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• Cities like New York, Los Angeles, and Detroit have long served as major hubs for iconic bands.
• Still, every state boasts at least one band it can call its own.
• OneRepublic famously hails from Colorado, and Alabama is from, you guessed it, Alabama.

Great music isn't just found in a few iconic cities — it thrums through every corner of the United States

The creators of Jmail, the viral Gmail clone that mimics Jeffrey Epstein's email inbox, are back at it again.

This time, the makers of Jmail have created JCal, a Google Calendar clone that shows you what Jeffrey Epstein's Google Calendar likely looked like. The calendar events are based on Epstein's schedule, as detailed through document releases in the Epstein Files. JCal contains 20 years of

• As a professor at Harvard, I encourage my students to use AI on every assignment.
• My students can use AI as a research tool and editor, but AI cannot do the thinking for them.
• I teach my students how to use AI to make better arguments, and that's where the use should stop.

I still remember

• Elon Musk said that Tesla and SpaceX would collaborate on a moonshot Terafab chip-building project.
• Tesla has posted its first Terafab roles in California and Texas, and is offering a wide salary range.
• SpaceX is also ramping up hiring at its silicon division as it looks to

The head of the National Transportation Safety Board said a key safety alert meant to prevent runway collisions failed to activate before the fatal Air Canada crash on Sunday night.

According to the safety board, the truck that collided with a regional jet in New York was not equipped with a transponder. Without it, a runway warning system known as ASDE-X could not function properly.

• HBO has released the first teaser trailer for its new "Harry Potter" reboot series.
• The trailer mirrors the original movie's visuals, sets, and character designs.
• It suggests a creatively stagnant reboot, whose only aim is to keep making money from the franchise.

Millions of "Harry Potter" fans had a simultaneous case of déjà vu this week.

On Wednesday, HBO released the first teaser trailer for "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone," a new television adaptation of J.K. Rowling's best-selling book. The eight-episode season, which recasts all of Harry's friends, professors, and wand-wielding enemies, will debut this Christmas.

However, based on what we've seen so far, calling the adaptation "new" feels generous. From the very first shot of the trailer, it's clear that HBO is taking no creative risks. Dominic McLaughlin's Harry Potter is shoved into a closet under the stairs in his aunt and uncle's home, just as he is in the original movie trailer from 25 years ago. The glimpse inside 4 Privet Drive is eerily familiar. Harry's glasses, his hair, his outfits, and his snowy owl look the almost exactly the same as Daniel Radcliffe's when he originated the role. The trailer is nearly two full minutes of recycled sets and snippets of dialogue.

So why does this reboot even exist?

The short answer is obvious: to make money. For Warner Bros. Discovery, the umbrella company behind HBO, the "Harry Potter" universe is arguably its biggest, most beloved, and most valuable property. In 2024, The Wall Street Journal reported that Warner executives had long been frustrated that similar, ever-expandable franchises like Star Wars, Marvel, and DC Comics churned out hit after hit for competing streamers. They wanted to milk their own cash cow.

The key difference is that "Harry Potter" author J.K. Rowling has retained control over the brand, even after signing the film rights over to Warner in 1999. Over the past quarter-century, Rowling has reportedly vetoed spin-off ideas and limited the studio's ability to expand the Wizarding World beyond her own written works. When she greenlit the "Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them" prequel, Rowling's request to write the screenplay was granted, marking her screenwriting debut.

That spin-off film series attempted to deepen "Potter" lore and introduce novel, eye-popping kinds of magic. But it faltered when the movies began to contradict established rules of spellwork, rely too heavily on familiar characters, and rip off memorable scenes from the original story.

While Jude Law did his best to embody a younger, more stylish Albus Dumbledore, it wasn't enough to salvage the series, which was unceremoniously scrapped after the third installment flopped at the box office in 2022. Many critics argued that "Harry Potter" had lost its magic.

In one sense, a pure reboot makes sense as a course correction. Returning to the beloved settings, characters, and details from the original books — Hogwarts! Hagrid! Hedwig! — seems like a foolproof way to lure new viewers and nostalgia-bait old readers.

It also makes sense why Rowling would be keen to keep the brand aesthetics consistent. The Wizarding World of Harry Potter theme parks are designed to mimic the original movies, from the immersive Diagon Alley set to interactive wand props for $65 a pop. According to Forbes, the second-largest chunk of Rowling's fortune comes from her cut of ticket sales, merchandise, and food and beverage revenue. (Rowling said she "worked closely" with the writers on the reboot series.)

But financial incentives for a multibillion-dollar company and a billionaire author aside, the new "Harry Potter" trailer offers nothing fresh for fans to get excited about. If you grew up watching the iconic movie series, what's the draw to watch a shot for shot remake as a TV series?

A reboot that regurgitates the original's visual identity, down to the length and bushiness of Hagrid's beard, is redundant at best and creatively bankrupt at worst.

Even Chris Columbus, who directed the first two "Harry Potter" movies and steered the series' aesthetic, had a similar reaction when a first-look photo of Nick Frost as Hagrid was released last summer.

"Part of me was like: What's the point?" Columbus said on "The Rest Is Entertainment" podcast, per People. "I thought the costumes and everything was going to be different, but it's more of the same. It's all going to be the same."

There's still hope that the new actors will bring different takes on their characters via their performances. But so far, there's very little to go on. With each actor dressed and styled so familiarly, the trailer has an uncanny-valley effect: These are people we've seen before, but not quite. One of my closest friends, who literally has a "Harry Potter" tattoo, said that watching the trailer felt like she fed a prompt into an AI video generator: "Turn 'Harry Potter' into an HBO show."

My friend's reaction was echoed by plenty of fans online. "I was fully unprepared for just how off-putting and uncomfortable this would be to watch," reads one tweet with over 32,000 likes. Another quipped, "Making Chris Columbus look like Scorsese."

Even worse, HBO cast its all-too-familiar spell on this version, giving it the desaturated and dark aesthetic of prestige TV that's not only hard to see on some screens, but doesn't match the story's tone. (This isn't "True Detective." Turn the lights on!)

Without the glow and glimmer of Lumos, along with any flicker of novelty, it's hard to imagine this version of "Potter" working its magic on viewers.

Earlier this month, Apple released the MacBook Neo, a colorful new budget laptop that landed like a bomb in the laptop world. Priced at $599, the newest member of the MacBook family has been a magnet for hot takes in the tech world.

So, is the MacBook Neo on sale during the Amazon Big Spring Sale 2026? Technically, yes.