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But on that day in Beit Lahia, something happened, says Yoni (a psyeudonym, as are the names of other interviewees). "Terrorists, terrorists," one soldier shouted. "We go into a frenzy, and I get on the Negev [a machinegun] right away and start spraying, firing hundreds of bullets. We then charged forward, and I realized it was a mistake."

There were no terrorists there. "I saw the bodies of two children, maybe 8 or 10 years old, I have no idea," recalls Yoni. "There was blood everywhere, lots of signs of gunfire, I knew it was all on me, that I did this. I wanted to throw up. After a few minutes, the company commander arrived and said coldly, as if he wasn't a human being, 'They entered an extermination zone, it is their fault, this is what war is like.'"

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Amid all of this, Silicon Valley is doubling down on its push to integrate AI into schools. In the lead-up to final exams last spring, nearly every major AI firm offered college students free (or heavily discounted) access to their paid chatbots. Now the tech industry is offering students cheap access to their agentic tools. Last summer, Anthropic announced “Claude Builder Clubs”—an initiative in which students paid by the AI company host workshops and hackathons on their campuses. In exchange for membership in those clubs, students are given free access to Claude Code. A few weeks ago, OpenAI announced that it would be offering college students $100 worth of credits for Codex, its agentic coding tool.

The students affiliated with the AI companies, at least, say that the more powerful bots are helping them with their studies. Thor Warnken, an Anthropic ambassador and a biology major at the University of Florida, told me that he has designed what is effectively a personalized Khan Academy. When he takes a practice test—say, in organic chemistry—he feeds his completed work into Claude. He then asks the bot to find patterns in his errors and make new practice problems based on them. “The first practice question will be super easy, and the next one will get a little harder and a little harder, until it gets super hard,” he explained. Liu, who also serves as an ambassador for Anthropic, similarly said that the bot has made for a “fantastic” study partner. When he has questions during large lectures, he asks Claude, which has access to his course materials, and the bot explains concepts in real time; previously, those questions might have gone unanswered.

Instructors, as I have previously written, are also using plenty of AI. Canvas recently introduced a new AI teaching agent designed to save instructors time on “low educational value tasks” such as organizing online-course modules and adjusting assignment due dates. “Faculty are using AI tools both for instructional purposes, for building course materials, but they’re also starting to play around with generative AI to actually grade and assess the learning,” Marc Watkins, a researcher at the University of Mississippi who studies AI and education, told me. He gave a hypothetical: “I could set my agent up, open it up in my course, go out on campus to walk across campus to get a cup of coffee at Starbucks,” he said. By the time he returned, 15 minutes later, all of the essays would be graded, and “bespoke personal feedback” would be sent out to each student. AI can save teachers time—that same grading takes him 10 or 12 hours, Watkins estimated—but in the process, the technology threatens the relationship between students and teachers that is core to education. “That’s really scary,” he said.

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Pixar has been the focus of headlines over the past month as its original comedy Hoppers made a splash with a great critical response and pleasing box office results, offering optimism for the Disney-owned animation studio’s ability to launch an original property on the cusp of Toy Story 5 becoming a likely behemoth this summer.

But Pixar has also been the subject of recent debate surrounding the revelation of a planned movie that is unlikely to ever come to life. On the day Hoppers opened last month, the Wall Street Journal published a story looking at the future of the company and confirmed that a feature called Be Fri (styled as BeFri) had been in development for years until it was scrapped in late 2023. The article noted that Pixar employees were stunned that a project that involved 50 people and was three years in the making would be killed — becoming perhaps the longest-developed Pixar movie to receive such a fate — given that the studio had been previously adept at reworking troubled films, as it did with 2012 release Brave.

This decision to stop progress on Be Fri came in late 2023, months after Toy Story prequel movie Lightyear was a box office misfire in light of right-wing pundits causing commotion over its same-gender kiss. This was also around the same time that Pixar boss Pete Docter and the studio’s team decided to reconfigure their original sci-fi feature Elio, stripping away the queer-coded characterization of the titular lonely boy who longs to visit space. Shortly after these internal decisions, Docter spurred public debate when he noted in a 2024 interview that the studio should make the “most relatable films” possible, which some social media users perceived as pushing to shift away from underrepresented characters and voices.

“When they canceled the film itself, it was devastating,” says the former staffer, who recalls employees coming together for a memorial of sorts to honor Be Fri. “They had what amounted to a funeral for Be Fri at the studio. They had a little place where you could put notes or things that were really special to you. There was art all over the place that was really memorializing the film, and there was this outpouring of love for a project that everybody really wanted to see come to life.”

