What's New

OnePlus phones have always had one core selling point: they’re as powerful as the latest flagship Android phones, yet cost hundreds of dollars less. That winning combination made the OnePlus 6 and 5T two of our top recommended phones of the past year. The new OnePlus 6T mostly continues that trend, but this time it’s bringing some cutting-edge innovation with it. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

For nearly two decades, I met Stan Lee for lunch about once every month or two. In the 1990s and into the 2000s I was writing for Wizard magazine, which at the time was kind of a catch-all, 800-pound gorilla in the comics business. And Stan, as we all learned from his many MCU cameos, knew the value of publicity. He liked seeing his name in print, which meant he was happy to sit down with a reporter—especially if I picked up the tab. So in 1999, we started meeting regularly for mid-day meals. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Look at the latest data on US car sales, and you won't find much in the way of surprises. Ford's F-Series pickups reign supreme. SUVs and other pickups dominate the 20 most popular models in the country, along with cheaper sedans like the Toyota Camry and Honda Civic. Let your eyes fall to the bottom of the list, though, and you'll spot a newcomer: Elon Musk's Tesla Model 3. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Board game designer Rob Daviau is shuffling through a deck of 3” x 3” cardboard tiles, each displaying a somber, aerial-view illustration of a room. He spies one, raises his eyebrows, and plucks it out of the pile. “This is the creepiest,” he says with a sly grin, turning the card’s face toward me. “There’s two things in here: The room is empty except for a crib and a teddy bear that’s been dismembered.” He studies the card a moment. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Former intelligence official Richard A. Clarke says that Earth is virtually defenseless against incoming asteroids, and that an asteroid large enough to level a city could strike with almost no warning. “We do not have a plan for dealing with that,” Clarke says in Episode 334 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “We don’t have a rocket or a missile we can fire up right now, certainly not on 48 hours alert, but not even on six months alert. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

In November 1981, Butterball introduced a toll-free hotline with a simple mission: to help Thanksgiving chefs turn out top-notch turkeys. And while the phone call remains the beating heart of the Turkey Talk-Line industrial complex, it has in recent years branched out. In 2008, Butterball took its first tips to social media. In 2016, it added texting to its toolkit. This year, it’s adding an Alexa skill. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

As gray clouds cleared Wednesday morning, the feed that broadcast out of Trumpland beamed a bright, bloody red. Unsurprisingly, the ostensible victory—a continued firm hold on the Senate and critical, if slim, gubernatorial wins—emboldened many Republican acolytes whose loyalties lie with the president’s camp. Amongst Trump supporters, news moves at a dizzying, disorienting pace. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Wouldn’t it be really, really nice to get places really, really fast? That’s the promise of the hyperloop, a transportation idea popularized in the 21st century by none other than its Chief Engineer/Magician/Dreamer, Elon Musk. Five years after Musk wrote a white paper on the concept of a maglev train inside a frictionless, air-free tube, hyperloop has become a sort of legitimate business. Four companies with more than $300 million in funding are competing to build the first real one. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Earlier this month, people in Central Park noticed the presence of a majestic Mandarin duck. As quickly as he was there, he was gone. But he’s back. With his bright pink beak, mohawk of blue and gold, and proud chest feathers of royal purple, the mysterious visitor has returned—and quickly captured our collective heart. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The first statewide carbon tax in the United States almost certainly isn't going to happen. Washington votes by mail, so it ain’t over yet, but the No side of Initiative 1631 has just over 56 percent, with more than two thirds of the votes counted. It doesn’t look good. LEARN MORE The WIRED Guide to Climate Change That’s a disappointing end for a bill that some environmentalists and journalists had held out as a bellwether. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Most things don’t happen the way they do in the movies. Changes are less sudden, incidents less surprising, humans less attractive. But when a runaway train tore through the Australian outback, the action sequence that followed seems to have come right out of a Tony Scott flick. The whole mess started when the engineer stopped the 268-car, four-locomotive train and hopped out to inspect one of the cars, according to the Australian Transport Safety Board. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Like a college graduate ready to head off into the workforce and start a career, Apple has graduated the iPad from tablet school. As he prepared to lift the curtain on the new 11-inch and 12.9-inch iPad Pro last week, CEO Tim Cook explained that Apple sees the iPad as a personal computer now. Apple says that new designation makes iPad the top-selling line of PCs in the world. It’s a fair comparison. After using a new iPad Pro 12. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Look at just about any rendering or essayistic sketch of the world’s transportation future, and you’ll notice two things about the cars, trucks, vans, and whatever elses tootling around the roads: They drive themselves and they run on electricity. The funny thing about that pairing is that there’s no inherent relationship between a vehicle’s ability to drive itself and what it uses to move its wheels. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Homecoming, the latest series with prestige TV bona fides to come to Amazon, is about as subtle and mysterious as a thriller can get. Based on the podcast of same name, it is, on the surface, about a group of soldiers returned from combat and the facility—called Homecoming—that seeks to treat their PTSD. However, as seen in flash-forwards and tiny cracks in the veneer of each person's story, none of that is what it seems, and everyone's motives and actions are suspect. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

