Dispatched by the crown as part of a secret expedition to a remote island part of the realm, you’re ready for a life of adventure. But in third-person RPG Of Ash and Steel you’re not one of the highly-trained, well-armored holy knights trying to enforce the will of the king… you’re the clever orphan-turned-cartographer along for the ride because the maps of the island, Grayshaft, are pretty bad. Perhaps they’re bad because the island suffers periodic volcanic eruptions so devastating that it’s blanketed in deadly ash that cakes inside your lungs and kills you, eruptions so awful that ships avoid the island for the entire year when one seems imminent.
Which is obviously why brave cartographer Tristan has agreed to go there. And so like many fantasy protagonists, Tristan will soon be in way over his head—all because he wanted a bit of adventure—when the holy knights are all dead and he’s the only one left to deliver the urgent missive. At least, that’s what a hands-on preview with a beta build tutorial and first few hours of Ash and Steel told me.
Of Ash & Steel – First Screenshots
Of Ash and Steel looks like a pretty traditional RPG, reminiscent of classics from the 2000s. It’s unapologetic about not giving you quest markers or anything but in-world directions, but at the same time it does highlight loot on the ground or chests you can interact with when you’re near them. It’s somewhere between Gothic and the first Witcher game, in its own way, with a nod toward the survival-centric games of the last decade or so. While it doesn’t go all-in on survival and encumbrance, Ash and Steel still has something of the 2019 RPG Outward in it.
It’s unapologetic about not giving you quest markers or anything but in-world directions.
More than anything, Of Ash and Steel feels like a game in the legacy of dearly departed mid-tier RPG studio Piranha Bytes, creators of the Gothic, Risen, and Elex series. That includes the signature campy acting mixed in with some decent drama, as well as plenty of oddball and unexpected humor. (One early quest has you finding the soiled trousers of a man who, when drunk, just craps himself and leaves the pants right there to clean up later.)
Perhaps its most old-school feature is how it has no level scaling in its world—creatures are a fixed level in a fixed location, forever. You’re warned early on that going off the path can be dangerous, and each new enemy encounter is often a question of getting close enough to see if it massively out-levels you before you decide to try and take it on or not—and hope for good loot when you do. Coupled with that lethal-but-rewarding exploration is the rudiments of a survival system, where staying fed and watered is a must to survive, and setting up shop at pre-determined campsites lets Tristan rest and cook to regain hit points and pick up buffs. It also passes time, which is useful in a world where the NPCs and monsters follow a schedule of their own as to when and where they appear, or even when they’re taking a nap and won’t talk to you about your very urgent quest.
Tristan has three skill trees, and perhaps the most pressing one is Combat. Investing in combat skills lets you pick up to three different stances to fight from, each of which looks to have different effects based on what kind of weapons you’re wielding—there were axes, swords, clubs, daggers, and a crossbow. Sadly, poor starter Tristan wasn’t strong or competent enough to wield most of them.
Which is a big part of what I think the story developer Fire Frost is telling with Of Ash and Steel. This isn’t a fantasy hero game where your character starts as competent at any useful skills relevant to his current situation. It’s going to be a zero-to-hero story, with other characters in the world reacting to Tristan as he grows stronger. “If at the beginning of the game you were treated like a ragamuffin,” said Fire Frost, “by the end of the game the characters will literally bow to your feet.”
There was a hint of that in action during the preview play, as characters who previously saw Tristan dressed only in threadbare clothing later had complimentary things to say about a suit of basic armor I’d purchased. Where before they’d just asked: “Are you really wearing that?” they later said, “Ah, I had a sturdy suit like that when I was younger.”
And a sturdy suit of armor is much needed, because the fighting can get pretty brutal. Armor will help you survive a few hits, but the stamina-based combat was really based around perfectly timed dodges and parries. Tristan’s attacks, at least at the start of the game, are slow and clumsy—he’s literally never fought before. As he got combat skills, though, he moved more confidently and picked up the ability to parry in a way that opened up enemies for counterattacks. That blended well with a fast knife, which let him get in those hits before quickly going back on his guard. Still, there’s some tweaking to do on the early stages of the fighting—some people will definitely bounce right off of how clumsy Tristan was, or just won’t be familiar with the time-honored strategy of “train the difficult enemy into a nearby powerful NPC.”
A sturdy suit of armor is much needed, because the fighting can get pretty brutal.
Speaking of trying to survive, that’s the focus of Tristan’s other two skill trees: Survival and Crafting. They’re much more down-to-earth, practical skillsets simply due to their nature. Survival lets you keep yourself fed and alive, while Crafting lets you upgrade and upkeep your equipment. Crafting also does one very important job: Makes you money. Quests and other odd jobs are a great source of experience and cash, sure, but paying people to train Tristan in all these new skills ain’t cheap.
What was cool is that investments of money and skill points into the Craft and Survival trees actually did pay off in combat. A good craftsman can better sharpen their weapon for bonus damage, or reinforce their armor for extra defense. Survivalists, meanwhile, could pick up nasty tricks like thrown daggers and the use of poisons on their weapons—though poor preview Tristan was a bit too intellectually dull and low-level to get to try those skills out.
Even with all the advantages of level and time, however, Of Ash and Steel is definitely going to be a game where you get your butt kicked. A lot. Quicksave, I expect, is Tristan’s greatest friend in the world. Enemies hit hard, and enemies that are higher level than you hit extremely hard—or even so fast that poor low-level Tristan simply stood no chance of reacting in time, let alone getting a single attack in. As a result, he got splatted by a lot of things. He got mauled by a giant rat-thing. Trampled by a big bug. Eaten by a lizard-thing. Dismembered by all manner of bandits, both living and apparently undead.
And the only dang reason Tristan didn’t get splatted by this giant troll is because when everything can splat you, well, you get pretty good pretty fast at running and climbing your way out of danger.
While some people might find that kind of thing frustrating, Of Ash and Steel was pretty nice on that count. The action-RPG combat was somehow clunkier than a FromSoftware game but settled into its own rhythm after a while, and hopefully gets more and more fluid with more skills and abilities in the full game.
