It's hard to overstate Jad Abumrad's impact on the podcasting world. He created and hosted Dolly Parton's America and Fela Kuti: Fear No Man, two Peabody Award-winning shows that offered unprecedented looks at the lives of two of the most important music icons of the last century.
Before that, though, he created Radiolab, an experimental NPR show that leaned heavily on creative sound design and eventually helped redefine what a podcast could be. In the early days of podcasting, shows were often just a couple of people talking at each other at a table (some still are), or lazily repackaged radio broadcasts. Radiolab instead told deeply repor …
Wu-Tang Clan member Method Man, who got to hear the album for the first time thanks to Pablo Torre Finds Out. | Getty Images
Wu-Tang's Once Upon A Time in Shaolin album has, for the most part, been extremely difficult to listen to, but you can now hear two snippets of the album thanks to the podcast Pablo Torre Finds Out, which just published an episode all about the exclusive record.
Once Upon A Time in Shaolin has a long history, which Pablo Torre Finds Out goes into in detail. Disgraced pharmaceutical executive Martin Shkreli bought the only copy of the album, which cannot be commercially released until 2103, in 2015 at auction. Shkreli had to forfeit the album to the US government, and the government sold it in 2021 to the crypto art collective PleasrDAO, whi …
Nathan Fielder's documentary about disgraced Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes has created a constellation of colliding personas that interrogate the very nature of authenticity.
Earlier this year, an AI agent powered by Claude basically wiped out a person’s entire company by deleting the code that made the business run. It was pretty funny. Sad, but funny. Well, it happened again, but instead of deleting vital code, an AI agent deleted an entire upcoming season of a TV show.
According to reports from Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet, production company Mastiff gave an AI agent access to their servers while putting the final touches on The Challenge Sverige, Sweden’s version of the MTV reality show that feels like it’s been on the air here in the States for at least a century.
‘The Challenge Sverige’ Lost Its Entire Edited Season. Now It Has to Be Rebuilt.
According to the Swedish publication, the AI wiped out the entire edited season just five weeks before it was scheduled to air on November 22. No backup was available to restore the files, so weeks of editing vanished into thin air thanks to an AI agent that is basically also thin air.
The show’s broadcaster, TV4, has been forced to push the premiere date back into 2027 as post-production crews scramble to re-edit every single episode from scratch. The show’s host, Ahmed Berhan, seems to be taking the disaster in stride, telling Aftonbladet, “I knew AI would be the death of me” and “some days you just have to accept that you’re living in a f*cking sitcom.”
Valve is introducing a major new feature for Steam achievements called "achievement sets" that lets developers list different groups of achievements for a base game and DLCs.
"In games that support sets, you still unlock achievements by playing the game as usual," Valve says. "But when you browse what you have unlocked afterward, Steam will break the long list of game achievements into the developer-created sets, making it easier to see what you have completed and to find other related achievements you can unlock next." Achievement sets have their own progress bars, and if you finish a set, you'll get a "set complete" trophy that's visible …
Big Walk's co-op multiplayer walking adventure has proved popular since launching in August, but Xbox players have been excluded from the fun - and now the game's creators have explained why. Developer House House said in a blog post that it decided not to release Big Walk on Xbox consoles in accordance with the Palestinian-led BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) movement, which has called to boycott Microsoft, including products under the company's gaming division.
YouTube is adding a "Made with AI" label to tracks that were "altered or fully generated" using AI, with a similar approach to its existing process for applying AI labels to videos. It doesn't sound like this will apply to any and all use of AI tools in making music, but according to YouTube, it includes things like "using a generative model to create the composition and vocals." In its rules for music partners who upload their songs, YouTube lays out how to disclose generative AI use, and says that if there's no disclosure, it may use "other signals" to decide if a song is AI-generated.
The label is rolling out starting today in the YouTub …
There's an entire cottage industry of iPod mods out there, but Sprout Pi and Sprout Pico are two of the few full motherboard replacements that combine many of the most popular mods into a single upgrade. Both versions add Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, USB-C, a microSD card slot, FLAC playback, and more. And while cracking open an iPod will never not be intimidating, at least the Sprout doesn't require any soldering.
The firmware allows audio over USB for wired headsets, as well as over the original 3.5mm jack. Plus, Bluetooth support lets you connect to your AirPods or favorite UE party speaker. Wi-Fi enables Google Cast and AirPlay streaming, as well …
Get a 50% discount on the last two days of TechCrunch Disrupt 2026, October 14-15, in San Francisco. Register now and join the rest of the startup ecosystem. Today, it's all about physical and software AI.
Back in 2019, author Margaret Stohl was handed a manuscript written by Jason Jones, who's best known as the co-creator of sci-fi gaming series Halo and Destiny. The two had worked together at Bungie, and Jones wanted Stohl's opinion on a book he was writing about AI taking over the world. It was an oral history of the fictional events, with around 100 characters spread across 40 countries, all detailing the AI uprising from their own perspectives. Pretty quickly Stohl realized that this idea could be much more than a single book.
