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Ryan Murphy has a very particular set of skills. 
He’s a writer, producer, and a director, but plenty of other people are as well. Murphy’s special skill lies in creating worlds that look and sound like candy-colored versions of our own that feature elements that are more or less real — glee clubs exist, people do murder occasionally, and as seen in Netflix’s The Politician, high school elections are a thing — but that tilt in bizarre directions that feel &ldqu

Images: Lucid Motors Lucid Motors spent the last few years waiting to break ground on a brand-new factory in Casa Grande, Arizona, and the EV startup was finally able put things in motion late last year after it locked down a $1 billion funding round from Saudi Arabia. Now, The Verge has obtained the first images of what that factory will look like, after they were filed with Casa Grande’s Planning and Developing Department this week.
It’s... big! And white! Perhaps unsurprisingly i

Mario Kart Tour just beat out its fellow licensed gaming properties in terms of day-one downloads — and not by a small margin either. By any metric, the game is the biggest out-of-the-gate success on the app market thus far. Too bad it’s such a drag to play. Tour was announced last year, and according to Bloomberg, insiders claimed Nintendo was betting a lot on the app‘s success. I prophesied that it might be Nintendo‘s biggest smartphone hit thu

Krystina Rubino & Lindsay Piper Shaw Contributor Krystina Rubino is a marketing executive who leads the offline growth marketing practice at Right Side Up. Lindsay Piper Shaw is an advertising strategist and growth marketer currently consulting on podcast and offline advertising at Right Side Up.Of the various channels available to growth marketers, podcast is among the most misunderstood.
Brands like Dollar Shave Club, Squarespace, and ZipRecruiter have deployed podcast advertising for user

Every product here is independently selected by Mashable journalists. If you buy something featured, we may earn an affiliate commission which helps support our work.Samsung's Galaxy Fold is one of the most ambitious devices I've ever used. Think about it: a phone that opens up into a tablet. Or if you prefer: a tablet that folds up into a phone.The $1,980 foldable device is finally launching — for real this time — after broken review units forced Samsung to scrap its release in

The first transgender professional boxer, Patricio Manuel, is now also representing Everlast in its "Be First" campaign. 
The premier boxing brand spotlights inclusivity in sports with its campaign, championing other underdogs such as Jinji Martinez, an amputee boxer. First is Patricio Manuel https://t.co/1L2wI2LavI
— Everlast (@Everlast_) September 26, 2019Before Manuel transitioned, he was sidelined by an injury while competing in the 2012 Olympic trials, CNN reports.  
Ma

Images provided by Spotify / Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge I love the podcast series Heavyweight, which started as a Gimlet Media show in 2016 and is now part of Spotify’s podcast empire. It’s funny, well-scripted, and surprising. Also, it’s heart-warming. I need it! On the show, host Jonathan Goldstein assists his guests in confronting unresolved past conflicts, which can range from genuinely traumatic experiences to smaller spats.The fourth season premieres this we

About three years ago, I was shopping for a Chromebook to take on a business trip — I wanted something lightweight enough to carry around all day and inexpensive enough that I wouldn’t mind as much when I spilled coffee on the keyboard. I was considering two different models when a sales rep came over to see if I needed help. “You’re aware,” he said, “that these are Chromebooks, right? They only work online; you can’t save any files to the hard drive.&rd

I didn't realize how anxious I was about seeing Joker in theaters until Warner Bros. felt compelled to remind everyone that the movie isn't a hero's journey.
"Make no mistake," the studio's Tuesday statement read. "Neither the fictional character Joker, nor the film, is an endorsement of real-world violence of any kind. It is not the intention of the film, the filmmakers or the studio to hold this character up as a hero."
Try to divorce yourself from the heightened emotions of our current moment

Apple TV Plus will arrive on November 1st with a couple of glossy-looking, star-studded original series that scream “Emmy potential,” but there will also be shows for kids. The company has released new trailers for its first three children’s shows: Snoopy in Space, Helpsters, and Ghostwriter.These aren’t the first trailers for the shows, but it’s clear that Apple is trying to get potential TV Plus subscribers hyped for the service’s launch by releasing additio

Image: Meyoco Running an online shop is a daunting task for any digital artist, with bigger hurdles than most people realize. There are on-demand printing services like Printful or Society6 that can print art on tote bags and T-shirts. But custom-made items like enamel pins or acrylic charms come with production challenges that require finding the right suppliers that specialize in making those items. (Just check out this How It’s Made video that shows how much manual work goes into makin

Image: Respawn Respawn made a bombshell announcement for its Apex Legends battle royale shooter this morning, revealing a brand-new map for its upcoming third season that’s arriving in just a few days. The new destination, called World’s Edge, is “where molten heat and chemical ice collide,” indicating players will be facing off in an extreme temperature environment.In a teaser trailer for the map, we can see both icy and lava-filled battlefields. In a twist on the exist

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Earlier this week, Apple alerted customers that third-party keyboards on iOS 13 could gain “full access” and transfer data over the internet even without user permission, and now the company has already released an update to fix it. iOS 13.1.1 is rolling out now, and along with patching up the third-party keyboard issue, it includes a fix for customers who might’ve experienced faster-than-normal battery drain after updating to iOS 13

