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This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Michelle Pippin, the founder of Women Who WOW. It has been edited for length and clarity.

I have three children, four grandchildren, and another grandbaby due in October.

Every Thursday, I watch the grandkids. It is the best day of my week.

I usually strap the little ones — they're 4, 3, and 2 — into their carseats and bring them to a trampoline park with special toddler hours. After they jump around for two hours, we drive across the parking lot to Chick-fil-A, and they usually fall asleep on the ride home.

For years, those outings required some automotive juggling.

I drove a Honda HR-V, which was too small for three car seats. My husband and I also had an older Chevrolet Tahoe with a third row, but it doesn't always work for our needs. Its air conditioning isn't great — a big problem in our rural, North Carolina, town — and my husband sometimes wanted to use it without all the car seats inside.

Eventually, I got tired of moving everything around. I decided I needed a car where the seats could stay permanently.

That was not an easy admission.

When my own children were younger, I drove a Ford Expedition. We lived in North Carolina, their school was in Virginia, and I spent a lot of time driving that enormous SUV during an era of high gas prices.

When my youngest child got his license, I got rid of the Expedition and bought a two-door Honda Civic. I loved being able to bop around town and zip into any parking spot, and swore I would never own another vehicle with a third row.

I hadn't considered that I might one day have grandchildren.

I test-drove several 3-row SUVs

I wanted a midsize SUV with all-wheel drive and enough room to fit three car seats across one row if necessary.

I started with Google and its AI-generated answers, which helped me compile a list. I considered vehicles including the Hyundai Palisade, Kia Telluride, Volvo XC90, and Volkswagen Atlas.

I wasn't working with a rigid budget, but $75,000 was my psychological ceiling. My first house cost $85,000, so spending close to that on a car would have made me stop and ask whether it was really worth it.

Some of the prices surprised me. I saw Tellurides approaching $71,000 and remember thinking that was a lot for a Kia. The Palisade, my runner-up, was also more expensive than I expected.

The Honda Pilot was the last vehicle I drove. Almost immediately, I knew it was the right car for me.

I liked that it looked a little masculine rather than overly sleek. Inside those chiseled exterior body panels, it had everything I needed: the third row, all-wheel drive, a panoramic roof, and a feature that amplifies the driver's voice for passengers in the back.

I have always been a Honda person, mostly because of their reliability. The Civic I bought more than a decade ago is now driven by my son and is approaching 200,000 miles. Aside from routine maintenance, it has needed very little.

The Pilot cost about $54,000 with the additional protection plans I purchased. I don't like negotiating: A business tells me its price, and I decide whether I'm willing to pay it. I felt I got a good deal and came in far below my ceiling.

My inaugural trip was with the grandkids

I picked up the Pilot on a Wednesday night. The next morning, I loaded the grandchildren into it and took them to the trampoline park.

They loved looking through the panoramic roof. My oldest grandson told me, "Nana, this is my most favorite car ever."

I told him it should be. I bought it for them.

I even ordered a personalized license plate that says "CUZN CRU," because this is their car as much as it is mine.

One granddaughter recently climbed inside with dirt on her shoes and apologized. I told her that if Nana was more worried about dirt than having her in the car, my heart would be in the wrong place.

Years ago, I had sworn off three-row SUVs — but I bought this one because it's supposed to be filled with car seats, Chick-fil-A crumbs, and my grandchildren.

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Ben Shimkus

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Ben Shimkus is a reporter for the Business News desk. He writes about cars, transportation, retail, and jobs. Ben's reporting has appeared in Rolling Stone, The Verge, Automotive News, USA Today, AutoBody News, LGBTQ Nation, TopSpeed, and Out Magazine. He's also held staff writing positions at The U.S. Sun and the Daily Mail. He graduated from NYU with a Master's in journalism in 2024. Email Ben at [email protected] or message him privately on Signal at bshimkus.41. 

• as told to

Complaints have also come from other groups. The UK’s Digital Entertainment and Retail Association (ERA), for example, called Sony’s decision “a triumph of corporate convenience over consumer choice.”

