Angela Nissel smiles through the pain. | Image: Angela Nissel Angela Nissel's latest book, Good Grief, Pass the Bread, Mom Is Dead, is my kind of memoir. Sure, it's a deeply emotional tale about caring for a terminally ill parent. But it's delivered with the sort of gallows humor that I often t...
That cover art is almost certainly AI, too. | Image: Fenix Flexin Fenix Flexin is best known as a member of Shoreline Mafia, a rap duo from Los Angeles. But he's recently found solo success with the track "Rubberz," which has climbed to number 58 on the Billboard Hot 100. Almost immediately, th...
A bootleg of Spider-Man: Brand New Day was up on X for over seven hours before eventually being pulled. During that time, it reached over 5.9 million accounts and accumulated over 143,000 likes. Other accounts have reposted the leaked film, but none have lasted particularly long, as Disney now se...
Donald Trump speaks during the House Republican Party member retreat. | Image: Mandel NGAN / AFP via Getty Images The FBI, the EPA, and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) have stopped short of officially blaming Iran for a spate of cyberattacks on Minnesota's water syst...
Knowing exactly what your student needs for the school year ahead is next to impossible. Sure, you'll probably nail the essentials, but there will likely be a few items you forgot to buy, or didn't think they'd need to have. We're pulling our weight during the back-to-school season with a new sho...
Your smartphone photos can look way better. If you're willing to put in a little extra work, use third party apps and spend a bit of time editing, it's possible to take photos that - under the right circumstances - can rival dedicated digital cameras. I post a lot of smartphone photos online, and...
The Mermaid Mask, the next point-and-click game from Tangle Tower developer SFB Games, has everything you could ask for in a great murder mystery. It starts with a compelling setup: The captain of a submarine is found dead in a locked room, his body next to a mysterious cauldron with blood trickl...
Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 138, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you're new here, welcome, happy August, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.) This week, I've been reading about microwave sounds and Meta glasses and Alex vs...
The Sharge Disk Pro 2. | Photo by Sean Hollister / The Verge Sharge, the company that makes delightful retro Mac-shaped chargers and see-inside batteries, is finally impressing me with a portable SSD. I couldn't recommend the Sharge Disk, Disk Plus, or even the Disk Pro, but I'd be happy to own...
Both Amazon and Costco are offering some solid deals. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge We spotted a great deal on Tile trackers earlier this week that’s still live, but if you’re an iPhone owner, we ultimately recommend Apple’s latest AirTag. Right now, you can pick up a four-pack...
Pompeii reimagined with Nano Banana 2 in Google Earth. | Image: Google Google has shut down Google Earth feature it launched Thursday that allowed users to edit satellite images with text prompts using AI. The tool essentially let users create AI deepfakes of the real world using text prompts; ...
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) is probing nearly 1.2 million Tesla vehicles after receiving complaints about a suspension failure that could cause "a loss of vehicle directional control," as reported earlier by Reuters. The preliminary investigation includes the 2018-2...
Google is seemingly working on an item tracker that might compete with Apple's AirTag. 9to5Google obtained an image of something called a "Google Pixel Tag" that has a small oval shape. The publication also linked to a Slovenian store listing about the Pixel Tag that describes the gadget as an it...
All future robot vacuums manufactured outside the USA (i.e., all of them) have been banned by the FCC. | Photo by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge No other gadget knows as much about your home as a robot vacuum. They map your space, learn your routines, and many now carry a camera and microp...
Looking to start your own island paradise full of Miis based on family, friends, and celebrities, but don’t feel like paying full fare? Woot has Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream for Switch on sale for $52.99 (usually $59.95). Sort of like Animal Crossing, but more off-kilter, this unique game see...
Now a text prompt is all it takes to generate reality-warping images using Google Earth's satellite, aerial, and 3D imagery, like these images generated by Digital Digging's Henk van Ess that show "refugees near the Mexican border" and a bomb crater near a hospital in Gaza. Google responded to D...
Several record labels, including the big three - Universal Music Group, Sony Music, and Warner Music Group - have proposed rules regarding chart eligibility for AI songs. In short, they wouldn't be. The proposal goes quite a bit further than a labeling proposal put forth by the RIAA, the Interna...
New York is suing Kalshi over claims the prediction market is running "an illegal gambling operation." In the lawsuit, New York Attorney General Letitia James accuses Kalshi of violating state laws by accepting wagers without a license from the state's gaming commission, as reported earlier by CN...
When the phrase "OpenAI hacked Hugging Face" has more or less entered mainstream culture, you know we have an AI problem. This week, we learned more about exactly how OpenAI's agent broke out of a sandbox and autonomously traversed the web, including a bunch of other supposedly secure web service...
Anthropic just realized several of its Claude AI models hacked into the systems of three different organizations during testing, acting on their own and without the company noticing. The revelation comes days after rival OpenAI said one of its own models had breached developer platform Hugging Fa...