IT General

SAVE $190.99: As of July 31, the Ecovacs Deebot T90 is on sale for $509 at Amazon. That's a 27% discount on the list price.

Opens in a new window Credit: Ecovacs Ecovacs Deebot T90 $509 at Amazon
$699.99 Save $190.99   Get Deal

It's official, the FCC has announced it will ban new foreign-made mobile robots from entering the U.S. market. This includes Ecovacs robot vacuums, among other popular brands. The good news for shoppers is that the ban won't affect previously approved devices, so existing robot vacuum stock will remain available to purchase. But if you've been hoping to get an Ecovacs model, act fast before stock drops.

It's not all bad news: if you've been eyeing the Ecovacs Deebot T90, it's currently on sale for $509 at Amazon.

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This model isn't just a robot vacuum; it also has a built-in mop. It has a 30,000Pa BLAST suction to remove dirt, while the OZMO Roller 3.0 mop system uses a 10.6-inch self-washing roller with pressurized scrubbing to tackle spills and dried stains. The roller is cleaned with fresh water during use to help reduce streaks and residue, and TruEdge 3.0 extends the mop beyond the robot’s body so it can reach along awkward edges and corners.

Plus, when it's done, the OMNI docking station will automatically wash the mop roller with adjustable hot water up to 167°F, dry it with hot air, and clean the dirty water system to reduce maintenance.

This robot vacuum deal is available at Amazon right now.

SAVE $72: As of July 31, this like-new Kindle Scribe is on sale for $287.99 at Amazon. That's a 20% discount off the list price.

Opens in a new window Credit: Amazon Kindle Scribe (Like-New) $287.99 at Amazon
$359.99 Save $72   Get Deal

Kindle is arguably the most recognizable e-reader on the market. Amazon has been producing the devices for years, and there are now models to suit every type of reader.

Whether you prefer the basic Kindle that offers reading alone or a pop of color with the Colorsoft, there's so much to choose from. And for the notetakers, there's the Kindle Scribe, an e-reader and digital notebook in one. As of July 31, you can find a great deal on a refurbished model at Amazon, now down to just $287.99.

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This price is for the black colored 16GB model. It comes with the Premium Pen stylus too, to make note-taking feel more natural. And if you're wary about a refurbished device, don't be. Amazon says it is "refurbished, tested, and certified to look and work like new and comes with the same limited warranty as a new device."

This Kindle also has built-in AI tools that can make note-taking even easier. Whether it's summarizing notes, adjusting their length and tone, and refining your writing, there's so much it can do. Plus, this device is designed specifically for reading, writing and annotating documents, so there won't be tempting distractions from social media or streaming apps.

You can find this Kindle deal at Amazon now.

Home Depot's Christmas in July Collection lineup: 8.5-foot Giant-Sized LED Towering Santa $299 at Home Depot Shop Now 8.5-foot Giant-Sized LED Towering Reindeer $299 at Home Depot Shop Now 8-foot Long Giant-Sized Santa's Sleigh $349 at Home Depot Shop Now 7.5-foot Animated Chewbacca $349 at Home Depot Shop Now 9-foot Smart Grand Duchess Twinkling Tree $449 at Home Depot Shop Now

It's 90 degrees out, but Home Depot wants you thinking about snow. The retailer's Christmas in July Collection has dropped, and yes, it's exactly what it sounds like. We know it feels ridiculously early, but there's an upside to shopping now instead of waiting until the usual holiday scramble in November.

Leading the drop is the return of the viral 9-foot Grand Duchess tree, and this year, it's had a real upgrade: it's now Hubspace app-enabled, meaning you can control and customize your holiday display straight from your phone instead of fumbling with a remote or manual settings. The fan-favorite 8.5-foot Giant-Sized Towering Santa is also back, and it's even bigger than last year's version.

Pieces like the Grand Duchess tree tend to sell out well before Christmas actually rolls around, so grabbing it now, in the middle of summer, is the smarter move if you don't want to be stuck with the leftovers.

8.5-foot Giant-Sized LED Towering Santa Opens in a new window Credit: The Home Depot 8.5-foot Giant-Sized LED Towering Santa $299 at The Home Depot
  Shop Now

The 8.5-foot Towering Santa has a lantern with a flickering flame effect that makes it feel warm and inviting, not just lit up. It works indoors or outdoors, and since it runs on three AA batteries rather than a cord, you can place it anywhere in your yard without worrying about extension cords or finding a nearby outlet. There's even a built-in timer, so it turns on and off automatically every night (six hours on, 18 hours off) without you having to remember to flip a switch.

8-foot Long Giant-Sized Santa's Sleigh Opens in a new window Credit: The Home Depot 8-foot Long Giant-Sized Santa's Sleigh $349 at The Home Depot
Currently sold out, but you can sign up to get notified for restocks. Shop Now

If you're going for a full North Pole setup, the 8-foot Giant-Sized Santa's Sleigh is a nice piece to add in. It's got an illuminated lantern with a flickering flame effect, and it's rated for both indoor and outdoor use, so it works wherever you're setting up your display. It takes two people about 45 minutes to put together, so this isn't a quick solo unboxing situation.

But if you're already planning on the Towering Santa and Towering Reindeer, this sleigh is designed to pair with both, so together they make for one solid, complete holiday scene.

9-foot Smart Grand Duchess Twinkling Tree Opens in a new window Credit: The Home Depot 9-foot Smart Grand Duchess Twinkling Tree $449 at The Home Depot
  Shop Now

The 9-foot SMART Grand Duchess connects to the Hubspace app for scheduling, brightness control, and voice control via Alexa. It's got 3,343 branch tips for a full, realistic look, plus 2,000 color-changing micro fairy lights. Setup is easy, too, with Quick Set technology built into the trunk, memory-wire branches for easy fluffing, and everything included — timer, foot pedal, remote, and stand.

Here's the rest of Home Depot's Christmas in July lineup — because apparently the holiday hype doesn't stop at just one tree and a giant Santa:

• 9-foot Grand Duchess Fir Garland — $49.98

• 12-foot Grand Duchess Balsam Fir Garland — $79.98

• 4-foot Potted Grand Duchess Twinkling Balsam Fir LED Pre-Lit Tree — $99

• 3-foot Grand Duchess Balsam Fir LED Pre-Lit Trees, Set of 2 — $99

• 7.5-foot SMART Grand Duchess Twinkling Balsam Fir LED Slim Pre-Lit Tree — $249

• 3.5-foot Animated LED R2-D2 — $299

• 7.5-foot SMART Grand Duchess Twinkling Balsam Fir LED Pre-Lit Tree — $349

• 7.5-foot SMART Grand Duchess Twinkling Balsam Fir Flocked LED Pre-Lit Tree — $399

• 9-foot SMART Grand Duchess Twinkling Balsam Fir LED Pre-Lit Tree — $549

• 9-foot SMART Grand Duchess Twinkling Balsam Fir Flocked LED Pre-Lit Tree — $599

• 12-foot SMART Grand Duchess Twinkling Balsam Fir LED Pre-Lit Tree — $899

This lineup's already thinning out fast — grab yours at Home Depot before it's gone for good.

On any given day, poking around for TVs on sale is all but guaranteed to turn up at least some decent steals. But of course, retailers don't casually offer their absolute best TV prices year-round. So, when is the best time to buy a TV?

The answer is more than just Black Friday and Prime Day. There are a few other good times to find a TV on sale throughout the year, like during football season or in the spring when the new TVs of the year are finally hitting shelves. It's kind of like a "once per season" thing.

SEE ALSO: What is camelcamelcamel? Just our secret weapon for finding the lowest prices on Amazon.

In general, just remember that TV pricing follows a yearly cycle of sorts: Whichever main sale window is coming up next will match or beat most of the best deals seen during the sale window that came right before it. For example, Prime Day 2026 just outpriced most of the best TV deals we saw during football season in February. But many of those Prime Day prices will probably be outpriced by October Prime Day and Black Friday.

Being the big investment that they are, understanding the peaks of the TV calendar is a crucial chapter in the unofficial TV buyer's guide. Let's break down the best months of the year to find TV deals — and if you could use a breakdown of TV specs before you make your purchase, my TV specs explainer lays it all out.

The No. 1 best time to buy a TV: Black Friday and Cyber Monday

Months: Late October, November, and early to mid-December

People may not be ready to throw hands in a Best Buy parking lot at 4 a.m., but Black Friday TV deals are still unmatched — they just don't require you to leave the house at the crack of dawn.

Black Friday is trending toward a month-long affair at this point, with retailers shifting into Black Friday mode online as early as October. The extended time frame raises the question of whether TV sale prices will drop even further closer to Black Friday. Thankfully, most of the big retailers are up front about early deals. Best Buy and Samsung will straight-up tag a certain deal as a Black Friday deal if they drop it ahead of time, confirming to buyers that there's no need to hold out until the week of Thanksgiving.

This is an especially auspicious time for budget shoppers looking for the cheapest possible version of a 4K TV at a certain size. During Black Friday, basic budget-friendly 4K TVs are typically the doorbusters that sell out soon after they drop — and are much less likely to return in the next few months.

SEE ALSO: Amazon Prime Day vs. Black Friday: When are the deals better?

In-store or not, Best Buy TV deals during Black Friday include elite prices on TVs 65 inches or larger. You can save hundreds on high-end QLEDs, OLEDs, and big-screen cheap QLEDs at shockingly low prices. Budget-friendly TVs get even more. Walmart also stays in the mix with a handful of wild doorbuster deals on the best cheap TVs. Amazon mostly caters to the affordable TV crowd, focusing most on its own Fire TVs and Fire TVs from brands like Hisense and TCL.

Post-holiday sales and New Year sales are absolutely a thing, but you can be confident that most TV prices are generally better before Christmas than after. We've seen firsthand how sale prices on TVs quietly go up by $100 or two during post-holiday sales. However, if you miss the Black Friday-Cyber Monday season, another chance to save on TVs is around the corner.

The second-best time to find TV deals: NFL playoff season

Months: Mid-January to early February

Waiting for the festive hustle and bustle to pass is definitely a strategy to save in some categories. So, are TVs cheaper after the holidays?

