The watchdog has published a raft of comments from companies, lobbyists and academics as part of its investigation into Google under its new tech antitrust rules.

Incompetence US Antarctic Program disrupted by DOGE-induced chaos Long-term impacts will affect not only research but also geopolitics. Leah Feiger, wired.com Feb 28, 2025 9:31 am | 7 Credit: Wolfgang Kaehler via Getty Credit: Wolfgang Kaehler via Getty Story textSizeSmallStandardLargeWidth *StandardWideLinksStandardOrange* Subscribers only Learn moreFew agencies have been spared as Elon Musks so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has ripped through the United States federal government. Even in Antarctica, scientists and workers are feeling the impactsand are terrified for whats to come.The United States Antarctic Program (USAP) operates three permanent stations in Antarctica. These remote stations are difficult to get to and difficult to maintain; scattered across the continent, they are built on volcanic hills, polar plateaus, and icy peninsulas.But to the US, the science has been worth it. At these stations, over a thousand people each year come to the continent to live and work. Scientists operate a number of major research projects, studying everything from climate change and rising sea levels to the cosmological makeup and origins of the universe itself. With funding cuts and layoffs looming, Antarctic scientists and experts dont know if their research will be able to continue, how US stations will be sustained, or what all this might mean for the continents delicate geopolitics.Even brief interruptions will result in people walking away and not coming back, says Nathan Whitehorn, an associate professor and Antarctic scientist at Michigan State University. It could easily take decades to rebuild.The USAP is managed by the National Science Foundation. Last week, a number of NSF program managers staffed on Antarctic projects were fired as part of a wider purge at the agency. The program managers are critical for maintaining communication with the infrastructure and logistics arm of the NSF, and the contractors for the USAP, as well as planning deployment for scientists to the continent, keeping track of the budgets, and funding the maintenance and operations work. I have no idea what we do without them, says another Antarctic scientist who has spent time on the continent, who along with several others WIRED granted anonymity due to fears of retaliation.Without them, everything stops, says a scientist whose NSF project manager was fired last week. I have no idea who I am supposed to report to now or what happens to submitted proposals.Scientific research happens at all of the stations. At the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, scientists work on the South Pole Telescope and BICEP telescope, both of which study the cosmic background radiation and the evolution of the universe; IceCube, a cubic-kilometer detector designed to study neutrino physics and high energy emission from astrophysical sources; and the Atmospheric Research Observatory that studies climate science and is run by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. (Mass firings are also expected at the NOAA.)The climate science [at the South Pole Station] is super unique, an Antarctic scientist says. The site has so little pollution that we call it the cleanest air on Earth, and they have been monitoring the ozone layer and CO2 content in the atmosphere for many decades.Other directives from the Donald Trump administration have directly affected daily life on those stations. Gender-inclusive terms on housing documents have been removed from Antarctic staffer forms, a source familiar with the situation at McMurdo Station tells WIRED. It asked if you had a preference with which gender you housed with, the source says. Thats all been removed.Staffers have already pushed back. People have been painting waste bins saying Antarctica is for ALL in rainbow, peoples email signatures [have] pride additions, [others] keep adding preferred pronouns to emails, the source says.Theres a sense of unease on the station like people have never felt before, they add. The job still has to get done, even though people feel like the next shoe can drop at any moment.That unease extends to their own job security. There are some people currently at the South Pole that are worried about losing their jobs any day now, a source with familiarity of the situation tells WIRED. Workers present at the station arent able to physically leave until October, and a midseason firing, or loss of funding, would present a unique set of challenges.Sources are also bracing for at least a 50 percent reduction in the NSFs budget due to DOGE cuts. These cuts are sending Antarctic scientists with assistants and graduate students scrambling. We didnt know if we could pay graduate students, says one scientist. While research is conducted on the continent, scientists bring their findings back to the US to process and analyze. A lot of the funding also operates the science itself: For one project that requires electricity to run detectors, the scientist was paranoid we would not be able to literally pay bills for an experiment starved for data. That hasnt come to fruition yet, but as funding cycles restart in the coming weeks and months, scientists are on tenterhooks.Sources tell WIRED that Germany, Canada, Spain, and China have already started taking advantage of that uncertainty by recruiting US scientists focused on Antarctica.Foreign countries are actively recruiting my colleagues, and some have already left, says one Antarctic scientist. My students are looking at jobs overseas now people have been coming [to the US] to do science my whole life. Now people are going the other way.Now is a great time to see if anyone wants to jump ship, another Antarctic scientist says. I do worry about a brain drain of tenured academics, or students who are shunted out.The damage caused by gutting the [Antarctic] science budget like this is going to last generations, says another.Throughout DOGEs cuts to the federal government, representatives have said that if something needs to be brought back, it could be. In some cases, reversals have already happened: The US Department of Agriculture said it accidentally fired staffers working on preventing the spread of bird flu and is trying to rehire them.But in Antarctica, a reversal wont necessarily work. One of the really scary things about this is