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Spot available on Mental Health Board - Illinois Times, the capital city's source of news, politics, arts, entertainment, culture
Sangamon County Board is seeking to fill a vacancy on the Mental Health Board in the next few weeks. Interested individuals should submit a résumé, letter of interest and “any supporting documents, such as letters of recommendation” in person to 200 S. Ninth Street or to County@SangamonIL.gov by Nov. 5 at 5 p.m. Sangamon County […]
Five Ways Out Of Israel's Political Deadlock, Most Are In Netanyahu's Favour
The fragmented outcome sets the stage for difficult negotiations to form a government that could last weeks, as deep-rooted political and ideological divisions make any seemingly straightforward coalition almost impossible.
Australian actor and martial artist Richard Norton’s 2025 death linked to peptide usage
The 75-year-old died in March 2025, less than two weeks after a doctor prescribed the trendy anti-aging medication.
Steelers ready themselves ahead of Browns rematch
The Pittsburgh Steelers are preparing for a rematch against the Cleveland Browns following a defeat in Cleveland four weeks ago.
Apple Releasing HomePod Mini 2 Tomorrow With These New Features
Following more than two weeks of pre-orders, the HomePod mini 2 will begin arriving to customers and launch in stores this Friday, October 30. Siri AI will be one of the HomePod mini 2's key upgrades, but the feature will not be available at launch. Apple said Siri AI support on the speaker will arrive in a future software update, but it did not say when the update will be released.
A golden age of science is coming
It’s almost hard to remember, but just a few years ago, a lot of very smart people thought that science was in terminal decline. Respected researchers were writing papers with titles like “Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?”, “Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time”, and “Slowed canonical progress in large fields of science”. In 1996, science writer John Horgan even published a book called The End Of Science: Facing The Limits Of Knowledge In The Twilight Of The Scientific Age. The fundamental idea was that the Universe only has so many insights to discover, and that we’ve picked the low-hanging fruit. It was the idea that Joseph-Louis Lagrange expressed when he said that “we cannot find more than once a system of the world to establish.” As the big ideas and the simple ideas get mined out, we’re forced to throw ever more brains at the mysteries of nature just to keep scientific progress going at a fraction of its old pace: It looked like science was hitting a wall. Then along came AI. It’s far too early to tell how much AI will eventually speed up the growth of total factor productivity. But already we can see signs of a speedup in science. Anthropic Founder Jack Clark assembled some of the hopeful data points in a recent lecture: [ Dror Poleg@drorpoleg "If you pick different parts of science, you see the same pattern show up: Progress is accelerating, and it has started to accelerate in the last two years." Jack Clark @jackclarkSF I’m speaking at the IMF in an hour about the singularity and why I believe it has begun and the choices we'll need to make. Watch live here: https://t.co/Hj9HzcXx5h 6:08 PM · Oct 18, 2026 · 21.2K Views 2 Replies · 10 Reposts · 123 Likes ](https://x.com/drorpoleg/status/2111882070376980529) Anthropic is accelerating its investment into drug discovery, and is already announcing some impressive preliminary results: [ BioTender@Junioryu136689 BREAKING: Anthropic unveils early results from six Claude-powered drug development collaborations. • 70% shorter CAR-T signaling domain • ~35,000 antibody designs • >10× tighter antibody binding • 89% less batch-record review time Still largely preclinical. Anthropic @AnthropicAI Over the past few months, Anthropic scientists have engaged in deep research partnerships with six organizations developing new medicines. We've also begun drug discovery efforts of our own. In doing so, we’ve learned much more about how Claude can support the many stages of 9:43 PM · Oct 27, 2026 · 11.2K Views 3 Replies · 24 Reposts · 205 Likes ](https://x.com/Junioryu136689/status/2115197821150495150) Claude also appears to be enabling rapid progress toward a treatment for food allergies. OpenAI, meanwhile, announced a possible breakthrough treatment for neurodegenerative disease. Meanwhile, Google Cloud Chief Scientist Pushmeet Kohli has a list of recent scientific advances that have been enabled by its new Gemini model, including breakthroughs in nuclear fusion reactor design, rare disease research, and quantum computing: [ Pushmeet Kohli@pushmeet Gemini 4 Argon is a step change in model performance. In recent weeks, it has had a transformative impact on the Science projects in our team at @GoogleDeepMind and our external collaborators, and helped make a number of remarkable advances across scientific disciplines. 🧵👇 4:47 PM · Oct 13, 2026 · 36.5K Views 8 Replies · 41 Reposts · 497 Likes ](https://x.com/pushmeet/status/2110049807385702623) But as cool as these stories sound, they’re just very minor, preliminary efforts. There are a number of reasons to think that AI is going to propel us into a golden age of scientific discovery. That age might not last forever — AI might still run into diminishing returns eventually. But the next few decades are probably going to be an absolutely amazing time for human science. The number of “effective researchers” is no longer limited The most important input into science is scientists themselves. Until this year, that meant human brains — talented, highly trained human brains. The number of trained human brains could be increased by sending more people to grad school, but only to a point — the smartest people tend to be sent into the hardest research fields first, and if you 10x the number of researchers, the average quality will go down. This constraint was already starting to bite, as Ekerdt and Wu argued in 2024: We argue that a substantial portion of the downward historical trend in U.S. research productivity is a composition effect resulting from self-selection in researcher ability and the dramatic expansion of the research sector…[W]e find that this composition effect has lowered average researcher ability by between 37% and 53%[.] And of course, low fertility was making the problem worse, because fewer children meant fewer people who were able to become future scientists. AI just blows up this constraint completely. If an AI agent can function as an autonomous researcher, there’s no constraint on the number of researchers in the world — you can just build more of them, by building more computer chips and data centers that enable the running of more AI agents. Whether or not massive hordes of agents can collaborate to solve individual problems much faster, increasing the number of agents allows them to tackle many different research questions in parallel. What’s more, these AI “researchers” can be trained incredibly quickly compared to human beings. A human scientist takes decades to train, and more years to reach the frontier of their research field by diligent reading and conversation. This is the “burden of knowledge”, and it’s commonly believed to be one reason ideas have been getting harder to find — by the time human scientists can get up to speed, they’re often so old that their ideas are no longer novel. AI just annihilates this constraint — it can assimilate the entire literature and reach the frontier of research extremely quickly, and it can also tell human scientists where the frontier lies without forcing them to discover that for themselves. It can also pivot to new research directions more easily than humans can. And there’s also a self-reinforcing economic cycle here. Because scientific advances enable higher GDP, they enable more resources to be invested into the creation of yet more electronic “scientists”. Now that doesn’t mean the amount of scientific research goes to infinity — there may still be some essential bottleneck task that human researchers are still needed to perform. There are some indications that AI’s progress on open-ended conceptual research tasks is slower than in other dimensions, and it may be that humans are still needed to provide some of this long-term conceptual thinking. I’d bet against this being true for much longer, but it might be true for a long time. Even in this most “pessimistic” case, though, the amount of effective capital that scientists can use to leverage their work just went up by a lot. AI eliminates the theory bottleneck Science proceeds by an iterative process of theory and experiment. The theory part of that cycle is typically short, but non-trivial — it took a couple of years after the blackbody radiation spectrum was observed for Max Planck to come up with the quantum hypothesis to explain it, and decades longer before quantum theory as we now know it was created. It took about a year for Watson and Crick to figure out the shape of DNA after the requisite data was gathered. AI will basically eliminate the theory bottleneck entirely — or at least shorten the turnaround time between experiment and theory by an order of magnitude. AI is an absolute beast at math. Recently, an OpenAI model solved some of the most important open problems in computer science, math, and theoretical physics, and no one even batted an eyebrow because that sort of triumph is becoming increasingly commonplace. One of those solutions was a proof that the Standard Model of Particle Physics could be mathematically well-defined — a problem that human theorists had so far been unable to tackle. Not all research relies equally on theory, but understanding novel experimental results almost always involves some important component of either mathematical or spatial reasoning. That part of the task has now been made much, much faster. And on top of that, science is now open to a greater number of humans who aren’t naturally good at theorizing. AI can read the whole literature Much of the work of human scientists involves reading and understanding endless amounts of papers and going to endless conferences and seminars. The purpose of that work is to understand the existing scientific literature. Understanding the literature allows scientists to do the following things: Come up with new ideas for hypotheses to test Avoid doing research that someone else has already done Synthesize approaches from different areas or fields AI can reduce this effort to almost zero. Consider this excerpt from OpenAI’s blog post about their new research into neurodegenerative disease: The team divided the analysis among thousands of AI agents powered by GPT‑Rosalind, an approach we call distributed biological reasoning. The agents examined a whole-brain CRISPR atlas…a dataset showing how gene disruptions affect different types of cells across the mouse brain. Each agent investigated a gene disruption, analyzed cellular responses, searched scientific literature, and proposed explanations for the results. Their reports were combined into a reasoning atlas linking genes, cellular effects, relevant publications, and possible biological mechanisms. The research team estimated that comparable human analysis and literature review, conducted one perturbation at a time, would take months to a year. The agents reproduced findings from human analyses while uncovering additional leads. Their assessments of novelty and scientific value also aligned with judgments from blinded human experts. These findings help prioritize further experiments needed to test the proposed biological mechanisms. Some of these insights point to new leads for understanding brain disease. [emphasis mine] This is one case in which parallel work by a large number of agents really does make a huge difference: [ Haider.