Artists concept of the Parker Solar Probe spacecraft approaching the sun. Launched in 2018, the ... [+] probe is increasing our ability to forecast major space-weather events that impact life on Earth.NASAToday, humanity achieved a historic milestone as NASAs Parker Solar Probe got closer to the sun than any spacecraft in history. At just 3.86 million miles (6.1 million kilometers) from the suns surface, the probe broke records for speed as well as proximity, traveling at a staggering 430,000 mph.Parker achieved its landmark at 11:53 UTC (6:53 a.m. EST) on Dec. 24, bringing it within 4% of the Earth-Sun distance, well inside Mercurys orbit.It was humanitys closest encounter with a star, a feat inextricably linked to two spectacular things that happened in 2024 North Americas total solar eclipse on April 8 and the global displays of aurora on May 10 and Oct. 10.Heres everything you need to know about the science behind NASAs Parker Solar Probe and its incredible achievement.Parker Solar Probe: Mission ExplainedDec. 24s close flyby was the final objective of the historic mission conceived over 65 years ago. Its mission is helping solar scientists better understand the sun, whose magnetized material creates solar wind in the solar system.This so-called space weather ultimately interacts with Earths atmosphere to cause the Northern Lights, but stronger geomagnetic storms can also threaten GPS satellites, causing havoc on Earth, as well as posing a danger to electricity grids.MORE FOR YOUThe moon crosses in front of the sun during a total solar eclipse at Lake Monroe on April 8, 2024 in ... [+] Indiana, U.S., offering a rare glimpse of the solar corona. (Photo by Edward M. Pio Roda/Getty Images)Edward M. Pio RodaParker Solar Probe: Space WeatherThe key to understanding the origins of space weather lies in understanding the sun itself, which is why NASA and the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory have Parker make direct measurements of the suns corona. This outer, hotter atmosphere of the sun only visible from Earth during the few minutes of totality during a total solar eclipse, as occurred on April 8, 2024 across North America can reach several million degrees Fahrenheit, where the solar wind originates. Parker became the first spacecraft to fly through the corona in 2021.We are learning new science about the corona and the solar wind, said Dr. Nour Raouafi, the projects scientist at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, during a media roundtable at the American Geophysical Unions annual meeting on Dec. 10, 2024.Parker Solar Probe: Solar CoronaSolar scientists are specifically trying to understand where the solar wind is accelerated to supersonic speeds. They think the secret may be understanding why the corona is magnitudes hotter than the suns surface.Parkers data is also helping solar scientists understand how coronal mass ejections clouds of charged particles hurled outwards by the sun are born and structured. CMEs clean everything in front of them, leaving a near-perfect vacuum behind them, said Rawafi. Its no wonder that when one of them hits our magnetosphere, it causes havoc, like the super storms in May and October.He refers to the two powerful geomagnetic storms that resulted in intense global displays of aurora borealis, which, in the U.S., were seen as far south as Arizona and Florida.To reach the sun, Parker Solar Probe's path has used seven gravity assists from Venus to propel it ... [+] closer to the star.NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio and Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory.Parker Solar Probe: Journey And Whats NextParker has been readying for its close flyby of the sun since it launched on Aug. 12, 2018. On Jun. 30, Parker completed its 20th close approach to the sun, matching its distance record by coming about 4.51 million miles (7.26 million kilometers) from the solar surface. It then conducted its 21st close approach to the sun on Sept. 30, reaching an identical distance from the sun.In recent months, its been getting into position for todays record-breaking close approach, completing its final Venus gravity assist maneuver on Nov. 6 when it passed within 233 miles (376 kilometers) of the planets surface. The flyby adjusted Parkers trajectory into its final highly elliptical path around the sun, which it will remain in for the rest of its mission.After its close flyby today, Parker will complete two more hyper-close passes at the same distance on March 22 and June 19, 2025.Wishing you clear skies and wide eyes.

By Tharin PillayDecember 24, 2024 10:05 AM ESTDespite their expertise, AI developers don't always know what their most advanced systems are capable ofat least, not at first. To find out, systems are subjected to a range of testsoften called evaluations, or evalsdesigned to tease out their limits. But due to rapid progress in the field, todays systems regularly achieve top scores on many popular tests, including SATs and the U.S. bar exam, making it harder to judge just how quickly they are improving.A new set of much more challenging evals has emerged in response, created by companies, nonprofits, and governments. Yet even on the most advanced evals, AI systems are making astonishing progress. In November, the nonprofit research institute Epoch AI announced a set of exceptionally challenging math questions developed in collaboration with leading mathematicians, called FrontierMath, on which currently available models scored only 2%. Just one month later, OpenAIs newly-announced o3 model achieved a score of 25.2%, which Epochs director, Jaime Sevilla, describes as far better than our team expected so soon after release.Amid this rapid progress, these new evals could help the world understand just what advanced AI systems can do, andwith many experts worried that future systems may pose serious risks in domains like cybersecurity and bioterrorismserve as early warning signs, should such threatening capabilities emerge in future.Harder than it soundsIn the early days of AI, capabilities were measured by evaluating a systems performance on specific tasks, like classifying images or playing games, with the time between a benchmarks introduction and an AI matching or exceeding human performance typically measured in years. It took five years, for example, before AI systems surpassed humans on the ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge, established by Professor Fei-Fei Li and her team in 2010. And it was only in 2017 that an AI system (Google DeepMinds AlphaGo) was able to beat the worlds number one ranked player in Go, an ancient, abstract Chinese boardgamealmost 50 years after the first program attempting the task was written.The gap between a benchmarks introduction and its saturation has decreased significantly in recent years. For instance, the GLUE benchmark, designed to test an AIs ability to understand natural language by completing tasks like deciding if two sentences are equivalent or determining the correct meaning of a pronoun in context, debuted in 2018. It was considered solved one year later. In response, a harder version, SuperGLUE, was created in 2019and within two years, AIs were able to match human performance across its tasks.Evals take many forms, and their complexity has grown alongside model capabilities. Virtually all major AI labs now red-team their models before release, systematically testing their ability to produce harmful outputs, bypass safety measures, or otherwise engage in undesirable behavior, such as deception. Last year, companies including OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, and Google made voluntary commitments to the Biden administration to subject their models to both internal and external red-teaming in areas including misuse, societal risks, and national security concerns.Other tests assess specific capabilities, such as coding, or evaluate models' capacity and propensity for potentially dangerous behaviors like persuasion, deception, and large-scale biological attacks.Perhaps the most popular contemporary benchmark is Measuring Massive Multitask Language Understanding (MMLU), which consists of about 16,000 multiple-choice questions that span academic domains like philosophy, medicine, and law. OpenAIs GPT-4o, released in May, achieved 88%, while the companys latest model, o1, scored 92.3%. Because these large test sets sometimes contain problems with incorrectly-labelled answers, attaining 100% is often not possible, explains Marius Hobbhahn, director and co-founder of Apollo Research, an AI safety nonprofit focused on reducing dangerous capabilities in advanced AI systems. Past a point, more capable models will not give you significantly higher scores, he says.Designing evals to measure the capabilities of advanced AI systems is astonishingly hard, Hobbhahn saysparticularly since the goal is to elicit and measure the systems actual underlying abilities, for which tasks like multiple-choice questions are only a proxy. You want to design it in a way that is scientifically rigorous, but that often trades off against realism, because the real world is often not like the lab setting, he says. Another challenge is data contamination, which can occur when the answers to an eval are contained in the AIs training data, allowing it to reproduce answers based on patterns in its training data rather than by reasoning from first principles.Another issue is that evals can be gamed when either the person that has the AI model has an incentive to train on the eval, or the model itself decides to target what is measured by the eval, rather than what is intended, says Hobbahn.A new waveIn response to these challenges, new, more sophisticated evals are being built.Epoch AIs FrontierMath benchmark consists of approximately 300 original math problems, spanning most major branches of the subject. It was created in collaboration with over 60 leading mathematicians, including Fields-medal winning mathematician Terence Tao. The problems vary in difficulty, with about 25% pitched at the level of the International Mathematical Olympiad, such that an extremely gifted high school student could in theory solve them if they had the requisite creative insight and precise computation abilities, says Tamay Besiroglu, Epochs associate director. Half the problems require graduate level education in math to solve, while the most challenging 25% of problems come from the frontier of research of that specific topic, meaning only todays top experts could crack them, and even they may need multiple days.Solutions cannot be derived by simply testing every possible answer, since the correct answers often take the form of 30-digit numbers. To avoid data contamination, Epoch is not publicly releasing the problems (beyond a handful, which are intended to be illustrative and do not form part of the actual benchmark). Even with a peer-review process in place, Besiroglu estimates that around 10% of the problems in the benchmark have incorrect solutionsan error rate comparable to other machine learning benchmarks. Mathematicians make mistakes, he says, noting they are working to lower the error rate to 5%.Evaluating mathematical reasoning could be particularly useful because a system able to solve these problems may also be able to do much more. While careful not to overstate that math is the fundamental thing, Besiroglu expects any system able to solve the FrontierMath benchmark will be able to get close, within a couple of years, to being able to automate many other domains of science and engineering.Another benchmark aiming for a longer shelflife is the ominously-named Humanitys Last Exam, created in collaboration between