No one was more excited than I was to try the Movano Evie ring. When it was first announced, I added it to our list of the Best of CES in 2023. I was excited to finally find a fitness tracker that solved an actual problem for an underserved population! It is really hard for many women to track their menstrual cycles, and this is especially relevant if you’re a woman in perimenopause. The 10-15 years before your period ends are typically characterized by health conditions like hot flashes and lack of sleep. Monitoring these conditions would be the first step to treating them effectively.
However, in the intervening year, almost every fitness tracker has come out with a similar cycle tracking feature. Apple debuted skin temperature sensing and automatic ovulation detection with the Series 8 (8/10, WIRED Recommends), and so did the Samsung Galaxy Watch and the Withings ScanWatch (7/10, WIRED Recommends). Several months ago, the period tracking app Clue introduced a new feature set, Clue Perimenopause, where you can manually track perimenopausal symptoms.
Most significantly for biological women in the United States, Roe v. Wade was overturned. Depending on where you live, you might not even want to track your period online at all. Assuming that you still want to track your period in an app, and don’t have menstrual cycle features on your existing fitness tracker, is the Movano Evie ring worth buying? Right now, it’s probably not.
Affordable Price
The Evie ring has a number of great features. At $269, it’s relatively affordable (as far as smart rings go), and it doesn’t require an additional subscription fee. I used the free sizing kit and got my usual size 8, and the tester came in a gold finish (there is also silver and rose gold).
The ring itself is injection-molded and has a titanium finish that feels high-quality and comfortable, with tiny sensors packed into the inside. There is a notch cut into it, which makes the sizing a little more flexible than it might be otherwise. It can accommodate your hands changing size when you work out or have hormonal fluctuations, but the downside is that the notch gets caught in my hair.
The ring’s sensors include red and green LEDs, infrared PPG sensors, skin temperature sensors, photodiodes, and a 3D accelerometer. It also comes with a tiny portable charging case that holds up to ten additional charges and itself charges via USB-C. When I first got the ring, I had multiple charging issues that were only resolved with frequent app and ring updates.
Right now, I get a little less than 3 days of battery life, which is not that much, especially compared to the Oura ring’s 5 days. I also don’t get any notification that the battery is dead, so I miss a lot of data if I don’t check the app every morning. It takes between 2-3 hours to recharge.
The app itself looks pretty perfunctory. It’s currently only available on iOS 16 or above, and does not sync with Apple Health. The Daily Summary shows your day as a circle, but that circle doesn’t seem to correlate with your activities for that day. For example, half of the circle is sleeping, even though I only sleep 6-7 hours per night and not 12. A 40-minute run shows up as almost half of my daytime hours. You also have to log workouts manually in the app and can’t note what type of workout it was, only the duration.
It’s also pretty disappointing that the vaunted skin temperature sensor only shows you deviations from the average, and not a monthly graph. A monthly graph is the only way to see the minute temperature drop that occurs at the end of your cycle. You can see and record the drop on an Oura ring, but not with the Evie.
The U8N also lets you control the volume output of its optical port with the TV remote, making it much simpler to control older audio systems that don’t support HDMI ARC/eARC, like my original KEF LSX speakers. If you decide to settle for the onboard sound, the U8N’s 2.1.2 speaker system offers some decent detail, and a bit of extra bass punch for its woofers.
The TV is well stocked on the gaming front, including VRR (Variable Refresh Rate) and AMD FreeSync Premium Proto for fluid high frame-rate gaming, as well as ALLM (Auto Low Latency Mode) for low input lag. Gaming feels realistic and responsive, with impressive HDR performance. I like the variety of available picture settings, including both Theater and Game modes, which provide rich contrast and vibrant colors for details like Kratos’ ruby red armor in God of War Ragnarok.
Peaky Blinder
The U8N provides an almost intimidating level of picture settings for deep-dive adjustments. The Peak Brightness setting is the most confusing. When applying my usual picture modes during setup, like Theater Night for standard dynamic range (SDR) and HDR Theater mode for HDR10, Peak Brightness was set on High by default, which really pumps up the overall picture. This can result in raised black levels and white-hot highlights in content and menu bars, especially with HDR video, leading my wife to call the U8N “the hurty TV” at first.
There are a few things going on here. First, Peak Brightness is primed for daytime watching in bright rooms with sunlight pouring in, allowing even the darkest scenes to pop. Hisense also includes an adjustable Automatic Light Sensor under the General picture settings, something most reviewers tend to turn off for consistent performance but is all but necessary for Peak Brightness. It does a relatively good job taming the splashy brightness in low lighting, even if I don’t always love how it reacts to each environment.
Still, Hisense’s decision to quietly set Peak Brightness on High (often without the light sensor engaged) in picture modes that are usually more restrained is confounding, even for someone used to digging through picture settings. A colleague suggested that the TV’s default Energy Saving mode—a dimmer setting that includes the light sensor on for Peak Brightness—is the one Hisense expects most viewers to experience since most folks apparently don’t change their picture settings. The light sensor is also helpfully engaged by default in some other modes, like Dolby Vision Dark.
If you decide to use Peak Brightness, which is necessary to reach the TV’s highest brightness levels, I suggest starting on Low and turning the light sensor for night viewing. This worked well for illuminating challenging SDR content like Harry Potter and the Deadly Hallows during daylight hours, where the darkest scenes seemed to have even less pop than the U8K without the peak brightness setting on.
My brightest HDR testing content often looked overcooked and oversaturated in this mode. That’s not surprising, considering the TV can reach over 3,000 nits, or triple the brightness at which most videos are currently mastered (though this baseline will change with the latest mastering tools). I usually left the setting off for HDR, but it can be useful in brighter rooms, especially for the always murky Dolby Vision Dark mode. I couldn’t help but marvel at how vibrant and flashy some scenes looked with the setting on, such as the monster scene in Moana, where the giant crab Tamatoa’s golden shell burst to life in disco psychedelia.
Slackjaw Spectacle
However you utilize the U8N’s picture settings, it’s capable of the signature beautiful picture we’ve come to expect from the series, with deep black levels, fabulous backlight control, very little “haloing” around bright objects, and intense colors that sparkle like jewels in sunlight.
This is showy performance, especially for high-quality 4K HDR productions like Netflix’s Our Planet. Episode 4’s coral scene looks incredible, with dashing neon yellows, sapphire blues, and lifelike sunlight sparkling across it all. Occasionally the TV tends to oversaturate reds, especially when using the Warm1 color temperature, but even so it’s stunningly beautiful. It’s the kind of picture that makes you just want to sit there, slackjawed and dumbfounded, as the pretty colors and bright sparklies dance before your eyes.
If you’re looking at bikes online—or anything, really, whether it’s headphones or monitors—you have to consider price versus payoff. Gazelle has billed its newest ebike, the Eclipse, as a long-range comfort cruiser. It is basically the expensive Dutch version of the direct-to-consumer (DTC) Rad Power Bikes’ Radster Road (8/10, WIRED Recommends).
I brooded over that price difference while I was riding, until I realized that I really was much more comfortable, and for a really dumb reason. The handlebars on the Eclipse are much narrower than the Radster’s, as well as the other DTC bikes that I have tested. Most bikes have smaller parts for smaller frames, but if you’re a smaller or newer bike company, you might standardize your handlebar sizes due to restricted supply or economies of scale. That’s just not something you would do if you’re Royal Dutch Gazelle, which has existed for more than 130 years and holds the royal warrant in the Netherlands as a distinction of high quality.
