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The 10 best vehicles Ars Technica drove in 2025

car reviews, Cars, Features / Tim Belzer / December 30, 2025

Of all the cars we’ve driven and reviewed this year, these are our picks.

Credit: Collage by Aurich Lawson

2025 has been a tumultuous year for the car world. After years of EV optimism, revanchists are pushing back against things like clean energy and fuel economy. Automakers have responded, postponing or canceling new electric vehicles in favor of gasoline-burning ones. It hasn’t been all bad, though. Despite the changing winds, EV infrastructure continues to be built out and, anecdotally at least, feels far more reliable. We got to witness a pretty epic Formula 1 season right to the wire, in addition to some great sports car and Formula E racing. And we drove a whole bunch of cars, some of which stood out from the pack.

Here are the 10 best things we sat behind the wheel of in 2025.

10th: Lotus Emira V6

A lime green Lotus Emira at a highway lookout — A Lotus Emira doesn’t need to be painted this bright color to remind you that driving can be a pleasure. Credit: Peter Nelson

Let’s be frank: The supposed resurgence of Lotus hasn’t exactly gone to plan. When Geely bought the British Automaker in 2017, many of us hoped that the Chinese company would do for Lotus what it did for Volvo, only in Hethel instead of Gothenburg. Even before tariffs and other protectionist measures undermined the wisdom of building new Lotuses in China, the fact that most of these new cars were big, heavy EVs had already made them a hard sell. But a more traditional Lotus exists and is still built in Norfolk, England: the Lotus Emira.

Its V6 engine is from Toyota, so it should be pretty bulletproof, and there are three pedals and a proper gearstick to change your own gears. Geely’s parts bin means modern infotainment and switchgear—always troublesome for low-volume, resource-challenged car companies—and the electrohydraulic steering bristles with feel. Sure, most people will play it safe and instead go for the Porsche 718 Cayman, but we’re glad the Emira exists.

9th: Volvo V60 Cross Country

A Volvo V60 Cross Country seen head-on, in an alley — The last time I drove a V60 Cross Country, I was wrong about it. Very, very wrong. Credit: Jonathan Gitlin

I got to spend more time than usual with this Volvo station wagon, and the experience made me completely reevaluate my original thoughts on what I now know is a charming and laid-back car. It doesn’t have a huge top speed. It isn’t that fast to 60 mph. It doesn’t make a particularly exciting noise. But a ride designed to cope with unpaved Swedish forest roads pays dividends on poorly maintained American tarmac, and it’s surprisingly agile when it comes to changing direction.

Station wagons are a nearly extinct breed in North America now, particularly if you’re looking for something more normal than hugely powerful, very expensive wagons like the BMW M5 and Audi RS6. That this one is normal and pleasant to live with secures it a place in the top 10.

8th: Volkswagen Golf GTI

A grey Golf GTI in profile

The three-door GTI went the way of the three-pedal GTI, unfortunately. Credit: Jonathan Gitlin

Take an everyday small hatchback, then add better suspension, a more powerful engine, some sticky tires, and a few styling tweaks. The recipe isn’t quite as old as time, but it is almost as old as I am; the first Volkswagen Golf GTI hit the street in 1976. Since then, it’s supplanted the Beetle as the iconic VW, as well as proving that a car can be sporty and have plenty of utility without jacking up the ride height. Now it’s midway through its eighth iteration—and freshly refreshed.

You can’t get a manual Golf GTI anymore; it turns out that only the US wanted one at this point in the 21st century, with take rates dropping to single figures in Europe. But you can get one without VW’s annoying capacitive multifunction steering wheel—the big improvement for this model year was a return to the old button-festooned tiller. It remains a hoot to drive, and you’re less likely to get pulled over in it than in the Golf R.

7th: BMW i4 xDrive40

A white BMW i4 outside a midcentury modern building — BMW EVs always look good in stormtrooper white, helped here by the black M Sport accents. Credit: Jonathan Gitlin

BMW’s styling department may have played things much safer with the i4 than the i3, but the engineers didn’t. To the uninitiated, it looks like any other 4 Series Gran Coupe—BMW-speak for a five-door fastback—but the filled-in kidney grilles give it away: This one is electric.

The xDrive40 is the regular all-wheel drive version, more efficient and less powerful than the M50. It’s not quite as efficient with its electrons as the rear-wheel drive i4, but you’re probably more likely to encounter one, given US predilections for all-wheel drive. The infotainment is one of the better systems on the market, the interior is a pleasant place to spend time, and the rear hatch makes it almost as practical as an SUV without any of the extra inches in height.

6th: Hyundai Ioniq 5

A silver Hyundai Ioniq 5 N parked by the side of a road — You’ll need a very keen eye to spot the design changes for model year 2025. But the other tweaks improve an already great car. Credit: Jonathan Gitlin

This car probably makes the top 10 list every year we drive one. Like the Golf GTI, 2025 saw the Ioniq 5 get its refresh. This included a different charge port—US-made Ioniq 5s now ship with a Tesla-style NACS plug, plus some adapters for using CCS and J1772 chargers. That means many of Tesla’s superchargers are fair game for recharging this Hyundai on the go, though if you stick with the adapter and seek out a 350 kW CCS1 machine, you’ll experience much faster charging. (For context, 35–80 percent in 15 minutes, last time I charged one.)

There’s now an off-roady version called the XRT—similar to the Cross Country treatment given to the Volvo V60 above—which has a certain charm. But its rugged looks—and especially tires—eat away at the range. The standard car remains one of the more efficient EVs you can buy, and one of the best EVs in general, too. And now it has USB-C ports—and, finally, a rear windshield wiper.

5th: Mercedes-Benz CLA

A mercedes-benz CLA with the Golden Gate Bridge in the background. — The new entry-level Mercedes EV is a very competent effort. Credit: Jonathan Gitlin

Mercedes has an all-new EV, and rather than a really expensive car for plutocrats, this one comes in at the entry level. It’s a compact four-door sedan—there’s a trunk at the rear, not a hatch—with a remarkably low drag coefficient, but most of the clever stuff is under the skin. The CLA is the first true software-defined vehicle from Mercedes, meaning its electronics are a clean-sheet design, controlled by four powerful computers rather than more than a hundred discrete black boxes.

There’s Mercedes’ latest OS running everything and a very modern electric powertrain based on the one in the EQXX concept car that gives the CLA 374 miles (602 km) of range from an 85 kWh battery pack. There’s also some new driver-assist stuff that you’ll have to wait until January to learn about. Best of all, both rear-drive and twin-motor CLAs are less than $50,000.

4th: BMW iX3

A silver BMW iX3 outside a building with a giant eye on its wall and a horn coming out the side. — Based on our first drive, the iX3 should have what it takes to be a contender in the luxury electric crossover segment. Credit: BMW

BMW also has an all-new EV with its latest and greatest powertrain technology, and it chose the best-selling compact crossover class to introduce it. Unlike Mercedes, which will make a hybrid version of the CLA, BMW’s Neue Klasse platform is purely electric, and the first vehicle is the iX3.

Instead of chrome, BMW’s traditional face is picked out with light. Rather than an instrument binnacle, there’s a very effective display that appears built into the base of the windshield. It can charge at up to 400 kW and should go at least 400 miles (643 km) on a full battery. Better yet, it’s engaging to drive, the way a BMW should be—even the SUVs. But fans of sedans, take note: The Neue Klasse i3, a true electric 3 Series, will be next. We can’t wait.

3rd: Honda Civic Hybrid

A blue Honda Civic parked in an alley — Very efficient *and* fun to drive? Yay! Credit: Jonathan Gitlin

I had to go back to January 2025 for the first of the podium finishers, with the new Honda Civic Hybrid. The Civic is a good example of the way cars of the same name have gotten larger over the years: the 11th generation is three feet (920 mm) longer than the version sold in the early 1970s, and that’s counting the 1974 car’s huge low-speed impact bumpers.

I wouldn’t want to get in a crash in a 1974 Honda Civic, though. And somehow I doubt it would generate 200 hp (150 kW) while getting 50 mpg (4.7 L/100 km) while meeting modern emission standards. The interior still features plenty of physical controls, and like the Golf, it’s refreshing to drive something low to the ground and relatively lightweight.

2nd: Porsche 911 GTS T-Hybrid

A grey Porsche 911 parked outside a building with an Audi logo and Nurburgring on the side.

Porsche developed a new T-Hybrid system for the 911, and it did a heck of a job. Credit: Jonathan Gitlin

I’ve been lucky enough to drive some rather good 911s this year. In January, I got behind the wheel of the new 992.2 GT3 on the road and on track. This fall, I tested a convertible 911 T. Both are excellent 911s, but my pick has to be the 911 GTS T-Hybrid.

Porsche built an all-new flat-six engine for the T-Hybrid, then applied the same turbocharger hybrid technology we’ve seen in F1 and Porsche’s own Le Mans winner to give this engine a sharper, more immediate throttle response than even the naturally aspirated GT3’s. It responds to throttle pedal inputs as quickly as an EV, but you still get all the things people want from a Porsche 911 with a flat six. There are gears (paddle-shift) to use, and the engine revs freely and sounds good doing so.

While it’s cheaper than the GT3, it’s darned expensive. That’s why it placed the runner-up.

1st: Nissan Leaf

A Nissan Leaf — Turning over a new leaf. Credit: Nissan

Nissan might not be having Lotus-level bad times right now, but the Japanese OEM probably wishes life was smoother. A mooted merger with Honda was called off in February, and the company’s competent electric SUV, the Ariya, isn’t available for import anymore due to tariffs. However, it also brought out the third-generation Leaf this year, and we like what we found.

Smaller on the outside than the old car, it has more room inside thanks to a much more modern design approach. That old Leaf bugbear, the air-cooled battery, is a thing of the past. It looks good, and there’s even a version with steel wheels that gets more than 300 miles (487 km) on a single charge, although we reckon the SV+, a little higher up the trim tree, is the one to go for. At less than $35,000, it’s also one of the cheapest new EVs on sale.

Jonathan is the Automotive Editor at Ars Technica. He has a BSc and PhD in Pharmacology. In 2014 he decided to indulge his lifelong passion for the car by leaving the National Human Genome Research Institute and launching Ars Technica’s automotive coverage. He lives in Washington, DC.

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A quirky guide to myths and lore based in actual science

books, culture, Folklore, geomythology, history, Mythopedia, natural history, Science / Tim Belzer / December 29, 2025

Folklorist/historian Adrienne Mayor on her new book Mythopedia: A Brief Compendium of Natural History Lore

Credit: Princeton University Press

Earthquakes, volcanic eruption, eclipses, meteor showers, and many other natural phenomena have always been part of life on Earth. In ancient cultures that predated science, such events were often memorialized in myths and legends. There is a growing body of research that strives to connect those ancient stories with the real natural events that inspired them. Folklorist and historian Adrienne Mayor has put together a fascinating short compendium of such insights with Mythopedia: A Brief Compendium of Natural History Lore, from dry quicksand and rains of frogs to burning lakes, paleoburrows, and Scandinavian “endless winters.”

Mayor’s work has long straddled multiple disciplines, but one of her specialities is best described as geomythology, a term coined in 1968 by Indiana University geologist Dorothy Vitaliano, who was interested in classical legends about Atlantis and other civilizations that were lost due to natural disasters. Her interest resulted in Vitaliano’s 1973 book Legends of the Earth: Their Geologic Origins.

Mayor herself became interested in the field when she came across Greek and Roman descriptions of fossils, and that interest expanded over the years to incorporate other examples of “folk science” in cultures around the world. Her books include The Poison King: The Life and Legend of Mithradates, Rome’s Deadliest Enemy (2009), as well as Greek Fire, Poison Arrows, & the Scorpion Bombs (2022), exploring the origins of biological and chemical warfare. Her 2018 book, Gods and Robots: Myths, Machines, and Ancient Dreams of Technology, explored ancient myths and folklore about creating automation, artificial life, and AI, connecting them to the robots and other ingenious mechanical devices actually designed and built during that era.

When her editor at Princeton University Press approached her about writing a book on geomythology, she opted for an encyclopedia format, which fit perfectly into an existing Princeton series of little encyclopedias about nature. “In this case, I wasn’t going to be working with just Greek and Roman antiquity,” Mayor told Ars. “I had collected very rich files on geomyths around the world. There are even a few modern geomyths in there. You can dip into whatever you’re interested in and skip the rest. Or maybe later you’ll read the ones that didn’t seem like they would be of interest to you but they’re absolutely fascinating.”