@haider1 this is actually insane openai deployed thousands of GPT-Rosalind agents to analyze millions of mouse brain cells in 32 minutes, work that could take human researchers months to a year also the agents uncovered new leads for brain diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's OpenAI @OpenAI GPT-Rosalind surfaced a new lead for drug discovery: could restoring cholesterol transport protect neurons from degeneration? DCTN1 is a gene linked to Perry syndrome, a rare neurodegenerative disorder. In mouse-brain data, disrupting it increased expression of genes involved in 2:41 PM · Oct 21, 2026 · 51.5K Views 26 Replies · 95 Reposts · 1.26K Likes ](https://x.com/haider1/status/2112917197903540516) Not only does instantaneous literature review vastly speed up the research process, but it allows AI to make novel conceptual leaps from combining approaches from wildly different fields of research. AI regularly does this in math research, combining results, approaches, and theorems from far-flung places that no human mathematician would have thought to combine. It can do it in science, too. Much of scientific innovation, historically, has been “recombinant” innovation — scientists applying insights from one field to another. With AI, essentially all research is now cross-disciplinary — AI can read not just the literature on a particular subject, but the literature on a million other subjects that might have produced useful techniques or insights for the problem at hand. Superscience So far, all of the factors I’ve listed are ways that AI can speed up science as it’s already done. I’ve basically described how AI can send gigantic hordes of superhumanly fast, superhumanly well-read, superhumanly mathematically gifted researchers to re-accelerate scientific discovery. But it’s also possible that AI will enable types of discovery — and ways of understanding the natural world — that no network of humans, no matter how large or how brilliant it was or how long it had to work, would ever be able to discover. In a post back in July, I wrote about how that might work: What if there are lots of…aspects of the Universe that [are] too complex to understand in terms of simple laws, but not so complex that they just dissolve into unknowable chaos? It’s possible that we can reliably control these complex phenomena with AI, even if we never reduce them to the kind of principles that we can teach a grad student in a textbook… Another way of saying this is that there may be laws of the universe that humans can’t understand but AI can. I call these “cloud laws” — causal regularities that can be exploited by technology, but which are too diffuse and complex for an individual human being to either intuit or communicate… Perhaps social sciences like economics, sociology, and political science obey similarly complex regularities, and AI can help us find them. Perhaps there are physical processes — plasma, or topological materials, or aerial turbulence, etc. — that obey cloud laws instead of chaos?… [H]uman collaboration is bottlenecked — it’s limited by our ability to intuit patterns at an individual level, and to communicate these patterns from one individual to another. AI, being a computer, just doesn’t have this sort of limitation; it can work with vast, diffuse patterns without having to break them into pieces or simplify them in order to compress them into the tiny pipelines of person-to-person explanation… If much of the Universe turns out to be ruled by cloud laws, we could be on the precipice of a scientific renaissance. In order to discover cloud laws, AI will need huge amounts of data about the natural world. AI figured out human speech by assimilating essentially all of the text humans have ever written. If it’s going to figure out hidden patterns in biology, neuroscience, materials science, etc., it’s going to need similarly massive amounts of data from physical instruments. That data will be far, far more than humans — individually or collectively — would be able to parse, label, characterize, or model. But AI was built to do this. If scientists simply build huge arrays of sensors to measure complex phenomena like the brain, the cell, the economy, etc., they may be able to feed this flood of data to AI directly and bypass human cognitive intermediation entirely. AI would then learn about the world directly, and it might learn things that humans never could. This “superscience”, if you want to call it that, would actually go beyond the kind of science humans have done heretofore. Many of the technologies it yielded would be beyond human comprehension — indistinguishable from magic. But to the AIs, they would make perfect scientific sense. In any case, it seems clear that the scientific slowdown that threatened human progress will now be delayed — at least for a while. Unless humans have somehow found most of the actual exploitable regularities in our Universe, we’re about to enter a new golden age of science. Subscribe Share
‘Took care of his business’ – Chiefs coach Andy Reid defends controversial Justin Tucker signing
Kansas City Chiefs head coach Andy Reid had to face the media fire after the team signed kicker Justin Tucker to the practice squad. Tucker was suspended by the NFL without pay for the first 10 weeks of the 2025 season under the personal conduct policy for allegations of inappropriate conduct during massage sessions between 2012 and 2016 while on the Baltimore Ravens.
Garrett Wilson makes decision on Jets
New York Jets wide receiver Garrett Wilson has been visibly frustrated in recent weeks, with the team sitting at 2-5 and the star wideout rarely getting the ball. And with the trade deadline approaching, that frustration has led to plenty of speculation about his future in New York. On Wednesday, Wilson addressed that speculation head-on,…
Zillow agrees to pay $212.5M to settle investor lawsuit over failed home-flipping business
Zillow will pay $212.5 million to settle a shareholder class action alleging it misled investors about Zillow Offers, the home-flipping business it shut down in 2021. The deal, which needs court approval, comes three weeks after the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear Zillow's challenge to the case's class status.
Fox News viewer dip pre-election suggests Republican unease
NEW YORK — Fox News, the most-watched cable news network, saw a 28% prime-time viewer decline over the past four weeks leading up to the midterm elections, a sign the
Deadlock in Israeli elections means weeks of political jockeying
With no clear winner in Israeli elections, the opposition has to decide if it allies with Arab parties.
Israel faces weeks of political wrangling after deadlocked election
Remaining as a caretaker prime minister could be Netanyahu's best option.
Here's what's happening in St. Helena
Here's what's happening in St. Helena in the next few weeks.
Official | Lens’ Odsonne Édouard undergoes surgery
Odsonne Édouard (28) has undergone surgery for an adductor injury and will miss several weeks of action, RC Lens have confirmed. Édouard has struggled with injuries throughout the start of the seaso...
In brief: Amy Poehler stars in 'Dig' official trailer and more
The official trailer for Dig has been unearthed. Amy Poehler co-created and stars in the show that also features Hugh Laurie, Geraldine Viswanathan, Antonia Thomas and Fina Strazza as parts of its main cast. The 10-episode season of the new comedy premieres on Peacock on Nov. 23 ...Miraculous: Tales of Ladybug & Cat Noir has released its worldwide season 7 rollout strategy. The show is set to debut in the U.S. and Latin America on Disney Channel on Nov. 20. It will be available to stream on Disney+ the next day. The animated children's TV series is incredibly popular, having ranked fourth among all TV series globally — not just children's programming — in Parrot Analytics data covering the days between June 21 to Sept. 18 ... TNCMS.AdManager.render({region: 'fixed-big-ad-top-asset', slot: 1, fold: "above"}); Billy Crystal is sticking around on Broadway a bit longer. His new solo play 860 has been extended six weeks due to popular demand. It will remain playing at the Imperial Theatre until Feb. 14, 2027. The show finds Crystal recounting the aftermath of the Palisades fire that destroyed his home and uses that incident to reflect on his life ...Copyright © 2026, ABC Audio. All rights reserved. Thank you for reading kmaland.comAt KMA, we attempt to be accurate in our reporting. If you see a typo or mistake in a story, please contact us by emailing kmaradio@kmaland.com.
Politics is medicine on a large scale
In February 1848, a 26-year-old doctor named Rudolf Virchow arrived in Upper Silesia, a poor, rural corner of Prussia that’s now part of Poland. A typhus epidemic was killing thousands, and the Berlin government wanted a doctor to assess how to contain this pathogen, advise local authorities, and propose a plan. Virchow spent a few weeks going from villa…
‘Surprised’ Marshall Director Opens Von Braun Space Exploration Symposium
Just a couple weeks ago, Stephen Cash was living life as a retiree from the Marshall Space Flight Center.
Inside Melania Trump's secret diplomatic role in the Russia-Ukraine ceasefire deal
Melania Trump spent weeks negotiating between Moscow and Kyiv to broker a localized ceasefire in Oleshky, a devastated city in Ukraine's Kherson region.
907 Sports: ‘Probably the big story for ASAA this year,’ the future of 9-man football in Alaska
Over the past two weeks, Alaska has seen four football programs crowned as state champions of their respective class. However, only three of those championships were sanctioned by ASAA, the governing body of high school athletics in the state, with the 9-man division excluded from an official state championship.
Fourth Graders Explore the Wonders of Space in Science Class
Mrs. Bridges’ fourthgrade science students at Wheeler County Elementary School had an exciting start to the school year as they explored the wonders of space during the first several weeks of class. Throughout the unit, students participated in a variety of hands-on activities designed to expand their knowledge of the universe. They created Solar System
Stacy’s Streamers: Five Players to Start in Week 8
Stacy Perez highlights at least one player at each position who is capable of helping your team through all the injuries and bye weeks in Week 8.