You can swap out handlebars pretty easily on acoustic bikes, but doing so on an electric bike is a more complicated matter. Finding a narrower handlebar was such an unexpected comfort. It’s just … a really nice bike. Even the paint job is nicer than other bikes I have, with four hand-applied coats and dimensional shading to make it look slimmer. If you’re not trying to pinch pennies, there are a lot of really nice things about the Eclipse.
So Much Information
There are two different models of the Eclipse. Both have an aluminum frame, but the T11+ HMB has a Shimano Deore XT derailleur gear, while the version I tested is the C380+ version, which has the Enviolo CVT gear hub and a low-maintenance Gates belt drive. May I never have a chain drop out while crossing a busy street again!
Both come in a step-over and step-through version with three different frame sizes, with the smallest being a 46 centimeters. I’m 5’2″ and was positively thrilled to find a Dutch bike that comes in a size this small as the Dutch are tall people and this is unusual. Of course, the bikes all have UL certification, which means that the bike has been certified to comply with Underwriters Laboratories safety standards and won’t inadvertently set your garage on fire.
Photograph: Adrienne So
Probably the first thing you’ll notice is the new Bosch system. It has a Bosch Performance Line motor with 85 nm of torque and a 750-Wh ginormous battery integrated into the downtube. After about 45 miles of biking up hills and hauling gear, I only got the battery down to 45 percent. It’s a class 3 ebike with a maximum speed of 28 miles per hour.
Control is all I want in an electric scooter. OK, that’s a lie, I also want decent range, good power, and a reasonable weight. Being able to control speed, regenerative braking, and how turn signals work—if they’re even available—is not something you find on most escooters. And even if you can access those things, tweaking them isn’t always intuitive. The new Apollo Go changes all of that.
I’ve tested Apollo scooters for a few years now, and the Apollo Go is my favorite yet. It’s speedy, isn’t terribly heavy, has a decent folding system, includes perks like turn signals and a bell, and delivers satisfying range. Best of all, I have easy control over some core features through the companion app.
Good Control
The sleek-looking Apollo Go has a pretty simple setup process once you take it out of the box. Just add some screws to affix the handlebar to the scooter’s stem and you’re good to go. In the box, you get a nice tool kit for handling basic repairs yourself.
It’s worth noting that while Apollo does have service locations across the country, it recently shut down its New York City service center, citing “the current regulatory environment.” There’s still a third-party service partner you can take your scooter to in Manhattan, but you can check this map to see if there’s a location near you. It’s always smart to make sure there’s some kind of ebike or escooter servicing shop in your area before buying one.
Photograph: Julian Chokkattu
Connecting to the app is a snappy affair, and you do need to use the app to unlock the scooter’s top speed for safety reasons. Lo and behold, you can finally customize the speed modes on the Apollo Go. Most escooters have three speed modes you can cycle through, but these speeds are usually fixed. Apollo lets you set a preferred speed for Eco, Comfort, and Sport. Now I no longer have to deal with the speed modes that are too fast or too slow. I’ve set the Comfort mode here to 15 miles per hour, the speed limit for New York City, and I can still switch to Sport mode if I need a boost. (It has a top speed of 28 mph, but you can lower this if you’d like.)
The app also lets you choose how much regenerative braking you want—this feature recharges the battery slightly every time you use the regen brake—as well as the acceleration response to increase the torque. I maxed out both of these. You can choose a max speed for the Go, control how long it takes for Cruise Control to kick in (so you don’t have to keep holding down on the throttle), and even whether the turn signals should turn off automatically after seven blinks or manually by pressing the signal button again. The best part is I don’t have to bother with the app after I’ve done all this initial setup.
Go Go Go
Photograph: Julian Chokkattu
The aluminum Apollo Go weighs 46 pounds, which is manageable for me, but might be a smidge too heavy for some people. The good thing is the stem isn’t too thick to comfortably carry, and there’s a grab handle at the end of the deck for two-hand toting. If you will have to carry this scooter up and down more than two flights of stairs regularly, I’d suggest getting a lighter model.
There’s not much to the new Beats Solo 4 headphones at first glance. Starkly missing in this $200 package is any form of noise canceling or transparency mode. There’s no auto pause feature or water-resistance rating—something you might expect from headphones shown as jogging companions in marketing videos.
Beats seems proud of the Solo 4’s stark minimalism, pointing instead to their slimline design, upgraded sound, and versatile core features. Highlights include up to 50 hours of playback per charge, the ability to plug in with either 3.5-mm or USB-C for lossless audio, and most convenient, in-house features for both Android and Apple phones like one-touch pairing and a headphones tracker.
I was admittedly dismissive of the Solo 4 for their lack of firepower at first, but over multiple days of testing, the sound kept calling me back. Their warm, clean, and buttery performance stems from a redesigned acoustic architecture that proves Apple’s sonic influence on the Beats brand runs deep. You can get a lot more tech from other options, but there’s enough here to make the Solo 4 worth considering for some—especially once the price inevitably drops.
Slick and Simple
The Solo 4’s aesthetic hasn’t strayed far from its roots. You’ll get all the trappings of a modern Beats device here, like matte plastic casing in flamboyant colors and the signature Beats logo on each earcup. The headphones fold down for travel, fitting into a nifty compact case with pockets inside for the included 3.5-mm and USB-C cables.
Photograph: Ryan Waniata
On-ear headphones like the Solo 4 are a rarity these days, and I generally find over-ear headphones more comfortable since they press against your head, not your ears. The Solo 4’s clamping force can cause some discomfort over time, but I was able to wear them for multiple hours without major complaints, and had no trouble throwing on some sunglasses.
The firm grip keeps the headphones in place and provides some solid passive noise isolation—a good thing considering the Solo 4 eschew any form of ambient audio. It’s undeniably odd in 2024 for such sporty-looking headphones to forgo transparency mode so you can hear the world around you when working out. A good water-resistance rating, something most flagship headphones don’t offer, would have been a nice inclusion in its place.
I do like the Solo 4’s simplified control system, offering intuitive volume and playback keys centered around the left-side Beats logo. Like the Studio Pro, the plastic key feels a bit clanky, but it’s less of a concern at this price. The Solo 4’s other major omission that vexed me over multiple days is the lack of auto pause sensors or auto power-down. Once again, it’s not a huge deal given the massive 50-hour battery life, but it’s something I’d expect at this level.
Either/Or
That’s not to say the Solo 4 are without advanced features. They offer an intriguing double dip of tricks for both Android and Apple devices courtesy of the Beats Proprietary Platform. The system, which also drives the Studio Pro (7/10, WIRED Recommends) and many of the latest Beats earbuds, allows for convenient one-touch pairing and Find My features for either device type, while catering to each in a few key ways.
Android-friendly features include auto pairing and audio switching between Google-connected tablets and phones, as well as a Beats app for some basic customization and firmware updates. On the Apple side, you’ll get “Hey Siri” hands-free voice control, basic in-phone customization options, message playback, and audio sharing. They’ll also auto handoff to your Apple Eatch, but don’t allow for automatic switching between iCloud devices like AirPods.
Everywhere I look, I see an ad for Logitech’s Aurora Collection of accessories. At least, it feels that way. Often it’s the distinctive, cloud-shaped palm rest, or the beautiful all-white headphones. They follow me across social media platforms. You got me, Logitech: I’m interested.
