The exact timing varies, but eventually it comes for many of us: seasonal affective disorder. (It happened to me this week.) The days are shorter, the skies are drearier, and winter looms ahead. We can’t make the sun shine year-round, but we can help the transition to hibernation mode feel a little less daunting. Keep yourself entertained with these great deals on board games, Lego sets, and our very favorite iPad. Be sure to check out our deals roundup from earlier this week on TVs, gaming peripherals, and wireless headphones. 

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When Israel issued an evacuation order from north Gaza on October 13, Shouq Al-Najjar left her house and headed south, to the city of Khan Younis, where she’s now sharing a home with 150 relatives and friends. Every day is a struggle for the basics. “Now bakeries are stretched to the limit. They cannot meet the demand for bread,” she said in a video message over WhatsApp. “Hospitals could stop working at any hour now, as there is no electricity and no fuel to power generators.”

A ground invasion of Gaza is thought to be imminent. Al-Najjar, a coordinator at Ma’an Development Centre, a nonprofit that works with other local

Nintendo is having a very good year. The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom was a record-breaking success; Switch sales continue to climb even in the console’s sixth year. In February, the company opened Super Nintendo World at Universal Studios in California. All of this, though, looks small compared to the hype around the company’s ubiquitous moustachioed plumber. This summer, The Super Mario Bros. Movie brought in nearly $1.4 billion globally at the box office, making it the second-highest-grossing animated film of all time. Now, Nintendo is releasing Super Mario Bros. Wonder, the latest game in the franchise, to rave reviews from

There are tons of smart ambient lighting panels. Here are a few we also like.

Twinkly Dots for $100: You can stick these strings of LED dots around frames and furniture or have them hanging somewhere, and the app offers a wide range of colors and animated effects. You can map your pattern to make the most of the effects, create your own effects, and group Twinkly lights together. On the downside, the strip is split into two sections, with the power controls in the center, and you don’t get enough adhesive dots in the box.

Govee G1 Gaming

What I’m about to tell you sounds like the kind of thing made by an AI story generator designed to spit out the final segments of the local 11 o’clock news, but here goes: A few weeks ago, firefighters in Glens Falls, New York, got called to the scene of a burning home. Except it wasn’t burning, it was a very elaborate Halloween display made with some LED lights, fabric, a fog machine, and a fan. An NPR Morning Edition report called it a “fire.”

Chances are, though, you didn’t hear about this first on NPR. It, erm, blew up on TikTok. Or, rather, videos of fake-house-fire Halloween decorations are

In the three weeks since his trial began, Sam Bankman-Fried, founder of crypto exchange FTX, has watched in near silence as a parade of ex-colleagues, peers and other witnesses have taken the stand. They have testified to his greed, recklessness, bullying and chicanery. His lawyers have offered relatively little in the way of riposte—and have been pilloried for it. But the strategy and ambitions of the defense, ex-prosecutors say, have been misinterpreted.

Bankman-Fried is charged with multiple counts of fraud in connection with the collapse of FTX. The exchange fell to pieces in November after users found they could not withdraw their funds, worth

The opening hours of Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 feel slick and cinematic, like a well-edited superhero movie. It’s the kind of game you sit back with, soak up. If mucking up your PlayStation 5 controllers weren’t an issue, it would go perfect with a bucket of popcorn.

Just because it’s massive, though, doesn’t mean it’s only for elite players. While there’s plenty here for dedicated fans of the franchise—from variations on his classic suit to the web-slinging traversal—it’s still approachable for gamers just looking for something fresh to play. “We definitely go through pains to make sure that we are teaching the player everything they need to know to be great

Two companies have launched clinical trials to see if they can restore hearing to children with a rare type of genetic deafness.

Akouos and Decibel Therapeutics, both based in Boston, are testing experimental therapies in children with severe hearing loss due to variations in a gene called OTOF. A third firm, Sensorion, in France, is gearing up to begin a similar trial in Europe. The companies are all aiming to deliver functioning copies of this gene to the inner ear. The approach is known as gene therapy. It’s designed to be given once and have lasting effects.

Genetic causes account for 50 to 60 percent

The home recording revolution has come. From cheap and affordable audio interfaces and software to the rocketing abundance of USB microphones in the Zoom era, there is no reason why you can’t make chart-topping singles in your bedroom. (See: Billie Eilish and her brother Finneas O’Connell.) It’s easy to get audio quality that’s good enough, but now high-end companies are aiming to help average musicians get true studio quality at home.

The latest Sphere DLX and Sphere LX modeling mics from Universal Audio ask a simple question: What if you could have virtually every famous microphone available at your fingertips in a single, sub-$1,400

For Taylor Klein, it starts with a weird Facebook message from a friend. A Pornhub link. She doesn’t open it. Must be spam, she figures. “I think you’ve been hacked?” she replies. Nope. Her pal insists the link is real. She clicks, and her nightmare begins.

Another Body, directed by Sophie Compton and Reubyn Hamlyn, opens with Klein seeing that she has been deepfaked into pornography; someone has used editing software to put her face on the bodies of porn actors and now these clips are all over the internet. The film follows Klein as she tries to figure out who did this to her and what she can do