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This is likely the final photo that NASA's Mars InSight lander will ever send back to Earth. The robot has been snapping pics and gathering data about the Martian environment since landing on the planet in November 2018 — and it's been steadily accumulating dust on its solar panels that entire time. As NASA predicted earlier this year, the layer of debris has finally become too thick for the solar panels to operate. The InSight Twitter account officially said goodbye on December 19th with a final image from the surface of Mars.

"My power’s really low, so this may be the last image I can send," the tweet reads. "Don’t worry about me though: my time here has been both productive and serene. If I can keep talking to my mission team, I will – but I’ll be signing off here soon. Thanks for staying with me."

You're welcome, metal astronaut.

InSight touched down on Mars on November 26th, 2018. It set up a seismometer on the Martian surface and collected data about marsquakes, which helped NASA scientists compile a clearer picture of the planet's interior structure. Over the past four years, InSight provided data on more than 500 quakes and at least one meteoroid impact. From these reports, NASA researchers concluded Mars' core is about half the size of Earth's and likely composed of lighter elements than previously thought.

NASA announced in May 2022 that InSight would likely go dark by the end of the summer, due to the dust settling on the lander's solar panels. InSight had recently celebrated its fourth anniversary on Mars when it stopped communicating with NASA. In a blog update on December 19th, the agency said the following:

"On Dec. 18, 2022, NASA’s InSight did not respond to communications from Earth. The lander’s power has been declining for months, as expected, and it’s assumed InSight may have reached its end of operations. It’s unknown what prompted the change in its energy; the last time the mission contacted the spacecraft was on Dec. 15, 2022. The mission will continue to try and contact InSight."

National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) researchers have developed a way to monitor breathing based on tiny changes in WiFi signals. They say their BreatheSmart deep-learning algorithm could help detect if someone in the household is having breathing issues.

WiFi signals are almost ubiquitous. They bounce off of and pass through surfaces as they try to link devices with routers. But any movement will alter the signal's path, including how the body moves as we breathe, which can change if we have any issues. For instance, your chest will move differently if you're coughing.

Other researchers have explored the use of WiFi signals to detect people and movements, but their approaches required dedicated sensing devices and their studies provided limited data. A few years ago, a company called Origin Wireless developed an algorithm that works with a WiFi mesh network. Similarly, NIST says BreatheSmart works with routers and devices that are already available on the market. It only requires a single router and connected device.

The scientists changed the firmware on a router so that it would check "channel state information,” or CSI, more frequently. CSI refers to the signals that are sent from a device, such as a phone or laptop, to the router. CSI signals are consistent and the router understands what they should look like, but deviations in the environment, such as the signal being affected by surfaces or movement, modify the signals. The researchers got the router to request these CSI signals up to 10 times per second to gain a better sense of how the signal was being modified.

The team simulated several breathing conditions with a manikin and monitored changes in CSI signals with an off-the-shelf router and receiving device. To make sense of the data they collected, NIST research associate Susanna Mosleh developed the algorithm. In a paper, the researchers noted that BreatheSmart correctly identified the simulated breathing conditions 99.54 percent of the time.

Mosleh and Jason Coder, who heads up NIST’s research in shared spectrum metrology, hope developers will be able to use their research to create software that can remotely monitor a person's breathing with existing hardware. “All the ways we’re gathering the data is done on software on the access point (in this case, the router), which could be done by an app on a phone,” Coder said. “This work tries to lay out how somebody can develop and test their own algorithm. This is a framework to help them get relevant information.”

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg misled Congress and the American public about how early he knew about the threat Cambridge Analytica posed to Facebook user privacy, according to a newly published US Securities and Exchange Commission document. The sworn deposition was obtained by Zamaan Qureshi, a policy advisor with the Real Facebook Oversight Board. 

In 2019, Zuckerberg told the SEC he was aware of Cambridge Analytica at least as early as 2017. At the start of that year, Zuckerberg sent an email to Facebook staff asking about an article Motherboard published about the data firm. The Vice News outlet was one of the first English-language publications to detail Cambridge Analytica's use of online data to build psychographic profiles. 

