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The Pitt is my very favorite show of 2025, and HBO has confirmed that production has now started on season 2 of the hit medical drama.

The HBO Max Original has been a huge success, gaining a 95% rating on Rotten Tomatoes from the critics and sitting comfortably in Max's top three most-watched streaming shows worldwide.

The press release hasn't shared any more information, but a few days ago it was revealed that the second season would stream in January 2026 and would bring a host of new faces into the ER – including Skinny Pete from Breaking Bad, aka the actor Charles Baker. Baker will be joined by Irene Choie, Laëtitia Hollard, and Lucas Iverson.

What to expect from The Pitt season 2

As Hello magazine reports, Baker will be playing an unhoused man called Troy; Iren Choie will be Joy, a medical student "with strong boundaries"; Laëtitia Hollard plays a recent nursing school graduate; and Lucas Iverson will play James, a fourth year medical student.

Noah Wyle, the man with the saddest eyes on any streamer, will of course return as Dr Robbie, and he previously told Deadline that the second season will take place over the Fourth of July weekend. Dr King, Dr Abbot, Dr Langdon and charge nurse Dana Evans are confirmed to be returning too.

I genuinely loved every episode of season 1 of one of the best Max shows, and cried quite a lot in every single one of them: it's a show with a huge heart and the cast are exceptional. In a time when there are many horrible things happening it reminds me of Fred Rogers' famous line: "look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping."

The Pitt season 1 is streaming now on Max. Season 2 is scheduled for January 2026.

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The attacks was one of the largest on Ukraine's capital in months. It came as President Volodymyr Zelenskyy prepared for the G7 summit in Canada, where he is pushing for stronger sanctions on Russia.

(Image credit: Efrem Lukatsky)

• Salesforce research finds single-turn tasks see only 58% success, while multi-turn effectiveness drops to 35%
• Reasoning models like gemini-2.5-pro tend to outperform lighter models
• CRMArena-Pro has proven to be a challenging benchmark

Researchers from Salesforce AI Research have introduced a new benchmark – CRMArena-Pro – which uses synthetic enterprise data to access LLM agent performance in difference CRM scenarios.

It found LLM agents achieved around 58% success on tasks which can be completed in a single step, with tasks that require multiple interactions dropping in effectiveness to just 35% – barely more than one in three.

Although models like gemini-2.5-pro achieved over 83% success in workflow execution, the Salesforce researchers still highlighted some concerns with AI agents, suggesting they might not quite be up to scratch after all.

Are AI agents actually that good?

The paper, entitled 'Holistic Assessment of LLM Agents Across Diverse Business Scenarios and Interactions', explained that LLM agents displayed near-zero inherent confidentiality awareness, noting that their performance in handling sensitive information is only improved with explicit prompting (which often came at the expense of task success).

They also criticized previous and existing benchmarks for failing to capture multi-turn interactions, addressing B2B scenarios or confidentiality, and reflecting realistic data environments. CRMArena-Pro is build on synthetic data validated by CRM experts, covering B2B and B2C settings.

In terms of analysis results, reasoning models like gemini-2.5-pro and o1 outperformed lighter models most of the time – Salesforce's researchers concluded that models that seek more clarifications generally perform better, especially in multi-turn tasks.

For example, while the average performance across the nine models tested (three each from OpenAI, Google and Meta) resulted in a score of 35.1%, gemini-2.5-pro scored 54.5%.

"These findings suggest a significant gap between current LLM capabilities and the multifaceted demands of real-world enterprise scenarios, positioning CRMArena-Pro as a challenging testbed for guiding future advancements in developing more sophisticated, reliable, and confidentiality-aware LLM agents for professional use," the researchers concluded.

Looking ahead, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff views AI agents as a high-margin opportunities, with major corporate clients including governments betting on AI agents for boosted efficiency and further cost savings.

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• New Magnetic Switch to turn the earbuds on and off without the case
• Up to 65 hours of battery life with ANC off
• £125 / €149 / $149

If you're looking for earbuds to wear on a mission to space, Audio-Technica have just the things: their new ATH-CKS50TW earbuds have an extraordinary 65-hour battery life in total, which is just about long enough to fly to the moon. That makes my AirPods Pro 2 look pretty feeble.