Following the release of its first quarter financial results today, Sony held an investor-focused Q&A in which it answered questions from analysts. Inevitably, Sony was asked about its decision to stop selling PlayStation discs. In Sony's first comments on the issue since the announcement was made on July 1, chief financial officer Lin Tao, speaking through a live interpreter during the call, signalled the company’s intention to go through with it.

Here’s the response in full:

“We announced that January 2028 onwards we will no longer be manufacturing game discs. So, one-and-a-half years ahead. So we made this announcement at this time.

“There are various reasons we made this decision. The biggest being that the digitalization of contents overall has been progressing. That’s the big factor. It’s not just for PlayStation, but for all kinds of contents, digitalization is progressing.

“And so when we think about the future — and we put in a lot of thought and time, and we cautiously considered this, and we came to this conclusion, and we’re going to cautiously move this forward.

“And to this decision, we have received various opinions and people have strong views, and we understand that the community has put forth those views to us. Games are loved by many people. It’s a form of entertainment that’s loved by people, and it’s connected to people’s fond memories in many cases.

“And so we understand those emotions. We want to consider that. And in the future digital ecosystem, how do we engage the gamers is something that we would like to continue to explore.”

Essentially, Tao is saying Sony won’t budge despite the backlash. And in that final line is there a hint at a possible method for preserving physical discs digitally?

When Sony announced its decision it said it was simply following consumer trends. “In response to shifting trends in consumer preference, new games will be released on PlayStation Store and at retailers in digital formats only,” Sid Shuman, Senior Director, Sony Interactive Entertainment Content Communications, said in a post on PlayStation Blog.

“As consumer preferences and the broader entertainment industry continue to shift away from physical discs to digital, physical game disc production for all new games releasing on PlayStation consoles will be discontinued starting January 2028. Following this date, new games will be available on PlayStation Store and at retailers in digital formats only. This transition has no impact on games that already released, or will be releasing, prior to January 2028 in disc format.

“This is a natural direction for Sony Interactive Entertainment to adapt to consumer trends as the general preference for digital media significantly outpaces physical discs. This transition will enable us to align more closely with how most of our community prefers to access and play games today."

Reinforcing this trend, Mat Piscatella, Senior Director and Video Game Industry Advisor at Circana, said that just seven PlayStation video games had sold more than 100,000 physical units so far this year in the U.S.. Only two PlayStation video games sold more than 10,000 physical units in the U.S. during the week ending July 11.

There are of course instances of companies reversing controversial decisions amid a backlash, but, as analysts have told IGN, it remains unlikely that Sony will U-turn on this.

Dr. Serkan Toto, CEO of Japanese game industry consultancy firm Kantan Games, suggested that even if half a million people cancelled their PlayStation Plus subscription in protest, it would be just a drop in the ocean for Sony.

"I sympathize with physical media fans, but Sony will not reverse this decision," Toto told IGN. "They of course knew what the online reaction would look like, and they now wait for this storm to pass.

"Sony has over 120 million active PlayStation users," he continued. "Around 50 million people subscribe to PlayStation Plus. As a thought experiment, let's say 500,000 cancel in protest, that would be just 1% of that business gone — of course not enough for Sony to start rethinking. Digital is just too lucrative."

Piers Harding-Rolls, games industry analyst at Ampere, has said a lot has changed over the course of the last two generations. "Console gaming is the last hold-out for physical media in the gaming sector, but physical product has been declining in importance," he said in a post on the Ampere website. "Back in 2013 when the PS4 launched, Ampere data shows that only 13% of total full games unit sales for Sony consoles were digital (including digital-only games). Fast forward to 2025, and this digital share of full game purchases stood at almost 80% of the total.

"Inevitably there will be concerns from PlayStation gamers around various aspects of this announcement including choice, accessing older physical games on new consoles, the ability to collect physical games, and game preservation, however the purchasing trends of gamers are clear."

One analyst said fans of physical media had their chance and blew it, so there’s no going back. “If gamers and preservationists had bought more physical games, Sony wouldn’t have seen the digital sales ratios that justify this decision,” Robin Zhu, a games analyst at Bernstein, told the Financial Times.

For Sony, going all-digital for new game releases will earn it more money from every sale at a time when console sales are expected to plummet due to their rising cost. For a first-party PlayStation game such as The Last of Us, Sony will only keep around 65% of the money from a physical copy, with around 30% going to the retailer and roughly another 5% on manufacturing costs. Meanwhile, for a physical copy of a third-party game such as the Activision-published Call of Duty, Sony will get a licensing fee, likely around 15%.