The SEC asked Zuckerberg if that was the first time he had become aware of the firm. "I think that's probably right," he told the Commission. "My guess is I heard of them before. And that this was after seeing a couple of mentions of what they were claiming to do, I wanted to ask people who I trusted what their assessment was."  

Zuckerberg also considered explicitly calling out Cambridge Analytica in a statement he made about Facebook's attempts to combat Russian election meddling in the fall of 2017. His first draft called for him to state: "We are already looking into foreign actors including Russian intelligence actors in other Soviet states and organizations like Cambridge Analytica.” However, on the day of the livestream, he at best alluded to the firm, saying Facebook was investigating "organizations like the campaigns, to further our understanding of how they used our tools.”

The timeline Zuckerberg provided to the SEC contradicts the one he gave during sworn testimony before the House Financial Services Committee in 2019. "I'm not sure of the exact time, but it was probably around the time it became public, I think it was around March of 2018. I could be wrong, though," he told Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.  

When asked to comment on Real Facebook Oversight Board's findings, Meta pointed Engadget to its 2019 Federal Trade Commission settlement, which saw the company agree to pay $5 billion in financial penalties and implement new privacy measures. “This has been a settled case for over three years," a Meta spokesperson added. The office of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez did not immediately respond to Engadget's comment request.

The findings are likely to prompt new questions about Facebook's handling of Cambridge Analytica. To this day, the scandal is the largest in Meta's history. The data firm harvested information from as many as 87 million Facebook profiles and may have passed on that data to Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign and the Brexit campaign.

The United States Postal Service said it expects to buy more than 66,000 electric vehicles by the end of 2028 in a significant change from previous plans. In February, the USPS said it would purchase 5,000 fully electric versions of the Next Generation Delivery Vehicle, with gas-powered trucks accounting for the remaining 45,000 of the initial order. After pushback from the Biden administration and resistance to that from the USPS, the agency has graduallyincreased the proportion of EVs in the order.

Now, the postal service aims to buy at least 60,000 Next Generation Delivery Vehicles by 2028, at least 75 percent of which will be electric models. Starting in 2026, the USPS expects that all NGDV acquisitions will be electric versions. The NGDVs are expected to start operating on delivery routes late next year. In addition, the agency plans to buy another 21,000 off-the-shelf EVs through 2028.

Overall, the USPS plans to buy 106,000 delivery vehicles by the end of 2028 to start replacing its aging, inefficient and not-as-safe fleet of more than 220,000 vehicles. That means the agency still expects to buy around 40,000 gas-powered models over the next six years. The USPS said in a statement that the feasibility of fully electrifying the fleet "will continue to be explored." However, it believes there will be more EV availability in the future, which will certainly help.

The agency expects to spend $9.6 billion on these vehicle purchases and related infrastructure, $3 billion of which is from Inflation Reduction Act funding. "The $3 billion provided by Congress has significantly reduced the risk associated with accelerating the implementation of a nationwide infrastructure necessary to electrify our delivery fleet," Postmaster General Louis DeJoy said. "While most of the electric vehicle funding will continue to come from Postal Service revenues, we are grateful for the confidence that Congress and the Administration have placed in us to build and acquire what has the potential to become the largest electric vehicle fleet in the nation."

Sifu’s long-awaited Arenas mode will arrive next March. Developer Sloclap made the announcement through IGN, which shared a trailer for the upcoming DLC. The studio first teased the mode last April when it published a free content roadmap for Sifu. At the time, Sloclap said the update would arrive in the winter of 2022. However, true to its initial promise, the mode will include new outfits for players to unlock.

“Successfully completing the arenas will progressively unlock a massive new modifiers batch, which doubles the current game's amount and notably brings alternative moves to the Kung Fu palette of our main character,” Sloclap told IGN. “Completing the new Arenas challenges will also unlock new cheats and exclusive new outfits.” If you haven’t had a chance to play Sifu yet because it’s not available on Xbox, there’s more good news. The arrival of the Arenas mode update will coincide with the game’s release on Xbox and Steam. Sloclap promised to share more information about both news items soon.