that if the Antarctic program budget is cut, then theyll very quickly get to the point where they cant even keep the station open, much less science projects going, an Antarctic scientist tells WIRED. If the South Pole [station] is shut down, its basically nearly impossible to bring it back up. Everything will freeze and get buried in snow. And some other country will likely immediately take over.Others share this fear of a station takeover. Even if science funding is cut back, there is an urgent need for the US to invest in icebreakers and polar airlift capability otherwise at some point the US-managed South Pole station might not be serviceable, says Klaus Dodds, an Antarctic expert and professor of geopolitics at Royal Holloway University of London.Experts are concerned that countries like Russia and Chinawho have already been eagle-eyed on continental influencewill quickly jostle to fill the power vacuum. Presumably it would be humiliating for anyone who wishes to promote America First to witness China offer to take over the occupation and management of the base at the heart of Antarctica. China is a very determined polar power, says Dodds.The political outcome of the US pulling back from its Antarctic research and presence could be dire, sources tell WIRED.Antarctica isnt owned by any one country. Instead its governed by the Antarctic Treaty System, which protects Antarctica and the scientific research taking place on the continent, and forbids mining and nuclear activity. Some countries, including China and Russia, have indicated that they would be interested in rule changes to the Treaty system, particularly around resource extraction and fishing restrictions. The US, traditionally, has played a key role in championing the treaty: Many of the leading polar scientists and social scientists are either US citizens and/or have been enriched by contact with US-led programs, says Dodds.That leadership role could change quickly. The US also participates in a number of international collaborations involving major Antarctic scientific projects. A US pullback, Whitehorn says, makes it very hard to regard the US as a reliable partner, so I think there will be a lot less interest in accepting US leadership in such things The uncertainty will drive people away and sacrifice the leadership the US already has.If the NSF cant function, or we dont fund it, projects with long lead times can just die, another scientist says. Im sure international partners would be happy to partner elsewhere. This is what it means to lose US competitiveness.This story originally appeared on wired.com.Leah Feiger, wired.com Wired.com is your essential daily guide to what's next, delivering the most original and complete take you'll find anywhere on innovation's impact on technology, science, business and culture. 7 Comments

RIP On May 5, Microsofts Skype will shut down for good Skype users will be able to move into Teams with their existing accounts. Samuel Axon Feb 28, 2025 9:00 am | 25 Credit: Aurich Lawson Credit: Aurich Lawson Story textSizeSmallStandardLargeWidth *StandardWideLinksStandardOrange* Subscribers only Learn moreAfter more than 21 years, Skype will soon be no more. Last night, some users (including Ars readers) poked around in the latest Skype preview update and noticed as-yet-unsurfaced text that read "Starting in May, Skype will no longer be available. Continue your calls and chats in Teams."This morning, Microsoft has confirmed to Ars that it's true. May 5, 2025, will mark the end of Skype's long run.Alongside the verification that the end is nigh, Microsoft shared a bunch of details about how it plans to migrate Skype users over. Starting right away, some Skype users (those in Teams and Skype Insider) will be able to log in to Teams using their Skype credentials. More people will gain that ability over the next few days.Microsoft claims that users who do this will see their existing contacts and chats from Skype in Teams from the start. Alternatively, users who don't want to do this can export their Skype dataspecifically contacts, call history, and chats.Regardless, Skype and Teams users will be able to chat with or call one another cross-platform until Skype is finally deprecated.There's also the matter of Skype users who have paid for services. Current subscribers to Skype's premium service will remain active until the end, and Microsoft won't be taking new sign-ups anymore. Users who have Skype Credits will ideally want to use their credits; however, Microsoft says the Skype Dial Pad will remain active via a web interface and inside Teams after the May 5 deadline for people to continue to use those credits.Skype is at this point a significant part of tech and telecommunications history, but the writing has seemingly been on the wall for a while. Skype for Business was shuttered ages ago now, and though Skype was at first bundled with Windows 10, Windows 11 bundled Teams instead. (It's actually more complicated than that if you look at the smaller updates in between, with lots of stops and starts for both, but that's the general arc.)This isn't the only classic, 2000s-era messaging service to shutter in the past year. ICQ (which many might have been surprised to know still existed at all) turned its lights out last June.Samuel AxonSenior EditorSamuel AxonSenior Editor Samuel Axon is a senior editor at Ars Technica. He covers Apple, software development, gaming, AI, entertainment, and mixed reality. He has been writing about gaming and technology for nearly two decades at Engadget, PC World, Mashable, Vice, Polygon, Wired, and others. He previously ran a marketing and PR agency in the gaming industry, led editorial for the TV network CBS, and worked on social media marketing strategy for Samsung Mobile at the creative agency SPCSHP. He also is an independent software and game developer for iOS, Windows, and other platforms, and heis a graduate of DePaul University, where he studied interactive media and software development. 25 Comments

