would be going up soon. Steve Richardson, the district’s IT director, quickly placed an order, only to be eventually told it couldn’t be fulfilled because memory chips were on back order. “We were kind of in dire straits,” Richardson told me. In 2023, Chromebooks cost the school $353 a piece. The price rose to $400, then $412, and then $427. The most recent batch that Richardson purchased, in August, cost $508 each. But the district needed them to ensure that every student had a Chromebook ahead of the PSAT, which is now entirely digital.

So far, schools have been willing to stomach the costs to continue giving every student a device. Districts initially decided to implement “one to one” policies on the premise that technology can be an equalizing force in the classroom; many educators and administrators still believe that. Dorann Avey, the board chair of the State Educational Technology Directors Association, told me that she is concerned that RAMageddon will widen the digital divide. Devices are not for “just writing papers,” she said. “We’re trying to prepare students to learn different software that is workplace- and workforce-appropriate.”

That has meant making difficult trade-offs. Because of the extra spending on laptops for students, Homewood-Flossmoor didn’t buy any new smart whiteboards or computers for teachers this year. In Texas, the Paradise Independent School District has considered asking students to bring in their own laptop or tablet, Director of Technology Doug Bryant told me.

A common solution has been to extend the lifetime of a laptop. Instead of replacing a device every four years, schools are opting for seven or eight to reduce how many units they need to purchase in a given year. But that introduces new problems: Older computers sometimes aren’t able to update to the latest operating system, which could create cybersecurity risks. Schools are already a top target for hackers, because they store lots of sensitive personal information but have limited resources. Plus, as a device gets older, its battery degrades and may ultimately need to be replaced. That costs “time and money,” Avey said. “But it’s still less money than buying brand-new devices.”

All of this may not be enough. Multiple administrators told me that they are already considering rolling back their one-to-one device policies because of RAMageddon, and the challenges for schools are poised to mount. Heading into this school year, some districts were able to skirt the worst of the memory shortage by buying Chromebooks before prices really started to soar. Aaron Smith, the CTO of Loudoun County Public Schools, told me that he sought special permission from his school board to commit to purchasing nearly 24,400 Chromebooks in February instead of May. Memory prices jumped so quickly over that time span that the decision ultimately saved the district $1.66 million, he said. But Smith and other technology directors may not have the same luck as they begin looking to purchase gadgets for the next school year. An executive at Micron, one of the world’s largest RAM manufacturers, recently warned that there’s “no line of sight” to the end of the memory shortage. If schools wait to buy, prices could end up going up even more. But buying early might mean devices will languish in storage for months as the warranty clock ticks away.

RAMageddon will force schools to scrutinize which tech purchases actually improve learning, and which don’t. The fallout will reach far beyond Chromebooks. “We’re not going to be able to afford the servers that we thought we were,” said Samberg, the Chatham County Schools CTO. Those servers power functions such as security cameras, badge readers, and account logins—and every one of them needs RAM.

© Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty

Sign up for Video Village, a new weekly newsletter in which David Sims unearths cinematic gems and brings readers into his movie obsession.

To kick off this newsletter, I sent out a message declaring that movies were “undeniably back.” Within days, it seemed that the sky was falling again. Two venerable studios, Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery, officially merged on October 6, further consolidating power in Hollywood into just a few conglomerates. The new entity has been dubbed Skydance, the name of the original production company that CEO David Ellison founded in 2006. Not much has outwardly changed thus far, new moniker aside. But internally, Ellison has already made at least one concerning decision. Once the deal closed, two key leaders at Warner Bros., the bolder and more risk-taking of the two studios, were immediately shown the door: Michael De Luca and Pam Abdy, the co-chairs of Warner Bros. Motion Picture Group. Their departure suggested what many industry analysts had feared: that their new boss was no longer a fan of taking big, bold risks.

After all, the news that De Luca and Abdy were exiting the company—to be replaced by Paramount’s current team, which will oversee what has been referred to as the “Paramount Warner Bros. Motion Picture unit” (try saying that three times fast)—arrived right before a historically bad weekend for the studio. The Tom Cruise project Digger opened on October 2 to only $8 million domestically, on a budget that reportedly climbed as high as $180 million; that’s an especially anemic number given Cruise’s involvement as both star and co-producer. Digger now stands as Warner Bros.’ final release before it joined Skydance, and the movie’s catastrophic box-office performance is the latest in a series of tough beats for the company this year. Given the film’s wild ambition, its failure will also be a fitting coda for an era that was very up-and-down financially—but often creatively thrilling.

De Luca and Abdy took over Warner Bros. Pictures in 2022, bringing with them a strategic reset. They were both well-regarded names in the world of awards-friendly indie cinema, shaking up a studio that was bouncing back from a theatrical strategy unpopular with the industry: putting blockbusters on HBO Max the day they were released. De Luca was a storied executive whose career included green-lighting boundary-pushing projects by Paul Thomas Anderson and David Fincher and earning Best Picture Oscar nominations for such movies as The Social Network and Moneyball. Abdy started out her career at Danny Devito’s hyper-cool Jersey Films and worked on The Revenant and The Big Short, among other awards-season hits, as president of the production outfit New Regency.

Together, they presided over a splashy period at Warner Bros. in which they focused on recruiting big stars and major auteurs while they also shed the remains of the prior leadership’s flailing, expensive approach to the DC Comics franchise. But their results were inconsistent: In 2023, the giant success of Barbie in the summer and Wonka at Christmastime buoyed the studio. The following year, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga and Joker: Folie à Deux were such expensive flops that industry experts began predicting De Luca and Abdy would soon lose their jobs.