Mythopedia is also a true family affair, in that illustrator Michelle Angel is Mayor’s sister. “She does figures and maps for a lot of scholarly books, including mine,” said Mayor. “She’s very talented at making whimsical illustrations that are also very scientifically accurate. She really added information not only to the essays but to the illustrations for Mythopedia.

As she said, Mayor even includes a few modern geomyths in her compendium, as well as imagining in her preface what kind of geomyths might be told thousands of years from today about the origins of climate change for example, or the connection between earthquakes and fracking. “How will people try to explain the perplexing evidence that they’ll find on the planet Earth and maybe on other planets?” she said. “How will those stories be told?”

Ars caught up with Mayor to learn more.

book opened to a particular page, lying on a moss covered rock — Credit: Princeton University Press

Ars Technica: Tell us a little about the field of geomythology.

Adrienne Mayor: It’s a relatively new field of study but it took off around 2000. Really, it’s a storytelling that has existed since the first humans started talking to one another and investigating their landscape. I think geomyths are attempts to explain perplexing evidence in nature—on the Earth or in the sky. So geomyth is a bit of a misnomer since it can also cover celestial happenings. But people have been trying to explain bizarre things, or unnatural looking things, or inexplicable things in their landscape and their surroundings since they could first speak.

These kind of stories were probably first told around the first fires that human beings made as soon as they had language. So geomyths are attempts to explain, as I say, but they also contain memories that are preserved in oral traditions. These are cultures that are trying to understand earthshaking events like volcanoes or massive floods, tsunamis, earthquakes, avalanches—things that really change the landscape and have an impact on their culture. Geomyths are often expressed in metaphors and poetic, even supernatural language, and that’s why they’ve been ignored for a long time because people thought they were just storytelling or fiction.

But the ones that are about nature, about natural disasters, are based on very keen observations and repeated observations of the landscape. They also can contain details that are recognizable to scientists who study earthquakes or volcanoes. The scientists then realized that there had to be, in some cases, eyewitness accounts of these geomyths. Geomythology is actually enhancing our scientific understanding of the history of Earth over time. It can help people who study climate change figure out how far back certain climate changes have been happening. They can shed light on how and when great geological upheavals actually occurred and how humans responded to them.

Ars Technica: How long can an oral tradition about a natural disaster really persist?

Adrienne Mayor: That was one of the provocative questions. Can it really persist over centuries, thousands of years, millennia? For a long time people thought that oral traditions could not persist for that long. But it turns out that with detailed studies of geomyths that can be related to datable events like volcanoes or earthquakes or tsunamis from geophysical evidence, we now know that the myths can last thousands of years.

For instance, the one that is told by the Klamath Indians about the creation of Crater Lake in Oregon that happened about 7,000 years ago—the details in their myth show that there were eyewitness accounts. Archaeologists have found a particular kind of woven sandal that was used by indigenous peoples 9,000 to 5,000 years ago. They found those sandals both above and below the ash from the volcano that exploded. So we have two ways of dating that. In Australia, people who study the geomyths of the Aborigines can relate their stories to events that happened 20,000 years ago.

Ars Technica: You mentioned that your interest in geomythology grew out of Greek and Roman interpretations of certain fossils that they found.

Adrienne Mayor: That really did trigger it, because it occurred to me that oral traditions and legends—rather than myths about gods and heroes—the ones that are about nature seem to have kernels of truth because it could be reaffirmed and confirmed and supported by evidence that people see over generations. I was in Greece and saw some fossils that had been plowed up by farmers on the island of Samos, thigh-bones from a mastodon or a mammoth or a giant rhinoceros. The museum curator said, “Yes, farmers bring us these all the time.” And I thought, why hasn’t it occurred to anyone that they were doing this in antiquity as well?

I read through about 30 different Greek and Roman authors from the time of Homer up through Augustine, and found more than a hundred incidents of finding remarkable bones of strange shape, gigantic bones that were inexplicable. How did they try to explain them? That’s really what got me going. These stories had all been dismissed as travelers’ tales or superstition. But I talked with paleontologists and found that if I superimposed a map of all the Greek and Roman finds of remarkable remains of giants or monsters, it actually matched the paleontological map of deposits of megafauna—not dinosaurs, but megafauna like mastodons and mammoths.

Also, I grew up in South Dakota where there were a lot of fossils, so I had always wondered what Native Americans had thought about dinosaur fossils. It turns out no one had asked them either. So my second book was Fossil Legends of the First Americans. In that case, I knew the geography of all the deposits of dinosaur fossils. I just had to drive about 6,000 miles around to reservations, talking to storytellers and elders and ordinary people to try and excavate the folklore. So I sometimes would read a scientific report in the media and think, “here’s got to be oral traditions about this,” and then I find them. And sometimes I find the myth and seek the historical or scientific kernels embedded in it.

Ars Technica: What were your criteria for narrowing your list down to just 53 myths?

Adrienne Mayor: I had to do something for every letter; that was a challenge. A few other authors in the series actually skipped the hard letters. I started out with the hard letters like Q, W, X, Z, Y. My husband says I almost got mugged by the letter Q because I got so obsessed with quicksand. I started talking about writing a book about quicksand because I was so obsessed with sand. There are singing sand dunes.

Ars Technica: There’s been a lot of research on the physics of singing sand dunes.

Adrienne Mayor: Yes. Isn’t that amazing? There are even some humorous stories. One of my favorites is that Muslim pilgrims in the medieval period would travel to special singing sand dunes between Afghanistan and Iran. When pilgrims would feel the need to relieve themselves, they would try to find some privacy, yet urinating and defecating on the sand dune caused a very loud drum roll sound.

Ars Technica: Your work necessarily spans multiple disciplines in both the sciences and the humanities. Has that been a challenge?

Adrienne Mayor: I’ve built my career since my first book in 2000 on trying to write not only to other disciplines, but to ordinary educated readers. Some people think it feels like walking a tight rope, but not to me because I don’t have a canonical academic career. I’m an autodidact, I’m not really an academic. So I have absolutely no problem trespassing in all kinds of disciplines. And I depend on the generosity of all these experts.

Some are from the classics and humanities, but an awful lot of them are from scientific disciplines. I think there’s a big tendency to want to collaborate. It’s just that in academia it’s been difficult because people are siloed. So I feel like I have worked as a bridge between the two. Scientists seem very excited to find out that there are epic poems discussing exactly what they’re studying. Paleontologists were thrilled to discover that people were noticing fossils more than 2000 years ago. So the impulse and the desire to collaborate is there.

Jennifer is a senior writer at Ars Technica with a particular focus on where science meets culture, covering everything from physics and related interdisciplinary topics to her favorite films and TV series. Jennifer lives in Baltimore with her spouse, physicist Sean M. Carroll, and their two cats, Ariel and Caliban.

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GPS is vulnerable to jamming—here’s how we might fix it

Biz & IT, GPS, interference, jamming, satellites / Tim Belzer / December 29, 2025

GPS jamming has gotten cheap and easy, but there are potential solutions.

In September 2025, a Widerøe Airlines flight was trying to land in Vardø, Norway, which sits in the country’s far eastern arm, some 40 miles from the Russian coast. The cloud deck was low, and so was visibility. In such gray situations, pilots use GPS technology to help them land on a runway and not the side of a mountain.

But on this day, GPS systems weren’t working correctly, the airwaves jammed with signals that prevented airplanes from accessing navigation information. The Widerøe flight had taken off during one of Russia’s frequent wargames, in which the country’s military simulates conflict as a preparation exercise. This one involved an imaginary war with a country. It was nicknamed Zapad-2025—translating to “West-2025”—and was happening just across the fjord from Vardø. According to European officials, GPS interference was frequent in the runup to the exercise. Russian forces, they suspected, were using GPS-signal-smashing technology, a tactic used in non-pretend conflict, too. (Russia has denied some allegations of GPS interference in the past.)

Without that guidance from space, and with the cloudy weather, the Widerøe plane had to abort its landing and continue down the coast away from Russia, to Båtsfjord, a fishing village.

The part of Norway in which this interruption occurred is called Finnmark. GPS disruption there is near-constant; problems linked to Russian interference have increased since the invasion of Ukraine.

Military and Pokemon players?

It’s one of the starkest geographic examples of how vulnerable GPS technology is. But such disturbances happen at a lower level all over the globe. The world’s militaries (including that of the United States) are big culprits, breaking out devices that can confuse or disrupt drones, missiles, and aircraft. But the equipment required to interfere with GPS at a less-than-military level is cheap and accessible and affects other aspects of life: Truck drivers, for instance, use it to look like they’ve delivered cargo on time. Players use it to fool augmented-reality games.

Given all this disruption, more U.S. institutions, from the Department of Defense to the Department of Transportation to the Federal Aviation Administration, are making moves toward alternatives and complements for GPS, though perhaps imperfectly. And the existing system has been undergoing a huge modernization program, introducing better-encrypted signals for military users, more varieties of signals for civilians, and higher-power signals for both to the tune of at least $22 billion. The military’s 2025 budget additionally requested $1.5 billion for more resilient “position, navigation, and timing” programs. Other departments have invested smaller amounts. In October 2025, for instance, the Department of Transportation awarded $5 million total to five companies to develop and demonstrate technologies complementary to GPS.

The update’s goals are to make the system more accurate, and harder to mess with. But as threats increase in frequency and sophistication, more work is necessary. “Sooner or later, we’re gonna see bad things happening here,” said John Langer, a GPS expert at the Aerospace Corporation, a nonprofit research organization. “So we need to armor up for it before it happens.”

GPS is the invisible spine of society, in more ways than most people realize. It became central quickly after the satellite system, built in the 1970s for the military, was optimized for civilians. “Part of what makes GPS so successful is that it’s ubiquitous and it’s inexpensive,” said Langer.

Losing GPS would mean losing a lot more than Google Maps. The technology is integrated into everything from lights that turn on at sunset to dating apps that match users nearby. Its signals also undergird the electrical grid, cell networks, banking, defense technology, and the movements of robots used in industries like agriculture.

The U.S. government currently has 31 GPS satellites in orbit around Earth, and three other governments have their own systems: Russia made one called GLONASS, China created BeiDou, and the European Union built Galileo; all four systems’ data is available to the international community.

Finding your place

GPS works in a deceptively simple way: Each satellite carries an atomic clock aboard. It broadcasts that clock’s time toward Earth. That signal alone is what’s useful to energy infrastructure and financial transactions. But to get position information, a receiver—in a phone or other device—simply has to pick up signals from at least four satellites. It knows what time those signals were sent, where the satellites were when they sent them, and how long it took the signals to arrive. Through fancy triangulation, the phone (or guided missile) then computes its own location.

Or at least that’s the idea. GPS can be jammed, meaning that someone broadcasts a signal much stronger than that of GPS (which has had to travel across thousands of miles of space, and grows weaker with every meter), drowning the real signal in noise. It can also be spoofed, meaning someone sends out a fake signal that looks just like a GPS blip but indicates an incorrect location or time.

Image of the globe centered on the Caribbean. Three satellites are superimposed on it, each of them with a colored circle around it. A pin highlights the point where the three circles intersect. — Three satellites are needed to pinpoint a location on Earth. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Threats like these were always a possibility—and those who built GPS knew about that problem from the beginning, said Todd Walter, director of the Stanford GPS Lab. “Around 2000 is when people got a little more serious about it,” he said. Hardware and software became cheaper, lowering the barrier to swamping or faking signals.

Problems ticked up when the augmented reality game Pokémon GO came online, in 2016. The game required people to travel to places in real life to win. Turns out, not all of them actually wanted to. “All of a sudden, everyone was interested in spoofing,” said Walter.

Pokémon GO cheaters used low-power devices close to the ground, and so didn’t affect cruising aircraft like Widerøe’s. The game made cheating high-tech and furthered methods and technology for signal scrambling, making it available to non-experts, Walter said. At the same time, spoofing arose in conflict zones, where drone and missile attacks are often guided by GPS. Don’t want to get hit by one? Fool its navigation system. “So now people say, ‘Well, we need to protect ourselves from that,’” said Walter. “And so then you see a huge increase in very powerful jamming and spoofing.”

In Norway, officials have noted that GPS disruptions, while most commonly affecting flights thousands of feet in the air, can also cause issues for police cars, ambulances, and ships. According to Espen Slette, director of the spectrum department at the Norwegian Communications Authority (known as Nkom), the agency has detected GPS jammers near hospitals, which could force life-saving helicopters to redirect to a more distant facility. Nkom has also clocked disruptions that affect agriculture and construction operations, while emergency responders have warned about how problems might home in on emergency beacon devices, like the satellite SOS buttons many people carry in the backcountry or aboard boats. The police’s chief of staff in Finnmark encouraged anyone venturing out to, old-school, carry a map and compass.