The buds' own batteries deliver 25 hours of continuous playback, and the charging case adds another 40. Those figures are with active noise cancelling (ANC) off, but with ANC enabled the numbers are still astounding: 15 hours from the buds and a further 25 from the case.

Again, for comparison, the AirPods Pro 2 give you six hours from the buds alone. The Sony WF-1000XM5 give you eight hours. Audio-Technica's new earbuds absolutely crush any of the best earbuds in this measure.

(Image credit: Audio-Technica)Audio-Technica ATH-CKS50TW2: key features and pricing

The icing on the long-lasting cake is that the new earbuds will cost only $149 / £125 (about AU$260).

One of the more unusual new features here is a magnetic switch, which powers the buds on or off by separating or joining their built-in magnets. The idea is to be able to turn off the buds without having to pop them in the case, although I'm not sure there are many people who've been cursing the tyranny of charging cases. It's nice to have the option, though.

The case is also compatible with Qi wireless chargers, which is somewhat rare among affordable earbuds – you don't get it from the Sony WF-C710N or the Nothing Ear (a) for example.

The earbuds feature hybrid ANC with hear-through and talk-through modes, Bluetooth LE Audio with the more advanced LC3 codec, custom-designed 9mm drivers with extended low-end response, and hybrid hard and soft silicone ear tips. They're waterproof and dustproof, rated IP55.

The specs and the battery specs in particular are impressive, but it's worth noting that Audio-Technica has had a few issues with earbud batteries in the past: its SQ1TW2 wireless earphones had a faulty batch that overheated and even produced smoke, and there has also been a recall of the charging case for the ATH-CK3TW earbuds – again due to overheating.

So while I'm glad to see game-changing battery life, if A-T is pushing the limits of battery tech here you might want to keep an eye out for any recalls, just in case. (No pun intended.)

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Federal officials say the suspect in the killings of a Minnesota lawmaker and her husband had a much larger list of targets, including Democratic officeholders and abortion rights supporters.

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Americans across the political spectrum like Medicaid and think it should get more funding, not less, according to a new poll from health research organization KFF.

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Clever advice on how to quickly rebook your flight, skip long lines and avoid flight issues in the future. One tip? Try queuing up for an agent in the airport lounge.

On Tuesday, Virginia hold its primary election. The contest is a barometer for how Virginians, and maybe the country, feel about the Trump administration ahead of the 2026 midterms.

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Since last week, Israel has been attacking Iran's nuclear facilities, along with many other targets around the country. Iran has fired hundreds of missiles in response. NPR correspondent Geoff Brumfiel has been watching all of this very closely because Israel's missile defenses have been a focus of the Trump White House. This year, President Trump requested funding from Congress for a "Golden Dome for America" — a missile defense system that would protect all of the United States. The idea comes from Israel's Iron Dome — a network of interceptor missiles stationed at points across the country. Iron Dome and related Israeli air defenses don't get every missile fired — including some launched in the past few days by Iran — but the Israeli military says it has intercepted thousands of rockets since it was built. Trying to get that kind of protection for America, though, might be a very different matter.

Read more of science correspondent Geoff Brumfiel's reporting on this topic and find NPR's coverage of the Middle East here.

Questions about nuclear science? Email us at shortwave@npr.org.

Listen to every episode of Short Wave sponsor-free and support our work at NPR by signing up for Short Wave+ at plus.npr.org/shortwave.

Dr. Salvador Plasencia agreed to plead guilty to four counts of distribution of ketamine, according to the signed document filed in federal court in Los Angeles.

(Image credit: Willy Sanjuan/Invision)

I wasn't quite sure what to expect from The Alters, the latest game from developer and publisher 11 Bit Studios. From the trailers I'd watched, it seemed almost like parts of several different games were grabbed and hastily cobbled together into something that shouldn't work - and yet, much like my hastily-cobbled-together base in-game, it does.

Review information

Platform reviewed: PC
Available on: PC, PS5, Xbox Series X/S
Release date: June 13, 2025

Following Jan Dolski, a construction specialist on a space mission to find the ultra-rare element Unobtaini- sorry, ‘Rapidium’, The Alters meshes together survival, management sim, third-person action adventure, and decision-based narrative elements with apparent grace and ease. There's a well-struck balance here, never tipping too far in any one direction, keeping you constantly engaged and on your toes. Less than two hours in, I was already having a blast.