Instead, last year, the duo spearheaded a cinematic slate that will likely be spoken about in hushed tones in Hollywood C-suites for generations. A Minecraft Movie took advantage of its kid-friendly IP to make nearly $1 billion worldwide, despite being barely coherent. The relaunch of the DC cinematic universe went splendidly with Superman, directed by the new DC Studios co-chair, James Gunn. The silly sequels Final Destination Bloodlines and The Conjuring: Last Rites punched above their weight commercially. Zach Cregger’s Weapons was not just a horror hit but also a critical favorite that won major awards. Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, whose high budget met prerelease skepticism from box-office analysts, was a cultural sensation and a financial boon. And Anderson’s blockbuster, One Battle After Another, earned just enough money to justify its scale before taking the Oscar for Best Picture.

In basically each of these cases, De Luca and Abdy’s calculation of betting on creators who had an established track record and pairing them with reliable stars worked. Meanwhile, safe comic-book and video-game adaptations helped shore up any business concerns. This year, however, the same approach has resulted in a lot of swings and misses. Collaborations between acclaimed directors and performers, such as Maggie Gyllenhaal and Jessie Buckley’s The Bride!, failed to make back their budget; Supergirl and Practical Magic 2 were box-office disappointments, in part because of poor reviews. Warner Bros. couldn’t even claim the surprise success of Coyote vs. Acme, a Looney Tunes movie that it sold to the indie distributor Ketchup Entertainment after deciding in 2023 not to release it; it became a sleeper family hit this summer.

Maybe Digger flopping was the final straw for Ellison. Or maybe the Skydance CEO was always intent on keeping his own team in charge. Paramount has adopted a more populist, risk-averse strategy since Ellison took over that studio in 2025. This year’s schedule included crowd-pleasing horror films and a Jackass clip-show-style sequel, although none was particularly successful with theatergoers; a new live-action Street Fighter and the latest edition in the Angry Birds franchise are on the way. Indeed, it even has a Tom Cruise movie on the slate for 2028—but rather than being an auteurist effort like Digger, it’s a sequel to the 1990 NASCAR drama Days of Thunder that I’d argue nobody was really asking for.

Skydance seems to be planning to keep Paramount and Warner Bros. separate, the industry reporter Matthew Belloni suggested in a Puck column last week. Ellison has also promised that Skydance will keep up a furious pace of releases, perhaps in recognition of Hollywood’s agita when Netflix almost got its hands on Warner Bros. during the merger drama; the concern was that films released as part of “Netflix Warner Bros.” would not be shown in cinemas at all. But the departure of De Luca and Abdy certainly suggests that any weirder Hail Mary passes will be few and far between. Sure, they haven’t all worked—but a hit like Sinners doesn’t happen without a couple of other tough throws that fail to connect.

Meanwhile, some viewers are seemingly already reclaiming Digger as a cult classic; maybe that’s just quick-turn nostalgia for a moment in Hollywood that appears to be further slipping away. Or perhaps it’s a sign that some portion of the audience will always be clamoring for audacious work—the kind that is and will still be made by studios of all sizes. Just maybe not by Warner Bros., going forward.

---

An Essay I Enjoyed

The Most Cursed Team in American Sports

By Kaitlyn Tiffany

The mythical story of the Buffalo Bills could be told like this: Their fans are crazy and live in the snow. They shovel this snow out of their stadium to help their godforsaken football team, which, until recently, was most famous for losing the Super Bowl four times in a row in the early 1990s. According to one theory, those failures fed into Timothy McVeigh’s derangement before he planned and executed the Oklahoma City bombing. The franchise was an utter disaster, for the most part, until the 2018 arrival of an otherworldly quarterback named Josh Allen, who has exhibited many heroics. But he has yet to bring his team to the Super Bowl.

Read the full article.

---

Coming Attractions

A gorgeous new release this week is William and David Greaves’s Once Upon a Time in Harlem. The project restores old, unreleased footage shot by William, which his son, David, helped assemble and spruce up for a new generation to understand. William Greaves, who died in 2014, was a former actor who, dispirited by the opportunities afforded him in postwar Hollywood, became a challenging, acclaimed filmmaker. His body of work is well worth a deep dive, particularly the avant-garde documentary Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One, which is itself about the reality-warping process of making documentaries. Once Upon a Time in Harlem, however, was left unfinished for decades.

The documentary captures a party the elder Greaves threw in August 1972, bringing together every living member of the Harlem Renaissance he could find to Duke Ellington’s townhouse. He let the cameras roll as the group chatted, caroused, and unfurled memories of that flourishing era for Black art. David, then age 26, helped his father with the filming; more than 50 years later, he went through 60,000 feet of footage to pick out the best moments. The result is a rather stunning look back at an event filled with people who were already looking back; it’s a beautiful echo of an echo. Once Upon a Time in Harlem is debuting in select cinemas, but it’s a must-see—and will hopefully expand soon.

---

What Else I’m Watching

• Chris Rock’s Misty Green received a mixed reception at this fall’s festivals, but it’s somewhat redeemed by Rosalind Eleazar’s lead performance. She plays a fading actress striving for a role while her personal life disintegrates around her, and her masterful on-screen sloppiness helps explain away some of the dodgier plot twists. I’ve always found Rock’s directorial career frustrating; although he has good taste and influences (this film has major Safdie-brothers energy), he always falls a little short of what he’s imitating.
• Criterion’s humongous Stanley Kubrick box set will finally be on shelves Tuesday, and it’s an unsurprisingly impressive package from those doyens of physical media. All 13 of his features have received sparkly restorations, and the collection also includes his daughter Vivian’s documentary Making The Shining, which offers a glimpse into the much-mythologized auteur’s process. The rare international version of The Shining, which is far shorter than the U.S. theatrical cut, is one of the best Easter eggs on offer.
• Another movie that had long been thought lost is the director’s cut of Ken Russell’s intense psychological horror The Devils, which was censored and outright banned in many countries on its 1971 release. The original version was officially unavailable for years, but a 4K restoration of it is now touring theaters. A 17th-century-set dramatization of witch-hunting within the French Catholic church, The Devils is genuinely shocking—especially given the era of its release—but should be required viewing for genre completionists.

