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On July 7-8, NATO held its 36th official summit in Ankara, Turkey. There were several consequential topics to discuss at this year’s meeting, chief among them the wars in Ukraine and Iran and the uncertain future of European defense and security. We asked five experts to assess the outcomes of the summit for the various parties involved.Liviu HorovitzAssociate Researcher at German Institute for Security and International AffairsThe key takeaway from Ankara is that even President Donald Trump is struggling to escape NATO’s strategic logic. He arrived attacking allies and questioning the alliance’s value, yet left reaffirming Article 5 and praising

The post NATO’s Unity on Paper and Fractures Beneath the Surface appeared first on War on the Rocks .

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It’s a story we just can’t seem to quit. From antiquity to outer space, literature and film are filled with scrappy adventurers struggling to get home.

This week, Christopher Nolan cashes in on that safe narrative bet with a new Odyssey starring Matt Damon and Anne Hathaway. We may debate the success of this latest epic. But one thing’s for sure: Homer’s story isn’t going anywhere.

Speaking of stories—of the dozens and dozens of adaptations, it’s also true that some Nobodies are better than others. Here’s an irrefutable, completely objective and scientific list ranking odysseys for ye discerning adventurers.

10.

Michael Caine’s AI-dyssey (2026)

The actor Michael Caine recently licensed his plummy voice to a large language model, so now a robot avatar can read you the tale. This sucks for several reasons . But today my favorite is: AI narrators defeat the point of storytelling.

If the person ostensibly reading the epic aloud to you was too lazy to actually read the epic, what are we even doing here, friends? Last place, with a bullseye.

9.

L’Odissea (1968)

In a recent New Yorker letter, the critic David Denby explored why The Odyssey has bested so many adaptors . As case in point, he revisits an eight-part Italian miniseries in which Ithaca is rendered fairly dull.

Denby dismissed the series—which you can currently watch in French on Youtube —as highbrow 60s kitsch. “As the camera roams the ruins of Troy, we get a stern historical lecture, followed by heavily populated scenes of actors standing around talking or gazing out to sea. The moviemaking is faithful, literal, and dead.” Ouch.

8.

The Odyssey (1997)

Did you know there was a glossy Odyssey mini-series released in 1997? (And that it starred Eric Robert s and Vanessa Williams ?!)

This epic didn’t seem to stick in the culture’s craw—even though per Variety , on it release, it was “on a minute-to-minute basis the most expensive TV drama ever made.” This tale was critically dinged for the same problem Denby identified above. Though its adventure scenes were praised, the script lacked the “ insight or depth ” of the source material.

7.

Ulysses (1954)

This first major Hollywood spin on the story was also epic in scale, but knocked in The New York Times for a technicolor tawdriness and casting.

And alas, poor Kurt! Critic Bosley Crowther yearned for “someone a trifle more transcendent” in the lead role.

6.

George Chapman, The Odyssey (1616)

Though non-scholars may find the 1616 version a little roomy in the elbows, Chapman’s Odyssey brought the epic to English-reading shores. And hey, firsts are important.

His project wasn’t wholly faithful to the Greek, though. Writing in the Los Angeles Review of Books , historian Richard H. Armstrong noted that Chapman’s translation is “surrounded by punchy commentary and wild claims, both for Homer’s genius and his own bona fides as a translator.” Ego follows ego, I suppose.

5.

James Joyce, Ulysses (1922)

I know, I know. It’s hard to make space for deviant adaptations. By this metric, we might also include Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain , or Scorsese’s After Hours, or [insert most any adventure/return story here]. I take your quibbles on the chin.

But I’d be remiss to ignore Ulysses’ most direct literary descendant. Here, Dublin is Ithaca, and the timeline is compacte. But something tells me Homer would approve.

4.

L. Frank Baum & Victor Fleming, The Wizard of Oz (1939)

While we’re in the neighborhood of slant adaptations, here’s my case for Oz. In this odyssey, we find a key spin on the hero’s journey. Dorothy Gale is not here to be humbled; nor does she arrive on the scene as confident as her antecedent. Her odyssey is about stepping into power, not abdicating it. Which makes this voyage home all the more poignant.

(See also: The Wiz .)

3.

Emily Wilson, The Odyssey

Called “ brisk and understated ” on its 2018 release, Wilson’s Odyssey put the epic back on the map for a wide modern audience. According to critics like Annalisa Quinn at NPR , the classicist winnowed down the “nostalgic detritus” that makes older versions of the story feel stodgy.

Wilson also rendered the yarn in “friendly iambic pentameter,” which some readers felt recaptured a conversational rhythm suitable to a story designed to be read aloud.

2.

Robert Fitzgerald, The Odyssey (1961)

Scholars can debate translation merits just as long as film nerds. Do we dig the academic Lattimore, or the cinematic Fagles? This new Mendelsohn looks exciting. But what about Cesar Pavese?