“It’s hard to grasp the full effect this has on society,” Slette wrote in an email.

Such widespread disruptions are not isolated to the Russia-adjacent Arctic. There are hotspots in Myanmar, most likely associated with drone warfare in the area; on the Black Sea, publicly associated with Russia, which has denied some cases of GPS interference; and in southern Texas, potentially from drug cartels near the border. A report from OpsGroup, a membership organization for international aviation personnel, found a marked increase in spoofing in 2024. “By January 2024, an average of 300 flights a day were being spoofed,” the report said. “By August 2024, this had grown to around 1500 flights per day.” From July 15 to Aug. 15, 2024, 41,000 flights total experienced spoofing. (While in the U.S., it’s generally illegal for civilians to jam or spoof signals, military-led disruptions during conflict are considered a legitimate and legal use-case.)

No going back

The uptick indicates that there’s no going back to a world without disruption hotspots. And that, combined with humans’ dependence on GPS, is why scientists and engineers are working on ways to shore up the system—and develop backchannels so a single-point failure doesn’t come to bite anyone, in conflict or in peacetime.

“There are many ways to mitigate GPS disruptions,” Slette wrote in an email. He suggests setting up devices to use signals from all four international constellations, and to install better receivers and antennas. That’s easier for militaries or infrastructure companies, and hard for people who are just buying the latest model of cell phone and have no control over its innards. But existing backups can tell a given device that something fishy may be up. Planes have inertial navigation systems, which mostly use motion-sensing devices to get an independent measurement; phones do too, and they can also check their data against cell towers, to see if something is off in their GPS signal.

But the U.S. government is worried enough about GPS issues that, across civilian and military agencies, research and development for more robust and resilient systems is ramping up. In March, for instance, the Federal Communications Commission launched a proceeding on GPS alternatives, exploring tools that could be used in addition to or instead of traditional GPS.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, and the Defense Innovation Unit, meanwhile, are investigating how quantum sensors might help with position, timing, and navigation. The United States’ military branches are also working on their alternative position, navigation, and timing capabilities, and their innovation arms like the Space Force’s SpaceWerx organization are running challenges to support alternative technologies. The Department of Defense acknowledges challenges to GPS and the consequent need to diversify the ways it gets position, navigation, and timing information, noting that it is pursuing the integration of alternative capabilities, according to a statement that public affairs officer Chelsea Dietlin requested be attributed to a Pentagon spokesperson. It is also looking toward working with commercial companies.

Even the Department of Transportation has a strategic plan that includes promoting technologies complementary to GPS. (Undark reached out multiple times to the Department of Transportation to request comment but did not receive a response.) A statement that FAA media relations specialist Cassandra Nolan requested be attributed to an agency spokesperson noted that the FAA is working on a system to detect GPS interference, and that it is working with the Department of Defense on navigation signals and antennas that are more resilient. In addition, the statement noted, the FAA already has “a layered aircraft tracking system that incorporates multiple technologies to guard against threats to Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS).”

But the newer efforts across government may not be as connected as they could be, according to Dana Goward, president of the Resilient Navigation and Timing Foundation, a nonprofit advocacy group that largely comprises companies working in the GPS-problem space. For one, he said, efforts to bolster military and civilian systems have a fairly strict line between them. And neither has been as effective as he’d advocate: On the military side, plentiful programs exist, but they may not be working together. “It’s not clear if there is any coordination or synergies between the projects or how much senior leader support there is for comprehensive solution sets,” Goward wrote in an email.

On the civil side, Congress mandated in 2018 that a backup to GPS be established, but only experimental systems exist so far. There also have been efforts to repeal the law, with the disputed rationale that funding a single system isn’t feasible and there are better paths toward resilience. Goward contended that the government has hoped the private sector will come up with a usable solution, saving the government from creating one itself.

Starting over

And companies are coming to cash in on that desire, offering their solutions to both government agencies and other industries. “Our founding hypothesis was ‘let’s take 50 years of lessons learned but throw out the rulebook and do a clean-sheet design of a new GPS system incorporating a couple of fundamentals,’” said Patrick Shannon, CEO of one such company, called TrustPoint. The company, which has hired scientific and engineering experts in signal processing and space, aims to have a fleet of small satellites orbiting much closer to Earth than the current GPS constellation, and transmitting at a higher frequency.

TrustPoint’s satellites, a few of which have already gone to orbit, also send out an encrypted signal—something harder to spoof. With traditional GPS, only the military gets encrypted signals.

Many Russian jamming systems, he said, work tens of kilometers from their ground zero (their ground zero usually being a truck with a generator aboard). But with TrustPoint’s higher-frequency signals, the effectiveness of the jammer goes down by three times, and the circle of influence becomes 10 times smaller, shrinking even more if the receivers use a special kind of antenna that the U.S. government recently approved.

Messing with signals becomes less feasible, given those changes. “They would need exorbitant numbers of systems, exorbitant numbers of people, and a ton of cash to pull that off,” said Shannon.

So far, TrustPoint has launched three spacecraft, and has gotten five federal contracts in 2024 and 2025, totaling around $8.3 million, with organizations like the Air Force, Space Force, and the Navy.

Another company, called Xona Space Systems, is also putting satellites in low-Earth orbit, and has worked with both the Canadian and U.S. governments. The company plans to broadcast signals 100 times stronger than GPS, giving users two-centimeter precision, and making jamming more difficult. The signal also includes a watermark—a kind of authentication that, at least for now, protects against spoofing. They have launched one satellite that’s being tested by people in industries like agriculture, construction, and mining.

TrustPoint’s technology may offer novel defense against the dark GPS arts, but Xona, whose founders met while students at the Stanford GPS Lab, may have an edge anyway: Its signals are compatible with current infrastructure, so no one has to buy a new device. They just have to update their software. “We are not building receivers ourselves,” said Max Eunice, head of marketing and communications. Instead, they’re relying on the billions of earthly devices that already themselves rely on GPS.

Image of the inside of the cabin of a large farming machine moving through a field of wheat. Screens track its current location and where it has been. — Reliable GPS has become essential for a huge range of industries. Credit: Thomas Barwick

Other solutions, like one called SuperGPS, stay closer to the ground. They use radio transmitters on Earth to do the same things GPS satellites do in space. The setup, as demonstrated by scientists at the Delft University of Technology and VU University in the Netherlands, involves scattering radio transmitters around an area or using those already in place. Each transmitter is synchronized to an atomic clock, which sends the time to transmitters via fiber optic cable, which may already be in a place due to existing communications infrastructure. Receivers can collect signals scattered across a wide range of radio frequencies, making it more difficult to jam or spoof them. The team published a proof of concept in a 2022 Nature paper and is working on a second iteration called SuperGPS2.

Tom Powell, another GPS expert at the Aerospace Corporation, said that looking at alternatives and augmentations like these is important—even though GPS recently underwent the 25-year modernization effort, making its own signals more robust to vulnerabilities. “Now that we have delivered, or nearly completely delivered, this modernization, is there a better way to do it in face of the current realities?” he said. He and other GPS experts don’t have answers yet. “We’re just asking questions right now.”

Walter, the director of the Stanford GPS Lab, thinks that whatever a better path looks like, it will likely still include the old-school, original system. “There’s nothing that really does replace GPS,” he said. “I see articles saying ‘post-GPS World’ and so forth. But really, GPS, I think, will always be there.”

People will, and should, strengthen it, Walter added, but that bolstering is going to be piecemeal—efforts may work in a particular region, or they cover some of GPS’s roles (such as providing accurate time) but not others, or they may back up navigation but not be as accurate. They may also cost money. “GPS is free, so that makes it almost impossible to compete with,” he said.

GPS is also straightforward, said Powell. “As satellites go, they’re pretty simple,” he said. They point at Earth, and they transmit signals that tell what time it is. From that, humans get to live in an interconnected, chronologically propriocepted world. Figuring out how to keep it that way, though, is proving a little more complicated.

This article was originally published on Undark. Read the original article.

GPS is vulnerable to jamming—here’s how we might fix it Read More »

TV Technica: Our favorite shows of 2025

best of 2025, culture, Entertainment, Features, Staff source, television / Tim Belzer / December 24, 2025

Netflix and Apple TV dominate this year’s list with thrillers, fantasy, sci-fi, and murder.

Credit: Collage by Aurich Lawson

Editor’s note: Warning: Although we’ve done our best to avoid spoiling anything major, please note this list does include a few specific references to several of the listed shows that some might consider spoiler-y.

This was a pretty good year for television, with established favorites sharing space on our list with some intriguing new shows. Streaming platforms reigned supreme, with Netflix and Apple TV dominating our list with seven and five selections each. Genre-wise, we’ve got a bit of everything: period dramas (The Gilded Age, Outrageous), superheroes (Daredevil: Born Again), mysteries (Ludwig, Poker Face, Dept. Q), political thrillers (The Diplomats, Slow Horses), science fiction (Andor, Severance, Alien: Earth), broody fantasy (The Sandman), and even an unconventional nature documentary (Underdogs).

As always, we’re opting for an unranked list, with the exception of our “year’s best” selection at the very end, so you might look over the variety of genres and options and possibly add surprises to your eventual watchlist. We invite you to head to the comments and add your own favorite TV shows released in 2025.

Underdogs (National Geographic/Disney+)

a honey badger investigates a logg in South Africa — Credit: National Geographic/Doug Parker

Most of us have seen a nature documentary or two (or three) at some point in our lives, so it’s a familiar format: sweeping, majestic footage of impressively regal animals accompanied by reverently high-toned narration (preferably with a tony British accent). Underdogs takes a decidedly different approach. Narrated with hilarious irreverence by Ryan Reynolds, the five-part series highlights nature’s less cool and majestic creatures—the outcasts and benchwarmers more noteworthy for their “unconventional hygiene choices” and “unsavory courtship rituals.” (It’s rated PG-13 due to the odd bit of scatalogical humor and shots of Nature Sexy Time.)

Each of the five episodes is built around a specific genre. “Superheroes” highlights the surprising superpowers of the honey badger, pistol shrimp, and the invisible glass frog, among others, augmented with comic book graphics; “Sexy Beasts” focuses on bizarre mating habits and follows the format of a romantic advice column; “Terrible Parents” highlights nature’s worst practices, following the outline of a parenting guide; “Total Grossout” is exactly what it sounds like; and “The Unusual Suspects” is a heist tale, documenting the supposed efforts of a macaque to put together the ultimate team of masters of deception and disguise (an inside man, a decoy, a fall guy, etc.). Green Day even wrote and recorded a special theme song for the opening credits.

While Reynolds mostly followed the script (which his team helped write), there was also a fair amount of improvisation—not all of it PG-13. The producers couldn’t use the racier ad-libs. But some made it into the final episodes, like Reynolds describing an aye-aye as “if fear and panic had a baby and rolled it in dog hair.” We also meet the velvet worm, which creeps up on unsuspecting prey before squirting disgusting slime all over their food, and the pearl fish, which hides from predators in a sea cucumber’s butt, among other lowly yet fascinating critters. Verdict: Underdogs is positively addictive. It’s my favorite nature documentary ever.

—Jennifer Ouellette

Dept. Q (Netflix)

group of people I'm an underground office sanding around a desk — Credit: Netflix

Dep. Q is a rare show that commits to old tropes—an unlikable but smart central character revisits cold cases—and somehow manages to repackage them in a way that feels distinctive. To get a sense of the show, you only have to describe its precise genre. You might call it a murder mystery, and there are murders in it, but one of the mysteries is whether a key player is alive or not, given that a lot of her story takes place in flashbacks with an uncertain relationship to the present. It’s almost a police procedural, except that many of the police are only following procedures grudgingly and erratically. It’s not really a whodunnit, given that you only end up learning who done some of it by the time the first season wraps up. And so on.

Amid all the genre fluidity, the show does a great job of balancing the key challenge of a mystery program: telling you enough that you can make reasonably informed guesses on at least some of what’s going on without giving the whole game away and making it easy to figure out all the details. And the acting is superb. Matthew Goode does a nice job of handling the central character’s recent trauma while helping you understand why he has a few loyal co-workers despite the fact that he was probably unlikable even before he was traumatized. And Alexej Manvelov (who I’d never seen before) is fantastic as a former Syrian policeman who drops occasional hints that he had been an active participant in that country’s police state.