© Illustration by Soña Lee. Sources: Gilbert Flores / Variety / Getty.

Sign up for Video Village, a new weekly newsletter in which David Sims unearths cinematic gems and brings readers into his movie obsession.

To kick off this newsletter, I sent out a message declaring that movies were “undeniably back.” Within days, it seemed that the sky was falling again. Two venerable studios, Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery, officially merged on October 6, further consolidating power in Hollywood into just a few conglomerates. The new entity has been dubbed Skydance, the name of the original production company that CEO David Ellison founded in 2006. Not much has outwardly changed thus far, new moniker aside. But internally, Ellison has already made at least one concerning decision. Once the deal closed, two key leaders at Warner Bros., the bolder and more risk-taking of the two studios, were immediately shown the door: Michael De Luca and Pam Abdy, the co-chairs of Warner Bros. Motion Picture Group. Their departure suggested what many industry analysts had feared: that their new boss was no longer a fan of taking big, bold risks.

After all, the news that De Luca and Abdy were exiting the company—to be replaced by Paramount’s current team, which will oversee what has been referred to as the “Paramount Warner Bros. Motion Picture unit” (try saying that three times fast)—arrived right before a historically bad weekend for the studio. The Tom Cruise project Digger opened on October 2 to only $8 million domestically, on a budget that reportedly climbed as high as $180 million; that’s an especially anemic number given Cruise’s involvement as both star and co-producer. Digger now stands as Warner Bros.’ final release before it joined Skydance, and the movie’s catastrophic box-office performance is the latest in a series of tough beats for the company this year. Given the film’s wild ambition, its failure will also be a fitting coda for an era that was very up-and-down financially—but often creatively thrilling.

De Luca and Abdy took over Warner Bros. Pictures in 2022, bringing with them a strategic reset. They were both well-regarded names in the world of awards-friendly indie cinema, shaking up a studio that was bouncing back from a theatrical strategy unpopular with the industry: putting blockbusters on HBO Max the day they were released. De Luca was a storied executive whose career included green-lighting boundary-pushing projects by Paul Thomas Anderson and David Fincher and earning Best Picture Oscar nominations for such movies as The Social Network and Moneyball. Abdy started out her career at Danny Devito’s hyper-cool Jersey Films and worked on The Revenant and The Big Short, among other awards-season hits, as president of the production outfit New Regency.

Together, they presided over a splashy period at Warner Bros. in which they focused on recruiting big stars and major auteurs while they also shed the remains of the prior leadership’s flailing, expensive approach to the DC Comics franchise. But their results were inconsistent: In 2023, the giant success of Barbie in the summer and Wonka at Christmastime buoyed the studio. The following year, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga and Joker: Folie à Deux were such expensive flops that industry experts began predicting De Luca and Abdy would soon lose their jobs.

Instead, last year, the duo spearheaded a cinematic slate that will likely be spoken about in hushed tones in Hollywood C-suites for generations. A Minecraft Movie took advantage of its kid-friendly IP to make nearly $1 billion worldwide, despite being barely coherent. The relaunch of the DC cinematic universe went splendidly with Superman, directed by the new DC Studios co-chair, James Gunn. The silly sequels Final Destination Bloodlines and The Conjuring: Last Rites punched above their weight commercially. Zach Cregger’s Weapons was not just a horror hit but also a critical favorite that won major awards. Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, whose high budget met prerelease skepticism from box-office analysts, was a cultural sensation and a financial boon. And Anderson’s blockbuster, One Battle After Another, earned just enough money to justify its scale before taking the Oscar for Best Picture.

In basically each of these cases, De Luca and Abdy’s calculation of betting on creators who had an established track record and pairing them with reliable stars worked. Meanwhile, safe comic-book and video-game adaptations helped shore up any business concerns. This year, however, the same approach has resulted in a lot of swings and misses. Collaborations between acclaimed directors and performers, such as Maggie Gyllenhaal and Jessie Buckley’s The Bride!, failed to make back their budget; Supergirl and Practical Magic 2 were box-office disappointments, in part because of poor reviews. Warner Bros. couldn’t even claim the surprise success of Coyote vs. Acme, a Looney Tunes movie that it sold to the indie distributor Ketchup Entertainment after deciding in 2023 not to release it; it became a sleeper family hit this summer.

Maybe Digger flopping was the final straw for Ellison. Or maybe the Skydance CEO was always intent on keeping his own team in charge. Paramount has adopted a more populist, risk-averse strategy since Ellison took over that studio in 2025. This year’s schedule included crowd-pleasing horror films and a Jackass clip-show-style sequel, although none was particularly successful with theatergoers; a new live-action Street Fighter and the latest edition in the Angry Birds franchise are on the way. Indeed, it even has a Tom Cruise movie on the slate for 2028—but rather than being an auteurist effort like Digger, it’s a sequel to the 1990 NASCAR drama Days of Thunder that I’d argue nobody was really asking for.

Skydance seems to be planning to keep Paramount and Warner Bros. separate, the industry reporter Matthew Belloni suggested in a Puck column last week. Ellison has also promised that Skydance will keep up a furious pace of releases, perhaps in recognition of Hollywood’s agita when Netflix almost got its hands on Warner Bros. during the merger drama; the concern was that films released as part of “Netflix Warner Bros.” would not be shown in cinemas at all. But the departure of De Luca and Abdy certainly suggests that any weirder Hail Mary passes will be few and far between. Sure, they haven’t all worked—but a hit like Sinners doesn’t happen without a couple of other tough throws that fail to connect.

Meanwhile, some viewers are seemingly already reclaiming Digger as a cult classic; maybe that’s just quick-turn nostalgia for a moment in Hollywood that appears to be further slipping away. Or perhaps it’s a sign that some portion of the audience will always be clamoring for audacious work—the kind that is and will still be made by studios of all sizes. Just maybe not by Warner Bros., going forward.

