The Rubik’s Cube has been reinvented with more games and many more screens for much more money.

What has long been cherished as a simple toy yet complex puzzle requiring nothing but a healthy amount of twisting, turning, and patience has been rebooted for the 21st century. Naturally, that calls for a few dashes of technology.

Differing from the original Rubik’s Cube, which has six faces that each contain a 3×3 grid, the Rubik’s WOWCube, made available for preorder today, as spotted by The Verge , has six faces with 2×2 grids.

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Cards Against Humanity , the often-vulgar card game, has launched a limited edition of its namesake product without any instructions and with a detailed explanation of each joke, "why it’s funny, and any relevant social, political, or historical context."

Why? Because, produced in this form, "Cards Against Humanity Explains the Joke" is not a game at all, which would be subject to tariffs as the cards are produced overseas. Instead, the product is "information material" and thus not sanctionable under the law Trump has been using—and CAH says it has obtained a ruling to this effect from Customs and Border Patrol.

"What if DHS Secretary and Dog Murderer Kristi Noem gets mad and decides that Cards Against Humanity Explains the Joke is not informational material?" the company asks in an FAQ about the new edition. (If you don't follow US politics, Noem really did kill her dog Cricket .) Answer: "She can fuck right off, because we got a binding ruling from Trump’s own government that confirms this product is informational and 100% exempt from his stupid tariffs."

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At this point, you sort of expect Donald Trump's big-picture assaults on free speech, foreigners, and the rule of law. (Sometimes, as in the case of the new outright assault on US higher ed , all three are packaged in one convenient wrapper.) Although troubling and dangerous, these kinds of attacks are all at least predictably unhinged; most are drawn from the standard authoritarian playbook or its more recent " illiberal democracies " update.

It's when you look into the details, though, that one is constantly reminded: Nothing is too petty to be corrupted in Trumpworld.

Not even "out of office" auto-replies.

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AI poses an obvious danger to millennia-long human fight to find the truth. Large language model "hallucinations," vocal deepfakes, and now increased use of video deepfakes have all had a blurring effect on facts, letting bad actors around the globe brush off even recorded events as mere "fake news."

The danger is perhaps most acute in the political realm, where deepfake audio and video can make any politician say or appear to do anything. In such a climate, our most senior elected officials have a special duty to model truth-seeking behavior and responsible AI use.

But what's the fun in that, when you can just blow up negotiations over a budget impasse by posting a deepfake video of your political opponents calling themselves "a bunch of woke pieces of shit" while mariachi music plays in the background? Oh—and did I mention the fake mustache? Or the CGI sombrero?

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Epic Games has disabled a Fortnite emote based on the HBO show Peacemaker after the latest episode cast the dancing animation in a potentially different light.

The remainder of this post contains spoilers for Season 2 of Peacemaker.

The "Peaceful Hips" emote, which was first introduced to the game on September 15, mirrors the dance motions that John Cena's character Christopher Smith makes during the opening credits sequence for the show's second season. In the dance and the emote (which can be applied to any character in-game), the dancer briefly flails their arms at opposing right angles before shaking their hips seductively.

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Late last week, The Hollywood Reporter ran a story about an "AI Stan Lee hologram" that would be appearing at the LA Comic Con this weekend . Nearly seven years after the famous Marvel Comics creator’s death at the age of 95 , fans will be able to pay $15 to $20 this weekend to chat with a life-sized, AI-powered avatar of Lee in an enclosed booth at the show.

The instant response from many fans and media outlets to the idea was not kind, to say the least. A writer for TheGamer called the very idea "demonic" and said we need to "kill it with fire before it’s too late." The AV Club urged its readers not to pay to see "the anguished digital ghost of a beloved comic book creator, repurposed as a trap for chumps!" Reactions on a popular Reddit thread ranged from calling it "incredibly disrespectful" and "in bad taste" to "ghoulish" and "so fucked up," with very little that was more receptive to the concept.

But Chris DeMoulin, the CEO of the parent company behind LA Comic Con, urged critics to come see the AI-powered hologram for themselves before rushing to judgment. "We're not afraid of people seeing it and we're not afraid of criticism," he told Ars. "I’m just a fan of informed criticism, and I think most of what's been out there so far has not really been informed."

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The smouldering star of Once Upon a Time in the West, 8½ and The Leopard had her best roles for Italian directors
• Claudia Cardinale, star of The Leopard, dies aged 87
• Claudia Cardinale: a life in pictures

Claudia Cardinale was part of the great wave of Italian movie stars whose postwar career took them from Europe to Hollywood; these included Sophia Loren, Gina Lollobrigida and Monica Vitti, who the American film industry prized not merely for their beauty but also for their mystery: an exotic feline allure and sense of toughness and survival, and even tragedy. But Cardinale perhaps had something her contemporaries didn’t: a kind of simplicity and frankness to go with the sensual allure. She often played opposite Alain Delon, whose own beauty complemented – almost merged with – hers.

In Visconti’s early masterpiece Rocco and His Brothers from 1960, Cardinale played Ginetta, engaged to one of Rocco’s brothers from the uncouth south and her parents are openly hostile when their son-in-law’s entire family make their chaotic appearance. She was radiant in Luchino Visconti’s The Leopard in 1963, as wealthy merchant’s daughter Angelica on whom Burt Lancaster’s Prince bestows his frank admiration even as she is engaged to his nephew Tancredi, played by Delon. In the famed final ball sequence, she plays her part by inviting Lancaster’s ageing lion to dance, and perhaps also to offer him an elegant symbolic exit from his own prestige.

Tron theatre, Glasgow
Uma Nada-Rajah writes with polemical force from firsthand experience of a health system on its knees

A black hole sign is the dark area of a CT scan that suggests a haemorrhage on the brain. A black hole could also be the gap that has opened up in the ceiling of a windowless A&E department, where a drip becomes a torrent, a metaphor for a crumbling NHS. And a “black hole of greed” is what playwright Uma Nada-Rajah sees in a system in which profit frequently comes before health.

As a staff nurse who works in critical care, Nada-Rajah writes with authority. All her characters, whether it is the recovering alcoholic with hours to live (Beruce Khan), the self-harming young woman who claims to have had a fall (Betty Valencia), the delirious octogenarian who thinks she is at a 1970s disco (Ann Louise Ross) or the man with a spike in his buttocks (Martin Docherty), have the ring of messy truth.

At Tron theatre, Glasgow , until 4 October. Then at Traverse theatre, Edinburgh , 8–18 October.

Kim A Snyder’s documentary highlights the defenders of young readers’ rights to see their lives in print facing rightwing attacks

There is real and genuine fear about young people’s use of pornography; usually, that conversation is about exposure to porn online, not in libraries. But this excellent culture wars documentary tells the story of book-banning in red states such as Florida and Texas, where religious rightwingers are crusading to protect children from “obscene” books. Usually that means titles about LGBTQ+ issues or race, and books about girls getting their period aren’t safe either. In Tennessee, a school board banned Maus, the graphic novel memoir of the Holocaust by Art Spiegelman, for mouse nudity . The utter nonsense of it would be funny if it wasn’t so disturbing.

The most recent purge began in 2021 with a list of 850 books circulated by Texas state representative Matt Krause (over 60% were books with LGBTQ+ themes). Rightwing Florida governor Ron DeSantis piled in, followed by Moms for Liberty, a rightwing parents’ rights group (don’t ask them about big dollar funders). Documentary maker Kim A Snyder and her editors cleverly work in footage of Nazi book burning and clips from classic movies and TV into their film.