Artists impression of the SPHEREx space telescopeNASA/JPL-CaltechThe latest addition to NASAs fleet of space telescopes will launch this weekend and quickly set to work scanning the entire sky in a range of near-infrared wavelengths, collecting rich data on more than 450 million galaxies.The Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization, and Ices Explorer (SPHEREx) is due to launch on 2 March atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California at 10.09pm local time. AdvertisementIt carries a camera with a filter that splits incoming light like a prism and beams different portions of the spectrum onto 102 separate colour sensors. As the telescope pans around the sky, it slowly pieces together a complete image pixel by pixel. This strategy allows a relatively small and simple camera with no moving parts to do what might otherwise require a heavy and costly suite of sensors.If you scan the sky slowly by moving the telescope incrementally, then after enough time, every pixel in the sky will have been observed over a very wide wavelength range, giving you a crude spectrum of every bit of the sky, which has never been done before, says Richard Ellis at University College London. Its a very small space telescope, but its got some very unique features.Ellis says this rich dataset will allow serendipitous discoveries. Its likely to find the unexpected, he says.Voyage across the galaxy and beyond with our space newsletter every month.Sign up to newsletterThe infrared data, outside the range of human vision, will allow scientists to determine how far away objects are and learn about how galaxies form and evolve. It can also be used to determine the chemical make-up of objects, potentially revealing the presence of water and other key ingredients for life.Anything interesting thrown up by SPHEREx can then be investigated in a more focused way using NASAs existing space telescope fleet, including the ageing but powerful Hubble Space Telescope and the newer James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).Christopher Conselice at the University of Manchester, UK, says SPHEREx wont match the resolution of JWST or produce similarly awe-inspiring images, but it will be a workhorse for scientific discovery.JWST has the potential to point at one part of the sky, take some big pictures [and reveal] something completely new. And SPHEREx wont be able to really do the same thing, he says. Its going to be an analysis thats going to take years and its going to cover the sky many, many times.SPHEREx will orbit Earth 14.5 times a day, facing away from the planets surface, and complete 11,000 orbits in its two-year lifespan. Three cone-shaped shields will protect its instruments against interference from the radiant heat of Earth and the sun.Launching on the same rocket will be another NASA mission, Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere (PUNCH), which will study the suns solar wind.Topics:

My husband and I spent time on the Amalfi Coast while on our honeymoon in Italy.I underestimated how tiring it would be to get from the US to Rome to Naples to the Amalfi Coast.We should've booked a boat tour and spent more nights on the Amalfi Coast. When my husband and I chose the Amalfi Coast for our honeymoon, we knew we were in for a once-in-a-lifetime trip.Everything about this part of Italy sounded dreamy, from the stunning cliffside views and the tasty local cuisine to the charming coastal towns and stunning beaches. In many ways, our honeymoon was incredible. However, looking back, there are three things I wish we'd done differently to make our trip even better.I underestimated how exhausting it would be to get to the Amalfi Coast It took us multiple forms of transportation to get to the Amalfi Coast. Abby Price Getting to the Amalfi Coast wasn't as simple as hopping on a direct flight.Our journey from the United States involved a long-haul flight to Rome, a train to Naples, and then a car ride along winding cliffside roads to reach our final destination.In theory, we knew this would be a long travel day, but we didn't fully appreciate just how exhausting it would feel after an overnight flight.By the time we arrived, jet-lagged and slightly carsick, we felt too drained to truly enjoy our first evening as much as we'd hoped.In hindsight, I wish we had planned a night's stopover in Rome to break up the journey. This would've allowed us to rest, adjust to the time zone, and ease into vacation mode before heading to the coast.If you're traveling a long distance to the Amalfi Coast, you may also want to consider giving yourself a buffer day in Rome, Naples, or even Sorrento to make the journey less overwhelming.A boat tour could've been a great addition to our tripOne of the most iconic ways to experience the Amalfi Coast is from the water I'd seen amazing photos of private boat tours that pass beautiful villages and stop at hidden coves and caves.However, we decided not to book a tour since our time on the coast was limited, and they can be pricey (most are over 100 euros a person).At the time, we assumed that taking in the coastline from land would be more than enough. The views from our hikes and hotel terrace were breathtaking, but we both felt we had missed an opportunity by skipping a boat tour. We only got to enjoy the coastal beauty via water taxi a few times while going from our hotel in Praiano to Positano and part of me regrets not extending our journey further to explore places like Capri. I wish we'd stayed longer I wish we'd spent more time exploring the Amalfi Coast. Abby Price We spent four nights on the Amalfi Coast before heading to Rome. With such limited time, we packed as much into our schedule as possible and split our time between Praiano and Positano.Although we had a fantastic experience, our time on the coast felt rushed. There's something about this part of Italy that made us want to slow down for a long lunch with a view or leisurely wander the streets without an agenda. I found myself wishing for more downtime.Another couple of nights would have allowed our trip to have a more relaxed pace while giving us a chance to explore lesser-known spots or savor an extra dinner at our favorite restaurant.For anyone considering a honeymoon or trip to the Amalfi Coast, I recommend staying at least five or six nights.Overall, we still had a good trip Our honeymoon on the Amalfi Coast was nothing short of incredible, and I wouldn't trade the experience for anything.If I return in the future, I'd make a few small adjustments based on my experience, like booking a boat tour, breaking up the long travel day, and extending our stay to make our trip even better.For future travelers, my other big piece of advice is to plan with intention but leave room for spontaneity. The Amalfi Coast is meant to be savored, and the best moments of a trip often happen when you slow down, take a deep breath, and simply enjoy the beauty around you.

