The Verge·Sunday, December 21, 2025

The Verge - Sunday, December 21, 2025

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Stories Covered

Frozen Waymos backed up San Francisco traffic during a widespread power outage

Waymo driverless car is not able to detect traffic lights after a major power outage in San Francisco, California, | Photo by Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu via Getty Images A power outage struck San Francisco on Saturday that blacked out about 130,000 customers at its peak, according to Pacific Gas and Electric Company, but also caused another problem: stranded Waymo vehicles. Posts all over social media showed the company's autonomous SUVs sitting still in the streets and causing traffic jams. Some p

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Some of our favorite gifts will cost you less than $25

Holiday shopping on a budget can feel constricting, especially if you've been invited to a white elephant or need a last-minute stocking stuffer. The good news is that, with this guide, you can leave that stress behind. Whether you're aiming for something practical or fun, we've found plenty of great gifts for under $25 - heck, we found several under $10 - that don't scream "I bought this at the gas station on my way over." You might not expect to find a worthwhile Nintendo Switch / iPad-compati

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You need to listen to these Christmas deep cuts

Santa knows how to boogie. | Image: AFP via Getty Images It's the holiday season, and Christmas music is utterly inescapable. Look, I love Mariah Carey and Wham! As much as the next guy. But at some point, you get really tired of hearing the same handful of Christmas songs over and over again. So here are 10 suggestions to add to your holiday playlist that are hopefully a little less obvious. Tom Waits - Christmas Card from a Hooker in Minneapolis View Link There's a long history of downer Ch

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The 35 best gifts that your teen will actually use

Between keeping up with TikTok trends and whatever new gadget just dropped, it's tough to know exactly what teens are into these days. Luckily, we can help. We may be older than teenagers, but many of us here at The Verge are kids at heart. Plus, we've also got a few staffers with older kids. To make your life a little easier this holiday season, we rounded up what we think are the best gifts for teens, based on our tech expertise as well as what our staff's teens are into right now. Below, you'

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Job killer

Park Chan-wook's 12th feature-length movie, No Other Choice, begins with Man-su (Lee Byung-hun) as a proud patriarch at the barbecue, a vision of the platonic ideal domestic life he will spend most of the movie defending. In the long middle where life is lived, the movie offers its audience mirth and pathos and deep social critique. Also: murders. After being laid off from a paper company, Man-su realizes that his best chance at getting hired for his next job is to knock off the three other qual

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The best thing I bought this year: The Nintendo Switch 2

I waited for the Nintendo Switch 2 for a long time. Rumors of an allegedly-real-but-never-released Switch Pro swirled around for years as I watched fewer and fewer AAA third-party games make their way to Nintendo’s little console that could. There were always enough first-party titles and indie games to tide me over, but I watched with some envy as games like Elden Ring took the world by storm, knowing I’d have to wait until Nintendo’s next generation hardware arrived to add them to my Switch li

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How AIM taught the internet to chat

If you were an internet user around the turn of the century, there's a good chance I could play a one-second long sound of a door opening and memories would immediately come flooding back. Memories of running home from school and logging onto AOL Instant Messenger to chat with your friends or your crush. Maybe memories of how AIM changed the way your company did business. Certainly memories of your old screen name, and the angsty song lyrics you put into your away message. AIM was, for a time, t

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2025: a year in art on The Verge

The Verge art team's favorite projects this year spanned the circus surrounding DOGE, the myths of the Vietnam War, the privacy crisis for trans people online, the vast surveillance network aimed at tracking down Iranian military dissidents, and much more. We built a kaleidoscope to showcase some standout products from The Verge's gift guides, sent an illustrator to the crowded halls of the courthouse to draw Luigi Mangione fans and spectators live, and dug deep into the confusing world of News

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Humanoid robots are coming. Eventually?

This is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more on robotics and AI, follow Robert Hart. The Stepback arrives in our subscribers' inboxes at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here. We're taking a winter break! The Stepback will be back on January 11th, 2026. Meanwhile, you catch up on past issues here. How it started I have a soft spot for robot fail videos. I watch them on a loop, chuckling to myself, as a kind of therapy. Maybe I'm a sadi

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Our favorite stuff of 2025

Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 110, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you're new here, welcome, happy holidays, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.) This week, I've been reading about mall Santas and malleable software and phone bans, wondering how I barely know any of the songs in DJ Earworm's annual mashup, waiting patiently for Ugmonk's Layflat notebooks to go back on sale, finally setting up my Switch 2 Camera for some hol

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