The Aurora Collection checks several boxes for me: It’s designed for gamers like myself, but with a softer aesthetic, featuring white form factors and colorful accessories, something that’s hard to find in a landscape of all-black everything. (Someone bring back the colorful monitors of the iMac age! I’m begging you!) It nicely toes the line of visually pleasing without being cheap or infantile, and isn’t so feminine in its design choices that it feels exclusive to anyone who identifies as a woman.
Something about the G715 wireless mechanical keyboard reminds me of my childhood keyboard. I think it’s the bulky form factor paired with the dark gray buttons on the top; it sends me right back to using my parents’ big gray keyboard while I played Freddi Fish.
On the build design alone, it feels like a classic, old-school keyboard. There’s some weight, but it’s not particularly noteworthy when compared with fun keyboards like the Logitech Pop (9/10, WIRED Recommends). It doesn’t come with circular keys, for example, and there’s no numpad.
The G705 mouse, too, looks similar to other gaming mice I’ve used, but the light strip that runs through the back half (where your palm sits) certainly makes it more fun on my desk. The collection as a whole is pretty classic in its design, yet the white backdrop and well-placed pastel lights give it an entirely new look.
The G735 headphones have the sleekest look of the Aurora line and are the least stereotypically gamer-y. They look fairly high-end, akin to Apple’s AirPods Max (8/10, WIRED Recommends), and have a thinner headband since they’re designed with smaller heads in mind. I have a large noggin and was worried about how they would fit; they were certainly snug, but not so much that I had a headache or couldn’t comfortably wear them for a few hours at a time.
Control Boxes
Courtesy of Logitech
All of the Aurora collection is controlled by the Logitech G HUB, a computer app that will connect to all of these devices and several other Logitech peripherals. The app not only gives you a huge variety of controls and options to customize your lights, but also lets you adjust key commands and macros on the keyboard, your mouse sensitivity, and way more.
Razer’s Blade 14 is my go-to recommendation for anyone hunting for a good gaming laptop, but as impressive as it is, it trades power for portability. If that’s the kind of sacrifice you don’t want to make, then say hello to the Razer Blade 18—this is the powerhouse you’re looking for.
Side-by-side with the Razer Blade 14, the Blade 18 looks like a protective big brother. You can see the family resemblance, but the larger Blade is more imposing. Its 18-inch Mini LED display is so bright it’s almost overwhelming in dark rooms, and it produces vivid colors that rival the already stunning screen on the Blade 14.
The Blade 18 starts at $3,100, but the model I tested is $4,500. You get a lot of power for the price. It packs a 14th-generation Intel Core i9 14900HX processor, an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Laptop GPU (upgradable to the beastly RTX 4090, which is what I tested), 32 GB of RAM, and a 1-terabyte solid-state drive. It’s the kind of power that can tear through even the most demanding games.
Smooth Screen
Razer outdid itself with the display on the Razer Blade 18. The Mini LED panel has a 2,560 x 1,600-pixel resolution, with 2,000 local dimming zones, delivering exceptional contrast between brighter and darker areas of the image. The Razer Blade 14 was already one of the most vibrant laptop screens I’d seen, but the Blade 18 makes it look dull by comparison.
Photograph: Eric Ravenscraft
But what sets it apart is the 300-Hz refresh rate. At their best, most gaming laptops only support 240 Hz, which is plenty for most games, but for fast-paced titles like Overwatch 2, you want all the frames you can get, and the Blade 18 is one of the few laptops I’ve tested that can crank out that many reliably.
Maintaining such a high frame rate is going to be a drain on the battery, but Razer’s Synapse software has an option to automatically switch the display to 60 Hz when on battery power. This dramatically cuts down on how many frames your games have to render, conserving power, but will lead to less smooth gameplay. You can also press Fn+R to cycle between 60 Hz, 240 Hz, and 300 Hz while connected to a charger.
Synapse also has a color profile selector that lets you swap between DCI-P3, Adobe RGB, Rec.709, and other profiles to get precise, accurate colors. This is especially helpful for gamers who are also designers and photo or video editors—where color accuracy is incredibly vital to their workflow.
Powerful Performance
A great display doesn’t matter much if you don’t have the horsepower to back it up, but fortunately, the Razer Blade 18 rises to the task. The model I tested comes equipped with the GeForce RTX 4090 (you can also choose between the RTX 4070 or 4080), and it tore through most games. Starfield, a notably less-than-optimized game, was getting 60-plus frames per second in crowded areas like New Atlantis on Ultra graphics settings, and maintaining 80 to 90 fps on Medium.
Overwatch 2 is what blew me away, though. On Medium graphics settings, I maintained a full 300 fps (while the laptop was connected to power). This is a game where I’m constantly flying across the map in seconds, whipping out my pistol to land headshots on an enemy that wasn’t in my view a third of a second ago, before rushing back to heal my teammates. Three hundred frames per second is exactly what I need, and the Razer Blade 18 has the display and the power to give it to me.
The Eureka E10 is fairly affordable in the face of other robot mop-vacs; our recommendation for an affordable option is $800, while the E10 is $600. You might think to yourself, why buy a more expensive model then?Why spend more if I don’t have to?
The Eureka is a little dumb. It bumps into so many things you’d think it’s wearing a blindfold, and if I move the vacuum around too much–like flipping it over to cut the hair on the brush, or my toddler gets curious and pushes it around–it will forget where it is and wipe my home map from its memory. It’s adorably dumb when it can’t figure out how to get around my husband’s office chair, and infuriatingly dumb when it gets itself stuck on the same patch of rug-to-carpet transition five times in a row.
It’s not a bad vacuum. If you can find it on sale and mostly want it for carpet cleaning, you’ll likely be satisfied. I was plenty happy with how it vacuumed my carpet. But the mopping and built-in smarts left something to be desired.
B-Level Cleaning
The E10 is just a B student trying to survive out here in the world, at least when it comes to vacuuming my carpet.
I was pretty happy with the E10’s vacuuming. It left the satisfying vacuum lines and fluffy carpet behind that screamed “freshly cleaned!” But it wasn’t great at getting all the cat litter off the floor, and it tended to pool a little bit of litter underneath itself when it returned to base. Still, the vacuuming experience wasn’t much different than I got with the much more expensive Dreame X30 Ultra (7/10, WIRED Review), and the E10 was much, much quieter than the Dreame while it zipped around my home.
Photography: Nena Farrell
The difference is in the mopping job. Most robot vacuum-mops today have rotating scrubbers or refillable water tanks or self-cleaning tools. Not the E10, which has the same system as robot mops of yore where you pour water into a canteen in the vacuum that’s above the single mop pad. Then the vacuum drags the lightly damp pad around your house to mop your home.
After the Among Us collaboration DLC, I had no real idea what to expect from Vampire Survivors(Free) for its next potential DLC. I assumed that was a sign that we’d just see popular indies like maybe Risk of Rain, but never in a million years did I think we’d see Vampire Survivors collaborate with Contra. Can you imagine telling someone Vampire Survivors has a collaboration with a Konami IP, but it isn’t Castlevania? I sure wouldn’t have believed you back then. Today, the Vampire Survivors Operation Guns DLC is launching worldwide for iOS, Android, Switch, Xbox, and PC platforms. I’ve been playing it for review on all non mobile platforms since the mobile DLC isn’t up yet. Alongside my review for the Vampire Survivors Operation Guns DLC, I’ve also covered a bit of how the account and cross save system currently works in beta.