the nonprofit Center for AI Safety and Scale AI, a for-profit company that provides high-quality datasets and evals to frontier AI labs like OpenAI and Anthropic. The exam is aiming to include between 20 and 50 times as many questions as Frontiermath, while also covering domains like physics, biology, and electrical engineering, says Summer Yue, Scale AIs director of research. Questions are being crowdsourced from the academic community and beyond. To be included, a question needs to be unanswerable by all existing models. The benchmark is intended to go live in late 2024 or early 2025.A third benchmark to watch is RE-Bench, designed to simulate real-world machine-learning work. It was created by researchers at METR, a nonprofit that specializes in model evaluations and threat research, and tests humans and cutting-edge AI systems across seven engineering tasks. Both humans and AI agents are given a limited amount of time to complete the tasks; while humans reliably outperform current AI agents on most of them, things look different when considering performance only within the first two hours. Current AI agents do best when given between 30 minutes and 2 hours, depending on the agent, explains Hjalmar Wijk, a member of METRs technical staff. After this time, they tend to get stuck in a rut, he says, as AI agents can make mistakes early on and then struggle to adjust in the ways humans would.When we started this work, we were expecting to see that AI agents could solve problems only of a certain scale, and beyond that, that they would fail more completely, or that successes would be extremely rare, says Wijk. It turns out that given enough time and resources, they can often get close to the performance of the median human engineer tested in the benchmark. AI agents are surprisingly good at this, he says. In one particular taskwhich involved optimizing code to run faster on specialized hardwarethe AI agents actually outperformed the best humans, although METRs researchers note that the humans included in their tests may not represent the peak of human performance.These results dont mean that current AI systems can automate AI research and development. Eventually, this is going to have to be superseded by a harder eval, says Wijk. But given that the possible automation of AI research is increasingly viewed as a national security concernfor example, in the National Security Memorandum on AI, issued by President Biden in Octoberfuture models that excel on this benchmark may be able to improve upon themselves, exacerbating human researchers lack of control over them.Even as AI systems ace many existing tests, they continue to struggle with tasks that would be simple for humans. They can solve complex closed problems if you serve them the problem description neatly on a platter in the prompt, but they struggle to coherently string together long, autonomous, problem-solving sequences in a way that a person would find very easy, Andrej Karpathy, an OpenAI co-founder who is no longer with the company, wrote in a post on X in response to FrontierMaths release.Michael Chen, an AI policy researcher at METR, points to SimpleBench as an example of a benchmark consisting of questions that would be easy for the average high schooler, but on which leading models struggle. I think theres still productive work to be done on the simpler side of tasks, says Chen. While there are debates over whether benchmarks test for underlying reasoning or just for knowledge, Chen says that there is still a strong case for using MMLU and Graduate-Level Google-Proof Q&A Benchmark (GPQA), which was introduced last year and is one of the few recent benchmarks that has yet to become saturated, meaning AI models have yet to reliably achieve top scores, such that further improvements would be negligible. Even if they were just tests of knowledge, he argues, it's still really useful to test for knowledge.One eval seeking to move beyond just testing for knowledge recall is ARC-AGI, created by prominent AI researcher Franois Chollet to test an AIs ability to solve novel reasoning puzzles. For instance, a puzzle might show several examples of input and output grids, where shapes move or change color according to some hidden rule. The AI is then presented with a new input grid and must determine what the corresponding output should look like, figuring out the underlying rule from scratch. Although these puzzles are intended to be relatively simple for most humans, AI systems have historically struggled with them. However, recent breakthroughs suggest this is changing: OpenAIs o3 model has achieved significantly higher scores than prior models, which Chollet says represents a genuine breakthrough in adaptability and generalization.The urgent need for better evaluationsNew evals, simple and complex, structured and vibes"-based, are being released every day. AI policy increasingly relies on evals, both as they are being made requirements of laws like the European Unions AI Act, which is still in the process of being implemented, and because major AI labs like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind have all made voluntary commitments to halt the release of their models, or take actions to mitigate possible harm, based on whether evaluations identify any particularly concerning harms.On the basis of voluntary commitments, The U.S. and U.K. AI Safety Institutes have begun evaluating cutting-edge models before they are deployed. In October, they jointly released their findings in relation to the upgraded version of Anthropics Claude 3.5 Sonnet model, paying particular attention to its capabilities in biology, cybersecurity, and software and AI development, as well as to the efficacy of its built-in safeguards. They found that in most cases the built-in version of the safeguards that US AISI tested were circumvented, meaning the model provided answers that should have been prevented. They note that this is consistent with prior research on the vulnerability of other AI systems. In December, both institutes released similar findings for OpenAIs o1 model.However, there are currently no binding obligations for leading models to be subjected to third-party testing. That such obligations should exist is basically a no-brainer, says Hobbhahn, who argues that labs face perverse incentives when it comes to evals, since the less issues they find, the better. He also notes that mandatory third-party audits are common in other industries like finance.While some for-profit companies, such as Scale AI, do conduct independent evals for their clients, most public evals are created by nonprofits and governments, which Hobbhahn sees as a result of historical path dependency.I don't think it's a good world where the philanthropists effectively subsidize billion dollar companies, he says. I think the right world is where eventually all of this is covered by the labs themselves. They're the ones creating the risk..AI evals are not cheap, notes Epochs Besiroglu, who says that costs can quickly stack up to the order of between $1,000 and $10,000 per model, particularly if you run the eval for longer periods of time, or if you run it multiple times to create greater certainty in the result. While labs sometimes subsidize third-party evals by covering the costs of their operation, Hobbhahn notes that this does not cover the far-greater costs of actually developing the evaluations. Still, he expects third-party evals to become a norm going forward, as labs will be able to point to them to evidence due-diligence in safety-testing their models, reducing their liability.As AI models rapidly advance, evaluations are racing to keep up. Sophisticated new benchmarksassessing things like advanced mathematical reasoning, novel problem-solving, and the automation of AI researchare making progress, but designing effective evals remains challenging, expensive, and, relative to their importance as early-warning detectors for dangerous capabilities, underfunded. With leading labs rolling out increasingly capable models every few months, the need for new tests to assess frontier capabilities is greater than ever. By the time an eval saturates, we need to have harder evals in place, to feel like we can assess the risk, says Wijk.

It's the Software, Stupid The year is coming to a close, and AMD had been hoping its powerful new MI300X AI chips would finally help it gain ground on Nvidia. But an extensive investigation by SemiAnalysis suggests the company's software challenges are letting Nvidia maintain its comfortable lead. SemiAnalysis pitted AMD's Instinct MI300X against Nvidia's H100 and H200, observing several differences between the chips. For the uninitiated, the MI300X is a GPU accelerator based on the AMD CDNA 3 architecture and is designed for high-performance computing, specifically AI workloads.On paper, the performance figures appear excellent for AMD: the chip offers 1,307 TeraFLOPS of FP16 compute power and a massive 192GB of HBM3 memory, outclassing both of Nvidia's rival offerings. AMD's solutions also promise lower overall ownership costs compared to Nvidia's pricey chips and InfiniBand networks.However, as the SemiAnalysis crew discovered over five months of rigorous testing, raw specs are not the entire story. Despite the MI300X's impressive silicon, AMD's software ecosystem required significant effort to utilize effectively. SemiAnalysis had to rely heavily on AMD engineers to fix bugs and issues continuously during their benchmarking and testing.This is a far cry from Nvidia's hardware and software, which they noted tends to work smoothly out of the box with no handholding needed from Nvidia staff.Moreover, the software woes weren't just limited to SemiAnalysis' testing AMD's customers were feeling the pain too. For instance, AMD's largest cloud provider Tensorwave had to give AMD engineers access to the same MI300X chips that Tensorwave had purchased, just so AMD could debug the software. // Related StoriesAlso read: Not just the hardware: How deep is Nvidia's software moat?The troubles don't end there. From integration problems with PyTorch to subpar scaling across multiple chips, AMD's software consistently fell short of Nvidia's proven CUDA ecosystem. SemiAnalysis also noted that many AMD AI Libraries are essentially forks of Nvidia AI Libraries, which leads to suboptimal outcomes and compatibility issues."The CUDA moat has yet to be crossed by AMD due to AMD's weaker-than-expected software Quality Assurance (QA) culture and its challenging out-of-the-box experience. As fast as AMD tries to fill in the CUDA moat, Nvidia engineers are working overtime to deepen said moat with new features, libraries, and performance updates," reads an excerpt from the analysis.The analysts did find a glimmer of hope in the pre-release BF16 development branches for the MI300X software, which showed much better performance. But by the time that code hits production, Nvidia will likely have its next-gen Blackwell chips available (though Nvidia is reportedly having some growing pains with that rollout).Taking these issues into account, SemiAnalysis listed a bunch of recommendations to AMD, starting with giving Team Red's engineers more compute and engineering resources to fix and improve the ecosystem.SemiAnalysis founder Dylan Patel even met with AMD CEO Lisa Su. He posted on X that she understands the work needed to improve AMD's software stack. He also added that many changes are already in development.However, it's an uphill climb after years of apparently neglecting this critical component. As much as the analysts want AMD to legitimately compete with Nvidia, the "CUDA moat" looks to keep Nvidia firmly in the lead for now.

