Three very different worlds are waiting for you on Netflix this weekend. A 19th-century murder mystery that questions everything you think you know about guilt, a Danish Nordic noir serial killer thriller that you genuinely cannot stop watching, and a Japanese sumo drama that has absolutely no business being as gripping as it is.

One is based on a Margaret Atwood novel, the second has a perfect 100% on Rotten Tomatoes, and the third one will make you care deeply about a sport you have never thought about once in your life. All three are criminally underrated and worthy of your weekend binge.

We also have guides to the best new movies to stream, the best movies on Netflix, the best movies on Hulu, the best free movies, and the best movies on Amazon Prime Video.

Alias Grace (2017)

Based on Margaret Atwood’s novel of the same name, this six-part miniseries follows Grace Marks, a young Irish immigrant in 19th-century Canada, convicted of murdering her employer and his housekeeper. A decade into her sentence, psychiatrist Dr. Simon Jordan begins interviewing her to determine whether she should be pardoned on grounds of insanity. The whole show rests on one central question: is Grace telling the truth?

Sarah Gadon plays Grace with such quiet, calculated control that you never quite know where you stand with her. She is fragile yet magnetic and possibly dangerous all at once. The show is also a sharp study of how women were perceived, judged, and silenced in that era. It holds a 99% on Rotten Tomatoes and deserves every bit of it.

You can watch Alias Grace on Netflix.

The Chestnut Man (2021)

This is your perfect weekend watch because season 2 of The Chestnut Man: Hide and Seek drops on Netflix on May 7. So you have just enough time to binge the first season before it arrives. This Danish crime thriller follows detectives Naia Thulin and Mark Hess as they hunt a serial killer in Copenhagen who leaves tiny chestnut figurines at each crime scene.

What makes the series so gripping is how the mystery keeps expanding in directions you do not see coming. The pacing is relentless, the atmosphere is genuinely unsettling, and the finale lands hard. With six episodes, a perfect 100% on Rotten Tomatoes, it is one of the best Nordic noir series Netflix has ever put out.

You can watch The Chestnut Man on Netflix.

Sanctuary (2023)

It’s baffling how little people talk about this hidden gem on Netflix. This Japanese drama follows Kiyoshi, a broke and reckless young man who stumbles into the world of professional sumo wrestling, chasing money, only to find himself swallowed whole by its traditions, politics, and brutal hierarchy. Think Rocky, but set in one of Japan’s most sacred sporting institutions, with a dark comedy streak running through it.

The actual sumo matches are equal parts brutal and stunning. But what keeps you hooked on this underrated show is how it captures the culture around the sport, the rivalries between stables, the iron grip of tradition, and the political games played behind the scenes. It holds an 86% on Rotten Tomatoes and an 8/10 on IMDB. I recommend giving it two episodes before you judge the show.

You can watch Sanctuary on Netflix.

It’s about that time of year. National Pool Opening Day is tomorrow, April 25, and summer is almost here, which means pool owners everywhere are getting ready to unveil the horrors of whatever happened during the off-season. Most of the Beatbot lineup is on sale at Amazon and Beatbot’s own storefront, with prices starting at $499. Beatbot makes many of the best pool-cleaning robots we’ve tested, and we’ve highlighted our top picks below. Note that the discounts are scheduled to end on April 26, though items may sell out sooner. Happy pool party season! (Drop me an invite!)

Beatbot AquaSense 2 Ultra for $2,649 ($500 Off)

Our favorite robotic pool cleaner overall, the AquaSense 2 Ultra has what WIRED contributor Chris Null called “near-perfect cleaning capabilities.” It has six hours of battery life and AI-powered debris detection, and it can handle cleaning the floors, walls, and waterline. You’ll get a charging stand as well. Be aware that this cleaner weighs nearly 30 pounds, so be sure to eat your protein so you can lug it out of the water when the job is done. Even though it floats, it can still feel pretty hefty. The AI debris detection sets this model apart, as do the five cleaning brushes and frankly oversized battery capacity. If you want the fanciest pool cleaner we’ve tested, and you don’t want to pay full price, this deal is up your alley.

Beatbot Sora 30 for $749 ($200 off)

The Beatbot Sora 30 offers great value for the price. It tends to fluctuate between this discounted price and its full thousand-dollar MSRP, and we have yet to see it sell for less than it is right now. It has excellent battery life and more than enough power and features for daily pool cleaning needs for most users. It doesn’t have a surface skimmer—you might want the pricier Sora 70 (on sale for $1,200; $300 off) for that—but otherwise it’s capable of cleaning your pool floor, walls, and waterline. It’s easy to use with the companion app, and it floats when it’s done cleaning for easy retrieval. If you don’t need a surface skimmer or you don’t want to drop a ton of cash, this middle-of-the-road robot is worth considering.

