'toughen up'

'This Martian meteorite is the largest piece of Mars we have ever found'

'Problems with their own political base'

'They're all so angry and egotistical'

'It's time for this boondoggle to die'

Their reaction told the crowd everything they needed to know

News Assassin’s Creed Netflix’s Assassin’s Creed Series Is Moving Forward We hope the rooftops of history are ready for all this running. By Molly Templeton | Published on July 17, 2025 Screenshot: 20th Century Studios Comment 0 Share New Share Screenshot: 20th Century Studios Five years ago, Netflix and the game developer Ubisoft announced a live-action Assassin’s Creed series. Five years is a long time (especially when one of those years is 2020), and according to Variety, the show “has gone through multiple creative teams in that time.” But at long last, the streamer is “officially moving forward” with Roberto Patino and David Wiener as creators and showrunners. Patino and Weiner said, in a statement quoted by Variety: Every day we work on this show, we come away excited and humbled by the possibilities that Assassin’s Creed opens to us. Beneath the scope, the spectacle, the parkour and the thrills is a baseline for the most essential kind of human story — about people searching for purpose, struggling with questions of identity and destiny and faith. It is about power and violence and sex and greed and vengeance. But more than anything, this is a show about the value of human connection, across cultures, across time. And it’s about what we stand to lose as a species, when those connections break. The Assassin’s Creed series began in 2007, when the first game was released; there have been more than a dozen games since then (and a poorly received 2016 movie starring Michael Fassbender, pictured above). The games center on a conflict between the Order of Assassins and the Knights Templar; you play an assassin (naturally) changing the fate of the world whilst experiencing what one of my esteemed colleagues described as a history parkour simulator. Or, as the logline for the show puts it, it’s “centered on the secret war between two shadowy factions — one set on determining mankind’s future through control and manipulation, while the other fights to preserve free will. The series follows its characters across pivotal historical events as they battle to shape humanity’s destiny.” Patino and Weiner have both worked on other adaptations: Patino developed DMZ (and was a writer and producer on Westworld), and Weiner was the showrunner for the second season of Halo and for the Brave New World adaptation of some years back. There’s no word yet on when the series will arrive.[end-mark] The post Netflix’s <i>Assassin’s Creed</i> Series Is Moving Forward appeared first on Reactor.