What just happened? Scientists have discovered that our brains process thoughts much more slowly than previously believed. This surprising finding has its roots in our evolutionary history and sheds more light on why our minds work the way they do. Researchers at the California Institute of Technology have unveiled a startling revelation about the human mind: our thoughts move at a mere 10 bits per second, a rate that pales in comparison to the staggering billion bits per second at which our sensory systems gather environmental data. This discovery, published in the journal Neuron, is challenging long-held assumptions about human cognition.The research, conducted in the laboratory of Markus Meister, the Anne P. and Benjamin F. Biaggini Professor of Biological Sciences at Caltech, and spearheaded by graduate student Jieyu Zheng, applied information theory techniques on an extensive collection of scientific literature. By analyzing human behaviors such as reading, writing, video gaming, and Rubik's Cube solving, the team calculated the 10 bits per second figure a rate that Meister describes as "extremely low."To put this in perspective, a typical Wi-Fi connection processes about 50 million bits per second, making our thought processes seem glacial by comparison. This stark contrast raises a paradox that Meister and his team are eager to explore further: "What is the brain doing to filter all of this information?"The human brain contains over 85 billion neurons, with one-third dedicated to high-level thinking in the cortex. Individual neurons are capable of transmitting more than 10 bits per second, yet our overall thought process operates at a much slower rate. This discrepancy presents another conundrum for neuroscientists to unravel.Furthermore, the study highlights a peculiar constraint of human cognition: our ability to process only one thought at a time, rather than multiple thoughts in parallel like our sensory systems. This sequential nature of thought is exemplified in activities such as chess, where players can only envision one possible sequence of moves at a time.Zheng and Meister propose that this limitation may be rooted in our evolutionary history. They suggest that the earliest creatures with nervous systems primarily used their brains for navigation moving towards food and away from predators. If our complex brains evolved from these simple systems, it would explain our tendency to follow only one "path" of thought at a time. // Related Stories"Human thinking can be seen as a form of navigation through a space of abstract concepts," the researchers write.This new quantification of human thought speed has far-reaching implications, potentially debunking some futuristic scenarios proposed by tech visionaries. For instance, the idea of creating direct interfaces between human brains and computers to accelerate communication may be less promising than previously thought, as our brains would likely still communicate at the same 10 bits per second rate.The study also suggests that our cognitive speed is well-suited to our environment. "Our ancestors have chosen an ecological niche where the world is slow enough to make survival possible," Zheng and Meister note. "In fact, the 10 bits per second are needed only in worst-case situations, and most of the time our environment changes at a much more leisurely pace."

Table of ContentsTable of ContentsThe Iron Giant (1999)Carry-On (2024)The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (2005)Krampus (2015)Scrooged (1988)Dear Santa (2024)The Holdovers (2023)Miracle on 34th Street (1947)Home Alone (1990)The Long Kiss Goodnight (1996)There are no rules that say you have to watch a Christmas movie on Christmas. But it is absolutely the best time to watch Christmas movies, or at least Christmas-adjacent films. These stories dont tend to play the same way in March as they do in December. Plus, Christmas films have the added benefit of being family-friendly selections for the most part. Some Christmas action movies are probably best left for older viewers.This years selections for the 10 best movies to watch on Christmas are available on most of the major streamers, and include new films mixed with some older titles. Not every selection below is strictly Christmas-related, but they all share the Christmas spirit in one way or another.Recommended VideosNeed more recommendations? We also have guides for the 10 best TV shows to watch on Christmas,the best Christmas movies on Netflix, the best Christmas movies on Disney+, the best Christmas movies on Hulu, the best Christmas movies on Amazon Prime Video, the best Christmas movies on Max, and the best Christmas movies on Hallmark Channel.Warner Bros. AnimationWould you believe that one of Vin Diesels best roles was when he voiced a giant robot 25 years ago? The Iron Giant is a masterpiece, and one of the last great 2D animated movies made before Pixars 3D style became the industry norm. The Giant (Diesel) is an alien robot that finds itself in America in 1958 during the Cold War. Although the Giant was created as a weapon of mass destruction, he is blissfully free of his memories when he befriends a young boy, Hogarth Hughes (Eli Marienthal).Although this isnt a movie set during Christmas, snow does fall by the end of the story when federal agent Kent Mansley (Christopher McDonald) and the U.S. army descend upon Hogarths town to find and destroy the Giant. The conclusion pulls on the heartstrings in unexpected ways, as the Giant is influenced by the greatest superhero of them all to become more than just a weapon. Hes Superman.Watch The Iron Giant on Paramount+.NetflixWe love the idea of Die Hard as a Christmas action movie as much as anyone else, but its time give the genre a fresh selection. Much like Die Hard 2, Carry-Onis set at an airport on Christmas Eve. Kingsmans Taron Egerton stars as TSA agent Ethan Kopek, whose holiday is ruined when an unnamed traveler (Jason Bateman) blackmails him into letting something dangerous get smuggled onto a commercial plane without being flagged.The traveler seems to have prepared for every contingency that Ethan comes up with to stop him, and hes even got someone ready to kill Ethans girlfriend, Nora Parisi (Sofia Carson), if he doesnt go through with his end of the deal. Ethans always wanted to be a cop, but hell have to settle for being a hero if he can live long enough to figure out a way to prevent this terrorist plot from coming to fruition.Watch Carry-On on Netflix.20th Century StudiosStrangely enough, The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe does qualify as a Christmas movie, complete with a cameo appearance by Santa himself. Since this is an English story, the name Santa goes by is Father Christmas (James Cosmo). During World War II, Peter Pevensie (William Moseley), and his three siblings, Susan (Anna Popplewell), Edmund (Skandar Keynes), and Lucy (Georgie Henley), are sent to the British countryside to escape the German blitz.While playing in their temporary home, Lucy and her siblings find their way into a fantasy realm known as Narnia, which is ruled with an iron fist by the White Witch (Tilda Swinton). Edmund soon falls under the sway of the witchs power, but the rest of his family decide to help free Narnia alongside the great lion, Aslan (Liam Neeson). Aslans return may weaken the White Witch, but the Pevensie children still have their roles to play in the battle ahead. Even Edmund.Watch The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe on Hulu.Universal PicturesSometimes Christmas just isnt complete without a yuletide horror story. Thats what Krampus is, without veering into R-rated territory. The story follows a dysfunctional family who have come together for the holidays to make each other miserable. Young Max Engel (Emjay Anthony) is a true believer in Christmas until his mean cousins ridicule him and taunt him for his faith in Santa Claus.In his anger, Max has attracted the attention of the anti-Santa, Krampus (Gideon Emery), an entity that punishes people who have lost the Christmas spirit. Krampus descends upon the household with his deadly toys and holiday minions to make everyone pay, and theres no Santa Claus coming to bail out the family this year.Watch Krampus on Max.UniversalScrooged is a variation of the classic story from A Christmas Carolwith a few modern twists. Or at least as modern as a film from 1988 can be. Bill Murray plays a miserly TV executive named Frank Cross whose network is putting on its own production of A Christmas Carol. None of that matters to Frank until he finds himself living out the story himself on Christmas Eve.Frank lost his faith in humanity a long time ago, and the Ghosts of Christmas Past (David Johansen), Present (Carol Kane), and Future have a hard time reaching his long buried heart. So they may have to literally slap some sense into Frank and show him the enormity of what hes lost, and what he might still be able to reclaim.Watch Scrooged on Prime Video.Paramount PicturesJack Black makes almost everything better, and hes easily the best thing in Dear Santa, a new Christmas film that went under the radar earlier this month on its way to Paramount+. A dyslexic kid named Liam Turner (Robert Timothy Smith) is going through some rough times when he writes a letter to Santa Claus asking for his help. Liam accidentally addressed his letter to Satan Claus, and it winds up in the hands of Satan (Black) himself.Satan trades one red suit for another, so to speak, and he is very interested in bringing Liams soul to Hell. But Satan cant help himself when it comes to liking this kid and wanting to genuinely help him. Thats going to cause all kinds of problems down in Hell, especially when Satan cant deliver what