The Hunger Games franchise , based on the bestselling novels by Susan Collins, has grossed over $3.4 billion at the global box office across five films and shows no sign of slowing down any time soon. Lionsgate just dropped an extended teaser for the sixth film, Sunrise on the Reaping —a sequel to 2023's Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes and a prequel leading into the events of the first film, The Hunger Games (2012).

(Some spoilers for prior films in the franchise below.)

Confession: While I was a fan of the first two films, my interest in the Hunger Games franchise flagged a bit after that. It didn't help that the first prequel, Ballad, was the weakest film in the franchise, although it still raked in $349 million globally at the box office. That film told the backstory of future Panem President Coriolanus Snow (played by the late Donald Sutherland in the first four films) as a young man (Tom Blyth). Set in the earliest days of the Games, we see his gradual transformation from well-meaning mentor to a tribute named Lucy Gray (Rachel Zegler), to conniving villain willing to do pretty much anything for power.

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IBM agreed to pay $17 million to the US government to resolve the Trump administration's claim that the firm's diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies discriminated against employees and job-seekers.

The Department of Justice (DOJ) touted the settlement on Friday, saying it's the first one secured under the Civil Rights Fraud Initiative launched in May 2025. The Trump administration created the program to make DEI-related complaints against government contractors fall under the False Claims Act of 1863 , which imposes triple damages and a civil penalty on contractors that defraud the government.

The Justice Department alleged that IBM violated the False Claims Act by failing to comply with anti-discrimination requirements in its federal contracts, which required IBM to certify that it would not discriminate against employees or applicants. The US claims that IBM certified compliance despite maintaining practices that "discriminated against employees during employment and applicants for employment because of race, color, national origin, or sex, and failed to treat employees during employment without regard to race, color, national origin, or sex."

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The electric pickup startup Slate Auto starts the week off well. This morning it announced it has raised $650 million as part of its latest funding round.

Slate is a refreshing outlier among all the aspiring new electric vehicle OEMs. Lucid debuted with an electric sedan that intended to move the game on from the Tesla Model S. Rivian said, "What if [we had] supercar suspension and a smiley face for an EV with serious off-road skills ?" Both arguably succeeded. Sony Honda Mobility wanted to make the EV a true digital content hub, at least until one half of that joint venture called time —who knows how that project would have turned out, although I suspect sales would have been underwhelming.

But Slate, which got its start in 2022, is doing things differently. It's not starting sales with something near six-figures; far from it. The abolishment of the federal clean vehicle tax credit was no doubt inconvenient—with it, a sub-$20,000 starting price was possible , but even at "mid-$20,000s" the Slate Truck should match or undercut the Ford Maverick XL, currently the cheapest pickup on sale in the US.

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Meta is building an artificial intelligence version of Mark Zuckerberg that can engage with employees in his stead, as part of a broader push to remake the Big Tech company around AI.

The $1.6 trillion group has been working on developing photorealistic, AI-powered 3D characters that users can interact with in real time, according to four people familiar with the matter.

The company recently began prioritizing a Zuckerberg AI character, three of the people said.

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I’ve been teaching college Earth science courses as a part-time faculty member for a long time now, all while juggling other jobs. I started because it was enjoyable; no one gets into this line of work for the famously poor pay or complete lack of job security. Working with students is just one of those genuinely fulfilling experiences that is addictive enough that they ought to warn people about it.

But thanks to generative AI, it has become mostly miserable―at least in certain settings.

For the last few years, I’ve been exclusively teaching asynchronous online courses, meaning recorded videos rather than live sessions. These have always been a bit more challenging than face-to-face classes, where you have a greater ability to keep the students on track. If a student doesn’t have to show up in a room for an hour at a scheduled time and no one can see their involuntary facial expressions when they don’t understand something, the probability increases greatly that they’ll just… fall off.

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In President Donald Trump’s telling, the United States has fuel enough to hover above the chaos that his attack on Iran has triggered in global energy markets.

“We’re in great shape for the future,” Trump said in a speech last week, asserting that this nation, as the world’s biggest oil and gas producer, doesn’t rely on the tankers Iran blocked from passage through the Strait of Hormuz for the past month. “We don’t need anything they have.”

But the view is much different beneath the service station signs across the country that have flipped to more than $4 per gallon for the first time in four years. Over the past month, US households paid $8.4 billion more for gasoline compared to prices before the war on Iran began, according to a report by Democrats on Congress’ Joint Economic Committee.

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AI models from Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic lost money betting on soccer matches over a Premier League season, in a new study suggesting even the most advanced systems struggle to analyze the real world over long periods.

The “KellyBench” report released this week by AI start-up General Reasoning highlights the gap between AI’s rapidly advancing capabilities in certain tasks, such as writing software, and its shortcomings in other kinds of human problems.

London-based General Reasoning tested eight top AI systems in a virtual re-creation of the 2023–24 Premier League season, providing them with detailed historical data and statistics about each team and previous games. The AIs were instructed to build models that would maximize returns and manage risk.

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The Artemis era well and truly began Friday evening when a shiny spacecraft that had traveled 700,000 miles around the Moon, carrying four astronauts, splashed down in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of California.

For NASA, for its international partners, and for all of humanity the successful conclusion of the Artemis II mission marked a return to deep space by our species after more than half a century.

It was a spectacular achievement, and NASA deserves credit for making something what is very difficult look relatively easy. But it also raises an important question: What comes next?

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Slamming into the atmosphere at more than 30 times the speed of sound, NASA’s Orion spacecraft blazed a trail over the Pacific Ocean on Friday, returning home with four astronauts and safely capping humanity’s first voyage to the Moon in nearly 54 years.

Temperatures outside the capsule builtup to some 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit as a sheath of plasma enveloped the Orion spacecraft, named Integrity , and its four long-distance travelers, temporarily blocking radio signals the Moon ship and Mission Control in Houston. Flying southwest to northeast, the spacecraft steered toward a splashdown zone southwest of San Diego, where a US Navy recovery ship held position to await the crew’s homecoming. Ground teams regained communications with Orion commander Reid Wiseman after a six-minute blackout.

Airborne tracking planes beamed live video of Orion’s descent back to Mission Control, showing the capsule jettison its parachute cover and deploy a series of chutes to stabilize its plunge toward the Pacific. Then, three larger main chutes, each with an area of 10,500 square feet, opened to slow Orion for splashdown at 8:07 pm EDT Friday (00:07 UTC Saturday).

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