Last night, a new company called Slate Auto unveiled its first product, a spartan two-seater electric truck with a mere 150 miles of range and a world of possibility. There's no paint, no distracting infotainment screen, and no stereo or even radio. It doesn't tower over your average 12-year-old, and it may sell for under $20,000 (including incentives) when it arrives in 2026.
If it arrives, of course. We don't need to get into the litany of obstacles that lie in the path of Slate's future success - including a global trade war and a presidential administration openly hostile to EVs - because instead I'm interested in talking about the truck as a possible antidote to our growing obsession with overpowered, oversize trucks and SUVs.
You've probably noticed this problem if you have eyes and live in America in 2025. Our roads are packed with these roving land yachts. Sales of SUVs and pickup trucks reached new highs in 2024, accounting for 75 percent of total vehicle registrations. A decade ago, these two segments made up just half of the market. Today, they represent three out of every four new vehicles sold in America.
YKK’s self-propelled zipper prototype is chunky and currently being tested for more industrial applications. | Screenshot: YouTube
Japan’s YKK, the world’s largest zipper manufacturer (go ahead, grab the nearest zipper, it probably says YKK on the pull), has announced a prototype self-propelled zipper with a built-in motor and gear mechanism it can use to zip itself up at the push of a button on a wired remote.
The days of being embarrassed when you forget to zip up could soon be behind us, if it’s ever miniaturized from its current form, which is several inches long and a lot chunkier than the zipper pulls currently used on clothing.
Although some recent zipper innovations, such as Under Armour’s one-handed MagZip upgrade, are designed to improve accessibility and make zippers easier to use for those with limited mobility, YKK envisions more industrial use cases for its prototype.
As demonstrated in a video recently shared on the company’s YouTube channel, the self-propelled zipper is seen connecting a pair of 16-foot-tall membranes in about 40 seconds. Zipping them together manually would require the use of a ladder or other machinery.
In another video, the prototype is used to quickly connect a pair of 13-foot-wide temporary shelters standing over eight feet tall, taking about 50 seconds to progress from one side to the other.
The prototype uses a spinning worm gear that winds its way through the teeth on either side and pulls the zipper along behind it. In the videos, a power cable is seen attached to the prototype as it self-zips. In addition to miniaturizing the tech and adding a battery, YKK would also need to develop some safety mechanisms before its self-propelled zipper could ever reach consumers’ clothing, ensuring there’s nothing that might get stuck.
Chromebooks on Arm processors are about to get a big boost as developers prepare new versions of ChromeOS with support for Qualcomm’s latest Snapdragon chips, reports Chrome Unboxed.
According to a new developer commit message posted in the Chromium project Gerrit code review, the SoCID for a Qualcomm X1P42100, aka the Snapdragon X Plus, is now being included in the Chromium repository, which likely means active development of Chromebooks with the chip is underway.
The Snapdragon X Plus isn’t Qualcomm’s flagship “Elite” processor used in some of the top Windows 11 Arm laptops, but it is capable of the same 45 TOPS of AI performance from its NPU.
Qualcomm’s previous Arm-powered Chromebooks haven’t exactly been powerhouses. The 2021 Acer Chromebook Spin 513 that we’ve tested has great battery life, but a very slow Snapdragon 7c chip powers it. And although the 7c Gen 2 version was faster in devices like the Lenovo Chromebook Duet 3, Qualcomm ended up not bringing the Gen 3 to Chromebooks. That left Chromebooks with chip options from MediaTek and Intel, the latter of which hasn’t been known for excellent battery life.
Infinity Nikki’s next update will add some major new features. Bubble Season starts April 29th and will include a new area, new activities, and, of course, new (and returning) outfits. But the biggest addition is one that fans have been asking for since launch: co-op. Check out the trailer above.
In the new season you’ll be able to have dress-up adventures with a friend in two player co-op mode. You can travel the world of Infinity Nikki together, solving special co-op mode puzzle games and participating in escort missions. Players will also prove they’re the most stylish one in the group chat with a fashion runway and new interactions that players can use in all the photos they’re going to take.
Like every new Infinity Nikki season, there will be special outfits to collect – though none of them inspire in me the kind of fanaticism that the cowgirl outfit from two seasons ago did. (Which I did get without spending any money. Hooray!) For the first time though, IN is also bringing back outfits from previous seasons for players who missed out on them and for newbies to build up their wardrobe quickly.
Speaking of wardrobe, Infinity Nikki is catching up to the MMO girlies by implementing a new dye system. In Bubble Season, players will be able to use dyes to change the color of their outfits the same way one can in World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy XIV. No word on exactly how dyes will work or if they will be yet more things to spend your precious currency on. But I am interested in the potential of getting new colors for my clothes without the hassle of the current system, which involves the expensive and time consuming process of collecting duplicate outfits.
Bubble Season starts April 29th and if you’re one of the folks waiting for the game to come to PC, the Steam version of Infinity Nikki launches that day too.
If you’re like me and you have a bit of an uncontrollable potty mouth, Microsoft has got you covered with its latest Windows 11 feature. The software maker is changing the way its profanity filter for voice typing works on Windows 11 soon, so you can disable the filter and let all your nasty swear words be free like nature intended.