If you’ve been driving your Tesla in the past week, you’re likely enjoying the major upgrade Elon Musk’s automaker just issued with a free, over-the-air software update. And if you believe the blog post trumpeting the advance, you’ve taken a major step towards chillaxing on the highway while the car handles the traffic for you. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

To keep dog hair and toddler mess at bay, I use three separate vacuums: a heavy corded one for deep cleaning; a robot vac that I run daily for light maintenance cleaning; and a cordless handheld for quickly picking up small messes. However, it is possible to go overboard. You don't want your descendants to find you buried, a skeletal arm sticking out from under piles of dusty, decaying vacuuming devices. That's where the Coral One comes in. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

With the possible exception of Tom Cruise, learning to fly a helicopter demands months of classroom, simulator, and in-air training. The controls feature all the logic of Bop It: twist one hand, move the other to the left. Push one foot, then the other. Watch the instruments, but don’t forget to look at the horizon. I once spent a full day working with Airbus' top instructors, and by the end couldn't even keep the chopper in level flight. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Maybe you like business trips. The chance to go somewhere new, eat out for every meal, dry off with a fresh towel each morning, and be away from the daily life of the office (and the home) for a while. You do not, however, like filing your expenses when you get home. Uber thinks it can help. Today, it announced that it’s expanding Uber for Business to incorporate its Eats food delivery service, aiming to make it easier for companies to help their employees get grub as well as get around. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

On October 16 of 2014, Apple announced a modest upgrade to the Mac Mini, the puckish computer that plays caboose in Cupertino's desktop train. And then... nothing. For four years, despite remaining for sale, the Mac Mini languished without any updates at all. But now, it's back with a vengeance. "There’s another small but mighty Mac our users have been waiting for,” said Apple CEO Tim Cook at an Apple hardware event in New York. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Last month’s iOS 12 update gave us screen time tools, security updates, and a whole heap of new features that make your iPhone feel new again. Now, with iOS 12.1, you get even more ways to express yourself on your iPhone and iPad. With Group FaceTime, you can chat with up to 32 friends and family. You can also spice up your messaging life with 70 new emoji—including a freezing-cold smiley, a mooncake, and a long-awaited redhead. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The theme of Apple's second fall hardware show: throwbacks. The event, at Howard Gilman Opera House in New York City, featured a revival of the MacBook Air, a dusted-off Mac Mini, new iPads, and, for some reason, Lana del Rey. Did you miss the show? You can watch the whole thing here, catch up on the analysis from our liveblog, or simply read on for our TL;DR recap. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The people most excited about Halloween are little kids. For humans aged between 2.5 and 10 years old, there’s really nothing better. They get to dress up and go out—at night!—and strangers give them candy. There are leaf piles to jump in and fake skeletons to scream at. But it can also be a nightmare, if they get too scared. Halloween works best for young kids when it's a mixture of spooky and sweet, one that's light on the spooky and heavy on the sweet. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

On Halloween night, 41.1 million children in the US will roam the streets, decked out as ghosts, ghouls, and the year’s best memes. It’s trick-or-treating time, folks. The one fright you don't want to have as a parent is worrying about your kid on Halloween night. “You want to empower your kids to be a little more independent as they get older,” says Leticia Barr, founder of the Tech Savvy Mama blog. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Look, we won’t waste your time here. There are more important things going on in the world. But if you use any of Google’s G Suite products, you’ll be glad you read this. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Richard K. Morgan has spent most of the past decade working on his fantasy trilogy A Land Fit For Heroes. The books were popular with readers, but Morgan has received a steady stream of emails urging him to write more science fiction in the vein of his 2002 debut Altered Carbon. His new novel Thin Air definitely fits the bill, delivering more of Morgan’s signature blend of mystery, sci-fi, sex, and violence. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

