After more than 20 months and more hurdles than a track meet, Microsoft has completed its $69 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard.

Despite efforts from governments in the US and UK to keep tech giants from increasing in size and reach, Microsoft’s acquisition of the Call of Duty maker shows the enduring power of major technology companies—even in the face of regulatory obstacles. The last of those obstacles came in April, when the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority blocked the deal. Today, the CMA reversed the decision, clearing the way for Microsoft’s acquisition to complete.

“We now have all regulatory approvals necessary to close, and

NASA’s Psyche spacecraft blasted off this morning at 10:20 am Eastern time and is now en route to its namesake metal-rich asteroid. The long-delayed mission will examine the asteroid with a suite of scientific instruments and determine whether the hunk of rock was the core of a baby planet that never fully formed.

But that’s not Psyche’s only mission. The probe also carries an important experiment. It will test a futuristic laser technology for transmitting large amounts of data to and from faraway spacecraft that’s called the Deep Space Optical Communications project, or DSOC. It’s expected to deliver much-improved data rates, with 10 to 100 times the capacity of radio

One of the most remarkable achievements in cinema is when a film successfully transports its audience to another time and place. Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain immerses viewers in the world of cowboys in 1960s Wyoming. Pawel Pawlikowski’s Cold War brings us to bleak, gorgeous 1950s Poland. Spike Lee’s The 25th Hour could take place nowhere but post-9/11 New York. And now we have John McPhail’s Dear David, a journey to the psychedelically cringe heart of the 2010s internet.

A tepid attempt at horror about a narcissistic blogger as he’s menaced by a ghost with an oddly wholesome anti-cyberbullying agenda, Dear David is not a good movie. But it is the

Last week, after helping foment the eight-person coup that ended Kevin McCarthy’s 269-day reign as speaker of the United States House of Representatives Matt Gaetz’s signature smirk was everywhere. The 41-year-old Florida congressman peacocked through a slew of must-see Beltway cable news shows, dancing on McCarthy’s political grave, and generally basking in the brilliance of his successful scheme—one he openly doubted would work just the night before it did.

This week, Gaetz shut up—or, more accurately, he was shut up.

It’s not just Gaetz. All week long, unidentified Republican Party puppet masters have muzzled House members, scrambling to portray unity in the face of the disarray emanating from today’s leaderless House

Trouble, it seems, is afoot in the Mouse House. Daredevil: Born Again, the reboot of Netflix’s canned Daredevil series, is reportedly getting an overhaul. Marvel didn’t just recast a side character or have someone punch up a script, no. Instead, it dismissed head writers Chris Ord and Matt Corman and is seeking new writers and directors to take the helm, even though several episodes of the series had already been filmed.

The move, per The Hollywood Reporter, came after Marvel execs, including honcho Kevin Feige, saw the completed episodes. Whereas the Netflix series had been gritty and big on action, Born Again played more like a legal procedural, and the

A rad moon’s on the rise. Early on October 14, our lunar satellite will briefly hover before the sun, obscuring the dawn and immersing millions of people in a strange morning gloom. But this annular eclipse will not be total: Since the moon’s traveling at the more distant part of its orbit, it won’t block the entire sun. Instead, it will create a glowing orange outer ring.

With all of our Earthly concerns, it’s easy to forget about cosmic mechanics, especially how fast our planet and the moon move through their orbits. People turning their eyes (and protective glasses) to the skies will behold the rare “ring of fire” spectacle

I had a lot of gripes about the first-ever Pixel Watch. It launched with a lot of missing functionality you’d expect for a $350 wearable. Over the past year, Google has kept its promise to improve the product by periodically adding new features to the smartwatch. Now, with the release of the new Pixel Watch 2, I get a watch that actually comes with everything I wish the original did out of the box. Hooray!

The number one thing I did not want to see was a change to the design. In a sea of smartwatches that look,

Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Cloudflare revealed this week that they battled massive, record-setting distributed denial of service attacks against their cloud infrastructure in August and September. DDoS attacks, in which attackers attempt to overwhelm a service with junk traffic to bring it down, are a classic internet menace, and hackers are always developing new strategies to make them bigger or more effective. The recent attacks were particularly noteworthy, though, because hackers generated them by exploiting a vulnerability in a foundational web protocol. This means that while patching efforts are well underway, fixes will need to essentially reach every web server globally before these attacks can be fully stamped out.

Dubbed

Brunch tomorrow in Texas will take place under the eye of Sauron. From about 10:20 am local time in San Antonio, the sky will begin to darken with an annular solar eclipse, in which the moon crosses directly in front of the sun at a time the satellite is especially distant from the Earth. From an earthling’s perspective, the moon will be too small to blot out the sun entirely, leaving fiery tendrils at the edge of a deep black disk. About 10 percent of the sun will manage to flicker past.

For those in charge of converting solar radiation into electricity, that remaining fraction provides little comfort. From California

A nearly complete digital library of Whole Earth publications—including the famed Whole Earth Catalog founded 55 years ago by counterculture icon Stewart Brand—has been made available online for the first time. A curious reader can now flip through all the old catalogs, magazines, and journals right in their web browser, or download entire issues to their computer free of charge.

The Whole Earth Catalog was the proto-blog—a collection of reviews, how-to guides, and primers on anarchic libertarianism printed onto densely packed pages. It carried the tagline “Access to Tools” and offered know-how, product reviews, cultural analysis, and gobs of snark, long before you could get all that on the internet.

At