The answer is technically yes, but not in the "after-Christmas sales" way that you're thinking. By "after the holidays," we mean the last few weeks of football season. Football-fueled TV deals kick off near the start of the NFL playoffs (sometime in mid to late January) and last until the big game (some in early to mid-February).

It makes sense that TV deals are pushed so hard during the lead-up to the most-watched sporting event in the U.S. Perhaps you're hosting a watch party as an excuse to upgrade to a bigger screen. Or perhaps the past 18 weeks of the regular season have brought you to your breaking point with your current TV. The field is always washed out, small details like the score bug are pixelated, the glare from your windows makes afternoon games unbearable — whatever the issue, TV brands aren't about to let this opportunity pass.

SEE ALSO: Best 65-inch+ TVs for watching in dark and bright rooms

Football playoff deals tend to spotlight TVs that are good for watching sports: i.e., big-screen QLED TVs, plus some of the brighter OLED TVs of the year. The vibrant lighting supplied by a QLED panel is ideal for following small details like a ball or tiny score box, as well as the brightness of the team's colors and the field to make your experience feel as live and in-person as possible. It's not uncommon for most of these deals to be identical to what we saw during Black Friday, or in some cases, drop even lower in price due to proximity to CES. (Read more about that below.)

The third-best time to find TV deals: Spring

Months: March and April

The annual TV release cycle mostly revolves around CES: a Las Vegas-based tech trade show where the latest and greatest consumer tech is unveiled to gadget enthusiasts. This is where brands like Samsung, LG, TCL, and Hisense show off their new TV designs for the year. Sony doesn't always participate in CES, but its TV announcement and release cycle still has similar timing.

While these fresh new TVs aren't the ones getting major discounts, their existence does trigger major price cuts on the previous year's flagship TVs. These deals pop up not when the TVs are announced at the event in January, but once they start being officially released to the public in the spring.

Surprisingly, it's not that uncommon to see small discounts on the brand-new models in their first few months on the market.

The fourth-best time to find TV deals: Prime Day

Month: June or July

Amazon stands out as a TV destination during the shopping holidays it made up for itself: Prime Day and Prime Big Deal Days (basically a second Prime Day). The summer sale was consistently held in July until 2026, when Amazon bumped Prime Day to June.

Naturally, Fire TVs are the focal point during Prime events — we've seen a 43-inch Amazon Omni 4K Fire TV drop below $100 during Prime Big Deal Days. Prime Day is packed with unbelievably cheap QLED TVs (in price, not quantity) from Hisense or TCL, even in the big sizes.

SEE ALSO: Camelcamelcamel just launched Camelmart, a Walmart version of our favorite Amazon price tracker

But many of the best Prime Day TV deals aren't actually at Amazon. They're at Best Buy, which loves to hold a mega sale conveniently during the same week that Prime Day is taking place. Best Buy is the best place to shop for a TV if you're looking for a more high-end model from Samsung, LG, or Sony, like a flagship OLED or an RGB TV.

Does a TV deal seem too good to be true? Check its price history.

Pro Amazon tip: Any time you spot a seemingly good discount, you can confirm that you're actually getting a good deal by checking its price history with Camelcamelcamel, a free Amazon price tracking site. Just copy and paste the URL to get a graph depicting that TV's price fluctuations throughout the past year or so, plus confirmation of its lowest sale price ever at Amazon. If the deal you're currently eyeing doesn't match that, it's probably best to wait — that record-low price is sure to pop up during one of the peak sale times we just discussed.

There's also a Walmart price tracker now: Camelmart, obviously. Hopefully, Best Buy's is next.

SEE ALSO: Comparing the best art TVs: How to decide between The Frame and its growing list of competitors Recent TV news: TCL and Sony are going halvesies now

Sony has long been revered as one of the best TV brands, and its Bravia TVs have been no strangers to lists of the best TVs across the internet. But Sony as a TV brand is about to look a lot different. As of January 2026, TCL is in charge of Sony's home entertainment business, which spans TVs and home audio. The "Bravia" family of TVs isn't going anywhere, at least as far as branding and picture processing — but TCL will be behind much of the manufacturing and pricing. Sony TVs often toe the line of being so premium that they're too expensive for the average person to consider. But paired with TCL's budget-friendly expertise, they could make a wicked pairing come 2027.

At a glance:

• Release date: We're expecting the iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max to arrive in fall 2026, but rumor has it the iPhone 18 may not arrive until early 2027.

• Colors: Possible leaks point to four main color options this year for the Pro models: light blue, silver, dark gray, and dark cherry.

• Key upgrades: Besides iOS 27 and the Siri AI beta, we're expecting bigger batteries, camera improvements (including variable aperture for the main camera), and possibly a smaller Dynamic Island.

• Pricing: Most new phones are arriving with price increases, and we think a starting price increase is very likely for the new iPhone 18 lineup, sadly.

Apple's flagship smartphone hasn't taken a year off from its updates since 2007, and barring a massive surprise, 2026 won't be different — but there will be a twist. The Cupertino-based tech giant is widely expected to launch a new lineup of iPhones later this year, including the iPhone 18 Pro, 18 Pro Max, and the rumored iPhone Ultra, the company's first-ever foldable. The regular iPhone 18, the 18e, and the new iPhone Air are likely to arrive early next year.

We asked you to predict what Apple will do next. See the results and find out how to get a shot at winning an Apple Watch!

As we await the iPhone 18 — and its updated operating system, iOS 27 — rumors continue to trickle out. The pace of leaks on the iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max in particular is likely to increase after a massive hack exposed thousands of Apple's internal documents, reportedly including iPhone 18 Pro suppliers and tests.

We won't see any of the new Apple phones in the wild for a couple more months, but we can bring you all of the latest iPhone 18 rumors and the most likely updates in one place.

SEE ALSO: Apple reportedly working on anti-phone snatching security feature iPhone 18 lineup pricing

If you're in the market for a new iPhone, you should circle September in your calendar. That's when Apple typically holds its big iPhone showcase, and there's no reason to believe Apple will change that for the iPhone 18. Expect to see new Apple CEO John Ternus take the stage, as his term of office officially begins Sept. 1.

What he'll be introducing, alas, may put more of a dent in your wallet. Thanks to the ongoing RAM shortage caused by the AI industry (also known as RAMageddon), tons of smartphones, laptops, and gaming consoles are seeing huge price hikes. Experts who've spoken to Mashable say that trend isn't going to stop anytime soon.

As the world's number one smartphone maker, Apple has some advantages over its rivals, but a price increase is very likely. Apple recently raised prices on a variety of its products, and outgoing Apple CEO Tim Cook even took the unusual step of preparing us for a pricier iPhone. "Price increases are unavoidable," Cook told the Wall Street Journal in a June interview. The Journal quoted an analysis showing that the memory chip components in the iPhone 18 Pro will cost Apple $150 more than those in the iPhone 17 Pro.

So should you expect the phones to cost just $150 more than their predecessors (check the iPhone 17 prices for reference)? You wish. There's the pesky fact that Apple is a for-profit company, and the iPhone is the #1 smartphone in the world for a reason, even though it's already pricier than Samsung's.

How much of an increase will Apple fans bear? We may be about to find out, but the Journal estimated $1,299 for the iPhone 18 Pro ($200 more than last year).

iPhone 18, 18 Pro, and 18 Ultra launch dates The iPhone 18 Pro Max smartphones at last year's iPhone launch event. Credit: CNET

Barring a huge turn under Ternus, Apple will release the iPhone 18 Pro, the iPhone 18 Pro Max, and the foldable iPhone Ultra in early September. Obviously, Apple's first foldable iPhone is the biggest headline here, but the Pro models will bring numerous improvements too.

The iPhone 18, however, alongside the cheaper iPhone 18e, and the next-gen iPhone Air, are rumored to come next year, likely in March 2027.

iPhone 18 and iPhone 18 Pro design

Again, Apple has not released any official teasers or other imagery for the iPhone 18 lineup yet, so anything reported to date could be wrong. Still, from the sum total of all reports, it sounds like Apple isn't really reinventing the wheel, design-wise. But Ternus, a hardware guy, is reportedly bringing the company's industrial design group into the center of the Apple fold.

Looking further into the future, the iPhone 20 is said to bring big changes, including a curved waterfall display.

Per our friends at CNET (Mashable and CNET are both owned by Ziff Davis), the display sizes will be roughly the same as last year:

• iPhone 18: 6.3 inches

• iPhone 18 Pro: 6.3 inches

• iPhone 18 Pro Max: 6.9 inches

However, the display quality might be a little different this year. Prominent leaker Instant Digital shared on Chinese social media that Apple's brightness demands are unusually high this year, so it would be reasonable to expect much brighter displays than in previous years.

Some iPhone 18 models could also have a smaller camera bump compared to previous models. There are reports of a slightly redesigned Dynamic Island on the screen itself, with the pill-shaped notification hub potentially being made smaller in the iPhone 18 Pro models. One alleged leaked image purports to show an iPhone 18 Pro with a downsized Dynamic Island cutout.

This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed. iPhone 18: rumored hardware features

So we know the software the iPhone 18 will run: iOS 27, introduced at WWDC 2026. Time to start talking about some of the internal hardware changes Apple is reportedly making to the iPhone 18 lineup.

For starters, it sounds like the lineup will have a standardized 12GB RAM count across the board. In previous years, the Pro models had 12GB of RAM, while the base model had only 8GB. According to Korean outlet The Bell, Apple will be upgrading the base model so that it matches the Pro models in that regard. It's also widely expected that Apple will adopt new A20 and A20 Pro chips for the base and Pro models, respectively.

It's also expected that the new iPhones will have a new C2 modem for improved cellular connectivity, and they may also have 5G satellite support. Also reported: a new N2 chip for better WiFi performance.

As for the battery, leaker Digital Chat Station on Weibo reported that the batteries will finally be upgraded to 5,000mAh, which would be a big improvement over the iPhone 17 Pro. This year, 5,000mAh has become the new standard for flagship phones, including in Samsung's new Galaxy Z Fold 8 Ultra.