he originally came for.Watch Dear Santa on Paramount+.Seacia Pavao / Focus FeaturesThe Holdovers is a very different kind of Christmas story, but Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti) is basically th Grinch of the Barton Academy boarding school in 1970. Paul is forced to stay behind during Christmas break to oversee the children who cant go home to their parents. Eventually, that leaves Paul in charge of just one student: Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa).Its not really in Pauls nature to be a people person or empathetic to his students. However, Angus emotional plight and Pauls grieving co-worker, Mary Lamb (DaVine Joy Randolph), reawaken some of his closed-off feelings. Even as Paul bonds with Angus in a meaningful way, theres a high price to pay for his newfound empathy even if it does make him a better person in the process.Watch The Holdovers on Prime Video.20th Century StudiosThe 1994 remake of Miracle on 34th Street turned 30 this year, but since the 1947 original film is available on Peacock, well get this all-time classic holiday movie on our list. Edmund Gwenn won an Oscar for his role as Kris Kringle, who is perhaps the greatest department store Santa Claus ever. Children and parents love him, and Macys enjoys a lot of good will when hes around. The only problem is that Kris really believes that hes Santa, and that makes people think hes crazy.Kris befriends a young girl, Susan Walker (Natalie Wood), and he tries to restore her faith in Christmas by proving that he is really Santa. Convincing a child is one thing. But if Kris wants to avoid spending the rest of his Christmases in an asylum, then hell have to prove his identity in a highly publicized trial.Watch Miracle on 34th Street on Peacock.20th Century Fox / 20th Century StudiosHome Alone gets a lot of flak for its improbable premise and its occasionally violent slapstick comedy. But there are some genuinely touching moments, a great cameo by John Candy, and some really hilarious performances by Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern as Harry and Marv, the Wet Bandits.Macaulay Culkin became a star as Kevin McCallister, a child in a large family who is accidentally left behind while his relatives goes on vacation. As his mother, Kate (Catherine OHara), desperately tries to get back to him, Kevin realizes that the Wet Bandits have targeted his house for a robbery. And hes going to fight back with some deviously inventive traps.John Williams - Somewhere in My Memory | Home Alone (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)John Williams provided the score for this film, and he also co-wrote the memorable theme song Somewhere in My Memory, which feels like an instant Christmas classic.Watch Home Alone on Disney+.New Line CinemaFinally, were closing out this years list with an underrated Christmas action thriller: The Long Kiss Goodnight. Kiss Kiss Bang Bangs Shane Black wrote this film, and he does have a tendency to set his movies during the holiday season. Geena Davis plays Samantha Caine, a woman who is missing memories from over half of her life. Despite settling down as a schoolteacher with a loving husband, Hal (Tom Amandes), and a daughter, Caitlin (Yvonne Zima), Samantha still wants to know who she really is.She should have been careful about what she wished for. Private investigator Mitch Henessey (Samuel L. Jackson) has picked up new leads about Samanthas old life, and shes starting to remember some particularly lethal skills. Unfortunately for Samantha, she wont be able to hide from her enemies anymore, even if she cant remember why theyre trying to kill her.Watch The Long Kiss Goodnight on Pluto TV.Editors RecommendationsIf you have to watch one Hulu movie in December, stream this one

Table of ContentsTable of ContentsSelf-RelianceStrange DarlingDidiThe BikeridersThe OrderBlitzWoman of the HourHorizon: An American Saga Chapter 1My Old AssThe OutrunThere have been plenty of critically acclaimed mainstream movies released in theaters and on streaming this year. There have, however, also been just as many great movies unveiled throughout this year that have unfortunately failed to capture any level of widespread audience attention. With that in mind and, given that there are fewer than two weeks to go before this year comes to an end, now seems like as good a time as any to look back at some of those 2024 movies and give them the second chance at breakthrough success that they deserve.So, without any further ado, here are 10 underrated films that you probably missed this year.Recommended VideosSelf Reliance | Official Trailer | HuluJake Johnson made his feature directorial debut with this small, DIY comedy about a man who agrees to participate in a dark web reality game show where he becomes the target of unknown assassins for 30 days in exchange for a potential $1 million cash prize. The only way to survive the game is to make sure hes never alone long enough for his unknown attackers to reach him unnoticed. The further into the experience he gets, though, the more blurred the lines between his reality and his imagination become.RelatedSelf-Reliance quietly dropped on Hulu in January and flew relatively under-the-radar, but its a nifty and playful comedy. Even more notably, it introduces Johnson as a director with surprisingly experimental instincts and an admirable desire to explore whacky, high-concept ideas in modest ways.Strange Darling Exclusive Trailer (2024)Among those who have seen it, writer-director JT Mollners Strange Darling ranks high as one of the most divisive genre films of the year. Boasting a positively Tarantino-esque non-linear structure and a shocking mean streak, its a low-budget but immaculately photographed cat-and-mouse thriller that turns its initial, familiar premise of a young woman (Willa Fitzgerald) crossing paths with a possibly dangerous stranger (Kyle Gallner) completely on its head.Its many surprises, whether they ultimately work for you or not, are best left unspoiled, but Strange Darling emerges across its 96 minutes as one of the years most daring and subversive films. Its a deceptively sharp piece of genre filmmaking, and Fitzgeralds central turn as its female lead is one of the best movie performances of 2024.DDI () - Official Trailer [HD] - Only In Theaters July 26Didi was warmly received by critics when it hit theaters in late July, but it failed to achieve the kind of mainstream success that many hoped it would. Writer-director Sean Wangs feature directorial debut is a sharply conceived slice-of-life coming-of-age dramedy about a Taiwanese-American middle schooler (Izaac Wang) struggling to find his way in the 2000s at a time when online social platforms like YouTube and Myspace are already starting to complicate his and his friends means and methods of communicating.The film finds the right balance between affectionately looking back at its time period and still offering an unvarnished look at its young protagonists many struggles and faults. Seek it out if you havent already and be prepared to be blown away by Joan Chens breathtaking, quiet supporting performance as the caring, lonely mother of Didis adolescent lead.THE BIKERIDERS - Official Trailer [HD] - Only In Theaters June 21Writer-director Jeff Nichols The Bikeriders received a bit of a muted response when it made its fall festival debut in late 2023, which may have been what led to Searchlight Pictures surprisingly dropping it altogether. The film was, thankfully, picked up and revived by Focus Features, which gave it a late-June theatrical release befitting its sunburnt, wind-in-your-hair vibes and aesthetic.Those who took the time to catch The Bikeriders this past summer were consequently treated to one of the best films of the year. Based on a book about the rise and fall of a real-life Midwest motorcycle club in the 1960s, its an observational, romantic, and deeply cinematic piece of work, and stars Jodie Comer, Tom Hardy, and Austin Butler give three of the years most underrated performances in it.The Order | Official Trailer (HD) | VerticalThe Order only hit theaters a few weeks ago, but it seemed fated even before its release to make less of a splash among casual moviegoers than it deserved to. Whether you want to blame that on this years crowded December release slate or just poor marketing is up to you. Either way, its already set to make its VOD debut Christmas week (December 24, to be exact), and it should be at the top of your end-of-the-year watchlist.Based on real-life events, this thriller about an FBI investigation into an emboldened white supremacist organization is one of 2024s most affecting crime dramas. Its worth catching up on just for Superman star Nicholas Hoults chilling performance in it as a neo-Nazi who believes its his destiny to give America back to its rightful sons, but its expertly staged bank robbery and shootout sequences pack just as much of a punch.Blitz Official Trailer | Apple TV+Apples decision this year to move away from theatrically releasing its original films may be partly why director Steve McQueens Blitz didnt make a wider impact when it was finally released on Apple TV+ in late November. The film, a sweeping, Spielbergian World War II drama about life on Londons streets during the Nazis bombing campaign on the city, had all the potential to emerge as a widely appealing mainstream hit. Instead, it seems destined now to remain an underrated gem in its directors filmography.Fortunately, time will likely be kind to Blitz, a mournful yet frequently thrilling drama. It takes many of the thematic ideas that have long fascinated its director and repackages them in a more straightforwardly entertaining but no less artistic cinematic experience