Beatbot iSkim Ultra Robotic Pool Skimmer for $649 ($350 off)—Clip the Coupon

The best surface skimmer has sensors that prevent it from slamming into your pool walls while it cleans. Unlike many other robots in this category, it actually slows down and turns while it’s skimming. It does have a basket-eject button on the front that sometimes gets depressed by accident, though this might not be an issue depending on your pool shape, and it’s not so much a deal-breaker as it is a thing to be aware of. Snag this model if you want to keep the surface of your pool clean automatically, but you don’t mind manually cleaning the walls and floor.

More Beatbot Deals

Here are some more pool cleaner discounts for your perusal, on models with slight variations from those we recommend above.

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from the playing-favorites-with-religions dept

In June 2025, the Fifth Circuit Appeals Court upheld what would seem to have been an extremely obvious conclusion reached by the federal court handling the case: yes, it definitely violates the Constitution to mandate the posting of a religious text in every classroom in Louisiana. This wasn’t about displaying an assortment of “foundational texts” as its defenders (disingenuously) claimed: It was about pushing their preferred religion on students by any means possible.

Last June, the Fifth Circuit exposed the hypocrisy of the mandate while upholding the lower court’s injunction blocking its enactment:

It is also unclear how H.B. 71 ensures that students in Louisiana public schools “understand and appreciate the foundational documents of [its] state and national government” when it makes displaying those “foundational” documents optional, and does not require that they also be printed in a large, easily readable font. La. R.S. § 17:2124(A)(9). When the Ten Commandments must be posted prominently and legibly, while the other “contextual” materials need not be visible at all, the disparity lays bare the pretext.

If only that had been the end of the story. Presumably, enough Fifth Circuit judges preferred to reach a different conclusion that the appellate court decided to take another look at it using its full slate of judges. Since this is the Fifth Circuit we’re talking about, you already know how that turned out.

This time, the majority pretended it was simply impossible to tell if this Louisiana law actually violated the Constitution. The only way to be sure was to let the state enact it first and allow the courts to deal with any rights violations after they’ve occurred. The injunction was lifted, with the majority claiming Supreme Court precedent (that hasn’t actually been overturned by the Supreme Court) is no longer valid when it comes to discussing possible Establishment Clause violations.

That same argument — that the three-prong test created by the Supreme Court in 1971’s Lemon v. Kurtzman, which dealt with another set of church/state separation issues. This is the test:

• The “Purpose Prong”: The statute must have a secular legislative purpose.
• The “Effect Prong”: The principal or primary effect of the statute must neither advance nor inhibit religion.
• The “Entanglement Prong”: The statute must not result in an “excessive government entanglement” with religion.

While a handful of judges (you can guess which ones) have opined that the “Lemon test” is dead, having been “abrogated” by more recent decisions, the Supreme Court has never issued a ruling overturning it. In fact, elements of the test were still being applied more than 30 years later.

Nonetheless, the Fifth Circuit — as it did earlier this year during its en banc review of the Louisiana law — says Lemon is dead [PDF] and, therefore, pretty much any law requiring the posting of the Ten Commandments in classrooms doesn’t violate the Constitution.

We conclude the Texas law does not violate either the Establishment Clause or the Free Exercise Clause. Here is a summary of our reasons.

First, the Establishment Clause. Plaintiffs primarily claim we are bound by Stone v. Graham, 449 U.S. 39 (1980) (per curiam), which invalidated a similar Kentucky law decades ago. We disagree. Stone applied an analysis—the “Lemon test”—which confounded courts for decades. See Lemon v. Kurtzman, 403 U.S. 602 (1971). Mercifully, the Supreme Court jettisoned Lemon and its offspring some years ago. See Kennedy v. Bremerton Sch. Dist., 597 U.S. 507, 534 (2022) (recognizing the Court has “abandoned Lemon”). With Lemon extracted, there is nothing left of Stone.

After deciding Lemon (and Stone) no longer applies, the majority moves on to say even if it did, there would be no constitutional violation because:

No child is made to recite the Commandments, believe them, or affirm their divine origin…

While it is true that the law makes no demands of teachers or students to do anything more than be in the same room as a Ten Commandments poster that “must be visible” to all students from up to 16 feet away, it’s quite obvious that this law is crafted to sneak a bit of the state’s preferred religion (at least in terms of those writing, supporting, and defending this law) past the protections of the Constitution.

