Entertainment
Netflix Original Apocalyptic Thriller Takes Down Our Technological Dependence
By Robert Scucci
| Published
Navigating the early stages of a potentially world-ending event is no easy feat, especially if you’re the characters living within the fiction that Leave the World Behind establishes. After all, when airplanes start falling from the sky and self-driving cars start piling up on the interstate, you may find yourself wondering how you’re going to be able to watch the series finale of Friends on streaming while society crumbles around you, which is something that needs to be addressed immediately.
Taking a local approach instead of a global one, Leave the World Behind offers a startling glimpse of how a family vacationing in a remote area copes with getting suddenly cut off from the rest of the outside world. They scramble to find resources to make sure they can survive whatever faceless horrors are coming their way.
We’ve Become Too Reliant On Technology
Leave the World Behind wastes no time establishing how critical technology is to the Sanford family’s sense of well-being, as Amanda (Julia Roberts) decides to go on a spontaneous weekend getaway with her husband, Clay (Ethan Hawke), and their two children, Rose (Farrah Mackenzie) and Archie (Charlie Evans). On the ride from New York City to the vacation rental, everyone is distracted and disconnected from each other because the only connections they care about are those accessed through the devices in their hands.
Settling in for the weekend, Amanda shows just how unlikeable she is when the owner of the house G.H. Scott (Mahershala Ali), and his daughter, Ruth (Myha’la), show up unexpectedly in the middle of the night, claiming that they’re seeking shelter due to a blackout. Though G.H. seems to have some inside knowledge about what’s happening back in the city, he doesn’t reveal any more information than he has to, so as not to cause any unnecessary panic.
Instead of trusting G.H. and Ruth and letting them be comfortable in their own home (something that Ruth makes clear several times), Amanda lets them stay the night after conversing with Clay, but only if they stay in the basement in-law apartment and leave after everybody gets a good night’s sleep.
Waking up the next day, Amanda sees a number of emergency alerts on her cell phone, but they quickly vanish before she can show anybody else.
A Vacation Gone Wrong
Having reason to believe that a global catastrophe is about to occur, both families begin to panic when they realize they have no way to communicate without their cell phones. Clay sets out to find locals who have more information than he does, while G.H. reveals to Amanda that the United States may be the victim of a massive cyberattack of unknown origin. Archie, your typical apathetic teenager, feels indifferent about the whole thing, while Rose takes note of the surrounding wildlife acting in increasingly strange ways, like a whole bunch of deer surrounding the vacation home that disappear as quickly as they make their presence known to her.
However, Rose’s primary concern is streaming Friends because she’s working through the series for the first time (poor girl), and it provides a great amount of comfort to her as the family dynamic begins to break down.
Preppers Be Preppin’
Thankfully, Amanda recalls encountering a doomsday prepper named Danny (Kevin Bacon) stocking up on supplies when she went into town for groceries, resulting in Clay and G.H. seeking him out for answers. With no access to radio, internet, or television, there’s no way for anybody to know how far-reaching the problems they’re facing are in Leave the World Behind, which demonstrates just how hopeless human beings are without being constantly dialed into their devices.
Stuck in the middle of nowhere, both families in Leave the World Behind have to use what limited resources they have to find answers, all while emergency sirens blare in the distance, which can only be heard when the entire sky isn’t shrieking at an unthinkable frequency that may be the result of the alleged cyber attack that they’re in no way prepared for.
Streaming Leave The World Behind On Netflix
While you may think that Leave the World Behind suffers from not showing how the rest of the world is coping with the blackouts, it’s quite effective in generating suspense because there’s no strength in numbers at the vacation house, and the entire situation could quickly devolve into an “every man for himself” scenario at the drop of a hat. Not fully understanding just how deep the alleged cyber attack goes, there’s no reasonable way for anybody to know how to find safety, or if everything will blow over and return back to normal.
However, Leave the World Behind gets in its own way on more than one occasion by trying to create conflict that doesn’t necessarily need to be there to move the story along. From the weird, semi-romantic encounters that Amanda has with G.H. when they bond over their distrust of humanity to Clay’s disproportionate amount of hopefulness and strange conversations with Ruth while they’re sitting poolside, hitting a vape pen, this movie felt bloated in a way that makes me wish a 90-minute cut existed instead of the 140-minute version we get on Netflix.