Books Mark as Read The Thing You Want to Read Is Out There (Probably) On reading—and looking—outside your comfort zone By Molly Templeton | Published on July 17, 2025 Photo: Jaredd Craig [via Unsplash] Comment 0 Share New Share Photo: Jaredd Craig [via Unsplash] The other day I was complaining about books. This was foolish for a whole host of reasons that I will get into shortly. But I was looking at a lot of upcoming releases, looking at the rest of the year in books, and I felt—for a grumpy and absurd moment—like everything was romantasy or horror. And I whined about it. I know better. At this point, when it comes to books, there’s everything (with certain caveats). You just have to go find it. I am old enough that I have lived through several rounds of my peers complaining that there’s no good music “anymore.” In an earlier era, when I heard this complaint, I ran the music section for an alt-weekly, and knew perfectly well that there was plenty of good music. It just wasn’t the music my peers were automatically hearing about without having to seek it out. (Please note, of course, that everyone has a subjective and wildly different idea of “good.”) Later, when I was older and no longer anywhere near an alt-weekly, I would sometimes catch myself falling prey to this same assumption. I can still fall into this trap, even now; it will feel like I can’t find what I want, and so I assume, briefly and incorrectly, that what I want isn’t out there. It is (almost) always out there. Somewhere. If you are a romantasy or horror reader, you are undoubtedly—and very visibly—living in a vibrant age for your beloved genre(s). It seems like every time I go to Powell’s there’s a new subgenre on display on the endcaps near the SFF section (one was something like “cozy plant horror” and yes, there were enough books to fill a whole endcap, and yes, Eat the Ones You Love was one of them). I am too much of a baby for (most) horror, yet I get repeatedly tempted by books that I would probably throw across the room in a fright. I love romance readers, but that’s not my happy reading space. I’m delighted for all of them, genuinely and enthusiastically; I remember the not-so-long-ago days when “romance” was a dirty word in a lot of bookstores. I hope that everyone who loves these genres is enjoying every moment of their ascendancy and/or dominance. But if, like me, these are not your genres, you may feel a little sulky from time to time, and that’s okay. Everything comes in cycles, to some degree. Things cycle out (YA dystopia), things cycle back (hi again, YA dystopia!). The thing is, other books are still out there. They’re just not quite as easy to find, not as prominently placed in the bookstore, or as regularly popping up in our social feeds. This is not a needle-in-a-haystack problem of scarcity. It’s more like a piece of hay in a haystack problem, because there are just so many books. Traditionally published books, self-published books, small-press books, books that don’t quite fit into any of those categories; cross-genre books, nonfiction books, online articles the length of books—at any given moment there are at least six books that I want to read this second demanding my attention.  And let’s be real. I said six because it sounded reasonable. It’s more like sixteen. Sixty? I don’t know. It’s a lot.  (While I was thinking about this odd problem-that-feels-like-it-shouldn’t-be-a-problem, I saw author Kameron Hurley mention the tyranny of choice on social media—the concept that too many choices don’t actually make people happier. Hurley linked a Scientific American article on the subject; it’s from 2004, but the opening could have been written yesterday. It feels silly to say “There are so many books that I don’t know what to read,” but it tracks.) To some degree, what I want to say here is that if you’re feeling like you can’t find the books you want to read, they’re out there. Somewhere. Saying this is not, I hasten to add, to let traditional publishing off the hook for all its weaknesses when it comes to whose voices get published and promoted. Other outlets, including self-publishing, fill some of the holes, but not all. Publishing could still do better on so many fronts, from living wages to real commitments to diversity and equity. And that’s just for starters. But I am also trying to remind myself that when I think I can’t find what I want, one of two things is probably happening. One, I’m not looking hard enough, or in the right places. (This is where I stop myself from writing a whole sidebar about