Americans keep buying a lot of stuff, even though said stuff is getting more expensive. The spending helps keep the economy afloat amid rising inflation but at a cost to households digging deeper into debt to stretch their paychecks.

What did the commentators say?
Americans “continue to spend” even though they are “feeling pessimistic about their finances as affordability pressures mount,” said NBC News. Retail sales were up in August, and holiday spending is “projected to hit record levels this year.” But the seemingly good numbers suggest a gloomier reality. The rise in spending is largely because people are “paying more” for the stuff they routinely buy.

The trend is “particularly remarkable” given the overall “downbeat consumer sentiment,” said The Wall Street Journal. Those dark moods historically “correlated with lower consumer spending,” but that rule of thumb mostly broke since the pandemic. 

Now, economists say bad feelings about the economy are “increasingly decoupled from spending and other economic indicators,” said the Journal. Americans are “spending their financial condition, not their psyche,” said Mark Mathews, the chief economist at the National Retail Federation, to the outlet.

Older consumers are driving the economy, said CNBC. The affordability crisis is for “younger people,” said economist Ed Yardeni to the outlet. Senior Americans have “accumulated an enormous amount of net worth” that has allowed them to keep spending.

What next?
It’s not clear that the spending can continue much longer. U.S. households are “borrowing more, saving less and watching their paychecks lose purchasing power,” said The Wealth Advisor. Consumer debt is now above $18 trillion, a total that will carry future consequences. Today’s borrowing has the potential to “constrain spending for years, particularly when balances carry high interest rates.”

High prices “haven’t put a dent in U.S. holiday spending,” said The Street. Consumers have already begun Christmas shopping, increasingly relying on “buy now, pay later” options to purchase gifts and other seasonal items. September purchases of holiday items “ran well ahead of 2025,” said Bank of America in a statement, per the outlet.

For the first time in years, applications are flowing into the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the organization that controls web addresses, for new top-level domains. These proposed suffixes at the end of URLs will shape the internet’s next era.

What do the applications reveal?
ICANN has received 1,615 applications from 481 applicants so far, according to its Reveal Day announcement earlier this month. This is the “biggest shake-up” of internet addresses in “more than a decade” and could “result in you typing .fart to reach a website,” said The Times. While some domains are “quirky,” others show how AI companies are “seeking to grab domains like .agi, .superintelligence and .chatgpt.”

Ten companies including Meta and OpenAI applied for the .agent domain, seven for .agi, and six including OpenAI for .asi, “attempting to get in on” Trump’s push to switch from artificial intelligence to super intelligence, said The Verge. OpenAI applied for 15 top-level domains, or TLDs, while Meta filed for 21.

This is the first time ICANN has accepted applications in over a decade. The nonprofit “first sought new top-level domain applicants in 2012,” said Politico, resulting in .app, .web and .pizza. Each application costs $227,000 and is “subject to, among other processes, a community input period that runs from November to March.”

Those awarded a domain “become registries, gaining control over the suffix,” said The Times. They can keep these for themselves or “sell the registrations under it to third parties.”

Who benefits?
The domain applications show that organizations worldwide are “seeking new ways to build trusted online identities, serve their communities and connect with internet users,” said ICANN President and CEO Kurtis Lindqvist in a press release. But not everyone is enthusiastic.

Internet safety expert John Carr, who has attended ICANN meetings for a decade, is critical of the organization’s process. It’s a “conspiracy against the public good,” he said to The Times. Under its rules, ICANN is supposed to check the “real-world identities” of the people buying the domain names, but “they don’t.” These new domains are just “another way for them to make money.”

A red stag peers over a bush in London’s Richmond Park. Visitors are being warned that the annual deer mating season has begun, making stags more unpredictable and potentially aggressive.
Brook Mitchell / Getty Images

Many horror hits are more fascinating or engrossing than terrifying. But these four films manage to create genuinely unnerving atmospheres of dread.

‘The Exorcist’ (1973)
Director William Friedkin’s classic (pictured above) brought demonic terror straight to the heart of the postwar American suburbs with this story of a young girl’s possession. It retains its capacity to horrify, leaving the audience “subject to devilish, claustrophobic torment,” said Brian Eggert at Deep Focus Review. (HBO Max)

‘The Blair Witch Project’ (1999)
The movie that invented the “found footage” trope is viscerally scary as it follows a group of students into the woods to investigate a local supernatural legend. Relying on atmosphere instead of flashy special effects, it “set up a convincing everyday reality and furtively sneaked the horror in,” said Steve Rose at The Guardian. (HBO Max)

‘Session 9’ (2001)
A group of workers is sent to clear asbestos from an abandoned mental hospital and slowly succumbs to claustrophobia, paranoia and fear. This “character-driven take on the classic haunted house movie” is “one of the great American horror films of the 21st century,” said Matthew Monagle at Roger Ebert. (AMC+)

‘The Witch’ (2015)
Director Robert Eggers delivers a taut, terrifying period piece about a 17th-century New England family expelled from its village and stalked by a witch. Suffused with “quiet, tangible malevolence,” the film “carefully strips you of modern sensibilities, pulling you into a world without irony or awareness,” said David Crow at Den of Geek. (Prime Video)