A country runs out of interceptors. A hospital runs out of beds. A grid runs out of margin. This week Podcast Magazine asks the least glamorous question in the world: what are you keeping in reserve, and who decided you didn't need it? On the front page — seventeen dead in Kyiv and not one missile stopped; the Congo outbreak becomes the second largest ever recorded; six thousand cubic kilometres of magma hiding under Tuscany; immune cells that kill by exploding; and a buried lede about Texas, four hundred and seventy-four gigawatts, and a grid being auctioned off to a chatbot. Plus: the letter that saved Britain by refusing to help, a two-thousand-year-old Chinese grain policy that ended up in American federal law, and a podcast recommendation about a seawall that wasn't tall enough. Reporting up front, opinion in the back, corrections in the open.

How do you stop a thing once it's started? This week: the DRC Ebola outbreak passes 1,400 dead even as Uganda declares itself Ebola-free, a fragile US–Iran strike pause holds for two days, 300,000 people flee wildfires across France and Spain and nearly all make it out, and Pogačar wins a fifth Tour de France on a course the fires cut short. Plus a Bronze Age "town that stopped" in Northern Ireland, and The Number: 42. Our cover story visits three times humanity actually pulled off the stop — the Cuban Missile Crisis, smallpox, and the ozone layer — the feature is the Kuwaiti oil fires and the tank with jet engines bolted on, and the review is Norman Maclean's Young Men and Fire. We close with a heartfelt goodbye to John C. Dvorak. Reporting up front, opinion in the back, and the commerce is fake.

How do you find the thing that's hiding in plain sight? This week: the fastest-growing Ebola outbreak on record in the DRC, the sharp escalation between Russia and Ukraine, and — looking up — a giant planet the Webb telescope found without ever seeing it, detected purely by its chemical fingerprint. Our cover story traces the art of detecting the invisible, from finding Neptune with a pencil to Pauli's ghost particle to dark matter. The feature is Ignaz Semmelweis, the doctor who spotted an unseen killer and was destroyed for being early. Plus a new Corrections desk, a new celebrity desk skewering the World Cup's halftime spectacle, and a Podcast Feature on 99% Invisible's "Structural Integrity." Reporting up front, opinion in the back, and the commerce is fake.

Almost everything we know about the past survived by accident, and most of the accidents were catastrophes. This issue asks: what do we only learn when something breaks? The cover story reads history as a stain — Pompeii, the Burgess Shale, a bog man with stubble still on his chin — and the feature dives to the wreck that hid a two-thousand-year-old Greek computer nobody believed could exist. Up front, covered straight: the Bangkok bar fire and the nine hundred heat deaths the Netherlands counted in a spreadsheet. Plus a magnificent dinosaur cold case, Argentina breaking England's heart on schedule, and a Deep Cut about a Roman dinner service at the bottom of a Swiss lake. New this release: a closing theme, a tuba, and one quiet thank-you to the people who invented this medium. In the morning.

Worth pausing on one editorial call from the run, because it was the right one: the number 33 genuinely appeared this week — as the Bangkok death toll — and the host deliberately withheld the numerology bit rather than attach it to a tragedy. The guardrails held under their first real test.

In 1914, Lawrence Sperry flew past the judges in Paris with his hands off the controls — and his mechanic standing on the wing. A hundred and twelve years later, we're still asking the same question: who's flying the plane? In this issue: the empty cockpit, from dead man's switches to the Soviet "Dead Hand" to Stanislav Petrov, the one guy who caught it. Plus the week's front page — Iran, a newborn magnetar caught "chirping," the first AI ransomware that runs itself, World Cup officiating drama — and a Deep Cut nobody's covering: a 1952 flying-saucer briefing film headed to Congress. New voice, by the way. Same guy, new larynx. We featured Tim Harford's Cautionary Tales in our first Podcast Feature — nobody paid, they don't know we exist. That's how you know it's real.

America buries a 900-pound steel time capsule with orders not to open it until 2276 — from a country that can't pass a budget by Friday. In our debut issue: the strange discipline of deep time engineering, from the Svalbard seed vault to the government committee that wrote "this place is not a place of honor" and meant it. Plus: Marie Tharp, the woman who mapped the ocean floor while the experts called her data "girl talk"; a fake ad for a watch with one hand; an honest review of Dava Sobel's Longitude; and the week's front page — a record-hot ocean, quantum entanglement you can almost see, and new Mozart, 235 years after the man stopped writing. Closing essay: what we choose to keep, and why the committee won't do it for you.

Reporting up front, opinion in the back, fake ads in the middle — labeled, always.