New releases in fiction, nonfiction and comics that caught our attention.
Despite college being (potentially) some of the best years of your life, it can be hard to enjoy it if you're scrounging every dollar for books, supplies, food and, if you're lucky, the occasional outing with friends. But there is a silver lining: student discounts. While it seems like good discounts can be harder and harder to find for the rest of us, students can find them fairly easily if they know where to look. We’ve collected the best student discounts we could find on useful services, along with some things you’ll enjoy in your down time.
According to the Prison Policy Institute, the US has a higher incarceration rate per 100,000 people in its population than any other NATO country and it’s even higher than the next five member states combined (the UK, Portugal, Canada, France and Belgium).
This is your periodic reminder that AI-powered chatbots still make up things and lie with all the confidence of a GPS system telling you that the shortest way home is to drive through the lake.
Kobo isn’t the first on the color-ereader scene; Boox and Pocketbook have had color ereaders and tablets for years. Both of those companies make beautiful, premium devices that are highly capable and customizable — but they don’t offer the plug-and-play ereader experience of a Kindle or Kobo. Of all the ereaders I’ve tried over the past year, I’ve found Kobos do the best job of combining a user-friendly interface with quality hardware.
Twitch has updated its filtering tools to allow the exclusion of livestreams that feature mature themes, like sexual, violent and profane content.
At I/O 2024, Google’s teaser for Project Astra gave us a glimpse at where AI assistants are going in the future. It’s a multi-modal feature that combines the smarts of Gemini with the kind of image recognition abilities you get in Google Lens, as well as powerful natural language responses. However, while the promo video was slick, after getting to try it out in person, it's clear there’s a long way to go before something like Astra lands on your phone.
Audible is testing a new category of book recommendations based on what a user watched recently on Prime Video. Which, as the name suggests, will show you audiobooks based on what you watch on the Amazon-owned service, TechCrunch reports.