---

An Essay I Enjoyed

The Most Cursed Team in American Sports

By Kaitlyn Tiffany

The mythical story of the Buffalo Bills could be told like this: Their fans are crazy and live in the snow. They shovel this snow out of their stadium to help their godforsaken football team, which, until recently, was most famous for losing the Super Bowl four times in a row in the early 1990s. According to one theory, those failures fed into Timothy McVeigh’s derangement before he planned and executed the Oklahoma City bombing. The franchise was an utter disaster, for the most part, until the 2018 arrival of an otherworldly quarterback named Josh Allen, who has exhibited many heroics. But he has yet to bring his team to the Super Bowl.

Read the full article.

---

Coming Attractions

A gorgeous new release this week is William and David Greaves’s Once Upon a Time in Harlem. The project restores old, unreleased footage shot by William, which his son, David, helped assemble and spruce up for a new generation to understand. William Greaves, who died in 2014, was a former actor who, dispirited by the opportunities afforded him in postwar Hollywood, became a challenging, acclaimed filmmaker. His body of work is well worth a deep dive, particularly the avant-garde documentary Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One, which is itself about the reality-warping process of making documentaries. Once Upon a Time in Harlem, however, was left unfinished for decades.

The documentary captures a party the elder Greaves threw in August 1972, bringing together every living member of the Harlem Renaissance he could find to Duke Ellington’s townhouse. He let the cameras roll as the group chatted, caroused, and unfurled memories of that flourishing era for Black art. David, then age 26, helped his father with the filming; more than 50 years later, he went through 60,000 feet of footage to pick out the best moments. The result is a rather stunning look back at an event filled with people who were already looking back; it’s a beautiful echo of an echo. Once Upon a Time in Harlem is debuting in select cinemas, but it’s a must-see—and will hopefully expand soon.

---

What Else I’m Watching

• Chris Rock’s Misty Green received a mixed reception at this fall’s festivals, but it’s somewhat redeemed by Rosalind Eleazar’s lead performance. She plays a fading actress striving for a role while her personal life disintegrates around her, and her masterful on-screen sloppiness helps explain away some of the dodgier plot twists. I’ve always found Rock’s directorial career frustrating; although he has good taste and influences (this film has major Safdie-brothers energy), he always falls a little short of what he’s imitating.
• Criterion’s humongous Stanley Kubrick box set will finally be on shelves Tuesday, and it’s an unsurprisingly impressive package from those doyens of physical media. All 13 of his features have received sparkly restorations, and the collection also includes his daughter Vivian’s documentary Making The Shining, which offers a glimpse into the much-mythologized auteur’s process. The rare international version of The Shining, which is far shorter than the U.S. theatrical cut, is one of the best Easter eggs on offer.
• Another movie that had long been thought lost is the director’s cut of Ken Russell’s intense psychological horror The Devils, which was censored and outright banned in many countries on its 1971 release. The original version was officially unavailable for years, but a 4K restoration of it is now touring theaters. A 17th-century-set dramatization of witch-hunting within the French Catholic church, The Devils is genuinely shocking—especially given the era of its release—but should be required viewing for genre completionists.

© Illustration by Soña Lee. Sources: Gilbert Flores / Variety / Getty.

The promise of GLP-1 drugs has always depended on people being able to afford them. These drugs still cost hundreds of dollars per month if you’re paying cash, at which point access becomes a privilege: The higher-income executive who wants to trim a few pounds might be able to afford them either way, but the low-income worker who needs the drug to lose significant weight might not be able to afford them — unless their health insurance covers it.

For a while, the trend lines for GLP-1 insurance coverage were positive. As of 2026, roughly two-thirds of private employer plans, which insure half of Americans, were covering GLP-1 medications for weight loss to treat obesity. Over the summer, Medicare launched a new $50-per-month prescription program. The US has struggled with an obesity epidemic for decades, but it looked like powerful drugs to treat it were finally starting to be more seamlessly integrated into the health system.

At least that’s how things appeared earlier this year. But now, private plans are pulling back from GLP-1 coverage. People are being left in the lurch, debating whether to try to pay for these drugs on their own or stop taking medicines they feel are making a real difference for their health.

The dilemma reveals one of the structural flaws in American healthcare. For working-age adults, your insurance depends on your job. Unfortunately, because people no longer stay at the same job for decades, there is not a strong financial incentive for employers to make investments that will benefit your health in the long term — but there is a strong incentive to minimize short-term costs as much as possible. It’s the kind of perverse rationale that could compel employer-sponsored health plans to stop covering a drug that, if taken over the full course of a person’s life, could help them not only lose weight but ultimately reduce their risk of heart disease, kidney disease and other chronic health problems, improving their health and saving all of us money as they get older.

“An employer or an insurer making coverage decisions doesn’t necessarily care if they’re saving Medicare money,” said Dan Sacks, a healthcare economist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “That’s a classic problem with the American health insurance system, and it’s certainly salient here.”

This mismatch between what’s good for people’s health and what’s good for the corporate bottom line has long been one of the underlying flaws in the US health system. Now access to GLP-1 drugs is shrinking just as these drugs were starting to make a real dent in the US obesity crisis. The stakes couldn’t be higher.

Why employer-sponsored health plans are suddenly dropping GLP-1 coverage

From the beginning, insurance coverage was the big question hanging over GLP-1s and their potential to revolutionize US healthcare. But recently, it looked like we’d turned a corner.

When I attended the Aspen Ideas: Health festival over the summer, pharmaceutical reps seemed visibly relieved that GLP-1 coverage had been picking up among private insurers. In 2026, about two out of every three employer-sponsored plans were covering some of these drugs for weight management, up from about 20 percent just the year before.

“They’re recognizing that this is an investment in their workforce,” said Laura Steele, who leads the cardiometabolic health unit at Eli Lilly, which manufactures Zepbound and Foundayo. “Yes, there is a budget, and there is a benefit design that every employer has. That’s real. That’s not going away. But they’re also recognizing the overall cost that they’re experiencing by not dealing with this too.”