Amazon has agreed to change some business practices in the European Union as part of legally binding commitments with the bloc's executive branch. The European Commission said the deal will put antitrust investigations over how Amazon treats third-party sellers to bed for the time being. Amazon will need to abide by the commitments for between five and seven years or it could face hefty fines.

"Today’s decision sets new rules for how Amazon operates its business in Europe. Amazon can no longer abuse its dual role [as both marketplace and seller] and will have to change several business practices," Margrethe Vestager, the Commission's executive vice-president in charge of competition policy, said in a statement. "They cover the use of data, the selection of sellers in the Buy Box and the conditions of access to the Amazon Prime Program. Competing independent retailers and carriers as well as consumers will benefit from these changes opening up new opportunities and choice."

The deal includes several preliminary commitments Amazon made in July. Among other things, it will rank all sellers equally in the Buy Box, which displays an item from a specific seller so customers can quickly purchase it. Amazon said it will display a second Buy Box if another seller offers the product with a significantly different price and/or delivery time.

Third-party sellers in the EU will be able to offer their products through Prime without having to use Amazon's delivery or logistics services. Additionally, Amazon will not use any non-public data relating to third-party sellers to benefit its own business, including logistics or creating copycat versions of popular products.

The final deal includes some additional commitments, such as making it easier for third-party sellers to directly contact their Amazon customers so they can provide similar delivery services to those offered by Amazon. The company will also need to create a way for sellers and carriers to file complaints if they suspect it isn't complying with the commitments.

Amazon said it disagreed with some of the Commission’s preliminary conclusions. However, it told the Associated Press that, “We are pleased that we have addressed the European Commission’s concerns and resolved these matters.”

The settlement applies for five years in most cases. The Prime and second Buy Box commitments will last for seven years. The deal is legally enforceable in the European Economic Area save for Italy. That country's competition authority has imposed its own penalties on Amazon.

If EU regulators determine that Amazon isn't sticking to the terms of the deal, the Commission can fine the company up to 10 percent of its global annual revenue without having to find an infringement of antitrust rules. Based on Amazon's 2021 revenue, that fine could be as much as $47 billion. Alternatively, the EC could fine Amazon five percent of its daily turnover for every day that it doesn't comply with the terms of the deal.

EU regulators brought formal antitrust charges against Amazon in November 2020, accusing the company of abusing its dual position. The Commission opened an investigation over the use of non-public data the previous year. In a separate investigation, the EC found that Amazon "abused its dominance on the French, German and Spanish markets for the provision of online marketplace services to third-party sellers." Amazon is still facing scrutiny on these issues in the US and the UK.

Earlier this year, Alienware released what’s arguably the best all-around gaming monitor on the market right now: the AW3423DW. But last week, LG quietly announced its latest batch of UltraGear gaming monitors and after getting a chance to check them out in person, I can say that Alienware’s display has some formidable new rivals.

Unlike the AW3423DW, LG’s monitors are available in two sizes intended for slightly different use cases. There’s the 27-inch 27GR95QE-B, which sports a flat panel with 2,560 x 1,440 resolution meant for both general use and more demanding competitive play, while the 45-inch 45GR95QE-B packs a curved display with 800R radius and 3,440 x 1,440 resolution designed to deliver a more immersive experience.

Sam Rutherford/Engadget

The nice thing about these monitors is that regardless of which one you pick, both feature 240Hz refresh rates – the highest you can get from any OLED monitor available today. On top of that, both models have incredibly fast response times of just 0.3 ms (gray to gray). What’s more, they each support both AMD FreeSync Premium and Nvidia G-Sync while also outputting a dazzling range of colors (up to 98.5 percent of the DCI-P3 spectrum). In short, LG’s new UltraGear displays deliver a laundry list of premium display tech with one clear downside: a relatively low max brightness of just 200 nits.

