DC's new, very large Batman has a new, very large Bat-axe—and maybe a laissez-faire approach to the Dark Knight's traditional "no killing" rule.

Glasst has come up with an unusual solution for DIYers struggling to commit to a new wall color. Its Unpaint is a paint alternative that can be applied using standard tools like brushes, rollers, or even sprayers, but not permanently. When it dries, the company claims the paint can be easily peeled off instead of requiring laborious sanding or solvents to remove it. Unpaint uses the Colombian-based company’s proprietary Glasstommer technology, which allows a quickly applied liquid material to become a thin removable film. Glasst considers the exact makeup of the material a trade secret but does divulge that it contains a “biodegradable elastic component” that “dries to create a film that removes as easily as peeling an adhesive.” The...

The latest Volkswagen Golf GTI isn't perfect, but it has enough charm to overcome its flaws. , with that peak torque arriving at just 1,750 rpm. This sends its power to the front wheels via a seven-speed DSG or the soon-to-be-retired six-speed manual.

In case you missed the news, Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscriptions recently went up in price with the rollout of a new “Standard” tier, which doesn’t include day-one access to first-party Xbox games. Thankfully, if you’re still keen on an Ultimate membership, CDKeys is offering one-month subscription codes for $11.19 ($9 off) and three-month codes for $29.79 (about $30 off). These aren’t the lowest prices we’ve seen, but they sure beat paying the subscription’s new price of $19.99 a month. If you need a refresher, Xbox Game Pass Ultimate grants access to a massive library of downloadable games for Xbox consoles and PCs. Naturally, that includes first-party titles like Halo Infinite and Hi-Fi Rush but also great third-party games like S...

T-Mobile, which is working with SpaceX to let people text and make phone calls over satellite, says it has successfully sent a test emergency alert via a Starlink satellite. Satellite alerts can help ensure that people receive critical communication when they’re out of wireless coverage range, and T-Mobile claims this is the first time a wireless emergency alert has been sent over satellite in the US. “At 5:13 PM PT on Thursday, September 5th, T-Mobile initiated a test alert for a hypothetical evacuation notice,” according to T-Mobile. “The alert was sent 217 miles into space where it was received by one of the more than 175 Starlink direct-to-smartphone satellites currently in low earth orbit that effectively function as cell towers in...

Google Search is now adding links to archived websites in the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. That’s a bit of good news for anybody lamenting the disappearance of the cached pages link from Google’s results. The Internet Archive hosts billions of archived webpages, as it notes in its blog post today about the change. The Wayback Machine is a very helpful tool for looking at older versions of websites to see what may have changed compared to past versions, which, in some cases, can go back decades. Hey, catching up. Yes, it's been removed. I know, it's sad. I'm sad too. It's one of our oldest features. But it was meant for helping people access pages when way back, you often couldn't depend on a page loading. These days, things have...

The maker of the earrings joked to Gizmodo that they could make some for Trump but his orange skin tone might be "challenging."

Following last night’s debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, several users on X homed in on the vice president’s earrings — speculating that she was using them to get her talking points. Echoing a long history of political conspiracy theories, X users claimed she wore the Nova H1 Audio Earrings, which double as wireless earpieces. But anyone who looks closely can tell those aren’t what Harris was wearing. The Nova H1 Audio Earrings were announced last year as part of a Kickstarter campaign. They feature real pearls that hide a pair of wireless speakers, which transmit audio up and into your ears. They’re also almost certainly not what Harris was wearing. Apart from the large pearls on both Harris’ earrings and the Nova H1...

Stellantis, the European parent company of American brands Ram, Dodge, Chrysler, and Jeep, is retooling its Michigan plants to enable more electric vehicle production. The automaker says it will put more than $400 million into three Michigan facilities to support its “multi-energy strategy,” enabling manufacturing of electric and gas versions of the same vehicles to be built in the same facilities. Most of the money will roll into the Sterling Heights Assembly Plant (SHAP), where the upcoming 2025 Ram 1500 Ramcharger, an EV truck with a gas-powered range extender, will be built alongside the all-combustion engine versions of the pickup. SHAP will...

Want a PS5, but don’t want to spend $700 on a PS5 Pro? Thanks to Sony’s new refurbished website for PS5s, you’ll soon be able to buy an older version of the console for a lot less money than the PS5 Pro’s eye-watering cost. You can see everything that’s on offer on Sony’s certified refurbished website, which lists a bunch of products as “coming soon.” A refurbished PS5 in the original launch design with a disc drive will cost $399.99 (a $100 discount from a new PS5 slim with a disc drive), while a refurbished all-digital PS5, also in the original design, will cost $349.99 (also a $100 discount). The store features refurbished DualSense controllers, too, with white and black controllers for $59.99 and...