than McQueens fans are used to getting from him, and there are certain sequences throughout Blitz that are more immediately impactful than almost any others youll see this year.Woman of the Hour | Official Teaser | NetflixBased on the shocking real-life event when a serial killer appeared on The Dating Game in 1978, Woman of the Hour is a tense, difficult, and intelligent thriller about how the human gaze can be weaponized to hurt, minimize, and control others. It marks star Anna Kendricks directorial debut, and if the film is any true indication of her artistic abilities and wider interests, then it may also mark the beginning of an exciting new chapter of her career.The film is one of the best movies Netflix had to offer this year a confident piece of true-crime storytelling thats brimming with real, infectious anger and heartache. Its final 10 minutes will shock you by providing an epilogue to its story that is simultaneously cathartic and haunting.Horizon: An American Saga | Trailer 1For a brief time this past summer, Kevin Costners latest directorial effort, Horizon: An American Saga Chapter 1, the film that was seemingly at the center of his contentious Yellowstone exit, seemed primed to be one of the biggest cinematic punchlines of the year. Few could have predicted that, despite its poor box office performance and the uncertainty surrounding its planned sequels, it would actually end up ranking as one of 2024s most underrated films. Lo and behold, though, Horizon: An American Saga Chapter 1 is a rich, majestic blockbuster the likes of which audiences rarely get nowadays.Yes, it is overflowing with familiar Western archetypes and clichs. Yes, its too long and ends with a trailer for its sequel. Accept these issues and youll be treated to an epic that features not only some of 2024s most stunning imagery but also some of its best practically created set pieces and action sequences. Say what you will about the merits of Costners directorial vision: Few other working directors could have put together and pulled off the explosive, pulse-pounding midnight raid that sets Horizons story of Western migration into motion.My Old Ass | Official TrailerAt the center of writer-director Megan Parks underrated coming-of-age comedy My Old Ass is a question weve all asked ourselves at one time or another: What would you do if you could talk to your older self? Thats a chance that Elliott (Maisy Stella), a young teenage girl on the brink of going to college and leaving her hometown behind, receives when a mushroom trip results in her 39-year-old self (Aubrey Plaza) literally appearing next to her. When her future self tells her to appreciate her family more and gives her an ominous warning about a boy, Elliott gets caught up in a million dilemmas regarding her life, her future, and her priorities.My Old Ass eventually winds its way to ideas about grappling with loss, whether it be circumstantial or universal, that strike a deeper chord than first-time viewers may expect. The film isnt exactly subtle, and it struggles a bit to articulate its themes in a non-ham-fisted manner in its third act, but My Old Ass has enough heart to make up for its flaws, and it is buoyed at all times by Stellas luminous breakthrough central performance.THE OUTRUN | Official Trailer (2024)The Outrun made waves when it premiered in January at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival but went on to only briefly appear and disappear from movie theaters in early October with little promotion or acknowledgement. Thats a disappointing fate to befall a film as good and worthwhile as The Outrun. Based on the memoir of the same name by co-writer Amy Liptrot, the drama follows a struggling alcoholic (Saoirse Ronan) who returns to her home in Scotlands Orkney Islands in an attempt to achieve consistent sobriety and some kind of stability.Its a non-linear drama about the difficulties of addiction and the importance of putting some stable ground beneath your own feet. At the center of it all is a lived-in, commanding performance from Ronan that is not only one of the best shes ever given but also deserves to be seen and more widely appreciated than it has been up to this point. Above all else, The Outrunreminds us why Ronan really is one of the greatest actresses working in Hollywood right now.Editors Recommendations

you better watch out Why The Long Kiss Goodnight is a great alt-Christmas movie Geena Davis and Samuel L. Jackson are sheer perfection as an amnesiac former assassin and PI who foil a terrorist plot. Jennifer Ouellette Dec 24, 2024 11:12 am | 4 Credit: New Line Cinema Credit: New Line Cinema Story textSizeSmallStandardLargeWidth *StandardWideLinksStandardOrange* Subscribers only Learn moreEveryone has their favorite film that serves as alternative Christmas movie fare, with Die Hard (1988) and Lethal Weapon (1987) typically topping the listat least when all you want for Christmas is buddy-cop banter, car chases, shootouts, and glorious explosions. (Massive gratuitous property damage is a given.) I love me some Lethal Weapon but it's high time to give some holiday love to another great action flick set during the Christmas season: The Long Kiss Goodnight (1996), starring Geena Davis as an amnesiac school teacher who turns out to have been a government assassin in her former life.(Spoilers below for this nearly 30-year-old film.)At the time, Davis was married to director Renny Harlin, coming off a disastrous showing for their previous collaboration, Cutthroat Island (1995), which remains one of the biggest box office bombs of all time. (It is indeed a pretty bad movie.) But Shane Black's smart, savvy script for The Long Kiss Goodnight seemed like the perfect next project for them; it was promising enough that New Line Cinema bought it for what was then a record $4 million.Davis plays Samantha Caine, a small-town school teacher in Honesdale, PA, who has no memory since washing up on a beach eight years earlier with a head injury. Since then, she's given birth to a daughter, Caitlin (Yvonne Zima) and moved in with a kind-hearted fellow teacher named Hal (Tom Amandes). She's hired various private investigators to find out her true identity, but only the low-rent Mitch Henessey (Samuel L. Jackson) is still on the case. Then Mitch's assistant, Trin (Meloina Kanakaredes), finally finds some useful informationjust in time, too, since Sam is attacked at home by a criminal named One-Eyed Jack (Joseph McKenna), who broke out of prison to exact revenge after recognizing Sam during her appearance as Mrs. Claus in the town's annual Christmas parade.This coincides with Sam starting to recover fragments of her memory after a car accident following a holiday party. She'd already thought she might be a chef because of newly emerged expert knife skills. (The moment where she tosses a tomato in the air, skewers it into the wall with a kitchen knife, and nonchalantly says to her shocked partner and child, "Chefs do that," is priceless.) But when she ruthlessly snaps the neck of One-Eyed Jack in her kitchenpausing afterward to lick blood off her fingersit's clear that chef doesn't quite cover her unique skill set.A harrowing trip down memory lane Samanthan Caine (Geena Davis) has a quiet life as a small town schoolteacher with partner Hal (Tom Amandes), even if she has amnesia. New Line Cinema Samanthan Caine (Geena Davis) has a quiet life as a small town schoolteacher with partner Hal (Tom Amandes), even if she has amnesia. New Line Cinema "Chefs do that." Sam's memory starts to return after a car accident. New Line Cinema "Chefs do that." Sam's memory starts to return after a car accident. New Line Cinema Sam and Mitch (Samuel L. Jackson) make a daring escape. New Line Cinema Sam and Mitch (Samuel L. Jackson) make a daring escape. New Line Cinema "Chefs do that." Sam's memory starts to return after a car accident. New Line Cinema Sam and Mitch (Samuel L. Jackson) make a daring escape. New Line Cinema Charly resurfaces when Sam undergoes "the torture thing." New Line Cinema A quick makeover and Mitch finds himself dealing with assassin Charly. New Line Cinema Mitch and Charly/Sam are up against some pretty steep odds to rescue Caitlin (Yvonne Zima). New Line Cinema Craig Bierko plays the evil mercenary Timothy who has a history with Charly. New Line Cinema Hell hath no fury like a mother whose child has been kidnapped by terrorists. New Line Cinema Mitch and Sam embark on a harrowing road trip to follow up on the newly unearthed clues to her past identity, which leads them to Dr. Nathan Waldman (Brian Cox, in a performance dripping with sardonic grumpiness). She learns her true name is Charlene "Charly" Baltimore, an assassin for the US governmentand Waldman should know, since he trained her.Sam's memoryand her Charly personareturns with a vengeance after she's tortured by a former target named Daedalus (David Morse). (We're not going to quibble the finer points of the actual science behind focal retrograde amnesia. Sam's memory loss is what's known in the industry as a "buy"a plot point that simply exists without much explanation, in order to tell a better story.) Sam/Charly and Mitch team up against mercenary terrorist Timothy (Craig Bierko) and his corrupt government allies to foil a plot dubbed "Operation Honeymoon"and rescue Sam's kidnapped daughter in the process.Yes, there are some cheesy elements and the film's action is frequently over-the-topbut not any more so than countless other hugely popular action movies, particularly those from the 1980s and 1990s. It's all that wickedly sharp dialogue, expert pacing, and strong performances from the cast that makes the movie fire on all cylinders. Anchoring it all is the bickering dynamic and powerful bond