No one was ever bored watching Tim Curry onscreen. Our writer remembers speaking to him for the 50th anniversary of his most iconic hit, 'The Rocky Horror Picture Show.'

Right now, if you go to the website of Columbia House—yes, it has one—you’ll notice a tragic message right at the top: > _“After 9/15/26, The Columbia House will no longer be accepting new orders._ > _You can still purchase books with your credit card or credits as normal.”_ You’re not remembering wrong: It went bankrupt in 2015. That was a big blow, certainly, but it didn’t drive the company completely out of business until, well, one month from now, when it will start winding down operations by turning away new customers. It survived this long because it stopped selling music, but held onto its basic business concept, transitioning when it needed to, as it always had. You probably remember it as a CDs-by-mail company, and you may know that it started out as the Columbia Records-associated Columbia Record Club in 1955. But as nostalgia bloggers are fond of pointing out, it didn’t just undergo one big transformation when record collectors switched to CDs. It was nimble from the beginning, spawning the Columbia Reel-to-Reel Club in 1960, the 8-track-centric Columbia Cartridge Club in 1966, and then the Columbia Cassette Club in 1969. In 1985, after the rebrand to Columbia House, it even started selling TV shows on VHS. The format wasn’t the secret sauce, and neither was the content. It was the business model. > I'm pretty sure that I still owe Columbia House money pic.twitter.com/x0uBeD0iu8 > > — Axiomatic Enemy of the State (@DeTocqueville14) August 16, 2026 Whenever direct mail ads from the Columbia House showed up in my mailbox trumpeting bargains like 8 CDs for a penny, it always seemed like an unbelievable deal to teenage me in the 90s. My parents called it a scam and discouraged me from subscribing, but the price gambit was just a so-so deal, not a scam. The splashy upfront low-price thing was just a transparent method of locking people into contracts that made them buy CDs every month—hopefully for many profitable years. As anyone who has seen Chris Wilcha’s rather astonishing and intimate 1999 documentary _the Target Shoots First_ can tell you, Columbia House may not have been God’s gift to physical media consumers back then, but it was a company like any other, profit-seeking above all else, sure, but staffed by human beings who were trying to perform at least a somewhat valuable service. You remember Columbia House as “that CDs-by-mail company” because, as Forbes pointed out in 2015, CD sales in general were an absolute feeding frenzy in the mid-90s. Columbia House was positioned to cash in on CD mania, and did, raking in a reported $1.4 billion in revenue in 1996. But as the Hollywood Reporter pointed out in 2015, the CD era was a corporate sugar high, and things soured afterward—long before music streaming came along. Even after making the extremely on-brand move of transitioning to selling DVDs, Columbia House started bouncing from parent company to parent company, until revenue reportedly dropped to $17 million in 2014, the year before its bankruptcy. According to Cord Cutters News, the first publication to spot Columbia House’s impending demise (after the YouTuber Channel 33 RPM), the economics of being a mail order business in a streaming world continued to wreak havoc on the husk that remained of Columbia House over the past decade, and its inventory and selection shrank and shrank. Today, there appear to only be 12 DVD and Blu-ray options left: © Columbia House / Gizmodo screenshot And that lineup, it seems, is the swan song of Columbia House. If you’re a subscriber and you want your final mail order to be something apropos, go with _Blackberry_. But that might be a little too hopeful, since Blackberry, unlike Columbia House, is on the upswing lately. Still, this company survived for 71 years, and I still have a CD of the album _Debut_ by Björk that Columbia House sent to my sister even though she didn’t want it. Columbia House’s “negative option” billing may be vilified, but I owe a lifetime of Björk fandom to it.

“Any sufficiently advanced information is indistinguishable from noise.”

“The older I grow the more I listen to people who don’t talk much.” — Germain G. Glien

Neuroscientist Jared Cooney Horvath said older generations “screwed up” giving students access to so much technology: “I genuinely hope Gen Z quickly figures that out and gets mad.”

**On July 1, 2026, arXiv will spin out from Cornell University, its home for the past 25 years, to become an independent nonprofit organization.** With this next phase in arXiv’s journey quickly approaching, you can read more about arXiv’s history and the decision to spin out from Cornell in this recent article in the Cornell Chronicle. arXiv has been discussing the opportunity to become an independent organization for a long time, and we’re excited for the new flexibility and opportunities that this change will bring. This step is an important part of arXiv’s story that will have a positive impact as we continue to grow and has required great effort from staff to transition smoothly. Thanks to this, in the coming months, arXiv authors, readers, and the community that relies on us will not notice much change at all. arXiv was built for scientists, by scientists, and while our home may be changing, our mission, vision, and values never will. arXiv will remain committed to being free to read and to submit to, and we are dedicated to supporting scientists across the globe with equitable access to new ideas and discoveries. As we spin out from Cornell University, arXiv staff, volunteers, and our supporters are working hard to ensure there is no interruption to the important service arXiv provides. arXiv is also committed to transparency. We are a community resource, and we want to make sure that our community is aware of any changes to arXiv that may affect them. We also want to make sure the community has a better understanding of how changes support arXiv’s long-term goals as an essential scholarly publishing infrastructure. arXiv has created a page dedicated to frequently asked questions and information about the arXiv’s establishment as an independent organization. This FAQ page will be updated promptly as new information is available. On this dedicated FAQ page, you can find out more about the new arXiv’s leadership, governance, and special projects. While the FAQ page will be the best place to find the most up-to-date information on arXiv’s spinout, major updates will also be announced through arXiv’s blog and social media as they occur. In addition to the FAQ page, arXiv will be releasing a series of blogs to cover recent arXiv milestones, new organizational updates, and upcoming changes, including: * Introduction to arXiv’s new Engineering Director and dev team projects * arXiv’s 3 million submission milestone * Recent changes to arXiv policy practice around AI articles These blogs will be up in the coming weeks, and as always, comments from our community are welcome.

'Doonesbury' cartoonist Garry Trudeau pens a tribute to Charles M. Schulz's character Snoopy, the charming dog who became our most beloved fantasist.

Attached: 1 image 44 USB Port 22 Power Adapt Combo HotPlug Board

“If at first you don’t succeed, you’re running about average.” — M. H. Alderson

A web page that tells you what your browser gave away the moment you arrived. No login, no form, no permission. Most pages do this. None of them tell you.

They say a reader does not steal and a thief does not read. In the city of Gothenburg, Sweden, that's definitely true.