Microsoft has started testing this change in the Dev and Beta Channel with Windows Insiders, by adding a new toggle inside voice typing’s settings interface that lets you either filter profanity and replace it with asterisks or have it type out your profanity like any other words. I’m personally ****ing excited about this one, because voice typing currently filters out profanity with the incorrect amount of asterisks, which makes me swear even more.
Alongside the profanity filter changes, Microsoft is also allowing Surface Pen owners to configure the button on the stylus to trigger the new Click to Do feature that started rolling out today. Click to Do provide actions for the text or images that are on your screen, so you could click your stylus button and summarize text or quickly remove an object from an image.
These features are all being tested with Windows Insiders, and I’d expect to see them appear for Windows 11 users in the coming months.
Trump administration senior officials are facing harsh criticism after it was revealed that they had used the personal messaging app Signal to discuss highly classified military intelligence in a group chat. The chat, in which Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth laid out plans for an upcoming military strike in Yemen, inadvertently added Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic magazine, as a participant.
Though the rest of the chat’s participants – including national security advisor Michael Waltz, Vice President J.D. Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and director of national intelligence Tulsi Gabbard – doubled down on insisting nothing improper had happened. But after details of a second chat emerged, even harsher scrutiny fell upon Hegseth, who was a Fox News anchor prior to Donald Trump appointing him as Defense Secretary.
Further investigations revealed that he had a startlingly accessible digital presence, raising questions over whether he’s left key classified information vulnerable to foreign adversaries.
Read on below our live updates as we track the fallout from the Signal group chat.
Donald Trump's staggering tariffs on Chinese imports have hit nearly every category of consumer goods, from electronics and automobiles to clothing and footwear. One of the most vulnerable industries is the ultracheap e-commerce sites like Shein, Temu, and AliExpress that American shoppers have become accustomed to. It is already showing signs of a bloodbath.
Last week Shein and Temu warned shoppers that price increases were coming on April 25th. A spot-check of prices on Shein show modest increases across categories, though not every item is more expensive than it was a week ago. A pair of kid's fleece pants that were $8.29 on April 17th are now $10.19. A women's plus-size dress that was $22.39 is now $27.51. A pair of pants that were $13.99 have gone up to $17.09. Shein's inventory and prices change daily so it's impossible to pinpoint why an item has changed in price, but Shein shoppers have noticed their shopping carts and wish lists getting more expensive: shoppers on Reddit report some items doubling. According to data provided to The Verge by Bright Data, price increases on Shein until early March were for the most part modest compared to late 2024 prices, and many product …
Maybe, like me, you bought the Xbox Series S with 512GB of storage and realized, after installing Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, that you don’t have much (or any) space left for any other games. And maybe, like me, you had to hunt for another drive so you could install other games to play.
If you’re still in that boat, you might want to consider Western Digital’s 2TB WD_Black NVMe solid state drive. It’s currently on sale at Amazon for an all-time low of $179.99 ($50 off), or about 22 percent off the standard price, and will provide you with plenty of additional storage to work with. To put the price in perspective, it’s only $30 more than the 1TB version, which isn’t on sale. WD is also one of two manufacturers I’m aware of that make these easy plug-in cards — the other is Seagate.
There’s no fiddling around with screws or anything to get it to work, either. Just pop it into the back of your Xbox Series S / X, and bam, you’re good to go. Plug and play at its finest, baby.
But let’s pivot to another good deal real quick.
Amazon and B&H Photo are also selling Apple’s brand-new M4 MacBook Air, which just launched in March, starting at $899 (its best price to date). That’s $100 off Apple’s starting price of $999, which itself is already $100 cheaper than the entry-level price of the M3 model last year.
And, with the M4, you get 256GB of starting storage instead of 128GB, which is probably fine for most folks who don’t need a lot of local storage. Like me, for example. I’m using an M2 MacBook Air for work, and I only have 82GB used.
The latest M4 model also has a better 12-megapixel Center Stage camera that will follow your face around while you’re on camera (better said: it’ll keep you in frame) and 16GB of RAM. The design is unchanged from last year, which means you’re still getting just a MagSafe charger and two USB-C ports. But the update to M4 allows you to add two external monitors while also leaving the display open, for a total of three running screens. Good for multitasking.
It’s a MacBook Air. It’s the best MacBook for most people. You really can’t go wrong here.
We knew Microsoft was about to launch Recall for real this time, and now the software maker is making it available to all Copilot Plus PCs. Recall, a feature that screenshots almost everything you do on a Copilot Plus PC, will be available today alongside an improved AI-powered Windows search interface and a new Click to Do feature that’s very similar to Google’s Circle to Search.
Recall was originally supposed to launch at the same time as Copilot Plus PCs in June last year, but the feature was delayed following concerns raised by security researchers. Microsoft then planned to start publicly testing Recall in October, but pushed it back again to November to have more time to secure it further. Microsoft has now spent the past 10 months overhauling the security of Recall and making it an opt-in experience that you don’t have to enable if you’re concerned about the privacy implications.
