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Ascending Everest has gone mainstream

August 02, 2026

Everyone knows that the friend who can’t stop talking about their rock climbing gym also secretly dreams of summiting Mount Everest. That’s never been more possible than today, since extreme Himalayan climbing is now accessible to tourists beyond survivalists with bushy beards. Peak business In the years after the swashbuckling New Zealander Edmund Hillary and his intrepid Nepalese local guide Tenzing Norgay became the first known people to summit Everest in 1953, the number of annual Everest ascents stayed in the single digits for the next two decades. But thanks to equipment innovations that made climbing more manageable, the number of summiters skyrocketed in the 1990s and continued to grow from 121 in 1998 to 866 in 2025—with an entire industry emerging to bring amateur alpinists to the summit. Several Nepalese companies offer fully planned expeditions, complete with glamping at slopeside camps, climbing tech, and know-how from local mountain guides known as Sherpas. While a...

Foreign tourists are shunning the US

August 02, 2026

Contentious foreign relations, a rising dollar, and fears about visiting a country that has detained overseas visitors are resulting in the US hemorrhaging tourism money like it’s Baby Billy’s production of Teenjus . The World Travel & Tourism Council (WTTC) projects the US to lose $12.5 billion in travel revenue in 2025—a 7% dip from last year and a 22.5% drop from 2019, when international spending reached a record $217.4 billion. Of the 184 foreign economies tracked by the WTTC, the US is the only one on pace to see a decline in tourism revenue. Everyone is staying away In March, US airports that have historically served throngs of international visitors who want to see Disney parks and the Grand Canyon were experiencing massive year over year declines in international arrivals: Arrivals from the UK and South Korea both dipped 15%. Tourists from Germany plummeted 28%. Other markets that had previously been staples, including Spain and Ireland, fell between 24% and 33%. Acc...

The Strip is emptier this year

August 02, 2026

Fewer people are putting themselves at risk of losing their home playing roulette or misplacing the groom after a debaucherous bachelor party. Las Vegas is experiencing a tourism slump , which experts attribute to larger American trends of a slowing economy and a decline in foreign travelers: Visitor numbers overall were 11% lower in June compared to the year before, after declining for six months straight on a year-to-year basis, per the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority. There were also 11% fewer networkers expensing $18 cocktails convention-goers visiting the city, compared to June 2024. What happens in Vegas…has roots outside of Vegas The vacant slot machines at Caesars Palace could be indicative of how Americans feel about their wallets, since it takes financial chutzpah to gamble. Experts say that economic anxieties are making Americans more guarded in their leisure spending, as evidenced by how they scaled back on their vacation budgets this spring , according t...

Why Japan has the world’s best trains

August 02, 2026

The worst thing trainspotters can do in Japan is blink. But even if they miss the bullet train, the next one is probably just minutes away, looking like Amtrak at 3x speed. The country’s famous Shinkansen high-speed rail network can replace a six-hour drive with a two-hour ride at a top speed of 200 mph. It also boasts frequent service and an average delay time of 1.6 minutes. Meanwhile, an early departure by 25 seconds once prompted an official apology from the train company. While offering tourists an experience to obsess over alongside multistory manga stores, it’s also a common mode of transportation for local travelers. In Japan, 28% of the country’s passenger miles are traveled by train, compared with 10% in France and 0.25% in the US. How do they do it? Transportation experts say Japan’s railtopia stems from the privatization of the country’s railroads in the 1980s. Its notoriously inefficient national railroad was split into six companies, which axed unprofitable routes...

Canvas cyberattack shuts down schools’ sites

August 01, 2026

Procrastinating Intro to Romantic Lit students at thousands of schools were granted a surprise extension on their final essays. Canvas, the platform that about half of all colleges and universities in North America use to manage assignments and share grades, shut down all its sites for a few hours on Thursday, after its parent company, Instructure, suffered a massive cyberattack—just in time for final exams. Instructure reported late Thursday that Canvas was back for most users, but not before schools like Penn State canceled some exams scheduled for Thursday and Friday. A hacking group called ShinyHunters took credit for the attack, which it claimed affected 8,800 universities and K-12 schools around the globe and 275 million people’s data. It’s unclear exactly how many users or schools were targeted, as hacker groups sometimes exaggerate the impact to gain media attention or to get a ransom, according to TechCrunch. Some users at Harvard reported seeing a message from the ha...

Claude chats were showing up in Google searches

August 01, 2026

Conversations with Claude that were intended to be private—some involving medical data and children’s phone numbers—were discovered in search engine results by Reddit users over the weekend. How it happened: Users can create a shareable public link for Claude chats (much like you can with Google Docs), so friends or coworkers can view them. While a public Google Doc with your 80-page screenplay no one wants to read isn’t indexed for search, the Claude creations were. Claude creator Anthropic told TechCrunch that those links only become public if they are posted where web crawlers can find them, like on a social media platform. Search engine companies had other explanations: A Google spokesperson told Wired that it gives Anthropic and any website owner “clear controls” over whether web pages are crawled or indexed. Microsoft’s Bing (it still exists) says that developers can use tags to block indexing. But when Wired reviewed the exposed Claude chats, it did not find the recomme...