Don’t expect miracles from Of Ash and Steel, but the preview was evidence of a promising mid-tier RPG that’ll likely enthuse ye olde genre purists while still being accessible and interesting enough to draw in lovers of more modern character-driven action.
Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the studies that caught my eye this week.
First up, a bummer! NASA is facing devastating cuts to Earth science, and science in general, which is pretty important for an agency tasked with understanding the universe. I try to keep this newsletter relatively downer-free, but current events are not cooperating with this aim.
Then: the early bird gets the comet, a donkey destined for decapitation, a grand universal theory of coolness, and the case of the stolen exomoons.
Knowing about the planet we live on is good, actually
This may sound obvious for the esteemed readers of this newsletter, but it apparently bears repeating: Earth, our home planet and the only known life-bearing world in the vast expanse of spacetime, is worthy of some passing interest.
This is true because—and I can’t stress this enough—we live on planet Earth. All our bones and guts and snacks are here, so it’s probably wise to get the lay of the land. But as a bonus, Earth is wildly interesting, a restless substrate unlike anything we have seen in our own solar system or beyond it.
Despite these considerations, the Trump administration plans to gut NASA’s Earth Science Division (ESD), the world leader in world-watching. In a letter published in Science, researchers from the recently dissolved NASA Earth Science Advisory Committee lamented the administration’s proposed budget cut of more than 50 percent to ESD, warning that it “would come at a profound cost to US society and scientific leadership.”
“NASA ESD accounted for just 0.03 percent of US spending in 2024,” said researchers led by Dylan Millet of the University of Minnesota. “This investment returns its value many times over by improving predictions, by spurring technological innovation and high-tech jobs, and by forging the knowledge of the planet that is needed for short- and long-term planning.”
“The budget cuts proposed for ESD would cancel crucial satellites that observe Earth and its atmosphere, gut US science and engineering expertise, and potentially lead to the closure of NASA research centers,” the team said. “Given that the cuts would prevent the US from training and preparing the next generation of the scientific and technical workforce, the consequences would be long-lasting.”
This is just the latest appeal from scientists on behalf of NASA, which is also facing catastrophic cuts to its overall Science Mission Directorate (SMD), the arm that oversees ESD. Last week, every past administrator of the SMD, the agency’s top job for science leadership, signed a letter urging Congress to reject the cuts of about 47 percent to the directorate.
“Each one of us knows what it’s like to shepherd an ambitious project forward, knowing that its payoff will come years after we have left the agency,” the administrators said. “This proposed budget ends nearly all future investments for both new missions and advanced technology for science. It walks away from dozens of current, extraordinarily successful and productive science missions in extended operations on a combined budget that is only about three percent of NASA’s annual funding.”
Fortunately, the US Senate appropriations committee has voted in favor of a bill rejecting the science cuts, but it has a long road to go down before taking effect, with plenty of opportunity to fall apart.
Needless to say, turning a blind eye to Earth at a time when our activities are reshaping its climate and biosphere, would be a huge loss. As one last twist of the knife, Trump just gave the top job at NASA to the guy from TheReal World—all while ignoring the actual real world.
In other news…
Mark your calendars for July 2061
Barbieri, Cesare et al. “Preparing for the 2061 return of Halley’s comet. A rendezvous mission with an innovative imaging system.” Planetary and Space Science.
Prepare for the return of everyone’s favorite space iceball: Comet Halley. Scientists have flagged the comet’s next visit as arriving in the summer of 2061 and proposed an audacious space rendezvous with Halley on its wild ride toward the Sun.
“Although the crucial phases of the comet’s ingress in the inner Solar System are still more than 30 years in the future, we started to examine the feasibility of a space mission using present-day rockets and technologies,” said researchers led by Cesare Barbieri of the University of Padova.
God bless the astro-preppers. Sure, this event will occur decades into the future, in the twilight of the millennials. But they make a pretty good case that we should get moving if we want to take full advantage of the iconic visitor, which “will be better positioned for observation from terrestrial observers than during the 1985–1986 apparition, as it will be on the same side of the Sun as the Earth.”
“We stress that a concerted effort is needed in the current decade to plan and approve a rendezvous mission to [Comet Halley],” the team concluded. “Indeed, the scenario here described needs launches before 2040, less than 15 years from now.”
The last days of a sacrificial ass
Arnold, Elizabeth et al. “An isotopic perspective on equid selection in cult at Tell eṣ-Ṣâfi/Gath, Israel.” PLOS ONE.
Who would have guessed that a study about a Bronze Age donkey corpse would be a tear-jerker? Researchers have shed new light on female donkeys (or jennies), which were imported from Egypt to the Tell es-Safi/Gath site in Israel some 5,000 years ago for ritual purposes.
One specimen, called EQ1, is particularly noteworthy because it was decapitated and had its limbs tied together, unlike all the other donkeys buried at the site. “It is evident the animal was sacrificed, the head entirely cut off and carefully placed on the abdomen facing in the opposite direction,” said researchers led by Elizabeth Arnold of Grand Valley State University.
The four donkey burials at Tell eṣ-Ṣâfi/Gath. Image: Arnold et al., 2025, PLOS One, CC-BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
“It can be deduced that even though EQ1 was grazed locally toward the end of her life, she was treated slightly differently from the other local equids,” the team continued. “This imported donkey was kept penned and foddered with hay that was harvested in the valley, a product of dry farmed cereals. This donkey was never herded with other livestock east of the site.”
The unique treatment of EQ1 suggests that the “Egyptian donkey might have been seen as an exotic and special animal, worthy of specific ritual use,” the study concluded. While it’s truly impressive that so much about this jenny can be inferred from her bones, there’s also an eerie pathos to imagining the animal hanging out for months, receiving preferential treatment, unaware of the sand flowing through the hourglass.
It’s a real cool club, and you’re not part of it
Pezzuti, Todd and Warren Caleb et al. “Cool People,” Journal of Experimental Psychology.