Predictably, things go wrong almost immediately for poor Jan, and despite finding an abundance of Rapidium, he's left stranded on a hostile planet with an approaching sunrise that will scorch him and his base to an irradiated crisp. Alone, desperate, and running out of options, he follows the highly questionable directions of a crackly voice on the base comms to utilize Rapidium’s mysterious qualities and create a duplicate of himself: an ‘alter’. After all, many hands make light work - and the rest of the original crew are too dead to help out.

Seeing double

Needless to say, this planet is not exactly hospitable. (Image credit: 11 Bit Studios)

The thing is, Jan’s duplicates aren't exactly that. The core premise of The Alters is right there in the name, with each alternate Jan Dolski having a distinct - though familiar - personality and memories of a life that went a different direction at one pivotal moment or another. It's an excellent central conceit for both a story and a game. Need a miner to help gather the resources required to survive on this desolate planet? Good news: in another life, Jan chose to pursue his father’s mining career. Bad news: Miner Jan has a substance abuse problem and crippling self-esteem issues, and you're going to have to deal with that now.

This is where the narrative segment of the game comes in, with a wide variety of both one-on-one chats and group interactions to be had with Jan’s parallel selves. It's reminiscent of chatting to your crew aboard the Normandy between missions in the Mass Effect series; although instead of a sleek spaceship, your base of operations in The Alters is a thin, blocky structure housed on a gyro inside a gigantic tire. It gives the story a sort of twisted road trip vibe, which I loved - check out Overland and Get In The Car, Loser! If you’re interested in some other very weird virtual road trips.

Best bit

(Image credit: 11 Bit Studios)

Jan's rolling base is certainly unique - just don't question the physical logistics of how such a vehicle would remain upright.

The ‘mobile base’ is just one part of the fantastic and occasionally goofy world-building on display here. True to 11 Bit Studios’ Polish heritage, the life Jan left behind to join this mission is a corporate sci-fi dystopia with a distinctly Eastern European flavor. Janky Europop plays from a jukebox in the social room you can build for the Alters to relax in; Jan’s childhood home is a nondescript mining town with brutalist concrete architecture; two Jan Dolskis bond over their shared love of pierogi. While the planetary backdrop of Jan’s current predicament might be a bit more par for the course, the injection of a little cultural identity helps massively in creating a more unique, interesting setting. The soundtrack is pretty good too, an appropriate blend of synthy overtures and foreboding background music.

I won’t delve too much into the plot to avoid spoilers (this is a story best experienced as blind as possible), but I will say as a lifelong sci-fi lover that the story is solid. The writing and voice acting are both excellent, with some interesting supporting characters and plenty of dialogue that serves to flesh out the characters and move the story along. Particular props go to Alex Jordan, who voices not just Jan but also all of his titular alters - and make no mistake, despite sharing the same origins, this is a greatly varied group of characters who don't always get along. Listen up, Geoff Keighley, because I fully expect to see him nominated for Best Performance at the next Game Awards.

Too many cooks

See that weird glowing stuff? That's Rapidium - and Jan's going to need a lot of it to make more alters. (Image credit: 11 Bit Studios)

Speaking of not getting along, though: we're all going to need to get along, or we're all going to die.

Befriending Jan’s alters isn't enough to survive with the radioactive sunrise mere days away. You need to put them to work, whether that's producing food or equipment aboard the mobile base or gathering resources in the dangerous environment outside.

This is mostly done through a series of menu screens, which have clean, well-designed UIs, and managing your alters takes up a decent portion of your time in-game. They're quite proactive; for example, if an alter in the workshop finishes building all the tools you've queued up for manufacturing, they'll suggest moving to a different assignment, prioritizing stations aboard the base with unfinished workflows and no assigned staff.

It's not the deepest management sim system I've ever seen - 11 Bit Studios previously developed Frostpunk and Frostpunk 2, which offers great complexity for hardcore fans of the genre - but it works well as one component of a broader story-driven survival game and keeps the focus on the micro rather than the macro. You can only have a maximum of six alters out of a possible nine (although two of them, Technician Jan and Scientist Jan, are mandatory for the plot - so it's more like picking four out of seven).