If you’ve not played Vampire Survivors since it launched, you’ve missed out on a lot through free updates and paid DLC releases. Read my co-op impressions of the Steam version here, 1.0 launch review here, Legacy of the Moonspell DLC review here, Tides of the Foscari DLC review here, and Emergency Meeting DLC review here. It was already a superb experience, but each update and DLC only enhanced things. So how does the Vampire Survivors Operation Guns DLC feel for a Contra fan, newcomer, and someone who just wants more Vampire Survivors? I’m going to try and cover all that in this review.
On paper, Vampire Survivors Operation Guns brings in 22 new weapons, 11 new characters, a new map, Contra music (including six new tracks), and more. You initially start by just getting access to the new stage (Neo Galuga), which is awesome not only for the Contra theme, but because of its layout in general. What initially starts out as just a nice themed stage ends up quite surprising. I don’t want to spoil things, but I recommend paying attention to the prompts on the map sooner than later when you notice something new. One more thing I love about the stage is how the Contra power-ups have been translated to Vampire Survivors. The team went all out, and this is easily my favorite release involving Contra since probably Contra Hard Corps that I recently got to enjoy on Nintendo Switch Online. I’m not counting the M2 anniversary release of course and I’ve not played Contra 4, but you get the picture.
So the stage looks and feels awesome, but what about the characters and weapons. As usual, you start out with nothing and need to unlock the first new character from the new stage. After you unlock Bill who is the first Vampire Survivors Operation Guns character, you can slowly work your way to getting the rest which have their own requirements usually relating to evolving weapons. Speaking of weapons, I can’t get over how awesome the animations are for the weapons, the particle effects, and interactions with elements of the stages. Vampire Survivors Operation Guns feels like a labor of love throughout, and if you love Contra Hard Corps and the original games, you will adore this DLC.
Whenever I review a DLC pack, I also like covering the current state of the game in question. While pushing for absolute chaos, Vampire Survivors Operation Guns on my Steam Deck OLED never dropped below the high 40s for its frame rate before the 30 minute timer ended. It usually hovered around the high 70s mark. I disabled damage numbers as I usually do when I play, but I did enable them just to see how much I could push the game for this review. I’m impressed with the current state of the game on Steam Deck and Xbox Series X. The Switch version is excellent, but the worst platform to play the game on right now.
If you’re wondering about the mobile version, I had the least progress in that version and the Switch release since I have put so much time into both Xbox and Steam Deck. This brings me to the cross save feature that’s currently in beta. I moved my Steam Deck (LCD) to the beta version of Vampire Survivors and created an account. This process is simple. Once created, I uploaded my progress from Steam Deck to the cloud. I have access to the account (beta) through the beta build on iOS that I used on my iPad. I got my Steam Deck save to my iPad and picked it up right there. I don’t have the Vampire Survivors Operation Guns DLC on iOS yet, but everything else worked fine in the sync. The only complaint I have is auto sync not being possible, but I understand the reasoning for that with how save data is handled in this game. You can read about the poncle account system here.
Coming back to Vampire Survivors Operation Guns, and it is time to cover the music. The new Vampire Survivors arrangements for Contra songs are incredible. I can’t wait for the soundtrack on Steam to get updated so I can transfer these to my phone. Just like with the visuals and weapons in Vampire Survivors Operation Guns, I think the team has gone above and beyond for the music. Other than arrangements, there are also Contra songs from Contra 4 and Contra Hard Corps.
At this point, Vampire Survivors DLC is a lot like Dead Cells DLC where it is hard to not recommend buying any of it. Vampire Survivors Operation Guns, like the Emergency Meeting DLC, is a must-have regardless of whether you are familiar with the source material or not. It enhances the game and made me play a lot of Contra Hard Corps on Nintendo Switch Online today. It is an essential purchase if you like Vampire Survivors given the value and quality.
The counter space in my kitchen is at a premium. It’s valuable real estate, and every square inch matters. So when a new espresso machine arrives at my door, I always have to play a high-stakes game of countertop appliance Tetris to figure out how everything will fit—or who needs to get banished into a cupboard. When the De’Longhi Specialista Arte Evo rolled into my kitchen, I was ready to make tough decisions.
From the box’s size, I was sure the rice cooker or the food processor would have to be exiled. When I got the De’Longhi out of its box, though, my appliances breathed a sigh of relief. This is a svelte espresso machine, and it fits perfectly without sending any of my favorite appliances to a pantry gulag. Things were off to a good start, and it only got better—mostly.
Slim and Consistent
The first couple of shots I pull out of any espresso machine will usually require some finagling. When an espresso machine has an internal burr grinder, that’s just one other thing I have to dial in from scratch. By the second shot, I was happy with what I was getting out of the Specialista.
The espresso poured into the cup in two streams of luxurious caramel-gold liquid, the crema gathering on top in an even layer. I changed the settings and pulled more tester shots to see how it performed with different grind consistencies and amounts for testing purposes, but by that second shot, I knew I’d found the sweet spot.
Photograph: Jaina Grey
Something I always like about De’Longhi espresso machines is the knobs. A lot of different models from the company up and down the price spectrum have really good knobs. The ones here are a joy to use. They’re raised from the surface of the control panel, and the outward face has the signature concentric circles of machined steel; the sides are adorned with textured metal accents. One controls the amount of coffee to grind, and the other toggles between brewing modes.
When you turn the grind knob, there’s a little resistance, just enough to feel like you have very fine control. The mode knob has a satisfying click when you switch from one mode to another. How much you enjoy using a device is important, and these little details make the Specialista Arte Evo feel good to use.
The Specialista Arte Evo comes in at a delightfully narrow 11.2 inches, sparing quite a bit of my counter space—especially since this is taking the place of two appliances, an espresso machine and a coffee grinder. There are smaller espresso machines—the new KitchenAid Semi-Automatic Espresso Machine is about as narrow as the Specialista—but most that have a built-in grinder are a little wider.
Photograph: Jaina Grey
Some Assembly Required
The Specialista’s built-in conical burr grinder can grind coffee fine enough for espresso and coarse enough for drip or other brewing methods, so it’s capable of replacing a stand-alone grinder. There is one little quirk, though. The portafilter can’t slot into place underneath the grinder unless you attach the “grinding and tamping guide.” This component is a short cylinder of plastic that locks onto the portafilter to guide the grounds directly into the basket and help direct the tamp down onto the grounds.
It’s weird. The guide doesn’t feel as high-quality as other parts of the Specialista, almost like a cheap 3D-printed plastic. If you try to slot the portafilter underneath the grinder without the guide, you have to hold it there the whole time, and the grinder will likely spill some grounds into the drip tray. It feels like the grinding and tamping guide was added as a fix to the issue of the grounds spilling out.
The Xiaomi Watch S3 is an affordable smartwatch with a highly customizable look that includes swappable bezels. It can track your health, fitness, and sleep, bring phone notifications to your wrist, and last several days between charges. The downside? It runs Xiaomi’s software, which feels a bit basic, and you can forget about third-party apps.
Closing in on a month with the Xiaomi Watch S3, I’m impressed by its tracking capabilities, considering the relatively low price, and the changeable bezels are a neat idea. But I’m also fine with saying goodbye to it. The Watch S3 has too many limitations for me, but it’s important to remember that this device is less than half the price of the most affordable option in our best smartwatches guide.
Before we dig in, it’s worth noting that there is a global version of the Xiaomi Watch S3, but it’s not sold in the US, there’s no official US support, and certain features (like NFC for payments) vary by region.