Further Thoughts on the Googlebook, in Comparison to the MacBook Air
I’ve had the Googlebook now for a couple of weeks, and I have gotten a chance to both use it on a regular basis, and compare it with the MacBook Air I have (it sports an M4 processor). One of…
Animals Starves while the Kardashians Miss the Charts Again
(Welcome to my weekly streaming ratings report, the single best guide to what’s popular in streaming TV and what isn’t. I’m the Entertainment Strategy Guy, a former streaming executive who now analyzes business strategy in the entertainment industry. If you were forwarded this email, please subscribe to get these insights each week.) Before we get going, I’d like to offer congratulations to Jonathan Funke, whose suggestion “midflicks” won the poll for what I should call straight-to-streaming films which aren’t big or cinematic enough to go to theaters but seem too expensive for a TV movie. It’s so useful a term, I just used it last week! Now I just need to add this term to my data dictionary! Okay, on to this week’s issue. We’re starting out looking at Netflix/Ben Affleck’s latest crime thriller, Animals. I’ll also look at Disclosure Day heading to Peacock (it did better than you’d remember in theaters...) and a new movie based on toys. Plus, a long-time streaming flop returns for its eighth season...will it finally chart? (No.) Will anyone at Disney care? Probably not. All that, plus another look at new shows landing on streaming on 1-Oct from Reelgood, what streamer hasn’t had a film make the Luminate charts since August, Reacher’s long run on the charts, M_onster: The Lizzie Borden Story’s_ short run, the top shows in 2026 according to Samba TV, all the flops, bombs and misses, and a whole lot more. And I mean that last part: putting this week’s issue together, I assembled OVER 25 images, most of which are bespoke looks I made just for this report. Really, publishing articles like this takes the work of writing two articles: one is the narrative and the other is making charts/graphs. Let’s dive right in! (Reminder: The streaming ratings report focuses on the U.S. market and compiles data from Nielsen’s weekly top ten viewership ranks, Luminate’s Top Ten Data, JustWatch and Reelgood interest data, Samba TV household viewership, company datecdotes, Netflix hours viewed data, Google Trends, and IMDb to determine the most popular content. While most data points are current, Nielsen’s data covers the week of October 5th to October 11th, 2026. You can find a link to my terminology here.) Subscribe Film - Netflix’s Latest Star-Studded Thriller Goes For Glory The tempting angle for anyone writing about streaming film this month, like yours truly, is to ask, “Is this why Dan Lin lost his job at Netflix?” Take Animals, the Ben Affleck-starring-and-directing, Artists Equity-produced crime thriller that opened on 9-Oct. (Kerry Washington and Gillian Anderson are also in it.) If it did really well, then one could argue that Lin has another success on his resume. If it underperformed, then it’s another example of a Netflix underperformance this year. So where did Animals fall? Kinda in the middle, but that means it’s more “not a hit” than “big hit”. On Nielsen, it opened to 12.0 million hours, and here’s how that stacks up for 2026 films so far this year: Obviously, that’s not great. It’s both under my 15 million opening bar for “fine” for a Netflix film and 20 million bar for “great” opening. It did a bit better on Samba TV, getting to first place. That’s very, very good, though again, looking at the Nielsen data, it probably means that it was a light week overall. Luminate’s data is a bit closer to Samba TV’s, tied for 17th all time for single weeks since May of 2024: To top it off, no one seemed to like it. It has a 33 on Metacritic and only a 5.7 on IMDb. Both of these numbers could have been impacted by the stories about Affleck’s comments about using AI to make the film. Given the controversy, the film might not have been as bad as the ratings suggest, but it’s also not a bullish sign. All to say…yeah, on net this film isn’t a point in Dan Lin’s favor. At this point, Netflix’s slide has been long enough—going on since February—that I’m almost tempted to lower the bar for what a “hit” is on streaming. Post-February of 2026 or so, it seems like straight-to-streaming films just haven’t hit the same heights as they did from 2022 to 2025. Before we head onto the “Quick Hits” for film, I want to shout out a fellow newsletter whose articles I’ve been loving this year, LA Material, a new LA-based news outlet. For just a highlight of my favorite articles since July... I loved this article on Ghost Town, a group on Venice that clears homeless encampments. As a Los Angeleno, obviously I adore their articles on LA parking issues. Their article on illegal parking tickets got the City Council to address the issue! Also check out their article on people parking in medians. Check out their deep dive on what went wrong with the LA Jazz Festival and how it fell apart, or what’s wrong with USC’s finances. Finally, they wrote up a voter guide on voter guides for the LA General Election. So meta! In search of a city? L.A. Material is an independent news outlet covering the people, politics, culture and glorious chaos shaping Los Angeles. L.A. Material brings you intel on the city you can’t get anywhere else. From exploring how Reddit short stories became Hollywood’s hottest commodity to reporting on the survival jobs keeping entertainment workers afloat. And answering, once and for all, why the AMC Burbank escalator is always broken. Through their newsletters, podcast, videos, events, and member community, L.A. Material is designed to help Angelenos connect to Los Angeles and each other. Sign up now for the free weekday newsletter. Quick Notes on Film Steven Spielberg’s latest film, Disclosure Day, came to Peacock on 9-Oct, and I’ll admit that, after pulling its stats, I did a pinch of a double take. As I wrote throughout my deep, deep, deep dive on summer box office/Obsession/Backrooms/IP/superheroes, oftentimes the film media discusses films as “flops” or “misses” or “hits” without clarifying what they specifically mean. Since Disclosure Day didn’t make $250 million in the US or $500 million globally, it was definitely a disappointment by Spielbergian standards, who is the highest-grossing director of all time, and arguably even more ahead in adjusted grosses. But it did make $245 million globally on a $115 million budget, so it isn’t as big of a miss as I remember. That’s still probably not enough to break even in the theatrical window, when you factor in marketing costs…but it’s close. And it grossed a lot more even in the US than some titles with about ten times more coverage. Anyways, lots of preamble to say this one only did 4.5 million hours according to Nielsen, so it did make the charts, but on the low end. Here’s how it stacks up to other Peacock titles: Apple TV (née +) followed up their “success for them” Mayday with Matchbox The Movie. This one doesn’t look like a success even for them, but at least it’s not a miss. Apple/Skydance clearly tried to take advantage of the success of Barbie at the box office—let’s greenlight all the toy properties!!!—but of course, this didn’t make it to theaters. And it stars John Cena, who, as I argued earlier this summer, NEEDS to get his movies back in theaters. Anyways, this one has mixed-to-bad numbers. It missed the Samba TV and Nielsen charts in its first week, but did make Luminate with 7.1 million hours. That’s just enough to not be an outright miss, and about half what Mayday did earlier this summer. Speaking of Apple Studio’s Mayday, it ended up lasting five weeks on Luminate, which isn’t bad for Apple TV. On Nielsen, it had a three-week run, racking up 13.5 million hours total. Again, like Matchbox, the issue is the budget; I doubt that this viewership earned enough to justify that budget. Also, to be clear, neither of these films are “midflicks”; both should have gone to theaters. Toy Story 5 is not hanging around on the streaming charts on Disney+, so it’s not as leggy as either Zootopia 2 or Moana 2, and definitely not in the same class as Encanto. (It did make all the money at the box office, so Disney is going to be fine…) The Breadwinner on Netflix (from Sony) is down to 3.9 million hours in its third week. It only lasted for one week on the Samba TV charts. Netflix’s Doing Life had a smaller-than-normal binge release curve bounce, only going to 7.1 million hours from 6.0 to start, but it made Samba TV at fifth place in its second week. The Netflix documentary, The Widower: Til’ Death Do Us Part, also had a small binge release curve bounce to 6.5 million hours, but did make a second week on Samba TV. Meanwhile, Netflix’s Unabomber fell off after two weeks on Nielsen—which is not great at all—and Demon Slayer fell off after just one week. Over on Luminate, the two smaller titles The Swan: Behind the Mirror and Kill. Bury. Print both fell out of the Luminate top ten charts. The story of library film at the first of the month is the arrival of the Ice Age films on Netflix. Now, here’s a small example of optimizing your library that even Netflix could do better. Say you want to rent/license a new film series from Disney**.** A streamer could pay a big paycheck and then drop each Ice Age film on the exact same day of the month, the fourth of October. That’s one choice. In contrast, the streamer could have released each film one week apart, and make each one a mini-event for folks watching Ice Age films. Or even roll them out monthly. Netflix opted for the former strategy, and as a result, only three of the films made the Nielsen charts this week. The “Miss of the Week” goes to Tubi’s YA-ish horror film_, R.L. Stine’s Pumpkinhead 2_, which didn’t even make the Luminate charts like Tubi films usually do, or, should I say, “used to”? Tubi films, most of which are straight-to-streaming, used to reliably make the Luminate film charts (which only covers straight-to-streaming films), but a Tubi film hasn’t made it since August. The first Pumpkinhead got 1.4 million hours last year according to Luminate. As I wrote about this film before, it seems to be a bit muddled in terms of age: too scary for young kids but probably not scary enough for older kids. Speaking of Luminate, Netflix’s latest doc about a comic (expect more docs about comedians all month), Who Is Martin Mull?, flopped, getting just 200K and 700K hours according to Luminate. Three other film/special misses belonged to Hulu, including a standup special, Jamie Foxx: Take Care of Yourself, Neon’s latest horror film, Hokum, which made $17 million in the US, and a Family Guy Halloween special. (That last one was only 22 minutes, so it’s not a surprise it missed.) Finally, another Netflix standup special missed the charts, Mojo Brookzz: I Know You Lying missed too. I can confirm last week’s misses, most notably Paramount+’s Jackass: Best and Last, MUBI’s Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma and HBO Max’s Evil Dead Burn. Television - I Can’t Visualize Nothing: The Kardashians Story Normally, in the mini-dive essays that open the Streaming Ratings Report, I focus on shows that do well or, at the very least, make the charts. Why? Because as I’ve said time and again, I can’t visualize nothing like, say, the Kardashians’ TV shows. Here’s the TV debuts chart for this week with a missing spot for The Kardashians, whose eighth season just landed on Hulu:
Neonatal intensive care unit at Penn State Health Lancaster Medical Center to open Saturday
Beginning Saturday, parents with babies born at 32 weeks and above in Lancaster County will have another choice of hospitals as Penn State Health Lancaster Medical Center’s three-bed level II
Bucs Rookie Named Biggest Offseason Addition Through Seven Weeks
The Tampa Bay Buccaneers struck gold with their second-round selection in this past draft, with linebacker Josiah Trotter serving as head coach Todd Bowles' best defender. As the team gets back into the playoff picture, his production will be expected to continue.
GTA 6 game size revealed, as pre-load commences in just over two weeks
It’s no surprise that GTA 6 is going to be massive and demand a lot of storage space. We now know exactly how much, and a lot of PS5 players are going to have to do some reorganizing.
Trump’s Ukraine Moves and Middle East Tensions Have Europe on Edge Ahead of Elections
As Americans head to the polls, many people in both Europe and the Middle East are on edge, wondering how the midterm elections may shape U.S. foreign policy in the weeks and months to come. While much of the attention domestically has focused on fuel prices and the cost of living, President Donald ...