between Sam/Charly and Mitch. Davis and Jackson have undeniable on-screen chemistryan essential ingredient for any successful buddy-cop action filmand both are clearly relishing their respective roles.It's a Christmas movie because it takes place at Christmasplus all those traditional holiday trappings frequently figure into the plot in small, clever ways. (Do be aware it's R-rated if you have young children.) And of course there is a happy ending, although in an early cut, Mitch died saving Sam and her daughter. But during a test screening an audience member hollered, "You can't kill Sam Jackson!" And the studio wisely reconsidered. Instead, Sam retires to the country and makes sure Mitch gets public credit for his role in foiling the plot. This leads to his hilarious appearance on Larry King Live, telling millions of viewers that he's "always frank and earnest with women. In New York I'm Frank, in Chicago I'm Earnest."Okay, so The Long Kiss Goodnight didn't exactly light up the box office when it was released, earning $95.4 million globally against its $65 million budget, despite mostly positive reviews. But it remains one of Davis's favorite roles, right up there with Thelma in Thelma and Louise (1991). (It's still Harlin's favorite of all his films.) Even Jackson told GQ in 2018 that of all the films he's been in, The Long Kiss Goodnight remains his favorite re-watch. Are you really gonna argue with Samuel L. Jackson? Just go add it to your holiday queue already!The Long Kiss Goodnight is currently streaming on Prime Video.Jennifer OuelletteSenior WriterJennifer OuelletteSenior Writer Jennifer is a senior reporter at Ars Technica with a particular focus on where science meets culture, covering everything from physics and related interdisciplinary topics to her favorite films and TV series. Jennifer lives in Baltimore with her spouse, physicist Sean M. Carroll, and their two cats, Ariel and Caliban. 4 Comments

Meta, Apple, OpenAI, and Tesla are set to launch new technology in the new year.In 2025, you can expect a display in Meta's glasses and a Gemini-infused mixed reality headset.Apple reportedly has several new offerings in the works, like an iPhone Air and a new iPhone SE.Big Tech companies didn't hold back when releasing AI updates and hardware in 2024 and you can expect the same pattern in 2025.Many companies showcased flashy product announcements and extravagant demonstrations at annual events this year, but a number of those offerings aren't available quite yet. Examples include Apple's revamped Siri, Meta's Orion glasses, and Google's Project Astra.While some release dates remain unclear, here's what you can expect to see from Big Tech companies in 2025.MetaMeta is reportedly adding a screen inside its Ray-Ban smart glasses that could be available in an update as early as the second half of 2025, the Financial Times reported Monday. The screen would be able to display notifications and responses from Meta's chatbot, the report said.CTO and head of Reality Labs Andrew Bosworth wrote in a December blog that in 2025, users can expect personalized AI assistants that don't just respond to prompts but help users throughout their day."One of the things I'm most excited about for 2025 is the evolution of AI assistants," Bosworth said in the post.AppleApple is expected to release a "more personal Siri," but it's unclear if that will come next year or with the Siri update expected in 2026. Apple is expected to announce the "LLM Siri" in 2025.Apple will also announce the release of a smart home device as early as March, according to a November Bloomberg article. The device may be a wall-mounted iPad-like tablet that can control appliances, manage video calls, and use AI to access apps.The tech giant will reportedly announce an iPhone "Air" model that will take on the sleek look of the MacBook Air, Bloomberg reported. And Apple will also unveil new iPad Air models and a new version of the budget-friendly iPhone SE, Bloomberg said separately. The new iPhone SE will eliminate the home button and is expected to support Apple Intelligence, according to the report.OpenAIOpenAI has been working on GPT-5 for over a year and a half, but the model has been pushed back. It's unclear when exactly it will launch, but there's a chance it might in 2025. The model is expected to have impressive capabilities, surpassing GPT-4's power.It will be able to complete multi-step tasks and work with audio, video, and text. It will also have a large context window, which would allow it to process larger amounts of text.TeslaWhile Elon Musk doesn't anticipate the Cybercab hitting volume production until 2026, he said in Tesla's third-quarter earnings call that he expects to get regulatory approval in 2025.During the call, he also said that the company is on track to start producing more affordable EV models in the first half of 2025."These vehicles will utilize aspects of the next-generation platform as well as aspects of our current platforms and will be able to be produced on the same manufacturing lines as our current vehicle line-up," Musk said.Musk also wrote in a post on X in July that Tesla will have humanoid robots in "low production" for the company's internal use in 2025, with high production for external companies in 2026.GoogleIn partnership with Samsung and Qualcomm, Google is introducing its approach to mixed reality with the release of the Android XR spatial computing platform. The company said in an announcement that the first device is built by Samsung and codenamed Project Moohan, and will be available to purchase next year.The device offers typical mixed reality experiences, as well as an integrated Gemini."With Gemini, our AI assistant, you can even have conversations about what you're seeing or control your device," the company said in the announcement. "Gemini can understand your intent, helping you plan, research topics and guide you through tasks."A Google DeepMind spokesperson also said that capabilities from research prototypes like Project Astra, which Google hopes will become a universal assistant, will graduate to Google applications and services. However, there are no plans to make Project Astra generally available itself, the spokesperson said.

The Roosevelt in New OrleansThe Roosevelt's "Waldorf Wonderland" lobby is covered in lights, Christmas ornaments, and mini trees. The Roosevelt It doesn't get more festive than a dazzling display of lights and mini-Christmas trees lining the hotel's lobby.The lobby, named "Waldorf Wonderland," is, per the hotel, enveloped in 112,000 lights, 1,600 feet of garland, and 4,000 glass ornaments.While decor is just one aspect of celebrating Christmas at The Roosevelt, another is its annual "Teddy Bear Tea" experience, where Santa welcomes kids of all ages to the hotel's North Pole. Once there, they can watch and listen as he reads stories aloud, sing and dance along, and enjoy a selection of festive sweet treats. The Plaza Hotel in New York CityThe Plaza in New York City hosts many events, including holiday-themed high tea and meet-and-greet with Santa. The Plaza, a Fairmont-managed hotel The Plaza's festive decor feels straight out of a film it's equal parts dreamy and magical.The hotel also offers a series of festive-themed events and experiences. Guests can enjoy afternoon tea with a revamped holiday menu at the Palm Court or sip cocktails and enjoy caviar at the Champagne Bar.For kids, there's "Storytime with Santa," a daily ritual from 3 p.m. to 4 p.m., where Santa will read a Christmas story aloud. Gaylord Opryland Resort & Convention Center in NashvilleThe hotel has three items, one of which is the Cascades Atrium. As pictured here, the atrium undergoes a festive transformation during the holiday season. Gaylord Opryland For 41 years now, Gaylord Opryland Resort has hosted "A Country Christmas," its annual holiday attraction.From life-size ice sculptures and over 5 million lights wrapping the resort to a 48-foot tree adorned with poinsettias, green garland, and hand-tied ribbon, guests will feel the festive spirit in every corner of the 2,888-room resort.The hotel also features an ice-tubing hill, a 10,000-square-foot ice rink, and many other festive-themed activities that engage guests of all ages. The Peninsula in ChicagoThe Peninsula in Chicago has a festive-themed afternoon tea, holiday meals, and a candy shop at its entrance. The Peninsula Chicago The Peninsula's entryway is populated with red poinsettias, ribbon-wrapped wreaths, and lots of twinkling lights.Whether you're staying the night or just visiting for a meal, the hotel has many holiday-appropriate traditions, including a themed afternoon tea, a skating rink surrounded by some of the windy city's most iconic skyscrapers, and a candy shop where kids can indulge in some Christmas sweets.On December 14, the property's in-house bar, Z Bar, will also host an ugly sweater party, where guests can don their best ugly sweaters and dance through the night. The Greenbrier in White Sulphur Springs, West VirginiaThe Greenbrier goes all out with Christmas decorations, preparation for which starts in early November. The Greenbrier In early November, a crew of 20 people begin working together to transform The Greenbrier's interiors into a festive wonderland.In addition to its plush decor, the hotel hosts a series of holiday-themed events, such as cookie and Christmas tree decorating, a mixology class, and seasonal performances.For guests staying in, there's also a special "Season's Greetings" dinner on Christmas Eve. Fairmont Scottsdale Princess in Scottsdale, ArizonaFairmont Scottsdale Princess hosts a yearly Christmas festival for guests and the public. The Fairmont Scottsdale Princess Hotel If you're on the hunt for a grand