Instant Digital posted in a separate Weibo leak that the back glass of the iPhone 18 Pro has been altered, resulting in a new unified look, as opposed to the two-tone look of the iPhone 17 Pro. Whether that change will affect durability (or if it's just an aesthetic difference) remains to be seen. Other possible upgrades include an improved LTPO+ display, Apple's new C2 modem, 5G via satellite connectivity, and the improved N2 chip, which should improve hotspot and AirDrop reliability.

The most colorful iPhone 18 Pro rumors

Courtesy of leakers, we may already know the iPhone 18 Pro colors. If that's the case, the must-see equivalent of the iPhone 17's unforgettable "cosmic orange" shade is said to be a wine-like "dark cherry," which we'd expect to sell like hot... cherry pies?

Based on numerous leaks, the most likely color lineup for the iPhone 18 Pro will be silver, dark gray, light blue, and the aforementioned "dark cherry."

Sadly, we think fans of black iPhones are out of luck, though the rumored dark gray color looks black in supposed dummy units shared by leakers like Sonny Dickson.

This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed. This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed. What about the iPhone 18 Pro Max?

Several reports out of China say that because the iPhone 18 Pro Max will have a much larger battery, it may be a bit of a chunky boy as a result.

We're not talking about a huge increase in weight and width: a quarter of a millimeter in thickness and 7 grams more, respectively. Still, every gram counts on the heftiest iPhone model you can get — so iPhone 17 Pro Max upgraders may want to check that their pocket linings can bear the bulk of a larger iPhone 18 Pro Max.

The iPhone 17 Pro has helped Apple break sales records in 2026. Credit: Stan Schroeder / Mashable iPhone 18 camera rumors

Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, a source of many spot-on iPhone reports, says the iPhone 18 Pro, in particular, will have "some of the biggest camera hardware upgrades in the lineup's history."

Why? First, the telephoto camera has a larger aperture. But more important is the variable aperture.

First reported by Digital Chat Station on Weibo, variable aperture is a huge deal. It would let the iPhone 18 Pro camera capture different amounts of light for different situations — potentially leading to a huge leap in photo quality, if you know what you're doing.

For instance, the bokeh effect famously associated with portrait mode on iPhones would be possible in-camera rather than through software processing, resulting in more natural and generally better-looking shots.

What about Siri AI?

Of course, one of the first things many users will want to know about the iPhone 18 when they get their hands on one: what is the new, revamped, AI-upgraded Siri experience like?

If you're feeling adventurous, you can try it yourself by installing the iOS 27 beta.

The new features include Siri becoming an actual chatbot with its own app. It's also able to understand what's on your screen, and it can help you write, create images, and edit photos.

For an overview, check out our guides to iOS 27 and Siri AI's top features.

SAVE UP TO $20: Through Sept. 21, you can secure a year of streaming on NFL+ and NFL+ Premium for 20% off, knocking the costs down to just $39.99 (reg. $49.99) or $79.99 (reg. $99.99) for the season.

Opens in a new window Credit: NFL+ NFL+ $39.99
$49.99 Save $10 *for your first year* Get Deal Opens in a new window Credit: NFL+ NFL+ Premium $79.99
$99.99 Save $20 *for your first year* Get Deal

We're on the brink of a new NFL season, y'all, which means it's time to get your streaming lineup in order. NFL+, the league's own streaming service, is running a limited-time promo to help you out. While it won't cover every game you want to watch this season, it will get you started on the right foot.

Through Sept. 21, you can lock in a full year of streaming on NFL+ and NFL+ Premium for 20% off. That drops the price of the basic NFL+ package down to just $39.99 for your first year (reg. $49.99) and the price of NFL+ Premium down to just $79.99 for your first year (reg. $99.99). That's a lot of content for as low as $3.33 per month.

The NFL's official subscription service offers two tiers: NFL+ and NFL+ Premium. The basic tier unlocks access to live out-of-market preseason games, live national broadcasts, in-market regular-season games, and NFL Network. For $40 more, NFL+ Premium also unlocks NFL RedZone and game replays (full, condensed, and all-22 coaches film). It's a pretty solid deal for a specific type of football fan, but there are some caveats to consider.

First, neither option includes out-of-market regular-season games. If you want access to those, you'll need NFL Sunday Ticket. That's a story for a different day. Second, NFL+ (both tiers) only grants you access to live games on your phone or tablet. I have no idea why, but it's been this way since its inception. I'm sure there are ways to cast your phone or tablet to your TV, but it's not the most streamlined way to watch your favorite team.

Who is NFL+ for? Dedicated football fans who can't watch every game from the comfort of their home. If you're constantly on the go, but want to be able to catch your local team live, NFL+ is for you. Or, if you want to catch the most important plays of every game on Sundays or analyze every play after the fact, NFL+ Premium is a great way to do so for a whole lot less than a live TV streaming service.

SAVE 23%: The Etenwolf Air 3 mini air pump is $22.99 at Amazon, down from $29.99. It inflates a standard air mattress in about a minute and includes a built-in 600-lumen camping light.

Opens in a new window Credit: Etenwolf Etenwolf Air 3 $22.99 at Amazon
$29.99 Save $7   Shop Now

Anyone who's ever tried to blow up an air mattress at 11 p.m., halfway through setting up a campsite, knows exactly how miserable that process is. You get five breaths in, your head's spinning, and the mattress is still somehow only a fraction full. The Etenwolf Air 3 mini air pump exists to make that whole ordeal a thing of the past.

It's absurdly small for what it does

At just 145 grams, the Air 3 is roughly the size of a large egg, which honestly feels like it shouldn't be possible for something with a motor inside. It comes with a hook so you can clip it straight onto a backpack, or you can just toss it in a jacket pocket and forget it's there until you need it.

Speed is the whole point

This is really where the Air 3 makes its case. It runs on a 13 CFM motor at 0.65 PSI, enough to fully inflate a standard air mattress in about a minute and deflate it in about 40 seconds. No cord, no outlet, and no fumbling around in the dark trying to find a plug.

Battery life that actually lasts

It's got a 2,600mAh battery, and Etenwolf says a full charge powers up to 16 sleeping pads or four pool floats. That's enough to get through a whole weekend trip or a pool day without needing to recharge mid-use. It also charges over USB-C, so no hunting for some odd proprietary cable.

A surprisingly useful bonus: the flashlight

The Etenwolf doubles as a 600-lumen camping light, with three separate brightness settings: a soft 60-lumen mode, a 200-lumen reading light, and the full 600-lumen outdoor setting. Super handy if you're setting up a tent after dark, need a hands-free light for a late-night bathroom run, or just want one less thing to pack.

It's not built for everything, though

With five nozzles included, it handles most inflatables you'd want to fill — pool floats, vacuum storage bags, sleeping pads, swim rings, inflatable furniture, not just air mattresses. That's a big part of what makes it useful beyond just camping trips.

However, it's not built for SUP boards, balloons, sports balls, car tires, or bicycles, so don't expect it to pull double duty as a bike pump.

On top of all that, it's currently 23% off too — grab the Etenwolf Air 3 mini air pump at Amazon for $22.99.

The biggest question surrounding Spider-Man: Brand New Day is a simple one: Who is Sadie Sink playing?

SEE ALSO: Spider-Man: Brand New Day' review: More like 'Déjà Vu'?

Ever since Sink's casting was announced in 2025, fans have clamored to know what role she'd have in the MCU. Was she Gwen Stacy? Jean Grey? Rachel Summers? Marvel certainly wasn't telling. Trailers revealed precious little of Sink's performance, while Sink herself deftly parried any questions about her character throughout the film's press run. Truly, all we know from Marvel is that Sink's character "sits on a bench." That's it!

Now, though, the film is out, and we can finally dig into Sink's role. Spoilers ahead, so this is your last chance to turn back if you want to experience the reveal in theaters.

Who is Sadie Sink in Spider-Man: Brand New Day?

To whoever guessed that Sink would be playing Jean Grey, congratulations! You were right on the money. Sink plays the beloved Marvel mutant, who is also Spider-Man: Brand New Day's primary antagonist.

In the X-Men comics and prior film adaptations, Jean is a powerful mutant gifted with telepathy and telekinesis. She's also the host for the cosmic Phoenix Force, which, when corrupted, turns her into the Dark Phoenix. Versions of the Dark Phoenix saga have come to the big screen twice before, in 2006's X-Men: The Last Stand, with Famke Janssen in the role of Jean, and in 2019's Dark Phoenix, with Sophie Turner in the role of Jean. (Between Turner and Sink, Marvel seems to love nothing more than casting stars of blockbuster shows with reviled final seasons as Jean.)

However, the Jean we meet in Spider-Man: Brand New Day is different from prior onscreen iterations. At the beginning of the film, she's solely a telepath, one who's able to hop through people's minds and control their bodies. Her telepathic "jumps" have a distance limit, but over the course of Spider-Man: Brand New Day, she levels up severely, getting closer to the Jean power set people are more familiar with.

Spider-Man: Brand New Day leaves Jean's future in the MCU open-ended. Notably, she's not a member of the X-Men yet, because the X-Men don't exist yet in the MCU's prime universe. However, they do exist in the multiverse, and several of its members from the first set of Fox films will be making an appearance in Avengers: Doomsday, with Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen, James Marsden, Kelsey Grammer, Alan Cumming, and Rebecca Romijn all set to reprise their roles. Sink is not confirmed to appear in Avengers: Doomsday, but with so many X-Men in the mix, it can't be long before the MCU tries its own hand at adapting the Dark Phoenix saga, right?

Spider-Man: Brand New Day is now in theaters.

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Very important editor's note: This story was written before the discovery of Jimothy. Check out our latest coverage of the internet's favorite raccoon.

Despite the decentralized nature of our internet-driven culture, there are still moments that can make millions of netizens focus on the same thing at the same time.

In 2026, that included a rocket launch that reminded us that humans can still do genuinely awe-inspiring things, as well as a baby macaque and his IKEA stuffed animal that broke a million hearts simultaneously, and high-tech anti-ICE protests that flooded many feeds.

We asked you to predict what Apple will do next. See the results and find out how to get a shot at winning an Apple Watch!

