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As wildfires burn millions of acres across Canada, smoke has descended upon cities across the United States, with air quality plummeting to unhealthy levels. In New York City, emergency room visits for asthma exacerbations jumped by 31% by the end of the first day. The timing could not have been worse for a city already in the throes of the second major heat wave of the season.

Extreme weather events represent the cyclical and compounding relationship between fossil fuel combustion, a warming climate, natural disasters, and related illnesses. Some may view them as proof the climate crisis has already become insurmountable. However, history teaches us to never let a health-related environmental crisis go to waste.

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It's been nearly two years since Arcane finished its run on Netflix, but the audience still misses it . With video game adaptations having quietly taken over Hollywood in recent years, demand for more series like the League of Legends series remains high, and there is no shortage of IPs ripe for this treatment. One such case is Overwatch , a gaming franchise that was once promised its own animated series , only to see its development crumble not long after. With some huge worldbuilding and filled with lore behind its battle arena and first-person shooter gameplay, Overwatch also has a huge and deeply loyal following. So, what's stopping it from becoming the next Arcane ?

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The redesigned BMW M3 has begun testing on the Nürburgring.

Due in 2028 with a mild-hybrid, twin-turbo 3.0-liter inline-six.

Car sports an aggressive Neue Klasse design and four tailpipes.

Development of the next-generation BMW M3 has entered a new phase as the model has begun testing on the Nürburgring. It’s a natural place for the high-performance sedan, which will have some things in common with today’s model.

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That will readily be seen under the hood as BMW M CEO Frank Van Meel recently confirmed the car will be offered with a version of their updated twin-turbo 3.0-liter straight-six. It complies with Euro 7 emission standards thanks to BMW M Ignite technology , which allows the engine to burn cleaner and more efficiently.

More: BMW’s Next M3 Could Keep Three Pedals And Won’t Plug In Like The M5

The upgraded engine debuts in the current M3 and M4 this month, before being added to the M2 in August. The output remains unchanged, so the mill should continue to have outputs of 473 hp (353 kW / 480 PS), 503 hp (375 kW / 510 PS), and 523 hp (390 kW / 530 PS).

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The redesigned model will largely echo that, but it’s slated to adopt a new mild-hybrid system. This should improve performance and efficiency, which sounds like a win-win.

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Putting the powertrain aside, the next M3 will adopt an edgier design. The front end loosely follows in the footsteps of the electric M Neue Klasse concept , but adopts a revised bumper and modified intakes. The car also appears to eschew a traditional grille, despite being ICE-powered.

The profile is notable for having extended wheel arches that hint at a wider track. They’re also marked with “19” front and “20” rear, which implies the prototype has staggered wheels.

Other highlights include flush-mounted door handles and stylish wheels that are grabbed by a beefy braking system with bronze calipers. We can also see a greenhouse and roofline that echoes the new i3 .

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The rear end is pretty evolutionary in comparison as it features a familiar four-tailpipe exhaust system and a small rear spoiler. They’re accompanied by a new trunk and temporary taillights.

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The interior is more mysterious, but it will undoubtedly adopt Panoramic iDrive . This means we can expect a pillar-to-pillar display at the base of the windscreen as well as a 17.9-inch infotainment system. The model could even be offered with a 14.6-inch front passenger display.

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Anyone who wanders to the very end of City Island Avenue will reach a small seating area looking out over the waters of Long Island Sound, from which portions of Queens and Nassau County can be seen. Only rows of rotting wooden pilings hint at this spot’s former life as a summer resort and amusement park.

In the 1860s financier William Belden was a controversial figure, having conspired with Jay Gould and Jim Fisk to inflate the price of gold, a plot that eventually caused a stock market panic. After years of investigations, he still had enough money to purchase a mansion at the southern tip of City Island in 1885 and develop it and the surrounding area into a summer resort, with the mansion itself becoming a French restaurant. The resort was a big hit, leading Belden to further develop it with features like a bowling alley and a billiard hall. Visitors could easily reach the area via steamboat, which ran to City Island frequently.

Unfortunately, the good times could not last; Belden had cheated his mentally ill brother and was now expected to pay damages as a result, while one of Belden’s many other creditors had obtained a lien on the resort property. Belden would sell the land to railroad magnate Collis P. Huntington, who died just a few short years later. Belden was never able to get the land back and without it, he died in impoverished obscurity.

The mansion itself would continue to stand for over 100 years as part of the City Island Athletic Club, but it would eventually burn to the ground in 2006. As for the former dock at the end of the street, it lay in ruins, with access to the waterfront blocked off by a chain link fence and the shore often used for illegal dumping. Eventually the city stepped in and renovated the area, building a small park with benches where people can now look over the water in tranquil peace after enjoying a hearty meal at one of the many seafood restaurants lining City Island Avenue.

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Bethesda unceremoniously dropped a cache of news about its upcoming games today as the wait for The Elder Scrolls 6 drags ever closer to 10 years. In a lengthy Twitter post, we learned that Fallout 5 is in pre-production , Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas remasters are in the works , and buried in the middle of the reveal blitz is the next Fallout 76 expansion, titled Raven Rock.

"Fallout 76 continues to be home to millions of players exploring Appalachia together," reads Bethesda's announcement. "With nearly 70 free updates released to date, the journey is far from over.