There are definitely quibbles. The creation of a cold case squad happens on the flimsiest of motivations, and the fantastic Kelly Macdonald is badly underused. But the show is definitely good enough that I’m curious about some additional mysteries: Can the team behind it continue to avoid getting bogged down in the tropes in season two, and which of the many threads it left unresolved will be picked up when they try?

—John Timmer

Daredevil: Born Again (Disney+)

Matt Murdock and Wilson Fisk sitting across from each other in a diner — Credit: Marvel/Disney+

Enthusiasm was understandably high for Daredevil: Born Again, Marvel’s revival of the hugely popular series in the Netflix Defenders universe. Not only was Charlie Cox returning to the title role as Matt Murdock/Daredevil, but Vincent D’Onofrio was also coming back as his nemesis, crime lord Wilson Fisk/Kingpin. Their dynamic has always been electric, and that on-screen magic is as powerful as ever in Born Again, which quickly earned critical raves and a second season.

Granted, there were some rough spots. The entire season was overhauled during the 2023 Hollywood strikes, and at times it felt like two very different shows. A weird serial killer subplot was primarily just distracting. There was also the controversial decision to kill off a major character from the original Netflix series in the first episode. But that creative choice cleared the decks to place the focus squarely on Matt’s and Fisk’s parallel arcs, and the two central actors do not disappoint.

Matt decides to focus on his legal work while Fisk is elected mayor of New York City, intent on leaving his criminal life behind. But each struggles to remain in the light as the dark sides of their respective natures fight to be released. The result is an entertaining, character-driven series that feels very much a part of its predecessor while still having its own distinctive feel.

—Jennifer Ouellette

Boots (Netflix)

army boot camp recruits running as part of their training in yellow t shirts and red shorts — Credit: Netflix

I confess I might have missed Boots had it not been singled out and dismissed as “woke garbage” by the Pentagon—thereby doubling the show’s viewership. I was pleased to discover that it’s actually a moving, often thought-provoking dramedy that humanizes all the young men from many different backgrounds who volunteer to serve their country in the US military. The show is based on a memoir (The Pink Marine) by Greg Cope White about his experiences as a gay teen in the military in the 1980s when gay and bisexual people weren’t allowed to serve. Boots is set in the early 1990s just before the onset of the “Don’t ask, don’t tell” era.

Miles Heizer stars as Cameron Cope (Cope White’s fictional alter ego), a closeted gay teen in Louisiana who signs up as a recruit for the US Marine Corps with his best (straight) friend Ray (Liam Oh). He’s not the most promising recruit, but over the course of eight episodes, we see him struggle, fail, pick himself back up, and try again during the grueling boot camp experience, forming strong bonds with his fellow recruits but all the while terrified of being outed and kicked out.

Heizer gives a powerful performance as Cameron, enhanced by the contrast with Max Parker’s stellar portrayal of the tightly wound Sergeant Liam Robert Sullivan—a decorated Marine inexplicably reassigned to train recruits while harboring his own secrets. Nor is Miles’ story the only focus: We learn more about several characters and their private struggles, and those inter-relationships are the heart and soul of the show. Netflix canceled the series, but this one season stands tall on its own.

—Jennifer Ouellette

Only Murders in the Building S5 (Hulu)

young woman and two older men posing against backdrop of iconic NYC buildings — Credit: Hulu

This charming Emmy-nominated comedy series has made our “Best of TV” list every season, and 2025 is no exception. Only Murders in the Building (OMITB) stars Steve Martin, Martin Short, and Selena Gomez as Charles, Oliver, and Mabel, all residents of the same Manhattan apartment complex, the Arconia. The unlikely trio teams up to launch their own true crime podcast whenever someone dies in the building under suspicious circumstances, chronicling their independent investigation to solve the murder. There’s no shortage of podcast fodder, as this single building has a shockingly high murder rate.

S5 focused on the death of the building’s doorman, Lester (Teddy Coluca), found floating in the Arcadia’s fountain in the season finale. The discovery of a severed finger leads our team to conclude that Lester was murdered. Their quest involves a trio of billionaires, the mayor (Keegan-Michael Key), a missing mafioso (Bobby Cannavale) and his widow (Tea Leoni), and maybe even the building’s new robotic assistant, LESTR (voiced by Paul Rudd). As always, the season finale sets up next season’s murder: that of rival podcaster Cinda Canning (Tina Fey), who lives just long enough to reach the Arcadia’s gates and place one hand into the courtyard—technically dying “in the building.” One assumes that OMITB will eventually run out of fresh takes on its clever concept, but it certainly hasn’t done so yet.

—Jennifer Ouellette

The Sandman S2 (Netflix)

Morpheus holds the key to Hell. — Credit: Netflix

I unequivocally loved the first season of The Sandman, the Netflix adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s influential graphic novel series (of which I am a longtime fan). I thought it captured the surreal, dream-like feel and tone of its source material, striking a perfect balance between the anthology approach of the graphic novels and grounding the narrative by focusing on the arc of its central figure: Morpheus, lord of the Dreaming. It was a long wait for the second and final season, but S2 retains all those elements to bring Dream’s story to its inevitably tragic yet satisfying end.

As always, the casting is extraordinary and the performances are note-perfect across the board. And Netflix did not skimp on the visuals, which bring the graphic novel imagery to vivid life. I still appreciate how the leisurely pacing lets the viewer relax and sink into this richly layered fictional world. Part I kicked off with an Endless family reunion that led Dream into revisiting Hell and agreeing to his sister Delirium’s request to look for their absent brother, Destruction. That sets in motion a chain of events that leads to the tragedy that unfolds in Part II. The bonus episode, in which Death gets one day (every hundred years) to be human—an adaptation of the standalone Death: The High Cost of Living—serves as a lovely coda to this unique series, which is pretty much everything I could have wanted in an adaptation.

—Jennifer Ouellette

Ludwig (BBC)

middle aged man in dress shirt and short sleeved sweater meticulously working on a puzzle on an easel — Credit: BBC

Ludwig is a clever twist on the British cozy mystery genre. David Mitchell stars as John Taylor, a reclusive eccentric who creates puzzles for a living under the pseudonym “Ludwig.” When his identical twin brother, Cambridge DCI James Taylor (also Mitchell), goes missing, his sister-in-law Lucy (Anna Maxwell Martin) convinces John to go undercover. John reluctantly pretends to be James to gain access to the police department in hopes of finding out what happened to his twin. He inevitably gets drawn into working on cases—and turns out to be exceptionally good at applying his puzzle skills to solve murders, even as his anxiety grows about his subterfuge being discovered.

The best crime shows deftly balance cases-of-the-week with longer character-driven story arcs, and Ludwig achieves that balance beautifully. The writers brought in a puzzle consultant to create the various crosswords that appear in the series, as well as a special cryptic crossword done in character as Ludwig that appeared in The Guardian. The first season ended with a bit of a cliffhanger about what’s really been going on with James, but fortunately, the BBC has renewed Ludwig for a second season, so we’ll get to see more of our cryptic crime-solver.

—Jennifer Ouellette

Poker Face S2 (Peacock)

red haired woman in thigh boots and leather jacket standing in front of a classic blue sports car — Credit: Peacock

Poker Face is perfect comfort TV, evolving the case-of-the-week format that made enduring early TV hits like Columbo and Murder, She Wrote iconic. The second season takes the endlessly likeable BS-detector Charlie Cale (Natasha Lyonne) to the end of the road after she overcomes fleeing the mob in her 1969 Plymouth Barracuda. Along the way, Charlie pals around with A-list guest stars and solves crimes, winding her way from Florida to New York as each delightful new caper serves not to ramp up tension but to disrupt how viewers anticipate Charlie will move. Some might think that the lack of tension made the season weaker. But creator Rian Johnson recently revealed that he expects Poker Face to cast a new lead detective every two years. That makes it seem clear that Charlie’s second season was more about release.

In the most memorable episode of the season, “Sloppy Joseph,” the front row of an elementary school talent show suddenly becomes a bloody splash zone when a bullied boy is framed for killing the class pet, a gerbil, with a giant mallet. That scene is perhaps an apt metaphor for Johnson’s attempt to keep modern-day viewers from turning away from their TVs by shattering expectations. It’s unclear yet if his formulaic TV hijinks will work, but if anyone decides to pick up Poker Face after Peacock declined to renew it, Peter Dinklage is next in line to become the world’s greatest lie detector.

—Ashley Belanger

The Gilded Age S3 (HBO)

young woman with her parents in evening dress standing in an opera box — Credit: HBO

I was a latecomer to this eminently watchable show created by Julian Fellowes (Gosford Park), who also gave us the Emmy-winning sensation Downton Abbey. Instead of following the adventures of post-Edwardian British aristocracy and their domestic servants, the focus is on ultra-wealthy Americans and their domestic servants in the 1880s and the social tensions that arise from the “old money” versus “new money” dynamic of this rapidly changing period. The Gilded Age has been described as an “operatic soap” (rather than a soap opera), replete with a hugely talented ensemble cast donning lavish costumes and cavorting in extravagantly opulent settings. It’s unadulterated, addictive escapism, and the series really hit its stride in S3.

Old Money is represented by Agnes van Rhijn (Christine Baranski), a wealthy widow who lives with her spinster sister Ada (Cynthia Nixon); orphaned niece Marian (Louisa Jacobson); and son and heir Oscar (Blake Ritson), a closeted gay man seeking to marry a rich heiress. Living just across the street is New Money, personified by robber baron/railroad tycoon George Russell (Morgan Spector) and his socially ambitious wife Bertha (Carrie Coon) and their two children. You’ve got Marian’s friend Peggy (Denee Benton) representing the emerging Black upper class and a colorful assortment of domestics in both houses, like aspiring inventor Jack (Ben Ahlers), who dreams of greater things.

Fictionalized versions of notable historical people occasionally appear, and two figure prominently: Caroline Astor (Donna Murphy), who ruled New York society at the time, and her simpering sycophant Ward McAllister (Nathan Lane). (The Russells are loosely inspired by William and Ava Vanderbilt.) The stakes might sometimes seem small—there’s a multi-episode arc devoted to which of two competing opera houses New York’s social elite will choose to sponsor—but for the characters, they are huge, and Fellowes makes the audience feel equally invested in the outcomes. There were a few rough edges in the first season, but The Gilded Age quickly found its footing; it has gotten better and more richly textured with each successive season and never takes itself too seriously.

—Jennifer Ouellette

Outrageous (Britbox)

Aristocratic Family photo circa 1930s with everyone lined up along the grand staircase — Credit: Britbox

The Mitford sisters were born to be immortalized one day in a British period drama, and Outrageous is happy to oblige. There were six of them (and one brother), and their scandalous exploits frequently made global headlines in the 1930s. This is ultimately a fictionalized account of how the rise of Hitler and British fascism fractured this once tight-knit aristocratic family. The focus is on smaller, domestic drama—budding romances, failed marriages, literary aspirations, and dwindling fortunes—colored by the ominous global events unfolding on a larger scale.

Nancy (Bessie Carter) is the primary figure, an aspiring novelist with a cheating husband who feels increasingly alienated from her older sister and bestie Diana (Joanna Vanderham). Diana married a baron but becomes enamored of Oswald Mosley (Joshua Sasse), leader of the British fascist party, embarking on a torrid affair. Another sister, Unity (Shannon Watson), is also seduced by Nazi ideology and has a major crush on Hitler. Meanwhile, Jessica (Zoe Brough) is drawn to the Communist cause, which rankles both her siblings and her traditionally conservative parents.

Things come to a head when Unity goes to study in Germany and becomes completely radicalized, even publishing a vicious anti-semitic screed that shames the family. Diana also goes all-in on fascism when she leaves her husband for Mosley, whom Nancy loathes. Jessica elopes with her Communist cousin to Spain to be on the front lines of that civil war, leading to a lifelong estrangement from Diana. Nancy, the political moderate, is caught in the middle, torn between her love for her sisters and her increasing discomfort with Diana and Unity’s extreme political views.

The Mitford sisters were prolific letter writers all their lives, so there was plenty of material for screenwriter Sarah Williams to draw on when fictionalizing their stories at such a pivotal point in the family’s (and the world’s) history. Outrageous is quite historically accurate in broad outlines, and there are plenty of moments of wry, understated humor amid the family tensions. The gifted cast makes the sisters come alive in all their flawed humanity. There’s no word yet on a second season, and this one ends on a suitable note, but there’s so much more story left to tell, so I hope Outrageous returns.

