Is it because it’s in the Fall, when things are dying and returning to the earth? Is it the stormy weather that accompanies the changing of the season? Where did this spooky holiday come from anyway? It has its origins, no doubt, in some medieval tradition. I don’t know, I haven’t looked it up, but seems kind of medieval, gothic atleast. My neighbors across the street have set up a graveyard on their front lawn .

If you enjoy this newsletter, I would be eternally grateful if you shared it. Share Nuclear Meltdown When I talk to people about multigenerational family, hands down the number one objection I hear is this: What if you just don’t get along? More than economics or careers or location, it seems, people worry that in the end they won’t get along with family if they live nearby. That could be due to political or religious views, personality clashes, or any number of other things.

In February of 2020, Disney/Lucasfilm released a four-minute preview video on YouTube for the company’s next major Star Wars project, The High Republic. The massive publishing-oriented project would set out to tell sweeping, interconnected epic stories across a series of comics, novels and magazines, all set 200 years before the events of the original films. Fan response was varied, but a sizeable portion of it seemed . . . unenthusiastic.

A few weeks back, New York Times reporter Kevin Roose filed two stories after product testing a new, artificial intelligence-enhanced version of Bing, Microsoft’s search engine. In thefirst, he was impressed, in thesecond, a little rattled. His conversations with Bing had taken an unexpected, and dark, turn. In short, Bing had manifested a kind of second personality named Sydney who freely expressed, in Roose’s words, “dark fantasies (which included hacking computers and spreading misinformation), and said it wanted to break the rules that Microsoft and OpenAI had set for it and become a human.

Cloud 9 doesn’t do a tifo—a fancy Italian soccer word for a large banner hung from the stadium rafters—for every home game of NJ/NY Gotham FC, the National Women’s Soccer League team that the fan group devotes itself to. It usually does one for the home opener, for Pride Night and for special occasions. When the supporters group realized that the team’s final home game of the regular season fell on Halloween, that was reason enough to begin planning a spooky tifo.