Chicago-based music superfan Aadam Jacobs has been recording the concerts he attends since the 1980s, amassing an archive of over 10,000 tapes. Now 59, Jacobs knows that these cassettes are going to degrade over time, so he agreed to let volunteers from the Internet Archive, the nonprofit digital library, digitize the tapes.

So far, about 2,500 of these tapes have been posted on the Internet Archive, including some rare gems like a Nirvana performance from 1989. (The group wouldn’t break through to mainstream audiences until they released the single “Smells Like Teen Spirit” in 1991.) Within the collection, you can also find previously unknown recordings from influential artists like Sonic Youth, R.E.M., Phish, Liz Phair, Pavement, Neutral Milk Hotel, and a whole bunch of other punk groups.

For many of these recordings, Jacobs was using pretty mediocre equipment, but the volunteer audio engineers working with the Internet Archive have made these tapes sound great.

One volunteer, Brian Emerick, drives to Jacobs’ house once a month to pick up more boxes of tapes — he has to use anachronistic cassette decks to play the tapes, which get converted into digital files. From there, other volunteers clean up, organize, and label the recordings, even tracking down song names from forgotten punk bands.

Sometimes, the internet is good. And so is this Tracy Chapman recording from 1988.

There’s no rewriting history here. Triumph were always the “other” Canadian power trio, living in the long shadow of Rush. But while Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson gear up for a closely watched return to the stage this summer; now with Anika Nilles stepping into the impossible role left by Neil Peart, Triumph are making their own move back into the conversation.

The Best of Triumph arrives June 12 via Craft Recordings, collecting the band’s most defining arena rock cuts at a moment when Canada’s hard rock legacy is suddenly front and center again. Available on LP, CD, and digital, the set revisits staples like “Lay It on the Line,” “Magic Power,” and “Fight the Good Fight,” charting Triumph’s rise from domestic breakout act to international stage regular—because if you grew up north of the border, they were never optional. They were already on the mix tape.

Triumphant Return: Canada’s Other Power Trio Steps Back Into the Spotlight

Alongside the announcement, “Lay It on the Line (Single Edit)” makes its streaming debut—finally. Newly mastered from the original analog tapes as part of the full-album remaster, this is the tighter, radio-ready version that helped push Triumph beyond Canadian borders in the late 1970s. Several of the single edits included in this collection have never been available digitally, giving longtime fans and the streaming generation a shot at hearing these songs the way radio first delivered them.

The physical rollout leans into collector appeal without going overboard. In addition to standard black vinyl, The Best of Triumph will be offered in multiple exclusive color variants: “Spellbound Purple” at Barnes & Noble, “Blue Smoke” at Sunrise Records, and “Silver Lightning” through Craft Recordings. A retailer-exclusive CD featuring a commemorative tour pass will also be available via Walmart and Sunrise Records in Canada.

Long before streaming playlists flattened everything into the same algorithmic swamp, Triumph carved out a distinct lane. Formed in the mid-1970s by Gil Moore, Rik Emmett, and Mike Levine, the band fused hard rock punch with progressive instincts and a surprisingly optimistic streak. The result: a run of Gold and Platinum releases and a steady grip on rock radio through the late ’70s and ’80s. They didn’t quite reach the global dominance of Rush, but they sat comfortably in that second tier alongside arena heavyweights like Boston and Foreigner, and for a lot of listeners, that was more than enough.

Tracks like “Lay It on the Line” and “Fight the Good Fight” remain fixtures on classic rock radio, and steady placement across film, television, and sports has kept the catalog alive. More recently, a surprise reunion appearance during the 2025 Stanley Cup Final helped put the band back on the radar ahead of their upcoming tour.

That momentum carries into 2026 with The Rock & Roll Machine Reloaded tour, marking Triumph’s first full-scale run in more than three decades. The North American trek launches April 10 in Orlando with a benefit performance before moving across the U.S. and Canada through early June, joined by fellow Canadian rock veterans April Wine. It’s a 50th anniversary victory lap—but also a reminder that for a band long cast as the “other” Canadian trio, Triumph never really left the building. They were just smoking in the boy’s room.