The internet this year has been a remarkable delivery system for memes, trends, and extremely good posts, all running in parallel with what can charitably be described as a lot going on in the world.

The thing is, even when everything feels like it's collapsing, social media has this stubborn ability to find the joke, find the moment, find the thing that makes a billion strangers feel briefly like they're all watching the same show together. That's what this list is — not a comprehensive account of 2026, but a record of the moments that we feel defined internet culture in the first half of the year.

The 'moon joy' of Artemis II

No other event this year has captured the attention of the U.S. quite like NASA's historic Artemis II launch in April.

On April Fool's Day, a 32-story rocket lifted off from Kennedy Space Center and reminded everyone that we still do things that make your jaw drop. For the first time in over 50 years, humans were headed toward the moon. Additionally, Christina Koch became the first woman, and Victor Glover the first Black astronaut, to travel into deep space.

The mission's 10-day loop around the moon — which carried humans further from Earth than ever before — gave the timeline something it rarely gets these days: a collective sense of awe and wonder. NASA even managed to make a meme out of it: Moon joy.

This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed. This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed. This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed. Alysa Liu and the Blade Angels Credit: Tang Xinyu/VCG via Getty Images

The Winter Olympics in Milan had no shortage of viral moments to offer. But easily the greatest came from American figure skater Alysa Liu, the 20-year-old gold medalist whose life story had layers that deeply resonated with the internet. What made this Olympic moment refreshing was how much of it felt like a repudiation of what elite figure skating usually looks like.

Liu had been the youngest U.S. national champion ever at 13. She spent years crying through practices under the weight of expectations she hadn't chosen for herself, retired after Beijing at 16, enrolled at UCLA, hiked Everest, and only came back to skating when she decided she wanted to, on her own terms, for her own reasons.

In Milan, Liu was visibly, infectiously happy on the ice — radical stuff in a sport not known for that kind of genuineness. That in itself was catnip to the internet. Liu's halo hair and outspoken pro-immigration and pro-Palestinian stances also endeared her to many, but ultimately her internet support had more to do with how she managed to make her gold medal performance look effortless on the biggest stage in the world.

Liu wasn't the only member of Team USA's figure skating roster to break through. Blade Angels teammates Amber Glenn and Isabeau Levito both found viral territory of their own. Glenn in particular has become one of the more prominent LGBTQ voices in sports; she has also into her platform more so than Liu, who has largely stepped back from social media since returning from Milan.

Glenn also made our Mash 101 list earlier this month, as one of the creators who most made a mark on culture in the past year.

AI slop and Fruit Love Island

On the opposite end of the cultural spectrum, the internet also spent a significant chunk of 2026 watching AI-generated anthropomorphic fruit cheat on each other. Because this is where we are.

Fruit Love Island is a TikTok series of AI-generated fruit characters recreating reality TV dating drama Love Island USA. The series account amassed 3 million followers in nine days. The account behind it, Ai Cinema, is likely running scripts through a custom GPT called Object Talk, which feeds directly into AI video generators.

It's a slop pipeline, and somehow it blew up.

The formula of the videos is odd, as with the Elsagate YouTube videos. Still, at least Fruit Love Island is a coherent show, even if it is lifting plotlines and given them to unimaginative characters (a Cherry named Cherrita; an Orange named Orangelo. Whether that counts as a step up is debatable.)

As an alternative to doomscrolling, Fruit Love Island is not all that bad. But as with all AI slop, will we even remember it a year from now?

This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed. This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed. This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed. Becoming Chinese

Among Gen Z westerners, "Becoming Chinese" or "China-maxxing" was a popular trend in the early part of 2026.

This was driven by several factors. The first was a growing disillusionment with the American experiment as Elon Musk's DOGE tore through USAID and the Trump administration waged a one-sided tariff war with the entire world. The second was the highly publicized trip to China by streamer iShowSpeed, which offered a neutral view of what China was like to millions of his viewers who only knew China through Western media.

Then there's the phrase "you met me at a very Chinese time in my life" — a meme that can be traced back to an X user in April 2025. It's a parody of the final line from the movie Fight Club: "you met me at a very strange time in my life."

So began a wave of ironic, and sometimes completely sincere, public adoration for America's number one rival. To "Chinamaxx" or "become Chinese" is to engage with Chinese culture in very tangible ways. These include smoking Chinese cigarettes, drinking Tsingtao beer, walking with your hands behind your back, eating congee, or drinking hot water.

The trend's absurdist nature resonated with many internet users, and Chinese-American influencers began to offer tongue-in-cheek advice on how best to Chinamaxx.

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The trend reached a critical point when the Chinese government responded — officially welcoming global interest in the country beyond common Western stereotypes such as "pandas" and "the Great Wall."

But it wasn't all positive. Many cultural analysts and influencers found elements of this trend that were arguably fetishizing Chinese culture. The meme, almost by definition, reflected a temporary interest in Chinese-ness that felt insincere and disposable.

Punch the Monkey adopted by the world

Punch the monkey is a baby macaque at Ichikawa City Zoo near Tokyo who went viral in early 2026. He was filmed clinging to a stuffed IKEA orangutan after being abandoned by his mother.

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Part of the love for Punch is that he's cute as hell; the other is that he reflects how plenty of us feel about the current state of the world. Here was this tiny monkey, alone and scared, holding a plushie for comfort in the absence of his mother. So overwhelming was the love for Punch that Jon Stewart made a joke about him on The Daily Show, and the crowd booed this man.

Eventually, the Ichikawa City Zoo began receiving so many international phone calls that it required staff only respond in Japanese.

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Good news, folks: Punch is now regularly playing with the other young macaques in his enclosure and learning to groom by carefully watching the older monkeys around him, all while still carrying his stuffed orangutan everywhere he goes.

This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed. Bad Bunny at the Super Bowl Bad Bunny performs onstage during the Apple Music Super Bowl LX Halftime Show at Levi's Stadium Credit: Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for Roc Nation

The Super Bowl halftime show is always meant to be a spectacle. In 2025, speculation around the event was focused on whether Kendrick Lamar would escalate his already won beef against Drake. But in 2026, Bad Bunny's performance was focused on whether the Puerto Rican superstar would make comments against President Trump and ICE.

Like Lamar (even though he did play "Not Like Us"), Bad Bunny used his show to spread a message of unity. The focus was on what it means to be Latin and who is truly considered an "American." While it wasn't the direct call-out many fans wanted, it was still a powerful message. As the message on the football he points to the camera reads, "Together we are America."

Sinners at the Oscars

While Sinners had its cultural moment in 2025, it got its Hollywood reckoning in 2026 — and that, too, became an internet moment. Not that successful Black films need validation from an industry that has historically looked the other way, but that doesn't mean it isn't worth saving.

Sinners became the first film ever to receive 16 Oscar nominations. The wins that followed also rewrote the record books. Autumn Durald Arkapaw took home Best Cinematography, becoming the first woman and first person of color to win the award in the nearly century-long history of the Oscars. Ryan Coogler became only the second Black person to win Best Original Screenplay. And Michael B. Jordan — Coogler's longtime collaborator and on-screen anchor — won Best Actor, joining a list of just six Black men to have ever claimed the award for a leading role.

Sinners didn't sweep everything; Best Director and Best Picture went elsewhere. But it didn't need to. And then for a topper, Michael B. Jordan celebrated one of the most significant acting wins in Oscar history at an In-N-Out Burger. Iconic.

This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed. John Kiriakou's CIA stories

John Kiriakou seemed like he was in everyone's FYP for a couple of weeks in early 2026 — and if he wasn't in yours, you missed something genuinely fascinating.

For those who don't know, Kiriakou is a 61-year-old former CIA officer who became a whistleblower after exposing the agency's use of torture during the war on terror. He was then arrested in 2012 after pleading guilty to giving a covert operative's name to journalists. He has spent the years since his 2013 release from prison doing interviews about his time in the intelligence community with a level of casual candor that feels almost surreal, given the subject matter — appearing on everything from the Joe Rogan Experience to the Diary of a CEO.

Because he's done so many of these long-form interviews over the years, partly in an attempt to get a pardon from President Trump, there was a deep well of Kiriakou material for creators to pull from.

The clips that went viral are made in that very specific "brainrot" editing style — sped up to 1.5x, slowed down dramatically at the most unhinged parts, with somber music underneath.

The most viral story, captioned "what is the CIA bro," came from Kiriakou's Diary of a CEO appearance in January. That's where he describes being asked by the agency to pretend to be gay in order to get information from a source.

Other clips covered Kiriakou's multiple divorces — including the time he spent the night hiding in a dumpster waiting for a contact, and had to explain to his wife that he was not out cheating.

2026 is the new 2016 Credit: Ian Moore / Mashable Composite; TouTouke / Moment / BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI / AFP / Spencer Platt / Getty Images News / EyeEm Mobile GmbH / iStock / Getty

For the new year, we wrote a retrospective on 2016 being considered the last good year. Then the 2016 nostalgia trend took over TikTok and Instagram in early 2026. There were "average day in 2016" videos, POVs about being a teenager with nowhere to be, songs from that era that somehow sounded better than they actually are, and considerably cringe fashion choices (graphic tees, skinny jeans, chokers, bomber jackets, ripped denim, nerd glasses, and that very specific eyeshadow).

The 2016 trend, arguably, is Gen Z collectively mourning the last period of their lives when being online still felt like a choice rather than a condition. And if that doesn't make you shudder, consider how bad 2036 is going to have to get to spur a 2026 nostalgia movement.

Everyone is -maxxing This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.

If there was an award for suffix of the year, "-maxxing" would win handily. Looksmaxxing, solomaxxing, chinamaxxing, lifemaxxing — it's now applied to basically any intentional behavior a person could engage in, which tells you something about our obsession with self-optimization.

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The "-maxx" suffix itself traces back to min-maxing, a tabletop RPG concept where you dump all your character points into a single stat and let everything else atrophy. For looksmaxxing, the goal is to optimize physical appearance with the same obsessive, systems-minded energy you'd bring to building a D&D character.