the bookish media landscape, its continued shrinking, the difficulty of finding reliable opinions about and discussion of books in anything resembling large media, and the way social media lets us all share opinions but doesn’t really encourage in-depth discussion. But I digress. A lot.) And two—well, two is harder. Two is that when I’m feeling sulky and shut out of a cultural space of conversation, it is probably a me problem. I am probably being way too much of a snail, pulled into my shell, tucked into my little comfort zone, and not looking out farther and wider for what interests me. I don’t just want science fiction about how we can make better worlds and fantasy about grown-ass humans having next-level grown-up coming-of-age experiences (though those are two of my favorite things). I want nonfiction about books and reading and culture from all different perspectives. I want weird genre-blending books and creative nonfiction works and books about how writers read. I want SFF in translation and mysteries starring plucky 12-year-olds and everything Mary Ruefle and Samuel R. Delany have ever written (to name just two from a very long list). I want work from writers who play with form and expectation, no matter what genre they’re writing in. When you run into that feeling like you can’t get what you want, you might ask yourself: Is there more out there to want? I started thinking about this topic because I was annoyed by another New York Times column that invented a problem and then complained about how things used to be without taking into account all the things we know were different in those days. It was one of those columns that treats a certain kind of fiction as if it’s the only kind of fiction that matters. At this moment in time, it is absurd to say that modern books lack “confidence and audacity.”  I resent those clickbait NYT columns for eating up time and space in my brain. So I started to think about abundance, and about the feels-fake-but-is-real issue of not being able to choose, because there’s too much to choose from. I thought about how easy it is to only know about what you already know about, without asking or looking for what else is out there. When I was a kid, the books available to me were those on my mom’s SFF shelves, those at the small-town public library, and those at the Waldenbooks in the mall. With all the free time of a 13-year-old in the summer, I could not have finished all those books.  And those books were, in hindsight, a very small selection from a very specific kind of writer. They were almost all white; they were not all male, because my mom read a lot of women SFF writers and I followed in her footsteps. But still: a specific pool.  Now, I can order books from writers around the globe. There is still not enough work being translated into English, but there’s some. There’s still not enough work from writers from other countries being published in this country, but there’s some. The boundaries stretch, the pool deepens. I don’t want to be a cranky old NYT writer who only sees what he’s looking for. I want to look further and wider. And to do that, I have to get out of that snail shell. The shell is comfortable, cozy; the shell feels protective. If I’m in there, with all the things I know and am familiar with, I can curl up with six more big fat books and pull the mental curtains for a while.  But the truth is, if I’m being a snail about books, I’m probably being a snail about everything. I’m forgetting to look out and beyond, to find the things that matter and speak to me in all places—the people doing the work to make this world better, to stop the monsters in their tracks; the people making beauty and art of all kinds; the places where progress is possible; the places to put anger, and to use it as fuel.  Being a reader isn’t just picking up whatever’s set in front of you. And being a person who’s engaged with the world isn’t just accepting what’s set in front of you, either. For me, there’s a connection between getting too comfortable in how I’m engaged with books and with art, and getting too complacent in how I’m moving through the world. For other readers, it’s the opposite: reading is a comfort, a balm, a retreat from all the other things. There’s no one right way to do anything, but if you are feeling set in your ways, or like you’re missing things, or like it’s hard to come out of a shell—it might help to look a little farther than you have been. [end-mark] The post The Thing You Want to Read Is Out There (Probably) appeared first on Reactor.