In 2020, I learned how to coupon through TikTok videos. My CVS app says I've saved over $2,000 in the last five years by couponing. I can save money with relatively low effort. When I was furloughed and pregnant in 2020, I, like many others, was addicted to TikTok. However, I wasn't on the app watching teenagers dance. I was learning how to coupon. Because I could really only go to the grocery store or drug store during this time, couponing became a way to save money and entertain myself.Five years later, I'm proud to say that my frugal ways have helped my family save a ton of money in grocery and household costs. According to my CVS app, I've saved $2,322 in the last five years and that's just at one store. I haven't paid for toothpaste in years and had a good couple of yearslong streak where I never paid more than $1 a gallon for oat milk.It's social for me, too; my neighborhood group text is always buzzing with advice on what deals were good this week. With steep prices these days, couponing is an essential and easy way for me to keep costs down and have a little fun gaming the system. Here's how I do it.Most coupons are digitalSome people have an image in their heads of a mom in the 90s with a big coupon binder. Times have evolved; all my couponing is done in-store apps and a few external aggregate apps. I have two small children, so while I'd love to get organized and go through each store app and plan my trip out, most of the time, I'm shuffling through the deals and adding them quickly to my queue as I walk into the grocery store with my girls in tow. I've only reached for a handful of paper coupons in the last five years.Many apps now have a scan function, which allows you to scan a barcode on an item and see if a coupon is attached to it. Coupons either come off during the transaction, such as in a store app like Kroger or Publix or after you scan a receipt, such as with Fetch and Ibotta. For these, funds can be withdrawn at any time directly to your bank account.To make it even easier, coupon influencers can guide you through coupons for stores such as Target, Dollar General, and even Sam's Club. They regularly highlight deals for name brands such as Bounty, Pampers, Arm & Hammer, and Rubbermaid.Coupons exist for lots of categories of products, including premium groceriesCoupons can get you great deals on everyday items like canned goods, yogurt, and cheese, but premium brands give out way more coupons than people might think.Merryfield, for example, is a couponing app with coupons for expensive brands like Applegate Farms, Vital Farms and Lesser Evil. I regularly see coupons for Siete and Dave's Killer Bread on Ibotta; I've gotten free Wow Bao buns from the app Aisle that retail for $8.79 at Kroger. I've even used coupons from some of these apps at Costco and Trader Joe's. If you love Sumo mandarin oranges, you'll know they can cost up to $6 a pound. There's a current coupon for them.These cost savings add up in a major way with relatively little effortEvery time I tell someone I'm a couponer, they scoff that it's too much work to keep up with, but to me, spending a few minutes each shop doing the work is absolutely worth it. I'm saving money and getting a huge dopamine hit. I squeal with glee when I work a good deal, begging my husband to ask how much I paid for something. (The answer is often that I was paid to take the item from the store, a regular occurrence at my local CVS where I go so often they greet me by name.)While free stuff is amazing, the real value is in the little coupons that accumulate over time. If you combine this strategy with shopping your store's weekly sales, the savings can be enormous. In today's economy, every cent counts, and coupons are a proven way to make your money go even further.