Admittedly, low brightness might not be a big deal if, like many people, you prefer gaming in dark environments – especially since you’ll probably want to turn the lights down anyway to make the most of LG’s built-in RGB light strips. You can even sync the LEDs on the back to what’s being displayed on screen, which adds a bit of bias lighting without the need for additional hardware. Another small bonus of having a lower max brightness is that there’s no need for an ABL (auto brightness limiter) setting like you see on some other OLED monitors, so you don’t have to worry about the display randomly getting dimmer when looking at primarily white screens (like when you’re viewing word docs or spreadsheets).

Sam Rutherford/Engadget

Unfortunately, because of the size of the displays – particularly the huge 45-inch model – text doesn’t look quite as sharp as I’d like. When you’re gaming that’s not an issue, but when I browsed the web, I could see color fringing and a bit of general blurriness when reading stories and headlines. Now, it’s important to mention that color fringing is something that can be seen on a handful of new OLED displays (most notably QD-OLED panels due to their triangular sub-pixel arrangement), and it’s possible that tools like Better ClearType or an update to Microsoft’s own Clear Type feature could address this issue. But unfortunately, I didn’t have the time to test that out during my brief hands-on.

Sam Rutherford/Engadget

That said, while the new UltraGear monitors may not be the best all-around displays for both productivity and entertainment, they look stunning in gaming scenarios. The 27GR95QE-B is the more approachable of the two as it only costs $1,000 (versus $1,700 for the 27GR95QE) and has a better chance of actually fitting on your desk – at least without you needing to rearrange everything. At 27 inches, it’s also closer in size to what pro gamers use in tournaments (most competitions feature 24-inch monitors), while support for tilt, swivel, height and even portrait adjustments make it super easy to position the display properly.

But the best thing is just how good everything looks in motion. LG brought in some pro Valorant gamers from Evil Geniuses to show off the new UltraGears and even in the midst of a firefight everything stayed tack sharp which brings me to the monitors’ most important spec: their 240Hz refresh rates. Previously, the highest you could get on an OLED monitor (including premium rivals like the Alienware AW3423DW and Samsung Odyssey OLED G8) was 175Hz.

Sam Rutherford/Engadget

For people still using 60Hz displays, that gap might not sound like a big deal. However, the issue is that the general rule when it comes to monitors is that you typically only notice a difference in perceivable performance when you double the refresh rate (e.g., from 60Hz to 120Hz or 120Hz to 240Hz) That means anyone upgrading from a 120Hz displays to one of Alienware’s or Samsung’s rivals might not notice a big improvement while still having a panel that can’t quite hit the super high frame rates (typically from 240 to 300 fps or more) that competitive gamers prefer. But with LG’s latest UltraGears, you get the deep blacks and rich vibrant colors that OLED displays are known for and a refresh rate that rivals all but the very fastest LCD screens.

As for the larger and more expensive 45GR95QE-B, while it has a slightly lower pixel density than its smaller sibling, its curved panel delivers an encompassing experience. Its 800R radius is meant to mimic the natural shape of your eye while wrapping around you even more than more typical 1000R curved displays. The sweet spot for the monitor is about two and a half feet from the screen and it’s basically perfect. You can still see from edge to edge so you get that glorious panoramic view, but it's not so expansive that you need to constantly move your head to spot buttons or icons that might live in the corners. Interestingly, when I asked EG Com if the 800R curve messed up his aim when compared to a flat display, he said even though it was his first time using this monitor he didn’t have to adjust much at all.

Sam Rutherford/Engadget

Aside from the new panels themselves, there are a couple of other design tweaks I want to call out. The first is that to better cater to competitive gamers, LG is using new feet on the UltraGears’ stands so you can position your keyboard closer to the monitor. But to me, the bigger upgrade is the inclusion of a dedicated remote for adjusting image settings. Instead of having to fumble around with hidden buttons or a joystick on the back of the monitor, you can just sit back and enjoy a more TV-like experience. The addition of a remote is something we’ve seen from other flagship monitors like Samsung’s Odyssey Ark and it’s a trend I’m really hoping to see trickle down to more mainstream displays across the market.

