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September is Apple's month, and this year it arrived with unusual weight. A new CEO on stage for the first time. A foldable iPhone that the company had been rumored to be building for years. And, quietly but perhaps most practically, a major software update that started rolling out to hundreds of millions of existing devices. For most people, that last part is the one that actually matters right now. The Software Update You Can Use Today Apple's iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS 27 updates began rolling out September 14...

The $200 million Castelion contract announced Tuesday deserves more attention than it's getting. The Navy's Blackbeard hypersonic missile — air-launched, 200-nautical-mile range, compatible with both the F-35 and F/A-18 Super Hornet — isn't remarkable because of what it costs. It's remarkable because of what it replaced. HALO, the Navy's previous hypersonic anti-surface program, spent years burning through Raytheon and Lockheed Martin competition cycles before getting scrapped in 2024 over budget constraints. The p...

Yesterday, Blue Energy Global filed the first part of its NRC construction permit application for a small reactor at a Texas power plant being built to supply a Crusoe Inc. data center. The facility will run on natural gas first, then layer in nuclear. A second application tranche follows in the second half of 2027. This is what we're fighting for. The timing matters. Moody's put out an analysis this week estimating the U.S. AI buildout needs $110 billion and 45 gigawatts of new generation capacity through 2030. Th...

Stand at the edge of a Southeast Alaska beach and try to describe where something is. In English, you reach for prepositions: on, under, beside, across. They're small, interchangeable, geometrically neutral. They tell you almost nothing about the nature of the surface, the relationship between the objects, or how a speaker is oriented to the scene. Tlingit — Lingít, spoken across Southeast Alaska, the Yukon Territory, and British Columbia — doesn't work that way. Spatial relationships in Tlingit aren't appended to ...

The UK just ran its most successful renewable energy auction in the program's history — and the honest read is that it still might not be enough. AR7 delivered 14.7 GW of contracted capacity, the largest single-round haul since the Contracts for Difference scheme launched. That's a genuine milestone. The previous record, set in AR4, was 10.8 GW. AR5 — the round that produced zero offshore wind bids and became a cautionary tale about setting strike prices too low — looks like a distant embarrassment by comparison. T...

Lesson 26: What a 50-year-old mathematical idea teaches us about memory For five decades, systems programmers lived with a deal that felt non-negotiable: you could have control over memory, or you could have safety — not both. C and C++ gave you the first. Java and the JVM gave you the second, via a garbage collector that traded throughput and predictable latency for freedom from use-after-free bugs. Rust broke the deal. The interesting question is how, because the answer isn't engineering cleverness. It's formal l...

The Army doesn't hand out production-track contracts to companies that haven't proven their software in the field. That's what makes Overland AI's $20 million award for the Engineer Autonomous Breaching Capability initiative worth examining closely — not for the dollar figure, but for what it reveals about where the Army's autonomous ground vehicle program actually stands. Breaching is one of the most dangerous tasks in ground combat. Engineers have to clear obstacles — minefields, barriers, fortified chokepoints —...

The descent engine throttling challenge for NASA's Artemis lunar lander is genuinely fascinating engineering — a tight negotiation between fuel efficiency and landing precision that I've written about twice before in this space. But here's the thing: the source pool this week keeps pulling me back to a more fundamental problem. Before the descent engine's throttle curve matters, the lander has to exist. And right now, that's the harder constraint. The throttling engineering is real and worth understanding. So is th...

The wholesale electricity market has a new price signal, and it's coming from the interconnection queue, not the trading floor. PJM Interconnection — the grid operator covering 65 million people from New Jersey to Illinois — filed a proposal with FERC that reframes the fundamental relationship between hyperscale data centers and the grid. The framework, filed August 13 and targeting an October 12, 2026 effective date, tells any new load of 50 MW or more the same thing: bring qualifying new capacity to cover your pe...

The conventional wisdom on exhibition-backed distribution is that it's a conflict of interest dressed up as a solution. Theater chains booking their own films, prioritizing their own screens — what could go wrong? That skepticism is reasonable. It's also missing what's actually happening with Leawood Films, AMC's new indie distribution label, which deserves a harder look than the eye-rolls it's getting. The setup: AMC is launching Leawood to focus "primarily on small and medium-sized releases, films that otherwise ...

There's a drink called the Toreador — tequila, apricot liqueur, lime juice, simple syrup — that has been sitting in the shadow of the Margarita for decades. Punch reports that in Australia it's a genuine classic, a standard entry in the mental recipe book of most professional bartenders there. Jeremy Blackmore, creative director for Sydney's Mucho Group, calls it "such a great, simple drink that gets overlooked." In North America, it's essentially invisible. This is worth sitting with. The Toreador predates the Mar...

The headline from the August employment situation was easy to write: unemployment rate unchanged at 4.1%, 569,000 net new employed persons, participation rate ticking up 0.2 points to 61.6%. Fine. Stable. Moving on. Don't move on yet. The Number Buried in the Duration Table When I wrote about the August jobs report two weeks ago, I flagged that 1,930,000 people had been unemployed for 27 weeks or longer — the long-term threshold that economists treat as a structural warning sign rather than a cyclical blip. That nu...