Gunzilla Games, the studio co-founded by District 9 director Neill Blomkamp and developers of NFT-infected battle royale game Off The Grid, have been accused by a number of former employees of failing to pay staff for months on end. One former animator at the studio has also accused them of attempting to "silence" workers attempting to get the money they claim to be owed.

As reported by the likes of VGC and Insider Gaming, among the former staff accusing Gunzilla of failing to pay staff are Paul Creamer - an animator who left the studio this March - and talent acquisition lead Anna Savina.

Both made their accusations on LinkedIn. "I dedicated 3 years of my professional life to Gunzilla Games. I built teams, found top talent, and lived the company's mission 24/7," Savina wrote. "Today, I'm forced to face a significant outstanding debt that covers several months of my professional life." She claimed staff in her position are facing "significant salary delays with no clear timeline", with reach-outs to Gunzilla's CEO and CFO having yielded no response and "zero specific information" respectively.

"I'm not the only one. I know many talented colleagues who are in the same "fog". We’re not asking for bonuses, we’re demanding what we have earned," Savina added. She appears to have since updated the post to note that "the situation regarding my personal matter has been resolved".

A year after the NDP suffered its worst electoral defeat in party history, new leader Avi Lewis stood on stage at the party’s convention and promised its renewal.

“Canada, mark your calendars: the NDP comeback starts now.”

Reactions from some quarters have been swift and furious. Lewis has come under attack by Prairie NDP leaders, establishment media columnists, and pro-Israel lobby groups.

To solicit the views of those on the Canadian Left, whose forces helped power Lewis to victory, The Breach collected responses to the following question: how should the Left orient itself to the new, Lewis-led NDP?

Five organizers answered, ranging from skepticism to super-charged excitement.

The public freakout about blue light started with a study in 2014. Half of the 12 participants read on an iPad before bed. The rest read physical books. The iPad users took longer to fall asleep, felt groggier the next day and produced less melatonin. The researchers said the culprit was the glow emitted from the iPad's LED screen, which produces a disproportionate amount of light in the upper, bluer end of the spectrum. Under specific circumstances, blue-enriched light disrupts the daily circadian rhythm – our body's natural pacemaker – that uses daylight to help determine when we start to feel tired. Subsequent research seemed to support the findings. Sounds simple, right? It's not.

"This was an incredibly deceptive piece of work," says Jamie Zeitzer, a professor of psychiatry and behavioural sciences at Stanford University, who studies the effect of light on the circadian system. The science wasn't bad, he says, the problem is it brought people to bad conclusions.

After years warnings and millions of people flipping on the blue light filters built into their phones, the latest science suggests screens are not the main culprit here after all. For example, a recent review of 11 different studies and found that the light from screens only delayed sleep by about nine minutes, at worst. Not zero, but not life altering, either.

The amount of blue light emitted by the screens of phones, laptops and tablets has also been shown to be tiny compared to the blue light we receive from the Sun – 24 hours-worth of blue light from digital devices totted up to less than one minute spent outdoors, according to one study. Other studies have shown it's not enough to affect levels of the hormones that control our sleep.

So why am I so tired all the time? Zeitzer and others told me there are lots of other ways that light, blue and otherwise, could be ruining my bedtime. If I really wanted to tackle the blue monster, it was going to take a serious lifestyle change.

While some teenagers hang out after school, playing Fortnite or shooting hoops, Michael has taken up a more enterprising hobby. He buys abandoned storage lockers at bargain prices from public lien auctions with the aim of selling their contents for profit. It began two years ago, when he watched a rerun of “Storage Wars.” He has been on an urban treasure hunt since.

His adventures have brought him to CubeSmart, Extra Space Storage and Manhattan Mini Storage facilities in and around New York. He sells his scavenged goods through his eBay store, “Mike’s Unique Treasures,” to earn over $7,000 a month, a figure backed by the financial records he showed me.

He runs his operation out of the suburban New Jersey home where he lives with his mother. The garage is lined with meticulously indexed old magazines, vinyl records, World War II artifacts, rare stamps, VHS tapes and vintage fishing rods.

After finishing his homework, Michael spends his nights at a work table, packaging inventory to ship to his customers around the country. “My friends tell me they’re amazed I’m making money at this,” he said. “None have asked to come along with me yet, though. I’m not sure why.”

Mr. Herzog began his Rogue Film School in 2009, in Los Angeles, where he has lived since the late 1990s. The densely scheduled four-day course cost participants $1,500. The purpose was not to learn how to make films, but to listen to Mr. Herzog, who makes clear that he doesn’t teach filmmaking — that belongs in film schools, of which he has long been a vocal critic. Filmmaking, he said, is about managing chaos or “wrangling.”