"In fact, we have a major Fallout 76 expansion planned for next year: Raven Rock, a prequel story to Fallout 3."

A NOTE FROM BETHESDA GAME STUDIOSWe love making these worlds as much as you love playing in them. Today, we want to share what's next for Bethesda Game Studios and what you can expect from us in the years ahead.For forty years, we've built games that have entertained almost… pic.twitter.com/slD4pMWqW1 July 17, 2026

Unironically, this is one of the most exciting new Bethesda announcements in a long while. The Fallout 76 team has proven itself capable of telling compelling stories at the scale of mainline Fallout games with substantial narrative expansions like Steel Dawn and Steel Reign, which together tell one of my favorite interpretations of the Brotherhood of any game in the series. I'm thrilled about the potential to see the same development team explore that faction even further in a Fallout 3 prequel story.

We also have a writeup on everything that was announced about the future of Fallout as well as The Elder Scrolls , which is all relatively exciting if you can get past the stink of Xbox's recent layoff bloodbath , which definitely impacted Bethesda proper as well as many other Xbox studios. For what it's worth, the labor union representing Bethesda Game Studios employees in the US and Canada suggested in the wake of the company's announcements that it was simply a distraction from the bad news , and that fans would do well not to "fall for it."

Bethesda says The Elder Scrolls 6 is going great, actually: "We're where we planned to be, loving how it looks, and playing it every day"

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You could hardly say Netflix is a business in trouble, but it does have a problem: for a lot of its shows, viewing figures are declining sharply after the first season. According to Bloomberg , Beef lost more than 70% of its viewers going into its second season, while The Night Agent lost 50% of its audience in season two.

This seems to be a pattern repeated over many Netflix shows, including some that rack up impressive viewing figures in their first season. The streaming platform relies on subscribers sticking around, and these stats are apparently "a major source of concern" for the executives at Netflix.

So what's going on? While I'm not privy to the internal discussions at Netflix or the statistics that its executives are available to them, I am a Netflix subscriber of many years standing — and I have a few ideas about what's going on.

Viewing fatigue

There's a lot to get through these days, isn't there? Tens of millions of songs on music streaming platforms, more movies than you'll ever have time to watch in ten lifetimes, and of course the entire history of TV — with new shows appearing weekly. It's perhaps no surprise that we're all finding it hard to stick with successive series when there's so much more out there to watch and listen to.

The way that Netflix's stats work, is that a drop-off in viewing numbers for a second season also includes those who abandoned the show somewhere along the way during the first run of episodes. And if you're not getting grabbed episode after episode by the plot and the characters, it's all too tempting to click away.

That's a shame for slow burn shows and those that need time to get going, and perhaps we all need to learn to be a bit more patient. However, it goes some way to explaining why Netflix shows can shed a lot of viewers after the initial pull of the first few episodes — there's an awful lot competing for our attention.

The binge model

For the most part, Netflix continues to drop its shows all at once, so as soon as they're live you can binge watch an entire season. Sometimes it's great to be able to burn through a bunch of episodes, but it also means you can be done with an entire season very quickly.

This exacerbates the problem of gaps between series (of which more in a moment), but it also means shows can be quickly forgotten in the rush of everything else that's going on. Some of my favorite TV shows are those that come out week by week: I watch the episode, then I catch up on the recap podcasts.

It means shows last longer — not in terms of the actual running time, but in terms of how many days and weeks it takes to get through a season. I actually quite like being able to binge shows sometimes, but it does mean they can be quickly forgotten.

Stranger Things lasted almost 10 years from start to finish (Image credit: Netflix) Season-to-season gaps

This isn't something that only affects Netflix, but we're still seeing huge gaps between seasons of shows — and unless the viewing experience is very special, that's likely to lead to waning enthusiasm from audiences as the months and years drag on.

Silo isn't a Netflix show, but the point is the same: as I was settling down to watch the third season a few days ago, even the initial recap montage had me confused (there was a mere 18 months between the end of season two and the start of season three). There were parts I didn't remember, and I had to head over to Wikipedia to get caught up.

Stranger Things is a Netflix show, and while I did manage to drag myself through it in its entirety, it was a struggle towards the end. The show lasted for just shy of a decade, and there are huge swathes of it that are no longer in my memory banks. It's not easy to produce television shows quickly, but the slow rollouts aren't helping their chances.

A trust issue

I've seen Netflix's regular cancellation of shows floated as a reason for second-series-syndrome, and I think this is an issue for program makers as well as audiences. If you don't know whether or not you're getting a second or third season, then you have to throw everything into the first one, and think more about wrapping it up neatly than extending it.

The Night Agent is one of the Netflix shows I've found it hard to stay with: the original rookie-on-the-run premise worked well and the first season was propulsive entertainment, but as it's continued, it's become more of a by-the-numbers action thriller. It's almost like they're making it up as they go.

Compare that with something like Bridgerton , which is a Netflix show I have managed to keep up with. It is of course based on a series of books (as is Apple TV's Slow Horses by the way), and that helps to ensure variety from season-to-season, with the focus switching between different characters and plotlines.

I'm not sure exactly how Netflix can fix the problem of viewing numbers declining in season two — I'm not a highly paid TV executive after all — but those are a few thoughts about why it's happening.