Speaking from the public school of which-book-got-you-personally-hyped, I’m a Fitzgerald fan meself. Writing in a 1974 New York Review of Books , the critic D.S. Carne-Ross praised this beloved translation of The Odyssey for its unparalleled poetry: “No previous rendering was entirely satisfactory.”

1.

Coen Brothers, O Brother Where Art Thou (2000)

When asked to think about singularly American art works last week, this romp through a Depression-era Mississippi sprang outta my head like Athena. In the Coen brothers’ film, we have foibles, jailbreaks, sirens out of Appalachia, and a South that can be as dapper as it is violent.

As Denby reminds us, “Odysseus is a warrior with wit and intellect, a con man and fabulist who constantly reinvents himself.” Clooney’s Ulysses (…Everett McGill) reps the second part of that description, highlighting the war hero’s under-praised flair. It takes an inventive man, after all, to whip up a chart-topping ear-worm at a moment’s notice.

Whichever your muse, Nolan or Joyce, may you not wander too long.

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The Rivelia Start is De'Longhi's smallest automatic coffee maker

It has a menu of 10 coffee drinks, including cold brew

It's on sale now in the UK for £599.99 (about $800 / AU$1,160)

De'Longhi makes some of the best espresso machines I've tested here at TechRadar, and as the owner of a small kitchen, its latest model has particularly piqued my interest. The De'Longhi Rivelia Start is the company's smallest fully automatic coffee maker.

The Rivelia Start is a successor to the 2024 De'Longhi Rivelia , which our tester Josephine Watson gave a full five stars thanks to its consistently well-extracted espresso, clever Bean Adapt technology that optimizes brew settings to suit your preferred beans, and LatteCrema Hot system, which creates thick and creamy foam for milky drinks.

The Rivelia Start offers all that in an even smaller package, and adds the ability to prepare authentic-tasting cold brew. De'Longhi promises that your cold brew will be "ready in under five minutes", which tells me that it's not just pouring a shot of hot coffee over ice, like some other machines I've tested recently. Instead, the coffee is extracted using ambient temperature water, which results in fewer bitter compounds being dissolved for a more mellow flavor.

The Rivelia Start can prepare hot milk foam, and you can upgrade it with a LatteCrema Cool kit if you want to make cold lattes and cappuccinos (Image credit: De'Longhi) The Rivelia Start's standard menu contains 10 drinks, but if you like the idea of an iced latte or cappuccino to help you stay cool in the summer months, you can upgrade your Rivelia Start with the optional LatteCrema Cool set, which lets you create chilled milk foam for six further drinks.

Personally, the feature I'm most excited about is the pair of swappable bean hoppers. My job sometimes involves drinking a lot of lattes, and I always prefer to switch to decaf in the afternoon so I can still sleep after a day testing drip and espresso machines. With the Rivelia Start, there's no need to purge one type of coffee from the hopper before refilling with another; just unscrew the whole thing and swap it for one filled with a different type of bean.

The De'Longhi Rivelia Start has a clear and simple interface with illustrated touch buttons (Image credit: De'Longhi) It's simple to operate too, with an interface of clearly-labelled buttons rather than a touchscreen, making it extra accessible for new users.

Its small size isn't the only thing that sets it apart from other coffee makers, either — it also comes in a palette of earthy colors that fit with the current trend for natural shades and textures, which makes a refreshing change from the stark black, white, and chrome that once dominated kitchen appliances.

It's available to buy now direct from De'Longhi in the UK for £599.99 (about $800 / AU$1,160) in two colors: maple brown and jade green. More hues will be available from third-party stores from September, and we're currently waiting for details of its international launch.

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Bitcoin Magazine

The Bitcoin Softfork That Tried to Police “Junk Data” — And Why It’s Already Failing

This is a guest post by Brandon Black . Opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc. or Bitcoin Magazine.

Within the tiny internet bubble of Bitcoin X (formerly Bitcoin Twitter or Crypto Twitter), there has been a lot of noise in the past year about @dathon_ohm’s proposal for a Reduced Data Temporary Softfork, otherwise known as BIP110 . Underlying this proposal is the idea that certain Bitcoin transactions have been violating the principles of the network by including in their locking or unlocking scripts data that can be interpreted in one or more additional ways besides their plain Bitcoin script interpretation. According to BIP110’s supporters, reducing the use of these transactions is sufficient justification for the most confiscatory Bitcoin softfork to date, on a deployment timeline that is dramatically faster than the two most recent softforks, and with a lower activation readiness threshold.

Bitcoin is an open-access, censorship-resistant ledger to which anyone can write entries if they are willing to pay fees sufficient to convince block template creators and miners to include their transaction. The fundamental value of Bitcoin vs. all other ledger systems is the aforementioned open access. Without it, Bitcoin’s ledger has no more value than the bowling alley scoreboard. Because of this fundamentally open access, we all know that Bitcoin will be used by those we hate. Much like the principle of free speech, which is meaningless unless it applies to speech that we don’t like, Bitcoin’s open access would be meaningless if it only applied to transactions of which you or I approve. I will therefore assume that we do not want to be in the business of inspecting how other people structure their ledger entries any more than we want them inspecting our entries.

