So what is the Backrooms, and why does an empty hallway with yellow wallpaper haunt half the internet? Short answer: it is a fictional liminal space that started as a single 4chan image in 2019, grew into a fan-built mythology with thousands of “levels” and “entities”, and now anchors a 73-million-view YouTube series, a sprawling […]
Google did not hold a press event. There was no blog post, no apology email, no farewell tweet. On May 4, 2026, the Project Mariner landing page just changed its copy to a single sentence: “Thank you for using Project Mariner. It was shut down on May 4th, 2026 and its technology voyaged to other […]
Fifteen years. That is how long it has been since any Beastie Boy released a piece of new music. Hot Sauce Committee Part Two came out in 2011, MCA died in May 2012, and the surviving members slipped into something closer to a museum residency than a band. Then on Thursday May 7, in a […]
FX confirmed it on May 8: The Bear is ending with Season 5, eight episodes, dropping June 25 on Hulu at 6 p.m. PT, Disney+ international the day after. Carmy quit the food industry in the Season 4 finale. Sydney, Richie, and Sugar woke up running a restaurant with no money, a sale hanging over […]
Two days ago a three-hour indie game about three teenagers driving around 1990s Northern California quietly became the highest-rated Xbox Game Pass day-one release of 2026. Yesterday Microsoft made it official. Mixtape, from Melbourne studio Beethoven and Dinosaur, is sitting at 95 on Metacritic Xbox Series X/S, 92 on PC, 89 on Switch 2, and […]
You know the moment. A glass sits on the edge of the table. Your cat walks over, locks eyes with you, lifts one paw, and pushes. Crash. So, why do cats knock things off tables, and is your cat actually trying to ruin your morning? The answer is more interesting than spite. Researchers at Kyoto […]
HarperCollins published its annual Farshore review of children’s reading for pleasure last week and the headline number is brutal. Daily reading for pleasure among UK five to seventeen year olds has collapsed to 25 percent. In 2012 it was 39 percent. The proportion of children who say they rarely or never read has tripled, from […]
For four straight days in early May, drivers in Toronto’s Oakwood Village took a left onto Winona Drive and found themselves staring at oncoming traffic, oncoming children, and oncoming everyone-who-actually-lives-here. Winona is a one-way going southbound past Belvidere Avenue. Google Maps had quietly decided it was northbound only. The app told the cars to go […]
Little Simz did the thing rappers used to do before Mondays got owned by streaming algorithms. She announced a new EP, called it Sugar Girl, then dropped four tracks today via AWAL with no rollout, no listening party, no 47-second teaser shot in vertical. The opener is called “That’s A No No” and the rest […]
At 23:23 on April 5, four high-speed bullet trains in Taiwan slammed into emergency braking at the same time. They sat there for 48 minutes. The cause was not a fault, not a power surge, and not a guy on the tracks. It was a 23-year-old radio enthusiast in his bedroom with a software-defined radio, […]