—Jennifer Ouellette

A Man on the Inside S2 (Netflix)

White haired older man in a nice blue suit and tie standing in front of a blackboard filled with equations in a college classroom — Credit: Netflix

I’ll admit I wasn’t sure how well A Man on the Inside would fare with its sophomore season after knocking it out of the park in S1. I should have known showrunner Mike Schur (The Good Place) could pull it off. Ted Danson plays Charles Nieuwendyk, a recently widowed retired engineering professor. In S1, he was hired by private detective Julie Kovalenko (Lilah Richcreek Estrada) to go undercover at a San Francisco retirement community to solve the mystery of a stolen ruby necklace. In S2, Charles returns to his academic roots and goes undercover at fictional Wheeler College to solve the mystery of a stolen laptop—a crime that just might have implications for the survival of the college itself.

Charles even falls in love for the first time since his wife’s death with music professor Mona Margadoff (Mary Steenburgen, Danson’s wife IRL), despite the two being polar opposites. The show continues to be a welcome mix of funny, sweet, sour, and touching, while never lapsing into schmaltz. The central Thanksgiving episode—where Mona meets Charles’s family and friends for the first time—is a prime example, as various tensions simmering below the surface erupt over the dinner table. Somehow, everyone manages to make their respective peace in entirely believable ways. It’s lovely to see a series grapple so openly, with so much warmth and humor, with the loneliness of aging and grief and how it can affect extended family. And the show once again drives home the message that new beginnings are always possible, even when one thinks one’s life is over.

—Jennifer Ouellette

Andor S2 (Disney+)

Star Wars rebel Cassian in the cockpit of a spacecraft — Credit: Lucasfilm/Disney+

When real-life political administrations refer to officials as Darth Vader in unironically flattering terms, maybe George Lucas made the Dark Lord of the Sith a little too iconic. Showrunner Tony Gilroy made no such effort in his depiction of the fascists in Andor.

During Andor‘s run, which ended this year with S2, the Empire is full of sad corporate ladder climbers who are willing to stab another in the back to get to the next rung of the Imperial hierarchy. The show makes it clear that these are not people to emulate. If more fans watched the show, maybe that message could have landed for them.

For people who grew up with Star Wars and want something more to chew on in our adulthood than endless callbacks to the original trilogy, Andor is revelatory. It colors the war of light versus dark with large amounts of gray because sometimes, as one character puts it, you have to use the tools of your enemy to defeat them (save for genetically gifted farmboys). Maybe most of Star Wars was always supposed to be for kids, but prestige TV viewers got a glimpse of what the universe could feel like if it took itself more seriously. Rather than use the broad strokes of a war of good versus evil, Andor painted between the lines to demonstrate how systemic oppression can look a lot more personal than firing a giant space laser.

For all its great writing and themes, Andor also delivered high stakes and suspense. Although we already knew the outcome of the story, we still held our breath during tense scenes with characters who make the ultimate sacrifice for a future they will never see.

—Jacob May

National Finals Rodeo (The Cowboy Channel)

exterior view of Thomas & Mack area in Las Vegas with banner proclaiming the 2024 Wranger National Finals rodeo — Credit: Sean Carroll

My personal end-of-year TV list would never be complete without a nod to The Cowboy Channel, i.e., the only place where armchair enthusiasts like myself can follow our favorite cowboys and cowgirls throughout the rodeo season. The goal is to rack up enough money to qualify for the Wrangler National Finals Rodeo (NFR), held at the Thomas & Mack Center in Las Vegas every December. This year, I’ve picked the channel’s stellar annual coverage of the NFR itself to highlight. The entire season comes down to this: an intense 10-day competition in which the top 15 athletes in each event duke it out night after night in hopes of winning a coveted championship gold buckle. And night after night, The Cowboy Channel is there with live commentary and post-round analysis.

What I love most is just how unpredictable the NFR can be. Part of that is the substantial monetary rewards that come with round wins; an athlete coming in at #1 in earnings can see even a substantial lead evaporate over just a few nights. Part of it has to do with who wins the average, i.e., who performs the best over ten nights collectively in each event. Winning the average comes with a substantial payout that can lead to unexpected upsets in the final results. But mostly it’s just the human factor: The best in the world can have a bad night, and young rookies can have the night of their lives. An ill-timed injury can knock an athlete out of the competition entirely. And sometimes the judges make inexplicably bad calls with major consequences (*coughStetson Wright in Round 6 saddle bronc *cough*).

It’s all part of the excitement of rodeo. The Cowboy Channel’s in-depth coverage lets us experience all that drama even if we can’t attend in person and lets us savor how the story unfolds in each subsequent round. We celebrate the wins, mourn the losses, and cheer mightily for the final champions. (Stetson did just fine in the end.) Then we gear up to do it all over again next year.

—Jennifer Ouellette

Top Guns: The Next Generation (National Geographic/Disney+)

backs of four fighter pilots walking toward a fighter jet — Credit: National Geographic

The blockbuster success of the 1986 film Top Gun—chronicling the paths of young naval aviators as they go through the grueling US Navy’s Fighter Weapons School (aka the titular Top Gun)—spawned more than just a successful multimedia franchise. It has also been credited with inspiring future generations of fighter pilots. National Geographic took viewers behind the scenes to see the process play out for real with the documentary series Top Guns: The Next Generation.

Each episode focuses on a specific aspect of the training, following a handful of students from the Navy and Marines through the highs and lows of their training. That includes practicing dive bombs at breakneck speeds, successfully landing on an aircraft carrier by “catching the wire,” learning the most effective offensive and defensive maneuvers in dogfighting, and, finally, engaging in a freestyle dogfight against a seasoned instructor to complete the program and (hopefully) earn their golden wings. NatGeo was granted unprecedented access, even using in-cockpit cameras to capture the pulse-pounding action of being in the air, as well as more candidly intimate behind-the-scenes moments as the students grapple with their respective successes and failures. It’s a riveting watch.

—Jennifer Ouellette

Alien: Earth (FX/Hulu)

young woman standing in a futuristic corridor bathed in white light — Credit: FX/Hulu

My first draft of what was supposed to be a 300-ish word blurb describing why Alien: Earth is fantastic ended up exploding into a Defector-esque narrative deep dive into my ever-evolving relationship with Alien 3 as a film and how Alien: Earth has helped reshape my appreciation for that poor broken baby of a movie by mixing the best of its visual techniques into A:E’s absolutely masterful cocktail of narrative stylings—but I’ll spare you all of that.

Here’s the short version without the bloviating: Alien: Earth is the thing I’ve been waiting for since I walked out of the theater after seeing Alien 3 in the summer of 1992. Unlike Alien Resurrection, any of the AvPs, or the wet-fart, falls-apart-like-mud-in-the-third-act swing-and-miss of Alien: Romulus, A:E gets nearly everything right. It’s grounded without being stodgy; exciting without being stupid; referential without being derivative; fun without being pandering; respectful of the lore while being willing to try something new; and, above all else, it bleeds craftsmanship—every frame makes it obvious that this is a show made by people who love and care for the Alien universe.

The thing that grabs me anew with every episode is the show’s presentation and execution—a self-aware blending of all the best things Scott, Cameron, and Fincher brought to their respective films. As I get older, I’m drawn more and more to entertainment that shows me interesting things and does so in ontologically faithful ways—and oh, does this show ever deliver.

Each episode is a carefully crafted visual and tonal mix of all the previous Alien films, with the episodes’ soundtracks shifting eras to match the action on-screen—like Alien 3’s jumpy choir flash-cut opening credits melding into Aliens’ lonely snare drums. The result is a blended world made of all the best things I remember from the films, and it works in the same way the game Alien: Isolation worked: by conjuring up exactly what the places where we used to have nightmares looked and felt like, and then scaring us there again.

I have heard that The Internet had some problems with the show, but, eh, everybody’s going to hate something. I vaguely remember some of the complaints having to do with how some of the new alien life-forms seem to be scarier or deadlier than our beloved and familiar main monster. All I’ve got for that one is a big fat shrug—I’m fine with our capital-A-aliens sharing the stage with some equally nasty new creatures. The aliens are always more interesting as devices to explore a story than as dramatic ends themselves, and I mean, let’s face it, in the past 40-plus years, there’s not much we haven’t seen them do and/or kill. They’re a literary force, not characters, and I’m way more interested in seeing how they shape the story of the people around them.

The tl;dr is that Alien: Earth is awesome, and if you haven’t watched it, you absolutely should. And when I was a kid, I used to regularly get put in time-out in recess for stiff-arming other kids while pretending to be a power loader, so you should consider my tastemaking credentials in this matter unimpeachable.

—Lee Hutchinson

Squid Game S3 (Netflix)

assembly of asian people in matching jumpsuits preparing to compete in a deadly game — Credit: Netflix

In the most violent series to ever catch the world’s attention by playing beloved children’s games, it turns out that the most high-stakes choice that creator Hwang Dong-hyuk could make was to put a child in the arena. For Squid Game‘s final season, Hwang has said the season’s pivotal moment—a pregnant girl birthing a baby during a game of hide-and-seek with knives—was designed to dash viewers’ hopes that a brighter future may await those who survive the games. By leaving the task of saving the baby to the series hero, Seong Gi-hun, whose own strained relationship with his daughter led him into the games in the first season, Squid Game walked a gritty tightrope to the very end.

The only real misstep was involving the goofiest set of cartoon villain VIPs more directly in the games. But we can forgive Hwang the clunky Dr. Evil-like dialogue that slowed down the action. He’s made it clear that he put everything into developing dramatic sequences for the game players—losing teeth, barely eating, rarely sleeping—and he fully admitted to The New York Times that “I have a cartoonish way of giving comic relief.

—Ashley Belanger

The Diplomat S3 (Netflix)

blonde woman on cell phone with a concerned look on her face — Credit: Netflix

Let’s be clear: The Diplomat is a soap opera. If you’re not into cliffhangers, intense levels of drama, and will-they-won’t-they sexual tension, it’s probably not going to be for you. Sometimes there’s so much going on that it becomes almost farcical. If that doesn’t scare you off, what do you get in return?

Superb actors given rich and intriguing characters to inhabit. A political drama that nicely finds a balance between the excessive idealism of The West Wing and the excessive cynicism of Veep. A disturbingly realistic-feeling series of crises that the characters sometimes direct, and sometimes hang on for dear life as they get dragged along by. And, well, the cliffhangers have been good enough to get me tuning in to the next season as soon as it appears on Netflix.

Kerri Russell plays the titular diplomat, who is assigned to what seems like a completely innocuous position: ambassador to one of the US’s closest allies, the UK. Rufus Sewell portrays her husband, a loose-to-the-point-of-unmoored cannon who ensures the posting is anything but innocuous. Ali Ahn and Ato Assandoh, neither of whom I was familiar with, are fantastic as embassy staff. And as the central crisis has grown in scale, some familiar West Wing faces (Allison Janey and Bradley Whitford) have joined the cast. Almost all of the small roles have been superbly acted as well. And for all the dysfunction, cynicism, and selfish behavior that drive the plot forward, the politics in The Diplomat feels like pleasant escapism when compared to the present reality.

—John Timmer

Murderbot (Apple TV)

shot of head and upper torso of white armored robot and a faceless mask — Credit: Apple TV+

Apple TV+’s Murderbot, based on Martha Wells’ bestselling series of novels The Murderbot Diaries, is a jauntily charming sci-fi comedy dripping with wry wit and an intriguing mystery. Murderbot the TV series adapts the first book in the series, All Systems Red. A security unit that thinks of itself as Murderbot (Alexander Skarsgård) is on assignment on a distant planet, protecting a team of scientists who hail from a “freehold.”

Mensah (Noma Dumezweni) is the team leader. The team also includes Bharadwaj (Tamara Podemski) and Gurathin (David Dastmalchian), who is an augmented human plugged into the same data feeds as Murderbot (processing at a much slower rate). Pin-Lee (Sabrina Wu) also serves as the team’s legal counsel; they are in a relationship with Arada (Tattiawna Jones), eventually becoming a throuple with Ratthi (Akshaye Khanna). Unbeknownst to the team, Murderbot has figured out how to override his governor module that compels it to obey the humans’ commands. So Murderbot essentially has free will.

The task of adapting Wells’ novellas for TV fell to sibling co-creators Paul Weitz and Chris Weitz. (Wells herself was a consulting producer.) They’ve kept most of the storyline intact, fleshing out characters and punching up the humor a bit, even recreating campy scenes from Murderbot’s favorite show, The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon. (John Cho and Clark Gregg make cameos as the stars of that fictional show-within-a-show.) The entire cast is terrific, but it’s Skarsgård’s hilariously deadpan performance that holds it all together as he learns how to relate to the humans—even forming some unexpectedly strong bonds.