It’s obvious from the statements they made while pushing this bill through the legislature. And it’s just as obvious now that the law has been given a free pass by the Fifth Circuit Appeals Court.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Republican, called the ruling “a major victory for Texas and our moral values.”

“The Ten Commandments have had a profound impact on our nation, and it’s important that students learn from them every single day,” he said.

Pretty bold to use the royal “our” to mandate a specific set of moral values be posted prominently in taxpayer-funded public schools. It’s even bolder when it directly contradicts the desires of prominent members of this particular religious community — something that was pointed out by the dissenting judges in Fifth Circuit’s ruling on the Louisiana Ten Commandments law:

Indeed, every faith-based organization before us—on behalf of thousands of members—and every clergy and devout plaintiff agree that Louisiana must not pick and post specific scripture that the state commands will confront children in state classrooms. All religious voices submitted to us, barring one individual, oppose Louisiana’s attempt to select, inculcate, and enforce this version of gospel text in compulsory public education.

The people with power are pushing religion on kids against the wishes of the clergy and “devout plaintiffs.”

There’s a dissent attached to this ruling as well. This one tackles the Fifth Circuit majority’s decision to rely twice on its presumption that Lemon is dead law to hand Bible-thumping legislators wins in two states:

In Van Orden, despite applying a historical approach instead of Lemon, the plurality cited Stone as a “limit[] to the display of religious messages or symbols” and “an example” of the Court’s “vigilan[ce] in monitoring compliance with the Establishment Clause in . . . schools.” “The placement of the Ten Commandments monument on the Texas State Capitol grounds,” Van Orden explained, is “a far more passive use of those texts than was the case in Stone.” […] This is because “[t]he display [was] not on the grounds of a public school, where, given the impressionability of the young, government must exercise particular care in separating church and state.” Id. at 703 (Breyer, J., concurring in the judgment) (citing Lee v. Weisman, 505 U.S. 577, 592 (1992); Stone, 449 U.S. 39). And, unlike in Van Orden, “the text” of the Ten Commandments in Stone “confronted elementary school students every day.”

Van Orden recognized Stone’s viability, notwithstanding Lemon, given the special “concerns that arise in the context of public elementary and secondary schools.”

The Fifth Circuit majority — like the defendants whose unconstitutional law it has allowed to be enacted — cherry picks from post-Lemon Supreme Court jurisprudence to arrive at the conclusion it wants, rather than one the Constitution (and actual Supreme Court precedent) dictates. With two of the three states in the circuit already have been given a green light to mix church and state, it’s up to Mississippi to get this bill signed by the governor so the Fifth can complete its three-state sweep of the Establishment Clause.

Filed Under: 10 commandments, 1st amendment, 5th circuit, establishment clause

At its highest capacity, DeepSeek’s V4 ‘redefines the state-of-the-art for open models’, according to the company.

Chinese AI darling DeepSeek has launched its long-awaited V4 large language model (LLM) in preview, as speculation around a possible first funding round swirls.

The latest open-source launch comes more than a year after the start-up released R1, whose cost effectiveness and performance sent Silicon Valley leaders in a flurry, igniting accusations of theft. R1 was trained using lower-capacity Nvidia chips.

The V4 series comes in two versions, a ‘Pro’ version with 49bn activated parameters and a ‘Flash’ version with 13bn activated parameters, both supporting a context length of 1m tokens.

At its maximum capacity, the V4-Pro-Max mode “redefines the state-of-the-art for open models, outperforming its predecessors in core tasks”, DeepSeek said.

This mode has “significantly closed the gap” with Google’s Gemini 3.1-Pro, the leading model in knowledge-based evaluations, according to the company, while outpacing OpenAI’s GPT-5.2 and Gemini-3.0-Pro on “standard reasoning benchmarks”.

In agentic tasks, DeepSeek’s V4-Pro-Max is on par with leading open-source models, such as Kimi-K2.6 and GLM-5.1, but slightly worse than frontier closed models, it noted.

Its internal evaluations revealed that the Pro-Max version outperforms Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 4.5 and approaches the level of Opus 4.5. Huawei has said that its Ascend supernode ​based on Ascend ⁠950 ​AI chips would be supporting V4’s versions.

OpenAI made fresh allegations against DeepSeek as recent as February, calling the company’s distillation techniques a part of “ongoing efforts to free-ride on the capabilities developed by OpenAI and other US frontier labs”.

Meanwhile, the US administration yesterday (23 April) said it will work closely with AI companies to fight “industrial-scale campaigns” by foreign actors attempting to steal its technology.