But as employers and private insurers make coverage decisions for next year, they are suddenly pulling back. At least 10 percent of employer plans that currently cover GLP-1s for weight loss say they are likely to discontinue coverage in 2027, according to one survey by the Business Group on Health — and that number may still increase. A Mercer survey of large employers found that 6 percent had dropped coverage in 2026 and another 5 percent were planning to in 2027 or actively considering it. A separate report from the Health Policy Commission in Massachusetts found that the number of commercially insured people in the state taking a GLP-1 drug had fallen by 50 percent between 2025 and the first quarter of 2026 as private coverage started to drop off. 

Some of the biggest brands in the US are reportedly eliminating or reducing their coverage: PepsiCo, Starbucks, and Lowe’s among them. And their reasons are simple: It’s too expensive. The drugs still carry a high net price tag — $600 or more for a 30-day supply — and potential demand is high (two in every five American adults have obesity). 

When a lot of people start taking an expensive medication all at once, it’s going to raise costs for employer insurance plans — and they have to figure out how to adapt. Insurers set premiums at the start of each year, based on how many people are on the plan and how much healthcare they are expected to need. But if those estimates are off — say, if more people take an expensive GLP-1 drug than the insurer expected — they have to offset those costs somehow, and raising premiums the following year is a common solution. According to one estimate, premiums are projected to grow by 5 to 13 percent due to GLP-1 costs — and the burden of paying those higher premiums is likely to fall on the workers. The employer can also try to limit GLP-1 use by, for example, asking workers to pay more out of pocket for these drugs; according to Mercer, 27 percent of large US employers instituted some kind of utilization controls for GLP-1 drugs over the past year or plan to next year.

They also have the option to simply stop covering these drugs for weight loss altogether — and that’s the route more and more of them are deciding to take. The abrupt reversal has even caught economists like Sacks off guard.

“I was surprised that anyone would do an about-face because I thought they understood the trade-offs well,” Sacks said. “My guess is that it turned out to be more expensive than they anticipated: Take-up is higher, and possibly more people are sticking with it. That’s one reason that you might not want to continue to offer it.”

For employers, the short-term costs of covering a drug often outweigh the long-term benefits that medication may confer, at least from the employer’s POV. One analysis — notably produced by Blue Cross Blue Shield Kansas — concluded that covering GLP-1s for weight loss increased average employee health costs by $7,000 in the first year and another $4,200 in the second, largely due to the cost of the drugs themselves. And yet at the same time, there were no decreases in obesity-related medical events in that time period. Another study from Sacks and his colleagues at Indiana University and the University of South Carolina found that GLP-1 use did not lead to any cost savings over five years.

So in the short term, these employers are arguably making an economically rational decision — but one that may still come at their employees’ expense. “I’m completely screwed,” said one person on Reddit about Cigna’s plans to drop GLP-1 coverage for their own employees. They’re looking at at least $300 for one month’s supply at cash prices. 

They weren’t alone either: “I’m devastated,” said another person, commenting on Starbucks’s decision to stop covering GLP-1 drugs. They said they had an autoimmune condition that had made it difficult to lose weight — until this new class of medicines came along.

Where GLP-1 coverage goes from here

How could we end up here, where it makes good business sense for companies to make a decision that could potentially harm their workers’ health in the long term? It is at least in part a result of the haphazard way the US has ended up insuring people.

When employer-sponsored insurance started to arise in the mid-20th century, eventually becoming the primary way to cover the working-age population, people tended to stay at the same job for a long period of time. In theory, there was a synergy: Companies wanted their workers to stay productive, and so it was worth it for the company to invest in their long-term health via their insurance benefits. And research has found that people who stay with the same company — and the same insurance plan — tend to have better health than those who switch a lot.

But these days, people change jobs all the time or work various gigs to piece together an income. You probably don’t expect to stay at your job for 10 years — and your employer doesn’t expect you to either. Instead, they want to keep their own costs as low as possible in the short term. This leads them to cut GLP-1 coverage, even though doctors do believe that people could benefit tremendously long term from the weight loss these drugs help them achieve and all of its potential health benefits. 

“There are very real health benefits of these drugs,” Sacks told me. “The fact that we don’t find offsets or they’re even more expensive than we thought doesn’t necessarily mean that we shouldn’t cover them.”

In theory, the market is supposed to fix the price problem: Drug companies get a period of exclusivity for the drugs they develop, and then, once that time elapses, cheaper generic versions can come onto the market. But generic semaglutide won’t be available in the US until at least 2031 — and for some versions, the generic competitors aren’t going to debut until the 2040s. Offering GLP-1 coverage could become a competitive advantage for employers, a perk they can offer to entice potential workers as part of their benefits package.

Beyond that, though, the path to more affordable GLP-1s is not immediately obvious right now. A lot of people are already willing to pay cash for these drugs — and that may continue as long as people can afford to do it. But with inflation still steadily rising, these drugs could slip out of reach for more and more Americans.

The government could get involved, but, for now, the federal government’s negotiating authority only covers Medicare, not the private plans that are dropping coverage. Serious healthcare reform is probably off the table until at least 2028, and then only if Democrats win both Congress and the White House and decide to make a healthcare package their legislative priority.

But the lesson of these recent developments is that, at some point, the US may have to look seriously at the underlying problem creating this mess in the first place. A patchwork method of insuring people that privileges short-term cost-cutting over people’s long-term health isn’t a real healthcare system.

Dear Kelly Clarkson,

Miss Clarkson. I have read that you wanted a bird but were not permitted to obtain it. Well, I am in possession of a bird and do not want to be. Perhaps we could come to a mutually beneficial arrangement.

