Today’s Big Story

Lights Out for Late Night TV

The genre, more than any other entertainment format, is struggling to adapt to a streaming world

Do you watch late night TV? I mean, like, actually live … at night, when it airs. Not clips on YouTube or juicy pieces of interviews that get reposted to social media. Yeah, me neither. Which could explain all the changes happening in the late night talk show landscape.

It seems that cutting the budget for Seth Meyers’s house band was just the beginning. Because on Thursday, NBC announced it would cut “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon” to four nights a week. Like its late-night rivals, “Tonight” will air in repeats on Fridays. CBS’ “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” ABC’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live,” NBC’s “Late Night with Seth Meyers” and Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show” are already on a four-originals-per-week schedule.

Variety reports that Comedy Central has given up on trying to devise a companion show to “Daily” that can follow the program after 11:30 p.m., and currently has Jon Stewart hosting the program once each week, with contributors such as Desi Lydic and Jordan Klepper filling in on other days. ABC has gone so far as to allow Kimmel to go on vacation for several weeks every summer.

A couple of decades ago these moves would have been crazy, given the talk shows’ young audience and pop cultural relevancy. But with the world of entertainment shifting to an on-demand streaming world, late night—perhaps more than any other entertainment TV format—has struggled to adapt. The Hollywood Reporter adds that it doesn’t help that streaming platforms like Netflix and Peacock haven’t quite nailed a late night formula that clicks, though they have tried, leaning on hosts like John Mulaney and Amber Ruffin to experiment. While it is always possible that they figure it out, that is far from a sure thing.

In the past, what’s helped shows is when hosts played to their strengths and adapted the long-standing shows to fit their personality and continually tweaked the tone of the show. But Forbes says that this situation will require more than that. The truth is that the format may simply die out due to the economics that forced NBC to pull back on weekly episodes. Several hosts, including Fallon and Meyers, are locked into long-term contracts with several more years on them, so that may prolong any definitive action. But at this point, with ratings on a long decline and the number of choices up, it’s hard to see three major shows surviving for another decade. We’ll likely see fewer and fewer live nights in the meantime.

The First Private Spacewalk

A billionaire entrepreneur and SpaceX engineer ventured out into the vacuum of space to make history

Billionaire Jared Isaacman popped out from a SpaceX capsule hundreds of miles above Earth on Thursday and performed the first private spacewalk—a high-risk endeavor that was once reserved solely for professional astronauts. The spacewalk was the centerpiece of Polaris Dawn, a collaboration between Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Isaacman, a tech entrepreneur who is leading the mission.

Because there’s no airlock on the SpaceX Crew Dragon vehicle, the entire capsule was depressurized and exposed to the vacuum of space—a dangerous and historic milestone in the Polaris Dawn crew’s five-day journey through Earth’s orbit. The mission has already set records, traveling farther into space than any human since the Apollo program concluded more than 50 years ago. The successful operation further reinforces that space travel is no longer the exclusive province of professional astronauts working at governmental space agencies like NASA.

Overall, the experience was designed to test procedures and technologies that could be used in future long-duration space travel. The Polaris missions—this one is the first of three—aim to accelerate technological advances needed to fulfill Musk’s hope of one day sending people to Mars. After the spacewalk, the crew members took off their protective spacesuits and shared photos taken from the capsule. The posts were the first ones to be transmitted from space to the X platform using SpaceX’s Starlink internet-beaming-satellites.

Vaping Could Be More Harmful Than You Thought

New research challenges idea that vaping could be healthier alternative to smoking

If you ask most people, the idea of e-cigarettes and other vaping products seem much healthier than old school smoking. In fact, it’s a distinction that many people rely on when they use vapes as a way of weaning themselves off traditional tobacco. But in some cases, the effects on the human body are more similar than they are different.

According to research that has prompted fresh debate over the health risks of e-cigarettes, vaping damages young people’s lungs just as much as smoking. The study compared vapers and smokers in a strenuous exercise test and found both groups emerged as being less fit and much more out of breath than people who have neither habit. Researchers found the vapers had an average “peak exercise capacity”, which, at 186 watts, was similar to that of the smokers (182 watts) but much lower than that among the non-smokers or vapers (226 watts). The test measures the maximum amount of physical exercise that someone can achieve.

Additionally, The Guardian reports that medical researchers have found evidence that vaping increases the risk of cancer, because it changes their DNA, and also that it may damage the brain and vital organs because e-cigarette aerosols and liquids can contain traces of toxic metals such as lead and uranium.

The Future of Chocolate

As climate change wreaks havoc on traditional crops, companies race to find alternatives

Did you know that more than half the global supply of cocoa beans comes from two African countries—Ivory Coast and Ghana—and that both countries, which lie just north of the equator, are facing more extreme weather events driven by climate change? When climate conditions wreaked havoc on their crops, the global supply of cocoa beans dwindled. Big chocolate manufacturers stockpiled beans, and the price for raw cocoa more than tripled.

Now, scientists and entrepreneurs are working on ways to make more cocoa that stretch well beyond the tropics, from Northern California to Israel. And others are attempting to craft chocolate without needing any real cocoa at all. Of course, the idea is “not to replace the high quality, 80% dark chocolate, but really to have a lot of different products in the mass market,” one maker told ABC News.

Yet while some are seeking to create alternative cocoa sources and substitutes, others are trying to bolster the supply of cocoa where it naturally grows. Mars, which makes M&Ms and Snickers, has a research facility at the University of California, aimed at making cocoa plants more resilient. The facility hosts a living collection of cocoa trees so scientists can study what makes them disease-resistant to help farmers in producing countries and ensure a stable supply of beans. That's similar to the effort under way at California Cultured, which plans to seek permission from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to call its product chocolate, because, according to company, that's what it is. It might wind up being called brewery chocolate, or local chocolate, but chocolate no less, he said, because it's genetically identical though not harvested from a tree.

A Weekend Pairing

‘In Vogue: The 90s’ + a Canned Cosmo Cocktail

Ready for a heavy dose of media and fashion nostalgia? In Vogue: The 90s is the definitive story of the fashion industry in the pivotal decade just before the millennium—told through the eyes of Vogue editors. From Kate Moss to Kim Kardashian, from Victoria Beckham to Mary J. Blige, this splashy doc-series reveals the inside story of the era that made celebrities out of supermodels and style icons out of music moguls.

Each episode in this six-part show centers on a defining ’90s moment. Vogue’s Anna Wintour tells The Hollywood Reporter, “Like the ‘60s, it’s a decade with an outsize reputation in the culture, and for good reason: it was the decade where everything changed. Fashion as we know it today—globally attuned, red carpet dressing, brand reinventions, logos, a new idea of luxury—all really started then… It was a time when everything felt possible—even the impossible.”

Have an ugly cry this weekend.