“When we introduced Recall, we set out to address a common frustration: picking up where you left off,“ explains Navjot Virk, corporate vice president of Windows Experiences at Microsoft. Recall is designed to improve how you search your PC, but taking snapshots that are categorized so it’s easy to search for vague memories instead of file names.
I spent a few weeks testing Recall last year and found it was creepy, clever, and compelling. Technologically it’s a great improvement to the Windows search interface, because it can understand images and content in a much more natural way. But it does create a privacy minefield because you’re suddenly storing a lot more information on your PC usage, and you still need to manage blocked apps and websites carefully.
Kevin Beaumont, one of the security researchers that first raised alarm bells over Recall, has been testing the final version recently and found that “Microsoft has made serious efforts to try to secure Recall.” The database is now encrypted, Recall attempts to filter sensitive data by default, and the feature is now an opt-in experience.
Beaumont does note that filtering sensitive apps and websites can be hit-and-miss though, and occasionally even buggy. He also says that you can access Recall through a simple four-digit PIN unlock option with Windows Hello, instead of it forcing more secure facial recognition or a fingerprint. Microsoft’s Recall website claims “you must have at least one biometric sign-in option enabled for Windows Hello, either facial recognition or a fingerprint, to launch and use Recall.”
Alongside Recall, Windows search is also getting some AI improvements on Copilot Plus PCs today. You can now use the File Explorer, Windows search box, or settings with natural language queries. That means instead of searching for file names or specific settings, you can now describe images or documents and get results. If you’re looking for an image of a brown dog you know you have saved somewhere, you can just ask for “brown dog” rather than having to know the file name or date the image was created.
Microsoft is also rolling out Click to Do today, which works a lot like Google’s Circle to Search. You activate it by using the Windows key + left mouse click, and it will provide actions for the text or images that are on your screen. This includes summarizing text or being able to quickly remove an object from an image.
Recall, the improved Windows search, and Click to Do will all be available today across all Copilot Plus PCs, but the text actions in Click to Do are currently limited to Qualcomm-powered devices, with AMD- and Intel-powered Copilot Plus PCs getting this feature “in the next few months.” Recall and Click to Do should be available in a variety of languages and regions, but Microsoft says both features won’t be available in EU countries and Iceland, Liechtenstein, and Norway until later this year.
Google has just announced that it’s ending software updates for the first-generation Nest Learning Thermostat, released in 2011, and the second-gen model that came a year later. This decision also affects the European Nest Learning Thermostat from 2014. “You will no longer be able to control them remotely from your phone or with Google Assistant, but can still adjust the temperature and modify schedules directly on the thermostat,“ the company wrote in a Friday blog post.
The cutoff date for software updates and general support within the Google Home and Nest apps is October 25th.
No more controlling these “smart” thermostats from a phone.
In other significant news, Google is flatly stating that it has no plans to release additional Nest thermostats in Europe. “Heating systems in Europe are unique and have a variety of hardware and software requirements that make it challenging to build for the diverse set of homes,“ the company said. “The Nest Learning Thermostat (3rd gen, 2015) and Nest Thermostat E (2018) will continue to be sold in Europe while current supplies last.”
Losing the ability to control these smart thermostats from a phone will inevitably frustrate customers who’ve had Nest hardware in their home for many years now. Google’s not breaking their core functionality, but a lot of the appeal and convenience will disappear as software support winds down. The early Nest Learning Thermostats can at least be used locally without Wi-Fi, which isn’t true of newer models.
Still, this type of phase-out is a very real fear tied to smart home devices as companies put screens into more and more appliances. Is 14 years a reasonable lifespan for the these gadgets before their smarts fade away? There’s no indication that Google plans to open source the hardware.
In a clear attempt to ease customer anger, Google is offering a $130 discount on the fourth-gen Nest Learning Thermostat in the US, $160 off the same device in Canada, and 50 percent savings on the Tado Smart Thermostat X in Europe since the Nest lineup will soon be gone.
The original Nest thermostats were released while the company was an independent brand under the leadership of former Apple executive Tony Fadell. Google acquired Nest in 2014 for $3.2 billion.
I find something weirdly captivating about tech products that come with transparent cases that let you see the works inside. We all know that there are all sorts of chips and wires in there that make the product do what it does, but unless we plan to break the thing open (and void the warranty), those items are usually hidden. If you also find this kind of thing fascinating, then Sharge’s charging gear might be right up your alley — and you may want to try out the Shargeek 170 Power Bank, which is currently available from Amazon (for Prime members) and Sharge for $99, a savings of a $100.
The Shargeek 170 doesn’t just look good, either. It features a 24,000mAh battery, 170W maximum output, and can charge three devices simultaneously via a pair of 140W USB-C ports and a single USB-A port. Meanwhile, a smart display keeps you up to date on recharging time and percentage, along with the Shargeek’s current output and input. The Verge’s Sean Hollister saw it at CES last year, and thought it looked “pretty sweet.” You might, too.