For downloads, however, the margins are much higher. For a first-party game sold via Sony's own PlayStation Store, the company obviously keeps 100% of the revenue. For third-party games such as Call of Duty, meanwhile, Sony keeps a 30% cut (so, roughly $21 for a $70 game).

Photo by Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images.

Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at [email protected] or confidentially at [email protected]. %!s()

Most recently, Duggan held a senior communications role at Sky, working across programming including “The Day of the Jackal,” “Lockerbie: A Search for Truth” and “The Tattooist of Auschwitz.” Prior to that, he led communications for local original programming at HBO Max in Europe while also helping deliver global campaigns for HBO U.S. shows such as “True Detective” and “Westworld.” He began his TV publicity career at the BBC, promoting iconic drama series “Doctor Who,” “Sherlock” and “Line of Duty.”

“Chris brings extensive experience promoting some of the biggest entertainment properties of recent years, and we are excited to welcome him to Element Pictures,” said Guiney and Lowe. “As we continue to develop our slate of television and film projects, we are delighted to have found someone to lead our communications and marketing function who shares our passion for telling authentic, high quality stories.”

As head of communications and marketing, Chris will oversee all aspects of Element Pictures’ external relations, including festival activity, awards campaigning and social channels.

The appointment comes as Element celebrates its 25th year and with the company — which was acquired by Fremantle in 2022 — continuing to make waves on both the big screen and small. It recently received received acclaim for “Bugonia,” its latest feature with regular collaborator Yorgos Lanthimos, which received four Oscars nominations, including best picture. Meanwhile, both Harry Lighton’s “Pillion” and Akinola Davies Jr.s “My Father’s Shadow” both won awards in Cannes in 2025 and combined received multiple nominations and wins across both the British Independent Film Awards and BAFTAs. On TV, Element recently announced the adaptation of David Nicholls’ “We Are Here,” reuniting it with the BBC after their smash hit “Normal People.”

Duggan will start his new role in August, working between Element’s offices in London and Dublin
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My name is Hig, one name. Big Hig if you need another.

If I ever woke up crying in the middle of a dream, and I’m not saying I did, it’s because the trout are gone, every one. Brookies, rainbows, browns, cutthroats, cutbows, everyone.

The tiger left, the elephant, the apes, the baboon, the cheetah. The titmouse, the frigate bird, the pelican (gray), the whale (gray), the collared dove. Sad but. Didn’t cry until the last trout swam upriver looking for maybe cooler water.

Melissa, my wife, was an old hippy. Not that old. She looked good. In this story she might have been Eve, but I’m not Adam. I am more like Cain. They didn’t have a brother like me.

Did you ever read the Bible? I mean sit down and read it like it was a book? Check out Lamentations. That’s where we’re at, pretty much. Pretty much lamenting. Pretty much pouring our hearts out like water. They said at the end it would get colder after it gets warmer.

Way colder. Still waiting. She’s a surprise this old earth, one big surprise after another since before she separated from the moon who circles and circles like the mate of a shot goose.

No more geese. A few. Last October I heard the old bleating after dusk and saw them, five against the cold bloodwashed blue over the ridge. Five all fall, I think, next April none.

I hand pump the 100 low lead aviation gas out of the old airport tank when the sun is not shining, and I have the truck too that was making the fuel delivery. More fuel than the Beast can burn in my lifetime if I keep my sorties local, which I plan to, I have to. She’s a small plane, a 1956 Cessna 182, really a beaut. Cream and blue. I’m figuring I’m dead before the Beast gives up the final ghost. I will buy the farm. Eighty acres of bottomland hay and corn in a country where there is still a cold stream coming out of the purple mountains full of brookies and cuts.

Before that I will make my roundtrips. Out and back.