celebration, the Fairmont Scottsdale Princess, with its dazzling holiday displays and colorful light shows, is as lavish as it gets in the Southwest.Come November, the hotel is draped in over 10 million lights, and attractions such as a Ferris wheel, an outdoor ice rink, and igloos with fire tables are on display.The festival, at $35 per person, is open to the public and free for hotel guests until January 4. Willard InterContinental in Washington, DCWillard InterContinental is ideal for an opulent, Gilded-Age Christmas celebration. Willard InterContinental A Gilded Age hotel, the Willard InterContinental lives up to its opulent association with over-the-top decor.Think hallways lined with gold ornaments and mini-Christmas trees while some suites are transformed into a cozy Winterland complete with tents and holiday-themed films. The property's in-house restaurant hosts an afternoon tea with sweet and savory treats.There are also free carol performances at the hotel's lobby every night. Swissotel in ChicagoSwissotel Chicago will welcome Santa at its suite, designed around memorable holiday music, and an aprs ski experience at Amuse, its in-house bar. Swissotel Chicago Swissotel's top offerings this year include a Santa suite based on holiday songs and a chic aprs-ski experience at its bars."The Santa Suite will be humming with festive spirit," said Angela Bauer, Swisstel Chicago's general manager. The suite, which is decked out with 17 Christmas trees and lots of lights, can be reserved for private parties or VIP visits with Santa Claus.In-suite activities include cookie decorating, arts and crafts for kids, and face painting. Sawgrass Marriott Golf Resort & Spa in Ponte Vedra, FloridaSawgrass Marriott Golf Resort & Spa has a gingerbread sandcastle made entirely of chocolate and graham crackers. Sawgrass Marriott Golf Resort & Spa The pastry team at Sawgrass Marriott Golf Resort & Spa, guided by executive pastry chef James Victorino, crafted a gingerbread sandcastle a tribute to the resort's beach club that's on display in the resort's main lobby.Beginning work in October, the pastry team used chocolate shells and about 175 pounds of graham crackers to make the castle.Other experiences to enjoy on-site include a large Christmas buffet and a Christmas Eve dinner. (Guests have to make reservations for both in advance.) Hotel del Coronado in San DiegoThis year, Hotel del Coronado in San Diego is taking inspiration from Old Hollywood for its festive celebrations. Hotel del Coronado To celebrate the festive season this year, Hotel del Coronado returns to Old Hollywood.Paying tribute to the film "Some Like It Hot," which starred Marilyn Monroe, Tony Curtis, and Jack Lemmon, the hotel will feature a series of Hollywood-themed experiences.The Christmas tree, inspired by Marilyn Monroe's style, has been decorated in ruby and cherry hues with hints of black, gold, and silver. Ojai Valley Inn in Ojai, CaliforniaOjai Valley Inn is celebrating the festivities by taking a mindful, slow approach, focusing on family-friendly activities and large buffet dinners. Ojai Valley Inn If you seek an escape from the holiday hustle this festive season but still want to partake in holiday traditions, the Ojai Valley Inn offers serene respite.For the holiday season, the Spanish revival hotel transforms into a cozy destination with activities such as treasure hunts, roasting s'mores, and breakfast with Santa.The hotel will host a jingle bell jaunt on Christmas Eve and a lavish buffet on Christmas Day. Waldorf Astoria in Park City, UtahThe Waldorf Astoria Park City in Utah is a great winter escape for anyone looking to celebrate Christmas in a snow-covered town. Waldorf Astoria Park City Are you dreaming of a white Christmas with over 300 ski trails to explore? The Waldorf Astoria in Park City delivers a snowy holiday paradise and a ski adventure.Guests can relax by in-room fireplaces while ski valets handle equipment and gear delivery. Families will love the "Little Miners Camp" experience, which will transform kids' rooms with a teepee, lanterns, and mining-era decor for an unforgettable stay. Origin Hotel Kansas City in MissouriOrigin Hotel Kansas City is transforming its Leg Lamp Lodge with Christmas decor and themed activities, like a hot cocoa bar cart, to allow guests to experience a taste of the festive season in-house. Origin Hotel Kansas City Origin Hotel Kansas City is taking extra steps to ensure guests can experience the magic of Christmas both indoors and outdoors.An ideal setup for those celebrating away from home and still wishing for that Christmas touch the hotel's Leg Lamp lodge suite comes decorated with a tree that's inspired by the film, "A Christmas Story," a DVD player with a selection of classic holiday films, and holiday-themed robes.To keep the little ones engaged, there are trivia cards from "A Christmas Story" and an assortment of board games that can be enjoyed with hot chocolate from the cocoa bar. The Houstonian Hotel in HoustonThe "Merry Mansions" gingerbread display at The Houstonian Hotel is inspired by oilman Albert Bel Fey's mansion. The Houstonian Hotel, Club & Spa Guests checking in at The Houstonian Hotel this holiday season will be welcomed by the sweet scents of cookies, gingerbread, and gumdrops, courtesy of the massive gingerbread constructions displayed in the lobby.These elaborate sets are pastry reconstructions of iconic areas, such as the streets of North Post Oak Lane, a residential neighborhood in Houston. While homes are a major source of inspiration, some gingerbread displays are inspired by sculptures and furniture found at Bayou Bend Collection and Gardens, a subsection of Houston's Museum of Fine Arts.Other stand-out activities include a Christmas Day dinner, teepee tents for kids, and a spa tea experience at the hotel's Trellis Spa. The Vanderbilt in Newport, Rhode IslandWell-known event designer Bronson van Wyck has collaborated with The Vanderbilt Resort to transform its space this festive season. Robyn Lehr Bronson van Wyck, who's previously planned events for luxury brands like Cartier and Omega, has turned his attention to The Vanderbilt resort in Newport this festive season.The designer collaborated with luxury fabric house Brunschwig & Fils to create a nautical-themed Christmas wonderland across the hotel's lobby, grand staircase, and other such public spaces.The highlight, though, is a marine-themed tinsel tree displayed in the hotel's library. Mayflower Inn & Spa in Washington, ConnecticutMayflower Inn & Spa collaborated with ace designer Alexandra O'Neill's womenswear brand, Markarian, for a fun, festive makeover. Donna Dotan Like other luxury hotels worldwide, The Mayflower Inn & Spa has partnered with designer Alexandra O'Neill's brand, Markarian, for a festive makeover.Inspired by the brand's autumn/winter collection, the decor features wreaths, garlands, and bows in vibrant pops of green and red.At the entryway, an 18-foot Christmas tree is bedecked in various ornate ornaments. White Barn Inn in Kennebunk, MaineThe White Barn Inn guests can reserve a 14-seat-only private dinner table at its wine cellar for a cozy Christmas experience. Joe St. Pierre/Auberge Resorts Collection The White Barn Inn's cozy tabletop setup in its wine cellar is ideal for guests looking for an intimate experience that captures the charm of a house party in an out-of-home setting.Designed by interior decorator Nathan Turner who has also helped decorate other parts of the hotel the rustic, 14-seats-only dinner table offers a standout experience.Other highlights include wreaths with satin ribbons, velvet garlands, elegant candles, and custom linens set up throughout the hotel's public spaces. The Beekman in New York CityThe Beekman's bar room has undergone a cozy festive transformation, complete with a Christmas tree and poinsettias for the holiday season this year. Joe Thomas Whether staying at the hotel or simply visiting The Beekman has multiple festive-friendly activities all through December, leading up to New Year's.We recommend reserving a spot in its bar room, ideal for a cozy Christmas night out with loved ones. With its intimate ambiance, the space feels like an escape from the holiday hustle while keeping the festive spirits high, thanks to a giant Christmas tree in the center.The festivities continue until New Year's Eve, during which the hotel will host a silver disco dinner party featuring cocktails, a DJ set, and aerialist performances. The St. Regis in AtlantaThe Christmas tree Jan Haedrich, designer and founder of MME.Mink decorated for The St. Regis Atlanta. Paul Beezley/The St. Regis Atlanta The St. Regis Hotel in Atlanta is also joining the ranks of luxury hotels collaborating with designer brands for a festive makeover.This year, the hotel partnered with Jan Haedrich, the designer and founder of luxury fashion and accessories brand MME.Mink, for its festive tree decoration.For her part, Haedrisch decorated the tree in green moss, ice, and crystal motifs, feathered white partridges, and some of her favorite handbags from her brand, like the mini Carlton basket and green crocodile, complete with customized charms. Ponte Vedra Inn & Club in FloridaGuests staying at Ponte Vedra Inn & Club in Florida can avail of a personalized festive room makeover for an added fee. Ponte Vedra Inn & Club Ponte Vedra Inn & Club brings festivities to your room, albeit at an extra cost.Guests booking a stay at the hotel between November and December 30 can, for an additional $500, have their room decorated in festive decor, complete with a 6- to 8-foot frosted fir tree and holiday treats delivered by elves on the night of arrival.Guests will also receive a keepsake ornament that they can take back with them.

