Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of The Odyssey is my #1 most anticipated film of 2026 and this trailer has got me revved up! Nolan’s trailers never reveal much, but still, it looks gooood.
I am still skeptical of Matt Damon at Odysseus. Zendaya as Athena, Charlize Theron as Circe, and Hoyte van Hoytema doing the cinematography tho! And how do you fit this entire story into 2.5 hours? (Unless Nolan’s gonna go for 3.5 to 4 hours?) Opens in theaters July 17, 2026.
Tags: Christopher Nolan · movies · The Odyssey · trailers · video
Every time you are inclined to use the word “teach”, replace it with “learn”. That is, instead of saying, “I teach”, say “They learn”. It’s very easy to determine what you teach; you can just fill slides with text and claim to have taught. Shift your focus to determining how you know whether they learned what you claim to have taught (or indeed anything at all!). That is much harder, but that is also the real objective of any educator.
— Shriram Krishnamurthi, Pedagogy Recommendations
Tags: teaching
Videos capturing the joy and emotion of families reuniting at Dublin Airport for the festive season have received thousands of views online. We speak to the team behind the cameras to find out why they wanted to share the messages of love. Also: meet the 'bubbliest' wedding judge in Texas. Judge Adam Swartz has gone viral for his ceremonies. We visit two rare grapefruit trees serving as a memorial to a community elder, who brought them from Grenada to the UK. Plus, a new world record for the number of golden retrievers in the same place at the same time and... knock, knock... it's time for a Christmas carol. Our weekly collection of inspiring, uplifting and happy news from around the world.
Presenter: Celia Hatton. Music composed by Iona Hampson.
In 2002, Aardman Animations produced a series of short episodes called Wallace & Gromit’s Cracking Contraptions. In each episode, Wallace unveils a new invention, which Gromit then has to deal with. For the holiday season, Aardman has packaged a few of these short shorts into this compilation, Wallace & Gromit’s Cracking Christmas, free to watch on YouTube.
You can watch a longer compilation of (I believe) all of the episodes here.
Aardman even produced a new episode this year, in the form of a clothing commercial:
I hadn’t seen most of these before; I legit laughed out loud several times while watching.
See also: Nick Park demonstrates how to draw Gromit.
Tags: Aardman Animations · advertising · animation · Christmas · holidays · stop motion · TV · video · Wallace and Gromit
In 2025, Reinforcement Learning from Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) emerged as the de facto new major stage to add to this mix. By training LLMs against automatically verifiable rewards across a number of environments (e.g. think math/code puzzles), the LLMs spontaneously develop strategies that look like "reasoning" to humans - they learn to break down problem solving into intermediate calculations and they learn a number of problem solving strategies for going back and forth to figure things out (see DeepSeek R1 paper for examples).
— Andrej Karpathy, 2025 LLM Year in Review
Tags: andrej-karpathy, llm, generative-ai, llm-reasoning, definitions, ai, llms, deepseek
“The embrace of the unitary executive theory by both the president and the [Supreme Court] has given us the worst of all worlds: an ultrapowerful presidency without an actual president at the helm.”
Kleiner süßer Film.
If you want to see the future of clean energy, you have to go to China. They have flying 2-seater taxis, lunch delivery drones, robots that can swap your empty EV battery in 3 minutes, bullet trains, driverless taxis, etc.
Apple TV’s press page has stories this month announcing release dates and first looks for a bunch of shows: Imperfect Women (a “psychological thriller”), Beat the Reaper (“dramedy”), a still-untitled Monarch: Legacy of Monsters spinoff, Widow’s Bay (“blends genuine horror with character-driven comedy”), season 2 of the Idris Elba thriller Hijack, and Margo’s Got Money Troubles, a series from David E. Kelley starring Elle Fanning, Michelle Pfeiffer, Nicole Kidman, and Nick Offerman (good cast!).
But not a word about Jessica Chastain’s The Savant, which was supposed to debut in September, was postponed after the Charlie Kirk shooting (against Chastain’s wishes), and has been in “At a later date” scheduling limbo ever since.