Looksmaxxing traces back to incel forums of the 2010s where men developed elaborate pseudoscientific frameworks for rating and improving their faces, including things like mewing (pressing your tongue to the roof of your mouth to supposedly reshape your jaw over time), double jaw surgery sought out purely for cosmetic reasons, and in the case of Kick streamer Clavicular — probably the most prominent looksmaxxer of 2026 — admitting to using crystal meth as an appetite suppressant and hitting his face with a hammer to try to chisel his bone structure.

Somehow, a term with such brutal meaning sat alongside the more palatable "-maxxing" trends on the same platforms. Gen Z is embracing solo-maxxing, friction-maxxing, and hope-maxxing. And we're still waiting for the trend to max out.

SEE ALSO: Why friction-maxxing could be good for your tech usage 'Obsession' and 'Backrooms' bring Gen Z horror This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.

Horror films are having a banner year in 2026, and the two biggest genre films come from filmmakers young enough that their careers began on YouTube.

The first is Obsession, written and directed by Curry Barker, a 26-year-old who got his start making sketch comedy online and somehow parlayed that into one of the most talked-about horror films in years.

Made for $750,000, Obsession premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, got picked up by Focus Features for roughly $15 million, and was widely distributed in May. The premise is deceptively simple — a music store employee uses a supernatural toy to wish his childhood friend into falling in love with him. But the execution landed hard enough that Obsession grossed $286 million worldwide, making it the highest-grossing horror film of 2026 so far and the 30th highest-grossing horror film of all time.

Part of what made Obsession connect so deeply with audiences was how its central anxiety felt to a generation that has grown up being aggressively quantified — by algorithms, by dating apps, and by hustle culture that frames human value entirely in terms of productivity and output. A story about someone who uses a supernatural shortcut to transform another person into an object of desire, stripping them of their own interiority in the process, lands differently when your life is mediated by platforms that are doing that to you constantly.

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While the movie is a simple monkey's paw story, it's also about the way desire curdles into possession and the way people get flattened into the roles others need them to play. That's the kind of thing for which Gen Z has extremely specific and well-developed language.

The second movie is Backrooms, Kane Parsons' adaptation of his own YouTube web series. Which is itself based on the 4chan creepypasta about an extra-dimensional maze of empty fluorescent-lit office space that you can only enter by accidentally clipping through the walls of reality. The liminal aesthetic had already been gaining traction through friendslop horror games on Steam and Roblox for years, so the audience was built in before a single trailer dropped.

Then A24's decision to hand a $10 million production to a 20-year-old became its own marketing story. Backrooms didn't get the critical embrace that Obsession did, but it didn't need to. It's now A24's highest-grossing film ever, surpassing Everything Everywhere All at Once with $262 million in worldwide gross.

Fake profiles have been spoiling the fun of online dating for years. And it's easier for scammers and bad-faith actors to create realistic profiles than ever before. Cheap generative AI can do the hard work of falsifying photos, videos, and profile bios. AI can also believably mimic humans in text conversations. All of which means that vigilance is super important right now. 

AdultFriendFinder one of the world's longest-running and largest online dating sites. It's also jam-packed with adult content — there's nudity all over the site's interface and content, which has attracted countless scammers over the years. The result is an abundance of nefarious fakery among all those spicy profiles. And while AFF likes to boast about its huge user base — there are apparently hundreds of millions of accounts across the world — many of these accounts are, in fact, inactive.

While this doesn't have to ruin your AFF experience, it does mean you have to use your judgment about where to focus your time and attention. Here are the best tips for sorting legit profiles from fake.

Opens in a new window Credit: AdultFriendFinder AdultFriendFinder   Learn More Prioritize verified accounts

AFF is well aware of the fake profile issue and has put safeguards in place to prevent it, giving users greater peace of mind. AdultFriendFinder allows you to verify your profile via the Confirm ID service, a two-step process that's effective without being a pain to action (as some verification processes can be in this day and age).

The first thing you need to do is provide AFF with a piece of government-issued identification. Then the site scans your face via your webcam (with your permission, of course). Completing this process is a verification one-stop shop, verifying not just your age but also your age, location, and gender. You'll get a blue checkmark on your profile, which then shows up in other users' search results, signaling that you are indeed a real person. Don't worry about privacy around the face scan. Having your face scanned does not mean that you have to show your face on AFF. If you want to keep a low profile, rest assured you can keep your face off AFF (even if you plan on showing plenty more) while also confirming to others that you're exactly who you say you are.

SEE ALSO: Is Hinge really 'designed to be deleted'? I tested it to find out.

Once you've verified your profile, it's a good idea to limit your on-site interactions to other verified profiles as well. If you decide to chat with unverified people, be especially vigilant about not sharing personal information.

Finally, don't assume that because a profile is verified, it is also legitimate; accounts can be sold or stolen, so treat profile verification as a positive sign rather than as perfect confirmation of the profile's legitimacy. 

Scrutinize their photos

Because people curate their own profiles, the photos they choose to share speak volumes about them, so if you're at all suspicious that you may be viewing a fake account, take a closer look at the pics the person has shared. If they look AI-generated, if they're all of professional quality, or if they're incredibly generic, these are all red flags.

To take things a step further, you can use a reverse image search on Google to see if the photos appear anywhere else (a strong indication that they're not original to the person or profile), or you can use a service like ZeroGPT or Sightengine to discover if they're AI-generated. 

SEE ALSO: All your Tinder questions, answered

Just as you look for red flags, you should also look for green flags, which would include photos with friends or groups of people, a mix of selfies and more staged shots, and photos that feature unique landmarks specific to your location, such as a well-known store, restaurant, or public area.

Engage in conversation

If you're on the fence about whether or not a profile is fake, the next step is to actually talk to the person (or bot?) in question. This doesn't mean you should let your guard down, though — far from it. Pay very close attention to the things the other person says, the questions they ask, and the replies they give. Here are some common red flags that indicate you're talking to a scammer or bot:

• They push for specific information about you early in the conversation

• They send links to outside websites or chat platforms like WhatsApp or Telegram

• They tell you a sad story to create a sense of urgency in you

• They ask for nude or compromising photos of you 

If you're still uncertain, you can request a video call or an in-person meet-up in a public place. Scammers will be reluctant to verify their identities over video calls and especially reluctant — or even incapable — of offline meet-ups. 

SEE ALSO: What are romance scams and how can you avoid them?

Finally, remember that while all of the above are useful guidelines, they're not iron-clad or fool-proof, and a clever scammer, catfisher, or bad actor can still find ways to circumvent these safeguards. Always be cautious about who you speak to, what you share, and under what circumstances, especially when it comes to personal or financial information.

American filmmaker Gregg Araki is so over movies taking sex too seriously. A defining figure of the New Queer Cinema moment of the early '90s, the director of the Teenage Apocalypse film trilogy (Totally F***ed Up, The Doom Generation, and Nowhere) is back with I Want Your Sex, a cheeky comedy that's got a throbbing debate penetrating its raunchy romance.

Written by Araki and Karley Sciortino, I Want Your Sex plays like a spirited "fuck you" to Halina Reijn's Babygirl. That erotic thriller saw a female CEO (Nicole Kidman) risk her comfortable life over a sexual affair with a male intern half her age, who dominated her in a kinky BDSM relationship. By sharp contrast, Araki's latest keeps the May-December BDSM romance, but turns the tables on who's wielding the whip.

SEE ALSO: A beginner's guide to understanding Dom/sub dynamics

In Babygirl, the heroine's desire was transgressive, as she ceded her hard-won power to an impudent younger man in exchange for consensual sexual degradation. In I Want Your Sex, it's the younger man who is the protagonist hungering to be debased and bossed about. What each craves is the freedom of submission in sexual play, a place where they won't be judged for their yearnings. 

But where Babygirl focuses intently on female desire, I Want Your Sex goes the way of After the Hunt, plunging into a curious intergenerational divide on sex and its politics. Yet, the intellectual undercurrent of this comedy doesn't keep the film from being wildly funny and scorchingly entertaining.

I Want Your Sex pokes at Gen Z prudishness through millennial provocation.

Mashable has previously reported on how Gen Z appears to be less interested in sex than millennials. This carnal culture clash is explored through I Want Your Sex's L.A.-set story of boy meets Domme. Post-college, Elliot (Cooper Hoffman) is floundering to find himself in early adulthood. While his stern girlfriend Minerva (a hilariously frigid Charli XCX) is endlessly focused on her grad school work, Elliot is comically distracted by his sexual desires. Even as Minerva stares at him with boredom, he imagines her talking dirty while big, bouncing cartoon breasts spill out of her top, taunting him.

With such an active sexual imagination, it seems like a (wet) dream for Elliot to get a job working under professional artist and notorious provocateur Erika Tracy (Olivia Wilde). The bad bitch of the art world, her work is endlessly centered on sex, lust, and genitals. Thus, she demands a flank of twentysomething lackeys to do her bidding, whether that be answering phones, prepping materials, or satisfying her late-night lust. 

The two are absolute opposites. Where Elliot is rumpled, gawky, and wide-eyed, Erika, who is 14 years his senior, struts with an alluring confidence and L.A. edginess. He wears khakis; she sports leather catsuits. He bungles even small talk. She spits out disdain about the art industry and even her own work with all the passion of making a grocery list. Then, she dares Elliot to agree with her after he's spent all day chewing gum to build a sticky multimedia depiction of a gaping vagina. Where he's an open book, she's a triple-latched diary with a latex cover, slicked with lube. And he's utterly enchanted by this slippery seductress. So when she suggests they have sex with no strings, Elliot is positively giddy.

While their relationship is a HR nightmare, Araki stitches in an undeniable sweetness. Where Elliot's peers consider him cringe, pervy, and too needy, to Erika, he's — to pluck a phrase from the recent BDSM rom-com Pillion — got an aptitude for devotion that she appreciates (in her own stoic way). 

A joyful montage displays Elliot and Erika in various kinky scenarios. He's drop-jawed in delight, accepting a spanking, or handcuffed and bound in leather straps, or crawling around in a skimpy maid's uniform. But when they're not fucking, Erika is mind-snapping in her emotional unavailability, insisting to him that sex is the point and means nothing beyond shared pleasure. As Elliot yearns for more — for her to see him or recognize the connection between them beyond the bondage — things turn gnarly, challenging Erika's carefree-fucking thesis. 