Science has invested its prodigious powers into the ultimate social mystery: What makes a person “cool”? Is it putting “cool” in scare quotes? (No!). Researchers have now developed a working theory of coolness by asking nearly 6,000 people in Australia, Chile, China, Hong Kong, Germany, India, Mexico, Nigeria, Spain, South Africa, South Korea, Turkey, and the United States to define this much-coveted attribute.
The results revealed six main traits associated with cool people, which were distinct from traits linked with “good” people. “Cool people are perceived to be more extraverted, hedonistic, powerful, adventurous, open, and autonomous, whereas good people are more conforming, traditional, secure, warm, agreeable, universalistic, conscientious, and calm,” said authors Todd Pezzuti of Universidad Adolfo Ibañez, Caleb Warren of the University of Arizona, and Jinjie Chen of the University of Georgia.
“This pattern is stable across countries, which suggests that the meaning of cool has crystallized on a similar set of values and traits around the globe,” the team said.
There you go, the cheat code to coolness. I’m exhausted just reading it.
Grand Theft Moons
Dencs, Zoltán et al. “Grand theft moons: Formation of habitable moons around giant planets.” Astronomy & Astrophysics.
The winner of Best Study Title this week goes to “Grand theft moons,” which explores how stars might steal moons from their own planets, and whether these “exomoons” could be habitable. The study models the formation of exomoons around giant gas worlds at various distances from their stars, measured in astronomical units (au), where one au is the distance between Earth and the Sun.
Planets with orbits of one or two au are more likely to sport exomoons in the habitable zone, but they are also at risk of stars yanking the exomoons away in brazen acts of “stellar theft,” according to the study.
“Our simulations show that moons with masses between Mars and Earth could form around planets with masses about ten times that of Jupiter, and many of these moons could potentially be habitable at 1 − 2 au stellar distances,” said researchers led by Zoltán Dencs of the Gothard Astrophysical Observatory, “These findings suggest that it is worth investigating not only rocky planets but also gas giants for Earth-like habitable environments.”
In addition to raising some fascinating questions, let’s hope this study inspires Rockstar to take the GTA franchise to outer space. I want to throw an astronaut off a lunar buggy and take it for a joyride across the Moon.
Early signs of Alzheimer’s disease may be hidden in the way a person speaks, but it’s not yet clear which details of our diction are most critical for diagnosis.
A study from 2023 suggests that as we age, how we say something may matter more than what we say. Researchers at the University of Toronto think the pace of everyday speech may be a better indicator of cognitive decline than difficulty finding a word.
Lethologica, also known as ‘tip of the tongue’ phenomenon, is experienced by young and old alike. But as we grow older, finding the name for things can become more challenging, especially over the age of 60.
To explore why that is, researchers at the University of Toronto asked 125 healthy adults, between the ages of 18 and 90, to describe a scene in detail.
Related: 5 Early, Speech-Related Signs You’re at Risk of Alzheimer’s Disease
Next, the participants were shown pictures of everyday objects while listening to audio that was designed to confirm or confuse them.
For instance, if participants were shown a picture of a broom, the audio might say ‘groom’, which helps them recall the word through rhyme. But on the flip side, the audio might also offer a related word like ‘mop’, which can lead the brain astray, momentarily.
The faster a person’s natural speech in the first task, the more quickly they came up with answers in the second task.
The findings align with the ‘processing speed theory’, which argues that a general slowdown in cognitive processing lies at the very center of cognitive decline, not a slowdown in memory centers specifically.
“It is clear that older adults are significantly slower than younger adults in completing various cognitive tasks, including word-production tasks such as picture naming, answering questions, or reading written words,” explained a team led by University of Toronto psychologist Hsi T. Wei.
“In natural speech, older adults also tend to produce more dysfluencies such as unfilled and filled pauses (e.g., “uh” and “um”) in between speech and have a generally slower speech rate.”
In a 2024 piece for The Conversation, dementia researcher Claire Lancaster said that the study from Toronto “has opened exciting doors… showing that it’s not just what we say but how fast we say it that can reveal cognitive changes.”
Recently, some AI algorithms have even been able to predict an Alzheimer’s diagnosis with an accuracy of 78.5 percent using speech patterns alone.
Other studies have found that patients with more signs of amyloid plaque in their brain are 1.2 times more likely to show speech-related problems.
The verbal fluency test can offer insights into which regions of the brain are affected by cognitive decline.(Motortion/Canva)
Amyloid plaques are a hallmark of Alzheimer’s disease.
In 2024, researchers at Stanford University led a study that found longer pauses and slower speech rates were also associated with higher levels of tangled tau proteins, another hallmark of Alzheimer’s.
Related: There’s a Critical Thing We Can All Do to Hold Alzheimer’s Symptoms at Bay
“This suggests that speech changes reflect development of Alzheimer’s disease pathology even in the absence of overt cognitive impairment,” the authors of the study concluded.
The groundwork is still being laid, but scientists are getting closer to decoding the nuances of human speech to figure out what our words are saying about our brains.
The 2023 study was published in Aging, Neuropsychology, and Cognition.
At least 87 Palestinians have been killed since dawn in Israeli attacks across Gaza, with dozens of children dying from malnutrition during Israel’s punishing months-long blockade, as ceasefire talks reportedly stall.
Among the victims on Saturday, 14 were killed in Gaza City, four of them in an Israeli strike on a residence on Jaffa Street in the Tuffah area, which injured 10 others.
At least 30 aid seekers were killed by Israeli army fire north of Rafah, southern Gaza, near the one operating GHF site, which rights groups and the United Nations have slammed as “human slaughterhouses” and “death traps”.
According to Al Jazeera Mubasher, Israeli forces fired directly at Palestinians in front of the aid distribution centre in the al-Shakoush area of Rafah.
Reporting from Deir el-Balah, Al Jazeera’s Hani Mahmoud said the Israeli army opened fire indiscriminately on a large crowd during one of the attacks.
“Many desperate families in the north have been making dangerous journeys all the way to the south to reach the only operating distribution centre in Rafah,” he said.