*

I have a neighbor. One. Just us at a small country airport a few miles from the mountains. A training field where they built a bunch of houses for people who couldn’t sleep without their little planes, the way golfers live on a golf course. Bangley is the name on the registration of his old truck, which doesn’t run anymore. Bruce Bangley. I fished it out of the glove box looking for a tire pressure gauge I could take with me in the Beast. A Wheat Ridge address. I don’t call him that, though, what’s the point, there’s only two of us. Only us for at least a radius of eight miles, which is the distance of open prairie to the first juniper woods on the skirt of the mountain. I just say, Hey. Above the juniper is oak brush then black timber. Well, brown. Beetle killed and droughted. A lot of it standing dead now, just swaying like a thousand skeletons, sighing like a thousand ghosts, but not all. There are patches of green woods, and I am their biggest fan. I root for them out here on the plain. Go Go Go Grow Grow Grow! That’s our fight song. I yell it out the window as I fly low over. The green patches are_ spreading year by year. Life is tenacious if you give it one little bit of encouragement. I could swear they hear me. They wave back, wave their feathery arms back and forth down low by their sides, they remind me of women in kimonos. Tiny steps or no steps, wave wave hands at your sides.

I go up there on foot when I can. To the greener woods. Funny to say that: not like I have to clear my calendar. I go up to breathe. The different air. It’s dangerous, it’s an adrenalin rush I could do without. I have seen elk sign. Not so old. If there are still elk. Bangley says no way. Way, but. Never seen one. Seen plenty deer. I bring the .308 and I shoot a doe and I drag her back in the hull of a kayak which I sawed the deck off so it’s a sled. My green sled. The deer just stayed on with the rabbits and the rats. The cheat grass stayed on, I guess that’s enough.

Before I go up there I fly it twice. One day, one night with the goggles. The goggles are pretty good at seeing down through trees if the trees aren’t too heavy. People make pulsing green shadows, even asleep. Better than not checking. Then I make a loop south and east, come back in from the north. Thirty miles out, at least a day for a traveler. That’s all open, all plains, sage and grass and rabbit brush and the old farms. The brown circles of fields like the footprint of a crutch fading into the prairie. Hedgerows and windbreaks, half the trees broken, blown over, a few still green by a seep or along a creek. Then I tell Bangley.

I cover the eight miles dragging the empty sled in two hours, then I am in cover. I can still move. It’s a long way back with a deer, though. Over open country. Bangley covers me from halfway out. We still have the handsets and they still recharge with the panels. Japanese built, good thing. Bangley has a .408 CheyTac sniper rifle set up on a platform he built. A rangefinder. My luck. A gun nut. A really mean gun nut. He says he can pot a man from a mile off. He has done. I’ve seen it more than once. Last summer he shot a girl who was chasing me across the open plain. A young girl, a scarecrow. I heard the shot, stopped, left the sled, went back. She was thrown back over a rock, a hole where her waist should have been, just about torn in half. Her chest was heaving, panting, her head twisted to the side, one black eye shiny and looking up at me, not fear, just like a question, burning, like of all things witnessed this one couldn’t be believed. Like that. Like fucking why?

That’s what I asked Bangley, fucking why.

She would have caught you.

So what? I had a gun, she had a little knife. To like protect her from me. She maybe wanted food.

Maybe. Maybe she’d slit your throat in the middle of the night.

I stared at him, his mind going that far, to the middle of the night, me and her. Jesus. My only neighbor. What can I say to Bangley? He has saved my bacon more times. Saving my bacon is his job. I have the plane, I am the eyes, he has the guns, he is the muscle. He knows I know he knows: he can’t fly, I don’t have the stomach for killing. Any other way probably just be one of us. Or none.

I also have Jasper, son of Daisy, which is the best last line of alarm.

So when we get sick of rabbits and sunfish from the pond, I get a deer. Mostly I just want to go up there. It feels like church, hallow and cool. The dead forest swaying and whispering, the green forest full of sighs. The musk smell of deer beds. The creeks where I always pray to see a trout. One fingerling. One big old survivor, his green shadow idling against the green shadows of the stones.

Eight miles of open ground to the mountain front, the first trees. That is our perimeter. Our safety zone. That is my job.

He can concentrate his firepower to the west that way. That’s how Bangley talks. Because it’s thirty miles out, high plains all other directions, more than a day’s walk, but just a couple of hours west to the first trees. The families are south ten miles but they don’t bother us. That’s what I call them. They are something like thirty Mennonites with a blood disease that hit after the flu. Like a plague but slow burning. Something like AIDS I think, maybe more contagious. The kids were born with it and it makes them all sick and weak and every year some die.