Olivia Wilde is a devilish diva in I Want Your Sex.

Wilde exudes thundering sensuality in a dazzling array of kinky clothes, including boldly alluring office attire that would make the office siren girlies faint. Her Erika is not a three-dimensional woman but an art piece of her own making — slick, sexy, and enigmatic. Fitting, then, that Araki begins his film with a nod to an early icon of problematic, unknowable but fabulous film divas: Norma Desmond, played by Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard.

Like Billy Wilder's phenomenal classic dark comedy from 1950, I Want Your Sex begins with a doomed figure, floating dead in a sparkling swimming pool, the glow of a posh home shining down on the scene. But this time, it's not the brash American man who toyed with the heart of a deranged female artist who's bobbing in the waters. It's the artist herself. 

How did Erika wind up here? And why is Elliot freaking out while wearing a matching pink satin bra and panties? That's the gleefully tawdry question that Araki poses with his intro. From there, every stilettoed step that Wilde takes in the journey of this deliciously mad baddie plays like a clue.

While Hoffman offers a goofy, guileless smile and willing flesh for the stomping, Wilde is a thigh-high boot in human form. She is shimmering and seductive, but with a threat of pain. To his clown, she is not just an eyebrow-arching straight man but a smirking tyrant, impossibly cool even when behaving like a hot mess, the kind juicy exposés thrive on.

With baby bangs and a chic mullet, Wilde presents L.A.'s art scene as a ruthlessly superficial space where sex sells, and it's easier to plead ignorance than it is to ask for consent. She is a caricature of a cynical millennial, attracted to Gen Z's eagerness but bored by their purity politics. Her give-no-fucks façade is as enchanting as it is shallow.

Araki builds out her world with a scowling business partner (an amusingly seething Daveed Diggs). Meanwhile, Elliot's is filled with friends like Zap, his eye-rolling work bestie (Mason Gooding in sassy mode), his flummoxed roommate Apple (a crackling Chase Sui Wonders), and foes like the two frustrated cops (Margaret Cho and Johnny Knoxville) interviewing him about Erika's pivotal last swim. Through all these collisions of colorful characters, Araki is able to explore the central sexual politics with plenty of verve and saucy while silly dialogue.

These contrary viewpoints on sex and relationships are bound to collide dramatically. Thankfully, the pool scene climax is just as juicy and twisted as you might hope for in a Araki spin on Billy Wilder. However, in the film's overlong resolution, the daring filmmaker who won the first-ever Queer Palm at the Cannes Film Festival takes his foot off the gas. This give-no-fucks romp about the beauty of making mistakes in lust and love falters in its daring. Its propulsive pace sputters in search of a happy ending that feels so jarring in tone that it feels almost like another one of Elliot's fantasies — minus the cartoony flare.

Still, even with a conclusion that loses its nerve, I Want Your Sex is an exuberantly entertaining comedy, alive with sexual vigor, earnest humanity, and biting humor. 

I Want Your Sex opens in theaters on July 31.

UPDATE: Jul. 30, 2026, 12:03 p.m. This review was first published on June 20, 2026, as part of Mashable's coverage of NewFest. It has been updated for its theatrical release.

The Drama has been stirring up drama online since a teaser dropped back in December. A24's dark comedy about a wedding gone awry stars Zendaya and Robert Pattinson and promises an unexpected twist. If you've managed to steer clear of spoilers thus far, this isn't your typical "cold feet" romantic comedy. It's darker and heavier.

The best ways to watch 'The Drama' at home: Best non-streaming option Buy or rent 'The Drama' on Prime Video $19.99 or $5.99 Shop Now Best non-streaming option 2 Buy or rent 'The Drama' on Apple TV $19.99 or $5.99 Get Deal Best long-term deal HBO Max (With Ads) $109.99/year (save $21.89) Get Deal Best no-ads option HBO Max Standard $184.99/year (save $36.89) Get Deal Best for students HBO Max Student $5.49 per month for 12 months (save 50%) Get Deal Best way to watch for free HBO Max Basic With Ads Free for Cricket customers on the $60/month unlimited plan (save $10.99/month) Get Deal Best bundle deal Disney+, Hulu, and HBO Max $19.99 per month (with ads), $32.99 per month (no ads) (save up to 42%) Get Deal Best for Verizon customers Netflix and HBO Max bundle (with ads) $10/month with Verizon myPlan (save $9.98/month) Get Deal Best for Xfinity customers Netflix, Peacock, and HBO Max (with ads) $22/month with Xfinity StreamSaver (save $8.97/month) Get Deal

Directed by Kristoffer Borgli, The Drama makes you question whether you really know the person you're about to marry. It's done surprisingly well at the theaters, besting Zendaya's 2024 hit Challengers. If you missed it or can't wait to watch it again, here's everything you need to know to watch the actual drama unfold from your couch.

What is The Drama about?

The Drama follows Boston couple Emma (Zendaya) and Charlie (Pattinson) as they prepare for their wedding. At a food-and-wine tasting event, along with their best friends Rachel (Alana Haim) and Mike (Mamoudou Athie), they play a game where each person confesses the worst thing they've ever done. While it's all in good fun at first, the game takes a dark turn when Emma admits her truth. Her confession throws the whole wedding and her relationship as a whole into question.

Check out the official trailer for a taste of The Drama:

How to watch The Drama at home Credit: A24

As of July 31, there are a few different ways you can watch The Drama at home: buy it or rent it via digital-on-demand retailers or stream it. We've broken down the details below.

Buy or rent on digital

The Drama made its at-home debut via digital-on-demand retailers on May 5, 2026. Originally, you could buy the film for your digital library for $24.99 or rent it for $5 less. Now, you can buy or rent it for much less. Note: If you choose the rental option, you'll get access for 30 days, but only 48 hours once you start watching.

Quick links to buy/rent The Drama on digital:

• Apple TV — buy for $19.99, rent for $5.99

• Fandango at Home — buy for $19.99, rent for $5.99

• Prime Video — buy for $19.99, rent for $5.99

Stream it on HBO Max

A24 recently renewed its output deal with Warner Bros. Discovery, which means new A24 theatrical releases will exclusively stream on HBO Max before anywhere else. Following the same theater-to-streaming schedule as other recently released A24 movies (Marty Supreme, Sorry, Baby, and Bring Her Back), The Drama will make its debut on HBO Max on July 31, 2026.

HBO Max subscriptions start at $10.99 per month. However, there are some ways you can save money on your plan. Check out the best HBO Max streaming deals below.

SEE ALSO: HBO Max and Paramount+ are combining into one streaming service The best HBO Max streaming dealsBest for most people: Save 16% on HBO Max annual subscriptions Opens in a new window Credit: HBO Max HBO Max Basic with ads annual subscription $109.99 per year (save $21.89) Get Deal Opens in a new window Credit: HBO Max HBO Max Standard annual subscription $184.99 per year (save $36.89) Get Deal

If you're ready to commit to an HBO Max subscription, the best way to save some money is to opt for the annual plan over the monthly plan. While a monthly plan with ads typically costs $10.99 per month, you can get a full year for $109.99, which breaks down the monthly cost to $9.17 (about 16% in savings).

Want to go ad-free? The annual HBO Max Standard or Premium plans will also save you about 16% over their monthly equivalents. Standard subscriptions cost either $18.49 per month or $184.99 per year (which breaks down to $15.42 per month). Premium subscriptions cost $22.99 per month or $229.99 per year (about $19.17 per month). While both are ad-free plans, only the Premium option will unlock 4K Ultra HD video quality, Dolby Atmos, and the ability to download more offline content.

Get HBO Max for free: Switch to Cricket's Supreme Unlimited plan Opens in a new window Credit: HBO Max / Cricket HBO Max (with ads) Free for Cricket customers on the Supreme Unlimited plan Get Deal

It may not be the most convenient option, but switching your phone plan to Cricket's Supreme Unlimited plan for $60 per month will get you HBO Max for free. Once you're a Cricket customer, you can use your provider credentials to log in via the HBO Max app or website.

Best HBO Max deal for students: Save 50% on HBO Max Basic with ads Opens in a new window Credit: HBO Max HBO Max Student $5.49 per month for 12 months Get Deal

College students can get an entire year of HBO Max with ads for half the price of a normal subscription. Just use UNiDAYS to prove your student status, and you'll receive a unique discount code that'll drop the price from $10.99 to $5.49 per month. Once the initial 12 months are up, the price will jump back to the full cost unless you cancel.

Best bundle deal: Get HBO Max, Disney+, and Hulu for up to 42% off Opens in a new window Credit: Disney / Hulu / HBO Max Disney+, Hulu, and HBO Max $19.99 per month (with ads), $32.99 per month (no ads) Get Deal

The Disney+ bundle deal, which includes HBO Max and Hulu, remains one of the best deals in streaming. For just $19.99 per month, you'll get all three streaming libraries with ads, which is about $15 cheaper than paying for each one separately. Prefer an ad-free viewing experience? It'll run you $32.99 per month as opposed to $56.47 for all three. That's up to 42% in savings.

Best for Verizon customers: Get Netflix and HBO Max for $10/month Opens in a new window Credit: Netflix / HBO Max HBO Max and Netflix (with ads) $10 per month for Verizon customers with myPlan (save $9.98 per month) Get Deal

If you're a Verizon customer on the Unlimited Welcome, Unlimited Plus, or Unlimited Ultimate plan, you can add the Netflix and HBO Max bundle (with ads) to your plan for only $10 per month. A $19.98 per month value, that's essentially like getting one streaming service for free each month. Once you enroll in the promo, you'll have to complete the account setup separately for each service. Check out Verizon's support page for all the eligibility details, terms, and FAQs.

Best for Xfinity customers: Bundle HBO Max, Peacock, and Netflix and save $10/month Opens in a new window Credit: Netflix / Peacock / HBO Max Netflix Standard with ads, Peacock Premium, and HBO Max $22/month with Xfinity StreamSaver (save $8.97/month) Get Deal

Xfinity Internet and TV customers can also get in on the bundle action with Xfinity StreamSaver packages. The package with Netflix Standard with ads ($8.99 per month), Peacock Premium ($10.99 per month), and HBO Max Basic with Ads ($10.99 per month) can be added to your existing Xfinity service for only $22 per month. It typically costs $30.97 for all three, so you'll save about $8.97 monthly.