—Jennifer Ouellette

Down Cemetery Road (Apple TV)

short gray-haired room in black coat staring through a mesh fence — Credit: Apple TV

Fans of Slow Horses (see below), rejoice: with Down Cemetery Road, Apple TV has blessed us with another exciting mystery thriller series based on the works of Mick Herron—in this case, his 2003 novel introducing private investigator Zoë Boehm (Emma Thompson). Ruth Wilson co-stars as Sarah, an artist rather unhappily married to a finance bro. A neighboring building is destroyed by an explosion, and Sarah tries to deliver a get-well card to a little girl who survived from her young classmates. She’s inexplicably rebuffed, and her dogged attempts to figure out what’s going on lead her to seek the help of Zoë’s PI partner and estranged husband Joe (Adam Godley). What Joe finds out gets him killed, setting Sarah and Zoë on a collision course with high-placed government officials trying to cover up a pending scandal.

Thompson and Wilson make a dynamic pair. This is Thompson’s meatiest role in a while: Her Zoë is all flinty cynicism and tough exterior, masking an inner vulnerability she’s learned to keep buried. Wilson’s Sarah is the polar opposite in many ways, but she’s equally dogged, and both women are eccentrics who tend to rub people the wrong way. They’re united in a common goal: find the missing girl and bring her kidnappers (and Joe’s killer) to justice. Down Cemetery Road takes a bit of time to set up its premise and its characters, but the pace builds and builds to a big, satisfying finale. It’s not quite on the level of Slow Horses, but it’s pretty darned close.

—Jennifer Ouellette

Pluribus (Apple TV)

blond woman on cell phone in yellow jacket looking dismayed — Credit: Apple TV

After watching five episodes of the nine-episode first season of Apple TV’s Pluribus, I’m still not sure if I should be rooting for protagonist Carol Sturka or not. On the one hand, Carol is one of the last true “individuals” on Earth, fighting to maintain that individuality against a creepy alien pseudo-virus that has made almost everyone else part of a creepy, psychically connected hive mind. Reversing that effect, and getting the world “back to normal,” is an understandable and sympathetic response on Carol’s part.

On the other hand, it’s unlear that being absorbed into the hive mind is a change for the worse, on a humanity-wide scale. Unlike Star Trek’s Borg—who are violent, shambling drones that seem to have an overall miserable existence—the new hive-mind humanity is unfailingly pacifist, intelligent, capable, and (seemingly) blissfully, peacefully happy. In a sense, this virus has “solved” human nature by removing the paranoia, fear, anger, and distrust that naturally come from never truly knowing what’s going on in your neighbor’s head.

The fact that Pluribus has so far been able to navigate this premise without coming down strongly on one side or the other is frankly incredible. The fact that it has done it with consistent humor, thrills, and amazing cinematography transforms it into a must-watch.

—Kyle Orland

Slow Horses S5 (Apple TV)

scruffy bearded older man in a beige trenchcoat walking down busy London street — Credit: Apple TV

There are many things I enjoy about Slow Horses, the Apple TV thriller about some not-great spies based on Mick Herron’s novels of the same name. The plots are gripping. The acting can be sublime. It’s shot well. And in its fifth season, which began streaming this September, Slow Horses engages more with the author’s humor than in seasons past. But with a plot involving the honeypotting of the deluded computer expert almost-extraordinaire Roddy Ho (played to perfection by Christopher Chung), that would be hard to avoid.

Slough House is a rundown MI5 office used as a dumping ground for employees in disgrace—the slow horses. They can’t be fired, but they can quit, and working for Jackson Lamb (Gary Oldman) is meant to make that happen. Lamb is a veteran of the dirtiest days of the Cold War, knowing not only where most of the bodies are buried but having helped put a few of them there himself. His legendary field prowess is only dwarfed by his repellent personality, mocking and belittling everyone in sight—but often deservedly so.

Each member of his team is there for a different sin, and throughout the season—which involves a plot to destabilize the British government, ripped from an MI5 playbook—we see evidence of why they’ve been consigned to the slow horses. These are not invincible operators, just flawed human beings, perfectly capable of screwing up again and again. And yet, our lovable bunch of losers usually manages to come through in the end, showing up “the Park”—MI5’s (fictional) head office in London’s Regent’s Park, which is usually a step behind Lamb’s quick and devious thinking.

The adaptation is faithful enough to the books to give me deja vu during the first episode, and with just six episodes in a season, the payoff comes relatively quickly. I can’t wait for season 6.

—Jonathan Gitlin

Severance S2 (Apple TV)

man in business suit holding blue helium balloons while standing in an antiseptic white corridor — Credit: Apple TV

The second season of Severance was never going to be able to live up to the constant, slow rollout of gut punches that characterized the first season. Those first 10 episodes ably explored the most important implications of the titular severance procedure, which splits a single person into separate “innie” and “outtie” consciousnesses with distinct sets of memories. The audience got to explore those implications along with the “innie” characters, who were struggling against the boundaries of their odd cubicle life right up until that thrilling final shot.

With so much now revealed and understood, a lot of that fire fell out of the second season of the show. Sure, there were still some loose ends to tie up from the mysteries of the first season, and plenty of new, off-puttingly weird situations on offer. And the new season definitely has quite a few high points, like the big twist revealed when the “innies” get to have a rare outdoor excursion or the extended flashback showing a character trapped in a seemingly endless sequence of social tests she can’t remember afterward.

But S2 also spent entire episodes exploring backstories and mysteries that didn’t have nearly as much emotional or plot impact. By the time the final episode arrived—with a rescue sequence that required an inordinate amount of suspension of disbelief—I found myself wondering just how much more interesting juice there was to squeeze from the show’s brilliant original premise. I worry that the show is trending in the direction of Lost, which drew things out with a lot of uninteresting padding before finally resolving the plot’s core puzzle box in an unsatisfying way. I’m still along on that ride for now, but I really hope it’s going somewhere soon.

—Kyle Orland

And now for our top choice of the year:

The Residence (Netflix)

black woman crouched over on white house lawn with a flashlight at night — Credit: Netflix

Paul William Davies created this delightful mystery comedy, loosely based on a bestselling nonfiction book by Kate Andersen Brower about the maids, butlers, cooks, florists, doormen, engineers, and others dedicated to ensuring the White House residence runs smoothly. In the middle of a state dinner for the visiting Australian prime minister, White House Chief Usher A.B. Wynter (Giancarlo Esposito) is found dead in the third-floor game room. Everyone initially assumes it was suicide.

Enter private detective Cordelia Cupp (Uzo Aduba), who most definitely does not think it was suicide and proceeds to investigate. She has about a dozen suspects, and her blunt, rather eccentric personality means she’s not remotely intimidated by the august setting of this particular murder. Cupp even takes the odd break in sleuthing to do a bit of birdwatching on the White House grounds. (It’s her goal to see all the birds President Teddy Roosevelt recorded during his tenure.) Birdwatching is more than a lifelong hobby for Cupp; it’s central to her character and to how she approaches solving crimes. Bonus: Viewers learn a lot of fascinating bird trivia over eight episodes.

Davies has devised a clever narrative structure, telling the story in flashbacks during a Congressional hearing (presided over by former US Sen. Al Franken playing a fictional senator from Washington state). It’s a good mystery with plenty of unexpected twists and snappy dialogue. Each episode title refers to a famous murder mystery; the camerawork is inventive and fun; and everyone in the cast knocks it out of the park. I especially loved pop star Kylie Minogue’s cameo playing a fictional version of herself as a state dinner guest. Davies apparently couldn’t convince her fellow Australian Hugh Jackman to also make a cameo. But Ben Prendergast’s winking portrayal of “Hugh Jackman”—only seen from behind or with his face obscured—is actually funnier than having the real actor.

It would be a mistake to dismiss The Residence as a mere bauble of a murder mystery just because of its playful, lighthearted tone. The show really does capture what is special and unique about the people who keep the White House residence functioning and why they matter—to each other and to America. Cupp’s final speech after unmasking the killer drives home those points with particular poignancy.

Netflix sadly canceled this excellent series, so there won’t be a second season—although I’m not sure how the writers could improve on such a tour de force. Do we really need Cupp to solve another elaborate murder in the White House? If I’m being honest, probably not. But she’s such a great character. I’d love to see more of her, perhaps in a Knives Out-style franchise where the location and main suspects continually change while the central detective stays the same. Somebody make it so.

—Jennifer Ouellette

TV Technica: Our favorite shows of 2025 Read More »

The Splay is a subpar monitor but an exciting portable projector

Monitors, Projectors, Reviews, Tech / Tim Belzer / December 23, 2025

Splay can be a monitor and takes a lot of the stress out of projectors, too.

The Arovia Splay in monitor mode. Credit: Scharon Harding

Since I’m fascinated by new display technologies and by improving image quality, I’ve never been a fan of home projectors. Projectors lack the image quality compared to good TVs and monitors, and they’re pretty needy. Without getting into the specific requirements of different models, you generally want a darker room with a large, blank wall for a projector to look its best. That can be a lot to ask for, especially in small, densely decorated homes like mine.

That said, a projector can be a space-efficient alternative to a big-screen TV or help you watch TV or movies outside. A projector can be versatile when paired with the right space, especially if that projector makes sure the “right space” is included in the device.

The Splay was crowdfunded in 2021, and its maker, Arovia, describes it as the “first fully collapsible monitor and projector.” In short, it’s a portable projector with an integrated fabric shroud that can serve as a big-screen (24.5 or 34.5 inches diagonally, depending on the model) portable monitor. Or, you can take off the fabric shroud and use the Splay as an ultra-short-throw projector and cast a display that measures up to 80 inches diagonally onto a wall.

At its core, the Splay is a projector, meaning it can’t compete with high-end LCD-LED or OLED monitors. It costs $1,300; the device is currently sold out, but an Arovia representative told me that it will be restocked this month.

Here’s how the device works, per one of Arovia’s patents:

The … collapsible, portable display device, has a housing member having a sliding member aligned on the exterior of the housing member, and sliding along the exterior of said housing member between two operating positions, a collapsible screen containing one or more sheets of flexible, wrinkle resistant silicone or rubber materials containing optical enhancing components and capable of displaying an image when in an expanded operating position, and multiple collapsible members connected to said screen …

Arovia’s representative pointed to the Splay being used for mobile workspaces, gaming, and enterprise use cases, like trade shows.

Because it uses lightweight and springy fabric materials and bendable arms, the whole gadget can be folded into an included case that’s 4×4 inches and weighs 2.5 pounds. Once extended to its max size, the device is a bit unwieldy; I had to be mindful to avoid poking or tearing the fabric when I set up the device.

Still, it can be rather advantageous to access such large display options from something as portable as the collapsed Splay.

Splay as a monitor

The Splay isn’t what people typically picture when thinking of a “portable monitor.” It connects to PCs, iOS and Android devices, and gaming consoles via HDMI (or an HDMI adapter) and is chargeable via USB-C, so you can use it without a wall charger. But this isn’t the type of display you would set up at a coffee shop or even in a small home office.

Compared to a traditional portable monitor, the Splay is bulky. That’s partly because the display is bigger than a typical portable monitor (around 14 inches). Most of the bulk, however, comes from how much the back of the “monitor” protrudes (about 19 to 21 inches from the front of the display).

A profile view of the Splay in monitor mode.

Credit: Scharon Harding

A profile view of the Splay in monitor mode. Credit: Scharon Harding

When extended, the device is mostly fabric, but its control center, where there is a power button, sharpness adjuster, and controls for brightness, and the integrated speakers go back pretty far (about 6.25 inches) even before you insert an HDMI or USB-C cable.

You will also want to use the Splay with a tripod (a small, tabletop one’s included) so that it’s at a proper height and you can swivel and tilt the display.

The Arovia Splay's control center. — The Splay’s control center. Credit: Scharon Harding

That all makes the Splay cumbersome to find space for and, once opened, to transport. Once I set it up, I wasn’t eager to pack it away or to bring it to another room.

Still, the Splay is a novel attempt at bringing a monitor-sized display to more areas. Despite its bulky maximum size, it weighs little and doesn’t have to be plugged into a wall.

Splay claims the monitor has a max brightness of 760 nits. When I used the display in a well-lit room or in a sunny room, it still looked sufficiently bright, even when perpendicular to a window. All colors were somewhat washed out compared to how they appear on my computer monitor but were still acceptable for a secondary display. If I look closely enough, though, I can see the subtle texture of the fabric in the image.