Sam Rutherford/Engadget

So while LG’s new UltraGear monitors don’t have the best brightness, they’ve got pretty much every other high-end feature you could want on a gaming monitor right now. And with the 27-inch model going for $1,000 while the bigger 45-inch version going for $1,700, LG suddenly has some very interesting alternatives (both smaller and larger) to Alienware’s fantastic QD-OLED display.

A year ago, Meta was riding high on the metaverse. The company had just completed its rebranding from Facebook to Meta. Social networks, as Mark Zuckerberg explained, were no longer a singular focus for the company. “From now on, we're going to be metaverse-first, not Facebook first,” he said.

Now, as Meta finishes its first full year as a “metaverse company,” the outlook is considerably less rosy. The company has lost billions of dollars on Reality Labs, the division overseeing its metaverse work. Its stock has cratered. The company has, for the first time, shed thousands of employees in mass layoffs. Even longtime shareholders are starting to do what was once unthinkable: question Zuckerberg’s vision for the future.

At the same time, Meta still hasn’t clearly articulated what the metaverse is or effectively made the case for why the billions of people currently using its social media apps would want to be part of an “embodied internet.” Worse still, the company’s initial metaverse product has proved underwhelming, and turned the metaverse into a punchline, rather than a source of anticipation.

We still don’t know what the metaverse is for

Meta and Zuckerberg have offered various definitions over the last year. The metaverse is the “successor to the mobile internet,” and “an embodied internet where you’re in the experience.” It’s virtual reality, but also (eventually) augmented reality. It will also, somehow, tie into our existing social graphs on Facebook and Instagram. But, unlike Facebook and Instagram, it will be interoperable with other companies’ platforms. It might have something to do with NFTs and web3.

“The defining characteristic of the metaverse is that you really feel like you're present with other people or in another place,” Zuckerberg said during an interview at SXSW in February. “You might look at documents, you might look at a website but in the future you're going to be in it.”

Zuckerberg might think this is explaining the beginnings of some grand vision for a future internet, but it also just sounds a lot like plain old virtual reality. Moreover, it’s telling that one of his go-to examples is “looking at documents.” Over the last year, the company has leaned hard into Horizon Workrooms, its social VR experience geared toward office workers.

Meta

When the company showed off its new high-end Quest Pro, it offered up Horizon Workrooms as one of the key experiences optimized for the new headset. You can now recreate a whole virtual workspace in VR. Soon, you’ll be able to use a slew of office and productivity software, from Zoom to Microsoft Word.

But the idea of working in VR with a headset strapped to your face is still pretty far from appealing to most people. And there are a vanishingly small number of jobs and industries where working in VR is even remotely justified.

Perhaps what’s most telling is that Meta has apparently struggled to persuade its own employees to use Workrooms. Despite making Quest 2 headsets free to all employees last year, a recent push from Zuckerberg for teams to start holding meetings in VR revealed that many either hadn’t taken advantage of the offer or hadn’t set the headset up, The New York Timesreported.

Meta’s metaverse is a meme for bad graphics

Without a clear vision, it became far too easy for Meta’s critics to seize on aesthetic issues and other problems. For now, the closest thing Meta has to the “metaverse” is Horizon Worlds, its social VR playground where users are free to explore as their avatar. But the experience of actually using it is far different than the polished videos and demos Meta has shared.

This was never more apparent than when Zuckerberg earnestly posted a screenshot of his avatar in front of the Eiffel Tower and Barcelona’s Sagrada Familia to mark Horizon World’s launch in France and Spain. The screenshot was hilariously bad and quickly took on a life of its own as people mocked the “1995 level graphics.”

Meta

Zuckerberg quickly promised new and improved avatars, and showed off a more realistic likeness of himself, saying that “graphics in Horizon are capable of much more.” (A post on LinkedIn, which has since been deleted, later revealed that the “improved” Zuck avatar took about a month and “40 iterations” to complete.)