In brief: There is a bird in here. Specifically, a raven. It sits, croaking, uninvited, on my bust of Pallas. (I would also be happy to give you the bust of Pallas. It is a tasteful bust; my only qualm with it is that it reminds me of my lost Lenore.) I didn’t ask the bird to be here. To the contrary, I would like nothing more than for it to depart. I have asked it to do so, first politely, and then rudely. But nothing. The raven will not budge.

When I read of your encounter with the store Art of Play I felt the only hint of hope I had felt for quite some time. I thought: This woman needs a bird. I have a bird. I will tell her the situation, and we can wring some triumph out of this whole miserable thing.

How did I come by this bird? Oh, the usual way. I’m sure you know the feeling. It’s a midnight dreary. You’re pondering, weak and weary, many and many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore. You are thinking of your lost Lenore. Then you hear a tapping, as of someone gently rapping, rapping at your chamber door? Well, this happened to me recently. But it wasn’t someone. It was a bird. And now the accursed thing will not depart!

I want to be rid of the bird. And you want a bird. I understand that the bird in which you expressed interest is a windup bird. Well, this raven certainly winds me up. Is that anything? I understand that the bird in which you were interested is named Molly. My raven could be named Molly. You could call it anything if only you would take the demonic thing out of here!

Before you object that the kind of bird you want is inanimate, whereas mine is clearly a live bird, I have considered this, and I think that the main objection people have to a live bird indoors is that the bird will fly around disruptively and try to escape. Well, the raven does not do that. I wish it would. I have opened the casement. I have said, “Shoo, bird.” I have said sterner things, things that I now regret. But the raven does not budge. It just sits there and says, “Nevermore,” at intervals.

Also, its sable hue would go with anything. Looking at this bird from an interior-design perspective, I think it would fit any room, especially if I included the bust, which, again, I am willing to do.

Do you need to feed it? I have not gotten that far with the bird. So far, it has not eaten anything. I think maybe it sustains itself by other means. It just sits there saying, “Nevermore.”

Make no mistake, I am not offering you a free bird because I doubt your ability to pay. I am offering you a bird because I hate the infernal creature and want it out of my sight! But I would accept your money. Using that money, I could perhaps even get rid of the beating heart that seems to be stuck in my wall.

I eagerly await your response.

Sincerely,

EAP

© Illustration by Akshita Chandra / The Atlantic

Updated at 5:17 p.m. ET on October 16, 2026

Dear Kelly Clarkson,

Miss Clarkson. I have read that you wanted a bird but were not permitted to obtain it. Well, I am in possession of a bird and do not want to be. Perhaps we could come to a mutually beneficial arrangement.

In brief: There is a bird in here. Specifically, a raven. It sits, croaking, uninvited, on my bust of Pallas. (I would also be happy to give you the bust of Pallas. It is a tasteful bust; my only qualm with it is that it reminds me of my lost Lenore.) I didn’t ask the bird to be here. To the contrary, I would like nothing more than for it to depart. I have asked it to do so, first politely, and then rudely. But nothing. The raven will not budge.

When I read of your encounter with the store Art of Play I felt the only hint of hope I had felt for quite some time. I thought: This woman needs a bird. I have a bird. I will tell her the situation, and we can wring some triumph out of this whole miserable thing.

How did I come by this bird? Oh, the usual way. I’m sure you know the feeling. It’s a midnight dreary. You’re pondering, weak and weary, many and many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore. You are thinking of your lost Lenore. Then you hear a tapping, as of someone gently rapping, rapping at your chamber door? Well, this happened to me recently. But it wasn’t someone. It was a bird. And now the accursed thing will not depart!

I want to be rid of the bird. And you want a bird. I understand that the bird in which you expressed interest is a windup bird. Well, this raven certainly winds me up. Is that anything? I understand that the bird in which you were interested is named Molly. My raven could be named Molly. You could call it anything if only you would take the demonic thing out of here!

Before you object that the kind of bird you want is inanimate, whereas mine is clearly a live bird, I have considered this, and I think that the main objection people have to a live bird indoors is that the bird will fly around disruptively and try to escape. Well, the raven does not do that. I wish it would. I have opened the casement. I have said, “Shoo, bird.” I have said sterner things, things that I now regret. But the raven does not budge. It just sits there and says, “Nevermore,” at intervals.

Also, its sable hue would go with anything. Looking at this bird from an interior-design perspective, I think it would fit any room, especially if I included the bust, which, again, I am willing to do.

Do you need to feed it? I have not gotten that far with the bird. So far, it has not eaten anything. I think maybe it sustains itself by other means. It just sits there saying, “Nevermore.”

Make no mistake, I am not offering you a free bird because I doubt your ability to pay. I am offering you a bird because I hate the infernal creature and want it out of my sight! But I would accept your money. Using that money, I could perhaps even get rid of the beating heart that seems to be stuck under my floorboards.

I eagerly await your response.

Sincerely,

EAP

---

In his eagerness to respond to Kelly Clarkson, Edgar Allan Poe initially misstated the location of the beating heart. It is under his floorboards, not in his wall. Alexandra Petri knows this, as you can see if you read the Poe chapter of her book, where she gets this detail right.

© Illustration by Akshita Chandra / The Atlantic

This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present. Sign up here.

Published in the October 1862 issue of The Atlantic, Henry David Thoreau’s essay “Autumnal Tints” arrived in a season of death. The Civil War was well into its second year, and copies of the magazine began reaching readers shortly after the Battle of Antietam, on September 17, a day with the grim distinction of being the single bloodiest of the conflict. Thoreau himself was already gone, having died four months earlier, a casualty not of war but of tuberculosis.