“Many of the bodies are still on the ground,” Mahmoud said, adding that those who were wounded in the attack have been transferred to Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis.
Amid relentless daily carnage rained upon starving aid seekers and the ongoing Israeli blockade, Gaza’s Government Media Office said 67 children have now died due to malnutrition, and 650,000 children under the age of five are at “real and immediate risk of acute malnutrition in the coming weeks”.
“Over the past three days, we have recorded dozens of deaths due to shortages of food and essential medical supplies, in an extremely cruel humanitarian situation,” the statement read.
“This shocking reality reflects the scale of the unprecedented humanitarian tragedy in Gaza,” the statement added.
Israel is engineering a “cruel and Machiavellian scheme to kill” in Gaza, the head of the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) said on Friday, as the world body reported that since May, when GHF began its operations, some 800 Palestinians have been killed while seeking aid.
“Under our watch, Gaza has become the graveyard of children [and] starving people,” UNRWA chief Philippe Lazzarini said.
Mass displacement, expulsion ‘illegal and immoral’
As the Israeli military announced on Saturday that its forces attacked Gaza 250 times in the last 48 hours, Israeli officials have continued to push a plan to forcibly displace and eventually expel Palestinians.
Earlier this week, Defense Minister Israel Katz announced a plan to build a so-called “humanitarian city” which will house 2.1 million Palestinians on the rubble of parts of the city of Rafah, which has been razed to the ground.
But Palestinians in Gaza have rejected the plan and reiterated that they would not leave the enclave. Rights groups, international organisations and several nations have slammed it as laying the ground for “ethnic cleansing”, the forcible removal of a population from its homeland.
Israeli political analyst Akiva Eldar told Al Jazeera on Saturday that the majority of Israelis are “really appalled” by Katz’s plan, which would be “illegal and immoral”.
“Anybody who will participate in this disgusting project will be involved in war crimes,” Elder said.
The message underlying the plan, he said, is that “there can’t be two people between the river and the sea, and those who deserve to have a state are only the Jewish people.”
As Israel announces its intention to force the population of Gaza into Rafah, Middle East professor at the University of Turin, Lorenzo Kamel, told Al Jazeera that the expulsion of Palestinians from their land and their concentration in restricted areas is nothing new.
In 1948, 77 years ago to this day, 70,000 Palestinians were expelled from the village of Lydda during what became known as the “march of death”.
“Many of them ended up in the Gaza Strip,” Kamel said, adding that the Israeli authorities have been forcing Palestinians into spaces similar to concentration camps for decades.
“This is not something new, but it has accelerated in the past months,” he said. The plan to gather the Gaza population on the ruins of Rafah is therefore “nothing but another camp in preparation for the deportation from the Gaza Strip”.
Ceasefire talks hang in the balance
Negotiations taking place in Qatar to cement a truce are stalling over the extent of Israeli forces’ withdrawal from the Strip, according to Palestinian and Israeli sources familiar with the matter, the Reuters news agency reported on Saturday.
The indirect talks are expected to continue, despite the latest obstacles in clinching a deal based on a US proposal for a 60-day ceasefire.
A Palestinian source said Hamas has not accepted the withdrawal maps which Israel has proposed, as they would leave about 40 percent of the territory under Israeli occupation, including all of Rafah and further territories in northern and eastern Gaza.
Matters regarding the full and free flow of aid to a starving population, and guarantees, were also presenting a challenge.
Two Israeli sources said Hamas wants Israel to retreat to lines it held in a previous ceasefire, before it renewed its offensive in March.
Delegations from Israel and Hamas have been in Qatar since Sunday in a renewed push for an agreement.
CANBERRA, July 12 (Xinhua) — A new Australian-led study has uncovered how ancient lungfish adapted to life on land, offering key insights into vertebrate evolution.
Flinders University researchers in South Australia and international collaborators used advanced 3D technology to study 380-million-year-old lungfish jaws from Western Australia’s Gogo fossil field.
Scientists used 3D finite element modeling, a technique commonly used in engineering, to analyze fossilized lungfish jaws, revealing how different species co-existed in Devonian “Age of Fishes” reef ecosystems, according to a Flinders University statement released on Friday.
Lungfish are the closest living fish relatives of tetrapods, the group that includes all four-limbed vertebrates such as humans, “which means they are our closest ‘fishy’ relatives,” said the study’s corresponding author Alice Clement from Flinders University.
The Gogo Formation, which exhibits exceptional preservation of a Devonian reef community, has revealed the greatest lungfish diversity ever, with 11 species displaying varied skull and jaw shapes. For the first time, their biomechanical functions have been reconstructed, uncovering details of their diet and predatory abilities, said the study published in the journal iScience.
“We’re slowly teasing apart the details of how the bodies and lifestyles of these animals changed, as they moved from being fish that lived in water, to becoming tetrapods that moved about on land,” said Clement.
The study’s dataset provides the most detailed fossil fish bite analysis to date, revealing diverse feeding adaptations and how different Gogo lungfish species shared the same environment by specializing in different foods or feeding strategies. Enditem
Superman possesses nearly every superpower imaginable: immense strength, flight, X-ray vision, and, apparently, watch collecting. At least that’s the takeaway from seeing David Corenswet, who plays Clark Kent in the new Superman movie, on the red carpet this week. The actor showed off a range of superhero-worthy watches this week, including a steel Cartier Tank Américaine and Rolex’s brand-new version of the 1908 on one of the sleekest gold bracelets in the industry.
It remains to be seen just how deep Corenswet’s horological interest delves, but he’s certainly off to a good start. Let’s start with his Cartier. The Américaine, launched in 1988 and based upon the classic Cintrée, is a fan favorite for its curved case and compelling design, while the still relatively new 1908 is not only a fresh Rolex collection, but is also suffused with the type of vintage inspiration that makes collectors salivate. They’re two very different watches, to be sure, but the net effect is the same. Each conveys a sense of elegance and timelessness that parallels their brands’ longevity in the horological arena.