Then, at the company’s Connect event, Zuckerberg promised an even bigger advancement: legs. Soon, Horizon’s cartoonish, legless avatars would be replaced with ones resembling actual, walking humans. We watched as Zuckerberg’s “full body” avatar casually strolled around Horizon Worlds. But while it was first thought to be a turning point — adding leg tracking to VR has been a notoriously tricky problem — it turned out this particular demo was more stagecraft than actual innovation. The company later confirmed that the demo was created with motion capture and wasn’t live VR.

Meta still says that its avatars will eventually have legs, but it’s not clear when, or if the feature will even look like the demo.

The metaverse is a money pit

It’s impossible to ignore that Zuckerberg’s metaverse pivot has also coincided with the company’s worst financial performance in recent memory. Meta’s revenue has shrunk for two straight quarters for the first time ever. Its stock has lost more than 60 percent of its value this year, wiping out billions of dollars.

To be fair, the metaverse isn’t entirely to blame. Apple’s anti-tracking changes in iOS have hurt the company’s advertising business. And the entire industry is reeling from an economic downturn that’s affected even the largest tech giants.

At the same time, Meta is undeniably losing vast amounts of money on its metaverse investments. Reality Labs lost $10 billion in 2021, and 2022’s losses already amounted to $9 billion by the third quarter. Those losses are expected to “grow significantly” in 2023, according to the company’s CFO.

Meta

It’s no surprise, then, that Meta’s investors are starting to question whether all this metaverse stuff is really worth it. The CEO of Altimeter Capital, a longtime Meta shareholder, made headlines when he wrote an open letter to Mark Zuckerberg earlier this year that called the company’s metaverse investments “super-sized and terrifying, even by Silicon Valley standards.”

In the company’s most recent earnings call, where Zuckerberg more often fields peppy questions about the company’s ad business, one analyst also raised the issue of “experimental bets versus proven bets.”

“I think everyone wants to hear why you think this pays off,” he asked. Zuckerberg, who seemed a bit flustered by the question, replied that “the metaverse work is a longer term set of efforts that we're working on, but I think that it’s going to end up working.” Patience, he said, will be rewarded.

CES 2023 usually features some pretty eccentric gadgets, and Lenovo is kicking off that trend with the Go Desk Station with Webcam. It's designed for those of us with limited desk space, serving as a webcam, adjustable desk light, Qi wireless charger and expansion hub all in one. It doesn't compromise on any of those things, but is priced accordingly.

The primary feature is the Lenovo Go 4K Pro Webcam (also available as a standalone camera) designed for video conferencing and high-res streaming. It can stream 4K at up to 30 fps and includes autofocus and auto-framing with an adjustable field of view, along with auto ambient light adjustment, via the built-in desk light.

Lenovo

That desk light rides on a height-adjustable and rotating arm, and can be positioned in almost any direction to illuminate your face or objects on your desk. You can choose from three color temperature options to match your environment, including 3,000K (yellow white), 4,500K (cool white) and 6,500K (daylight), with brightness up to 1600 lux at 0.5 meters (1.5 feet). 

It's a versatile hub, as well. It has a 135-watt USB-C power input with a full-function 65-watt USB-C port for laptop power, to start with. It also includes 15-watt Qi compliant charging pad for mobile devices, a 20W USB Type-C port, two USB Type-A 3.1 ports and an HDMI 2.0 output for external displays up to 4K at 60fps.  

If you're already looking for a desk lamp, wireless charger and USB hub, this could fit the bill in just a single purchase. You'll pay for it though. The Go Desk Station with Webcam arrives in March 2023 starting at $329, or you can grab the Lenovo Go 4K Pro webcam by itself for $150, also in March next year. 

We may not have had quite as much unfettered reading time as we did in the lockdown days of the COVID pandemic, but Engadget’s editors have still managed to pick out, peruse and ponder a broad variety of this year’s most intriguing books. Whether we learned how to wield a wok, listened to life lessons from Hideo Kojima, or dove into the seedy underbelly of an alt-universe 1940’s San Francisco, here are a few of our favorites from 2022.

