When you move across the Atlantic armed with only one year of self-taught Portuguese and a joie de vivre that's been chewed up and spit out by two years of a pandemic, things in your day-to-day life can start to feel a little … desperate. One day you're laughing at your own confusion and the next you're, I don't know, sobbing comically in a café bathroom because you ordered a latte and got bread instead. Let's face it--regardless of whether or not you're feeling a little lost in Europe's westernmost country, big wins are few and far between for any of us these days. In comes Wordle, a simple game with predictable rules, daily wins, a mediated dopamine rush, and a lighter reason to check in with your loved ones. And god was it a hit.

In May 2017, Ford announced that it had replaced its CEO, Mark Fields, who had been with the company since 1989, with Jim Hackett. Despite being on Ford's board since 2013, Hackett was probably best known for leading Steelcase, the large office-furniture company, for decades and turning around its fortunes, as well as for working with the University of Michigan to bring NFL coach Jim Harbaugh to the school. Other than the fact that all these things are based in Michigan, there wasn't really much that pointed to Hackett as the person who would lead the 114-year-old company into the future. But his first few months at the helm have cemented his vision for Ford. Earlier this month he released a treatise doubling down on the company's commitment to autonomous vehicles and the loosely defined concept of "mobility" and the "transport operating system" of the future.

Movie studios have a long tradition of testing out new films to see how audiences react before launching them in wide release. But with their latest research innovation, Disney is taking it to a whole new level. Now as you're settling in to watch the latest Disney blockbuster, the movie could also be watching you. And while this could signal an exciting new era of responsive storytelling in which movies are shaped around our likes and dislikes in real time, it also raises some red flags about yet another frontier in personal data collection. At a conference in July, Disney Research presented a new process called factorized variational autoencoders (FVAEs).