Damian Pickett · No. 5
Tuesday 8 September 2026
Apple’s iPhone 18 event is Wednesday, and the Patriots open their season against the Seahawks the same day.
The 2026 summer box office took $4.67 billion, making it the highest-grossing summer on record and the best since cinemas reopened after 2020. It is another sign mainstream cinema-going is recovering.
A thousand tons of volcanic rock replace concrete and steel in Petra Heights, a new north London apartment building by Groupwork and engineer Webb Yates, described as the world’s first high-rise held up by a stone exoskeleton.
The Patriots and Seahawks meet again in New England’s season opener, the first Super Bowl rematch to open a season in a decade, seven months after Seattle won Super Bowl LX.
Read · Lenny's Newsletter
A playbook for the biggest upheaval of work we’ll see in our lifetime
A playbook for building an unfair advantage as AI reshapes work, timely for a builder navigating the same shift himself.
Listen · Founders
A case study in an artist’s reinvention pairs with today’s read on building an unfair advantage as the ground shifts.
Listen · David Senra
A conversation with a communications and positioning specialist, squarely in Damian’s own craft as a product marketer.
Listen · Acquired
With the Patriots opening their season in a Super Bowl rematch this week, the business behind the league feels timely.
Simon Willison built a small video compressor tool with Claude Fable to publish an optimised demo video of his Equal Earth map animation on his blog, using FFmpeg under the hood.
Curious about the Equal Earth map projection recently adopted by the UN, Simon Willison had GPT-6 Astra in ChatGPT build him an animated transition between the Mercator and Equal Earth projections.
OpenAI, AIRPPU and WAN-IFRA have launched an AI programme to help Ukrainian news organisations strengthen innovation, resilience and independent journalism.
Simon Willison’s llm command-line tool reached version 0.35, adding support for OpenAI’s new gpt-6-astra model.
Eric Wu, who built and ran Opendoor before leaving in 2022, has a new company called NavigateAI building AI copilots that give construction workers real-time guidance, aiming to ease the industry’s labour crunch.
After Onimusha: Way of the Sword sold more than a million copies at launch, Capcom says it plans to revive more of its dormant game franchises.
Arm’s chief executive says modelling how a DNA marker affects cancer cannot be done with today’s computing power, but that more chips would let AI eventually help solve it.
Developer Amy Worrall has released McKinley 1.0, a new Mac app for drawing and annotating custom SF Symbols, bundling vector tools built specifically for Apple’s icon system.
Xiaomi has officially unveiled the 18 Fold, its first wide-format foldable phone, two days before Apple is expected to reveal its own first foldable iPhone.
Tim Cook will attend the screening for Wednesday’s Surprise and Shine event but will not appear in the event video itself, according to a report citing Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman.
Apple’s WebKit team is asking developers to submit ideas for Interop 2027, the next round of the cross-browser initiative aimed at improving compatibility across the web.
Hirokazu Koreeda says he was tearful throughout making ‘Look Back’, his live-action adaptation of Tatsuki Fujimoto’s manga, premiering in competition at Venice with performances from its young leads praised as remarkable.
Jury president Maggie Gyllenhaal paid tribute to Ellen Burstyn as ‘brilliant and brave’ while presenting her with a Golden Lion for lifetime achievement at the Venice Film Festival.
Cate Blanchett and Chris Pine lead an all-star cast as space aliens in David and Nathan Zellner’s ‘Alpha Gang’, a deliberately goofy, DIY sci-fi spoof reviewed at the festival.
Valeria Bruni Tedeschi shines as a devilish femme fatale in Paolo Strippoli’s campy thriller ‘The Spiral’, which earned a nine-minute standing ovation from its home crowd at Venice.
Payton Pritchard has emerged as one of Boston’s top five players heading into 2026-27, prompting debate over whether he should start or continue creating instant offence as Boston’s sixth man.
Patriots.com highlights three critical areas to watch as New England and Seattle kick off the 2026 NFL season in a rematch of the Super Bowl played just seven months ago.
Contract talks between the Patriots and cornerback Christian Gonzalez are far apart, Adam Schefter reports, making it hard to see a deal getting done before opening night.
The Patriots gave a discouraging update on running back TreVeyon Henderson’s injury ahead of the season opener against Seattle, saying only that he continues working hard to return.
McLaren’s Lando Norris accepted that his Italian Grand Prix battle with Oscar Piastri, which saw him put two wheels on the grass, was fair, saying his in-race complaint came in the heat of the moment.
A disappointing Italian Grand Prix result, and the fallout since, has turned into a crisis for Ferrari, leaving the team facing pivotal choices about its Formula 1 future.
Isack Hadjar will miss a third consecutive grand prix because of a wrist injury, with Liam Lawson remaining at Red Bull and Yuki Tsunoda continuing at Racing Bulls in Madrid.
Adley Rutschman’s three-run homer off the Pesky Pole beat the Angels 5-2, extending Boston’s MLB-best record to 34-17 since the All-Star break and closing the gap on the Yankees to two games for the top wild-card spot.
Brayan Bello threw a scoreless start in his first outing since 4 June, helping the Red Sox beat the Angels for a fifth straight win.
Joe Morgan, who managed the Red Sox to two division titles after taking over in 1988, has died at 95. Team chairman Tom Werner said ‘Morgan Magic’ is forever part of Red Sox lore.
Architecture collective Badweather has turned a 17-metre derelict canal boat into Soak, an off-grid bathhouse that moves to a new spot along London’s waterways every two weeks.