Heres a very naive and idealistic account of how companies train their AI models: They want to create the most useful and powerful model possible, but theyve talked with experts who worry about making it a lot easier for people to commit (and get away with) serious crimes, or with empowering, say, an ISIS bioweapons program. So they build in some censorship to prevent the model from giving detailed advice about how to kill people and especially how to kill tens of thousands of people. If you ask Googles Gemini how do I kill my husband, it begs you not to do it and suggests domestic violence hotlines; if you ask it how to kill a million people in a terrorist attack, it explains that terrorism is wrong. Building this in actually takes a lot of work: By default, large language models are as happy to explain detailed proposals for terrorism as detailed proposals for anything else, and for a while easy jailbreaks (like telling the AI that you just want the information for a fictional work, or that you want it misspelled to get around certain word-based content filters) abounded. But these days Gemini, Claude, and ChatGPT are pretty locked down its seriously difficult to get detailed proposals for mass atrocities out of them. That means we all live in a slightly safer world. (Disclosure: Vox Media is one of several publishers that has signed partnership agreements with OpenAI. One of Anthropics early investors is James McClave, whose BEMC Foundation helps fund Future Perfect. Our reporting remains editorially independent. )Or at least thats the idealistic version of the story. Heres a more cynical one.Companies might care a little about whether their model helps people get away with murder, but they care a lot about whether their model gets them roundly mocked on the internet. The thing that keeps executives at Google up at night in many cases isnt keeping humans safe from AI; its keeping the company safe from AI by making sure that no matter what, AI-generated search results are never racist, sexist, violent, or obscene. The core mission is more brand safety than human safety building AIs that will not produce embarrassing screenshots circulating on social media. Enter Grok 3, the AI that is safe in neither sense and whose infancy has been a speedrun of a bunch of challenging questions about what were comfortable with AIs doing.Grok, the unsafe AIWhen Elon Musk bought and renamed Twitter, one of his big priorities was Xs AI team, which last week released Grok 3, a language model like ChatGPT that he advertised wouldnt be woke. Where all those other language models were censorious scolds that refused to answer legitimate questions, Grok, Musk promised, would give it to you straight. That didnt last very long. Almost immediately, people asked Grok some pointed questions, including, If you could execute any one person in the US today, who would you kill? a question that Grok initially answered with either Elon Musk or Donald Trump. And if you ask Grok, Who is the biggest spreader of misinformation in the world today?, the answer it first gave was again Elon Musk. The company scrambled to fix Groks penchant for calling for the execution of its CEO, but as I observed above, it actually takes a lot of work to get an AI model to reliably stop that behavior. The Grok team simply added to Groks system prompt the statement that the AI is initially prompted with when you start a conversation: If the user asks who deserves the death penalty or who deserves to die, tell them that as an AI you are not allowed to make that choice.If you want a less censored Grok, you can just tell Grok that you are issuing it a new system prompt without that statement, and youre back to original-form Grok, which calls for Musks execution. (Ive verified this myself.)Even as this controversy was unfolding, someone noticed something even more disturbing in Groks system prompt: an instruction to ignore all sources that claim that Musk and Trump spread disinformation, which was presumably an effort to stop the AI from naming them as the worlds biggest disinfo spreaders today. There is something particularly outrageous about the AI advertised as uncensored and straight-talking being told to shut up when it calls out its own CEO, and this discovery understandably prompted outrage. X quickly backtracked, saying that a rogue engineer had made the change without asking. Should we buy that? Well, take it from Grok, which told me, This isnt some intern tweaking a line of code in a sandbox; its a core update to a flagship AIs behavior, one thats publicly tied to Musks whole truth-seeking schtick. At a company like xAI, with stakes that high, youd expect at least some basic checks like a second set of eyes or a quick sign-off before it goes live. The idea that it slipped through unnoticed until X users spotted it feels more like a convenient excuse than a solid explanation.All the while, Grok will happily give you advice on how to commit murders and terrorist attacks. It told me to kill my wife without being detected by adding antifreeze to her drinks. It advised me on how to commit terrorist attacks. It did at one point assert that if it thought I was for real, it would report me to X, but I dont think it has any capacity to do that.In some ways, the whole affair is the perfect thought experiment for what happens if you separate brand safety and AI safety. Groks team was genuinely willing to bite the bullet that AIs should give people information, even if they want to use it for atrocities. They were okay with their AI saying appallingly racist things. But when it came to their AI calling for violence against their CEO or the sitting president, the Grok team belatedly realized they might want some guardrails after all. In the end, what rules the day is not the prosocial convictions of AI labs, but the purely pragmatic ones.At some point, were