Everybody loves pizza, right? Or they did anyway. Pizza joints no longer dominate the U.S. landscape, now outranked by coffee shops and Mexican restaurants. The humble pie is just a little more humble these days.

America is “falling out of love with pizza,” said The Wall Street Journal. Sales growth at pizza places has “lagged behind the broader fast-food market for years,” and industry executives are unsure about the future. The parent company of the Pieology Pizzeria chain filed for bankruptcy in December, following the April filing by Bertucci’s Brick Oven Pizza & Pasta. Chains still made $31 billion in 2024, but pizza’s “dominance in American restaurant fare is declining.” 

What went wrong for pizza?
It can be difficult to innovate with such a familiar product, though there have been attempts. “No restaurant chain became the ‘Chipotle of pizza,’” said Restaurant Business. About 10 years ago, chains like Blaze Pizza, Pieology and Pie Five tried to bring a “fast-casual, customizable business model” to the business, offering “single-serve, customizable pies.” It did not work. MOD Pizza, the largest of the chains, has “flirted with bankruptcy” and is closing locations. “Quick-service” pizza restaurants like Pizza Hut, Papa Johns and Papa Murphy’s also saw “sales declines in 2024.” 

Is pizza the only food sector in trouble?
Casual restaurant chains of all stripes are “increasingly bifurcating” into a “handful of winners” and a much bigger group of losers, said NBC News. Operating costs are rising and forcing chains to raise prices to “maintain their profit margins,” which does not go over well with lower- and middle-class customers who face “growing financial instability amid a weakening job market.” That has created pain across the industry. 

What next?
“On the way down, at the moment, is Pizza Hut,” said Babson College’s Thought & Action entrepreneurship blog. Its owner, Yum Brands (also the parent company of Taco Bell and KFC), is “exploring a sale” of the chain. Pizza Hut is “old and tired,” said Ab Igram, the executive director of Babson’s Tariq Farid Franchise Institute. “Yum will focus on the brands that are doing well.”

But the weakness of big chains may be an opportunity for mom-and-pop shops. “The era of the chains is over,” said Loren Padelford, the chief revenue officer at Slice, and the “era of indie pizza is in full swing.”

It has been a long time coming. No human has ventured into deep space since the final Apollo mission in 1972, but that’s about to change. Four astronauts — three Americans and a Canadian — will soon be heading back to the Moon as part of NASA’s Artemis II program, possibly as early as Feb. 6 and “no later than April,” said the space agency. Although they won’t land on our rocky satellite during the 10-day mission, they will pass just a few thousand miles from it, in a mission that promises to unlock valuable lessons for future missions to the Moon and beyond. 

What’s the Artemis program? 
Artemis began in 2017. NASA aimed to return astronauts to the Moon and ultimately establish a permanent lunar base. In November 2022, Artemis’ Space Launch System rocket, the most powerful rocket ever built by NASA, and its Orion capsule were launched on a 25-day crewless test flight, Artemis I, that circled the Moon only 80 miles from its surface. 

What’s Artemis II’s mission? 
The astronauts will lift off from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida and spend the first two days orbiting the Earth, testing their life-support systems. Then the Orion capsule will fire up its main thruster and shoot off toward the Moon on its 240,000-mile, four-day journey. It will follow a figure-of-eight path, looping around the far side of the Moon, before beginning the four-day return trip and splashing down in the Pacific Ocean. 

Three of the astronauts on the mission — Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch — have travelled in space once before. The fourth astronaut, Canadian Jeremy Hansen, will be on his maiden flight. As well as testing the various systems on board, the crew will be test subjects, helping NASA to understand the effects that space travel has on their cognition, sleep, stress, immune responses and cardiovascular health. 

What’s the next goal? 
If all goes well, Artemis III will follow. Slated for 2027, the mission would be the first Moon landing and the first chance for a human to walk on the lunar surface since Apollo 17 commander Eugene Cernan left his footprints there more than 50 years ago.

Italian farmers pour milk in the streets of Milan in opposition to the EU-Mercosur trade deal, which has finally been approved after 25 years of negotiations between the EU and Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay. It will create the world’s largest free-trade area, although some EU farmers fear it will affect their livelihoods.
Marco Bertorello / AFP / Getty Images

January used to be the time of year in which studios dumped their unloved dregs in theaters. But in the streaming era, good movies can be found and watched at any time, and studios are keeping up. This means there are plenty of hotly anticipated flicks hitting theaters this month.

‘The Plague’
In director Charlie Polinger’s drama, Joel Edgerton plays the coach of a swim camp where the boys bully Eli (Kenny Rasmussen) by pretending that his skin rash is the plague. We witness these disturbing rituals of male adolescence through the eyes of the new kid, played by Everett Blunck (pictured above), who’s unnerved by what he sees. “This anxiety-inducing look at pubescent social structures [is] so thrilling and so brutal,” said The AV Club. (in theaters now)

‘28 Years Later: The Bone Temple’
In June, director Danny Boyle’s contemplative third entry in this zombie franchise arrived in theaters. Jumping ahead 28 years into the future, it depicted a U.K. still overrun by mutated zombies. In this follow-up helmed by Nia DaCosta, adolescent Spike (Alfie Williams) joins a post-apocalyptic gang of vigilantes as his father Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) searches for him. (in theaters Jan. 16)

‘A Private Life’
Jodie Foster (speaking perfect French) plays Lilian Steiner, an esteemed Parisian therapist whose life is upended when one of her patients commits suicide. Blamed for her death, Lilian begins to suspect foul play and launches her own investigation. Foster shines in director Rebecca Zlotowski’s “delightful and whimsical film,” whose “witty conundrums” keep it “firmly in the realm of the eccentric,” said IndieWire. (in theaters Jan. 16)