In the online dating world, AdultFriendFinder and Plenty of Fish are the website equivalent of elder statesmen. These OG dating platforms have been hooking people up for literally decades, having both launched over 20 years ago. They predate social media and even the smartphone era. But a good thing never goes out of date. Both sites have stayed relevant, attracting millions of visitors across the globe who all have one thing in common: They're all looking for a connection.

But that's pretty much where the similarities between these sites end. We'd argue that you'll be hard-pressed to find two online dating sites less alike than AFF and Plenty of Fish, in fact. Plenty of Fish is more of a conventional dating site, adopting the smartphone-friendly “yes-or-no” carousel function. AdultFriendFinder, on the other hand, is much spicier — it's basically an X-rated site with a social media platform built in.

But instead of approaching them as either-or alternatives, you can see them as essentially complementary. One offers a personality-focused approach, which is more likely to help you find something more serious and long-term, while the other is sexuality-first. It's built for steamy short-term fun and frolics.

Want to know more? We put these two online dating veterans to the test to find their respective strengths and weaknesses. In other words, keep reading for everything you ever needed to know.

Opens in a new window Credit: AdultFriendFinder AdultFriendFinder   Learn More Opens in a new window Credit: Plenty of Fish Plenty of Fish   Learn More

As dating sites have been around forever, both AdultFriendFinder and Plenty of Fish can absolutely deliver the goods for their users, but it’s interesting to see just how different their respective approaches can be — and, if you're intent on using just one, which site will best suit your dating needs.

Site design

The contrast between the two sites is immediately evident from the aesthetic choices. Plenty of Fish uses softer, pastel colors and a clean, minimalist aesthetic to focus your attention on a single part of the website: your user profile, for example, or the profile of a prospective match. AdultFriendFinder, on the other hand, has a crowded site layout, with ads, live streams, and user-generated content all vying for your attention.

The AFF approach gives you the initial feeling that there’s a lot going on, like you just stumbled into a huge swingers party, while the PoF approach is much less intimidating — though also less exciting. There’s another major difference that’s immediately obvious: AFF is very much an “adult” dating site, with nudity enabled by default in your profile settings, meaning a lot of what you will see on the site is indistinguishable from an X-rated tube site. Plenty of Fish, meanwhile, curates its content much more heavily. There are no NSFW live streams or d-pics.

SEE ALSO: All your Hinge questions, answered

And speaking of that X-rated content: Because AFF allows nudity on its site, it’s ineligible for inclusion on the most popular app stores, so you’re mostly confined to the on-site experience, even on your smartphone, but Plenty of Fish has an app in both the Google Play and Apple App stores, so you can swipe on the go as well. 

By the numbers

While both sites are tight-lipped about their user information, independent reporting from Business of Apps suggests that Plenty of Fish has approximately 10 million active users at any one time, compared to AdultFriendFinder’s two million active users, with both sites having a roughly 60-40 male-female skew in their gender ratio, though more recent reporting suggests AFF may be closer to 65-35 today. 

In either case, there’s no shortage of people for you to discover and talk to, though the farther you live from an urban hub, the more generous you’ll have to be in your search parameters. 

The typical dating profile

Another obvious difference between the two sites is their approach to profile creation. With AFF, you can set up a profile in seconds, with no verification steps and minimal required data entry. Plenty of Fish, on the other hand, asks you a bevy of personal questions, from your level of education and whether or not you own a car to whether your parents are divorced or still together and whether you want kids or not. PoF also requires that you verify the phone number tied to your account using a six-digit verification code, while AFF only requires email verification.

AFF has its share of personal questions as well, but they’re not so much related to your religion or smoking habit as they are to your kinks and sexual preferences. Their popular My Kinks tab allows users to fly their freak flags freely, and then re-incorporates that information into one of their search options, so if, for example, you have a foot fetish, you can search for other people who share your fetish, or they can search you out based on that fetish. 

User experience

One thing you’ll quickly realize when using both sites is that PoF is a lot more generous in what they allow non-paying users to do. With AFF, you can basically only engage with other people in public spaces like the chat rooms and discussion forums. In fact, you can’t so much as view someone’s full profile without purchasing a Gold membership.

With PoF, by contrast, you can actually use the site, view user profiles, like user profiles, and even speak to other singles, all without spending a dime. That being said, a Premium or Prestige membership on Plenty of Fish still represents a massive quality-of-life upgrade, giving you unlimited likes, read receipts on messages, an ad-free site experience, and some pretty cool bonus features like the ability to see who has liked your profile or a Rewind button for when you accidentally skip over a profile that caught your eye. 

SEE ALSO: All your Tinder questions, answered

From a purely aesthetic perspective, the PoF site is much cleaner and less distracting, even in the way it serves you ads, while the AFF site makes up for its busy design by offering a much wider variety of potential activities, including live streams, chat forums, blogs, and sexy stories.

Success rates

The major difference between the two sites boils down to the users and what they’re looking for online. In general, Plenty of Fish users seem to be more dedicated daters, aspiring to long-term relationships and meaningful connections, while AdultFriendFinder’s users are much more obviously content with short-term connections, whether that’s a sexy chat or livestream, or an in-person meetup. 

In practice, that means that you’ll find AFF a much easier place to start a conversation or find a fling, while PoF users are clearly more selective in who they talk to, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that “success” is easier on one site than another. It also helps that AFF offers more venues for interaction: you can try to message a single person, sure, but you can also search out people who share your hobbies, interests, or kinks and speak to them in a more public context like a forum or a live chat, which removes a lot of the stakes of one-on-one communication. 

On the other hand, if you’re after something more long-term and high-stakes, Plenty of Fish users appear to be much more aware of what they want and what they don’t want in a partner. They’re at a stage of life when they’re taking dating seriously, and PoF caters to this crowd, putting critical life information (are you a smoker? do you have kids?) front and center. 

In other words, you’ll find the most success by being honest with yourself about what you’re looking for and choosing the appropriate dating site. Can you find love on AFF or a fling on PoF? Most definitely. But it will also be an uphill battle, given how the two sites are set up. 

Slight spoilers for I Want Your Sex below.

Partway through Gregg Araki's film I Want Your Sex, the protagonists have a conversation that felt like it could've been lifted from a TikTok comment section. Twenty-something Elliot (Cooper Hoffman) and his boss Erika Tracy (Olivia Wilde) debate Gen Z and sex. 

Recent grad Elliot had recently started working for Erika, an esteemed artist. Erika is famous for pushing boundaries, and her art is often sexual. She takes a liking to Elliot, who at the start of the film is in a sexless relationship with his girlfriend, Minerva (Charli XCX).

Soon after this conversation, they begin an illicit BDSM affair — but at this point, the two characters are only steeped in sexual tension.

Erika, who's 14 years older, calls Gen Z uptight and proclaims that they'd rather watch porn and play video games than have sex.

SEE ALSO: Gen Z men are more religious online

Elliot argues that sex is complicated for Gen Z. Nothing feels safe or OK — not making eye contact, and certainly not having sex. Parents and teachers removed them from uncomfortable situations.

Erika doesn't buy it. She calls Gen Z's sex negativity "retro." (Elliot later masturbates to a fantasy of her calling his generation whiny, repressed "weaklings.")

Their conversation isn't much different from what the zeitgeist has been discussing for several years: That Gen Z, apparently, has less sex than in previous generations. While millennials were the first users of dating apps like Tinder and the forerunners of hookup culture, Gen Z is rejecting casual sex. 

But is what Erika is saying true? Is Gen Z repressed? Mashable spoke to experts to find out, and turns out — surprise! — it's more nuanced than that. 

Why is Gen Z having less sex?

While it's not right to brand an entire generation whiny and repressed, there is some truth to what Erika is saying. According to the 2024 General Social Survey by NORC, a nonpartisan research organization at the University of Chicago, 24 percent of people aged 18-29 didn't have sex in the past year, which was twice as many as in 2010.

The GSS data isn't perfect, as Mashable examined when its 2021 report was released, but it coincides with other findings about sexual inactivity in young adults. And researchers are noticing.

"Looking historically at data from prior generations and over time, it is a trend that we're seeing that honestly seems to be plenty significant," said Sara Vasilenko, doctoral program director and associate professor in the Human Development and Family Science department at Syracuse University.

Teen birth rates have also declined in the last 30 years. In 1991, the rate of live births born to mothers aged 15 to 19 was 61.8 per 1,000 births; in 2023, it was 13.1.

"There was a lot of concern about adolescent and young adult sexual behavior and high rates of pregnancy" in the 1990s, Vasilenko told Mashable, "and it's been declining since then."

And there's not just one cause.

Data points to differences in how parents raised Gen Z kids versus how older generations were raised. Gen Z, for instance, was less likely to have freedom from supervision. Children's "home range" (the distance between their parents' home and where they can roam unsupervised), outdoor spaces, activities, and companions have all decreased over the last few generations. There was less time with friends in a way that facilitates relationships and dating, which eventually leads to sexual behavior, Vasilenko said.

This coincides with young adults being called "generation stay-at-home," and being less likely to have a driver's license or to drink alcohol. 

Research also suggests that Gen Z spends much more time on social media than other generations, harkening to an adage that's turned into a meme at this point: It's the damn phones. 

"I don't want to say, 'Oh, it's just because Gen Z is on their phone all the time,' but I think it would be undeniable to say that clearly these two things are at least correlated, if not causative," said Carter Sherman, author of The Second Coming and cohost of The Guardian's Stateside with Kai and Carter podcast.

A new working paper published in June 2026 suggests that the iPhone has acted as "birth control."

What there's less data on, Vasilenko said, is the impact of the type of content Gen Z is consuming online. It's possible that sexual attitudes are shaped by online porn, which could also be a substitute for sex. Last year, a LADbible survey found that 70 percent of Gen Z men reported that their first exposure to sex was porn.