At the very least, Leave the World Behind is a solid watch on Netflix because it shows just how hopeless most of us would be if we couldn’t simply log onto social media to see what’s going on. Proving just how quickly the world can become such an incredibly small place if the technology we rely on for our day-to-day interactions disappears overnight, this film will most certainly make you consider hoarding water bottles and canned goods for your survival, and DVDs for your bunker so you don’t lose your mind while you wait for everything to blow over.
Entertainment
LG W6 Wallpaper vs. The Frame Pro: Why is the Wallpaper TV so expensive?
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The resurrected LG Wallpaper TV is officially available to preorder. LG hasn’t announced a release date yet, but some interested buyers may need an extra second to think after seeing that the W6 Wallpaper TV costs $5,499.99.
And that’s just the smallest size. To be fair, the smallest size in question is 77 inches, but that’s still quite pricey — especially if your instinct is to compare the Wallpaper to Samsung’s The Frame. So, the $5,500 question is: Is LG delusional for the W6 Wallpaper’s price tag, or are we delusional for wanting it to be cheaper?
get $200 off a soundbar when you preorder
Why does the Wallpaper cost so much more than The Frame?
The most expensive Frame model, the 83-inch Frame Pro, costs $3,999.99. We’re certainly not used to any art TV making The Frame look affordable. But this time, the Frame Pro sounds more like a dupe for the LG Wallpaper than the other way around.
However, comparing these two designs is a real apple and oranges situation. The W6 Wallpaper is OLED and The Frame Pro is Neo QLED (Samsung’s version of mini-LED). Those are two completely different methods of lighting the TV screen, and OLED is already considered to be superior to QLED in most situations.
As you can see from the side view, the Wallpaper is unbelievably thin.
Credit: LG
(I don’t think brands do themselves any favors in the “convincing the average buyer that this TV is a practical purchase” department by strictly staging product photos in a home that looks like Bruce Wayne’s penthouse, but I digress.)
The W6 Wallpaper’s OLED tech is some of LG’s most advanced ever. Some key features include Brightness Booster Ultra and Hyper Radiant Color Technology, which LG says make the W6 Wallpaper nearly four times brighter than the average OLED TV. According to LG, the W6 is the most “reflection-free” of any LG TV. Brightness and legibility in bright rooms are typically an OLED TV’s rare weak spot against QLED TVs, but it sounds like LG bridged that gap here.
The most mind-bending part is that LG packed it all into a screen that measures 9 millimeters thick — even thinner than either The Frame model, which are already impressively thin. For reference, 9 millimeters is thinner than a closed MacBook Pro.
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Comparatively, The Frame Pro’s Neo QLED technology isn’t even Samsung’s best Neo QLED work.
The best Samsung Neo QLED TVs use full array local dimming: Clusters of tiny LED bulbs arranged across the entire screen that can individually dim or brighten as needed, leading to deeper blacks, vibrant highlights without blooming, and overall more accurate picture quality. Instead, the Frame Pro’s mini-LED system consists of extra bulbs arranged across the bottom of the TV, pointing upward. While the Frame Pro’s picture is brighter and more contrasted than the regular Frame, it almost feels basic compared to the W6 Wallpaper.
As if gamers needed any convincing to blindly side with the OLED TV, the LG Wallpaper’s max 165Hz refresh rate is worth nothing — the Frame Pro can only hit 144Hz.
Samsung has a Wallpaper TV dupe. It’s just not in The Frame family.
The Frame Pro’s teetering title as the best art TV certainly didn’t get much cushion from Samsung’s latest TV launch. When the remaining half of Samsung’s 2026 flagship TVs were released at the beginning of April, the biggest news about The Frame Pro was a negligible HDMI port upgrade. That’s exactly the level of innovation needed to compete with LG’s new OLED art TV.
But during that launch, I noticed that the nicest new Samsung OLED embodied the core features of art or lifestyle TVs. The Samsung S95H rocks a steel-colored metal bezel and a “glare-free” matte screen coating, mounts flush with the wall, and can access The Samsung Art Store. It also sees boosted brightness and improved reflection handling over the 2025 Samsung S95F, which was already one of the internet’s favorite OLED TVs for bright rooms.
