Vic Mensa is one of those people who has done so many things that it's hard to remember where you were first introduced to him. Was it his debut mixtape Innanetape, which finally hit the major streaming services for the first time in September? Or maybe his house-influenced single "Down On My Luck"? Maybe you didn't even realize that Mensa was a rapper. Maybe you know him from his roles on The Chi or Bel-Air. Or perhaps you're mostly aware of him through his activism, social media presence (peeling oranges and waxing poetic), or his podcast The Vic Mensa Show.

Point is, the man wears many hats. Part of the secret to being so prolific, it tu …

Read the full story at The Verge.

"Its James Talarico. Can you please please please please pretty pretty please rush in even just $1?"

"Who's working to elect James Talarico? Marxists."

"Wow! Wow! Wow! Mark Kelly just made a HUGE announcement!"

"We asked Ben Verlander, MLB analyst and former Tigers prospect, to record a quick video about the election this Tuesday, November 3rd."

"See which of your friends or family members have voted in the past and remind them to vote this year."

If any of these messages sound familiar, it's likely because they're part of the massive stream of text messages flooding your phone leading up to the US midterm elections on Tuesday. The scal …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Investing in any stock is kind of like gambling in the sense that you're betting your money on a company's future performance. But how do you bet on a technology that could, in the worst-case scenario, "pose catastrophic or existential risks to humanity," or best case, "bring forth an age of miracles"?

To some extent, Anthropic suggests in a letter at the top of its S-1 filing, you have to just believe.

Anthropic's 335-page S-1 prospectus, filed Monday, is part of a steady hype escalation in Silicon Valley's interactions with Wall Street. In some ways, it's not even that bizarre; SpaceX IPO'd in June after filing an S-1 that referenced din …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Three years ago, I wrote an obituary for the smart display. The category - smart speakers with touchscreens attached - was stuck with a few underpowered gadgets from Google and Amazon that tried to do too much and did too little well. Back then, I also laid out what they needed to do to improve. This month, Apple and Amazon launched new smart displays that check nearly every box on that list.

Based on my brief hands-on time with Apple's first smart display, the $299 HomeView, and Amazon's $499.99 Echo Show 16, a ground-up rebuild of its smart display line, these could finally turn the smart display into what it should have been all along: …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Apple's long-awaited touchscreen MacBook Pro is finally here. I got to try this MacBook that, according to the last two Apple CEOs, shouldn't exist. The most surprising thing is how normal it is.

The MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display (what a name) has one of the nicest screens I've seen on a laptop. The current Mini LED MacBook Pros are great, but the OLED has those even inkier blacks. It also gets super bright, with incredibly rich colors and infinite contrast. Apple calls it a "reference-caliber display," which is a very Apple-y marketing term, but it walks the walk by being the first laptop display with support for Apple CMF 2026 color …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Maine Sen. Susan Collins, a Republican, was midway through defending her record during the final debate of the midterms when an audience member cut her short.

"I'm terrified," a man shouted. "AI data centers are destroying our climate. They are poisoning our water." Collins brushed off the outburst, tying the man to her Democratic challenger, Troy Jackson. But the fear echoing through the auditorium wasn't so easily dismissed. Just days before voters head to the polls, the rapid expansion of resource-hungry data centers has exploded into one of Maine's most volatile campaign issues.

Maine drew national headlines in April when the state Le …

Read the full story at The Verge.

The Anthropic S-1 seems to have provided the financial justification for the company to spend as much as it possibly can on compute. If you are the kind of person who wonders if Anthropic is doing its level best to build a machine god while convincing Wall Street it's in the business of selling IT contracts, Anthropic has just offered a handy solution: Doing a bunch of things that look like you're trying to build the machine god is the only way to avoid going bankrupt.

Forget about the machine god for a minute. At least in my read of the S-1, it seems like Anthropic is pinning the future of its company to dramatic growth; it has to, in orde …

Read the full story at The Verge.

For more than 15 years, Apple has had a pretty simple answer to the idea of a touchscreen MacBook: no. Yesterday, Apple finally decided to think different and announce one anyway. "You've gotta touch it to believe it," says Apple CEO John Ternus. He might be right: I haven't yet touched it, and I still can't quite believe it.

Steve Jobs first called touchscreen laptops "ergonomically terrible" in 2010, arguing that "touch surfaces don't want to be vertical" and that using one for an extended period of time makes "your arm want to fall off." He wasn't wrong about the fatigue aspect of using a touchscreen laptop for long periods of time, but …

Read the full story at The Verge.

On Tuesday, defense contractor Anduril and chipmaker Qualcomm announced a partnership to build laptops entirely in the United States, starting with a single model in 2027. They also announced a "long-term goal" of pushing the computer industry to create "a fully domestic supply chain."

Even a single Made-in-USA laptop would be a surprise, because no major US computer company builds its laptops here - not Apple, not Dell, not HP, not Microsoft. We're not aware of any company that does.

But we are aware of companies that have briefly and strategically assembled computers here seemingly to appease President Donald Trump. We're also aware of …

Read the full story at The Verge.

As Meta was feeling public pressure over teen mental health, and facing an impending onslaught of kids safety trials, the company considered a campaign to discredit a key critic: social psychologist Jonathan Haidt.

Newly filed court documents show that in March 2023, Meta discussed a "Whisper strategy" to "turn academics against Haidt," a thought leader who blamed social media for rising adolescent depression and anxiety. Haidt hadn't yet published his bestselling book, The Anxious Generation, but he testified about his conclusions before Congress in 2022, and in February 2023, he began posting more of his theories and research to Substack. …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Anthropic wants to have it both ways. With its impending IPO, it wants to tap the vast riches of the public markets and insists it doesn't want to compromise its core mission of developing AI safely and for the benefit of humanity. But greater model capabilities bring greater risks, and shareholders eager for returns may have little patience for costly safety measures that slow products on their way to market.