We have the perimeter. But if someone hid. In the old farmsteads. In the sage. The willows along a creek. Arroyos, too, with undercut banks. He asked me that once: how do I know. How do I know someone is not inside our perimeter, in all that empty country, hiding, waiting to attack us? But thing is I can see a lot. Not like the back of the hand, too simple, but like a book I have read and reread too many times to count, maybe like the Bible for some folks of old. I would know. A sentence out of place. A gap. Two periods where there should be one. I know.

I know, I think: if I am going to die – no If – it will be on one of these trips to the mountains. Crossing open ground with the full sled. Shot in the back with an arrow.

Bangley a long time ago gave me bulletproof, one of the vests in his arsenal. He has all kinds of shit. He said it’ll stop any handgun, an arrow, but with a rifle it depends, I better be lucky. I thought about that. We’re supposed to be the only two living souls but the families in at least hundreds of square miles, the only survivors, I better be lucky. So I wear the vest because it’s warm, but if it’s summer I mostly don’t. When I wear it, I feel like I’m waiting for something. Would I stand on a train platform and wait for a train that hasn’t come for months? Maybe. Sometimes this whole thing feels just like that.

This is an extract from The Dog Stars by Peter Heller (Tinder Press), the August read for the New Scientist Book Club. Sign up for the club here, and join the discussion on Discord here.

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For Christophe Jurczak at investment firm Quantonation, it all started at a conference that had nothing to do with quantum computing. Researchers were discussing a different emerging technology, and Jurczak realised that he had first heard about it 30 years ago. Back then, everyone was saying that it was only “five years away”. Déjà vu. Then, a worry set in – could quantum computers also be such a “perpetual five-year technology” (PFYT)? This drove him to do a year-long deep dive into philosophical literature. The paper I read was its outcome.

In it, he argues that, right now, quantum computers are firmly in the PFYT category. All attempts to forecast when quantum computers will truly arrive are misguided so long as they presuppose that we already know what quantum computers are, he writes. “If the identity of a quantum computer is still being settled as the machine develops, that presupposition fails.”

As someone who thinks about quantum computing an awful lot, I wanted to know what exactly brought Jurczak to this somewhat alarming conclusion. In the nearly five years that I have spent writing about quantum computers for New Scientist, they have certainly made measurable progress. Several firms have presented road maps for the future of their devices, including goals for their overall size and the performance of some of their components, and then they met those goals.

Quantum computers are also much closer to being useful devices than they were just a handful of years ago. Sure, they haven’t yet changed the world by aiding the discovery of some groundbreaking drug or battery redesign, but you could access a quantum computer through the cloud right now and use it as a scientific tool if you happen to be a chemist or a material scientist.

Jurczak doesn’t deny this. He even tells me that he recently ran an experiment remotely on a quantum computer made from extremely cold atoms that was housed in a lab in Canada while he was on his couch in Texas. But this doesn’t mean that the question of quantum computing is settled, he says. One way to see this is to note the diversity of approaches for building a quantum computer, as well as the many, many metrics that are important for capturing how well one might work.

The basic components of quantum computers are called qubits, and they can be built in many different ways, from using extremely cold atoms to tiny superconducting circuits or particles of light. Then, there are the things you may want to measure about your quantum computer: how many qubits it has, how well connected they are, how reliably they can be used for different parts of a computation, how quickly they can be controlled and so on. Perfecting one or even a few of these metrics typically doesn’t guarantee that all the others will become excellent too.

Having spoken to many researchers and executives within the field, I have come to recognise a certain mix of excitement and anxiety in how they often speak: celebrating all the components of a truly powerful machine having been proven to work by themselves, while trying to keep at bay the worry about what may happen when they are all put together.

In his paper, Jurczak, together with Brooke Abeles at ENS Paris-Saclay in France, collected data about some of these metrics across the industry and inferred a clear trend – once a threshold is crossed for one metric, such as guaranteeing that a single qubit makes errors less often than once in a thousand times, the five-year horizon doesn’t collapse. Instead, it resets. This is a consequence of discovering what a quantum computer is as it is being built.