It was an incredibly hectic and high-stakes 48 hours as House leadership cobbled together the votes to send the One Big Beautiful Bill Act to President Donald Trump’s desk. Few, if any, are better positioned to discuss what happened in those pivotal moments than House Majority Leader Steve Scalise. He joined “The Signal Sitdown” to give a behind-the-scenes look at the final push to pass the “One Big, Beautiful Bill” at a media row event hosted by the Republican Study Committee on Capitol Hill Tuesday. After six weeks of negotiations, the Senate needed the help of Vice President JD Vance. Vance cast the tie breaking vote in the upper chamber to send the One Big, Beautiful Bill back to the House just three days before the president’s self-imposed deadline of July 4.  Because of Republican’s narrow margins in both chambers, “we were always on a razor’s edge with this bill,” Scalise told The Daily Signal. When Vance had to break the tie in the Senate, “it showed you just how narrow these margins are.” But the bill that returned to the House from the Senate had some key differences from the product the House originally passed in May. The Senate made larger reforms to Medicaid, changed certain energy subsidy provisions, and tweaked a few other things. But the biggest sticking point for conservatives in the House was the lower amount of government spending cuts relative to tax cuts and the impact that would have on government deficits and debt. “When the bill came back from the Senate, they made a few changes: some good, some bad. … [The House] had to weigh all of that,” Scalise said. The bigger determining factor for Scalise and other House Republicans, however, was one question: “Does it achieve all the things that President Trump and House Republicans wanted to achieve at the beginning?” “Failure was not an option,” Scalise told The Daily Signal. “If Congress did nothing, then you would’ve had the largest tax increase—four and a half trillion dollars—primarily hitting middle- and low-income families.” Those priorities, Scalise said, were “no tax increases, no tax on tips, no tax on overtime,” among others. Scalise also seemed to suggest the Senate changes to the bill have been overblown. “Over 85% of the items that were in the House version ended up in the final version that came back to us,” he noted. “So there weren’t a lot of changes made in the Senate.” “Some, I would argue, were better changes,” Scalise added. For example, he pointed to “limiting the provider tax, which is a money-laundering scheme that even President [Barack] Obama and President [Joe] Biden said needed to be reformed. President Trump said we needed to reform that, too, and that ended up being in the bill.” To Republicans who wanted to make deeper cuts to government spending, Scalise argued the bill makes “historic cuts, by the way, in waste, fraud, and abuse in government: $1.6 trillion in cuts to waste, fraud, and abuse. The record for any Congress before that was $800 billion, even adjusted for inflation. So we more than doubled the historic record of cuts.” House members also said they felt they were getting jammed with the Senate’s version of the bill with little time to review, discuss, and publicly debate those changes. In the past few years, House members have pushed for at least 72 hours to scrutinize a piece of legislation before it is brought to the floor for a vote. Scalise told The Daily Signal that “anybody that wanted to read the bill had an opportunity.” “In fact, the Senate read the bill. They had a reading of the entire bill—900 pages—on the Senate floor that took about 14 hours,” Scalise said. “So anybody that said, ‘Oh, I need time to read the bill,’ they had that opportunity.” “You had more than enough time to read the entirety of the bill, and it was read in its entirety on the Senate floor. By the time it came back, you knew the changes that were made,” Scalise added. “There were maybe some items we’d like to make a little bit better, but at the end of the day, you also need the votes to pass the bill,” Scalise said, addressing some conservative critiques. “You know, if I wrote it on my own, it would look different, just as if you wrote it on your own,” he explained. “But that bill wouldn’t have gotten to President Trump’s desk because in the House you need 217 other people to agree with you and in the Senate you need 49 other people to agree with you and then get JD Vance to break the tie.” It was a hard sell, but successful. “We said, ‘Look: Yes, we can get this bill to the president’s desk and still hit every target we set out to achieve,’” Scalise recalled. Trump was the One Big, Beautiful Bill’s not-so-secret weapon. “I love working with President Trump,” Scalise said. “Nobody’s more engaged in the legislative process.” The president was intimately involved in making sure Republicans had the votes so he could sign the legislation on July 4. “President Trump made phone calls, brought people to the White House,” Scalise told The Daily Signal. “When there were problems with the vote coalition, he just called: ‘Steve, give me names.’ And he called all of those members—you don’t want to be on the other end of that call, by the way.” In short: “President Trump knows how to close the deal,” and he did. “Nobody thought that could happen,” Scalise stated. “In a narrow group of majorities, we delivered on some of the most historic wins for the American people.” “We’ve got a great bill to go sell now, and we’re gonna see economic growth like we haven’t seen,” Scalise said, previewing the 2026 midterm elections. “This bill’s going to deliver a lot of big wins for hardworking families,” the majority leader told The Daily Signal. “President Trump said in the campaign on every stop, we’re going to have no tax on tips, we’re going to have no tax on overtime. We delivered on those promises as well in the One Big, Beautiful Bill.” “Think about a tip worker, you’re at a restaurant, waiter, waitress that serves, and, on average, they make about $32,000 a year,” Scalise explained. “No tax on tips means about $1,700 more in their pocket. It’s real money for working families.”  “No tax on overtime? Same thing,” Scalise continued. “You know, a shift worker at a local plant making things in America won’t have to pay taxes on overtime. But that also means your local nurses at a hospital, your police officers… now, when they’re working extra hours away from their family, they won’t be paying taxes on overtime. This is gonna get the economy moving again.” Scalise named some metrics for the American people to watch as they evaluate the effects of the One Big, Beautiful Bill. “You’ll see inflation come down, interest rates come down. That first time home buyer can actually go out and buy a home again. They couldn’t do that under Joe Biden and his economy and the Democrats were against all of it.” “Every Democrat voted to raise taxes on every family in America,” Scalise concluded. “And it’s going to be a great contrast. Your Democrat opponent was against all of these reforms. They wanted higher taxes, they wanted more government control. We wanted to put more power back in the hands of families and more money back in the pockets of families.” The post Steve Scalise: Inside the Final Push to Pass Trump’s ‘Big, Beautiful Bill’ appeared first on The Daily Signal.