Thoreau’s essay makes no connection between the fall and the conditions of fighting, as the poet John Greenleaf Whittier did in “The Battle Autumn of 1862,” in the same issue. Instead, Thoreau’s work is a written version of what he’d initially imagined as a visual book—one in which he would compile the leaves of all the trees around him and follow their progression through the colors, from green to brown. (The magazine included a simple engraving of a  scarlet-oak leaf that he had rendered.) He had first drafted “Autumnal Tints” as a lecture in the 1850s, before the war’s start, and delivered a version of it in what would be the final public talk of his life. The event was far from a resounding success—a local newspaper deemed it “dull, commonplace and unsatisfactory”—and making the trip to Waterbury, Connecticut, in the bitter cold of December 1860 had worsened an illness from which Thoreau would never recover. The revised copy that appeared in The Atlantic gave the story new and enduring life.

“If I were to live, I should have much to report on Natural History generally,” Thoreau wrote in a March 1862 letter, a few months before his death. As it was, weak and barely able to breathe, he could do little more than adapt some of his lectures into essays for The Atlantic with the help of his sister Sophia. The enterprise marked a reconciliation with the magazine. In 1858, the first installment of his “Chesuncook” essay had appeared in the June issue, minus one beloved sentence about a fallen pine tree: “It is as immortal as I am, and perchance will go to as high a heaven, there to tower above me still.” He was incensed when he found the line unceremoniously axed from the printed copy. “Is this the avowed character of the Atlantic Monthly?” he demanded in a letter to the editor, James Russell Lowell. “I should like an early reply.” No reply, early or late, was forthcoming. Making matters worse, neither was Thoreau’s payment, which he’d already deemed lower than what he deserved. It took two additional letters to secure the $198 he was due.

The arrival of James T. Fields as The Atlantic’s editor in 1861 cleared the way for new contributions from Thoreau. Fields had first printed Walden seven years earlier at his publishing house, and he suggested another collaboration. Thoreau agreed, on much more favorable financial terms than most of the magazine’s other contributors, and on the condition that “no sentiment or sentence be altered or omitted without my consent.”

As Thoreau prepared the manuscripts for Fields, he confessed to a friend an inclination to expunge some of the humor from his writing, noting that “I cannot bear the levity I find.” But much levity does remain in “Autumnal Tints.” It is, on the whole, a joyous celebration of the season, and an invitation to “wild delight.” Through his observations, he divined that “man’s spirits should rise as high as Nature’s,—should hang out their flag, and the routine of his life be interrupted by an analogous expression of joy and hilarity.” As he worked through a catalog of trees and plants, he contrasted his own careful appreciation of the natural world around him (“The expression of this grass haunted me for a week”) with the bustle of his neighbors amid the busy occupations of the harvest. Stopping to take in the brilliant hues of the elms lining the Concord Common, he wondered “if there is any answering ripeness in the lives of the men who live beneath them.”

Death, however, is never far from “Autumnal Tints.” Keenly aware of his own imminent demise as he revised this manuscript for publication, Thoreau saw his mortality everywhere in the season. Walking on dead leaves in the forest, he imagined the setting as a grand and consecrated cemetery. “They that soared so loftily,” Thoreau wrote of the leaves, “how contentedly they return to dust again, and are laid low, resigned to lie and decay at the foot of the tree, and afford nourishment to new generations of their kind, as well as to flutter on high! They teach us how to die.” Thoreau, still seeking joy on the verge of his own death, had learned the lesson well.

© Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Ernst Haas / Getty.

This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present. Sign up here.

Published in the October 1862 issue of The Atlantic, Henry David Thoreau’s essay “Autumnal Tints” arrived in a season of death. The Civil War was well into its second year, and copies of the magazine began reaching readers shortly after the Battle of Antietam, on September 17, a day with the grim distinction of being the single bloodiest of the conflict. Thoreau himself was already gone, having died four months earlier, a casualty not of war but of tuberculosis.

Thoreau’s essay makes no connection between the fall and the conditions of fighting, as the poet John Greenleaf Whittier did in “The Battle Autumn of 1862,” in the same issue. Instead, Thoreau’s work is a written version of what he’d initially imagined as a visual book—one in which he would compile the leaves of all the trees around him and follow their progression through the colors, from green to brown. (The magazine included a simple engraving of a  scarlet-oak leaf that he had rendered.) He had first drafted “Autumnal Tints” as a lecture in the 1850s, before the war’s start, and delivered a version of it in what would be the final public talk of his life. The event was far from a resounding success—a local newspaper deemed it “dull, commonplace and unsatisfactory”—and making the trip to Waterbury, Connecticut, in the bitter cold of December 1860 had worsened an illness from which Thoreau would never recover. The revised copy that appeared in The Atlantic gave the story new and enduring life.

“If I were to live, I should have much to report on Natural History generally,” Thoreau wrote in a March 1862 letter, a few months before his death. As it was, weak and barely able to breathe, he could do little more than adapt some of his lectures into essays for The Atlantic with the help of his sister Sophia. The enterprise marked a reconciliation with the magazine. In 1858, the first installment of his “Chesuncook” essay had appeared in the June issue, minus one beloved sentence about a fallen pine tree: “It is as immortal as I am, and perchance will go to as high a heaven, there to tower above me still.” He was incensed when he found the line unceremoniously axed from the printed copy. “Is this the avowed character of the Atlantic Monthly?” he demanded in a letter to the editor, James Russell Lowell. “I should like an early reply.” No reply, early or late, was forthcoming. Making matters worse, neither was Thoreau’s payment, which he’d already deemed lower than what he deserved. It took two additional letters to secure the $198 he was due.

The arrival of James T. Fields as The Atlantic’s editor in 1861 cleared the way for new contributions from Thoreau. Fields had first printed Walden seven years earlier at his publishing house, and he suggested another collaboration. Thoreau agreed, on much more favorable financial terms than most of the magazine’s other contributors, and on the condition that “no sentiment or sentence be altered or omitted without my consent.”