Arovia Splay showing an image. — The Splay also supports portrait mode. Credit: Scharon Harding

The Splay struggles mightily with text. It’s not sharp enough, so trying to read more than a couple of sentences on the Splay was a strain. This could be due to the projector technology, as well as the lower pixel density. With a display resolution equivalent to 1920×1080, the 24.5-inch “portable monitor” has a pixel density of 89.9 pixels per inch.

Arovia Splay with text on it — The Splay displaying an Ars Technica article. Credit: Scharon Harding

Considering there are portable monitors that are in the 24-inch size range and easier to set up, it’s hard to see a reason to opt for a Splay—unless you also want a projector.

Splay as a projector

To use the Splay as a projector, you have to unzip the fabric shroud and pull the device out of its four-armed holster. Once set up, the Splay works as an ultra-short-throw pico projector with automatic keystone projection, which helps ensure that the display looks like a rectangle instead of a trapezoid or parallelogram.

The Splay as a portable projector. Credit: Scharon Harding

Arovia claims the projector can reach up to 285 lumens and display an image that measures up to 80 inches diagonally.

Now, we start to see the Splay’s value. Unlike other projectors, the Splay remains useful in tight, crowded spaces. Not only does the Splay wrap up neatly for transport, but the integrated screen means you never have to worry about whether you’ll have the right space for the projector to work properly.

There’s always a need for portable displays, and different use cases warrant exploring new approaches and form factors. While there are simpler 24-inch portable monitors with better image quality, the Splay brings remarkable portability and independence to portable projectors.

The Splay is niche and expensive, which is probably why the product’s website currently focuses on more B2B applications, like sports coaches and analysts using it to review footage and data. Similar to the big-screen tablets on wheels that more companies have been making lately, for now, the Splay will probably find the most relevance among businesses or public sector entities.

However, I’m inclined to think about how the Splay’s unique properties could apply to personal projectors. The Splay is a subpar “portable monitor,” but its duality makes it a more valuable projector. There are still too many obstacles preventing me from regularly using a projector, but the Splay has at least shown me that projectors can pack more than I expected.

Scharon is a Senior Technology Reporter at Ars Technica writing news, reviews, and analysis on consumer gadgets and services. She’s been reporting on technology for over 10 years, with bylines at Tom’s Hardware, Channelnomics, and CRN UK.

The Splay is a subpar monitor but an exciting portable projector Read More »

When clouds flock together

atmospheric science, clouds, global climate change, Science, syndication / Tim Belzer / December 23, 2025

Scientists discover that clumping clouds supercharge storms in surprising ways.

Caroline Muller looks at clouds differently than most people. Where others may see puffy marshmallows, wispy cotton candy or thunderous gray objects storming overhead, Muller sees fluids flowing through the sky. She visualizes how air rises and falls, warms and cools, and spirals and swirls to form clouds and create storms.

But the urgency with which Muller, a climate scientist at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria in Klosterneuburg, considers such atmospheric puzzles has surged in recent years. As our planet swelters with global warming, storms are becoming more intense, sometimes dumping two or even three times more rain than expected. Such was the case in Bahía Blanca, Argentina, in March 2025: Almost half the city’s yearly average rainfall fell in less than 12 hours, causing deadly floods.

Atmospheric scientists have long used computer simulations to track how the dynamics of air and moisture might produce varieties of storms. But existing models hadn’t fully explained the emergence of these fiercer storms. A roughly 200-year-old theory describes how warmer air holds more moisture than cooler air: an extra 7 percent for every degree Celsius of warming. But in models and weather observations, climate scientists have seen rainfall events far exceeding this expected increase. And those storms can lead to severe flooding when heavy rain falls on already saturated soils or follows humid heatwaves.

Clouds, and the way that they cluster, could help explain what’s going on.

A growing body of research, set in motion by Muller over a decade ago, is revealing several small-scale processes that climate models had previously overlooked. These processes influence how clouds form, congregate, and persist in ways that may amplify heavy downpours and fuel larger, long-lasting storms. Clouds have an “internal life,” Muller says, “that can strengthen them or may help them stay alive longer.”

Other scientists need more convincing, because the computer simulations researchers use to study clouds reduce planet Earth to its simplest and smoothest form, retaining its essential physics but otherwise barely resembling the real world.

Now, though, a deeper understanding beckons. Higher-resolution global climate models can finally simulate clouds and the destructive storms they form on a planetary scale — giving scientists a more realistic picture. By better understanding clouds, researchers hope to improve their predictions of extreme rainfall, especially in the tropics where some of the most ferocious thunderstorms hit and where future rainfall projections are the most uncertain.

First clues to clumping clouds

All clouds form in moist, rising air. A mountain can propel air upward; so, too, can a cold front. Clouds can also form through a process known as convection: the overturning of air in the atmosphere that starts when sunlight, warm land or balmy water heats air from below. As warm air rises, it cools, condensing the water vapor it carried upwards into raindrops. This condensation process also releases heat, which fuels churning storms.

But clouds remain one of the weakest links in climate models. That’s because the global climate models scientists use to simulate scenarios of future warming are far too coarse to capture the updrafts that give rise to clouds or to describe how they swirl in a storm—let alone to explain the microphysical processes controlling how much rain falls from them to Earth.

To try to resolve this problem, Muller and other like-minded scientists turned to simpler simulations of Earth’s climate that are able to model convection. In these artificial worlds, each the shape of a shallow box typically a few hundred kilometers across and tens of kilometers deep, the researchers tinkered with replica atmospheres to see if they could figure out how clouds behaved under different conditions.

The top frame of this computer simulation shows an atmosphere where the movements of air are somewhat disorganized, leading to clouds popping up in random locations. At the bottom is a simulation of an atmosphere where patterns of convection have become organized, and clouds spontaneously clump together into one large region—forming a storm.

Intriguingly, when researchers ran these models, the clouds spontaneously clumped together, even though the models had none of the features that usually push clouds together—no mountains, no wind, no Earthly spin or seasonal variations in sunlight. “Nobody knew why this was happening,” says Daniel Hernández Deckers, an atmospheric scientist at the National University of Colombia in Bogotá.

In 2012, Muller discovered a first clue: a process known as radiative cooling. The Sun’s heat that bounces off Earth’s surface radiates back into space, and where there are few clouds, more of that radiation escapes—cooling the air. The cool spots set up atmospheric flows that drive air toward cloudier regions—trapping more heat and forming more clouds. A follow-up study in 2018 showed that in these simulations, radiative cooling accelerated the formation of tropical cyclones. “That made us realize that to understand clouds, you have to look at the neighborhood as well—outside clouds,” Muller says.

Once scientists started looking not just outside clouds, but also underneath them and at their edges, they found other small-scale processes that help to explain why clouds flock together. The various processes, described by Muller and colleagues in the Annual Review of Fluid Mechanics, all bring or hold together pockets of warm, moist air so more clouds form in already-cloudy regions. These small-scale processes hadn’t been understood much before because they are often obscured by larger weather patterns.

Hernández Deckers has been studying one of the processes, called entrainment—the turbulent mixing of air at the edges of clouds. Most climate models represent clouds as a steady plume of rising air, but in reality “clouds are like a cauliflower,” he says. “You have a lot of turbulence, and you have these bubbles [of air] inside the clouds.” This mixing at the edges affects how clouds evolve and thunderstorms develop; it can weaken or strengthen storms in various ways, but, like radiative cooling, it encourages more clouds to form as a clump in regions that are already moist.

Such processes are likely to be most important in storms in Earth’s tropical regions, where there’s the most uncertainty about future rainfall. (That’s why Hernández Deckers, Muller, and others tend to focus their studies there.) The tropics lack the cold fronts, jet streams, and spiraling high- and low-pressure systems that dominate air flows at higher latitudes.

Supercharging heavy rains

There are other microscopic processes happening inside clouds that affect extreme rainfall, especially on shorter timescales. Moisture matters: Condensed droplets falling through moist, cloudy air don’t evaporate as much on their descent, so more water falls to the ground. Temperature matters too: When clouds form in warmer atmospheres, they produce less snow and more rain. Since raindrops fall faster than snowflakes, they evaporate less on their descent—producing, once again, more rain.

These factors also help explain why more rain can get squeezed from a cloud than the 7 percent rise per degree of warming predicted by the 200-year-old theory. “Essentially you get an extra kick … in our simulations, it was almost a doubling,” says Martin Singh, a climate scientist at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia.

Cloud clustering adds to this effect by holding warm, moist air together, so more rain droplets fall. One study by Muller and her collaborators found that clumping clouds intensify short-duration rainfall extremes by 30 to 70 percent, largely because raindrops evaporate less inside sodden clouds.

Other research, including a study led by Jiawei Bao, a postdoctoral researcher in Muller’s group, has likewise found that the microphysical processes going on inside clouds have a strong influence over fast, heavy downpours. These sudden downpours are intensifying much faster with climate change than protracted deluges, and often cause flash flooding.

The future of extreme rainfall

Scientists who study the clumping of clouds want to know how that behavior will change as the planet heats up—and what that will mean for incidences of heavy rainfall and flooding.

Some models suggest that clouds (and the convection that gives rise to them) will clump together more with global warming — and produce more rainfall extremes that often far exceed what theory predicts. But other simulations suggest that clouds will congregate less. “There seems to be still possibly a range of answers,” says Allison Wing, a climate scientist at Florida State University in Tallahassee who has compared various models.

Scientists are beginning to try to reconcile some of these inconsistencies using powerful types of computer simulations called global storm-resolving models. These can capture the fine structures of clouds, thunderstorms, and cyclones while also simulating the global climate. They bring a 50-fold leap in realism beyond the global climate models scientists generally use—but demand 30,000 times more computational power.

Using one such model in a paper published in 2024, Bao, Muller, and their collaborators found that clouds in the tropics congregated more as temperatures increased—leading to less frequent storms but ones that were larger, lasted longer, and, over the course of a day, dumped more rain than expected from theory.

But that work relied on just one model and simulated conditions from around one future time point—the year 2070. Scientists need to run longer simulations using more storm-resolving models, Bao says, but very few research teams can afford to run them. They are so computationally intensive that they are typically run at large centralized hubs, and scientists occasionally host “hackathons” to crunch through and share data.

Researchers also need more real-world observations to get at some of the biggest unknowns about clouds. Although a flurry of recent studies using satellite data linked the clustering of clouds to heavier rainfall in the tropics, there are large data gaps in many tropical regions. This weakens climate projections and leaves many countries ill-prepared. In June of 2025, floods and landslides in Venezuela and Colombia swept away buildings and killed at least a dozen people, but scientists don’t know what factors worsened these storms because the data are so paltry. “Nobody really knows, still, what triggered this,” Hernández Deckers says.

New, granular data are on their way. Wing is analyzing rainfall measurements from a German research vessel that traversed the tropical Atlantic Ocean for six weeks in 2024. The ship’s radar mapped clusters of convection associated with the storms it passed through, so the work should help researchers see how clouds organize over vast tracts of the ocean.

And an even more global view is on the horizon. The European Space Agency plans to launch two satellites in 2029 that will measure, among other things, near-surface winds that ruffle Earth’s oceans and skim mountaintops. Perhaps, scientists hope, the data these satellites beam back will finally provide a better grasp of clumping clouds and the heaviest rains that fall from them.

Research and interviews for this article were partly supported through a journalism residency funded by the Institute of Science & Technology Austria (ISTA). ISTA had no input into the story. This story originally appeared on Knowable Magazine.

Knowable Magazine explores the real-world significance of scholarly work through a journalistic lens.

When clouds flock together Read More »

In a surprise announcement, Tory Bruno is out as CEO of United Launch Alliance

atlas v, Boeing, launch, Lockheed Martin, Science, Space, tory bruno, united launch alliance, vulcan / Tim Belzer / December 22, 2025

The retirement of the Atlas V and Delta IV led to a period of downsizing for United Launch Alliance, with layoffs and facility closures in Florida, California, Alabama, Colorado, and Texas. In a further sign of ULA’s troubles, SpaceX won a majority of US military launch contracts for the first time last year.

Bruno, 64, served as a genial public face for ULA amid the company’s difficult times. He routinely engaged with space enthusiasts on social media, fielded questions from reporters, and even started a podcast. Bruno’s friendly and accessible demeanor was unusual among industry leaders, especially those with ties to large legacy defense contractors.

ULA is a 50-50 joint venture between Boeing and Lockheed Martin, which merged their rocket divisions in 2006. Bruno’s plans did not always enjoy full support from ULA’s corporate owners. For example, Boeing and Lockheed initially only approved tranches of funding for developing the new Vulcan rocket on a quarterly basis. Beginning before Bruno’s arrival and extending into his tenure as CEO, ULA’s owners slow-walked development of an advanced upper stage that might have become a useful centerpiece for an innovative in-space transport and refueling infrastructure.