Jose Perez/Bauer-Griffin
River Callaway/Getty Images
Appearing at a Superman fan event in London, Corenswet wore his large-size Américaine with a double-breasted velvet dinner jacket and red bow tie—a clever nod to his character’s suit and a fit made easier to pull off thanks to his 6’4” frame and otherworldly handsomeness. The Américaine, of course, was made precisely for this type of red-carpet environ. While it might not be an ultra-thin piece in the manner of a midcentury Vacheron or AP its curved case architecture hugs the wrist, while its silvered dial with Roman numerals and blued sword hands looks hella elegant. (“Hellegant?”) The Large model also receives extra points for its automatic movement, a touch that hearkens back to vintage Cartier.
Corenswet’s second look from the Superman premiere in Los Angeles included a three-piece blue pinstripe suit—very Clark Kent—and the Rolex 1908 in yellow gold on its matching Settimo bracelet, a multi-link design that calls to mind the model’s star bracelet maker Gay Frères fashioned in the mid-20th centuryTK. Based upon a vintage reference from the brand’s archive, the 1908 replaced the Cellini as Rolex’s contemporary dress watch offering in 2023 and immediately earned watch-guy points for its excellent proportions, new automatic Calibre 7140 movement, beautiful guilloché dial in rice-grain motif, and classic fluted bezel. Available in yellow gold, white gold, or platinum on either leather or the Settimo bracelet (depending upon the configuration), Corenswet’s 1908 features a white dial with applied yellow gold indices, an outer railroad minute track, and a sub-seconds display above 6 o’clock.
A classic, curvaceous Cartier and a new Rolex dress model that pulls from the brand’s powerful back catalog…quite a one-two punch, if you ask us. If he survives Lex Luthor, maybe someone can hook the guy up with a proper sports watch to jive with the whole “Man of Steel” thing!
Tristar Media
Courtesy of Omega
Jonathan Bailey’s Omega Railmaster
Appearing on his wrist in both the film’s Berlin premiere as well as in the actual movie itself, the Omega Railmaster is a fitting choice for Jonathan’s Bailey Dr. Henry Loomis, a paleontologist trying to survive a dino onslaught in the new Jurassic World Rebirth. The Railmaster debuted in 1957 as antimagnetic wristwatch for scientists alongside the Seamaster 300 and original Speedmaster. While it never quite achieved the fame of the brand’s dive watch and Moonwatch, the Railmaster nevertheless remained a fan favorite, and received new versions this year with monochromatic and tropical-looking gradient dials paired to straps or bracelets.
TheStewartofNY
Courtesy Jaeger LeCoultre
Nicholas Hoult’s Jaeger-LeCoultre Reverso Tribute Chronograph Pink Gold
Nicholas Hoult rocked a suite of impressive JLC models this past week on the Superman press tour. In New York City, he appeared wearing the Reverso Tribute Chronograph Pink Gold, a cool chronograph take on the maison’s flagship model. The Reverso is the gold-standard for flippalbe watches and this one makes full use of the dual sides. On one side is a beautiful time-only dial on one side and a unique skeletonized display a unique retrograde 30-minute totalizer on the other. (I would’ve pegged Lex Luthor for more of a Geophysic guy, myself, but it’s tough to argue with a solid-gold reversible chronograph.)
Tom Holland’s Rolex Cosmograph Daytona
LONDON, ENGLAND – JULY 08: Tom Holland reacts to the action court-side on day nine of the Wimbledon Tennis Championships at the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club on July 08, 2025 in London, England. (Photo by Karwai Tang/WireImage)Karwai Tang
Man, lots of superheroes and supervillains with great watches this week. Here’s another: Tom Holland, aka Spider-Man, rocking a splendid, solid-platinum Rolex Cosmograph Daytona ref. 126506 at Wimbledon. Holland’s watch is special on its own but his Daytona goes even further. A closer look at the dial reveals 11 diamond indices in place of the standard applied hour markers, making for an under-the-radar, IYKYK sort of take on the brand’s famed racing chronograph. Owned by numerous actors and musicians, the platinum Daytona is clearly a fan favorite.
Andrew Garfield’s Omega De Ville Trésor
Wimbledon or the multi-verse? Fellow Spider-Man Andrew Garfield stepped out at center court in a classy Omega De Ville Trésor, a subtle and handsome dress watch in a 40-mm stainless steel case with a silvered dial, applied indices and matching pencil hands, and a date window at 6 o’clock. Recalling vintage mid-century Omega designs, it’s one of the quieter, more under-the-radar models in the brand’s contemporary catalog. Powered by the brand’s Co-Axial Master Chronometer Calibre 8910—which is visible via a sapphire caseback—it’s more than fair to call it a serious Watch-Guy Watch.
This service is skinned another way in the Chat app, which presents a two-way conversation system, with your language on one side and your partner’s language on the other, upside-down. There’s no button-pressing in this setup: Each speaker simply talks into a microphone on either side of the handheld, and a translation is both played and displayed in text on their side of the screen. It’s the same concept as the one-click translation, but more hands-free.
The other major feature is a photo-based translation app, which works exactly as you think it should by snapping a picture of text in a foreign language. The unit supports 40 languages, many with multiple dialects, and boasts support for “93+ accents.” Any of those languages can be translated into any other if you’re online, either via Wi-Fi or connected via a cellular network.
But the killer feature of the T1 is that you can download offline language packs, which lean on the unit’s AI-powered CPU to translate text when you’re not connected. The device supports 31 offline language pairs, but note that’s not the same as 31 languages. Korean-to-Thai translation is supported, as is Korean-to-Russian, but you can’t translate Thai to Russian unless you’re online. For English, only 10 language pairs are supported, and each combination you wish to use must be downloaded to the device in advance, when you do have a connection.
Photograph: Chris Null
Translations are fast—if not quite completed in the 0.2 seconds that Timekettle claims—and accuracy was as good as any standard translator I tested it against. It was a more intuitive way to translate audio than using Google Translate (et al.) on a smartphone, though the Google method seems to be well understood globally these days, mitigating that advantage.