2026 Tour Dates

April 10 – Orlando, FL – Hard Rock Live Universal
April 13 – Hollywood, FL – Hard Rock Live Seminole Hard Rock Hotel and Casino
April 22 – Sault Ste. Marie, ON – GFL Memorial Gardens
April 24 – Toronto, ON – Scotiabank Arena
April 25 – Hamilton, ON – TD Coliseum
April 28 – Halifax, NS – Scotiabank Centre
April 29 – Moncton, NB – Avenir Centre

May 2 – Laval, QC – Place Bell
May 3 – Ottawa, ON – Canadian Tire Centre
May 5 – Winnipeg, MB – Canada Life Centre
May 7 – Edmonton, AB – Rogers Place
May 8 – Calgary, AB – Scotiabank Saddledome

May 13 – Rosemont, IL – Allstate Arena
May 14 – Milwaukee, WI – Miller High Life Theatre
May 16 – Kansas City, MO – Starlight Theatre
May 17 – St. Louis, MO – Hollywood Casino Amphitheatre
May 20 – Irving, TX – The Pavilion at Toyota Music Factory
May 21 – San Antonio, TX – Frost Bank Center
May 22 – Sugar Land, TX – Smart Financial Centre

May 24 – Tampa, FL – MIDFLORIDA Credit Union Amphitheatre
May 26 – Atlanta, GA – Synovus Bank Amphitheatre at Chastain
May 28 – Camden, NJ – Freedom Mortgage Pavilion
May 30 – Sterling Heights, MI – Michigan Lottery Amphitheatre at Freedom Hill

June 3 – Darien Center, NY – Darien Lake Amphitheatre
June 4 – Boston, MA – Leader Bank Pavilion
June 5 – Wantagh, NY – Northwell at Jones Beach Theater
June 6 – Boston, MA – Leader Bank Pavilion

Where to pre-order: $25.99 at Amazon | Craft Recordings | B&N (June 12, 2026)

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The modern era of cheating in chess began on a Thursday in July 1993, when a man with shoulder-length dreadlocks walked into the World Open tournament in Philadelphia and registered as John von Neumann. Both the hair and the name were phony.

The real Von Neumann was a prominent mathematician and computer scientist who died in 1957. The fake Von Neumann had a suspicious buzzing bulge in his pocket, fought a grandmaster to a draw, then fled before anyone could work out who he was.

A Boston Globe columnist called it “one of the strangest cheating episodes in chess history.” Chess.com recorded the “Von Neumann incident” as “the earliest known case of a potential computer cheater.”

This was decades before chess pros started getting expelled from tournaments for using smartphones, and a lifetime before the recent buzzing anal beads scandal. (Google it, but not at work.) It was years ahead of Garry Kasparov’s defeat by IBM’s Deep Blue, in an era when humans still imagined themselves to be smarter than machines. The identity of the man with the dreadlocks has remained one of the game’s most enduring mysteries. Until now.

I stumbled across the culprits while researching Lucky Devils, my new book about gamblers using science and technology to win at blackjack, poker, roulette and, on this occasion, chess. The following excerpt is based on my interviews with the gamblers involved and the tournament’s organizers and participants, as well as contemporaneous reports. Wherever possible, details have been independently verified.

Rob Reitzen packed light for the flight from Los Angeles to Philadelphia. He had to. His suitcase was stuffed with computer equipment, switches, wires, and buzzers. Sitting next to him on the plane was his best friend John Wayne, known to everyone in their crew of professional gamblers as “the Duke,” after his Hollywood namesake.

It was June 1993, just before the start of the World Open chess tournament, hosted by the City of Brotherly Love. Reitzen and Wayne both fancied themselves as players. It was how they’d first met. The Duke had posted a flyer, inviting challenges against “John Wayne, chess champion and arm-wrestling champion.” Reitzen had responded and found himself sitting opposite a Black ex-soldier with a megawatt smile, beginning a relationship built on competitive pranks.

