New federal rules cut the annual fuel-economy increase carmakers must hit from 2% to 1%, aiming for 34.9 mpg by 2031 instead of 50.4. The administration says it'll save $1,300 per car; critics call it a step backward that leaves US automakers less competitive as gas prices near $4.50 a gallon.
— via LAist
A 17-year-old pulled 463,000 public records to build the map of San Francisco's rent-controlled units the city itself never made. He ran the data through AI, found the Mission tops the list per capita, and stumbled into a system where the numbers never stop moving.
— via Hoodline, Emily Johnson
Doug Ford flew to Calgary to tell Albertans not to leave, standing beside Danielle Smith days before her Oct. 19 secession referendum. Smith says she'll vote to stay too, but blames a decade of federal policy for pushing Alberta this far. Brexit's David Cameron, also in town, says the comparison doesn't hold.
— via Vancouver Is Awesome, author
AI vision systems ace the lab and stumble in real homes and hospitals, especially once the lights go down. A computer scientist breaks down why dim rooms, messy behavior and scarce data keep tripping up pose-tracking robots, and what's being done to fix it.
— via The Conversation — Science, Bo Wang, Assistant Professor of Computer and Information Science, University of Mississippi
The first FPS wasn't "Doom" or "Wolfenstein": it was built in 1973 on a NASA minicomputer most people never touched. Here's how "Maze War" and its rival "Spasim" faked 3D space years before the hardware existed to do it properly.
— via The Conversation — Science, Mark J. P. Wolf, Professor of Communication, Concordia University Wisconsin
Linda Evangelista just sold her West Chelsea penthouse for $6.75 million, a comedown from its original $9.45 million asking price. The industrial-chic pad, once rented by Keanu Reeves for $45,000 a month, comes with six custom closets fit for a supermodel's wardrobe.
— via NY Post, Jennifer Gould
A Massachusetts lesbian bar dropped its mask mandate one night a week to stay afloat, and the backlash got so ugly Hollywood is circling. UTA is fielding both scripted and documentary pitches after the Boston Globe story went viral and pulled in thousands of new subscribers.
— via NY Post, Taylor Herzlich
Quentin Grimes had precise directions to JJ Redick's Hamptons guest house. He ended up in a neighbor's pool instead, and posted it on Instagram with the hashtag #hamptonslife before his coach tracked him down.
— via NY Post, Grant Young
Stephon Castle called the Madison Square Garden crowd "underwhelming," even after his team blew a 29-point lead there in a stunning Game 4 collapse. He says Oklahoma City's fans were louder, a claim that sits oddly next to Victor Wembanyama's admission the Spurs simply lost their hunger.
— via NY Post, Erich Richter
Court filings show the grandmother allegedly called her six-year-old grandson a "disgusting queer" for wearing his sister's dresses, then blamed her transgender son-in-law before he was allegedly shot dead by her and her husband in a Dublin parking lot. The documents also detail a bitter custody fight, dueling abuse allegations and a restraining order filed months before the killing.
— via NY Post, Ross O'Keefe, Marc Vartabedian
A 41-year-old father died days after a Central Park cyclist knocked him down on his morning walk to work, and police still can't say whether the rider will face charges. His family's GoFundMe, nearing its $150,000 goal, is now covering the mortgage.
— via Gothamist, Brittany Kriegstein
Alto saxophonist Immanuel Wilkins, a Blue Note recording artist whose 2020 debut topped the New York Times' jazz rankings, returns to the Village Vanguard this week. He talks about why moving to Brooklyn slowed him down, why jazz lost its late-night club-hopping culture post-covid, and why he now thinks of playing music as prayer.
— via Gothamist, Sonia Rao
Lindsay Clancy is back in court Tuesday for the first time since her mistrial, and prosecutors still haven't said if they'll retry her on murder charges. Her lawyer is pushing to get a lone holdout juror investigated while offering a deal, so long as it keeps his client out of prison.
— via NY Post, Priscilla DeGregory, Georgia Worrell
Sylvester Stallone skipped his own mother's funeral in 2020, he admits, and explains why in a new memoir that traces decades of family wreckage: an astrologer mom who wouldn't attend the "Rocky" Oscars without a plus-one for her hairdresser, a father's deathbed advice on love, and a 2022 divorce filing he narrowly survived.
— via NY Post, Sara Nathan
A $250,000 salary and a Palantir badge used to be a flex. Now one 23-year-old says women call him "the devil," his friends ban him from mentioning his job on guys' nights, and even a sob story about his parents' medical debt couldn't save the date.
— via NY Post, Allison Lax, Bianca Zalben
Link Cell Therapies has started dosing kidney cancer patients with a CAR-T therapy engineered to attack only when two tumor markers appear together, and just boosted its Series A by $30 million to $90 million. A new CEO with SystImmune and Bristol Myers Squibb ties joins as the company chases a solid-tumor problem CAR-T has yet to solve.
— via Hoodline, John Becker
Meta is plugging its AI agent Muse into Shopify, Slack, Stripe and a dozen other small-business tools, betting deep integration beats a standalone chatbot. The free rollout follows a new enterprise push led by ex-MongoDB CEO CJ Desai, as Muse already outranks ChatGPT on U.S. app charts.
— via TechCrunch, Aisha Malik
FEMA canceled a $14 million grant for Astoria's earthquake-proof hospital rebuild in April, blowing a $20 million hole in the budget. Twenty states sued and won, and this week the money finally landed, completing the $300 million project's funding with generators, water and the helipad all engineered to sit above tsunami flood levels.
— via Hoodline, Samuel Hansen
Marissa Mayer's new AI assistant skips your email and calendar entirely, building its picture of you from one thing: your camera roll. Dazzle deduced a family's love of escape rooms and suggested Mediterranean vacations, though it also missed that a tester's daughter already knows how to roller skate.
— via TechCrunch, Marina Temkin
A developer wants to put 372 apartments, nearly all of them below-market-rate, on a San Jose lot where a 210-unit project already died. The pitch arrives as the company's own Oakland building was just foreclosed on, with unpaid debt hitting $58.5 million.
— via Hoodline, Nina Singh-Hudson
Oura just shelved a share sale that could have valued the smart ring maker at up to $15 billion, blaming shaky IPO market conditions. Forerunner Ventures loses out on a roughly $1.2 billion payday, even as Oura's membership climbs to 5.7 million and revenue growth is projected to hit 90%.
— via TechCrunch, Ram Iyer
Green leader Emily Lowan wants to revive the NDP's abandoned $10-a-day child-care dream and turn it free and universal by 2031, borrowing rhetoric straight from the John Horgan era. Meanwhile Eby is out pitching $40-billion mining and LNG expansions, echoing a resource-revenue pitch Christy Clark made in 2017.
— via Vancouver Is Awesome, author
Ladbrokes has Can Xue at 10/1 to win the 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature, announced October 8, with no runaway favorite like last year's Krasznahorkai. Murakami, Pynchon and Atwood all sit near the top of the odds: and, per one longtime watcher, none of them will actually win.
— via Literary Hub, Emily Temple