I didn’t notice any real difference in quality or speed between online and offline translations across a range of language tests, and many of my text-based translations turned in identical results (perhaps suspiciously so) to what I got with Google Translate. Voiced translations aren’t perfect, as they never are with these devices, but they roughly met the 90 percent accuracy that Timekettle promises. Make sure to run an operating system update (you won’t be prompted to do so; the option is buried in the “Settings” menu) to make the handoff between offline and online modes more seamless.
Screen Woes
The only major downside of the device is the screen, which has a sad 540 x 1080-pixel resolution, making it difficult to capture much with the 8-megapixel camera to translate at one time. While I can easily photograph a full screen of text with my cell phone for translation, the T1 was able to parse out only a few lines at a time due to its limited resolution. When I zoomed out, the results were usually wildly inaccurate or wholly illegible. Getting closer to the text was ultimately required to get a proper translation with the T1’s camera.
Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi. File
| Photo Credit: AP
Iran plans to cooperate with the U.N. nuclear watchdog despite restrictions imposed by its parliament, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said on Saturday (July 12, 2025), but stressed that access to its bombed nuclear sites posed security and safety issues.
The new law stipulates that any future inspection of Iran’s nuclear sites by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) needs approval by the Supreme National Security Council, Iran’s top security body.
“The risk of spreading radioactive materials and the risk of exploding leftover munitions … are serious,” state media cited Mr. Araghchi as saying. “For us, IAEA inspectors approaching nuclear sites has both a security aspect … and the safety of the inspectors themselves is a matter that must be examined.”
While Iran’s cooperation with the nuclear watchdog has not stopped, it will take a new form and will be guided and managed through the Supreme National Security Council, Mr. Araghchi told Tehran-based diplomats.
U p until the second the Sex Pistols took the stage at London’s Bush Hall last September with new vocalist Frank Carter, nobody had any real idea if this new incarnation of the band could work. In the group’s five-decade history, they’d never played a single gig without John Lydon (a.k.a. Johnny Rotten) — inarguably the most iconic figure of the Seventies U.K. punk revolution — and the band was attempting to move forward without him following years of acrimony, nasty barbs in the press, and a massive legal row that brought band tensions to an all-time high.
“As I was walking up the street towards the venue, someone called out my name, pointed at me, and went, ‘Big shoes,’” says Carter, a heavily tattooed, 41-year-old singer who cut his teeth in hardcore U.K. punk bands like Gallows and Frank Carter and the Rattlesnakes. “I kept walking, but what he said really stayed in my head. I hadn’t given it much thought until that moment. But he was right. And then I was shook, really fuckin’ nervous.”
The Sex Pistols in 1976, one year before the release of their only studio album ‘Never Mind the Bollocks…’ (From left to right: Steve Jones, John Lydon, Glen Matlock and Paul Cook)
“Evening Standard”/Getty Images
His nerves vanished the second that drummer Paul Cook pounded out the intro to “Holidays in the Sun,” and bassist Glen Matlock and guitarist Steve Jones fell in line, with the capacity, overwhelmingly young crowd frantically pogoing like their parents — and even grandparents — did at the 100 Club back in 1976. The chaotic state carried through the entire show, which included a complete performance of the band’s sole studio album, 1977’s Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols, and “No Fun” by the Stooges, a mainstay of their early gigs.
“It was just like going back in time,” Jones says. “It was nuts. We were looking at each other, me, Glen, and Paul, like, ‘This is happening!’ This was right off the bat. It wasn’t even a question.”
Once footage of the performance hit the Internet and rave reviews appeared in the U.K. press, offers for festival and headlining gigs soon poured in, leaving the band stunned. Since then, they’ve spent the past few months gigging across Europe and Australia, and, in September, will launch a North American leg that will take them through the U.S. for the first time since 2003. (The played a one-off L.A. date in 2007, and another in Las Vegas in 2008.)
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Needless to say, Lydon isn’t happy about any of this. “That’s a clown’s circus at work,” he told the Independent. “Sorry, I’m not going to give a helping hand to this any longer, as far as I am concerned, I am the Pistols, and they’re not.” In another interview with NME, he said the concerts were little more than “karaoke. “That’s all it will ever be,” he said. “Bloody hell, the Three Stooges in that band have had how many years to write some new songs? That’s what I’d like to hear.”
His former bandmates weren’t the least bit surprised. “It says lots of things, don’t it?” says Matlock, who spent the past few years playing bass in Blondie. “It’s all to do with respect. And people who respect other people wouldn’t say something like that.”
“He’s entitled to his opinion,” adds Cook. “He always thought he was the Pistols, but I think he hasn’t read the reviews. I think we’re better with Frank in the band at the moment. And I don’t know if John knows this, but me, Steve, and Glen were the Sex Pistols as well.” (We attempted to interview Lydon for this article. “I’m afraid John isn’t up for this,” says his press spokesperson. “I’m sure you’ll understand why!”)
Sid Vicious, despite not having any bass guitar experience, replaced Glen Matlock in the band. Here’s Vicious and Lydon onstage at the Longhorn Ballroom in Dallas, Texas, in 1978.
Jay Dickman/Corbis/Getty Images
This isn’t the first time the Sex Pistols tried to carry on without a founding member. That was in February 1977 when they made one of the most ill-fated decisions in rock history to jettison Matlock — a key architect of the band’s sound and their primary songwriter — and replace him with Sid Vicious. The fact that Vicious had a severe heroin addiction and no ability to play bass, let alone write songs, didn’t seem to bother Lydon or Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren, the two orchestrators of the scheme.
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“Sid did become this iconic figure,” says Cook. “Image-wise, it was fantastic because he had all this aggression. The band looked great. But it wasn’t great songwriting-wise for the band. And everything just imploded and went so crazy when Sid joined. We just couldn’t hold it together. We all became Public Enemy Number One. It’s hard to explain the press reaction, what went on with punk over here at the time. It was out of all proportion, really.”
