What's New

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.