More sales to play and clean with
A real classic, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered is now available, and if you’ve always wanted to try out the 20-year-old game — but were reluctant to use an old game on new tech — now is your chance. The remastered version features overhauled graphics optimized for modern hardware and includes both the Knights of the Nine and Shivering Isles expansions. And it’s on sale at Fanatical: you can get the Standard PC version for $41.49 (about $9 off), while the Deluxe edition — which comes with new quests, a digital artbook, and a soundtrack app — can be had for $49.79 ($10 off).
Let me be really honest here: I tend to eat at my desk a lot. That’s why my keyboard — and desktop — is often littered with crumbs, and why I could probably use something like the Hoto Compressed Air Capsule. The handheld vacuum cleaner provides 15,000Pa of suction power and includes five attachments, allowing it to handle crumbs, dust, and other detritus in tight corners. It can even be used to clean your coffee grinder! It’s now on sale at Amazon for $57.99 ($52 off), which, although not as low as its recent price of $31, is still a reasonable drop.
If you’re in the market for the latest iPad with Apple’s A16 chip, the 11-inch base configuration is matching its all-time low of $319.99 at Amazon in blue and yellow, down around $29 from its usual price of $349. If color is important to you, you can also get it in silver for $327 and in pink for $339. Read our review.
WhatsApp is launching a new “Advanced Chat Privacy” feature that aims to prevent people from taking conversations outside the app. When the setting is turned on, you can block others from exporting your chat history and automatically downloading photos and videos sent in the app.
The feature will prevent people from using messages for Meta AI as well, which you can currently use to ask questions within a chat and generate images.
By default, WhatsApp saves photos and videos in a chat to your phone’s local storage. It also lets you and your recipients export chats (with or without media) to your messages, email, or notes app. The Advanced Chat Privacy setting will prevent this in group and individual chats.
This feature still doesn’t stop people from taking screenshots of your messages or manually downloading media from chats, WhatsApp spokesperson Zade Alsawah confirmed to The Verge. However, WhatsApp says this is its “first version” of the feature, and that it plans to add more protections down the line.
“We think this feature is best used when talking with groups where you may not know everyone closely but are nevertheless sensitive in nature,” WhatsApp says in its announcement. WABetaInfo first spotted this feature earlier this month, and now it’s rolling out to the latest version of the app. You can turn on the setting by tapping the name of your chat and selecting Advanced Chat Privacy.
Update, April 23rd: Added information from WhatsApp.
Pete Buttigieg appears on Flagrant with Andrew Schultz on April 23rd, 2025.
A Democrat has entered the manosphere.
Pete Buttigieg, the former Secretary of Transportation in the Biden Administration and a presidential candidate in 2020, sat for a three-hour appearance on Andrew Schultz's Flagranton Wednesday to discuss current events, the state of politics, and the culture wars - his latest foray into breaking outside of the Democrats' preferred "echo chamber," as he put it, and his first into the world of online, woke-skeptical bro media.
Sporting a beard, Buttigieg criticized his colleagues in the Democratic Party for shirking podcasts such as Flagrant, which conducted an interview with Donald Trump during the election. According to co-host Akaash Singh, Flagrant, which has drawn controversy for its hosts' willingness to engage with racist content,was unable to get Democrats to agree to come on the show, prompting Buttigieg to call them out for turning down the invitation. "We have to be encountering people who don't think like us and who don't view the world the way we do, both in order to become smarter and better and make better choices and take better positions, and also to persuade," he said.
Calling Buttigieg "the Democrats' secret weapon," S …
Discord co-founder and CEO Jason Citron is stepping down and will be replaced by former Activision Blizzard and King exec Humam Sakhnini, according to a press release. Sakhnini takes over on April 28th. Citron will stay on the board of directors and serve as an advisor to the CEO.
“As we enter our next phase, I’ve been reflecting on how I can best contribute to Discord’s long-term success,” Citron says in a message shared with employees and posted to Discord’s website. “The job of a CEO is constantly evolving, and over the years I have continuously ‘hired myself out of a job.’ Usually that means delegating work and then taking on different leadership challenges. However, as I look at what is needed of Discord’s CEO over the next few years, I realize that it’s time for me to literally ‘hire myself out of a job.’”
When we interviewed Citron on the Decoder podcast last year, he said the company had grown to about 870 employees and over 200 million monthly active users.
Stanislav Vishnevskiy, Discord’s other co-founder, will remain at the company as chief technology officer.
“I look forward to working with Stan and Discord’s talented team to scale our business while staying true to the company’s core mission and the special connection it has with player communities,” Sakhnini says in a statement. “We’re still at the beginning of gaming’s impact on entertainment and culture, and Discord is perfectly positioned to play a central role in that future.”
The leadership shift is happening as Discord is reportedly exploring an IPO. In an interview with GamesBeat, Citron said that Discord didn’t have plans to announce about potentially going public, but noted that “as you can imagine, hiring someone like Humam is a step in that direction.”
Roku founder and CEO Anthony Wood during the company’s April 23rd product event in New York City.
Last month, Roku ensnared itself in controversy after customers quickly complained about a limited test where an advertisement for Moana 2 started playing as soon as the company's products were powered on. Across Reddit and other social media channels, people threatened to ditch their devices if Roku repeated such an experiment. The message, at least from some customers, was clear: dial it back.