Googlebook should have been framed as the Chromebook successor, not a MacBook rival
If you’ve spent any time reading or watching the initial wave of Googlebook reviews over the past couple of weeks, you’ve seen the frustration firsthand. Mainstream reviewers are picking up these...
Bengals Face a Potential Trap Game This Week Against Titans
Cincinnati is coming off a statement win over the Ravens, but can the Bengals avoid a trap game against a struggling Titans team that has shown signs of improvement over the past two weeks?
Android Find Hub app reveals how ‘Left Behind’ and ‘Ring your phone’ alerts work on Pixel Tag
We’re just weeks away from the launch of Google’s first Android Find Hub tracker, the Pixel Tag, and that’s also...
Trump administration asks Washington state to hold more than 400 people’s ballots
The Justice Department has claimed the individuals may not be eligible to vote, weeks after making a similar request in California.
Are Chelsea finally playing the brand of football Sonia Bompastor wants - and is it WSL title-worthy?
Digital journalist Laura Hunter returns for a second season with a WSL-dedicated column, analysing all the big talking points from across the weekends action; this weeks focus is on Chelseas resurgence and Man Utds swift development under Eva Olid
A familiar mystery in Baltimore: The confusion around Lamar Jackson’s health
The Ravens characterized Lamar Jackson as day-to-day after injuring his ankle on Oct. 4. He hasn’t played in three weeks.
Golden Nuggets: Two weeks left to stew on that loss
Your daily San Francisco 49ers news for Tuesday, October 27th, 2026
Could meals help keep older adults from returning to the hospital?
Research found that food-insecure older adults who received two weeks of home-delivered meals after hospitalization had lower odds of early readmission.
Semiconductor stocks drive markets more than oil, Goldman says
Semiconductor exposure explained 54% of differences in cross-asset returns over three weeks, compared with just 2% for oil prices.
Israel heads to polls for pivotal election defined by security and democracy
Many fear neither of the leading political blocs will win enough seats for a majority - meaning weeks or months of political wrangling may lie ahead.
How Trump’s ‘little detour’ to Iran became a roadblock in the midterm elections
When President Donald Trump launched his war on Iran, he said it would last a matter of weeks.
Skydance offers voluntary buyouts to some employees
Skydance Corp. is offering some employees a one-time voluntary buyout, a move that comes nearly three weeks after Paramount Skydance closed its $111 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery. The
US told Venezuelan authorities that opposition leader Machado should be allowed to return
WASHINGTON (AP) — Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Monday that the Trump administration told Venezuela’s interim authorities “weeks and weeks ago” that oppos
Lexington Mexican restaurant reopens after 2 weeks. Why health department shut it down
What it means when a red notice goes on a restaurant door.
Vatican confirms Pope Leo's Latin America trip after post-surgery checkup
Pope Leo XIV will proceed with his planned Nov. 6-17 trip to Uruguay, Argentina and Peru, after doctors determined there are no medical reasons preventing him from traveling three weeks after lung cancer surgery, the Vatican confirmed Monday.
Vatican confirms Pope Leo's Latin America trip after post-surgery checkup
Pope Leo XIV will proceed with his planned Nov. 6-17 trip to Uruguay, Argentina and Peru, after doctors determined there are no medical reasons preventing him from traveling three weeks after lung cancer surgery, the Vatican confirmed Monday.
Vatican confirms Pope Leo's Latin America trip after post-surgery checkup
Pope Leo XIV will proceed with his planned Nov. 6-17 trip to Uruguay, Argentina and Peru, after doctors determined there are no medical reasons preventing him from traveling three weeks after lung cancer surgery, the Vatican confirmed Monday.
Thune campaigns for Republicans in marquee Senate races in scramble to save majority
Republican candidates in marquee Senate races have welcomed Thune's help as he’s traveled around the country in the weeks before the midterm elections, scrambling to save his majority.
Dallas sports anchor lands new TV gig after hometown stint
The move comes weeks after another sports anchor left the Austin newsroom.
Mid-Columbia Ballet prepares for 50th anniversary of "The Nutcracker"
RICHLAND, WA. — For 50 years, the Mid-Columbia Ballet has brought the holiday classic The Nutcracker to audiences in the Tri-Cities. This year, the organization is celebrating that milestone with 144 dancers, new costumes and months of preparation to bring the beloved production to life. The annual performance is a major undertaking for the dancers, instructors and volunteers who work behind the scenes to make the show possible. Rehearsals span 13 weeks, with dancers practicing four days a week for multiple hours at a time.This year’s production will feature new costumes for the Waltz of the Flowers, including a sequence with as many as 25 dancers on stage at once. The show also brings together performers across generations, including adults who have been part of the production for more than 20 years. For Artistic Director Debra Rogo, the preparation begins long before the curtains open.Rogo has been involved with the Mid-Columbia Ballet for 40 years and says planning for The Nutcracker takes place throughout the year. While organizing a production of this size requires significant time and effort, she says watching young dancers grow and develop a passion for ballet makes it all worthwhile. “It’s why I do this,” Rogo said. “It is overwhelming ina good way. To be able to share into their lives and watch them develop a love of this art form and the hard work … it makes me very proud.”Rogo’s decades of involvement reflect the lasting impact the production has had on the local dance community. For many performers, The Nutcracker is more than a seasonal performance. It is an opportunity to build skills, create relationships and become part of a tradition that continues year after year.While the dancers spend weeks rehearsing their routines, a large team of volunteers works behind the scenes to support the production.More than 100 volunteers are involved this year, helping make the performance possible. Their contributions reflect the range of people who come together to support the arts in the Tri-Cities.Randy Haven, a longtime volunteer, says the sense of community is one of the things that makes the experience so special.“The people that you hear volunteering, it’s incredible,” Haven said. He described seeing people from different backgrounds working together backstage, from employees at Hanford to parents raising large families.Haven says that shared commitment creates a family-like atmosphere among the people involved in the production. For Rebecca and Torrie, the Mid-Columbia Ballet has been part of their lives since childhood. Both began dancing with the organization at age seven and have since returned as teachers, helping introduce the next generation to the art form.Their connection to the ballet has continued into their adult lives, creating an opportunity to share their love of dance with younger performers.Torrie now has three daughters performing in The Nutcracker, giving her the chance to watch them experience a tradition that was also part of her own childhood.Being able to see her daughters participate in the production has made the experience especially meaningful, she said.Although audiences can see productions of The Nutcracker in major cities such as New York and Seattle, those involved with the Mid-Columbia Ballet say the local performance offers something distinctive.The community atmosphere allows audiences to experience the production while supporting local performers and the people who dedicate their time to the arts.Rebecca says experiencing a live performance alongside other people is particularly meaningful in a world where so much time is spent looking at screens.She believes live art gives people an opportunity to connect with one another through a shared experience.The ballet’s production also gives local dancers the chance to perform for their community while continuing a tradition that has been part of the Tri-Cities for five decades. When to see ‘The Nutcracker’ in RichlandThe Mid-Columbia Ballet will present its 50th-anniversary production of The Nutcracker Dec. 10 through Dec. 13 in Richland.Tickets go on sale Nov. 1. Audiences can look forward to seeing 144 dancers, new costumes and the work of more than 100 volunteers come together for the holiday production.COPYRIGHT 2026 BY APPLE VALLEY NEWS NOW. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. THIS MATERIAL MAY NOT BE PUBLISHED, BROADCAST, REWRITTEN OR REDISTRIBUTED.
Nintendo details Zelda: Ocarina of Time midnight launch events at Nintendo NY and SF
We’re only two weeks away from the release of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time’s remake, so Nintendo is getting people ready by detailing what steps
Report: Packers Could Lose Their Starting Center for Weeks
Green Bay lost both of its centers in Detroit, and Monday's news on Sean Rhyan was no kinder. #OnePride
Faris Moumbagna relegated to Marseille reserves
Whilst Olympique de Marseille have a paper-thin squad following the summer fire sale, Bruno Genesio has made some strong calls with his squad management in recent weeks. As reported by La Provence, Ke...
Lakers Quietly Part Ways With Talented Guard After Recent Acquisition
The Lakers have traded Adam Flagler's G League rights to the Texas Legends just weeks after acquiring the talented guard. The post Lakers Quietly Part Ways With Talented Guard After Recent Acquisition appeared first on HEAVY.
Science and Engineering Apprenticeship Program (SEAP) 2026
Deadline: November 30, 2026 Applications are invited for the Science and Engineering Apprenticeship Program (SEAP) 2026. The Science and Engineering Apprenticeship Program (SEAP) places high school students in Department of Navy (DON) laboratories where they will take part in real Naval research for eight weeks during the summer. SEAP gives academically talented high school sophomores,
This Offseason Will Hold Serious Considerations for These Three Yankees
It’s been weeks now since the 2026 New York Yankees season officially ended. This hasn’t stopped analysts from digging deep into what the future holds for the club. This offseason will involve some deep considerations about the structure of this club. Now more than ever, the Yankees and their ownership and front office want to spend …
How Beacon Health System Closed an 8,000-Patient Care Gap in Under Eight Weeks
Beacon Health System used agentic AI to reach 8,000 overdue patients, improve colorectal cancer screening and generate measurable ROI.
Who Should Lead Off for the A's in 2027?
Henry Bolte thrived leading off the final six weeks of the 2026 season, but heading into 2027, Zack Gelof may be the answer.
‘You Can See Everything’ becomes highest-grossing documentary at U.S. box office in 15 years
Nathan Fielder has broken the box office in just 2 weeks, as ‘You Can See Everything’ becomes the highest-grossing documentary in the U.S. in 15 years, while ‘Clayface’ opens with a solid start and ‘Wildwood’ bombs.