According to Google's "Frightgeist" map of trending costumes, there's no way around it: it's gonna be a very Fortnite Halloween. From Miami up to Boston and Anchorage down to LA, the Epic Games title is dominating people's searches for holiday getups. (At least, mostly; New England seems to be really into unicorns and fairies, and Glendive, Montana inexplicably is into "The ’50s" as a costume idea.) You, though, are a free thinker. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Snapchat Dysmorphia n. A fixation on perceived flaws in one’s appearance, caused by seeing too many filtered photos. People used to show up in plastic surgeons’ offices with photos of movie stars, asking for Angelina’s lips or Jon Hamm’s chin. Today they come with selfies, asking to look like themselves. Not the human selves that mock us all in fitting-room mirrors, of course, but the sparkling, digitally embellished versions that increasingly populate our social feeds. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

It's hard to imagine anyone has had a career like Ed Catmull's. He was hired by George Lucas to run Lucasfilm's computer division in 1979; seven years later, after Steve Jobs bought that division from Lucas, he co-founded Pixar with Jobs and then-Disney-ex-pat John Lasseter. There, he helped develop RenderMan, the studio's revolutionary computer animation software, which it still uses today. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Do you need a fitness wearable? Obviously, yes. Even if you're not interested in counting every step, every day, you can now use a fitness wearable to check your texts, listen to music, or effortlessly pay for a macchiato. The increasingly porous boundary between fitness trackers, sport watches, and smartwatches has resulted in a tough year or two for Fitbit. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The Mega Millions lottery jackpot has reached an absurd $1.6 billion, which translates to about 1.4 percent of a Bezos. The odds of winning are a comically low 1 in 302,575,350. Still, you almost certainly won. To make sure, here's how to follow along with Tuesday night's historic drawing as it happens. The drawing takes place at 11 pm EDT, out of ABC affiliate WSB-TV in Atlanta, Georgia. The good news is, you've got options if you want to watch. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Recently I was invited to join a panel to discuss Regulatory Hacking: A Playbook for Startups, a new book by venture capitalist Evan Burfield. The book is sort of a guide for new companies looking for a win-win—doing good by doing well—in highly regulated sectors like health and education. It argues that startups have the opportunity to make trillions of dollars solving global challenges that, in the past, would have been addressed by governments or nonprofits. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The promise of Patreon, the membership platform for independent artists and creators, has always been simple: If your fans like your work, they will pay you for it. No need to slough off cash from advertisers, or make shady deals with brands. It's just you, your fans, and the stuff you make for them. Patreon has slowly introduced new ways for creators to milk the most out of these fan relationships. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The thoroughbreds weren't running that morning. I was in the parking lot of the Santa Anita Park horse track, to the east of Los Angeles, for a different sort of race. The orange cones demarcate an autocross course that a solid driver in a high-performing car should be able to complete in about a minute. Ready? Yep. I slam my foot down, and the Bolt launches forward. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

If you were a baseball fan in 1921, you might have huddled around a radio to listen to the World Series. And when, in Game 8, you heard that George “High Pockets” Kelly of the New York Giants hit the title-winning grounder, you might have cheered—or if you were a Yankees fan, thrown your newsboy cap to the ground and uttered some old-timey obscenity. Today, our ardor for the national pastime hasn’t changed much, but we certainly have more devices to yell at. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

A scooter nightmare for cities might look something like this: Thousands of unused, rickety twists of metal and tire, sprawled across sidewalks. No walking, no wheeling: Just private companies’ private property, littered across public space. Of course, no American city really looks like that, even though the scooter-share craze has reached well over two dozen major urban places. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Orange Is the New Black’s sentence is up. Netflix announced this week that the show’s seventh season, hitting the streaming service next year, would be its last. After that, it’s dunzo. For many viewers, this is sad news—the inmates of Litchfield have been a part of the conversation for a long time now. But for everyone else, and for the future of TV broadly, it’s a move that’s long overdue. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

There are two things you need to know about my visit to Lime’s San Francisco office to see their new scooter, a thick, rugged white and green thing they’re calling Gen 3. The first is that I showed up almost 20 minutes late after getting caught in the city’s underground metro tunnel for half an hour. The second is that I walked-ran into the office building and onto its elevator, where I found Lime CEO and cofounder Toby Sun. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Cars are getting smarter and more capable. They're even starting to drive themselves, a little. And they're becoming a cause of concern for European and American safety agencies and groups. They're all for putting better tech on the road, but automakers are selling systems like Tesla’s Autopilot, or Nissan’s Pro Pilot Assist, with the implied promise that they’ll make driving easier and safer, and a new study is the latest to say that may not always be the case. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