Razzmatazz by Christopher Moore

Harper Collins

Classic noir cinema was a staple in my house growing up — I mean, my first celebrity crush was on The Thin Man series co-star, Myrna Loy — so any story from the days when mugs were mooks and gals were dames holds sway over my heart. But The Thin Man, like the rest of the media made at that time, only showed a very narrow, very male, very white view of life. Christopher Moore’s latest novel, Razzmatazz, adds some much needed color to the otherwise black-and-white world of noir.

Razzmatazz is the second title for Moore’s satirical murder mystery series, following 2019’s Noir. In this latest installment, we’re returned to Post-WWII San Francisco as bartender Sammy “Two Toes” Tiffin and his cadre of misfit friends hustle to survive in Fog City. Now, helping disappear your best friend’s girlfriend’s abusive husband is one thing but, as the team soon learns, stealing back a possibly magical, definitely priceless, heirloom from the local Tong is another entirely — and that’s before some madman starts murdering the city’s drag kings.

Razzmatazz is a smart and just a bit snarky adventure mystery featuring a diverse and developed cast of characters, fast-paced action that seamlessly transitions between the varying viewpoints of said ensemble and doesn’t get bogged down in world building. At around 350 pages apiece, Noir and Razzmatazz will each provide a solid weekend’s entertainment and, if you’re still looking for more Moore after that, check out 2020’s Shakespeare for Squirrels. – Andrew Tarantola, Senior Editor

Upgrade by Blake Crouch

Penguin Randomhouse

I always look forward to new Blake Crouch releases because his writing is vivid and fast-paced, so much so that I can see the movie version playing out in my head as I devour his latest title in just a couple of days. This year’s Upgrade was no exception – we’re in a world in which gene editing is real yet highly regulated, and we follow Logan Ramsay, a member of the Gene Protection Agency as he tries to apprehend those who may be involved in nefarious gene-editing activities.

But after a violent encounter on a mission, Logan starts to feel less and less like himself and more like a better version of himself. He can read faster, he’s physically stronger and he needs less sleep. He soon finds out his genome has been hacked, and he also discovers he’s part of a much larger plan that could change humanity as he knows it. As he works to stop this plan from being executed, he’s forced to confront some of the darkest parts of his past and the tarnished family legacy he’s been working so hard to escape.

Crouch excels at putting readers into his protagonist’s shoes, forcing them to feel the same anxiety, dread and confusion inflicting his main characters. But to think that produces an overall unpleasant reading experience would be incorrect: Upgrade is an intriguing thrill ride that moves at break-neck speed, while posing a lot of questions about humanity as a whole. – Valentina Palladino, Senior Commerce Editor

Notes on an Execution by Danya Kukafka

Harper Collins

On its face, Notes on an Execution may seem like a typical examination of a serial killer. The novel begins with Ansel Packer counting down his last 12 hours before he’s to be executed for killing many women. But Danya Kukafka is much less interested in this murderer as she is in telling the stories of three women who were all affected by Ansel in some way. We follow Lavender, Ansel’s mother, as a lost teenager pushed to the brink as she struggles to protect her children and herself; Hazel, Ansel’s sister-in-law who watches her twin lose herself in this toxic relationship; and Saffy, the lead investigator on Ansel’s case with more hidden trauma than you might expect buried just under the surface. But these women aren’t victims with a capital V. Instead, they work to flip the serial-killer narrative on its head by focusing our attention on the fact that, despite everything, they survived. Notes on an Execution is a dark, engaging story with lovely prose and a surprisingly, underlying element of hope at the end of it all. – V.P.

Our Missing Hearts by Celeste Ng

Our Missing Hearts, in the grand tradition of near-future dystopian fiction like The Handmaid’s Tale or 1984, presents a vision of our country that feels far too close for comfort. In Ng’s third novel, she writes of a 12-year-old boy named Bird and his father, who live in a United States where laws enshrining America-first culture have been put in place following years of economic and social turmoil.