Editorial: Company mergers are causing more harm to the entertainment industry than good
Two weeks ago, Paramount officially completed its $110 billion purchase of the historic Warner Bros.
MAPPED: The states Trump and top Democrats are targeting before Election Day
With Election Day less than two weeks away, Trump rallied in Florida, Georgia and Michigan as both parties deploy top surrogates to battlegrounds.
Made in Tarrant: Family turns sports card hobby into baseball stadium business
Rebecca Gallagher and her family opened their business in Choctaw Stadium in Arlington a few weeks ago. They hope it can grow into a place for community.
Made in Tarrant: Family turns sports card hobby into baseball stadium business
Rebecca Gallagher and her family opened their business in Choctaw Stadium in Arlington a few weeks ago. They hope it can grow into a place for community.
'Sound of Music' star Julie Andrews spotted in rare Hamptons outing weeks after turning 91
Julie Andrews, 91, was photographed in the Hamptons wearing a purple raincoat and pink sunglasses in a rare public outing in the coastal city.
10 Thoughts From Watching Others Sweat It Out
Back during the very lean years of the Ray Goff era in Athens, a certain revered columnist for the Macon Telegraph joked in a weekly prediction column that Georgia would lose to “Open” during its upcoming bye week. Thankfully, those years have passed by, and the outlook for Georgia during open weeks for what is […]
Inside California Politics: State Senate candidate John Erickson
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Indiana football should be better. It also could be worse
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At Issue: Oct. 25 focuses on political advertisements, Rep. John McGuire candidate profile
In less than two weeks, the votes will be in and you will know who will represent your hometown in Congress. But until then, the political advertisements will target you on every device and platform.
In first midterm rally, Obama blasts Trump administration
Democrats have embraced the former president as their most effective closing messenger in the final weeks of the high-stakes midterm campaign.
Netflix’s Leadership Shake Up…Explained
(Welcome to the “Most Important Story of the Week”, my bi-weekly strategy column analyzing the most important (but often not buzziest) news story of the last two weeks. I’m the Entertainment Strategy Guy, a former streaming executive who now analyzes business strategy in the entertainment industry. Please subscribe.) Well, I had a simple article planned for this week. Called “Whoa, I Missed It!”, I’d take a gander at a few important-but-under-the-radar stories I didn’t cover while I wrote about all things “Skydance. (Formerly known as “the saga of Netflix trying to buy Warner Bros., but not Discovery, then Paramount-Skydance bought all of Warner Bros. Discovery”.) Alas, that article will have to wait. Netflix made news. Ironically, my “Whoa, I Missed It!” article would have mostly been about “content” strategy decisions, which is also what today’s article is about. But instead of the entire industry, this article will only cover Netflix’s decision to upend their film and TV content teams. Just that! So that’s the full topic of the day. I’m going to tackle the issue in the opposite direction of the way “stuff” flows: uphill. We’ll start at film, then move onto TV, and then onto the CEOs themselves, and the strategy questions that still remain. But we start with the numbers driving this. Let’s dive in. Subscribe Most Important Story of the Week - Netflix Upends Their Corporate Hierarchy I’ve got a lot of thoughts, but we’ll start with the most common response to yesterday’s article. Let’s Talk Stock Price More than one person, responding to what I published two days ago, pointed out that, well, actually, the thing driving Netflix’s actions is this: In short, stock price! Even if Netflix isn’t obsessed with their own share price—they probably are, but, for the record, my strategic advice to every CEO is to absolutely ignore stock prices, which will, ironically, probably help the stock price long-term—most everyone thinks they are. By the way, I prefer market capitalization to stock prices, because it’s a more apples-to-apples way to compare companies: But there’s an even better way to look at it, and it kinda casts some doubt on the entire push here: price-to-earnings. I have a long list of articles that I wish I had written, and chief among them is an article titled, “Am I Still a Netflix ‘Bear’?” meaning someone who thinks Netflix’s stock is overvalued. As of last summer, Netflix had solved their biggest problem—which for me (circa 2019) was the lack of free cash flow—but their stock was CRAZY overvalued. That’s this chart here: Why did Netflix’s stock price increase to a price-to-earnings ratio of 50 last summer? What financial metric changed so quickly? Nothing. Given that, historically, mature entertainment companies average 10 to 20, with 16 being the average, that increase made little sense. Netflix’s stock swoon these last eight or so months wasn’t irrational; the stock price rise last year was. So if you want a really hot Netflix take, here it is: Netflix’s stock price has been going down because the financial industry recovered its senses, not because of any strategic mistake. Yes, that would imply that cleaning house may have been a mistake. That’s why the charts yesterday are so important, because they show that Netflix did have a strategic problem (a lack of hits) and that’s what they moved to address. (One could also argue the industry drastically overrated Netflix’s growth prospects, but that’s a financial industry problem, not a Netflix strategy problem per se. Some growth estimates are just crazy. *cough* AI *cough*) Now, the last time Netflix’s stock price crashed—circa 2022—it gave them an opening. I’d argue Netflix insiders knew they needed to expand post-COVID-19 crisis, adding advertising, cracking down on password sharing, and dabbling in sports. But if they had done that when their stock price was high, it would give folks a reason to second guess their strategy. (Arguably, last year, when Netflix pursued the Warner Bros. merger, it gave the industry a chance to review their business.) Instead, after the 2022 fall, they had the opening to make strategic changes. We may see Netflix pivot again following this latest slide. For example, the “binge versus weekly” conversation is alive and well again. Same for expanding into theaters even more. And adding both linear channels and streaming bundles. And maybe more either social, user-generated, vertical, or creator content. But the first shift came with who is making the content calls. A Message from Our Sponsor Last winter Pulp Fiction was on Netflix. For those same 90 days, it was also free, with ads, on Pluto TV and the Roku Channel. That is not a glitch, and it is not rare. The title has run on 20 different US streaming services since 2019, across 80 separate windows, and for more than 600 of those days it sat on a paid subscription service and a free ad-supported one at the same time. Almost nobody can see this, because when a title leaves a service, the record that it was ever there tends to leave with it. Reelgood keeps that record, dated to the day rather than the month: 4MM+ movie, show and episode titles across 300+ services globally, with timestamped arrivals, departures and moves across SVOD, AVOD, TVOD and vMVPD. Licensing teams price against every prior window. Rights teams check what a licensee actually delivered, and when. Pick a title you think you know: data.reelgood.com/title-availability Film - Dan Lin Want to know why I don’t opine on individual film or TV executives, especially new hires? Dan Lin. As I always caution, it’s really, really, really tough to predict which executives will succeed in new roles and which won’t. The successful head of co-production/finance partner, Rideback, Lin was considered for the head of DC Studios job before taking the job as the head of Netflix. By all accounts at the time, this was a smart hire. (That’s my read of the news coverage anyways.) But now that Netflix has fired Dan Lin, we got a slew of news stories about how he was doing a terrible job. In sports media, Bryan Curtis, new Substack writer/podcaster from The Ringer, calls this the “now you tell us” story, when you only hear the bad news after a star athlete leaves a sports team. In this case, now they tell us that Dan Lin was bad with talent after he got kicked out the door. So was Dan Lin a flop? It’s actually tough to say. While film moves faster than TV, even two years isn’t really enough time to evaluate a person’s output. The new head hasn’t really taken control. As Emily Horgan noted, it takes much longer than two years to produce animated films, so yeah, it’s definitely too early to judge in that domain. As for live-action films, I just published an article by Brandon Katz called “Netflix’s Summer of Bummer”, but I’d point out Netflix had a bad summer two years ago too. Arguably, their best summer came from KPop Demon Hunters last year and Happy Gilmore 2, the latter of which I saw credited to Lin. Then, the stories came out that Dan Lin clashed with talent, both Ben Affleck and Greta Gerwig, classic “now they tell us” factoids to explain his firing. This may have been true, but also should have been expected given that he was given the mandate to bring budgets back in check, especially after Rebel Moon. So if he made folks upset, well, that’s what he was hired to do! But also, he was described as “well-liked” at his hiring! In that case, I’m a bit sympathetic to Lin, since he may have been undercut by senior leadership, as often happens. Basically, a CEO hires a subordinate to be their “bad cop” and keep budgets in check, but then when talent complains, the CEO ends up undercutting them. That’s how I think you end up with a Narnia movie as expensive as any of the other flops, along with a film executive the town no longer likes. As a result, I think that Netflix is now executing a classic “hire the opposite” move by hiring Peter Rice. This phrase comes from my experience following football and basketball coaching decisions, where teams generally hire the opposite of who they just had. If you have an offense-minded head coach, hire the defensive guy. Or in college football, if you have a strong recruiter, then you pivot to an “X’s and Os” type of guy. Or in pro basketball, if you have a very analytically minded coach, you hire the player-friendly guy. I see that here. After dropping Scott Stuber—arguably a talent-friendly executive with lax budget control—Netflix hired the business guy to keep costs in check. Now Netflix is pivoting back to Peter Rice and presumably a more talent-friendly regime. (Disney, by the way, has done this twice: hiring business guys to succeed talent-friendly Bob Iger. It didn’t work out last time.) When it comes to Peter Rice…we’ll see! Maybe he works out, but maybe he doesn’t. I’d actually say the biggest problem is that Netflix still hasn’t solved its “IP Problem”, in that they don’t own much IP, so they just have a lower hit rate. The new executive won’t solve that. (Though buying Lionsgate would help.) Share “Content” - Bela Bajaria I almost published yesterday’s article after this column, but ended up flipping the order, because it told the story so well. So if you want the data for why Netflix is looking at TV to fix their problems, it’s in that article, this graph in particular: I know I just wrote that it’s often hard to judge executives, but Bajaria ran TV for six years and film for three and a half more. That’s more than enough to judge hit rates, and Netflix needs more hits. That’s the story. Since 2023, Netflix hasn’t had as many hit shows as it used to, and many of its previous power house TV shows have ended their runs (Stranger Things most of all). Also, many shows from 2020 to 2022 probably pre-dated Bajaria’s tenure. (That said, one thing may have been outside of Bajaria’s control, which I explain below.) Let’s lump some content strategy thoughts about Netflix and TV into one place: We’re just getting started with this issue, but the rest is for paid subscribers of the Entertainment Strategy Guy, so if you’d like to find out… Why I partially blame Squid Game for Netflix’s latest troubles… What is “the football trap”... Why it might not be the TV shows or films’ fault at all… What change I don’t think Netflix will make... How Bela Bajaria evolved Netflix’s TV strategy in smart ways… Whose departure likely submarined Bajaria’s final few years… One sneaky explanation for Netflix’s content struggles... And a whole lot more... ...please subscribe! We can only keep doing this great work with your support.