Their real calling, though, was gambling—specifically the high-tech kind. Reitzen, a dyslexic savant with a mop of curly hair permanently concealed under a baseball cap, earned a living with wearable gadgets. He’d used an adapted Zilog Z80 microprocessor, about the size of a pack of cards, to process the shifting possibilities in blackjack, then developed a similar device to do the same in California’s poker rooms. For a while, Reitzen and Wayne used a system with a tiny camera inside a player’s belt buckle. Outside, in a truck with a communications dish bolted to the side, teammates could pause its footage, zoom in, and see the blackjack dealer’s hidden card for a split second as it was placed face down on the felt. Was it cheating? Probably. But the profits spoke louder than any ethical doubts they might have had.

Since such machines were banned in casinos, they had to be concealed carefully. Reitzen and his players sent information to the computers using toe switches built into their shoes and received instructions back from a vibrating box hidden in the crotch.

On arrival in Philadelphia, the Duke wired himself up, putting on a pair of headphones to secure his wig. He wore one of their blackjack processors, modified to communicate with Reitzen, who would station himself, out of sight, in front of a bank of monitors in their hotel room running his homemade chess software. The two friends looked at each other, Reitzen grinning. This was it—their shot at chess immortality.

On the entry form, Wayne wrote the name John von Neumann. “As in … the father of game theory?” a skeptical official asked. Wayne nodded. The official raised an eyebrow, then put Wayne into the draw.

Fusion power startup Inertia Enterprises said on Tuesday that it has signed three agreements with the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) to help bring the laser-based fusion reactor pioneered at the Californian lab to market.

The deals could give Inertia a boost over rival startups. The National Ignition Facility (NIF) at LLNL is so far the only experiment to prove that controlled fusion reactions could produce more power than they require to ignite. Inertia burst onto the scene in February with a $450 million Series A, making it one of the best capitalized startups in the industry.

Inertia and LLNL are working on a type of fusion called inertial confinement, which generates fusion conditions by compressing a fuel pellet using some external force, unlike other approaches that use powerful magnetic fields to confine plasmas until atoms fuse.

At the NIF, 192 laser beams are fired into a large vacuum chamber so that they converge on a small gold cylinder called a hohlraum, which contains a diamond-coated fuel pellet. When the lasers hit the hohlraum, it gets vaporized and emits X-Rays that blast the BB-sized fuel pellet inside. The diamond coating is transformed into a plasma, which expands to compress the deuterium-tritium fuel.

If that doesn’t sound exotic enough, keep in mind that all of this needs to happen several times per second if the technology is ever going to produce power for the grid.

The laser-driven reactor design was first theorized in the 1960s as a safer way to research thermonuclear weapons, though scientists also recognized its potential for power production. Construction on the NIF began in 1997, and it took 25 years to reach the breakeven point where a fusion reaction released more power than needed to kick it off.

Several startups, including Inertia, Xcimer, Focused Energy and First Light, are attempting to turn the concept into commercial-scale power plants. Because NIF’s lasers are based on old technology, the hope is that new lasers will be more efficient, lowering the energy required to ignite each fusion reaction and so make it easier for each reaction to release enough energy to make a commercial-scale power plant profitable.

The agreements between Inertia and LLNL cover two strategic partnership projects, and one cooperative research and development agreement. The organizations say they will work together to develop more advanced lasers and improve the fuel targets with an eye toward better performance and manufacturing. Inertia is also licensing almost 200 patents from the lab.

It was perhaps inevitable that Inertia and LLNL would continue to work together. Annie Kritcher, the co-founder and chief scientist of Inertia, helped design the successful experiment at NIF that achieved scientific breakeven. The 2022 CHIPS and Science Act paved the way for her to found a company while retaining her position at LLNL.

When it rains, it pours.

That phrase defined retail cybersecurity in 2025. What began as isolated incidents quickly became prolonged, intense disruptions, exposing just how interconnected — and fragile — modern retail operations really are.