In this world, Asians have been made the scapegoat for all of America’s ills; while Asian Americans are still technically free and full citizens, many of them are under the thumb of police and subject to various degrees of violence from so-called “real” Americans. And any parents deemed to be un-America could have their children immediately confiscated – no questions asked. As in any good dystopia, books deemed unpatriotic have also been seized and destroyed, including a book of poetry by Bird’s mother, a woman who disappeared years earlier.

This story is simultaneously small and universal. The meat of the narrative focuses on Bird pushing to learn more about his mother and the circumstances of the world he’s living in, and there are only a handful of major characters. At the same time, Ng skillfully paints a plausible picture of an America that’s given in to its worst instincts. Ng has pointed out multiple times that all the atrocities being committed in Our Missing Hearts are things that have taken place in the US or other parts of the world already – not a comforting thought.

But as bleak as this world is, the book is filled with moments of unexpected beauty and small triumphs. Perhaps most crucially, there’s a sense that while an extremist minority currently may rule over a more sensible populace, there’s a way out of the darkness. Our Missing Hearts isn’t a light story, but it’s an important one, artfully told by a writer who can deftly weave together a compelling narrative with poignant social commentary. Ng may have made a big impact in popular culture with Little Fires Everywhere (and its accompanying Hulu miniseries), but Our Missing Hearts feels like her definitive work thus far. – Nathan Ingraham, Deputy Editor

The Creative Gene by Hideo Kojima

Simon and Schuster

Hideo Kojima is a video game designer best known for the Metal Gear series, which popularized the stealth genre and had a plot that could charitably be described as ridiculous. Perhaps shamefully, I am a Kojima fan. His studios’ games are often in dire need of an editor and almost constantly tow the line between insight and navel-gazing. Sometimes, they’ve also seemed incapable of treating their female characters with respect. But they are always bursting with ideas, trying things with an unmistakable voice and a ceaseless, pulverizing earnestness. His post-apocalyptic delivery sim Death Stranding is at once laughably on-the-nose (one hard-to-kill character is called “Die-Hardman” AKA: John McClane, of course), and one the most enchanting games I’ve played in the past decade.

I give you this background to help explain how I ended up reading Kojima’s book, The Creative Gene, earlier this year. (It was technically published in late 2021.) Instead of telling some weirdo techno-thriller or a behind-the-scenes look at game development, though, this is a collection of previously published essays about the books, movies and other cultural objects that Kojima finds essential to his being. Like his games, it can border on hokey and self-mythologizing, but it is disarmingly honest, personal and anti-cynical.

In many ways, the Metal Gear games are about identity – who we are and how we got there. That’s more or less what Kojima gets at here; for about 250 pages, he raves about things he likes with a tangible verve, not to recommend them to consumers, but to explore how they’ve shaped his experience. More than a memoir, though, The Creative Gene is an appreciation of how art of all stripes can spark inspiration in a recyclable process.

The prose is nothing extraordinary, and there are certainly more essential subjects out there. While you don’t need to be a gamer to get something out of this, having a familiarity with Kojima’s work doesn’t hurt. Still, The Creative Gene’s sincerity and enthusiasm are easy to appreciate in a time of widespread detachment. – Jeff Dunn, Senior Commerce Writer

Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel

Penguin Randomhouse

Emily St. John Mandel delivered one of the essential reads of the pandemic when she published The Glass Hotel in March 2020. It was no small feat given she previously wrote the award-winning Station Eleven, a novel that’s set partly after a world-ending flu. Given that there was a five-year gap between Station Eleven and Glass Hotel, I didn’t dare hope one of my favorite authors would release a new novel so soon, and that it would be as good as her previous works. Thankfully, Sea of Tranquility does not disappoint.

It shares many of the same strengths as Mandel’s past novels, including a brilliant sense of atmosphere and prose that rewards close reading. Sea of Tranquility is also in conversation with Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel in a way that will delight fans. That’s not to say you need to have read those books to enjoy her latest, but it may make you look at them (and Mandel’s career) in a new light. Add to that themes that will resonate with anyone who has lived through the past two years and you have one of the best books of 2022. – Igor Bonifacic, Weekend Editor