Chinese tech giants Tencent and Alibaba are reportedly in talks to join the DeepSeek’s first funding round. A source told Bloomberg that the benchmark for a valuation would be around $40bn. The publication further reported that Tencent has proposed a 20pc stake in the company.

DeepSeek’s Chinese contemporaries have made their own AI model launches in the months past, wishing to get ahead of V4, which was hyped to be the company’s most important launch since R1, and V3 in late 2024.

Latest launches include Alibaba’s Qwen3.5; ByteDance’s Seedance 2.0; Zhipu’s GLM-5, trained entirely using Chinese chips; MiniMax, which released M2.5; and the Alibaba-backed Moonshot AI, which came out with Kimi K2.5.

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The Ember Smart Mug 2 is niche, but it has a loyal following. Even though we think there are better mug warmers on the market, Ember is like Apple AirPods or Kleenex. People want what they want. Right now, for Mother’s Day, the Ember Smart Mug 2 is on sale for just under $100, a 30 percent discount and a match of the very best price we’ve tracked. You can save at Amazon, Best Buy, and the manufacturer’s website.

This smart mug is probably overkill. It has a smartphone app that notifies you when your coffee reaches the ideal temperature, and its onboard light also provides a visual indicator that your brew is ready. It intelligently adjusts power usage to keep your drink warm when you’re nearby, and turns off when you’re not around. The self-heating mug is on sale in a few variations—10 or 14 ounces, in blue, white, black, and purple.

The mug offers up to 80 minutes of powered heating time, or you can pop it on the included charging coaster to keep the battery going all day. And you don’t need the smartphone app unless you want to precisely dictate your coffee temperature—the mug defaults to 135 degrees Fahrenheit without your specific input.

Our main gripe is that this proprietary warming system is not dishwasher safe. You need to hand-wash each component, and ensure you do so carefully, because the items are not cheap to replace. But if Mom has been putzing around the house drinking perpetually microwaved coffee, perhaps an upgrade is in order. We have additional recommendations in our guide to the Best Coffee Warmers. You may also want to check our related stories on the Best Espresso Machines, Best Coffee Machines, and Best Pod Coffee Makers.

Govee’s Outdoor Solar String Lights have just launched, and they’re already making waves across social media. The string itself is 34 feet long and has eight extremely flexible bulbs that may be hung over a fence, a tree branch, or the border of your patio. A secondary 6 watt solar panel clamps on and may be tilted to maximize sun exposure while the lights are in place.

A full day in the sun will charge the built-in 4800 milliamp-hour battery, providing up to 13 hours of consistent, warm warmth when nightfall arrives. At 50 lumens apiece, they are not very bright and will not blind anyone around, but they do emit a warm and pleasant light. You can operate them using the free Govee Home app and a simple Bluetooth connection.

Govee Outdoor Solar String Lights 33ft, RGBICW Outdoor Lights with 8 Dimmable LED Shatterproof Bulbs…

• Unrivaled Radiance with LuminBlend: Govee solar string lights offer 16 million colors with LuminBlend technology for a premium ambiance – all fueled…
• Outdoor Reliability: Built for all-weather durability, these string lights and solar panel are IP67 waterproof. Solar panel with aerospace-inspired…
• High-Capacity Solar Panel for All-Night Lighting: With a 4800mAh high-capacity battery and a 6W high-power solar panel, a full charge offers up to…

Within that app, you can select from over 100 pre-programmed scenes that load instantaneously, or you can customize your own colors and have the lights match with music on your phone or a speaker. The RGBICW technology allows each bulb to function as an own unit, providing you with an extremely wide spectrum of hues and tones, as well as some stunning smooth white tones for everyday use.

The LuminBlend software ensures that every transition from one colour to another seems natural and even, avoiding washed-out pastel tones and keeping deeper colors polished. Don’t worry about poor weather; this item has an IP67 water proof classification, so rain and wind will not stop it from working. The bulbs are durable enough to take a few knocks, and the panel itself is coated with ETFE, which is basically aerospace grade material that can withstand high heat, cold, filth, and the like.

Setup is simple, requiring no wiring or tampering with an electrical outlet. Simply hang the string and set the panel, and you’re good to go. You can also check the battery state within the app and add a rapid charge with a USB-C charger if the clouds come in the way. Govee claims the whole device will endure for 30,000 hours and offers a two-year warranty.

You can acquire the entire setup for $99.99 right now from the Govee website or Amazon. Finally, anyone who has put up with basic solar lights for years but still wants some actual color and the option to control them from their phone can finally get it all in one convenient package that is self-charging and reliable season after season.
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