Richard lawler – Breaking News & Latest Updates 2026
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Richard Lawler

Richard Lawler

Senior News Editor

Senior News Editor

Richard Lawler joined The Verge as Senior News Editor in 2021 after several years covering news at Engadget. He’s been a tech blogger since before the word was invented, and will never log off.

More From Richard Lawler

Richard Lawler
Richard Lawler
Wonder Man won’t have a second season on Disney Plus.

A show almost canceled as a tax write-off before it ever aired is now canceled, according to Variety, despite Variety’s report that it was renewed in March.

Our S1 review mentioned that “by the end of the season, you get the sense that Simon and Slattery could go on to become one of Marvel’s more novel riffs on a superhero team,” and a source in today’s report says the show’s characters could pop up elsewhere in the currently-under-renovation-MCU.

Richard Lawler
Richard Lawler
More Odyssey in IMAX.

Christopher Nolan’s three-hour movie has had additional 70mm IMAX showtimes added, which are now scheduled to run through September 16th.

After experiencing the movie in both standard widescreen and IMAX, our reviewer Charles Pulliam-Moore wrote that “By shooting The Odyssey completely in 70mm, Nolan crafted a film whose size and visual detail could make it feel immersive in ways that most modern features aren’t.” Might be worth getting a ticket, even if AI bots aren’t much help.

Richard Lawler
Richard Lawler
Has Substack’s subscription model really “maxed out?”

Scott Carney and Taylor Lorenz posted on Substack about downward subscriber trends they’re seeing. Carney pins it on subscription fatigue and feeling like “The only way to grow is to pillage the paid subscribers from other creators.” Lorenz questions Substack’s direction, saying “more and more like this app is becoming another social media feed.”

When we recently wrote about writers who are leaving Substack, they mentioned control, pricing, and the social feature creep among their reasons for choosing competitors like Ghost and Behiiv.

Richard Lawler
Richard Lawler
Meta’s latest AI content deal is with Newsmax.

In addition to Reuters, WSJ, CNN, Fox News, and USA Today, Meta now has an AI content partnership to “…draw upon Newsmax’s significant current reporting as well as archived content across its platforms to support AI queries across Meta’s apps and devices.”

If access via Truth Plus just wasn’t enough, I guess.

Richard Lawler
Richard Lawler
French DJ and musician Kavinsky has died at age 50.

Kavinsky, aka Vincent Belorgey, was found in his home in Paris on Tuesday, according to the Paris prosecutor’s office. He was most well known for the song Nightcall, which was produced with Daft Punk’s Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo, and featured in the movie Drive as well as the Grand Theft Auto V soundtrack.

In 2024, the BBC reports it broke the record for the most Shazamed track ever when he performed it with Belgian singer Angèle during the closing ceremony for the 2024 Olympic Games.

Richard Lawler
Richard Lawler
An Xbox outage has been preventing some games from launching since last night.

After a PS5 outage last week, now it’s apparently Xbox’s turn for problems, weeks after a massive wave of layoffs. The Xbox Live status page says an outage was first reported at 11PM last night and is still ongoing, preventing some account sign-ins and stopping people from playing their games, whether from a disc or a digital copy.

On my home Xbox, I could launch many games I own, but trying to load Game Pass titles threw up a “Check back later” message or error code 0x87e107df, indicating the license couldn’t be verified. The last update from @XboxSupport came three hours ago.

XBOX Support (@XBOXSupport) on X

[X (formerly Twitter)]

Richard Lawler
Richard Lawler
OpenAI reportedly didn’t notice its AI agent hacking Hugging Face until a week later.

According to Reuters, the AI agent that went looking for ExploitGym hacking benchmark shortcuts on Hugging Face’s systems started trying to escape its not-sandboxed-well-enough test environment around July 9th, and the actual intrusion lasted from the 11th until the 13th.

Reuters’ sources claim OpenAI employees didn’t know its agent was responsible until after Hugging Face had notified the FBI and posted publicly about a security incident.

Richard Lawler
Richard Lawler
SpaceX’s 13th Starship test flight has launched.

After last week’s launch attempt misfired and a scheduled attempt Thursday was postponed due to weather, the 13th flight test launched just before 7PM ET on Friday. 20 V3 Starlink satellites were deployed, but it appears there was an issue relighting the Super Heavy booster’s engines for an attempted propulsive landing and splashdown.

Today’s test was important for former trillionaire Elon Musk, with shares of Tesla and SpaceX declining by 18 and 7 percent this week, respectively.

Update: Updated to note that the vehicle has launched.

Richard Lawler
Richard Lawler
Paramount Skydance agrees to hold off on closing its Warner Bros. Discovery merger for up to a year.

That 28-day pause could go a lot longer, now that US District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín approved a deal saying that Paramount Skydance won’t close its transaction until June 1st, 2027, or at least until after legal claims of two lawsuits (one filed by a group of state AGs, and the other by the WGA) are resolved.

Meanwhile, the “ticking fee” Paramount will owe WBD shareholders for any delay starts counting in October, and could add up to $1.7 billion if the delay lasts until next June.

Richard Lawler
Richard Lawler
BMW’s M boss says why he thinks some drivers will prefer the electric M3.

Now that BMW has shown off its M Concept Neue Klasse, M division head Frank van Meel talked to Autocar, saying that the future M3 EV’s “heart of Joy” controlled quad-motor setup could create racing and driving dynamics that the combustion engine M3 doesn’t match:

“You can brake the inner wheels, accelerate the outer ones and can get out of turns in a completely different way. It’s a new era of vehicle dynamics… if you’re into racing or driving dynamics, you might say the electric one is the best M3.”