Roku users have come to accept ad banners on the homescreen and in other areas of the OS in exchange for inexpensive hardware. There are sponsored items scattered throughout the company's signature Roku City screensaver. If you want a $30 or $40 streaming player, ads are just part of the deal, and they're vital to Roku's business. Ad revenue will grow even more important as tariffs threaten to disrupt Roku's hardware costs. But a full-screen takeover stirred an angrier, more powerful reaction.
So after today's product event concluded, I briefly chatted with Jordan Rost, who leads ad marketing at Roku, about the kerfuffle. Ads weren't mentioned at any point in the presentation, which focused on Roku's latest streaming sticks, 2025 TV lineup, new battery-powered smart home cameras, a …
OpenAI’s upgraded image generator in ChatGPT brought a surge of users to the AI service thanks to its ability to create Studio Ghibli-style images and really dull dolls, and now it’s coming to other apps. The company says the same “natively multimodal model” powering the image generator will be accessible in its API via “gpt-image-1,” according to a blog post, and some major names have already signed up to use it.
“The model’s versatility allows it to create images across diverse styles, faithfully follow custom guidelines, leverage world knowledge, and accurately render text – unlocking countless practical applications across multiple domains,” OpenAI says.
Companies like Adobe and Figma are already incorporating the model into their tools. Here’s how, per the blog post:
Adobe’s leading ecosystem of creative tools including its Firefly and Express apps will provide access to OpenAI’s image generation capabilities, giving creators the choice and flexibility to experiment with different aesthetic styles – something business professionals, consumers and creators all value when generating new creative ideas.
Figma is leveraging the latest model to bring advanced image generation and editing capabilities across its platform. Rolling out starting today, users can use ‘gpt-image-1’ in Figma Design to generate and edit images from simple prompt – adjusting styles, adding or removing objects, expanding backgrounds, and more. This new integration lets designers rapidly explore ideas and iterate visually, all in Figma.
OpenAI says that it’s also “continuing to work with developers and businesses to uncover more ways image generation in the API can serve their use cases,” including with Canva, GoDaddy, and Instacart.
The “gpt-image-1” model will initially be available via OpenAI’s Images API, and the company says support for the Responses API is “coming soon.”
Three men and two women wearing black combat gear and standing together side by side on a dirt road. | Image: Netflix
It only took five years, but Netflix has finally locked in its plan to premiere The Old Guard’s long awaited sequel.
Today, Netflix announced that director Victoria Mahoney’s (You, Lovecraft Country) The Old Guard 2 is slated to debut on July 2nd. Rather than dropping a trailer, Netflix released a handful of new stills from the film, and teased some of its plot details. Set some time after the first movie, The Old Guard 2 continues the story of previously-immortal warrior Andy (Charlize Theron) and her team of expert soldiers who have all been blessed / cursed with never ending lives.
With Quynh (Veronica Ngô), another immortal, now free from her underwater prison and on the hunt for revenge, Andy and her teammates Nile (KiKi Layne), Joe (Marwan Kenzari), Nicky (Luca Marinelli) have no choice but to fight one of their own. Because they can both die, the situation’s particularly dangerous for Andy and ex CIA operative James Copley (Chiwetel Ejiofor). But with Tuah (Henry Golding) potentially being on the verge of discovering how the groups’ healing powers work, Andy might not be spending all that much time as a regular woman.
In an interview with Netflix’s Tudum blog, Theron teased that, in addition to bringing Uma Thurman into the fold, the sequel will feature a little something for anyone who was a fan of the first film or the original graphic novel by Greg Rucka and Leandro Fernández.
“Andy and her warriors are back with a renewed sense of purpose,” Theron said. “The stakes are even higher now that Andy is mortal and can die — but that certainly won’t keep her out of the action.”
We’re used to seeing Predators do the hunting — it’s in the name, after all. But it looks like the roles will be reversed somewhat in Predator: Badlands, at least according to this new teaser trailer.
Directed by Dan Trachtenberg — who also helmed the excellent Predator spinoff Prey — Badlands follows a young Predator (Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi) who becomes outcast from his people, is stuck on a dangerous planet where everything wants to kill him, and is forced to team up with a human (Elle Fanning) to survive. Of course, he also has to be a Predator as well, and it looks like there’s an especially dangerous creature that he wants or needs to defeat, in order to gain back some respect. Much like Prey, it sounds like a clever twist on the formula, as it makes a Predator a protagonist for once.
Badlands hit theaters on November 7th, but it isn’t the only expansion of the Predator universe in the works. The animated anthology Killer of Killers starts streaming on Hulu on June 6th.
Operation Rolling Thunder was meant to be an act of persuasion. The US believed that a drawn-out bombardment would pressure the North to cease its aggression on the South — or, at least, encourage it to ease up. “I saw our bombs as my political resources for negotiating a peace,” President Lyndon Johnson claimed. His framing was belied by the words of Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Curtis E. LeMay, who said, “We’re going to bomb them back into the Stone Age.”