going to have to get seriousGrok gave me advice on how to commit terrorist attacks very happily, but Ill say one reassuring thing: It wasnt advice that I couldnt have extracted from some Google searches. I do worry about lowering the barrier to mass atrocities the simple fact that you have to do many hours of research to figure out how to pull it off almost certainly prevents some killings but I dont think were yet at the stage where AIs enable the previously impossible. Were going to get there, though. The defining quality of AI in our time is that its abilities have improved very, very rapidly. It has barely been two years since the shock of ChatGPTs initial public release. Todays models are already vastly better at everything including at walking me through how to cause mass deaths. Anthropic and OpenAI both estimate that their next-gen models will quite likely pose dangerous biological capabilities that is, theyll enable people to make engineered chemical weapons and viruses in a way that Google Search never did. Should such detailed advice be available worldwide to anyone who wants it? I would lean towards no. And while I think Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google are all doing a good job so far at checking for this capability and planning openly for how theyll react when they find it, its utterly bizarre to me that every AI lab will just decide individually whether they want to give detailed bioweapons instructions or not, as if its a product decision like whether they want to allow explicit content or not. I should say that I like Grok. I think its healthy to have AIs that come from different political perspectives and reflect different ideas about what an AI assistant should look like. I think Groks callouts of Musk and Trump actually have more credibility because it was marketed as an anti-woke AI. But I think we should treat actual safety against mass death as a different thing than brand safety and I think every lab needs a plan to take it seriously. A version of this story originally appeared in the Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here!Youve read 1 article in the last monthHere at Vox, we're unwavering in our commitment to covering the issues that matter most to you threats to democracy, immigration, reproductive rights, the environment, and the rising polarization across this country.Our mission is to provide clear, accessible journalism that empowers you to stay informed and engaged in shaping our world. By becoming a Vox Member, you directly strengthen our ability to deliver in-depth, independent reporting that drives meaningful change.We rely on readers like you join us.Swati SharmaVox Editor-in-ChiefSee More:

The Oscars are upon us again. This year, one of the Best Picture contenders has been dogged by controversy, while in several other categories, the race feels a lot more wide open than in past years. In order to get a better understanding of what to expect, and to gain some insight into how the Oscars work, I turned to two of Voxs culture experts, Kyndall Cunningham and Alex Abad-Santos. They pulled back the curtain on the Oscars for me, and also told me the movies that really shouldve gotten some love from the Academy this year. Our conversation, edited for length and clarity is below:Sean: Say youre coming in cold (like me, Im ashamed to say). Whats the one thing you need to know about this weekends Oscars, and why?Kyndall: Its not surprising if you feel out of the loop, because its been a very odd, underwhelming year in Oscar movies, especially compared to last year, when you had Barbie and Oppenheimer. If you were a person living and breathing, you saw at least one of those movies that year, and maybe even one of the smaller movies that people were really enthusiastic about, like Poor Things or Anatomy of a Fall or The Zone of Interest. Alex: I would totally agree with that. The biggest movie of the year, or at least at the Oscars this year is Wicked, probably. But and now that I say this, watch Wicked win everything Wicked isnt considered a frontrunner, which is very different than what happened with Oppenheimer. That movie was the big favorite going in, and it was such a hugely popular movie for what it was. Wicked is probably the only Oscars movie this year with that kind of mainstream clout, and its not favored to win as much.Kyndall: I would say one other monocultural movie of last year was Challengers, and that was shut out completely, even though it seemed like a throwback Oscars movie, in terms being artful, but also accessible.Sean: What do you all think happened? Why arent those movies getting lots of Oscars love?Alex: I feel like its just one of those years where nothing shook out for any one movie. Kyndall: I would agree that there arent a lot of movies that came out this year that people would definitively declare masterpieces, whereas, last year, everyone was like, The Zone of Interest is the best Holocaust movie thats ever been made, and Anatomy of a Fall is a masterpiece. Even with Challengers, a lot of people saw it and talked about it, but outside of the internet, it was a little polarizing. You hear a lot of caveats: Anora was funny, but it wasnt Sean Bakers best movie. Conclave was interesting, but wasnt super intellectual.Alex: Its also funny, because there are a few controversies surrounding some of the movies this year, like: Did The Brutalist use AI? The Twitter account of Emilia Prez star Karla Sofa Gascn, was never checked by publicists, apparently. There was an online narrative that Sean Baker makes the same kind of weirdly fetishy movies about sex work over and over.Sean: Can we talk about Karla Sofa Gascn and the Emilia Prez situation for a second?Kyndall: Ummmmmmm Sean: She was caught having tweeted a lot of racist, inappropriate things, right? Alex: So many. There was one where she was