As Thoreau prepared the manuscripts for Fields, he confessed to a friend an inclination to expunge some of the humor from his writing, noting that “I cannot bear the levity I find.” But much levity does remain in “Autumnal Tints.” It is, on the whole, a joyous celebration of the season, and an invitation to “wild delight.” Through his observations, he divined that “man’s spirits should rise as high as Nature’s,—should hang out their flag, and the routine of his life be interrupted by an analogous expression of joy and hilarity.” As he worked through a catalog of trees and plants, he contrasted his own careful appreciation of the natural world around him (“The expression of this grass haunted me for a week”) with the bustle of his neighbors amid the busy occupations of the harvest. Stopping to take in the brilliant hues of the elms lining the Concord Common, he wondered “if there is any answering ripeness in the lives of the men who live beneath them.”

Death, however, is never far from “Autumnal Tints.” Keenly aware of his own imminent demise as he revised this manuscript for publication, Thoreau saw his mortality everywhere in the season. Walking on dead leaves in the forest, he imagined the setting as a grand and consecrated cemetery. “They that soared so loftily,” Thoreau wrote of the leaves, “how contentedly they return to dust again, and are laid low, resigned to lie and decay at the foot of the tree, and afford nourishment to new generations of their kind, as well as to flutter on high! They teach us how to die.” Thoreau, still seeking joy on the verge of his own death, had learned the lesson well.

© Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Ernst Haas / Getty.

Speaking at TechCrunch Disrupt, Amazon devices chief Panos Panay described a future where ambient AI devices work in the background, anticipating users' needs instead of waiting for commands.

The executives argued that advertising isn’t the only path to monetization, and that there are alternative models that are feasible when it comes to monetization.

METR will publish its own assessments of Anthropic’s risks, incidents, and practices, and the frontier AI model maker has given up the right to block them.

Bluesky is bringing “social vibe coding” to its experimental Attie platform, allowing users to create interactive experiences like games, quizzes, and websites that can tap into the social network's audience.

Meta announced the Muse Spark Open AI model today, claiming that it's the "most capable US open-weight model to date." But the company also says that it's the "the first model in its class" that can "run on your desktop using two Apple M5 Ultra Mac Studios with the latest MLX framework."

Meta and Apple, typically rivals, worked together on the launch and are publicly supporting each other.

"Muse Spark Open - weights releasing today - runs great on new Mac Studios thanks to work with @johnternus and Apple," Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on X.

"Congrats to the team!" new Apple CEO John Ternus said in a reply. "Amazing to run a model of Muse …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Savings of up to $200 end October 16 for TechCrunch Founder Summit. These savings for Founder and Investor Passes vanish after Friday. Join 1,000 founders and investors on November 4 at Boston’s SoWa Power Station. Bring your toughest questions and make the day count for your business.

Sony has announced a trio of new Walkman portable media players that start at an already absurd $1,899.99 for the NW-ZX900 and climb all the way up to $5,899 for the gold-plated NW-WM1ZM3. Sandwiched in between is the $2,999.99 Walkman NW-WM1AM3, which is nearly identical to the WM1ZM3, just minus the gaudy gold shell.

All three devices are aimed squarely at the audiophile market, if the price tag didn't make that clear. All three feature Sony's DSD (Direct Stream Digital) Remastering Engine, which upsamples standard PCM audio to an 11.2MHz DSD stream, which it claims delivers a more analog-like sound. They also all feature gold-plating on …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Volvo is leveling up its automated driving system through an expansion of its nearly decade-long partnership with Nvidia that will extend beyond its battery electric vehicles.

Volvo plans to launch hands-free, point-to-point driving by 2030, powered by Nvidia's latest AI technology. The Chinese-owned, Swedish-designed automaker said Thursday it would use Nvidia's autonomous driving stack to power a new partially automated driving system similar to Tesla's Full Self-Driving (Supervised).

Volvo says the new point-to-point system will be Level 2++, meaning it can handle complex urban environments, including traffic lights, stop signs, and unprotected left turns without explicit driver control. In addition to Tesla's FSD, it will also resemble the Nvidia-powered system that Mercedes-Benz recently rolled out for the …

Read the full story at The Verge.

The Alienware AW3426DW is discounted to $742.22 at Amazon, just over $50 off its usual price of $799.99. It’s not quite the lowest price we’ve seen on this well-equipped gaming monitor, but still a decent discount. The 34-inch screen just came out a couple months ago, and is equipped with Penta Tandem quantum dots for bolder colors than you’ll find on other QD-OLED panel. And of course, it provides the deep blacks and high contrast expected of the display tech.

Alienware supports both Nvidia G-Sync and FreeSync Premium Pro adaptive refresh rate tech, so PC gamers with modern GPUs can enjoy a smooth frame rate when their systems can’t output a frame rate that matches its native 280Hz refresh rate. The 1800R curve adds an immersive element to the setup, and it has two HDMI 2.1 ports, as well as DisplayPort, and USB-A and USB-C for charging and connecting peripherals.

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Other deals to consider

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• The Baseus Bowie MC2 Open Ear earbuds are only $45.99 at Amazon when you use code HNDCWYO8 at checkout, a nice discount from their usual price of $79.99. These lightweight clip-on style earbuds last over 11 hours on a single charge, and are IP67 water and dust resistant, making them a great choice for working out or walking the dog.
• Best Buy has the 2025 edition of the Corsair RM850e on sale for just $72.99, just over half its usual price of $144.99. This fully modular desktop power supply is 80 PLUS Gold rated for excellent efficiency, with full ATX 3.1 support and a dedicated 12V-2×6 connector for single cable operation on newer GPUs.

Google is updating its AI search results to make inline links appear "higher up in responses more frequently," according to a blog post. The company's search results from AI Overviews and AI Mode give you answers in a customized view instead of the traditional list of links, but there are concerns that the format reduces traffic to publishers. Google says it's been making "continued and substantial increases to the presence of inline links in our AI experiences," and this new change will help ensure "ensure key sources are easily clickable right when you need them."

The company is announcing several other changes to highlight links an …

Read the full story at The Verge.