BIP110 proponents might say, “Sure, but that only applies to monetary entries! What about these non-monetary entries?”, but the reality is that there simply is no such distinction. Every transaction made on Bitcoin is made by satisfying the conditions of some locking script to make an entry in the ledger, which consumes input coins and creates output coins. The fact that one transaction’s scripts are larger or smaller than another is of no relevance to me as a Bitcoin node operator or user. First, I simply do not look at other people’s transactions. They’re no more my business than other people’s orders at the local café. Second, my node makes no such distinction. Transactions are either valid or invalid, and they are either costly to validate (like a large multisig) or cheap to validate (like one of these Ordinals or OP_RETURNs).

One could argue that Bitcoin, like gold, would be a superior monetary asset if it could not also be looked at in other ways. Imagine if gold could not be used in industry or jewelry! It might be true that that would make it better as money. But of course, the very same properties that make gold good money also make it desirable in jewelry and industry. The same applies to Bitcoin. The very fact that Bitcoin allows anyone to make an entry if they are willing to pay the fees means that we must give up the idea that we can control how they will look at that entry. No matter what restrictions we put on the structure of the entries, it will always be possible to make entries that can be interpreted in other ways by non-Bitcoin software. So, both with Bitcoin and with gold, we accept that other use is inevitable. In gold, this leads to distortions in the market when non-monetary demand increases or decreases. In Bitcoin, this can lead to periods of higher transaction fees when there’s greater demand for its limited blockspace.

In Bitcoin, we have two advantages that gold does not have. First, making Bitcoin transactions that can be viewed in alternative ways does not affect the market for Bitcoin itself. Unlike gold, very little Bitcoin is allocated to these uses. Second, in Bitcoin, we have a protocol that is already designed to minimize cost to the validation network from such other interpretations. Bitcoin limits both the size of blocks and the number of signatures that can be used in transactions. These are the greatest costs to validating nodes, and the protocol limits on them have been in place since the very early days of Bitcoin, precisely to prevent abuse by any high-frequency or high-volume use of the ledger. These limits have already spurred innovations such as the Lightning Network, Ark, Spark, Cashu, and many more. Even the boom in demand for blockspace caused by these “non-monetary” ledger entries (yes, that does sound ridiculous) has increased the use of these scaling solutions, which require fewer entries on the main ledger.

With the justification for BIP110 thus explored, and hopefully shown to be woefully lacking, let’s look at the proposed change itself. BIP110 restricts the size of locking scripts, restricts the number of alternative scripts in taproot, makes the taproot annex invalid, removes all upgradable witness and tapscript versions, removes all tapscript upgradable opcodes, and makes OP_IF and OP_NOTIF invalid in tapscript. All of these restrictions apply to UTXOs created during the 52414 blocks (approximately 1 year) after its activation. BIP110 also proposes a miner readiness signaling threshold of 55% instead of the threshold used in prior miner signaled softforks of 90% or more. If 55% of blocks do not signal readiness before block 961632, nodes enforcing BIP110 will treat blocks not signaling readiness as invalid to force the change to lock in by block 963648 and activate by block 965664.

BIP110 would be the most sweeping restriction of Bitcoin script since Satoshi’s well-known deactivation of many opcodes in response to a critical vulnerability ( CVE-2010-5137 ) back in 2010. It proposes miner signaled activation with an unprecedentedly low threshold and node-forced activation after less than 9 months from the date the BIP was assigned a number. It does all of this because (as discussed above) other people are viewing certain ledger entries in ways which the BIP110 supporters do not approve of. Worse yet, the folks who use such disapproved ledger entries have already updated their software to continue making such entries even if BIP110 were to become Bitcoin’s consensus rule set. This was, of course, a predictable outcome (many of us explicitly predicted it) because it is fundamentally impossible to restrict how other people use external software to analyze entries on an open-access public ledger.

In summary, BIP110 is a proposal to do something impossible (limit how users of an open access ledger use that ledger) in response to a problem that is already fully addressed through Bitcoin’s existing protocol limits. It proposes to do this impossible thing on an irresponsibly short activation timeline, with incredibly limited code review, and regardless of whether the change reaches any type of ecosystem consensus. Fortunately, Bitcoin is not such a delicate flower of a system that such a foolhardy attempt at modifying it will succeed. Not only have miners soundly rejected BIP110, but other voices throughout the developer, investor, influencer, and corporate landscape have spoken out against the changes. In August, this particular attack against Bitcoin’s consensus rules will have made Bitcoin stronger through its failure, and the network will continue its steady rhythm of tick-tock, next block.

This post The Bitcoin Softfork That Tried to Police “Junk Data” — And Why It’s Already Failing first appeared on Bitcoin Magazine and is written by Brandon Black .