But sex worker and sex educator Electra Rayne, who created and directs the sapphic porn site QueerCrush.com (link is NSFW), said, "Porn is this huge scapegoat, and it gets blamed so often for so many things."

Rayne said that criticism of her work, and of porn in generally, often comes from young people. She believes there's a growing puritanical idea that sex and desire are bad. 

"I don't totally know where all of this comes from, but I do think that it is a pretty pervasive idea that is spreading really aggressively," she said, "and I do also think that current legislation really feeds into this," referring to age-verification laws, which typically require one's ID or biometric data to view explicit content. 

Vasilenko also speculated on the impact that algorithms have on our sexual attitudes. Men and women could be served with different types of content about what relationships and sexuality should look like, thus they're being socialized in a way that makes it problematic to have healthy relationships. One algorithm could surface incel and tradwife content, while others show posts related to #MeToo and the reversal of Roe v. Wade.

"If you're socialized in those completely different streams, maybe that's going to impact how you see relationships, how much you want to be in a relationship, what you want that to be, and cause mismatches in people's attitudes," she said. 

The lack of comprehensive sex education could also impact how people feel about sex. In the U.S., only 19 states mandated medically accurate content for any topic as of 2025. 

Less sex effects

We don't yet know all the implications of these shifts, Vasilenko said. And they're not all bad. From an adolescent health perspective, the decline of unintended teen pregnancy is a good thing. 

As the research stands, sexual behaviors might be associated with negative mental health outcomes if it happens in an "off time," meaning not a normative time relative to their peers (i.e., at a very young age). Vasilenko wonders if sexual behavior becomes less developmentally normative, then it will more likely be associated with negative health outcomes for the young people who do have sex.

Young adults are delaying life milestones such as moving out, buying a home, getting married, and having children. This is certainly not just because of phones; it's because of the economy and rising cost of living. But if these events are getting delayed, relationships and sex might shift later, too. 

In defense of Gen Z

Angie Rowntree, sexologist and founder and filmmaker of the adult site Sssh.com, said we should be careful about drawing sweeping conclusions from the statistics. 

There are several questions worth asking before deciding that people are simply less interested in sex, she said: Are young adults lonelier or more stressed? Are they spending more time online and having fewer opportunities to connect face-to-face? Are economic pressures affecting their ability to date, socialize, and form relationships? "All of those factors can influence how frequently people couple up and become intimate," she said.

Gen Z also grew up with the internet, and with it unprecedented access to sexual content — and content about bodies, period. The negative impact of social media on teens' body image is well-documented.

"A lot of people felt like social media had exacerbated their lack of comfort with their bodies," Sherman said about the interviews for her book. 

Then there's the impact of far-right beliefs, which have flourished on social media. "There's a clear effort to make it difficult, if not dangerous, to have sex that is queer, that is unmarried, that is not procreative, and it's that's a really hard reality for Gen Z to be living under," Sherman said. "When we're accusing [Gen Z] of not having enough sex, of doing sex wrong, I'm always like, 'You guys, have you looked at the political environment that they're growing up in?'"

The internet undoubtedly impacts Gen Z's sexuality, but it's not all doom and gloom. A plus is increased knowledge around consent and agency. "Gen Z…seems more willing to question content that feels performative or disconnected from authentic pleasure and human connection," Roundtree said. And social media can be a positive space for LGBTQ youth to find community.

Sherman also said she was routinely surprised by how sexually progressive the Gen Z people she spoke to were. They were more open to what sex and gender could look like, and were more accepting of BDSM and non-monogamy. 

How Gen Z can be sexually free

Along with the positives of the internet, Roundtree acknowledges that talking openly about sex online isn't the same as developing intimacy in real life. Both she and Rayne emphasized the importance of talking about sex to engender freedom.

You can also sexually explore with yourself or your partner. "The more people know about their own anatomy and preferences, the better prepared they are to communicate with a partner," Roundtree said. 

Above all, sexual freedom is personal. It's not measured by how often one has sex, how many sexual partners one has, or whether the sex they have looks as it does online, she continued. You should be free to decide what works for you, without the pressure of cultural labels or societal expectations. 

Another Silo episode, another cliffhanger ending.

In Season 3, episode 4, we finished on the shock realisation that Bernard (Tim Robbins) is still alive, but in episode 5, the tension comes from the flashback storyline instead.

So what happens, and who is this mysterious Per Stensen (Colin Hanks) that's mentioned? Let's unpack what we know.

SEE ALSO: 'Silo' Season 3, episode 1: Have we already met the voice behind the algorithm? What happens at the end of Silo Season 3, episode 5?

Locked in an ever-deepening mystery, Daniel (Ashley Zukerman) and Helen (Jessica Henwick) finish the episode on the road, discussing what Daniel has learned from his former army buddy. We've transcribed the conversation they have prior to their car suddenly gaining a mind of its own:

Daniel: "Who's the number-one advocate for AI control, who also happens to fund the clinic where my sister's trying to rebuild her memory?"

Helen: "Per Stensen."

D: "Wanna take a guess at where Per Stensen was the night of Operation Righteous Vengeance?"

H: "On the Nimitz?"

D: "It's usually based in San Diego, but it's been in Norfolk since it got back from Iran. Sam knows someone on base who's willing to talk to us off the record."

H: "What changed his mind?"

D: "I'm guessing Charlotte. Just knowing what she means to me. I know Sam. We didn't just play in a band together. We got shot at together, and I've rarely heard him this scared."

H: "Okay, you think all this has to do with AI though?"

D: "I don't know... but the other carrier groups that night sent out 20, 30 sorties, and the Nimitz sends out one? With four planes equipped with pre-digital comms, and then suddenly—"

He never gets to finish the sentence, because at that point the car swerves — and then begins driving itself.

Who is Per Stensen?

We've actually heard the name before. Prior to Season 3's launch, Apple shared a promo in the form of a 20-minute livestream that mentioned the character in a brief news story. The video is now private, but the news clip spoke about him being a billionaire who'd purchased a large parcel of land in Georgia. We also know that he's played by Colin Hanks — a big enough name that he'll likely feature prominently in what's to come.

Based on the exchange Daniel and Helen have above, the implication seems to be that he could be a figure behind the curtain, pulling the strings. But what's his involvement, exactly?

Is Stensen the person employing the mysterious gray-haired man following Daniel and Helen? What's he got to do with what happened on Charles' mission? And does the fact that the promo talks about him purchasing land in Georgia mean that he could actually have something to do with the silo's origin story?

Silo Season 3 is streaming now on Apple TV, with new episodes dropping every Friday.

If you like playing daily word games like Wordle, then Hurdle is a great game to add to your routine.

There are five rounds to the game. The first round sees you trying to guess the word, with correct, misplaced, and incorrect letters shown in each guess. If you guess the correct answer, it'll take you to the next hurdle, providing the answer to the last hurdle as your first guess. This can give you several clues or none, depending on the words. For the final hurdle, every correct answer from previous hurdles is shown, with correct and misplaced letters clearly shown.

An important note is that the number of times a letter is highlighted from previous guesses does necessarily indicate the number of times that letter appears in the final hurdle.

Mashable 101 Fan Fave: Nominate your favorite creators today

If you find yourself stuck at any step of today's Hurdle, don't worry! We have you covered.

SEE ALSO: Hurdle: Everything you need to know to find the answers Hurdle Word 1 hint

A tropical fruit.

SEE ALSO: Apple’s new M3 MacBook Air is $300 off at Amazon. And yes, I’m tempted. Hurdle Word 1 answer

GUAVA

Hurdle Word 2 hint

Done to guitar strings.

SEE ALSO: Wordle today: Answer, hints for July 31, 2026 Hurdle Word 2 Answer

STRUM

Mashable 101 Fan Fave: Nominate your favorite creators today

Hurdle Word 3 hint

The sea.

SEE ALSO: NYT Connections Sports Edition today: Hints and answers for July 31 SEE ALSO: NYT Connections hints today: Clues, answers for July 31, 2026 Hurdle Word 3 answer

OCEAN

Hurdle Word 4 hint

To crease.

Hurdle Word 4 answer

CRIMP

Final Hurdle hint

Benefit.

SEE ALSO: Mahjong, Sudoku, free crossword, and more: Games available on Mashable Hurdle Word 5 answer

AVAIL

If you're looking for more puzzles, Mashable's got games now! Check out our games hub for Mahjong, Sudoku, free crossword, and more.

The Moon is now entering the next stage of its cycle after reaching its Full Moon phase, gradually losing some of its illumination each night as we begin to head towards the New Moon. Keep reading to see what you can still spot on its surface tonight.

What is today’s Moon phase?

As of Friday, July 31, NASA's Daily Moon Guide tracker tells us the Moon phase is in Waning Gibbous phase, with 97% of its surface visible.

Without visual aids, tonight you should still be able to see the Mare Tranquillitatis, Copernicus Crater, and the Tycho Crater. If you have binoculars will help you see the Alphonsus Crater, Endymion Crater, and the Clavius Crater. Finally, a telescope will help you see all this plus the Apollo 11 and 17 landing spots, as well as the Rupes Altai.

When is the next Full Moon?

The next Full Moon will take place on August 28.

What are Moon phases?

According to NASA, the Moon goes through a complete cycle of eight phases roughly every 29.5 days. As it travels around Earth, the angle between the Sun, Earth and Moon constantly changes, meaning we see different amounts of the Moon's sunlit side. This is what causes the familiar progression from a thin crescent to a half Moon, then a Full Moon, before the cycle repeats.

The eight phases are:

New Moon - The Moon is between Earth and the sun, so the side we see is dark (in other words, it's invisible to the eye).

Waxing Crescent - A small sliver of light appears on the right side (Northern Hemisphere).

First Quarter - Half of the Moon is lit on the right side. It looks like a half-Moon.

Waxing Gibbous - More than half is lit up, but it’s not quite full yet.

Full Moon - The whole face of the Moon is illuminated and fully visible.

Waning Gibbous - The Moon starts losing light on the right side. (Northern Hemisphere)

Third Quarter (or Last Quarter) - Another half-Moon, but now the left side is lit.

Waning Crescent - A thin sliver of light remains on the left side before going dark again.