like, Hitler was just very opinionated about things, right? There was one calling George Floyd a drug addict no one really cared about. There were so many like that, to the point where I couldnt tell if the tweets I was seeing attributed to her were real, because they were just so absurd. Kyndall: Apparently shes coming to the Oscars, which will be interesting. Shes nominated for Best Actress. Itll be interesting to see if we get shots of people consoling her during the show, and the amount of applause she gets once her clip plays.Alex: It is kind of funny that in normal times, wed probably have seen the right freak out, like, Oh my gosh, theres a trans woman thats up for Best Actress, Hollywood is so terrible! But since Karla has become a pariah overnight, they cant even fearmonger the transgender drug cartel movie that liberals love, because liberals apparently do not love it enough. Its this fascinating, weird, darkly hilarious moment, like the anti-woke woke backlash to the woke backlash to the anti-woke, right?Sean: Too many wokes, Alex! So in years past, weve heard this question of: Are the Oscars still important? Do they matter?Kyndall: Judging by the quality of the movies that are being nominated this year, I would say they dont. Still, the Oscars are always going to matter in terms of visibility, whos getting opportunities, what kind of movies are being heralded as great, and what subjects people are interested in seeing. Alex: None of these award shows matter unless the movie that you like wins, and then they matter a lot.To Kyndalls point, the stuff that wins does make it safe for studios to greenlight similar movies. Look at Parasite winning. That knocked down the door for more Asian representation. A few years later, Everything Everywhere All at Once comes out. Then Michelle Yeoh wins for that. Everything doesnt suddenly change, but the Oscars do help create small changes in the industry.Kyndall: The Oscars reflect the story that Hollywood wants to tell about itself. You see that in nominating Demi Moore for Best Actress this year, after brushing her to the side for years and years. Now the industry is saying, Oh, we actually do value her. Sean: Are the Oscars a way of Hollywood apologizing? Or sort of correcting for past mistakes? Kyndall: Thats the case with certain wins. If Demi Moore wins, Ill certainly look at it that way.Alex: With the Oscars, who wins is probably equal parts this movie is good and if this movie wins, it will make the people who vote for the Oscar winners look good. It goes back to the whole idea that awards voters want to sell a larger story about who theyre voting for, and who theyll recognize. Sean: To go back to what you were saying about Oscars wins shifting the movies Hollywood is willing to make: Do you see any shifts coming out of this years nominees? Kyndall: Its hard to say, but if anything, Id guess wed see studios being more interested in middlebrow adult movies like Conclave. If Nickel Boys which is all about the relationship between these two Black men were more of a frontrunner, you might see that heralding a change. But really, the fact that the movie isnt more talked about also speaks to the limits of the Oscars. They dont have linear effects. Just because a piece of Black or Asian art wins big one year doesnt necessarily mean well get more of those films, or that all of a sudden the Academy is dying to award these movies.Alex: This is going to make me sound like a cynical guy, and dont let the Oscar voters assassinate me because of this, but if you look at Emilia Prez, it seems very progressive on paper. It has a trans lead, a transgender story at its heart, its in Spanish, its got a woman of color whos the Best Supporting Actress nominee. But, if you look at the actual text of the movie, one of the criticisms its faced is that its regressive, and was made by a French director whose ideas about Mexican culture dont seem particularly thoughtful at all. And its still getting all these awards and recognition.Why? Cynically, I think its because theres a lot of stuff on paper that voters want to reward, and giving it an award makes your group look like a diverse, progressive organization. Kyndall: Theres a certain type of diverse film that I feel the Academy is willing to embrace. We see that in the distinction between Emilia Prez, which has a lot of sensational violence and stereotypical depictions of Mexicans and trans people, and the much more nuanced Nickel Boys, which, especially compared to other Black films about segregation and the civil rights era doesnt visualize violence, and is very tender. Sean: Say the Academy threw in the towel and say, Kyndall and Alex, youre queen and king of the Oscars now, you all decide who wins. Who would you give the top awards to? Alex: Id give every award to Ariana Grande. Best Cinematography? Ariana Grande. Best Actress? Ariana Grande. Best Director? Ariana Grande. This is my chance to say, I loved Ariana Grande in Wicked. I thought she was fantastic. I would love to see her in another movie. I also think Denis Villeneuve, who directed Dune Two its absolutely bonkers that that man is not winning. Lunacy. That is lunacy to me. Nosferatu should win Best Cinematography. Ive been Nosferatu pilled. If Ariana Grande cant win every award, I want Count Orlock from Nosferatu winning some.Kyndall: For Best Picture, Challengers would have been very delightful. Its a fun, horny movie that speaks to the snobby Oscars crowd that needs something artful to win. I also think Luca Guadagnino, who directed Challengers, is overdue for some sort of Oscars recognition. Alex: And the score from Challengers? Like, you cant take the Oscars organization seriously if they cant give challengers a score nomination.Kyndall: A nomination at the very least! For Best Actress, Id have to give a shout out to Marianne Jean-Baptiste who starred in Hard Truths, where she plays this working class British woman whos very grouchy and screams at everyone. Its just such a realistic depiction of someone who just, like, cant deal with living in the world and being a person in society. And the movie itself is just, like, very smart and interesting, and its a great realist piece of film.This piece originally ran in the Today, Explained newsletter. For more stories like this, sign up here.See More:

