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Once upon a time, film-makers were mysterious sorcerers hunched over Steenbecks and smoke machines, conjuring cinematic magic from the recesses of their cerebellums. These days it seems they spend half their time on Reddit, fighting like gremlins to stay one step ahead of the hive mind.

This week, Spider-Man: No Way Home director Jon Watts revealed that his original plan for the grand entrance of the Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield versions of Spider-Man in the blockbuster Marvel epic was to have them turn up following the death of Aunt May, just as Spidey was at his lowest point. As our hero sheds tears on a grimy New York rooftop, the pair would enter through Doctor Strange portals at the perfect moment to reset the film and set Peter Parker on the path to redemption.

It was a perfectly serviceable plan to get the film moving again quickly before the entire multiplex ruined their popcorn with salty tears. But there was one tiny, weeny problem: the internet had thought of it first. “I was on Reddit, and I was looking at people who had already made fan art of, ‘This is probably what it’s going to be like when the two Spider-Men get revealed’,” Watts told Collider. [...]

We’ve said it before, but it bears repeating: We won’t be able to meaningfully reduce climate pollution in the U.S. until we do something about trade associations.

Organized business groups aligned with the fossil fuel industry collectively spend hundreds of millions each year to stymie climate and environmental policy. From 2008 to 2018, trade groups allied with Big Oil and other major climate polluters outspent clean energy trade groups 27 to 1.

Two of the most climate obstructionist trade associations that work on behalf of major polluters are the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable. The Chamber is “the number one obstruction in the path of a just transition to clean energy,” according to a 2023 report on the group’s long history of anti-climate lobbying. The group was a major voice against President Joe Biden’s signature climate law; it opposed pollution limits for power plants and transportation; and it worked to dismantle climate transparency rules for public corporations. Currently, the group is suing Vermont to stop its game-changing climate law that would hold corporations accountable for damage they do to the planet.

And though the Business Roundtable insists it supports climate policy, the group has lobbied against many major efforts to reduce pollution. The association is currently calling on Congress to ban environment- and climate- focused shareholder proposals, which often seek to force companies to set more ambitious climate targets, such as Chevron shareholders’ successful 2021 proposal to reduce Scope 3 emissions. In 2021, the Business Roundtable also “spent millions of dollars to stop the Biden administration’s Build Back Better agenda, which included significant efforts to reduce carbon emissions and promote clean energy,” the Guardian reported.

These group’s anti-climate lobbying activities are only possible because of the millions they receive in annual membership payments from corporate members. And according to a new report, many of those corporate members claim to be climate champions themselves.

Humpback whales may be trying to communicate with us, using bubbles.

For the first time, scientists from the SETI Institute and UC Davis have documented humpback whales blowing large “vortex bubble rings” that resemble “smoke” rings during calm, voluntary interactions with humans — behavior that appears unrelated to feeding, mating or defense.

“Humpback whales often exhibit inquisitive, friendly behavior towards boats and human swimmers,” said Jodi Frediani, a marine wildlife photographer and UC Davis affiliate, in a press release.

The team observed 12 separate bubble ring episodes involving 11 whales and 39 rings across the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. Researchers say the bubble rings differ from other whale behaviors involving bubbles.

While humpbacks commonly use bubble nets to trap prey and bubble trails during mating, these bubble rings seemed to occur only during relaxed, voluntary encounters with humans — not while hunting or competing for mates.

In my free time, I help run a small Mastodon server for roughly six hundred queer leatherfolk. When a new member signs up, we require them to write a short application—just a sentence or two. There’s a small text box in the signup form which says:

Please tell us a bit about yourself and your connection to queer leather/kink/BDSM. What kind of play or gear gets you going?

This serves a few purposes. First, it maintains community focus. Before this question, we were flooded with signups from straight, vanilla people who wandered in to the bar (so to speak), and that made things a little awkward. Second, the application establishes a baseline for people willing and able to read text. This helps in getting people to follow server policy and talk to moderators when needed. Finally, it is remarkably effective at keeping out spammers. In almost six years of operation, we’ve had only a handful of spam accounts.

I was talking about this with Erin Kissane last year, as she and Darius Kazemi conducted research for their report on Fediverse governance. We shared a fear that Large Language Models (LLMs) would lower the cost of sophisticated, automated spam and harassment campaigns against small servers like ours in ways we simply couldn’t defend against.

Teamsters workers at the Airgas plant in Valley View, Ohio, are on strike as of June 25th. After voting 13 to 5 in favor of forming a union a little more than a year ago, the location’s 23 workers still don’t have a contract. Large corporations, like Airgas, are known to stall negotiations with newly formed unions for as long as financially possible. What is surprising is the Valley View location is not negotiating the first contract between Airgas and Teamsters, and another Airgas facility less than ten miles away got their contract months ago. However, another Ohio Airgas location just a few miles from the Valley View plant already negotiated their union contract months ago.