Looking at the Sex Pistols suddenly as an outsider, Matlock was horrified by the provocations of the band in the Sid Vicious period, including an infamous 1978 U.S. tour where McLaren (who died in 2010) booked them at honky-tonk bars in Texas, hoping to invite a hostile reaction from the crowds. “We were pelted with all sorts of things, dead rats, pig ears, coins, bottles,” says Cook. “Just talking about it now is going to give me nightmares tonight.”
“It just became a cartoon,” says Matlock.
The Sex Pistols cartoon show came to an end just a little over a week into their inaugural U.S. tour in January 1978. Nobody was shocked. “There was no way it was going to last,” says Jones. “You’ve got to remember we’re like 19, 20 years old. And we were just all nuts at this point.” (Vicious died of a heroin overdose one year later while awaiting trial for the murder of his girlfriend, Nancy Spungen.)
In the years that followed, Lydon maintained a high profile with his post-punk band Public Image Ltd, who scored radio hits like “Rise” and “This Is Not a Love Song.” Matlock worked with Iggy Pop and Johnny Thunders, while lifelong friends Jones and Cook attempted to carry on together as the Professionals, but struggled to find relevance in the MTV era. “I was living hand-to-mouth,” says Jones. “I didn’t know how I was going to pay the rent on my apartment.”
“We still hate each otherwith a vengeance,” Lydon told the press packed into the 100 Club in March 1996. “But we’ve found a common cause, and that’s your money.”
The Eagles, Kiss, Fleetwood Mac, Jimmy Page and Robert Plant, and other fractured Seventies acts had all reconvened in recent years, lured by enormous paydays, and the Sex Pistols were jumping on the bandwagon. “These are the people that wrote the songs, and now we’d like to be paid for it,” Lydon said. “Over the years every fucker has lived off us, and we haven’t seen penny one.”
The band hosted a combative press conference for their ‘Filthy Lucre Tour’ in 1996.
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He was only slightly exaggerating. The Pistols never rose out of the clubs during their original incarnation and lived off near-starvation wages doled out to them every week by McLaren. A reformation was a chance to finally make money, play proper venues, and right the historic wrong of pushing Matlock out of the band.
“These are the original members,” Lydon said, pointing to Cook, Jones, and Matlock. “Sid was nothing more than an empty coat-hanger to fill an empty spot onstage.”
The timing was perfect. Not only was the 20-year rule of nostalgia starting to kick in, but punk was now mainstream, thanks to young bands like Green Day, Rancid, and the Offspring. An ambitious slate of 72 shows was booked that took the group to Eastern Europe, North America, Australia, England, Japan, and South America between June and December 1996.
“In the Seventies, you always heard, ‘Oh, them guys can’t play,’” says Jones. “And this tour was, ‘We’ll show you we can play!’ And the shows were great. I wish we could have done it another year since I really needed the bread.”
All four of them needed the bread, but the grueling schedule left Cook and Matlock miserable after just a few months. “Old resentments came up within the band and all this same sort of shit was going on,” says Cook. “John’s not the easiest person to get along with. And to be honest, I couldn’t wait for it to end. It went on way too long.”
Future runs were limited to two concerts in 2002, a dozen U.S. shows in 2003, and seven 30th-anniversary U.K. gigs in 2007. The next summer, however, they agreed to 32 concerts that focused almost entirely on festivals. Much like 1996, it proved to be too much time together for a group of people that, with the exception of Cook and Jones, didn’t particularly like one another in the first place.
The tour also happened to coincide with the 2008 global financial meltdown. “We thought we were getting a certain amount of money at the beginning, and we ended up getting half,” says Jones. “We were making peanuts. I was just like, ‘Fuck this, I’m done.’ It was so toxic.”
After just four shows, Jones was already thinking of taking drastic action to end the tour at England’s Isle of Wight Festival. His desperate ploy — which he didn’t pull off — involved feigning a fall off the stage. “I was going to break my wrist on purpose,” he says. “I got on the ferry after we played, and was like, ‘Get me out of here. I didn’t ever want to fucking hang out with [Lydon] again!’”
There were another 28 shows to go. In his 2016 memoir Lonely Boy, Jones described a particularly harrowing scene on a private plane after a show, when Lydon was told by the flight crew that he had to put out his cigarette.
“Rotten goes absolutely ballistic,” Jones wrote. “He’s like a fucking baby having a tantrum — banging on the pilot’s door, trying to open the windows and doors in the fuselage, basically risking all our lives to have a [cigarette]. It’s two in the morning, we’re all knackered and everyone’s trying to make out they’re [sleeping], but no one is, cos a man in his fifties has gone into full-on meltdown mode about not getting his way.”
Lydon onstage at Isle of Wight Festival in England in 2008. The show was a breaking point for guitarist Steve Jones.
Matt Cardy/Getty Images
The band is reluctant to get into too many other details of Lydon’s behavior on that tour. “I thought that [plane story] wasn’t for public consumption, but there was lots of things like that,” says Matlock. “It wasn’t good. It was childish. Most people in their life, when they upset people when they’re growing up, their mum and dad make them stand in a naughty corner for a bit. And some people, I don’t think that ever happened to them. I wonder who that could be…”
The tour finally ended Sept. 5, 2008, at a festival in Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain. The night is seared into the memories of Jones and Matlock, with the trouble starting before they even got onstage: Lydon, accidentally or not, blew a giant wad of snot onto the back of Matlock’s pants. “There was a towel on top of my amp and I went to get it to wipe it off,” he says. “When I went to do my background vocals for the first time, a glass of something, hopefully it was beer, hit me in the face. I went to get the towel off my amp, but I couldn’t use that because I knew it had Johnny Rotten’s snot all over it. That’s what I remember. And that kind of summed everything up.”
Later in the night, not realizing they were in Basque country, Lydon said, “Viva Spain.” “The people there don’t like the Spanish,” says Jones. “They wasn’t happy about that. They started slinging shit at us.”
The newest chapter of the Sex Pistols saga began very quietly last year at a tiny coffee shop in the Soho neighborhood of London. At the behest of Cook, the group was beginning to plot a show to save the beloved Shepherd’s Bush concert venue Bush Hall. They initially thought about playing Never Mind the Bollocks straight through with a rotating cast of guest singers.