Kukakuka with Naka: Hawaii business filings delayed six weeks into DCCA Salesforce backlog
Hawaii businesses face six-to-eight-week DCCA delays amid Salesforce backlog after CNBC ranked state worst for business.
Critical 'Musk' documentary pulled from theatres after just two weeks
The film concludes its theatrical run with a $571,902 box-office performance.
Broncos vs. Cardinals score predictions for Week 7
The Denver Broncos have what we all would have marked down as an “easy” type game in May, but after they slogged through the first six weeks against some of the NFL’s best teams it doesn’t feel like there are any easy games at this level. The Arizona Cardinals are also coming off a huge […]
I spent two weeks using Googlebooks, and I have 5 big concerns
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Bayern Munich insiders raised red flags over 'workaholic' Vincent Kompany's health weeks before training ground collapse
New reports have emerged suggesting that senior figures at Bayern Munich were increasingly concerned about Vincent Kompany’s health and lack of work-life balance weeks before his recent collapse. The former Manchester City captain was rushed to hospital after falling ill while observing a reserve team training session, leaving those present at the Sabener Strasse facility deeply shaken.
Second raccoon tests positive for rabies in Los Angeles County, health officials say
Weeks after a raccoon tested positive for rabies in Los Angeles County for the first time since 1979, a second raccoon has tested positive for the deadly viral disease. The Los Angeles County Depar…
The Violent Cost of Being a Woman in Politics Spans Continents
Weekend Reading on Women’s Representation is a compilation of stories about women’s representation in politics, on boards, in sports and entertainment, in judicial offices and in the private sector in the U.S. and around the world ... with a little gardening and goodwill mixed in for refreshment. This week: —There is not (yet) the political will in the U.S. to talk about gender quotas ... but 35 nations in Europe have either been mandated or volunteered to implement them. —Weeks after the brutal rape of Arizona congressional candidate Bernadette Greene-Placentia, Australian independent member of Parliament Helen Haines is in hospital in a critical condition after she was struck by a car outside her office in what Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said appears to have been "a deliberate act." —"Politicians are no longer treated like we’re human,” says Arizona state legislator Alma Hernandez, who is facing rising harassment and threats. —Federal agents searched the Washington-area home of Rep. Ilhan Omar, a frequent critic of Republican President Donald Trump. —If elected governor of Georgia, Keisha Lance Bottoms would become the first Black woman governor in U.S. history. ... and more.
Newsom Could Commute California’s Death Sentences. Will He Pay a Political Price?
Hundreds of people remain on California’s death row. In his final weeks in office, Gov. Gavin Newsom is considering whether to commute their sentences to life without the possibility of parole.
Capcom and Square Enix Suffer Online Attacks As Hackers Access Player Data
Japanese companies have been facing a growing number of security breaches in recent weeks
Duke Predicted to Drop Another Game This Week vs Virginia
The last two weeks have been tough on the Duke Blue Devils.
What If We Only Had Weeks to Stop a Killer Asteroid? Our Best Bet Is Straight Out of Hollywood.
New simulations reveal the one option left when warning time runs out—and it’s nuclear.
Dover schools expand mental health support, plan healing forums
Dover City Schools plans to hold small-group forums for families as the district focuses on safety, support and long-term healing after what Superintendent Karie McCrate described as six weeks of "overwhelming loss."
Raiders entering a critical 2-game swing
Las Vegas has big opportunity in next 2 weeks
Arsenal fear Saka could be out for two months
Arsenal forward Bukayo Saka could be sidelined for up to eight weeks with the quadriceps injury he suffered against Bayern Munich.
Poll: Low-information voters have turned hardest against Trump and the GOP
In 2024, the voters who knew the least about politics were some of Donald Trump’s strongest supporters. A Data for Progress poll released just before the election found Americans who didn’t consume any news at all said they’d vote for Trump over Kamala Harris by a 20-point margin, 60%1 to 40%. In February, we reported that many of these voters had soured on Trump. Voters who couldn’t name the party in control of Congress moved away from Trump at about twice the rate as high-information voters. But approval isn’t vote choice. With the midterms less than two weeks away, it is worth asking if these voters are turning against the president’s party in federal elections, too. In our October Strength In Numbers/Verasight poll, conducted Oct. 13–19 among 2,028 U.S. adults, we asked respondents two factual questions about politics: which party has the most members in the House, and which has the most members in the Senate. I classified anyone who got at least one of these questions wrong as “low-knowledge.” About 30% of adults miss at least one question, including 25% of 2024 Trump voters, 22% of Harris voters, and more than half of people who didn’t vote in 2024. In this article, I do two things with this data. First, I repeat my February analysis and compare how these two groups feel about Trump’s job as president; then I look at each group’s voting behavior in the upcoming House midterms. Register for free to read the rest of this piece.
'We're Victims of Xbox's Change in Strategy': Dishonored Dev Has Weeks to Save Itself
Blames Microsoft for "incoherent" decision making
Pope hope, that’s entertainment, and getting ahead in the CIA
Happy Friday friends, I want to start by just breathing for all of us a big long collective sigh of relief at the news this week that the pope’s doctors have basically blown the all clear for Leo’s health. Going from knowing nothing to him declaring to the world he needed surgery, to a cancer diagnosis, to bouncing out of the hospital in barely even days, to ringing the bell in less than two weeks is whiplash inducing. But in the best possible way. We are living in a world in which the Roman pontiff, by dint of history, biography and circumstance, is once more at the epicenter of global affairs. Not just conversations about religion, or Christian and post-Christian values, but the bleeding edge of the most pressing issues of human affairs. Think I am exaggerating a touch? Consider the images of the crowds who greeted Leo in Paris just weeks ago, and juxtapose them with the absolute photo negative scenes unfolding there recently. Ask yourself how many world leaders are talking about AI right now and directly citing the pope as they do so. Try to name a country who has had as many top-ranked diplomats in and out of both Russia and Ukraine in the last three years as the Vatican has in the last three months. It has been fascinating to watch Leo XIV emerge as not just a kind of pop culture reference point or totem to be cited (Francis was often name-checked this way) but as a kinetic force in global conversation. Given the state of things, we need global figures of gravitas and values, even better if they have real wisdom behind what they are saying. So news of Leo’s illness was, it seemed to me, a tremor with potentially Richter Scale implications. That not only has the worst not come to pass but instead we’ve had the best of outcomes announced is something to really be grateful for. Humanity, it seems to me, is entering one of its irregular but cyclical phases where the pace of change — technological, social, and geopolitical — outstrips the ability of previously settled norms and received wisdom to cope. Such periods – and I think the first decades of the last century were a similar such time – throw into question the viability of all kinds of institutions. And many of ours have been straining to breaking point for a few years now. The papacy has the power and the potential to be a steadying pole in all of this. That’s my hope, anyway. It’s a lot to freight the office with, though it is arguably its ultimate purpose from its founding, to be a steadying rock on which all that matters can be anchored. It’s also, of course, an intolerable weight of responsibility to place on a single man. But I am encouraged to have hope in – and for – Leo. The apostle whom he succeeds, after all, was famously unequal to some moments, failed some tests of faith, and resiled from taking the road which led ultimately to the circus on Vatican hill. Human frailty and limitations, of health, of character, of temper, can open us to Christ, whose strength is greatest in our weakness, so St. Paul learned. That gives me hope, and I am sure it consoles Leo, too. And so I will continue to pray for him. Because we need apostles of rock right now. Here’s the news. Subscribe The News The Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith issued yesterday a new document “Venite ad me: Considerations on the Transmission of the Faith in an Epochal Change.” It’s not a short document, and it is at pains to stress this isn’t a doctrinal note from the dicastery, either. Rather, it brings together reflections on an important issue from the Church around the world. Some of it I actually found really rather powerful. It is, however, 25,000, which is a lot for a busy reader to get through on a weekday. So, you can read our busy reader’s summary right here. — News broke yesterday of an Oct. 22 meeting of U.S. bishops with President Donald Trump. The meeting was organized by an official at the Heritage Foundation, according to several sources close to the meeting. Video of several U.S. bishops praying in the Oval Office over President Trump was posted on social media Thursday afternoon, first by White House Communications Advisor Margo Martin, and then by the official twitter.com account of the Archdiocese of Denver. The meeting has drawn sharp criticism because of its proximity to the upcoming midterm Congressional elections, in which Democrats are widely expected to win control of the House of Representatives, while control of the Senate remains closely contested. Sources close to the bishops’ conference told The Pillar that some USCCB senior officials were surprised by the existence of the meeting when video of it first emerged online. And a source close to conference president Archbishop Paul Coakley of Oklahoma City told The Pillar that the archbishop was “deeply frustrated” by the occasion of the meeting. An official conference spokesperson told The Pillar that the meeting was “not organized with or by the USCCB” and was “not affiliated with the conference.” You can read the whole story here. — The next National Eucharistic Congress will be held in Indianapolis in 2029, a return to the city that hosted the last gathering in 2024. You read it here first. By here, I don’t mean this newsletter, I mean at The Pillar. We broke the story this week. It’s a big deal, in as much as the last congress was a roaring success and the next installment has the potential to be a real focal point for evangelizing efforts in the coming years. Read all about it here. — As Pope Leo prepares for the longest trip of his pontificate, Church leaders in Uruguay say the pontiff will encounter a highly secularized culture, in a country with a very different Catholic history than many of its South American neighbors. The nation has not had a papal visit since 1988, and leaders who spoke with The Pillar say it has a dire need for evangelization, even amid the prospect of a small revival in faith. This is real reporting on the Church in the country, and frankly a story you simply are not going to be able to read anywhere else. Read the whole thing. — The Archdiocese of Detroit announced this week a plan that would see the vast majority of its parish priests reassigned next summer, amid a restructuring process expected to dramatically shrink the number of parishes in the archdiocese. Archbishop Edward Weisenburger said this week that the plan “asks much of our priests,” but is a “sacrifice they are making as brothers of one, unified presbyterate.” The thing is, as JD pointed out in an analysis yesterday, pastors of parishes have a