There were also rumors in recent years of an impending sale of ULA by Boeing and Lockheed Martin, but nothing has materialized so far.

The third flight of the Vulcan rocket lifted off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida, on August 12, 2025. Credit: United Launch Alliance

A statement from the co-chairs of ULA’s board, Robert Lightfoot of Lockheed Martin and Kay Sears of Boeing, did not identify a reason for Bruno’s resignation, other than saying he is stepping down “to pursue another opportunity.”

“We are grateful for Tory’s service to ULA and the country, and we thank him for his leadership,” the board chairs said in a statement.

John Elbon, ULA’s chief operating officer, will take over as interim CEO effective immediately, the company said.

“We have the greatest confidence in John to continue strengthening ULA’s momentum while the board proceeds with finding the next leader of ULA,” the company said. “Together with Mark Peller, the new COO, John’s career in aerospace and his launch expertise is an asset for ULA and its customers, especially for achieving key upcoming Vulcan milestones.”

In a post on X, Bruno thanked ULA’s owners for the opportunity to lead the company. “It has been a great privilege to lead ULA through its transformation and to bring Vulcan into service,” he wrote. “My work here is now complete and I will be cheering ULA on.”

In a surprise announcement, Tory Bruno is out as CEO of United Launch Alliance Read More »

World’s largest shadow library made a 300TB copy of Spotify’s most streamed songs

AI, AI training, Anna's archive, LLMs, music streaming, piracy, Policy, shadow library, Spotify / Tim Belzer / December 22, 2025

But Anna’s Archive is clearly working to support AI developers, another noted, pointing out that Anna’s Archive promotes selling “high-speed access” to “enterprise-level” LLM data, including “unreleased collections.” Anyone can donate “tens of thousands” to get such access, the archive suggests on its webpage, and any interested AI researchers can reach out to discuss “how we can work together.”

“AI may not be their original/primary motivation, but they are evidently on board with facilitating AI labs piracy-maxxing,” a third commenter suggested.

Meanwhile, on Reddit, some fretted that Anna’s Archive may have doomed itself by scraping the data. To them, it seemed like the archive was “only making themselves a target” after watching the Internet Archive struggle to survive a legal attack from record labels that ended in a confidential settlement last year.

“I’m furious with AA for sticking this target on their own backs,” a redditor wrote on a post declaring that “this Spotify hacking will just ruin the actual important literary archive.”

As Anna’s Archive fans spiraled, a conspiracy was even raised that the archive was only “doing it for the AI bros, who are the ones paying the bills behind the scenes” to keep the archive afloat.

Ars could not immediately reach Anna’s Archive to comment on users’ fears or Spotify’s investigation.

On Reddit, one user took comfort in the fact that the archive is “designed to be resistant to being taken out,” perhaps preventing legal action from ever really dooming the archive.

“The domain and such can be gone, sure, but the core software and its data can be resurfaced again and again,” the user explained.

But not everyone was convinced that Anna’s Archive could survive brazenly torrenting so much Spotify data.

“This is like saying the Titanic is unsinkable” that user warned, suggesting that Anna’s Archive might lose donations if Spotify-fueled takedowns continually frustrate downloads over time. “Sure, in theory data can certainly resurface again and again, but doing so each time, it will take money and resources, which are finite. How many times are folks willing to do this before they just give up?”

This story was updated to include Spotify’s statement.

World’s largest shadow library made a 300TB copy of Spotify’s most streamed songs Read More »

Odyssey trailer brings the myth to vivid life

Christopher Nolan, culture, Entertainment, film trailers, The Odyssey, Trailers, Universal Pictures / Tim Belzer / December 22, 2025

It’s difficult to underestimate the tremendous influence Homer’s epic has had on global culture. Nolan himself recalled seeing the Odyssey performed as a school play when he was just 5 or 6 years old. “I remember the Sirens and him being strapped to the mast and things like that,” he recently told Empire. “I think it’s in all of us, really. And when you start to break down the text and adapt it, you find that all of these other films—and all the films I’ve worked on—you know, they’re all from the Odyssey. It’s foundational.”

In addition to Damon, the cast includes Anne Hathaway as Penelope; Tom Holland as Odysseus’ son, Telemachus; Robert Pattinson as Antinous, one of Penelope’s many suitors; Jon Bernthal as the Spartan king, Menelaus; Benny Safdie as the Achaean commander during the Trojan War, Agamemnon; John Leguizamo as Odysseus’ faithful servant, Eumaeus; Himesh Patel as his second-in-command, Eurylochus; Will Yun Lee and Jimmy Gonzales as crew members; and Mia Goth as Penelope’s maid Melantho. We also have Zendaya as Athena, Charlize Theron as Circe, and Lupita Nyong’o in an as-yet-undisclosed role.

The Odyssey hits theaters on July 17, 2026.

Odyssey trailer brings the myth to vivid life Read More »

How Europe’s new carbon tax on imported goods will change global trade

carbon border adjustment mechanism, EU, European Union, global trade, Policy, syndication / Tim Belzer / December 20, 2025

In many countries, CBAM is also accelerating interest in renewable energy and greener industrial processes. Some see it not as a threat, but an opportunity to attract investment and position themselves as low-carbon manufacturing hubs.

However, this mechanism is still controversial. For businesses, CBAM is complex and administratively heavy. Firms need robust systems to measure embedded emissions, collect data from suppliers, and produce environmental product declarations. Many will also need new renewable energy contracts to cut their carbon footprint.

Around the world, CBAM has faced strong criticism. India and China describe it as “green protectionism,” arguing that it puts unfair pressure on developing economies. At the same time, the EU has not yet created dedicated funding to help exporters in lower-income countries adapt. Without this support, the mechanism may not achieve the desired results.

What about consumers?

Although CBAM is mainly aimed at industry, its ripple effects will reach consumers in the EU. Importers are unlikely to absorb the full additional cost, meaning prices are likely to rise—particularly for goods that rely heavily on steel, aluminium, or cement. This could mean Europe sees higher costs for cars, home appliances, electronics, building materials, and, indirectly, food production (through fertilizers).

At the same time, CBAM may bring more transparency. Because importers must report the emissions embedded in their goods, consumers may eventually have clearer information about the climate impact of what they buy.

The mechanism will also generate EU revenues from certificate sales. These are expected to support vulnerable households in many European countries, as well as funding clean technologies and improving energy efficiency. How the funds are used will be crucial to public acceptance of Europe’s new carbon tax.

Even before full implementation, CBAM is already reshaping supply chains and influencing government policies far beyond Europe’s borders. It may trigger trade disputes, push exporters to adopt carbon pricing, and highlight the need for more climate finance to support developing countries undergoing green industrial transitions.

For many European consumers, it’s likely to mean gradual price increases—and potentially, more climate-conscious purchasing decisions. Behind the scenes, it marks a significant shift in how global trade accounts for carbon—and how climate policy reaches into people’s everyday lives.

Simona Sagone, PhD Candidate, Green Finance, Lund University; University of Palermo. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

How Europe’s new carbon tax on imported goods will change global trade Read More »

The evolution of expendability: Why some ants traded armor for numbers

ants, Biology, evolution, Science / Tim Belzer / December 19, 2025

“Ants reduce per-worker investment in one of the most nutritionally expensive tissues for the good of the collective,” Matte explains. “They’re shifting from self-investment toward a distributed workforce.”

Power of the collective

The researchers think the pattern they observed in ants reflects a more universal trend in the evolution of societal complexity. The transition from solitary life to complex societies echoes the transition from single-celled organisms to multicellular ones.

In a single-celled organism, a cell must be a “jack-of-all-trades,” performing every function necessary for survival. In a multicellular animal, however, individual cells often become simpler and more specialized, relying on the collective for protection and resources.

“It’s a pattern that echoes the evolution of multicellularity, where cooperative units can be individually simpler than a solitary cell, yet collectively capable of far greater complexity,” says Matte. Still, the question of whether underinvesting in individuals to boost the collective makes sense for creatures other than ants remains open, and it most likely isn’t as much about nutritional economics as it is about sex.

Expendable servants

The study focused on ants that already have a reproductive division of labor, one where workers do not reproduce. This social structure is likely the key prerequisite for the cheap worker strategy. For the team, this is the reason we haven’t, at least so far, found similar evolutionary patterns in more complex social organisms like wolves, which live in packs—or humans with their amazingly complex societies. Wolves and people are both social, but maintain a high degree of individual self-interest regarding reproduction. Ant workers could be made expendable because they don’t pass their own genes—they are essentially extensions of the queen’s reproductive strategy.

Before looking for signs of ant-like approaches to quality versus quantity dilemmas in other species, the team wants to take an even closer look at ants. Economo, Matte, and their colleagues seek to expand their analysis to other ant tissues, such as the nervous system and muscles, to see if the cheapening of individuals extends beyond the exoskeleton. They are also looking at ant genomes to see what genetic innovations allowed for the shift from quality to quantity. “We still need a lot of work to understand ants’ evolution,” Matte says.

Science Advances. 2025. DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adx8068

The evolution of expendability: Why some ants traded armor for numbers Read More »

LG TVs’ unremovable Copilot shortcut is the least of smart TVs’ AI problems

AI, chatbots, copilot, generative ai, lg, microsoft, samsung, Tech, TVs / Tim Belzer / December 19, 2025

But Copilot will still be integrated into Tizen OS, and Samsung appears eager to push chatbots into TVs, including by launching Perplexity’s first TV app. Amazon, which released Fire TVs with Alexa+ this year, is also exploring putting chatbots into TVs.

After the backlash LG faced this week, companies may reconsider installing AI apps on people’s smart TVs. A better use of large language models in TVs may be as behind-the-scenes tools to improve TV watching. People generally don’t buy smart TVs to make it easier to access chatbots.

But this development is still troubling for anyone who doesn’t want an AI chatbot in their TV at all.

Some people don’t want chatbots in their TVs

Subtle integrations of generative AI that make it easier for people to do things like figure out the name of “that movie” may have practical use, but there are reasons to be wary of chatbot-wielding TVs.

Chatbots add another layer of complexity to understanding how a TV tracks user activity. With a chatbot involved, smart TV owners will be subject to complicated smart TV privacy policies and terms of service, as well as the similarly verbose rules of third-party AI companies. This will make it harder for people to understand what data they’re sharing with companies, and there’s already serious concern about the boundaries smart TVs are pushing to track users, including without consent.

Chatbots can also contribute to smart TV bloatware. Unwanted fluff, like games, shopping shortcuts, and flashy ads, already disrupts people who just want to watch TV.

LG’s Copilot web app is worthy of some grousing, but not necessarily because of the icon that users will eventually be able to delete. The more pressing issue is the TV industry’s shift toward monetizing software with user tracking and ads.

If you haven’t already, now is a good time to check out our guide to breaking free from smart TV ads and tracking.

LG TVs’ unremovable Copilot shortcut is the least of smart TVs’ AI problems Read More »

Author name: Tim Belzer

10th: Lotus Emira V6

9th: Volvo V60 Cross Country

8th: Volkswagen Golf GTI

7th: BMW i4 xDrive40

6th: Hyundai Ioniq 5

5th: Mercedes-Benz CLA

4th: BMW iX3

3rd: Honda Civic Hybrid

2nd: Porsche 911 GTS T-Hybrid

1st: Nissan Leaf

Military and Pokemon players?

Finding your place

No going back

Starting over

Underdogs (National Geographic/Disney+)

Dept. Q (Netflix)

Daredevil: Born Again (Disney+)

Boots (Netflix)

Only Murders in the Building S5 (Hulu)

The Sandman S2 (Netflix)

Ludwig (BBC)

Poker Face S2 (Peacock)

The Gilded Age S3 (HBO)

Outrageous (Britbox)

A Man on the Inside S2 (Netflix)

Andor S2 (Disney+)

National Finals Rodeo (The Cowboy Channel)

Top Guns: The Next Generation (National Geographic/Disney+)

Alien: Earth (FX/Hulu)

Squid Game S3 (Netflix)

The Diplomat S3 (Netflix)

Murderbot (Apple TV)

Down Cemetery Road (Apple TV)

Pluribus (Apple TV)

Slow Horses S5 (Apple TV)

Severance S2 (Apple TV)

The Residence (Netflix)

Splay as a monitor

Splay as a projector

First clues to clumping clouds

Supercharging heavy rains

The future of extreme rainfall

What about consumers?

Power of the collective

Expendable servants

Some people don’t want chatbots in their TVs