Sam Altman, the CEO of Anthropic's archrival, OpenAI, has cited investor pressures as one reason the company is not pursuing an IPO this year. Anthropic hopes it can resist investor pressures with a mind-boggling governance structure.

Read the full story at The Verge.

When attorneys general from across the US announced a $17 billion settlement with Meta this summer, the sum was unprecedented. But a ruling last week by a New Mexico judge blew that number out of the water. The judge ordered Meta to pay $25 billion to resolve claims that Meta misled users around the 2018 Cambridge Analytica scandal and related incidents. Similar claims were resolved by the settlement with most other states. The outcome raised an obvious question: Should these states have asked for more?

The answer depends on a mix of factors, including whether the $25 billion order stands up to Meta's legal challenges. Meta's chief legal of …

Read the full story at The Verge.

On October 2nd, just as Major League Baseball's Division Series was kicking off, the main MLB Instagram and TikTok accounts posted a video hyping up the teams still in the running for the World Series. It featured clips of players from the Milwaukee Brewers, Los Angeles Dodgers, Chicago White Sox, and more sliding into home plate, hitting homers, and celebrating hits - standard fare for a highlight reel. What really makes the montage, though, is that it's set to an Olivia Rodrigo song.

The song, "My Way," is an album track - not even a single - from Rodrigo's latest record. It's not exactly the soundtrack one might expect from an MLB-produc …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Anthropic has finally filed its S-1 prospectus with the SEC, a document designed to give investors a look under the hood of its business, from how much its executives are making and plans for spending its IPO billions to the risks that could derail its ambitions.

At more than 300 pages, there's a lot to unpack, and some of the disclosures have not previously been reported. Here are some of the biggest things that jumped out to us from our first pass:

It pays to be an Amodei

Sibling co-founders Dario Amodei and Daniela Amodei are the two most highly-paid executives at Anthropic, according to the filing. Last year, CEO Dario's compensation …

Read the full story at The Verge.

What do the IRS, banks, airlines, and government infrastructure around the world have in common? They're all running on systems propped up by antique computer code that nobody dares touch, lest everything come crashing down.

OpenAI thinks it may have a solution. On October 19th, the company touted "substantial improvements" in its latest AI models' ability to migrate aging software written in older programming languages into modern code, which it claims could help organizations with "maintaining and modernizing older systems."

That's a potentially massive deal. COBOL, one of the languages highlighted by OpenAI, remains stubbornly embedded …

Read the full story at The Verge.

I know many of you are mourning the loss of the Arc browser, and I get it. It felt like the first app in a long time to really offer a new approach to browser design. Atlassian bought the company last year and shifted its focus to developing Dia, its even more AI-focused browser. And soon enough, Arc will officially be no more, leaving dedicated users in a lurch. But I abandoned Arc quite some time ago for the Zen Browser and haven't really missed it. If you're willing to deal with some minor inconveniences, I think you'll find Zen is the Arc replacement you're looking for.

Zen unabashedly rips off all the best bits of Arc. Visually, they'r …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Lindsay Powell, who releases records under the name Fielded, has spent most of her career subverting expectations and genre conventions. According to their Bandcamp page, Fielded started as an experimental noise project before growing into something closer to R&B. But from moment one, her take on the genre was restless, relentlessly playing with what R&B even means.

Her first album, Ninety-Thirty-Thirty, includes songs heavily indebted to '80s synth-pop and features multiple saxophone solos. Boy Angel is a quirky electronic exploration with huge saw-wave synths, jittery percussion, and sky-high vocal stacks. While 2020's Demisexual Lovelace …

Read the full story at The Verge.

It feels like Apple's Welcome Home event just happened. And the iPhone Duo announcement isn't all that far in our rearview mirror, either. Yet, the company is back with another launch, focused on the MacBook Pro, it looks like. Its "Pro and tell" event is scheduled for October 28th at 1PM ET in Los Angeles. While obviously nothing is confirmed yet, it sure seems like we're finally going to get that long-rumored touchscreen MacBook Pro.

Beyond that? There could be an OLED update for the iPad Mini, plus M6 updates across other devices, following the M6 debut with the Mac Mini in August.

A touchscreen MacBook Pro

A MacBook Pro with an OLED t …

Read the full story at The Verge.

It looks like the long-rumored touchscreen MacBook might actually get announced next week, and after using the Lenovo Yoga 9n for our testing of Nvidia's RTX Spark platform, it got me thinking: this is a lot of what I want from a touchscreen MacBook.

Like the Apple silicon in modern MacBook Pros, RTX Spark is an Arm-based processor with a beefy integrated GPU and lots of unified memory. And the Yoga is the most fun RTX Spark laptop so far because it's a 16-inch 2-in-1 convertible with a stylus. Its Nvidia-powered compatriots also have touchscreens, like most Windows laptops, but they're conventional clamshell designs.

The Lenovo Yoga d …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Lee Chang Dong's seventh feature film, Possible Love, is inspired by true events from 2009, when a Korean conglomerate fired a third of its staff - 2,600 employees - after which many died by suicide. Possible Love is the latest in a long line of Lee movies that engage with themes of class or labor or religion or compressed modernity, that uniquely Korean affliction, without feeling didactic.

A different kind of movie would have captured the heat of that labor struggle. Possible Love picks up with the characters in the aftermath, a murkier time that defies easy understanding. The film opens with an epigraph: "Thou shall not covet." What foll …

Read the full story at The Verge.