Joe Most says that he was initially skeptical when his coworker approached him about asking the Teamsters to help their small plant unionize. At a previous job, Most was a member of a UAW union, and he was disappointed by the lack of support his plant received. “Because we were only 150 [workers at that location], they [UAW] practically ignored us because we were so small.” Most recalls that when they approached UAW about supporting them during a strike, the union’s leaders declined to do so, claiming that the plant’s small size made it “not worth it.” (Most also notes that his experience with UAW was more than 20 years ago, and suggests that their practices may have changed since then.)

In contrast, the Teamsters have agreed to support the far smaller Valley View Airgas location, despite having a staff less than one sixth the size of Most’s previous job where the union was UAW. Most said he’s been “shocked” by the level of support they’ve received. When the plant was initially fighting for the contract, Juan Campos, the Vice President of the Teamsters, came to the Valley View plant to personally oversee the negotiations. “When they told me the vice president was coming in from Chicago, I thought, ‘I mean, he’s going to ‘big-time’ us, right? There’s no way he’s going to talk to these peons,’ you know?” laughs Most. “But no, he went to each person, shook their hand, asked them, ‘Do you have any questions?’ and gave them his card.”

What’s more, when it became clear during the contract negotiations that the Airgas representatives were refusing to match the Oakwood plant’s contract, it was Campos himself who walked out of negotiations and declared that the tiny plant of 23 workers would strike with the full support of the Teamsters. That is what working class solidarity looks like.

Midway through Benedict Nguyễn’s propulsive trans volleyball novel, Hot Girls with Balls, Six, one of the book’s two heroines, struggles with mounting nerves as she prepares to play an important match. She is less worried about the actual gameplay than she is about the performance of her public persona, which she knows will be screencapped, shared and dissected by fans and haters alike: “For what sports arena was not also a theatre?”

Six and Green are the larger-than-life protagonists of Nguyễn’s dizzying satire. The two are both “very hot” Asian American trans women who play in a fictional men’s global volleyball league; they work tirelessly, not just in their volleyball training sessions, but also to curate and maintain their social media star status. Six and Green, who are also very publicly dating each other, are as canny and self-aware as they are hot—they know that their athletic careers depend just as much on their ability to bring in brand deals by amassing more and more followers, as on their prowess on the volleyball court. Hot Girls with Balls brims with charisma, envy, sabotage and taut, taut muscles. You don’t have to be a sports fan to be utterly compelled by Nguyễn’s vision—and to become just as obsessed with Six and Green as their fictional followers are.

Nguyễn’s knack for recreating the chaotic, hate-it-but-can’t-look-away nature of online discourse makes this, her debut novel, a text in perpetual motion. She is an athlete herself—a dancer and self-professed gym buff—and writes as deftly about the stresses, training regimens and team choreography of competitive sports as she does about the micro-details of being trans in the public eye. Hot Girls with Balls is an expertly structured text, its central narrative arc intercut and propelled by scrolls of livestream and forum comments from Six’s and Green’s supporters and enemies. Reading it is a dizzying experience, as overwhelming as scrolling through a constantly updating online comment section, while straining to follow the various polarized arguments that are being thrown around. Six and Green have taken the sports world by storm, showing volleyball fans that the game “wasn’t just balls but endless unspoken feeling filtering back and forth across the net.” Nguyễn crafts a text that mimics this emotional back-and-forth—the novel darts between the perspectives of our two star players as they train for a major tournament; curate their online personas; publicly manage their romantic relationship; navigate brand deals, media appearances, blatant transphobia, obsessive adulation and the pitfalls of solidarity and visibility discourse.

When I first call Ros Hemmings, I expect her to be surprised. A widow in her 60s living in rural North Wales, she has never received a call from an investigative journalist in London. But instead she tells me: “Oh no, I have a very good idea why you are ringing.” She has been waiting for this call for years.

Hemmings rightly suspected that I wanted to ask her about a woman she knows as Sally Walker. Millions of people around the world know Sally by a different name: Raynor Winn. She is the author and protagonist of one of the most successful British non-fiction books in recent years. The Salt Path traces Raynor and her husband Moth’s 630-mile journey along the sea-swept South West Coast Path.

A heartbreaking “true” story of two people in their early 50s forced out of their rural home in Wales and weighed down by a sudden diagnosis of Moth’s terminal illness, The Salt Path went straight to the top of the bestseller charts, selling more than 2m copies worldwide since its publication in 2018.