Rolling Thunder was supposed to take eight weeks. Instead, it lasted more than three and a half years, with hundreds of thousands of sorties. It was longer than any bombing campaign during World War II or any other war that came before; it remains the longest bombing campaign in history. It cost the US $900 million, compared to an estimated $300 million in damage to the North Vietnamese. Given that the conflict continued for another seven years, it’s safe to say that Rolling Thunder was not very persuasive.
Still, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara thought it could work. Before the war, McNamara had made the unusual choice of leaving his position as the president of Ford Motor Company — at the time, one of the highest-paying jobs in the world — to work for the White House. He was a numbers guy, who believed that everything could be solved through efficiency metrics. The method was called “scientific management.” That belief in quantification had boosted American corporations; certainly it could do the same for US foreign policy.
Rolling Thunder reflected McNamara’s ambitions and approach toward Vietnam. According to a biography by Deborah Shapley, he saw the bombing campaign “as a balance sheet, with the number of enemy targets hit in one column and measures of enemy activity in the South on the other.” Not coincidentally, many historians see Rolling Thunder as a microcosm for the conflict itself — the hubris of the United States, its inability to understand what kind of war it was getting into. But even if one looked at the strategy on McNamara’s terms, they would see that the numbers offer a glimpse into the size and scope of what true failure looks like.
During Rolling Thunder, between 1965 to 1968, the US dropped 864,000 tons of explosives over Vietnam. We know this precise measurement because the military keeps active and accurate records, which it did for allocations, accountability, and so McNamara could inform policy decisions. For scale, the RMS Titanic weighed about 58,587 tons. The munitions dropped during Rolling Thunder would be the equivalent of nearly 15 Titanics.
But it’s a bit hard to imagine how big a Titanic is, let alone 15 of them. It’s easier to conjure a modern Ford F-150 pickup truck, the country’s most popular automobile, which weighs around 5,000 pounds on average. So imagine the bombs dropped during Rolling Thunder as nearly 344,000 pickup trucks — the kind you’re most likely to see on the road, but hundreds of thousands of them. For context, your average Ikea parking lot has the space for 1,700 automobiles. So envision about 202 Ikea parking lots, completely filled with pickup trucks.
Though Rolling Thunder was primarily a bombing campaign, it was also an early opportunity for the US to flex its air combat superiority. The US deployed variations of an explosive projectile developed by Raytheon, known as the Sparrow, for plane-to-plane encounters. It is now infamous for being a terrible missile — accuracy is an efficiency metric, and the Sparrows were not accurate. Military studies conducted after the war found that only 9.2 percent of Sparrows fired during the war hit their targets. A whopping 66 percent of them malfunctioned; the remaining failures just missed. The batting average of one of the worst hitters of all time, dating back to the beginning of Major League Baseball, belonged to Bill Bergen. He played for the Brooklyn Dodgers around the turn of the 20th century and batted about 0.170 — so about two times better than a Sparrow missile. There were plenty of excuses for the Sparrow’s performance: poor training, poor production, poor maintenance. It didn’t change the fact that each missile may have cost as much as $225,000, which, after inflation, would be $2.3 million a piece today.
But McNamara’s favorite efficiency metric was “loss exchange ratio.” It is the simple math of determining the quantitative relationship between how many you lost to how many they lost. That figure asks: what is the value of a life? You could determine the average price of saving a life to determine a human being’s worth. Conversely, as the military does, you can calculate how much it costs to kill them. The formula is straightforward: how much you spent divided by the number of deaths. If this sounds blunt, it is exactly the equation the US used. Loss exchange ratio is better known as kill ratio.
Being a man of “cool efficiency,” as he called himself, McNamara had an advantage in continuing to push through these doomed plans. One aide described him as being forceful and convincing. In meetings, McNamara arrived with “briefs, numbers, ratios, estimates, and projections.” (The same aide also described him as “exhausting.”) Gen. Maxwell Taylor, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, described encounters with the defense secretary as being “bombarded.”
It’s why the explosives kept falling, even as the numbers didn’t look great for Rolling Thunder. The most generous estimate of casualties claims that 21,000 enemy combatants were killed, meaning that, after spending $900 million, each one cost the US around $42,857. (Adjusted for inflation, that’s $9.2 billion — so $438,095 per life. Again, not very efficient.) McNamara considered body count to be the most precise, objective metric for success, but at no point did that factor in the more than 182,000 civilians killed during Rolling Thunder.
That was just during the three-year span of Rolling Thunder. Over the course of the two decades the US military was in Vietnam, the US dropped an estimated 5 million tons of explosives. That’s twice as much as during the entirety of World War II, and it remains, to this day, the largest bombardment of any single country ever.
Five million tons of bombs, or if it’s easier to imagine, 85 Titanics.
left | https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/assets.sbnation.com/csk/uploads/verge-features/american-war/spot-illos/spot_1.jpeg | The Vietnam Veterans Memorial stretches for 400 feet. One built for non-Americans lost with the same density of names would stretch for nearly five miles
The best way to honor the dead was with a competition. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund asked, who could design the best war memorial? The requirements were sparse: it must use the names of the lost soldiers; it must be “reflective” and “harmonious” while making “no political statement of the war.” The competition opened in the fall of 1980, and submissions were blind judged. Every entry was given a number rather than a name. There were 1,421 proposals, and a jury of eight unanimously chose the winner: entry #1026.
