'Student actors mimicking sex'

'I no longer feel this trophy belongs on my shelf'

'Coalition of countries'

'Significant recognition'

An English football team has replaced the beef patties in the stadium hamburgers with wild British venison, a change that’s proving popular with the fans, and better for the environment. Some forms of cattle ranching produce significant greenhouse gas emissions among food supply chains, while others sequester more carbon than is emitted by the animals. […] The post London Soccer Team Switches Beef Burger for Sustainable Venison to the Fans’ Delight appeared first on Good News Network.

News What to Watch What to Watch and Read This Weekend: When Bryan Fuller Makes a Movie, You Go See It Plus: Volcano Daughters and evil Santas. By Molly Templeton | Published on December 12, 2025 Photo: Lionsgate Comment 0 Share New Share Photo: Lionsgate Yes, it’s The Holiday Season, and never fear—even my Scroogey self can’t resist including one holiday viewing treat in this weekend’s recommendation. I have one holiday tradition, and it’s Finnish. Keep reading, and you’ll see. (Okay, okay, fine, I’m not actually that Scroogey. I do love a Christmas bar. Seriously. And sparkly lights of all denominations.) If you, like me, have a weird case of senioritis with this year—do we not all just want to lie on the ground for a few days at this point?—take heart: The solstice is only ten days away. The light will return. It can’t rain all the time. Get a warm beverage, call your reps, and curl up with a cozy blanket. There’s good stuff to watch, I promise. The Magicians Is Turning 10, Somehow? I recently rewatched the first four episodes of The Magicians, and holy shit did they hold up. There are ways in which they feel entirely Of An Era—the opening party scene being set to MGMT’s “Time to Pretend” is somehow hilarious, and not just because of the on-the-nose nature of the title—but the cast remains outstanding, the relationships precisely written, the setup with Eliza and the Dean tantalizing. The way Eliot says Quentin’s ridiculous name? Perfection. (I still don’t understand why Hale Appleman isn’t a major star.) And yet, somehow, due to the baffling passage of time, it’s been almost exactly ten years since the first episode premiered. It arrived on December 16, 2015—an inauspicious day for a series that went on to run for five years and still ended too soon. I feel like I just wrote my eulogy for its ending, and yet even that was five and a half years ago. I went into this series so skeptical, not least because people kept comparing it to my beloved Buffy, and yet by the time it was over, it was one of my absolute favorites. (Maybe even more so than Buffy, in the end.) Bless you, Sera Gamble and John McNamara, for understanding how to take the source material and make it more and different and bigger and punchier and funnier, and for finding that cast.  The Magicians is streaming on Prime, Tubi, and The CW. Dust Bunny: When Bryan Fuller Makes a Movie, You Go See It While Bryan Fuller just keeps talking about the projects he wants to revisit—Hannibal, Pushing Daisies—he also has new things in the works. Like, for instance, Dust Bunny, a film in which Mads Mikkelsen plays a hit man who is hired by his young neighbor to kill the monster under her bed. One gets the sense that things do not exactly go as planned. Along with Mikkelsen, the film stars an appealing power trio of actors: Sigourney Weaver, David Dastmalchian, and Rebecca Henderson. IndieWire loved the pairing of Mikkelsen and his young co-star, Sophie Sloan, writing, “Mikkelsen, in one of the most tender performances of his career, and Sloan, whose expressive eyes stay impossibly wide for the duration of the film, craft an easy chemistry together, his mordant humor matching hers like a glove.” Sounds like just the thing for a holiday-season outing to the theater, no? “The Coca-Cola Santa is just a hoax”: It’s Rare Exports Season! It’s cold, it’s dark, people are shopping like their lives depend on it… this means it is time. Time to rewatch Rare Exports. The 2010 Finnish horror (sort of) comedy (definitely) went under the radar on initial release, but it has a passionate fanbase, and it often gets shown at indie theaters as a holiday treat. If this happens near you: GO. Look, this movie is less than 90 minutes long and stars the most charming child, who pads himself up with hockey gear in order to avoid being thrashed by a very un-jolly figure he is pretty sure is real. He is not wrong.  There’s a greedy American, a whole lot of naked elves, heart-warming hijinks, and a genuinely surprising ending. (There are also almost no female characters, which still bums me out a little.) Those who’ve watched director Jalmari Helander’s Sisu films will recognize those movies’ star, Jorma Tommila, in a rather different sort of role. (Helander also cast two of his Rare Exports stars in the peculiar Samuel L. Jackson action flick Big Game.) I have never had someone come back to me, after I recommended this movie, and tell me it wasn’t worth their time. If you want to take that as a challenge, go ahead. I mean it as the most sincere recommendation. Listen to the Ghost Girls: The Volcano Daughters If you’re looking for an excellent book from this year’s crop, Reactor’s reviewers (myself included) have a lot of recommendations for you. But reading doesn’t always neatly follow timelines, you know? And lately I find myself thinking a lot about an incredible novel from last year: Gina María Balibrera’s The Volcano Daughters, a novel which made me rethink my entire opinion about historical fiction. It’s never been my thing, I thought. Except maybe it is. Especially when there’s another layer to it. (I’ve loved more than one historical fantasy lately!) The Volcano Daughters is the story of two sisters coming of age in El Salvador—sisters whose childhoods were very different. One grew up with their soon-to-be dictator father; the other is brought to his side to serve as his oracle. Their friends, from their village, were not so lucky. But those girls, the ones who never got to grow up, they narrate this novel, a chorus of ghosts with attitude and wisdom. This book is vivid, rich, layered, mythic, and historical at once, and it’s a debut novel. I am so anxious to see what Balibrera does next! But if you haven’t read this, you’re in for a treat.[end-mark] The post What to Watch and Read This Weekend: When Bryan Fuller Makes a Movie, You Go See It appeared first on Reactor.