A few years ago, I gave my parents-in-law a Chromecast for Christmas. They needed an easy way to watch Netflix and Chromecast was the hip, hot new thing. This will be perfect, I thought. I was wrong. The problems added up quickly. Their Wi-Fi was spotty, so the Casting icon didn't always show up on their phones, which was tough since casting video from their phones was a strange new concept to begin with. They also couldn’t stream Amazon Videos; Google doesn't support Amazon's app. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Do you remember Ember? Maybe not by name, but perhaps you recall the company’s defining concept: a mug that keeps your drink at your preferred temperature, and not a degree cooler, for hours at a time. On Wednesday, it got just a little bit better. Please know up front that the latest news from the Ember Ceramic Mug and Travel Mug is about as iterative as it gets. In fact, it’s barely about the mugs themselves at all. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

In early 2015, Netflix made one of the most dramatic deals in the company’s career, announcing it had paid close to $12 million for Beasts of No Nation, a grim war tale starring Idris Elba. By then, the streaming service had already found Emmy success with original series like House of Cards, and had even earned a couple of Academy Award nominations for its documentaries. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

It contributes to filter bubbles, he said. It risks silencing people, he said. And when it’s not silencing them, it might be incentivizing them to behave badly, or basely, he said. His biggest criticism of the social media site he runs was that it could be nudging its users in the wrong directions. “What does the service currently incentivize?” asked Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey on stage at the WIRED25 summit today. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Amazon has a new Kindle with an old name. It’s an updated version of the Kindle Paperwhite, which is Amazon’s best-selling Kindle e-reader—likely by a large margin, though we’ll never know because Amazon doesn’t share Kindle sales numbers. The Paperwhite is a good Kindle. This new one, which you can now preorder for $130, is a little bit better. It has the same six-inch, high-resolution display as the last Kindle Paperwhite. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Smart displays are the new smart speakers. A day after Facebook revealed Portal, a WiFi-connected video-chatting device for your home, Google has announced Home Hub, a new 7-inch smart screen that acts as a voice-controlled conduit for the Google Assistant. It's Google's first smart home gadget that's comprised largely of a touchscreen display, after having launched three different display-free smart speakers over the past couple years. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Like most people, you’ve probably watched Get Out at least once. Maybe twice. But the best way to see Get Out is with Jordan Peele sitting right next to you. Last spring, long before Get Out's eventual Oscar win, the movie was released on home video with a commentary track from its writer-director. A decade ago, in the pre-streaming era, this wouldn’t have been news: Back then, seemingly every movie got a commentary track, even Good Luck Chuck. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Yesterday Facebook took down 559 domestic political pages and 251 accounts for violating its terms of service on coordinated inauthentic behavior—“networks of accounts or Pages working to mislead others about who they are, and what they are doing.” While Facebook has been frequently critiqued for hosting and inadvertently aiding foreign disinformation campaigns, this is the first time a collection of domestic political pages have raised flags. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

You want the real windows into someone's soul? Look at their Reddit subscriptions. It's all there: their passions, their hobbies, their ideological leanings, their love of terrible haircuts and sublime anonymized cringe. And if they're anything like me, those subscriptions also tell the tale of a life spent diving down rabbit holes. Origami. Board games. Trail running. Pens. Cycling. Mechanical keyboards. Scrabble. (I know. God, I know. There are jokes to be made here. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

A NASA astronaut and a Russian cosmonaut were forced to make a dramatic landing after their ride to space, a Russian Soyuz rocket, failed minutes after takeoff. The incident caused the crew to initiate emergency abort procedures, landing a few hundred miles away from the launch site. Both Nick Hague and Alexey Ovchinin are safe. The crew launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 4:40 am ET and was scheduled to dock at the ISS six hours later. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

The man flying the drone didn’t know he was violating a temporary restriction on flights around New York City (the president was in town for the 2017 United Nations General Assembly). He didn’t know he had just two minutes to land before he violated the prohibition on nighttime flights. And he didn’t know his DJI Phantom 4—300 feet up, 2.5 miles away from him, and well beyond his line of sight—was flying dangerously close to an Army Black Hawk helicopter. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

After gathering strength from the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico overnight, Hurricane Michael blasted across the Florida Panhandle Wednesday afternoon, pummeling the area with winds up to 155 miles per hour. That makes the Category 4 hurricane one of the all-time strongest landfalls in US history. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices