Last Samurai Standing begins with a familiar premise. Desperate samurai dispossessed by the restoration of the emperor enter into a deadly game for a life-changing cash prize – all for the entertainment of anonymous elites. Unlike its inspirations Battle Royale and Squid Game, however, Last Samurai Standing’s violence is chaotic, fast-paced, and kinetic, though it […]
The first crack showed right before Inauguration Day. The year before, Congress had overwhelmingly passed a bill banning TikTok unless it broke ties with its Chinese parent company. The Supreme Court unanimously upheld it, and it was clear what needed to happen next: either the president could give TikTok another 90 days to complete a […]
These days when you want to engage with some media, you can choose from podcasts, videos, games, live performances – or books, one of the oldest and most popular ways to learn something new or escape (at least temporarily) from today’s troubled world. We polled the staff of The Verge to find out what books […]
The Verge art team’s favorite projects this year spanned the circus surrounding DOGE, the myths of the Vietnam War, the privacy crisis for trans people online, the vast surveillance network aimed at tracking down Iranian military dissidents, and much more. We built a kaleidoscope to showcase some standout products from The Verge’s gift guides, sent […]
When a friend invited me to play a new game called REPO earlier this year, I thought I was wasting my money – not because the game looked bad, but because it looked like Lethal Company. The surprise-hit 2024 co-op survival horror game has players wander through unnerving ruined structures collecting trash while evading monsters. […]
Trump Media – yup, the parent company of Truth Social – is the latest entrant in the near century-long race to develop a nuclear fusion power plant. It announced a merger agreement with fusion company TAE Technologies on Thursday, and a bold plan to break ground on the first utility-scale fusion plant some time in […]
Where’s the Trump Phone? We’re going to keep talking about it every week, except next week, when we take a break until the new year. We’ve reached out, as usual, to ask about the Trump Phone’s whereabouts. As usual, we’re still waiting for a response. In the meantime, we’re wondering who’s actually behind the mobile […]
Rapid advances in AI and robotics are set to become both powerful tools for police and potent weapons for criminals, a 48-page report from pan-European police agency Europol argues. Earlier this month, Europol’s Innovation Lab published “The Unmanned Future(s): The impact of robotics and unmanned systems on law enforcement.” The document is framed as more […]
Things might finally be looking up. In the penultimate episode of Pluribus’ first season, Carol (Rhea Seehorn) actually seems to be happy. That’s a pretty big deal for someone the show describes as the “most miserable person on Earth,” who also happens to be living through an odd sort of apocalyptic scenario that she is […]
If there’s one thing Republicans and Democrats came together on in 2025 – at least at the local level – it was to stop big, energy-hungry data center projects. For communities sick of rising electricity bills and pollution from power plants, data centers have become an obvious target. Fights against new data centers surged this […]