legal right to stability in office, so the only way this kind of wholesale reassignment goes ahead is if all of the archdiocesan clergy agree to resign. That creates its own kind of legal issues, though, and re-raises longstanding questions about the effectiveness of canonical due process protections for priests when dealing with coercive exercises in authority. Read the whole thing here. — More than three months after the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith issued its decree declaring the excommunication of the leadership of the Society of St. Pius X, questions remain about the full effects of the society’s schism. Specifically, the DDF’s July claim that marriages witnessed and confessions heard by SSPX priests are now invalid remains contested — and it emerged this week it appears that the Vatican’s own legal experts don’t agree. You can read my whole analysis of the situation and what it means here. All I would add is that the DDF’s undeveloped, some would say unsubstantiated, claim about the invalidity of some SSPX sacraments came in their July Explanatory Note on the schismatic consecrations by the society that month. It touches directly on both papal acts of governance — indeed it purports to nullify them — and the most intimate pastoral encounters possible in a parish setting. If there is one aspect of the Francis-era style of governance I would like the curia to finally cut out, root and branch, it would be these attempts to try to effect extraordinarily sensitive legislative acts via a note. — At least a dozen French bishops have spoken out following an eruption of violence on the country’s streets Oct. 17. Not surprisingly, they unanimously condemned the violence, but the length and content of their interventions varied significantly. Several sought to distinguish between the actions of rioters and what they suggested were the legitimate concerns of peaceful young protesters. Many also evoked Pope Leo XIV’s Sept. 25-28 visit to France, suggesting it offered a powerful counter-image to the scenes of looting and destruction. A number of bishops also stressed their solidarity with law enforcement officials who struggled to contain the disorder, as well as the owners of the roughly 3,000 damaged or looted businesses. What’s the background to the nationwide unrest that the French media calls “les violences du 17 octobre”? And what exactly are the bishops saying? Read all about it here. — A Polish bishop called for the firm defense of unborn children as well as compassion for their mothers this week, as the lower house of Poland’s parliament passed two bills seeking to liberalize the country’s abortion laws. The bill on decriminalizing assistance in an abortion passed by 217 votes to 213, while the abortion in cases of fetal abnormality bill passed by 233 to 203, thanks to the government’s majority in the lower house. Both bills will now move to the Polish Senate, the upper house of parliament, where the ruling coalition has a larger majority. The fetal abnormality bill is symbolically significant because if it became law, it would effectively overturn a 2020 ruling by Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal that a 1993 law permitting abortion for a severe and irreversible disability or a life-threatening incurable disease was unconstitutional. Read the whole story here. Subscribe **[The St. Paul Center App | Bible Study On-The-Go Read and understand the Bible with St. Paul Center’s new app! With today’s leading Catholic Scripture scholars as your guides, the St. Paul Center app empowers you to read the Bible](https://stpaulcenter.com/app?utm_source=pillar&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=applaunch)** from the heart of the Church. Download the app for free at either the Apple or the Google app stores. https://stpaulcenter.com/app That’s entertainment I have written before about my deep and sincere reservations about the celebrity exorcist subculture which has taken root in American Catholicism. And, because I am very ill at ease with the entire thing, I try to keep a weather eye on the phenomenon without being drawn into the kind of online back-and-forth which these figures sometimes generate. Earlier this week, JD noted that one such celebrity exorcist type, Fr. Chad Ripperger, has undertaken, on the request of his bishop, a year’s fast from interviews and public speaking. I’m sure that will be salutary for him, if for no other reason than that receiving with docility requests from one’s rightful ecclesiastical superiors always comes with graces. Then a second thing happened this week which caught my eye. Apparently, another fixture in the celebrity exorcist world, Fr. Carlos Martins, has initiated a lawsuit against two lay men — apparently associates of Rippenger, though I am unclear in what way, exactly — for allegedly defaming him and his ministry on a podcast. It seems the suit was initiated nearly a year ago and is now pending. At issue, I read, is that the two men described Martins on a podcast as “not who he says he is” with regard to his exorcism ministry and that he “doesn’t know what he’s talking about.” These statements Martins considers to be false and defamatory and, his suit claims, “directly affected the sale and reception of [his] The Exorcist Files book that was newly released at the time these episodes aired.” I don’t want to get too into the weeds of the details here, but a couple of things struck me about all this.
There’s a Reason That Netflix’s Ad Business Has Underwhelmed
Somewhat lost in the company’s slew of firings and engagement warnings over the past few weeks was the fact that Netflix is scaling back its ad forecast for 2026 from $3 billion to $2.7 billion. That’s despite the fact that: CTV is growing by 14-15% this year This year saw a monster upfront Netflix is the biggest streamer out there this side of YouTube, and was the platform that for years brands were supposedly dying to be a part of In other words, that’s an alarming pull-back from Netflix. A Wall Street analyst I spoke with last week was blunt, calling Netflix’s ad business “disappointing.” To me, a red flag on the ad front is that Netflix has never revealed how many ad-supported subscribers it has. Because if I know anything about how big companies work, if they have a positive number that makes them look really good - they tend to share it. (How many subs does go90 have right now? We’re not saying just yet. How are ads going on ChatGPT? Oh, a billion run rate - I see). Yes, to date Netflix has shared some fuzzy ad numbers, such as the idea that the company’s ad tier ‘reaches’ 250 million users globally.’ Here’s why that figure gives me pause: a)they lead with global, and b) they don’t explain how they are calculated. (Are they based on average people in each room? Surveys of some kind?). Regardless, some insiders say that Netflix’s ad tier is scaling nicely - others not so much. Either way, one of Netflix’s biggest challenge on the ad front appears to have been its starting point. Remember, when Netflix launched ads in 2022, it had 73 million subs in the US and Canada. That’s 73 million people who were used to Netflix with zero ads. And when the ad product rolled out, the company clearly was going after new users - a limited pool of potential subscribers by default. That focus seems to have changed over time, as Netflix has tried to convert longtime subscribers to the ad tier. Historically Netflix subscribers are very sticky. But is the company’s low churn a problem? Not necessarily, according to Antenna data. Rather, Netflix’s consumer loyalty is a bit of a double-edged sword. “Netflix is the one streamer which actually has seen substantial “trade downs” but has much lower ‘win backs,’ said Antenna founder Jonathan Carson (win-backs being people who were on the ad-free plan, cancelled, then rejoined on the ad plan). “Netflix has lower churn and so has less opportunity to win back old subs with a lower cost plan option.” This all might explain why Netflix has been so slow to roll out all of these table stakes targeting options until just this week. It likely didn’t have enough users to carve up into various targets. etc. However, what really hit Netflix’s ad business was Amazon’s move a few years ago to turn on advertising for Prime Video by default. Suddenly the market was awash in premium inventory, and Netflix was playing catch-up on multiple fronts. Thus, the streaming giant appears to still be figuring out if if wants lead in ‘programmatic TV,’ or premium ‘upfront’ TV sales. “The CTV market now sorts into three businesses, and Netflix is not the leader of any of them,” wrote analyst Jack Myers. Ouch. So how does Netflix ratchet up its ads business? Get the next NFL package You’re gonna have to wait until 2030 unless one of the bigger media companies like Skydance opts out, but the easiest (not cheapest) way for Netflix to become a huge TV ads contender is to get one of the regular NFL packages, ideally Sunday afternoons. That way it can sell ads to its whole U.S. subs base overnight. Go FAST This one is risky, because to program a compelling FAST channel, you’d likely have to take some older Netflix exclusive shows and make them available for free to non-subscribers. But FASTs, for better or worse, are ad-inventory machines. Go full UGC I’m not sure I see this happening. There is something already off about Netflix carrying podcasts and shows for creators. The experience sticks out in what is such a produced, and generally non-communal environment. But Netflix could open up its platform by allowing creators to upload videos without having to be approved by the service. But that opens a whole other can of worms (policing brand safety, copyright infringement, overall quality). Make a huge RMN Deal I was going to suggest something crazy, such as ‘instead of buying Warner Brothers, Netflix should buy Target. But the company doesn’t want to be in the brick and mortar business. Yet for Netflix’s ad business to compete in an Amazon world, it needs to be able to connect ad exposures to shopping. What if, instead of letting Amazon target Netflix viewers with its DSP, Netflix inked a deal with Target, or even took control of Roundel, and created its version of the Amazon full-funnel for brands? Price us out. I hope they don’t do this, but Netflix’s price increases - while significant - haven’t been enough to push long-term customers out of the ad-free tier. But if they made those prices so prohibitive, it could push large swaths of consumers to trade down. Then again, that could also dent engagement - as binging becomes much less appealing once you bring ads into the equation. Or, they could just launch a bunch of hit shows and maybe everyone will quickly forget all this angst. More from Amazon unBoxed A few weeks ago, I recorded two podcasts live at Amazon’s unBoxed event in San Francisco. I was able to go really deep with several brand partners about how Amazon’s various data and ad products work - particularly the under appreciated Amazon Marketing Cloud. First, I talked with Laura Abadias Velilla, of the Amazon specialty agency Amerge, along with Amazon’s own Charlotte Maines, Vice President, Devices Content & Advertising, about how the two partners helped a very specific printer company Epson launch into a brand new category - high end projectors. It’s a great example of how brands connect audience data across platforms to make budget deployment decisions. Next, I chatted with Monks VP Head of Digital Investment for North America Tom Burchill about how the agency actually brought in data from Linkedin to help target B2B customers across various Amazon properties for the brand Quicken. Check it out: Check these out, or just listen:
As election day approaches, several Town Council candidates weigh Bowdoin’s place in Brunswick politics
With less than two weeks until Election Day, five candidates are competing for two at-large seats on the Brunswick Town Council, the body that sets the town’s budget, zoning and housing policy, from Maine Street sidewalks to Bowdoin’s own building plans. Because at-large seats represent the whole town, any Bowdoin student registered to vote in […]
Pine and Mingo business owners seek answers from city council over construction impact
Over the past five weeks, several businesses near Pine and Mingo have watched their sales plummet upwards of 75% as a result of nearby road construction.