"I was floored but not surprised," she says of her reaction to the original manuscript. "He's a worldbuilder who …
Epic Games is announcing a big refresh of its PC games launcher today in preview, saying that the new version is "way faster" and now supports Linux. But the company, which has been publicly making a big push into AI-assisted development, also notes that the refresh was "vibe coded."
"Programming is hard," Epic says in a blog post. "So, instead of doing that, we vibe coded a new Epic Games Launcher that's way faster and more responsive than the current one, and has a new look."
On Monday, CEO Tim Sweeney announced that the company has a "huge pivot underway," where it will be "moving developers around to retool for maximum AI acceleration. …
Rockstar Games might not keep fans waiting as long for the next installment of Grand Theft Auto. As part of Bloomberg's expansive report on the making of GTA VI, Rockstar technical lead Phil Hooker said that the "engine, the tools and the team we've built during this project will allow us to do things more quickly."
GTA VI had a notoriously long development process. It took eight years to make, leaving a 13-year gap between this upcoming installment and GTA V.
The report points to the one-year gap between Grand Theft Auto III and Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, which was possible because Rockstar already had the framework in place for its nex …
If you were asked to select the most unsettling television theme song ever composed, what would you go with? In the event that your answer ends up being Unsolved Mysteries, literally nobody on the planet is gonna have an argument for you. Not one person. However, should you be in the rare position of not knowing what we’re talking about right now, go ahead and listen to the terrifying intro music below—and, for Christ’s sake, turn on a light first.
Composers Gary Malkin and Michael Boyd wrote that haunting little tune you just heard back in the 1980s, and it’s been striking fear into the hearts of everyone who’s listened to it since. Believe it or not, even Malkin himself wasn’t immune to the song’s chilling effects. While speaking with the Los Angeles Timesin 2020, Malkin recalled that after spending countless hours on the score and watching reenactments of murders and abductions in the process, he couldn’t get the melody out of his head. “I was destroyed for weeks,” he revealed, “I had horrible nightmares.”
Why the ‘Unsolved Mysteries’ Theme Still Gives You the Creeps
But Malkin was far from the only one his music gave the creeps to. As he tells it, the folks at NBC had to deal with quite a few complaints over the years regarding kids being freaked out by the show’s opening credits. “We used to get letters all the time from parents saying, ‘Could you please change the theme music? Our children are terrified of it,’” Malkin remembered.
As for what it is that makes the Unsolved Mysteries theme so eerie, Malkin explained that he and Boyd used an interval called the tritone (a.k.a. the devil’s interval), a dissonant combination that, according to musicologist Neil Lerner, creates a sense of tension, ambiguity, and instability. Evidently, religious songs from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance avoided the tritone because it made people feel uneasy. Malkin and Boyd were also inspired by the sinister music featured in earlier horror movies, like John Carpenter’s classic Halloween theme, for example.
On October 3, 1992, Sinéad O’Connor appeared as the musical guest on Saturday Night Live for the second and last time of her career. That evening, she performed two songs: her new single “Success Has Made a Failure of Our Home,” and an a cappella version of Bob Marley’s 1976 record “War.” At the conclusion of “War,” O’Connor held up a picture of Pope John Paul II, tore it to pieces, and yelled, “Fight the real enemy!” You can take a look at the footage for yourself below.
SNL producer Lorne Michaels reportedly demanded that the studio’s “Applause” sign be turned off immediately after the incident, which resulted in O’Connor’s actions being met with absolute silence from the audience. The network was said to have received upwards of 4,000 complaints in response and banned O’Connor from appearing on the show ever again. O’Connor’s behavior was also promptly condemned by everyone from Catholic cardinal Bernard Francis Law to the Anti-Defamation League.
The Notorious Sinead O’Connor Incident That Got Her Banned From ‘SNL’
On the following week’s episode, guest host Joe Pesci brought up O’Connor during his opening monologue. “She was very lucky it wasn’t my show, cuz if it was my show, I would’ve gave her such a smack,” Pesci joked, to a round of applause. “I would’ve grabbed her by her…her eyebrows,” he continued, poking fun at O’Connor’s bald head:
Madonna parodied the stunt as well when she was the musical guest in January 1993, tearing up a photo of Joey Buttafuoco at the end of one song:
For her part, O’Connor addressed the backlash in a letter that was sent to several news publications, calling herself an abused child and revealing that she became a singer so that her story could be heard. “The Catholic Church have controlled us by controlling education,” O’Connor continued, “Through their teachings on sexuality, marriage, birth control, and abortion. And most spectacularly through the lies they taught us with their history books.”
O’Connor closed out her statement by writing, “My story is the story of countless millions of children whose families and nations were torn apart for money in the name of Jesus Christ.”
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