Smartwatch Chameleon
Photograph: Simon Hill
For folks who like to match their watch with their outfit, the Xiaomi Watch S3 has a unique trick up its sleeve in the shape of interchangeable bezels. Changing the strap on a watch can be impactful, but being able to change both the strap and bezel almost makes it look like a completely different device.
The Watch S3 has quite a chunky 47-mm aluminum case with angled lugs and two buttons on the right. A stainless steel bezel sits on top of the screen, and you can rotate it to remove and replace it with a different bezel. It’s easy once you get the hang, and there’s a wee marker on the inside to help you align. The bezels slot into place securely, and I never worried about them coming loose.
Attach a new bezel and the Watch S3 suggests a matching watch face. It’s a neat trick. There are more than 100 watch faces in every conceivable style, and you can even create your own. Changing the strap is also straightforward, so you can quickly change your look. My favorite of the straps and bezels Xiaomi sent was the classy green and black combo. You get one black or silver bezel with a matching fluororubber strap with the Watch S3, and alternatives must be purchased separately.
The 1.43-inch AMOLED screen has a layer of protective Corning glass. The display is roomy and crisp, but the relatively low peak brightness of 600 nits (a luminance measurement) meant it was sometimes hard to read in direct sunlight. The Watch S3 is also 5ATM rated for water resistance, meaning you can swim with it.
Photograph: Simon Hill
Streamlined for Stamina
The Xiaomi Watch S3 focuses on the basics with call and notification alerts from your phone; health, fitness, and sleep tracking; and a handful of utilities like a voice recorder, camera shutter control, and compass. It runs HyperOS, so there are no third-party apps like you will find on a Google Wear OS smartwatch.
Navigating around the Watch S3 is slick and lag-free. HyperOS is not the most attractive software and lacks a cohesive design, with a mix of dull and garish icons. But it mostly worked well, aside from the odd missed notification from my phone. It connects via Bluetooth 5.2, and you can use it with any phone running Android 8 or iOS 12 or later. I tested with the Xiaomi 14 Ultra.
When Sony entered the over-the-counter hearing aid market two years ago, it did so with a pair of products: the CRE-C10 and the more expensive CRE-E10. I was dazzled by the minuscule C10—it’s still one of the hearing aid options I recommend the most—and assumed the E10 would be even more impressive. Now that I’ve finally landed a pair of E10 aids to test, I can assure you that the E10 isn’t so much an upgrade to the C10 as it is a wholly different class of product with its own pros and cons.
While both the C10 and E10 rely on an in-ear earbud-like design conceit, their general approach is considerably different. While the 1-gram C10 fits nearly entirely inside the ear, invisible enough to require a small retrieval wire to remove it, the 2.94-gram E10 is much more bulbous and visible. It looks more like a standard Bluetooth earbud than any other hearing aid I’ve tested, filling the concha with its rounded body. Since, as the old saying goes, all concha are not created equal, your comfort level while wearing these hearing aids may vary considerably. In my ears, the fit was snug but not tight—comfortable for wearing for a few hours but not all day. Sony provides just four pairs of eartips you can experiment with to help improve the fit.
Photograph: Sony
The other big difference between the C10 and E10 is that while the C10 uses replaceable hearing aid batteries, the E10 features a more common rechargeable battery. The extra size of the device lets the E10 work for up to 26 hours (without streaming). The USB-C connectible and Qi-compatible charger provides enough juice for an additional two to three recharges.
Despite their larger size, the CRE-E10 aids do not feature any external controls, which is understandable because controls would be hard to access based on the way the aids sit in the ear. Instead, all controls are situated in Sony’s Hearing Control app (Android, iOS). This is the same app used for the CRE-C10, so I already had it installed, but I ran into immediate problems because the old aids were still registered to the app.
Photograph: Sony
To set up new aids, you have to remove the old ones from the app. To do that, Hearing Control requires you to enter a code sent to your registered email address. Naturally, I never received the code, so I couldn’t install the new set of aids. Eventually, Sony tech support instructed me to delete the app altogether and set it up again with a different email address—perhaps not the most elegant solution, but it worked to get me up and running.
Twenty years ago, Park Chan-wook’s revenge thriller Oldboy turned him into a worldwide star, setting off a new wave of Korean neo-noirs and helping break down barriers for international cinema. The movie’s memorable, irresistible hook: After a drunken bender, Korean businessman Oh Dae-su wakes up in a small, dilapidated hotel room, where he’s been imprisoned by unknown parties. As months pass with no contact from the outside apart from anonymous food deliveries, he begins to unravel, numbed by isolation and helplessness.
Watching Hulu’s mesmerizing documentary The Contestant, it’s hard to believe Park and Oldboy manga writer Garon Tsuchiya didn’t take some inspiration from its subject, Nasubi. Starting in 1998, Nasubi spent more than a year naked, starving, and cut off from the world in a similarly small suite as part of a Japanese game show, utterly unaware that he was eventually being watched by 17 million gawking fans. His real-world story was considerably less gory than Oldboy, but it’s even more startling, given its big, surprising twists — and given how complicit Nasubi was in his own captivity and worldwide exploitation.
Clair Titley’s documentary starts with a brief overview of the game show, Susunu! Denpa Shōnen, and the environment that enabled it. In an era where reality TV was just starting to take off, Susunu! Denpa Shōnen specialized in luring participants into performing elaborate, dangerous stunts in the hopes of furthering their entertainment careers. A quick montage of footage from the show blitzes across a few of the show’s other most notorious moments, including an intercontinental hitchhiking trip that hospitalized one participant, and a stunt where two comedians were given a swan-shaped pedal boat and told to pedal from India to Indonesia.
But by far, the show’s most notorious project was “A Life in Prizes,” a segment where a would-be comedian was placed in a room, naked, with nothing but a rack of magazines and a pile of postcards, and ordered to live entirely off whatever he could win by entering magazine sweepstakes.
Producer Toshio Tsuchiya told Denpa Shōnen contestant Nasubi (born Hamatsu Tomoaki — the unusual shape of his face inspired his stage name, “Eggplant”) that he’d live in a room with one tripod-mounted camera, which he’d use to videotape short daily check-ins as he entered sweepstakes and slowly amassed 1 million yen worth of prizes. After the project finished, Toshio explained, the show would edit Nasubi’s footage and release it.
Instead, Toshio kept secret cameras in Nasubi’s room running 24 hours a day. Initially, the show’s producers edited the footage down into short segments for the show. Once millions of fans became obsessed with Nasubi, though, detractors denounced him as an actor faking the entire stunt. So Toshio began to livestream the cameras from Nasubi’s room, employing an around-the-clock staff to monitor the feed and hand-operate the mobile video effect that obscured Nasubi’s genitals with a CG eggplant.
The footage Titley assembles from Denpa Shōnen feels remarkably like a manically narrated version of Bo Burnham: Inside, with Nasubi’s naked dancing replacing the musical interludes. Hoping for a TV comedy career once the show actually aired, Nasubi played to his camera during the window where he knew it was on. He performs celebratory rituals whenever he wins a prize, pulls silly faces and tries out silly voices, and generally clowns for an imaginary audience. The goofy antics and the ridiculous extremes of the whole experiment edge toward making The Contestant feel comic and weightless, a light entertainment like so many other reality-TV gimmick shows.
Image: Hulu/Everett Collection
The hidden cameras tell another story. As months stretch by, Nasubi tries to survive with no source of nutrition but sparse, random prizes like fruit drinks and dog food. He grows increasingly gaunt and bony. He suffers bouts of lassitude, depression, confusion, and what seems like mania. And Toshio just keeps rolling.