The One Chart That Explains Why Netflix Cleaned House
(Welcome to my weekly streaming ratings report, the single best guide to what’s popular in streaming TV and what isn’t. I’m the Entertainment Strategy Guy, a former streaming executive who now analyzes business strategy in the entertainment industry. If you were forwarded this email, please subscribe to get these insights each week.) Yeah, I’ll be honest: I went with a clickbait-y headline today. One chart? That explains everything? That’s as clickbait-y as it gets. But let’s be real. I’m analyzing a dataset that I’ve built over six years, and c’mon, I never write articles which feature just one chart! If you think this article—which includes a level of data detail unheard of in journalism twenty years ago—is clickbait, fine by me. Really, what I’m doing is using data to explain Netflix’s recent strategy changes, since the story of the month is the turbulence at Netflix. First, head of content Bela Bajaria was fired. Then head of film Dan Lin followed her to the unemployment ranks. (Along with, sadly, 1,000 other Netflix workers.) And then Netflix delivered a “sub-optimal” earnings report, which continued their year-long stock price slide. Then came a flood of articles explaining why all this is happening. (Mine’s coming shortly, rest assured.) I realized I had the perfect chart to explain Netflix’s woes. Specifically, Nielsen’s weekly top ten charts. Usually I focus on one or two weeks in my Streaming Ratings Reports, but sometimes it’s worth stepping back to look at the larger story. And hoo boy, what a story. This article is my annual (plus three months) follow-up to one of my most popular articles of last year. (And a topic I’ve been visualizing for the last half decade.) Subscribe Netflix’s Share of The Nielsen Charts Continues to Decline
Pensacola area Week 10 scores and live updates
We have a full week of high school football again in the Pensacola area for the first time in three weeks. Bookmark this page for live updates.
CSU’s Ties with TimelyCare Raise Red Flags for Student Mental Health
Two weeks ago, we raised alarms over CSU management’s strange fixation on TimelyCare and their push to enter into a systemwide contract with the private,
Josh Simmons set to miss at least four weeks
Chiefs OT Josh Simmons moved to the Reserve/Injured list but will not need back surgery
Top health adviser and MAHA ally quits Trump admin
Means' departure two weeks before the midterm elections underscores MAHA's discontent with the pace of change on food policy.
Republican Senate candidate Bert Mizusawa talks energy, immigration, AI, Trump at UVA Center for Politics
With less than two weeks until Virginians hit the polls for midterm elections, Republican U.S. Senate candidate Bert Mizusawa took center stage at the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics Thursday evening for his “Evening with Maj. Gen. Bert Mizusawa” event.
Lamar Jackson Injury Update: Ravens QB’s Week 7 Status Revealed
Lamar Jackson suffered an ankle injury in Week 4, and the two-time NFL MVP left the game in a walking boot. While this was originally reported to be a minor injury, the two-time MVP missed Weeks 5 and 6 and is in danger of missing Week 7 as well. Originally entering the league as a …
The top 10 Senate seats most likely to flip, less than two weeks before the midterms
With the November election in sight, Democratic excitement about the party winning control of the US Senate is running high, but it’s far from a sure bet.
Rogers, El-Sayed battle over immigration, health care, and Iran in Michigan Senate debate
U.S. Senate candidates Mike Rogers and Abdul El-Sayed traded sharp criticism during a debate less than two weeks before Election Day, making their closing pitches to Michigan voters on issues including the cost of living, immigration enforcement, and the war in Iran.
Four-county mental health renewal levy heads back to November ballot
Voters in Defiance, Fulton, Henry and Williams counties will see a renewal levy on the ballot in less than two weeks.
Tracking tsunamis triggered by extreme weather
As much of Western Europe faced record-breaking temperatures and extended drought this summer, Croatia experienced another weather event that could also set a worrisome precedent.Over the course of two weeks, a series of meteorological tsunamis (meteotsunamis) struck Croatia’s Adriatic coast, alarming both residents and tourists. Social media posts showed flooded seaside promenades and people walking through knee-deep water. Fortunately, no deaths or major damage were reported.In a world where natural disasters seem to be increasing, meteotsunamis — tsunamis caused by rapid weather changes – rarely make headline news. But warming sea temperatures and changing atmospheric conditions may help explain why these phenomena could become more common, especially in shallower seas and inland lakes with wide coastal shelves.“We have definitely become more aware of them, and there have been a lot more reports of these events in the last 10 years,” says Jadranka Šepić, an associate professor of environmental physics at the University of Split whose research focuses on efforts to track meteotsunamis in real time. She is also one of Croatia’s ambassadors for Science Comes to Town (SCTT), a European Commission-funded programme aimed at making research more accessible to the public.Šepić sees two possible reasons for the apparent increase in meteotsunamis. One is that photos and videos shared on social media are providing more empirical evidence, while rising air and sea temperatures could also play a role. The geophysicist “cannot say with certainty” that warming is a contributing factor because research is still ongoing. “But I can say that previously in Croatia we might have had one exceptionally strong event every 10 or 15 years, and one strong event every five years, and within 15 days this summer we had five strong events,” Šepić notes. “This is not typical.”‘A fist against the sea surface’Unlike tsunamis that are triggered by underwater earthquakes or volcanoes, meteotsunamis are caused by sudden changes in atmospheric pressure combined with other rapidly developing weather events, such as thunderstorms. The effect “is like pushing a fist against the sea surface,” Šepić explains. The resulting oscillation intensifies as it reaches shallower water, and “can be far more destructive than a wind-driven wave because meteotsunamis are accompanied by very strong currents than can penetrate much deeper inland.” The meteotsunami, she continues, “then behaves the same as a tsunami — they slow down and grow as the sea shallows, and then grow further in places like harbours due to further shallowing and narrowing. When they come ashore, they can be very destructive — taking everything with them out to sea and then taking it back.”Croatian research institutions have tracked such sea oscillations since the 1930s because the relatively shallow Adriatic Sea is prone to meteotsunamis. The strongest recorded so far was in June 1978, according to the Adriatic Meteotsunami Catalogue, which is supported by the European Research Council (ERC), Croatian Science Foundation and the country’s leading research institutions. During that event, six-metre-high waves flooded the coastal town of Vela Luka on Korčula Island, causing major damage.Other meteotsunami “hotspots” in Europe include the Mediterranean Sea as well the Atlantic coastal shelves off France, Portugal and Spain. In June 2006, a meteotsunami with five-metre-high waves swept through the harbour of Ciutadella in Spain’s Balearic Islands, causing widespread damage to boats. Several less powerful events were reported in the Balearics and off the coast of Spain this summer, leading to some beach closures.Forecasting is challenging because of how quickly meteotsunamis can develop and their uncertain trajectory. Šepić is involved in two ERC-funded research projects — SHExtreme and MeD-Track — aimed in part at strengthening monitoring and real-time data collection. Access to accurate and immediate information is essential for early-warning systems.Early exposure to meteotsunamisŠepić first learned about meteotsunamis from her parents while growing up in Croatia. She later had the opportunity to investigate these events during her master and doctoral studies in geophysics at the University of Zagreb. The geophysicist has also conducted research at the Institute of Oceanography and Fisheries in Split, the University of the Balearic Islands in Palma de Mallorca and the Institute of Ocean Science in the Canadian province of British Columbia.Projects like SCTT are important to raise awareness about research and inspiring young people to pursue studies and careers in science, notes Šepić. She credits her colleagues at the University of Split and the Institute of Oceanography and Fisheries for their community outreach and engagement in the European project, which includes partner universities and institutions in Brest (France) and Kiel (Germany). As an example of town-gown collaboration, Šepić highlights her own university’s ‘Oceanographers on the Island’ programme. This initiative offers workshops and hands-on learning for children living on numerous Croatian islands.“It is a great privilege for Split to be involved in a project like Science Comes to Town, which is the first of its kind in the European Union," Šepić says. As for encouraging new generations of scientists, “This is a great effort, and I hope that we will see an effect in a few years.”Science|Business, which connects policymakers, academics and industry through its news reporting, analysis and events, is an SCTT partner.