This was distinctly not the case during the development of conventional computers. Jurczak says sometimes researchers like to compare today’s quantum computers to ENIAC, the world’s first programmable general-purpose electronic computer, but building that room-sized digital behemoth was much more of an engineering challenge. “[Classical computing] was a very much more mature ecosystem at the time when it started,” says Jurczak. While he was digging through philosophical literature, he found that an idea more relevant for quantum computers from the philosopher of technology Gilbert Simondon.

His theory of “technical individuation” says a shifting assembly of elements becomes a coherent “individual” through a process that includes a whole ecosystem, which consists of infrastructure, knowledge and practices maturing through iterative steps of trial and error. A collection of qubits and the devices that control and house them, for example, becomes a quantum computer only through interconnected developments in, for instance, laser and cryogenics systems, the building of special chip foundries, the growth of a specialised quantum workforce and basic research in quantum physics and computer science. Really, the list goes on; the ecosystem is large and complex.

As we talked, I found myself increasingly won over to Jurczak’s view of what has happened with quantum computing. The fact that we don’t have a fully useful quantum computer yet isn’t a failure of prediction, nor a failure of the market, but rather reflects the groundbreaking, paradigm-shifting nature of trying to corral the denizens of the quantum world into doing computational work for us. The technology is still too close to scientific discovery to be easily wrangled, easily scaled, easily accelerated by the usual tricks of the economy. “Don’t despair,” Jurczak puts a positive spin on it, “this is highly nonlinear, it takes time.”

Currently, the quantum computing industry has its sights on reaching “fault tolerance”, or building a quantum computer that is so good at catching its own errors that it can reliably run unprecedentedly complex computations. Once this goal is reached – and many firms are projecting they will do so by the end of the decade – will quantum computers have arrived? Will we know which type of qubit won the quantum-computing race? And what will be the next milestone?

Though Jurczak says that his framework isn’t predictive, it does begin to unravel some of these questions. Almost certainly the horizon will shift again, and not all the machines will be fully individuated. He says he is excited about the possibility of a really heterogenous quantum-computing system – no specific qubit design will win, they will just, through their own process of individuation, find applications they are well suited for. The question of what a quantum computer is won’t be answered by just one device. “The people who will build and use these machines should have more of an open mind about what a quantum computer is as a technical individual and how it concretises and how it’s going to be used as well,” says Jurczak.

Quantum computers won’t remain PFYTs forever, but he speaks about them currently being in that category with excitement. When he says that the constantly resetting horizon represents possibility, I can’t help but find that compelling. But what should quantum-computing firms do with this philosophical insight, I asked him. Certainly, they will still have to put out road maps and announce their goals. It’s important to have strategies for the next five years, he conceded. “We all want that and that’s needed, but think beyond and have a little bit of imagination as well, would be my take,” says Jurczak.

One way to achieve that may be to start working with people outside physics, maybe even philosophers themselves. The ecosystem for a quantum computer ought to be interdisciplinary. AI companies are already hiring across not just the sciences, but also the humanities, and it ought to happen with quantum-computing firms as well, he says. Jurczak believes AI agents themselves may also help accelerate some of that interdisciplinary work, as they aren’t trained in the specialised ways that human researchers are. He and several researchers at quantum-computing company Pasqal, which he co-founded, have already tested several examples of how such agents could help quantum-computing novices run computations on real quantum hardware. “If you ask me in five years what failure would really be, [it would be] that we still have these silos,” he says.

My own physics education was definitely siloed, and I was never asked to take a class in philosophy or the history of technology. Because a reporter’s job is to take both the broad view and the long view, I have, at times, felt the lack of that training rather sharply. The sheer amount of research in quantum computing is both impressive and overwhelming, and making sense of it has required a different skill set than merely being literate in the mathematics of quantum theory and somewhat conversant in materials science.

To be fair, the next time someone asks me what a quantum computer is, I will almost definitely not be telling them that it is a technical individual in an ever-evolving state of becoming. For anyone who isn’t actively trying to shape the fast-growing quantum computing industry, that won’t be very helpful. But the next time a paper reporting some narrow yet impressive advance crosses my desk, I will file it away as part of this evolution, reset my personal expectations clock and get at least a little excited about the quantum-computing horizon having just shifted. %!s()