If you are reading this, you probably knew who you were going to vote for long before Tuesday night’s presidential debate.  The reason for this is simple: The minority of American voters who lack a strong attachment to either party tend to pay less attention to politics than partisans do. Any political actor trying to reach undecideds must therefore mind the knowledge gap that lies between themselves and their audience.  And that is one thing that Donald Trump utterly failed to do at the debate in Philadelphia. For this reason, among others, Vice President Kamala Harris was likely the chief beneficiary of her first oratorical showdown with the Republican nominee. The first indication that Trump may have allowed himself to become “too online” for the normie debate watcher came before the event had even begun. When the former president’s plane touched down in Philadelphia, the far-right internet personality Laura Loomer was among the VIPs who emerged from its hull (if you recognize that name, no presidential candidate should waste time trying to appeal to you). Loomer has voiced the opinion that “there’s a difference between white nationalism and white supremacy. Right? And a lot of liberals and left-wing globalist Marxist Jews don’t understand that.” It is theoretically possible that a person with that perspective might be a good sounding board for a politician hoping to reach moderate moms in the Milwaukee suburbs, but that does not seem likely.  In any case, once on stage, Trump routinely betrayed signs of being the kind of man who knows who Loomer and Nick Fuentes are and who can probably recite Fox News’s primetime lineup.  Early in the debate, Trump sought to illustrate the horrors that the Biden-era upsurge in asylum seekers brought to America’s shores. Polls suggest swing voters share Trump’s general concern with immigration levels, and there were surely countless ways that he could have articulated the restrictionist argument that they would have found coherent and sensible. Here is what he chose to say instead: What they have done to our country by allowing these millions and millions of people to come into our country. And look at what’s happening to the towns all over the United States. And a lot of towns don’t want to talk — not going to be Aurora or Springfield. A lot of towns don’t want to talk about it because they’re so embarrassed by it. In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs. The people that came in. They’re eating the cats. They’re eating — they’re eating the pets of the people that live there. For any American who is not immersed in right-wing social media, these remarks were surely disorienting. Trump invoked “Aurora” or “Springfield” without any explanation, as though these places were synonymous with well-known disasters (rather than obscure right-wing conspiracy theories). And his answer only got more puzzling from there, as he declared that “the people that came in” are eating “the dogs” and “the cats.” Here, Trump was referring to a baseless, racist allegation — promulgated chiefly by his running mate — that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, are kidnapping and consuming their neighbors’ pets. His reference was plain to all of us fallen souls who, by dint of our social media addictions, were forced to scroll through the most hateful AI-generated images of cats ever conceived earlier this week. But to anyone else, he sounded like a Fox News superfan who’d accidentally ingested some of his grandson’s LSD. In other moments, Trump’s attack lines were less wildly detached from reality but still lacked sufficient exposition for those hearing them for the first time.  In trying to spotlight the left-wing stances that Harris embraced during her 2020 primary campaign, Trump declared, “she wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison.”  Here, Trump was referring to the fact that, in a questionnaire from the ACLU in 2019, Harris had answered “yes” when asked if she would use “executive authority to ensure that transgender and non-binary people who rely on the state for medical care — including those in prison and immigration detention — will have access to comprehensive treatment associated with gender transition, including all necessary surgical care.” Trump is probably right to smell a potential advantage in attacking Harris for favoring taxpayer-funded medical treatments for undocumented immigrants. But he did not walk viewers through exactly what Harris had endorsed and its implications. Instead, he chose to summarize her position in shorthand while needlessly distorting it, suggesting that she wanted to “do transgender operations on illegal aliens” (rather than provide such care to them), as though the vice president had intended to impose gender transition on detained immigrants against their will. The effect was to make Trump’s attack sound more baseless than it actually was.  Elsewhere, Trump’s references were plausibly too highbrow; he repeatedly declared Harris a “Marxist,” a term that might not have much resonance for non-college-educated voters who weren’t fully sentient during the Cold War. He also referred to “the Nord Stream 2 pipeline” without immediate elaboration and touted Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s praise, an endorsement that may carry weight with the extremely online right but means nothing to most ordinary voters.  Perhaps the single most telling illustration of Trump’s failure to comprehend the distinction between his Truth Social following and swing voters, though, was when he referred to the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot as “J6” — an abbreviation that few who have never been subject to a microblogging platform’s character limit would have any reason to use or even recognize.  All of this said, it is certainly true that I am no more the relevant audience for Tuesday’s debate than Laura Loomer superfans are. Whatever our political leanings, those of us who read the New York Times each morning or watch Fox News every night — and scroll X all hours in between — live in a different universe than the people whose fickle allegiances will decide November’s election. We know what references to JD Vance’s “couch” are supposed to convey. They know what it’s like to have healthy and fulfilling hobbies. We are not the same. But I’m not relying on mere intuition when claiming that Harris won last night’s contest. The available viewer polls and swing-voter focus groups available indicate the Democrat routed her rival, as do the betting markets. If that consensus holds, Trump’s inability to speak to voters who aren’t like me — which is to say, those who don’t immediately know what “J6” refers to — will be one reason for his failed debate. 

Engineers needed to swap out the clogged thrusters on the spacecraft as it continues its journey through interstellar space.

Eating pets. Executing babies. Donald Trump's debate rhetoric felt deeply mired in dark corners of the internet.

Hume AI, a startup founded by a psychologist who specializes in measuring emotion, gives some top large language models a realistic human voice.