Photo by Dieter Bohn / The Verge The week on The Vergecast, we covered two events that happened simultaneously on Wednesday: Amazon’s fall Alexa and Echo product event and Facebook’s Oculus Connect virtual reality developer conference.Amazon had 80 announcements at its event in Seattle, Washington, so Nilay Patel, Dieter Bohn, Adi Robertson, Ashley Carman, and Paul Miller run through the gadgets and what we know about them. Dieter was able to attend the event, so he talks about his

UK police raised £300,000 ($369,000) through the auction of criminally-seized Bitcoin and other cryptocurrency this week, achieving over market value. The sales, a first for UK police, occurred across two unreserved auctions that were finalized on September 26 via Irish firm Wilsons Auctions. In total, 62 lots of cryptocurrency were sold, which included Bitcoin, Ethereum, Ripple, and Bitcoin Satoshi Vision. Data shared with Hard Fork reports Wilsons Auctions fielded 7,500 bids from across

A game called Broomstick League surfaced this week, and what in the name of Harry Potter is this extraordinary Quidditch game and where can I get five of it? Okay, it’s not Quidditch, not really. Broomstick League is developed by Virtual Basement and published by Blue Isle — there’s no relation to anything Warner Bros, so any mention of Quidditch would no doubt be copyright infringement. But you and I are free to draw the parallels on our own. It’s a game

Photo: Well Go USA Welcome to Cheat Sheet, our breakdown-style reviews of festival films, VR previews, and other special event releases. This review comes from the 2019 Toronto International Film Festival.
“This is fucking wild!” a wounded yakuza member bellows to no one in particular, deep into the heart of Takashi Miike’s latest action-thriller, First Love. And he certainly isn’t wrong. The line may read like a self-congratulatory bit of meta-commentary, like Miike and

Oculus has spent years selling virtual reality fans on a diverse ecosystem of products. At last year’s Oculus Connect developer conference, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg showed off a family of headsets for different kinds of VR: the low-end Oculus Go, the tethered Oculus Rift, and the midrange Oculus Quest. This year, Oculus’ message was subtler, but no less clear: there’s only one headset that matters for consumers, and it’s the Quest.
Up until this point, Oculus has clea

Image: Valve The citizens of Half-Life 2 have it pretty rough. Not only are they being forced to live under an oppressive police state led by a multidimensional empire known as the Combine, but for the past five years, an unfortunate bug has left every NPC in the game unable to blink.RockPaperShotgun reports that the issue first seems to have cropped up in 2014, when Valve moved its games into its new SteamPipe content distribution system. It’s such a weird little bug that one user who re

Pokémon is entering the wild world of animal camming with a new “live stream.” Beginning at 6AM PT / 9AM ET on October 4th, The Pokémon Company will broadcast “live footage for 24 hours from a camera set up in Glimwood Tangle—a strange forest located deep within the Galar region.”
Sure, it’s no bearcam, but it’s fair to expect a few early looks at brand-new pokémon. Pokémon Sword and Shield’s release date is creeping eve

Image: Sony / Marvel Sony Pictures and Marvel Studios will make a third Spider-Man movie together after all. Sony and Disney have struck a new deal over Spider-Man, which would let the web-slinging hero return to the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
“I am thrilled that Spidey’s journey in the MCU will continue, and I and all of us at Marvel Studios are very excited that we get to keep working on it,” says Marvel Studios co-president Kevin Feige, according to Variety. “Spider-M

There are so many streaming options available these days, and so many conflicting recommendations, that it’s hard to see through all the crap you could be watching. Each Friday, The Verge’s Cut the Crap column simplifies the choice by sorting through the overwhelming multitude of movies and TV shows on subscription services and recommending a single perfect thing to watch this weekend.
What to watch
Election, a 1999 political satire directed by Alexander Payne and co-written by Payne

Image: YouTube YouTube Music is the latest Google app that will come bundled as part of Android. The company has announced that the subscription music service will be preinstalled on all devices that run Android 10 out of the box — and it’ll take the place of Google Play Music.
Until now, YouTube Music has required a separate download from Google Play, but not anymore. The app will also come preloaded on new devices that ship with Android 9 Pie in the future.
“Google Play Musi

Photo by Matthew Pearce / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images Things did not go as planned for Fox Sports viewers who were hoping to watch the first Thursday Night Football NFL game in 4K HDR on September 26th. Comcast pulled the 4K HDR feed from its cable lineup at the last minute for unspecified reasons. A carriage dispute meant that Dish Network customers didn’t get the game at all. The Fox Sports Apple TV app crashed on launch unless users immediately navigated to another screen. There w

Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge Apple has applied for a patent to use the logo on the back of its phones as a notification light. The patent application, which was first spotted by Apple Insider, outlines how the “adjustable decoration” could respond to events such as “incoming communication” or “a calendar reminder” by changing its appearance or flashing to attract your attention.
It’s not an entirely new idea. We saw a similar feature make

NOAH BERGER/AFP/Getty Images People might be able to trek out to theaters to see some of Apple’s biggest movies before they hit Apple TV Plus.Apple is reportedly going to pursue a traditional theatrical release plan, according to The Wall Street Journal, which could go beyond what Netflix offers for some of its biggest movies. That means some films would stay in theaters for a 12-week period before they’re available to stream. Apple plans to test the theatrical release schedule with