Laying out your base smartly (as I have very much not done in this screenshot) is key to making the most of your limited resources. (Image credit: 11 Bit Studios)

You're also responsible for the base itself, meaning that you'll need an alter - or yourself - on hand to carry out repair work when needed, and you'll need to modify and expand the base to match the evolving demands of your journey across the planet's surface to a promised rescue rendezvous. Thanks to the two-dimensional nature of your base-in-a-giant-tire, rooms are laid out in a grid and can be moved and slotted together Tetris-style to make the most of your available space.

This is another balancing act; everything needs to be correctly connected to function, and every new room added increases the total weight of your base and thus the amount of resources you'll need to travel to the next area. There's always a tradeoff; should you build the alters private cabins to help improve their mood, or make them bunk together in a far more space-efficient dorm room? Do you really need that greenhouse for manually producing proper food, when you could all survive perfectly well on processed organic mush?

Venturing forth

Scanning for mining deposits as you explore each new area is a vital task if you want to stay alive. (Image credit: 11 Bit Studios)

Of course, even with your alters hard at work, this is a team effort. Real boy Jan doesn't get to sit on his hands while his clones do all the heavy lifting, no, sir. You need to make use of every precious hour before sunrise comes, because every single job your alters can do is also something you could also be doing yourself.

This is where the third-person exploration and action elements of the game come into play - though I use the word ‘action’ quite generously here, since The Alters doesn't really have traditional combat. When I said ‘hostile planet’ earlier on, I wasn't talking about angry local megafauna or marauding aliens. The areas outside the base are populated by strange, pulsating anomalies, which can deliver a potentially lethal dose of radiation on contact. Luckily, you can research and build the Luminator: a magic UV flashlight that can be used to target the floating cores of the anomalies and shrink them into a stable ball of useful resources with an admittedly rather satisfying vwoosh.

It's perhaps the weakest component in The Alters’ otherwise flawless assembly of disparate parts, but it's far from a deal-breaker. The anomalies just aren't a particularly engaging threat, although later on, some more interesting variants do show up. One variety has two cores and rhythmically grows and shrinks in size; another warps spacetime in close proximity, causing you to lose hours in seconds while you remain within its radius.

I like the design of the Ally Corp spacesuits Jan and his alters wear - and even their standard-issue on-base clothes have little variations to help keep the alters distinct. (Image credit: 11 Bit Studios)

The rest of the off-base gameplay is a bit more appealing; you explore, gather resources, and map out locations for fixed mining stations, which must then be connected to the base by setting up pylons before being operated by yourself or one of the alters. Your rolling base only makes pit stops at a handful of locations throughout the game, and the maps aren't that large, but they do feel densely populated and hand-crafted - no sprawling procedurally-generated wilderness here. Sometimes, you'll stumble across wreckage from your original crashed ship, and can recover personal effects that certain alters might appreciate, improving their mood.

Brothers in arms

Keeping those alters happy is no laughing matter, however. They can go hungry or become depressed, get injured on the job, or fall sick from radiation poisoning if you force them to work outside for too long. Sometimes you'll find two or more of them in disagreement, at which point you'll need to find a solution - and it's not always possible to stay on everyone’s good side.

Some of these disputes are key to the overarching plot, while others are merely for character development and establishing personal conflicts - but I really appreciate how The Alters makes you stand on your decisions, even the smaller ones. A lesser game would have you pick a side and mete out judgment, with corresponding mood shifts based on your choice, but here you have to back up your words with actions or deal with the consequences. When one alter argues that we need more protection from radiation, while another insists that we should stop gathering irradiated metals altogether, you're expected to follow through on your decision. Fail to build that radiation shield quickly enough after choosing to support that plan? Tough, now both alters have lost some respect for you.