Maya Lin was 21 years old and studying architecture as an undergraduate at Yale University. She’d already been thinking about death. Earlier, for a class, she’d designed a memorial for an imagined World War III; she turned in a drawing of an underground tomb, a concept that deeply upset her professor. For the Vietnam Veterans Memorial competition, she sketched a cut in the earth; a sunken, black stone listing the soldiers’ names and nothing more. “The need for the names to be on the memorial would become the memorial; there was no need to embellish the design further,” she said.
Lin was surprised to win the competition. She’d submitted it in a college class and received a B. (No matter, her professor had entered the competition and lost.) Being entry #1026 had obfuscated the fact that she was Chinese American from the judges, but once her proposal was announced to the public, there were concerns that the memorial should not be designed by someone of Asian descent. Lin spent several tortuous months in Washington, DC, overseeing the project, enduring criticism of her design from all sides. She recalls one Washington Post op-ed dubbing her work “an Asian memorial for an Asian war.” (She was born in Ohio.)
As Lin’s work moved through a bureaucratic approval process, other design choices were called into question. One crucial facet of Lin’s idea was to list the names chronologically; veterans groups resisted the idea, saying it would be difficult for visitors to find the exact location of where a soldier was honored. Wouldn’t it be so much easier to list names alphabetically? But Lin fought hard to preserve the chronology, and she prevailed in the end: an honest accounting of death over a convenient one. The memorial would live firmly in time, rather than outside of it.
There was pushback on the color, as well. “One needs no artistic education to see this design for what it is: a black trench that scars the Mall. Black walls, the universal color of shame and sorrow and degradation,” said veteran Tom Carhart. In an essay for the New York Review of Books many years later, Lin defended her choice. “I do not think I thought of the color black as a color, more as the idea of a dark mirror into a shadowed mirrored image of the space, a space we cannot enter and from which the names separate us, an interface between the world of the living and the world of the dead,” she wrote. The prompt had asked for “reflective” — the black granite was quite literally reflective.
Unconvinced, Carhart and other critics suggested the wall be made white and adorned with a more conventional eight-foot-tall statue of wounded soldiers. Plus, they wanted a flag right in the center. Lin objected, claiming the additions violated the integrity of the work. The US Commission of Fine Arts, which had final say, heard arguments in favor of and against Lin’s design, and eventually settled on a compromise: Lin’s vision would remain intact, but a statue and a flag would be added — not in the center, but off to the side. No one informed Lin of the additions, and only after reading about it in the paper did she learn her vision would be undermined. (“They didn’t have the stomach to tell me,” she said.) The memorial was completed and dedicated in November 1982, but by that point, Lin had already left Washington.
In a city that is full of bright white neoclassical statues and monuments, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial is an unabashed piece of the land art movement, appearing almost like a dark gash carved into the ground. Lin even said she wanted it to look like a “wound that is closed and healing,” but the fact remains that black granite is a static material, a hard rock that is as close to permanence as we have on this planet.
The names set in the stone are cast in the typeface Optima. (Decades later, John McCain would deploy the same type in his presidential campaign logo.) Every name on the memorial is the same size, giving equal weight to each life, regardless of military rank. There are 58,395 names in total, representing the soldiers that were killed or missing in action from 1956 to 1975. For scale, if you met an average of two new people a day, every day — an incredible social clip — you would encounter only 55,518 people, assuming you lived to the American average age of 76. More than a lifetime’s worth lost, now memorialized as a small name chiseled into a slab of granite.
That death toll has become a strange marker to convey magnitudes of loss: for traffic accidents, gun violence, and other wars. During the pandemic, several outlets noted when the number of people killed by COVID-19 surpassed the fatalities of US soldiers during the Vietnam War. This is perhaps the legacy of Robert McNamara: an emphasis on body count, the metrics-driven approach to understanding death.
But even just looking at the numbers, there is the erasure of a greater figure: the 3.8 million Vietnamese soldiers and civilians that were killed during the war. That’s roughly the current population of Berlin or Los Angeles.
McNamara used the kill ratio as the key metric for the war, guiding many of his policy recommendations. The 58,000 Americans killed compared to the 3.8 million Vietnamese killed brings the kill ratio to a staggering 1 to 65.
Maybe it’s easier to imagine that ratio in other terms: a double espresso shot compared to a gallon of milk; the Scoville difference between a common serrano chile and a ghost pepper.