Winn has since written two sequels and has a lucrative publishing deal with Penguin to produce at least one more. Five weeks ago The Salt Path reached new audiences when it was released in the UK as a film, starring Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs, and Winn is a co-producer.

Standing proudly on the red carpet outside the Lighthouse Cinema in Newquay, Raynor, 60, told TV cameras at the film’s UK premiere that the experience was “almost unbelievable”. In that moment, she and Moth seemed like the ultimate examples of British grit and perseverance.

Back in Wales, Hemmings saw a very different picture. Because she knew something about Winn that almost everyone – her publishers, her agents, the film producers – had missed. She knew that Raynor Winn wasn’t her real name and that several aspects of her story were untrue. She also believed she was a thief.

With a population of about 3 million people, Toronto is not only the biggest city in Canada, but also the fastest-growing urban centre in North America.

Its downtown core is a hub of activity but venture just a couple of kilometres northeast and you’ll find yourself in the Don Valley Brick Works, a former quarry that over the course of three decades has been transformed into a wetland. Fringed by houses and high rises, the marshlands and the valley that surrounds them are home to ducks, foxes, beavers and even the occasional deer.

The urban oasis is one of several spread across Toronto, which was recently recognized by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) as a model for other cities aiming to restore their natural spaces.

Max will debut Sinners in the U.S. on Friday, July 4, when viewers will be able to watch it two ways: by 1) streaming the exact theatrically released version, and 2) choosing Sinners in Black American Sign Language (BASL). It’s the first time a streaming service has interpreted a film into BASL, Warner Bros. says.

BASL is “a distinct dialect of American Sign Language (ASL) with its own dynamic history and unique grammar, signing space, rhythm, facial expressions and cultural nuances,” reads an announcement released Monday. Max says the release of Sinners in BASL marks “a major step forward in accessibility, representation and visibility in streaming.

“For the first time, the Black Deaf community will have streaming access to a more immersive experience in their language,” the press release continues. The written announcement also encourages Max subscribers who sign in ASL but are unfamiliar with BASL to “follow along with this interpretation.”

Sinners with BASL is interpreted by Nakia Smith, “an influential voice in the Black Deaf community, who delivers a powerful interpretation with cultural depth and linguistic richness that aligns with the film’s themes and historical timeline,” Max said. Smith performs the BASL as directed by Rosa Lee Timm.

[...]there's another story to be told here — and it's older and, if possible, even sadder. Microsoft has simply never been any good at running game studios.

The waste — of time, money, and human potential — is incalculable. And it's a sadly familiar story. In 2006, Microsoft acquired the legendary British developer Lionhead, only to close it ten years later after forcing the studio to chase fads it was ill-suited to, like motion control and live-service games. Rare, acquired for a then-record-breaking $375 million in 2002, has seemed to skirt close to a similar fate several times as it searched for a place within the Xbox family that made sense and played to its strengths. Pirate game Sea of Thieves has kept the developer afloat in recent years, but how much longer can that last?

Microsoft's original sin in this arena was its handling of Bungie. The studio was an inspired early acquisition that almost single-handedly made Xbox's reputation among gamers with its Halo series. But Microsoft responded to this success by stifling Bungie's creativity with a forced march of sequel production that ultimately drove the studio away: It bought itself out in 2007. The Halo brand never recovered from the loss, and the mismanagement of the caretaker studio founded to take it over, 343 Industries (now Halo Studios), was arguably even worse. It was never allowed to develop its own identity, and saddled with tasks — including maintaining its own game engine, and turning Halo into an ill-defined forever game — that were clearly beyond its capabilities.

The truth is that much of Microsoft's decision-making as a publisher seems to come from a place of insecurity. Burned by its experiences with Bungie, Lionhead, and Rare, the company began a partial retreat from first-party development under previous Xbox boss Don Mattrick. When the resulting weakness of its slate of games became all too apparent, Mattrick's successor Phil Spencer began a massive overcorrection, buying studios left, right, and center.

If the goal of the spending spree was to turn Xbox into a first-party powerhouse with system-selling exclusives to rival Nintendo and Sony, Microsoft has failed — or, arguably, overshot the mark. The acquisitions of Bethesda and Activision Blizzard brought it properties like Call of Duty, Warcraft, and The Elder Scrolls that were too big to make exclusive. Combined with a strategic shift away from consoles and toward PC, subscriptions, and cloud gaming, Microsoft has become something quite different: the biggest game publisher the world has ever seen, bigger than any platform. In that context, nurturing vanity projects like Everwild or resuscitating old IP like Perfect Dark simply isn't a priority.