Art features or not, high-end OLED TVs are just expensive
It’s not like high-end OLED TVs aren’t always on the steep side of the pricing spectrum. The 2026 77-inch LG C6H OLED and 2026 77-inch LG G6 OLED cost $3,699.99 and $4,499.99, respectively. The 77-inch version of the aforementioned Samsung S95H OLED also costs $4,499.99. As one of the absolute best LG OLED TVs you can buy, plus the unique art TV features, the W6 Wallpaper is naturally pricier — just like we’ve long accepted that The Frame is simply going to be more expensive than other QLED TVs with similar specs.
If it makes you feel better, the new LG Micro RGB TVs are just as salty. The cheapest one, the 75-inch MRGB95B TV, just debuted at $4,999.99. The 85-inch version costs $6,999.99.
No one is alleging that the W6 Wallpaper is a realistic investment for the average household. $5K is still wickedly expensive for a TV, but it’s pretty in line with the common asking price for other premium OLED TVs.
Entertainment
Hackers got data on 5.5 million ADT customers by phishing, report says
Millions of people use security company ADT to protect their home or business. And yet their cybersecurity may have been compromised in the latest high-profile breach from hacking group ShinyHunters.
The website Have I Been Pwned reports that a ShinyHunters data breach included 5.5 million unique email addresses associated with ADT customers. ADT says that customers’ payment information wasn’t compromised.
Still, the company confirmed that the breach included customer names, phone numbers, and addresses, as well as Social Security and Tax ID numbers in a minority of cases.
“ADT’s cybersecurity systems detected unauthorized access to a limited set of customer and prospective customer data on April 20,” reads an ADT blog post confirming the breach. “The company’s response protocols activated immediately — terminating the intrusion, launching a forensic investigation with leading third-party cybersecurity experts, and notifying law enforcement.”
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ShinyHunters told Bleeping Computer they gained access to the ADT Salesforce account by compromising an employee’s Okta SSO login credentials. Bleeping Computer added that the hackers used voice phishing. The recent Panera Bread breach, also traced back to ShinyHunters, reportedly also involved SSO phishing.
Okta, a popular SSO service provider, recently warned about the prevalence of voice phishing attacks (also known as vishing) in a recent blog post, which included tips for guarding against these cyberattacks.
ShinyHunters is a prolific hacking organization. In recent months, the group has also been responsible for high-profile breaches involving Rockstar Games, Crunchyroll, Salesforce, Bumble, and others. Ransomware attacks may result.
In a typical ransomware attack, the hackers threaten to release or sell leaked customer or company data on the dark web unless the compromised organization agrees to pay a ransom.
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Entertainment
Get 10 bottles of wine for $40 with this 75% off deal
TL;DR: Get 10 bottles of red, white, or mixed wine for $39.97 (reg. $160) through May 10 at 11:59 p.m. PT. Shipping not included.
If you like having several bottles of wine on hand without putting too much thought into the different blends you should buy, this deal keeps things easy. Right now, you can get a 10 bottles of wine in this bundle for $39.97, which is 75% off the usual $160 price. The sale runs through May 10 at 11:59 p.m. PT, with shipping added at checkout.
This bundle isn’t about rare vintages or overly technical tasting notes. Instead, the Swirl team curated these wines to be balanced and easy to enjoy. From a flavor standpoint, that usually means fruit-forward profiles, moderate acidity, and smoother finishes, which tend to appeal to a wider range of palates. Several of the included wines have also earned recognition in blind-tasting competitions, where selections are judged purely on taste rather than branding.
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There are three options available for the bundles: a red-only collection, a white selection, or a mixed set that includes rosé. The red wines feature flavors such as cherry, raspberry, and subtle spice, while the whites offer lighter notes like green apple or citrus. The mixed option provides variety for changing preferences or different occasions.
This kind of bundle makes the most sense for anyone who entertains occasionally, enjoys trying different styles, or just wants to cut down on frequent trips to restock. Having a variety on hand can make last-minute plans, dinners with friends, or even a quiet night in feel a little more effortless. Plus, a bottle of wine makes a great last-minute gift idea for a friend.
If that sounds like something you’d use, the $39.97 cost keeps the commitment relatively low for 10 standard 750ml bottles of wine. Just factor in the $29.95 shipping cost at redemption and get ready to say bottoms up.
StackSocial prices subject to change.
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LG W6 Wallpaper vs. The Frame Pro: Why is the Wallpaper TV so expensive?