Twenty-five years after the incredibly discomfiting end of the “Life in Prizes” experiment, Titley brought Nasubi and Toshio in for studio interviews to discuss their memories of this international exercise in voyeurism. Nasubi is calm and philosophical about his ordeal, explaining why he didn’t just walk away from the experiment when he began deteriorating, and taking a clear-eyed look at what it did to him mentally. Toshio, meanwhile, remains politely apologetic about how sadistically he pushed Nasubi to continue on the show, but offers few explanations or insights into his behind the scenes decisions. The movie is likely to leave viewers with more questions about the story than they went in with.
Part of that comes from Titley’s refusal to editorialize, or to shape the story in a way that suggests a larger context. It’s easy to take it as a frightening story about what people are willing to endure (or make other people endure) in exchange for fame or profit. And given how famous Nasubi became both inside and outside of Japan, it’s similarly easy to take “A Life in Prizes” as a milestone event in the growth of reality TV, and the fascination with watching people harm themselves on camera to entertain others. (Jackass started airing the year after “A Life in Prizes” ended. So did Survivor. Fear Factor came the year after that.)
But it’s just as easy to see as “A Life in Prizes” as a companion piece to the Stanford Prison Experiment, an example of how easily power can lure ordinary people into cruelty and abuse, and how easy it is to become obedient and accepting in the hands of power, and to accept even a ruinous status quo. As Nasubi points out in an interview with Titley, the door to his tiny apartment wasn’t locked, and he could have left at any time. Past a certain point, he says, he didn’t have the will to resist.
Image: Hulu/Everett Collection
The Contestant doesn’t draw out any of these larger ideas, and Titley’s handling of her subjects seems gentle and cautious rather than probing. There are a lot of unsettling revelations in The Contestant, including that Toshio encouraged Nasubi to keep a journal about his day-to-day life — which was then taken away and published, without Nasubi’s knowledge. (It became a four-volume national bestseller.) But the film doesn’t explore how that happened, or question the ethics behind it: It just notes the publication of Nasubi’s diary as a data point in establishing the scope of his fame in Japan.
It might be considered admirable how firmly Titley sticks to the facts, rather than trying to draw out a moral from the entire situation. But it leaves the story feeling more like a quirky, isolated human-interest story than a watershed moment in the development of exploitative, stunt-driven reality television. It plays like a feature-length version of the “Here’s a wacky story from Japan…” news items that Titley excerpts at the beginning of the film, more a curiosity than a bigger discussion-starter. And when Nasubi enters his post-Denpa Shōnen life and embarks on a radical personal project, the film morphs into something more like a slick, inspirational feel-good story. It’s certainly a relief to see Nasubi healthy and happy after the early going, but there’s a constant sense of a film skating across the surface of a remarkable story, rather than exploring its depths.
None of which makes The Contestant any less of a compelling watch. We seem to have moved past the peak of grim cautionary documentaries focused on the seemingly endless environmental, technological, and societal apocalypses looming in the near future, maybe because they’d piled up in such numbing profusion that audiences were turning away. In spite of the guilty voyeuristic lure of a naked guy who doesn’t know he’s being filmed, the “Wow, this guy’s so wacky!” framing of Toshio’s game show, and the big, bright uplift of the ending, this movie is as frightening as any of the doomsaying docs of the last few decades.
Founded in 2018, Orka Labs feels like a bigger and more established hearing aid company than it is, with polished hardware that’s now on its second edition.
The Orka Two is something of a hybrid between prescription and over-the-counter hearing aids. The devices are registered as prescription-class aids but are sold online as OTC products. Professional medical consultations and adjustments are available (and included in the price) but are not required if you decide to go it alone.
The hardware is traditional in form, a behind-the-ear model with receivers that snake into the ear canal via flexible wires. But while they are a bit oversized in comparison to similar designs (and rather heavy at 3.8 grams each), they are distinguished by their glossy AirPod-white color and curvy, teardrop design. The units carry no physical controls, which further improves their sleekness. For behind-the-ear hearing aids, these look about as good as you could expect—and much better than the usual industrial-gray aids that are now so commonplace.
As with most over-ear aids, I found the units a little clumsy to fit and in need of significant fidgeting to situate them properly in my ears. The usual collection of open and closed tips is included in the box. While I normally find that medium-sized tips fit perfectly for me, I found all but the smallest uncomfortably large.
Photograph: Orka
In keeping with its hybrid design, Orka offers two ways to configure the units. There’s a capable hearing test built into the app, which can be used to quickly make the appropriate settings. Alternatively, if you have a professional audiogram, you can snap a photo and upload it through the app. Then Orka’s in-house audiologists will tune your aids accordingly (in one business day). Any adjustments can be made by emailing or calling Orka for tweaks, though the company notes its “remote consultation” feature, where you can schedule an appointment directly through the app, is currently being revamped and is offline.
Orka’s app is straightforward to the point of being idiot-proof, with two primary operating modes. “Normal” is the low-environmental-noise mode that relies on the settings made via your audiogram or in situ hearing test, while “In Noise” is, well, self-explanatory. Here, Orka gets more aggressive with settings, using an AI algorithm to adjust its settings dynamically in response to your environment. A beam-shaping option in the In Noise mode lets you target your hearing on a single person or on “everyone.” Volume can be adjusted universally or individually for each ear.
As noted earlier, there are no physical controls on the units. Unusually, hardware controls are found on the charging case (which is good for about three charges). Here you’ll find a program button that cycles through the two operational modes and another pair of buttons for adjusting volume. Pay close attention: Volume up is paradoxically the button on the left and volume down is on the right. Despite the reversal, I ultimately found the case-mounted buttons a lot more convenient than fumbling behind my ears to find the right buttons. For users with mobility impairments, this could be a game changer.
I now have a moisture sensor in my garden bed that tells me how dry my soil is, which is an awesome way to know I need to turn on my remote sprinklers while on vacation. An air quality monitor inside my workspace tells me temperature and humidity (important to monitor for some of my acoustic guitars), and another monitor really made me open the window when cooking indoors. All of these things are trivially combined by the system and displayed alongside my other metrics on the Ambient Weather dashboard. It’s the easiest thing to set up ever.
Ambient Weather recently added a better digital display that you can buy aftermarket. As I said, the one that comes with the unit is a bit retro-chic, requiring you to use physical buttons to input logins and passwords, and with only a few selectable layouts. The new Weather Window, as the brand calls it, is much larger and more modern-feeling, and it does include touchscreen controls and variable layouts, but it’s still not as fantastic as it could be.
Photograph: Parker Hall
I wish there was a way to show the weekly weather forecast on the main screen, instead of having to tap the display to see that, among other UI niggles. I do like that the Weather Window comes with a frame-like edge, which makes placing it where you might place a family photo, or hanging it on the wall, particularly easy.
By the Numbers
Most of us don’t need such minutiae in our lives, and that’s fine. For the person who wakes up and plans their whole day based on the temperature and precipitation, or who constantly checks weather radar and talks about it, the Ambient Weather system is the closest we will come to reaching nirvana on Earth.
That might not be you, but it is almost certainly someone you know. I love being away from home and knowing how wet the soil in my garden is, that my house temp and humidity are correct. I like seeing when the sun and moon are going to rise and set at a glance, and knowing how many inches of rain, at a spot above my head, we have gotten in rainy north Portland. Every time my dad and I get together, if we’re not talking about Formula One or the local soccer team’s current woes, we’re talking about what our stations are telling us.