The Vietnam Veterans Memorial stretches for 400 feet. One built for non-Americans lost with the same density of names would stretch for nearly five miles.
right | https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/assets.sbnation.com/csk/uploads/verge-features/american-war/spot-illos/spot_2.jpeg | Being impact-free is not the same as a total absence of bombs: Vietnam will never be close to completely clear
The remnants of the war are scattered everywhere across Vietnam. This manifests, in the most literal sense, as unexploded ordnance. These leftover explosives are still littered across the entire country. The Boeing B-52 Stratofortress could carry up to 108 bombs, each of which would then disperse as many as 600 tennis ball-sized “bomblets,” destroying everything in an area that was one mile long and half a mile wide. When one of McNamara’s deputies asked why the US deployed B-52s — a plane famous for its devastating power and lack of precision — Gen. William E. DePuy delivered the answer calmly and honestly: “because they’re there.”
This technique is called “carpet bombing” because it affects a large area, the way a carpet might cover a floor. The most famous ones were during World War II: Dresden, Hamburg, Tokyo. As recently as 2023, the US has controversially sold cluster bombs to Ukraine. But their usage was never more intense than they were over the 43 square miles of Quảng Trị, a rural province in Vietnam that was so thoroughly leveled that only 11 of its 3,500 villages were left alone by 1975. Quảng Trị has been dubbed “the most bombed place on Earth.”
While cluster bombs are an efficient way to annihilate large areas of land, the adorably named bomblets have a high failure rate as high as 30 percent. After the war, millions of dud cluster bomblets remain scattered across the country. Since the war ended in 1975, they have killed or injured more than 100,000 people. Estimates indicate that 17 percent of the entire country is still contaminated by leftover explosives — millions and millions of more bombs.
Several nonprofits, like Project Renew and the Mines Advisory Group (MAG), are dedicated to ordnance removal. They employ locals to survey large, often forested areas; teams of deminers locate explosives with off-the-shelf metal detectors. The work pays the equivalent of $500 a month, which is more than double Vietnam’s minimum wage. A team of 14 clears approximately 38,750 square feet a day — about half a professional soccer field. At that rate, it takes almost a year of sustained work to clear the area of a single cluster bomb. One of the hundred dropped from a B-52 would have taken about 30 seconds to reach the ground, and decades later, it would require more than 40,000 hours of human labor to clean up.
While it may sound like a dangerous job, heavy training and stringent safety precautions have resulted in very few accidents or injuries. At the end of each day, the unexploded ordnance are gathered and safely exploded. Project Renew says it has detonated more than 815,000 of them so far, while MAG has detonated another 400,000. The work in Quảng Trị, where the problem is the worst, hopes to be entirely clear by 2035, 60 years after the end of the war.
Still, as of 2024, at least half a million hectares of land in Vietnam have been cleared. The remaining area that needs to be cleared is another 6.6 million hectares. That means after half a century, only 7.6 percent of the contaminated areas have been deemed safe and ordnance-free.
At least one estimate suggests that it will be another hundred years of sustained work before Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia can be decontaminated of explosives; doing that math is hard, because it depends on so many variables, including the consistency of funding. The US has given $750 million for the cleanup effort, which seems like a large sum until you realize that the country spent $352 billion ($2.2 trillion after inflation) on the war effort. Earlier this year, the Trump administration suspended funding for bomb removal in Vietnam. Given the size of the issue, and how much progress has been made in five decades, it’s difficult to imagine a bomb-free Vietnam in the next 500 years — unless the current pace is significantly accelerated. The goal, according to a MAG representative, is to be “impact free” — that is, land safe enough to be developed, for communities and economies to flourish. Being impact-free is not the same as a total absence of bombs: Vietnam will never be close to completely clear.
When something is so big, it tends to become abstracted, simply so our minds can grasp them. This is normal. We abstract many of the things that are important to us: money, time, life. We only imagine things — value and worth — in relation to other things. What is 7.6 percent? That would be equivalent to running a marathon and quitting after the second mile. Or starting a two-hour-long horror movie and deciding it’s too scary less than 10 minutes in. Or living to kindergarten age in an average human lifespan.
I say all this, of course, just for an idea of proportion, for a sense of scale.
Microsoft revealed earlier this year that LG TVs would get access to Xbox Cloud Gaming, and now the Xbox TV app is rolling out to select LG smart TV models starting today. The Xbox app will let LG TV owners stream Xbox games directly to their TVs, and use a wireless controller to play them.
The Xbox app will be available for LG’s 2022 OLED TVs, select 2023 smart TVs, and newer models and smart monitors that are running webOS24 or higher. It will also soon be available for LG’s portable StanbyME screens. The Xbox app is built into the LG gaming portal on the latest 2025 LG TVs, but for older models you’ll have to head into the LG app store and download the Xbox app.
LG’s 2022 OLED TVs and select 2023 smart TVs will also need the latest firmware upgrade to run the Xbox app, and you’ll have to connect a Bluetooth-enabled controller and subscribe to Xbox Game Pass Ultimate to stream Xbox games to your TV.
Microsoft first launched its Xbox TV app on Samsung’s range of smart TVs in 2022, before expanding it to older models a year later. The app looks very similar to the web version of Xbox Cloud Gaming, and aims to provide a console-like experience without the need to purchase an Xbox Series S / X device. The Xbox TV app is a big part of Microsoft’s strategy to expand Xbox to multiple devices and make it clear that it thinks every screen is an Xbox now.
Login