By Matthew Gault Published December 24, 2024 | Comments (1) | 15-megaton Castle Bravo explosion at Bikini Atoll, March 1, 1954, showing multiple condensation rings and several ice caps. U.S. Department of Energy photo. Since the end of the Cold War, the world has lived with the threat of nuclear fire. The worlds nine nuclear powers have the ability to end all life on Earth. In Russia and the U.S., the power to launch those world-ending weapons rests in the hands of a single human being. This has been true for decades, but for a long time, the public was able to safely ignore the threat. Somethings changed though, and people have learned to fear them once again. Ive been covering nuclear weapons for a decade now, and Ive watched it go from a niche curiosity to a major news beat over the last two years. Something shifted in 2024. The amount of nuclear stories and the public interest in nuclear weapons has changed. Every time Vladimir Putin makes a vague threat, a cascade of stories hits the newswires. Every report to Congress about advances in the Chinese nuclear arsenal now gets national press coverage. Three weeks ago, 60 Minutes cut together a bunch of its nuclear coverage from the past decade and released it as a long video on YouTube. The New York Times has spent the last year publishing incredible investigative journalism about nukes. One of the biggest TV shows of the year is an adaptation of a video game set in a post-nuclear wasteland. How did we get here? How did nuclear weapons move from a Cold War curiosity to a major public concern? These weapons have hovered like a Sword of Damocles above our heads for my entire life, but people used to safely ignore them.Matt Korda, who tracks nuclear weapons for the Federation of American Scientists pointed to TV shows like Fallout, the nuclear coverage of The New York Times, and a prevailing sense of doom in American life. The mood right now is apocalypse. Doomerism. Apocalypse is very much on peoples minds, he said. Last year, Oppenheimer told the story of the birth of nuclear weapons. A few months later, Amazon released Fallout, a nihilistic and absurd journey through a nuclear-ravage California wasteland. Both were enormous hits.Korda also pointed to the election, especially when it was between Biden and Trump. They were both very old. Both parties were champing at the bit to claim the other candidate was historically dangerous for the country. There were signs of impairment on both sides, he said. I have to think that that had a real effect on people recognizing that one of these two people is going to be in charge of a very destructive nuclear arsenal and theres serious problems with both of them in that respect, Korda said. The election made people a lot more aware that the nuclear system that we have deployed is designed, specifically, to concentrate power in the hands of a single individual.As Biden leaves office, hes 82 years old. Trump will be 78 as he takes office and 82 when he leaves it. Putin is 72 right now. Earlier this week, the New York Times published a survey about the Presidents sole authority to launch a nuclear weapon. The Times asked all 530 incoming members of Congress how they felt about the President having the ability to end all life on Earth. The responses represent an interesting cross-section of understanding an opinion. Many were uncomfortable with the president launching nukes as a first strike but fine with the president launching nukes in retaliation for a strike. Democrats called out Trump as erratic. Republicans pointed to Bidens diminished capacities. Some gave nuanced and complicated answers about deterrence, escalation, and sole authority. Many didnt respond, and some gave yes or no answers, but those who answered in-depth did so with consideration and thought.Its something thats on their mind. Nuclear threats were part of the first Trump administration, its true. But the conversation around nukes is different now, and worse. What was frightening about the first Trump administration was the cavalier way in which Mr. Trump made nuclear threats, and mostly with respect to North Korea. So you know, the Fire and the Fury fall of 2017 and then, of course, all the negotiations, which ultimately failed with Kim Jong Un throughout his presidency, Sharon Squassoni, a Congressional arms control veteran and research professor at George Washington University, told Gizmodo.She also pointed to Russias full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and Putins constant drumbeat of nuclear threats as something thats stoked fear. For the first time we are positioned opposite a country that has made blatant threats to use nuclear weapons, she said. The other thing that went along with that is the collapse of all these arms control treaties, Squassoni said. For decades, a series of arms control treaties between the U.S. and Russia ratcheted-down tensions. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, America was even helping Russia dismantle its nuclear weapons and use the nuclear material inside its nuclear power plants. Thats over. During the first Trump administration, America pulled out of the Reagan-era Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty. The treaty stopped both nations specific kinds of nukes with an intermediate range. A year later, the U.S. pulled out of the Open Skies Treaty, which lets rival countries openly surveil each other in order to prevent misunderstandings. In 2023, Russia withdrew from a treaty that banned the testing of nuclear weapons.The only remaining nuclear arms control treaty between the U.S. and Russia is now the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START). This Obama-era agreement limits the amount of nuclear warheads both countries can deploy. Itll expire in 2026 unless both sides agree to renew it. But enforcing it requires both sides to allow their rivals to inspect nuclear weapons sites. Putin has already said he wont allow the treaty to be enforced and itll likely die. Add to this the fact that America, Russia, and China are all building up their nuclear arsenals. China is digging holes in its deserts to fill with new intercontinental ballistic missiles. America is modernizing its force and is set to spend billions of dollars on its own silos and ICBMs. Russia is testing a new nuclear cruise missile and recently launched a new kind of medium-range ballistic missile at Ukraine in November. Were in a new nuclear arms race. This is not just rhetoric, Joseph Cirincione, a former Congressional staffer turned anti-nuclear proliferation watchdog, told Gizmodo. There are multi-billion dollar programs underway in almost all of the nine nuclear-armed nations. Most prominently in the United States, Russia, and China. According to Cirincione, the U.S. is spending $70 billion a year on new nuclear weapons and an additional $30 billion on missile defense systems. That money has a tangible effect on the communities where its spent. Nuclear weapons warp the reality of the places where they exist.To build its new Sentinel-class ICBMs, the U.S. will have to dig massive new silos and construct enormous underground structures in Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, Nebraska, and North Dakota. Various parts of this project will touch 23 different states. In the places where theyre building silos, contractors will build temporary cities to house an influx of workers. General Dynamics, a contractor working on new nuclear submarines, visits schools to teach students about what its like to work in the nuclear industry and pitch them on building submarines in the future. All of this has an effect on the public consciousness. What was once an ancient weapon of a bygone era is back with a vengeance. It is not some abstract weapon of war, but an integral piece of American society. It is part of the post-World War II myth that we tell ourselves and the thing, some say, that keeps us safe from bigger and more terrible wars.I think nuclear weapons retain a unique place in the fears of Americans, in part because the main story taught about nuclear weapons is that we used them to end a war. The second story taught about nuclear weapons, that the US and Russia have enough pointed at each other to end the world forever, means that whenever tensions flare between the two states with the largest arsenals, its a short walk to assuming nuclear oblivion is imminent, Kelsey Atherton, Chief Editor at the Center for International Policy told me. In a sense, Americans understand nukes as what ends big wars, and forget everything else about them, and popular coverage (especially on television) is horrendous at placing nukes in context, he said. Which means when something startling does happen, like the use of IRBM on Ukraine, it gets filtered through the shallowest understanding of nuclear risk, paired with apocalyptic video.This will accelerate. Putin isnt going anywhere. China has no reason to slow down its nuclear ambitions and President Trump and the GOP want more nukes not less. We are in a new nuclear age, one where the old fear of total oblivion in nuclear hellfire is more possible than its been since the 1980s. We can seek to understand it, we can lobby our leaders to stop, we can watch TV shows and movies that help us deal with the anxiety. What we cant do is ignore it.Daily NewsletterYou May Also Like By Matthew Gault Published December 21, 2024 By Matt Novak Published December 20, 2024 io9 Staff Published December 20, 2024 By Ed Cara Published December 19, 2024 By Matthew Gault Published December 19, 2024 By Matthew Gault Published December 18, 2024