If learning the micro-trends of your yard and chatting, meaningfully, about the weather to friends, relatives, and strangers is your kind of thing, then an Ambient Weather system, really any of them, is probably a fun thing for you to check out. You might even find it useful.
At the R1’s launch event in New York City, Lyu demoed an example of having the R1 look at a paper with a printed spreadsheet on it. He asked the R1 to swap two columns, and then send the result to his email. I didn’t have a spreadsheet on paper, but I did have an auto-inspection report that I wanted to send to my email. I asked the R1 and … it said it didn’t have my email address. (I set up my Rabbit account with my email information.) I asked the company about this, and I was told the R1 didn’t support documents other than spreadsheets yet. Great. So I printed a spreadsheet, asked it to swap two columns, and sent it via email, and it sort of did this. It swapped the two columns, but for some reason, it didn’t include several other columns that were on the paper.
I picked up my copy of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun and asked the R1 whether it could look at it and tell me what it’s about. The R1 instead just described the cover and said it’s “likely” a work of fiction. If it could read out the name, why couldn’t it research it at the same time and give me a synopsis? Even the Humane Ai Pin could do this.
You can also have the R1 take notes, and edit these notes in the Rabbithole, but there’s no reminder functionality. I also find it annoying that the Rabbithole keeps logging me out after some time, so whenever I want to check a note, I might have to log in first. There are also voice recordings, and the R1 plays a nice tape recorder animation when it’s working. Too bad the recording itself is low-quality and muffled. It does summarize the contents of the recording though, and you can download the WAV file.
The translation capabilities, much like the Humane Ai Pin, are good. Just ask it to translate a specific language, and you can now have a back-and-forth conversation. The R1 will automatically change the translation language, so when I speak English, it changes it to Spanish. When the person across from me speaks Spanish, it swaps to English.
Hop to It
You know what else does all of this stuff pretty well? Smartphones! This is also the question I receive repeatedly whenever I show someone the R1. “Why can’t it just be an app?”
I posed this question to David Widder, a postdoctoral fellow at Cornell Tech studying open source artificial intelligence. “Hardware is cool—there’s increasing frustration from app developers on having to give so much money to Apple and Google. I think there’s a little bit of, ‘We want to do our own thing and not be beholden to them.’”
That’s fair, but the R1 is just not ready yet. I considered skipping this review and writing a more experiential story, but this is a product anyone can buy right now. A company is charging you $200 to be its beta tester, and while Rabbit has a roadmap of features and services—including a Teach Mode that lets you train the R1 to do specific tasks—I don’t see a reason to buy it now. Revisit it when it’s more feature-rich and genuinely useful, and buy it then if you want.
At the very least, I haven’t had the battery issues plaguing other reviewers. The R1 recharged quickly for me and doesn’t deplete juice too fast in standby mode. When you do use it, the battery drops fairly quickly though.
In the end, the biggest issue boils down to the fact that I now have to carry two devices. I’m WIRED’s resident smartphone reviewer and I hate carrying two phones—it’s why I always put my personal SIM into each new device I test. Over this past week, I forced myself to use the R1 but often ended up using my phone instead. (Weirdly, the Humane Ai Pin was better in this regard, as it is wearable and I don’t have to carry it in a pocket or hold it.)
Rabbit was clear in saying that the R1 will not replace your phone, but if I can do all of the same tasks and so much more on my smartphone (Google’s Gemini has given me identical if not better results than the R1), I have no reason to use it. At least it looks pretty. I’ll add it to my growing collection of AI-powered paperweights.
Fujifilm’s New Instax Mini 99 is an Instax camera for those who love manual controls and creative effects. It’s not the sharpest Instax I’ve tested—that remains the Mini Evo—but it might be the most analog and the most capable.
The $200 price tag is well above the entry-level point-and-shoot Instax cameras, but here you get exposure and shutter control, a swatch of color effects, and even the ability to simulate light leaks, like the ones you get with those thrift store cameras collecting dust on your shelf.
Manual Power
Except for the colorful and bubbly entry-level cameras, Fujifilm’s Instax design usually tends toward a retro-camera vibe, which holds true for the Mini 99. The 99 is all-black instead of the silver and black found in the Mini 90, but otherwise bears more than a passing resemblance to the older model. Fujifilm hasn’t officially said the 99 replaces the 90, but they feel close enough to each other that I’d be surprised if the Mini 90 continues for long.
Photograph: Scott Gilbertson
The lens of the Mini 99 is the same as the Mini 90. It’s a 60-mm lens made of plastic. It works out to roughly the same field of view as a 35-mm lens in 35-mm format (or if you prefer, somewhere between 1x and 2x on your iPhone). The shutter is fixed at f/12.7, which means you’ll be relying on the flash in all but bright, sunny, outdoor shots. That said, unlike quite a few other Instax models, with the Mini 99 you can turn off the flash for those well-lit shots.
Perhaps the most interesting part of the Mini 99, and something new for the Instax line, are the manual focus options. The Mini 99 does not have true manual focus where you turn a dial on the lens to get precise focus. Instead there are three zones of focus: close up (0.3 to 0.6 meters), midrange (0.6 to 3 meters), and infinity (3 meters to infinity). For those not metric-savvy, that works out to 1 to 2 feet, 2 to 10 feet, and 10 feet to infinity. While that’s not as precise as a true manual focus camera, it’s more control than you typically get with Instax.
I find the manual focus to be a little inconsistent—or rather, the results were less dramatic than I expected. Keep in mind that the aperture is f/12.7, which means the plane of focus will be pretty wide, even with the focus zone controls. The Mini 99 is capable of bokeh (the name for out-of-focus regions in a photo), but only in very specific situations like a portrait, and even then you have to use the closest focus, which means your subject’s face will mostly fill the frame anyway. That said, being able to play with focus at all is a step up from most Instax cameras, where focus is fixed, and the 1-foot close focus distance of the Mini 99 is nice for macro-style shots. Unlike some Instax cameras, there is parallax correction in the viewfinder so that what you see in the frame is very close to what you get.
Jessica Murdoch (Hayley Erin) is on the run. She thinks she’s accused of murder, but she’s actually wanted for something much, much worse.
So begins New Life, the debut feature film from director John Rosman. New Life features two intense leads and a harrowing chase through a brooding rural landscape—and the film’s high points mostly balance out a story with a few too many plot holes.
The film opens on Jess, her face splattered with blood, hurrying home to collect a few things before she begins a frantic trek to the Canadian border. At first, we know absolutely nothing about Jess’s predicament. We do know that a mysterious organization is out to get her, and that organization has sent its fixer Elsa (Sonya Walger) to bring her in. However, Elsa has her own secrets, and she’s forced to come to terms with a life-changing situation as she closes in on her target.
On the surface, New Life is a tense and creepy thriller. The trailer hints at what’s actually going on with Jessica—hazmat suits, a stray dog, and a few quick glimpses of body horror indicate that she’s spreading something truly nasty. The big reveal is pretty conventional, but the film does some interesting things with it, playing with the agony of lingering self-awareness amidst terrifying bodily transformations. The makeup is superb, and the over-the-top practical effects got at least one gasp out of me.
The main problem is that the plot hinges on highly trained professionals making bafflingly bad decisions, and once the lights come up and the story’s momentum wears off, you’ll start asking questions that don’t really have answers. For instance, the trailer shows a lightning-fast shot of Jess trapped in a dark, filthy prison cell. Why is she in there? You’ll never guess, because the answer doesn’t actually make any sense. Other movies manage to invoke the terror of unchecked disease while keeping their plots believable, and it’s a shame that New Life overcomplicates things.
