By Walt Hickey
AOL
Apollo Global Management has agreed to sell AOL to Bending Spoons for a reported price of around $1.5 billion. AOL still has 8 million active daily users and 30 million monthly users. Here is the rationale: listen, if you’re still using AOL in 2025 despite the existence of countless alternatives, then by gum, you’re part of one of the most loyal userbases in existence, and certainly that must be worth something. For those unfamiliar, Bending Spoons is an Italian group that’s snapped up the likes of Evernote, WeTransfer, Meetup and Vimeo. These are tech products that never really achieved the kind of hegemony that the Street tends to value, but nevertheless have some value in those books. For those unfamiliar with AOL, it is God’s way of telling you that you made too much money; founded in 1985, it’s best known for its part in the disastrous AOL-Time Warner merger, the disastrous Yahoo! era and presumably multiple more disastrous eras yet to come.
Sarah Fischer, Axios and Todd Spangler, Variety
Tennis
Spanish professional tennis player Alejandro Davidovich Fokina surpassed eight figures in career earnings yesterday in the 2025 Paris Masters, bringing his total to $10.02 million. This is a remarkable achievement because he has amassed such a sum despite never actually winning any of the 138 ATP tournaments he played. Excluding doubles specialists, nobody has ever done that: made $10 million despite never actually winning a tournament. Among active players, the next-highest career earnings without a win is $6.9 million. ATP titles are difficult, but not exactly rare to come by for a contender of Fokina’s caliber; over 60 active players have claimed it.
Work
In a rare move that may set a precedent, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston returned two works in its collection. The pieces are from 1857 and are attributed to the potter David Drake; the museum has returned his work to his present-day descendants. The vessels produced by Drake were made while he was enslaved, and the MFA pursued the resolution of ownership claims in much the same way that the Nazis looted art during the Holocaust. One of the vessels will remain on loan from the family to the museum for at least two years. The other, the “Poem Jar,” held to be his masterpiece, was purchased back by the museum and will assume a prominent spot in the Art of the Americas wing once the renovation is complete in June 2026.
Jori Finkel, The Art Newspaper
Headphones
A shift in music consumption over the past several decades has subtly changed the way that music is produced: the preponderance of headphone usage. In 2025, over 455 million headphones were sold worldwide, 59 percent more than the level in 2014, with 78 percent of streaming consumers listening to music through headphones or earbuds. This is a shift; music discovery, consumption and performance is now (for better and for worse) largely a solitary experience, and shared listening makes up a smaller percentage of music listening than it did in the past.
Jonathan Garrett, The Atlantic
Whitening
A BBC investigation has exposed a dangerous DIY teeth whitening scam throughout the United Kingdom, where amateurs are selling improper concentrations of teeth whitening chemicals. Patients are suffering serious and painful side effects from bootleg dentists. One salon in Manchester advertised whitening kits containing 35 percent carbamide peroxide that would break down into 12 percent hydrogen peroxide, 120 times the legal limit that can be used in cosmetic treatments by non-dentists and even twice the legal strength for dentists. One beautician charged 300 pounds for an online training course that included a kit with up to 53 percent strength of hydrogen peroxide gels.
Daniel O’Donaghue and Laura O’Neill, BBC North West Investigations
Bacteriophages
Food safety is threatened by bacteria that might appear on raw meat, such as E. coli or Salmonella enterica, and much of the food supply chain business is concerned with killing those bacteria. Or at the very least, stymying their reproduction. One clever way to address them is phages, or the viruses that evolved to kill E. coli and Salmonella enterica, waging biological warfare against germs. Since 2006, the FDA has authorized their use on ready-to-eat meats, usually applied as surface sprays. A new study tries to take that a step further. You see, phages tend to only remain where they land and can’t diffuse throughout the food, meaning that a pathogen under the surface of the meat might still evade their killer. However, a new study looked into microneedle patches to get the phages into the meat and found that PMMA patches cut E. coli levels in raw steak by 99 percent and in cooked chicken by 99.9 percent. A patch that addressed both E. coli and Salmonella cut the prevalence of the bacteria by 96.5 percent and 99.4 percent, respectively.
Category 6
The Saffir-Simpson scale of hurricane strength only goes up to Category 5, which is reached when a hurricane has sustained winds of 157 miles per hour or higher. Scientists are considering the flaws in that open-ended classification, given that five storms have had peak sustained winds over 192 miles per hour, a proposed threshold at which a Category 6 ought to start. Hurricane Melissa does not appear to have met the boundary — maximum winds were 185 miles per hour, the second strongest peak sustained winds in the Atlantic Ocean — and only 1980’s Hurricane Allen comes truly close, with winds of 190 miles per hour. The five storms that did meet the threshold were all in the Pacific, one hurricane and four typhoons. The counterargument to a new Category 6 is that an additional category might undermine the severity of the most powerful and destructive storms that the Atlantic is capable of producing, as the rationale that “well, this Category 5 hurricane could be worse” becomes an argument that people will have to spend time countering when time is not on one’s side.
Meghan Bartels, Scientific American
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AOL is also where I met my husband of 25 years!
1) I still think back nostalgically to turning on my home PC and hearing the cheery "You've got mail!".
2) Not that anyone is asking me, but a Category Six for hurricanes seems pointless. Even a Category one or two hurricane can be tremendously destructive (eg. Sandy, in 2012).