I probably spent more time playing the beer pong minigame than I needed to. But I needed Jan's alters to understand that he's the king, and there's no beating him. (Image credit: 11 Bit Studios)

Fortunately, there are plenty of ways to boost your alters' mental states. Assigning them to work that fits their specialism is a good start, but you can also prepare better food, play beer pong (which has its own minigame), build a gym or a therapy room, or even settle in for a movie night with all of your alternate selves. Hilariously, the ‘movies’ you can uncover from the ship’s scattered wreckage are all live-action shorts made by YouTube comedy duo Chris & Jack, which can be viewed in their entirety while the Jans provide occasional commentary. It's weird, but great. Hell, the only thing you can't do is exactly what I would do in this situation, which is a sloppy make-out session with my clones.

Whatever your methods, ensuring that your self-made crew is healthy in body and mind is of paramount importance. An unhappy or rebellious alter will work fewer hours; an injured one can't work at all. It all plays into the core idea that Jan - perhaps every version of him, in fact - simply wasn't cut out for this job, and you're constantly flying from one near-catastrophe to another. I opted to pick Doctor Jan as my final alter quite late in the game, and I'm glad I did: Miner Jan decided to overwork himself not long after, and kept coming back to base with increasingly severe radiation sickness.

The human touch

It's nice to find your alters gathered to relax in their off-time during the (rare) periods when everyone seems to be getting along. (Image credit: 11 Bit Studios)

In short, The Alters is nothing short of an artistic triumph. It's a cheerfully strange game with a lot of heart, using its premise to ask genuine philosophical questions about the nature of memories and identity, but also managing to remain grounded in a story about people just trying to survive a terrible situation. At one point, Jan leads the alters in a (shockingly good) impromptu musical number. It's silly, but it's hard not to like how downright earnest it all is. It feels like something that was created with genuine love and care, an increasing rarity in today’s game industry landscape.

I wouldn't call it an extremely challenging game overall, so if you're expecting a gritty, difficult survival experience, you might be disappointed - although I've been a fan of management sims for a while, so players less familiar with the genre may find it a bit tougher to stay on top of each new crisis. There are separate difficulty settings for the anomaly combat and the resource economy, which is a nice touch.

Lastly, as a PC game, I found it ran well both on my RTX 4080 gaming PC and an older RTX 3060 gaming laptop, at 1440p and 1080p, respectively.

The game isn't particularly long, either - my first playthrough clocked in at just shy of 20 hours, and I felt was taking my time with it - but there's certainly some room for replayability based on the different available alters and multiple endings. After getting what I'd like to call a ‘good’ ending, I'm already itching to start over and say all the mean things I avoided saying the first time around. Watch out, space: here comes Asshole Jan.

Should I buy The Alters?Buy it if...

You want a meaningful story
The Alters delivers emotional beat after beat across its whole plot, taking the time to muse on human nature while keeping its focus on Jan's struggle for survival.

You like base-building
From fitting together rooms in your mobile base to laying out connected pylons and power lines to support your fast-travel mining outposts, The Alters has a little something for everyone who likes to build stuff.

Don't buy it if...

You want an intense survival experience
Simply put, the various elements of The Alters all work to serve the central narrative - if you want a game that's all hardcore survival or management sim, look elsewhere.

You want fast-paced action
This isn't exactly a slow-paced game - seeing 'SUNRISE IN 3 DAYS' will certainly get you galvanized - but the infrequent combat sections are fairly basic.

Accessibility

There are a small number of accessibility features available in The Alters, primarily focused on reducing some intrusive visual effects (like those caused by certain anomalies, or when Jan is drunk after too much beer pong). There's also the option to adjust the font size of the subtitles and change the entire HUD scale - potentially useful for anyone who struggles to read small text.

A notable omission is a colorblind mode, although this might be a game where it wouldn't actually make much difference; most of the management menu screens are fairly monochrome, and the game broadly manages to avoid overlapping UI elements.

How I reviewed Mario Kart World

I played through the majority of The Alters on a gaming PC equipped with an RTX 4080 GPU and Ryzen 9 5950X CPU, at 1440p resolution, and got a consistent 60+ fps at max settings. I also played a short segment of the game on my laptop, which has an RTX 3060, and found similarly reliable performance at 1080p once I'd tweaked the graphical settings a little.

It took me about 20 hours to complete a full playthrough of the game, which I spread out over the course of a week. I played with a mouse and keyboard, but you can use a controller too if that's your preference. The game is also available on PS5 and Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S.

First reviewed June 2025

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