What mostly saves New Life, though, is Elsa’s story. When we first see her, she’s limping, but she brushes it off. However, it turns out that Elsa has been diagnosed with the degenerative disease ALS. Another character warns her that she’ll go through all the stages of grief as the disease progresses, and we those stages play out during the film. Elsa’s grief and fear over her own body’s changes is an obvious parallel to the catastrophe she’s trying to prevent by capturing Jess, and it gives the story an emotional anchor. Jess’s character never gets the depth she deserves, but Elsa is a relatable and sympathetic heroine.
Body horror doesn’t come out of nowhere. It’s rooted in primordial fears of everything from aging to terminal illness. The unexpected connection between Jess and Elsa touches on those fears, but it’s a shame New Life devotes much of its runtime to their cat-and-mouse chase. Eventually, Elsa and Jess get the confrontation the film spends two acts setting up, and it made me wish that the film had focused more on that connection and less on the convoluted circumstances that got the two women there.
New Life is now playing in theaters and on VOD.
(featured image: Brainstorm Media)
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Network amplifiers are springing up everywhere these days, and why shouldn’t they be? A single device that facilitates everything from your favorite streaming services to TV content over HDMI ARC is fantastically convenient and shouldn’t be reserved for A/V receivers or powered speakers. For listeners after a versatile, high-quality stereo experience, it can make a lot of sense to get everything you need in one refined device.
With a wide field of available options, choosing a heritage audio brand like Rotel also seems to make good sense if you have the cash, and Rotel’s newish RAS-5000 is well stocked for the task. After testing the amplifier for several weeks, I’m happy to report the sound quality is as excellent as you’d expect. Its Hulkish frame provides a similarly Hulkish punch for clear and dynamic sound, muscular bass, and enough wattage to get the most out of high-end speaker pairings.
The RAS-5000 is a capable workhorse with plenty of playback options, but some of the tech is clunkier than I’d expect at this price. Options like Technics’ SU-GX70 (8/10, WIRED Recommends) provide a better user experience for less, with a much handier app. Still, the Rotel has all the tools, and its mix of tactful clarity and brute-force power is formidable. For those with speakers that crave serious power, this amp has plenty to spare.
A Big Ol’ Block
The RAS-5000 arrives in a very large box because it is a very large amplifier. Standing nearly 6 inches tall and 17 inches deep, it easily dwarfs my pint-sized Naim Uniti Atom (8/10, WIRED Recommends) reference amp, and its weight of almost 35 pounds officially requires back support for setup. The overall vibe leans industrial but its rounded edges and shimmering metallic finish add a touch of elegance.
The aesthetic is similar to predecessors like the Rotel RA-1572 MKII, save for the big color screen at the block’s center, which adds a lot of personality. The screen lacks touch controls, a complaint I raised about the Naim Uniti Atom HE headphone amplifier (8/10, WIRED Recommends), but it’s less of an issue here since the RAS-5000 sits on a console, not a desk, and there aren’t that many settings to adjust anyway (more on that later).
Photograph: Ryan Waniata
I like the trend toward flashy screens for previewing album artwork, but the audio nerd in me is more enamored with the Rotel’s constant sampling and bitrate display for everything you play. It’s all the more handy since the RAS-5000’s ESS DAC supports hi-res audio files up to 384-kHz/24-bit when connected to a PC over USB-B with “any supported format by the PC Software.”
How high you fly depends mostly on the source—audio resolution is limited to 192-kHz/24-bit over optical/coaxial input, while Airplay 2 tops out at 48 kHz/24 bit. The system also supports streaming over Chromecast, Spotify Connect, Tidal Connect, and Roon’s high-resolution music management software for those looking to build an accessible hi-res library.
The RAS-5000’s monstrous enclosure leaves room for a similarly monstrous custom toroidal transformer, which will dramatically dim your lights when you fire it up. The hefty powerplant feeds an A/B amplification system that delivers up to 140 watts per channel at 8 ohms and 220 watts per channel at 4 ohms. That should be enough to suitably power virtually any high-end speaker pairing you’ve got (within reason).
Several years ago, a blurb in a food magazine caught my eye. In it, a chef recommended a unique-looking Japanese chef’s knife with giant dimples on only one side of the blade, designed to keep food from sticking to it. Knives with little dimples are common, but these were enormous, and it made me wonder if the manufacturer was on to something. That knife turned out to be as interesting as it looked. While it appears to be specialized equipment, it can help any level of home cook. Whether you are looking for your first nice chef’s knife or your forever blade, this Japanese gyuto fits the bill.
You may have seen dimples (aka hollows or “kullens”) on other knives and wondered whether they kept food from sticking to them, but on Glestain’s blades they are supersized, and they work. The Glestain’s dimples—two rows of them on the gyuto, no less—are extreme, like a neat double row of thumbprints on only one side of the blade. Lefties like me order theirs with the dimples on the left side and righties get them on the right. Lefties can use the right-handed version (and vice versa) and still love it; all they’d lose is the non-stick effect of the dimples. I was excited to put it to an extended-use test.
Hard and Durable
A gyuto is a type of chef’s knife that has a shape in between the curvy belly of a German chef’s knife and the near-flat cutting edge of the French style. There are two versions of Glestain’s gyutos, Professional and Home. I tested both and found them both to be pro-level equipment. The major differences are that the Professional has both a larger tang (the metal part that passes through the handle) and a metal plate on the butt of the knife. That makes it notably heavier–it feels a bit like a tank. Most home cooks and line cooks will prefer the Home version for everyday use.
Both versions feature a hard steel blade—59 on the Rockwell hardness scale—in a mix that includes chromium, carbon, molybdenum, and vanadium. That combination creates a hard, thin, and durable blade that resists rust and holds a mean edge. (For more knife nerdery, check out Chad Ward’s excellent reference, An Edge in the Kitchen.) The Glestains are Japanese-made Western-style knives, high-end Japanese blades with a handles like you’d find on a traditional French or German knives. It’s quite comfortable and evenly balanced and will keep you happy as you plow through piles of produce.
Photograph: Michael Calore
Really, though, we’re here for those dimples. It’s a “regular” knife, so there’s no special flick of the wrist to take advantage of them. It just took a minute to understand what to expect and how effectively they functioned.
The dimples are quite deep and much wider than on other knives. I own an old Mundial-brand slicer, and the Glestain’s dimples are much deeper and easily three times as wide. The real magic happens when what you’re cutting is wider than the dimples.
I got chopping, really happily so. Dimples or not, it’s a beautiful knife to work with. Dicing onions felt like I was doing it with a supremely nice blade, not a magic one. For those used to the curvy belly of a German-style chef’s knife, the flatter arc of the gyuto takes some getting used to. I cooked Moroccan chicken stew from Vishwesh Bhatt’s cookbook, I Am From Here, a favorite from 2022. It featured chopped dried figs, which did not stick too much. I loved the crunch-crunch-crunch feeling of chopping toasted pecans.
Pulling out the new Ottolenghi Test Kitchen: Extra Good Things cookbook, I made a daikon version of its kohlrabi tonnato recipe. The daikon was about two inches across. I started out by making quarter-inch-thick slices with both the Glestain and my santoku, a more vegetable-focused Japanese knife. The slices lay down neatly next to the Glestain, but when I switched to the santoku, they stuck to it as they would to almost any other knife. I had similar results when I quartered and sliced the daikon.
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