News Amazon New Kindle Feature Uses AI to Answer Questions About Books—And Authors Can’t Opt Out The new feature, called Ask this Book, is already drawing controversy and unanswered questions. By Molly Templeton | Published on December 12, 2025 Photo: Tatsuo Yamashita via Wikimedia Commons Comment 0 Share New Share Photo: Tatsuo Yamashita via Wikimedia Commons At present, there are multiple cases in which authors are suing AI companies for scraping their works without payment or permission. While these legal battles have been going on, Amazon has quietly added a new AI feature to its Kindle iOS app—a feature that “lets you ask questions about the book you’re reading and receive spoiler-free answers,” according to an Amazon announcement. The company says the feature, which is called Ask this Book, serves as “your expert reading assistant, instantly answering questions about plot details, character relationships, and thematic elements without disrupting your reading flow.” Publishing industry resource Publishers Lunch noticed Ask this Book earlier this week, and asked Amazon about it. Amazon spokesperson Ale Iraheta told PubLunch, “The feature uses technology, including AI, to provide instant, spoiler-free answers to customers’ questions about what they’re reading. Ask this Book provides short answers based on factual information about the book which are accessible only to readers who have purchased or borrowed the book and are non-shareable and non-copyable.” As PubLunch summed up: “In other words, speaking plainly, it’s an in-book chatbot.” Amazon did not answer PubLunch’s questions about “what rights the company was relying upon to execute the new feature was not answered, nor did they elaborate on the technical details of the service and any protections involved (whether to prevent against hallucinations, or to protect the text from AI training).” Perhaps most alarmingly, the Amazon spokesperson said, “To ensure a consistent reading experience, the feature is always on, and there is no option for authors or publishers to opt titles out.” It also sounds as though authors and publishers were, for the most part, not notified of this feature’s existence. Amazon is already in the news this week for its flawed AI recaps of television shows. After a Fallout recap was “garbage filled with mistakes,” as io9 called it, the company paused the feature. A similar thing happened earlier this year with Amazon’s AI dubs for anime series. As PubLunch says of Ask this Book, “Many rightsholders and creators are likely not to want an in-book chatbot without their specific review and approval (or at all), and we expect that message will be getting delivered to publishers and Amazon loud and clear in the ensuing days. And many people would deem the outputs of generative AI analyzing a particular copyrighted work as the very embodiment of a derivative work (or simply a direct infringement).” Ask this Book is currently only available in the Kindle iOS app in the US, but Amazon says it “will come to Kindle devices and Android OS next year.”[end-mark] The post New Kindle Feature Uses AI to Answer Questions About Books—And Authors Can’t Opt Out appeared first on Reactor.

Sympathy for the Devil II

Has Putin Reached the Exit-Strategy Point for Maduro?

“It’s been a privilege to be able to observe this phenomenon."