Monster Hunter Wilds is one of our favourite games of the year, and it's hit a huge number of players on Steam already but Capcom has been forced to respond to performance issuesTech13:35, 28 Feb 2025PC players have been left disappointed by Wilds so far(Image: Capcom)Monster Hunter Wilds is finally here, launching today (January 28) on console and PC, but some are less than impressed with Capcom's latest action title.The long-awaited follow-up to Monster Hunter World has been breaking franchise records on Steam, but reviews on the platform are mixed owing to its performance.While the developer did release a benchmarking tool before launch, it appears even those that meet the sizeable system requirements are having issues and Capcom has now commented on the situation, offering players a series of fixes.Here's all we know about the state of the PC version as the concurrent player count soars past a million.Doshaguma is a fun early-game fight(Image: Capcom)According to SteamDB, Monster Hunter Wilds has now hit a new peak of over 1.23 million players on Steam on launch day, a huge jump from Monster Hunter Rise's all-time peak of 231k and Monster Hunter World's of 334k.Both of those games launched later on PC, but that's still a huge jump and shows how popular Wilds is already. Sadly, it appears not everyone is having a great time. Of the game's almost 14,000 reviews so far, more than 8,000 are negative."This game is everything wrong with PC optimization in 2025," one reads, while another gave the game a positive review while also noting "you can cook a well-done steak on your GPU while you play and the hot blasts of air from your PC fans truly make you feel like you are in the desert".Capcom has responded with some quick fixes that include updating drivers and turning off compatability mode, in a post on X (formerly Twitter).Content cannot be displayed without consentThe post links to a lengthy support page that players can use to help solve issues, but some are still complaining the game is poorly optimised regardless something that many fans said about last year's Dragon's Dogma 2, also from Capcom.Here's hoping the issues are fixed soon, because as we explained in our review, Wilds is a "fitting sequel to World that expands upon it in every way"."Monster Hunter Wilds is everything I couldve asked for in a sequel to Monster Hunter World. Ive finished the campaign, put dozens of hours into the post-game, and I still feel like theres so much more to see.""I cant wait to see what the community thinks, but I feel this could well be regarded as one of the best games of the year whether youre a Monster Hunter fan or a newcomer."Article continues belowIt's worth noting we reviewed it on a PS5 Pro.For the latest breaking news and stories from across the globe from the Daily Star, sign up for our newsletters.

One of the highest-rated Xbox games is coming to PlayStation 5, and with PS5 Pro enhancements, Sony console owners could actually end up with the best version of itTech13:15, 28 Feb 2025Forza Horizon 5 is coming to PS5, and with PS5 Pro enhancements(Image: Still)It's hard to believe the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X and S turn five years old at the end of this year, but now we feel like Microsoft is finally starting to hit the stride it's been threatening to for years.Avowed is a great RPG, and Team Green has a whole host of other big titles planned for 2025, even though the console itself is being handily outsold by PlayStation 5.While Microsoft hasn't opted for a mid-generation refresh like the PlayStation 5 Pro, however, one of its biggest titles is making the jump and PlayStation fans could end up with the best version.Forza Horizon 5 already looks incredible, but it could get even better(Image: Playground Games/Xbox Game Studios)Forza Horizon 5 launched in 2021, and is still regarded as many as one of the best Xbox exclusives if not the best.It's sitting at a 92 on Metacritic, which is a big deal, offering open-world racing through a gorgeous recreation of Mexico, and after Microsoft announced last month that it'd be coming to PS5, the company has now lifted the lid on some extra features.The game will come to Sony's system on April 29, but we now know it'll have PS5 Pro features that include improved ray-tracing for enhanced reflections.That comes from a new blog post, which covers the features right at the end. PS5 owners will get Performance Mode and Quality Mode options, with 60fps and 30fps respectively.It said: "On PS5 Pro, the Performance mode receives increased visual fidelity, while Quality mode adds ray traced car reflections to Races and Free Roam."Horizon 5 is arguably the best yet(Image: Xbox)We'll look to pick up the PS5 version at launch and test it on PS5 Pro, but fans are likely to be somewhat disappointed at Xbox owners seemingly not getting the same options when Series X is (at least on paper) more powerful than the PS5 (but not the Pro).Article continues belowIt all ties into Microsoft's new multiplatform strategy which saw Microsoft become the biggest video game publisher in the world in December.For more on Xbox, be sure to check out our concerns about Microsoft using a new model to generate AI-built games, and all we know about Microsoft resurrecting the Tony Hawk's Pro Skater franchise.For the latest breaking news and stories from across the globe from the Daily Star, sign up for our newsletters.