“A couple of names, I won’t tell you who, had been put forward, I wasn’t that keen on,” says Matlock. “And my son Louis overheard me talking to our manager. I thought nobody else was in the house. But Louis come in, and he’s going, ‘No, no, no…’”
Louis Matlock has his own group, Dead!, and they toured a few years back with Frank Carter and the Rattlesnakes. He believed Carter would be perfect for the job, able to deliver Lydon’s words without succumbing to imitation. Intrigued, Glen Matlock asked to meet the singer at the coffee shop to run the idea past him. “I was shocked when I heard what he was proposing,” says Carter. “I thought he just wanted to meet and hang out.”
Jones was at his home in Los Angeles, but Matlock invited Carter to jam at a West London rehearsal hall with him and Cook. He gave him just two days to prepare. “I got in the room and forgot everything,” says Carter. “I’ve been listening to that record probably since I was 12, and all of a sudden I was starting too early, coming in late, forgetting words. I remember leaving and calling my mom. I was like, ‘I just played with a couple of the Pistols and I really feel like I did a bad job.’ She’s like, ‘Well, that’s punk.’ And I was like, ‘No, not how I wanted it to be.’”
Matlock and Cook disagreed and invited him back a few days later to rehearse with Jones. It was the first time the three of them had played together since the end of the 2008 tour. In the years that followed, Cook and Jones briefly teamed up with Billy Idol and his Generation X bandmate Tony James to form the supergroup Generation Sex. It lasted just a handful of dates, but it was proof that some form of the band could exist without Lydon. “I never thought about it until we did that thing with Billy,” says Jones. “I think that was a stepping stone.”
Right around this time, all hell broke loose in Sex Pistols world over Danny Boyle’s FX miniseries Pistol, which was based on Jones’ memoir. The series pissed off Matlock for portraying him as a privileged, out-of-touch teen unconnected to the genuine punk movement. He was even more incensed by a scene that showed Jones firing him in the bathroom of a pub at the behest of McLaren. Matlock insists that he walked away from the band at his own volition, exhausted by endless spats with Lydon and their manager. “I told Danny Boyle what really happened and he totally ignored me,” says Matlock. “Maybe it’s not a big deal, but it’s important to me. It comes across as a quasi-documentary, and people won’t know any better.”
“I don’t think Glen was portrayed very well,” says Cook. “I’m with him on that. But that was kind of out of our control once Danny Boyle got involved.”
Jones can only shrug his shoulders at the whole thing. “Glen and I talked about it, but he’s never going to be happy about that,” he says. “Yeah, he came across a little bit of a scapegoat, I guess. Danny Boyle wanted it that way, but I was happy with it because it was about my book and I loved it. Look, it’s not a documentary. It’s a biopic.”
A much bigger problem erupted when Lydon filed suit against his bandmates in England, arguing they couldn’t use the Sex Pistols music in the series without unanimous agreement. “[It’s like] telling the story of World War II without Winston Churchill,” he told England’s i Paper. “The idea you can remove the man that wrote all your songs and gave you your image is pretty damn ludicrous to me.”
A judge ultimately ruled that a simple majority of the band had the right to license the music. If Matlock had sided with Lydon, it would quite possibly have gone the other way. “I did sort of have the casting vote,” says Matlock. “But if people don’t really give you the proper respect over the years, they’re hardly going to get you on their side. You can read into that what you like.”
It was a clear declaration that despite all the bitterness in the past, Matlock was firmly aligned with Jones and Cook against Lydon. And now with Carter at the helm, the group may have found a lineup stable enough to play gigs without drama. Unlike bands like Yes, Journey, and Judas Priest, who turned to imitators in tribute bands when they needed a new frontman, Carter makes no attempt to copy Lydon.
“He’s like a ringleader in a circus, and brings a ton of energy,” says Jones. “He gets in the crowd, he gets them doing crowd-surfing. He gets them doing a circle. It’s nuts to watch. I think he’s going to get killed when he’s out there sometimes. But he’s brilliant and his voice is great. He’s not trying to be Johnny Rotten.”
Frank Carter has been receiving positive reviews at the group’s new singer.
Lucy North/PA Images/Getty Images)
The Sex Pistols kick off their U.S. tour Sept. 16 at the Longhorn Ballroom in Texas, 47 years after they dodged pig ears and dead rats on the same stage. “I’d like to believe that America won’t do the same to me,” says Carter. “We’ll wait and find out, won’t we?”
No matter what happens at the Longhorn Ballroom, don’t expect to hear any new songs. The Sex Pistols repertoire remains frozen in the amber of 1977. “I don’t know if people want to hear new music unless it’s on a par with the old stuff we’ve done,” says Cook.
Carter can’t imagine how it could even work. “It would be a different band,” he says. “And John wrote all the lyrics. Unless I could sit with John, and we could write some lyrics together…but I think the problem there is that I don’t think we agree on a lot of the same things.”
There’s no universe where Lydon would be willing to write lyrics for the Frank Carter incarnation of the Sex Pistols. But is there a universe where both sides of the divide get over their anger and agree to a full Sex Pistols reunion, perhaps for the 50th anniversary of Never Mind the Bollocks in 2027?
“Look, maybe one day down the line, even I’d like to see it again,” says Carter. “And if there’s ever the opportunity for me to be part of bridging that and being some sort of conduit between them to get the lines of communication open again, I’ll step in and I’ll do that as well. And then I’d step aside in a heartbeat.”
Cook simply cannot imagine this. “We wouldn’t want to do it, and John definitely wouldn’t want to do it after what’s happened,” he says. “So, that’s it. And I don’t want to do it with John anyway.”
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Matlock agrees. “People paint themselves into a corner sometimes,” he says. “And some people use very slow drying paint, and sometimes that corner might be right at the other side of a big fuckin’ ballroom.”
But countless other bands have said similar things shortly before their own big money reunions. “You said the magic word: ‘money,’” says Jones with a laugh. “How much money? We’ll see. It all depends if I need a new kitchen or something.”
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