According to the Rogue Film School website, the workshop was “about poetry, films, music, images, literature.” “Censorship will be enforced,” it warned. “There will be no talk of shamans, of yoga classes, nutritional values, herbal teas, discovering your boundaries and inner growth.”

The workshop sessions were so popular, Mr. Herzog made them longer and more elaborate. He started working with the Barcelona-based production company Extática Cine, which held them in Cuba, the Peruvian rainforest and Las Palmas in the Canary Islands. They chose São Miguel for 2026, because its moody, mythic winter landscape was ideal for cinema.

Mr. Herzog announced this year’s workshop via his new Instagram account, which Simon, his youngest son, had set up for him. Also new was the high price tag — 8,800 euros (about $10,200) — which shocked a lot of his Instagram followers, who left comments about privilege and trust funds.

In December, applicants had only six days between being accepted into the program and depositing the money to secure their places. They crowd-funded, dipped into their savings and applied for artist grants and loans. One person was rumored to have sold their car. “The time span between getting the invitation and wiring the money felt like a shotgun wedding,” said Lucas Ackermann, 28, a writer-director from Berlin.

There was an overwhelming feeling among those accepted into the workshop that they had earned a prestigious prize, or were being anointed by the master himself. It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for these filmmakers, who swallowed the price tag for what they were receiving in return: a close mentorship with Werner Herzog, contacts with other filmmakers and an impressive addition to their CVs.

Lunar exploration has always held a strange position in the history of exploration. For all of human history, people have been staring up at the Moon, and for centuries astronomers used telescopes to study the lunar surface. The telescopic surveying and mapping of the Moon by astronomers can (and should, I think) be considered a form of exploration. From this perspective, the Moon had been thoroughly explored far before the dawn of the Space Age. But on the other hand, because of the nature of the Moon’s orbit, the Moon also possessed some of the most mysterious and inaccessible terrain that ever taunted exploration-minded humans.

The Moon is tidally locked, meaning that only one side of the Moon ever faces the Earth. And so for all those millennia of Moon-gazing, there was an entire half of our natural satellite that no human had ever seen before. We would only get our first look at the end of the 1950s, and it would take even longer for us to complete a full map of the Moon. Here is a visual history of how we did it, designed to guide you through the process, even if you aren’t yet familiar with any lunar features.

The growing Aadam Jacobs Collection is an internet treasure trove for music lovers, especially for fans of indie and punk rock during the 1980s through the early 2000s, when the scene blossomed and became mainstream. The collection features early-in-their-career performances from alternative and experimental artists like R.E.M., The Cure, The Pixies, The Replacements, Depeche Mode, Stereolab, Sonic Youth and Björk.

There’s also a smattering of hip-hop, including a 1988 concert by rap pioneers Boogie Down Productions. Devotees of Phish were thrilled to discover that a previously uncirculated 1990 show by the jam band is included. And there are hundreds of sets by smaller artists who are unlikely to be known to even fans with the most obscure tastes.

All of it is slowly becoming available for streaming and free download at the nonprofit online repository Internet Archive, including that nascent Nirvana show recording, with the audio from Jacobs’ cassette recorder cleaned up.

The ’50s marked the heyday of so-called “physique” or “beefcake” magazines, some of the horniest documents in queer history. Photographers like Bob Mizer, founder of the iconic Physique Pictorial, published thousands of pages of nearly naked male bodies. Flick through the pages and you could expect to see homoerotic poses featuring sailors and cowboys, bulges straining through skimpy briefs and an occasional sprinkling of oiled-up grappling. The beefcake phenomenon wasn’t unique to the U.S. In Montreal, famed photographer Alan B. Stone turned his lens on Canada’s sexiest men, selling his beefcake prints via mail order. His risqué images were advertised in the back pages of publications like Physique Pictorial; naturally, they arrived in discreet packaging. In a world before mainstream videos of hardcore gay porn, these magazines obviously made their way into many a suburban gay spank bank, but they offered more than just eye candy.

Historian David K. Johnson chronicled the impact of this overlooked queer history in his 2019 book Buying Gay: How Physique Entrepreneurs Sparked a Movement. “I had a sense that [physique magazine] readers felt empowered by these magazines because they were mass-produced,” he tells Xtra. “That meant there were thousands of other men out there doing the same thing.” Readers could find one another through letters sections—where they could sometimes find the models too. In Grecian Guild Pictorial, Johnson says, there would be a “Grecian of the Month” pin-up pictured next to his name and street address. “It wasn’t a formal system, but it became clear to me that the biggest commodity they were selling—in addition to the images—was this access to other people. It was basically analogue social media.”