This digest compiles the latest from The Verge.
Today’s The Verge Roundup
Minnesota wants to win a war of attrition
17 Jan 2026, 2:00 pm by Sarah Jeong
As masked and armed men in combat armor swarmed throughout the Twin Cities, Gov. Tim Walz took to primetime television to ask Minnesotans to film ICE. The videos, he said, would “create a database of the atrocities against Minnesotans – not just to establish a record for posterity, but to bank evidence for future prosecution.”
While the feds besieged hospitals and school bus stops and Targets, Walz imagined a future with something akin to the Nuremberg trials. His speech emphasized the legal system and the ballot box, a promise of peaceful regime change and a process of accountability. And it was as much emotional solace for his constituent …
A cute frog game that remixes Nintendo’s best
17 Jan 2026, 2:00 pm by Jay Peters
While playing Big Hops, a new 3D platformer starring an adorable frog, I kept feeling like I was breaking the game – and, like with The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, breaking it is kind of the point.
In Big Hops, you play as a frog named Hop. Early on, Hop is taken away from his home, and he works to get back by collecting airship parts from a few different areas, each with its own cute animal characters and storylines. Because he’s a frog, the primary way you interact with things is by slinging his tongue. You can use it to grab pots to toss and break them for coins, as a grappling hook to reach new areas, and to snag foods with s …
Our favorite cozy game is back
17 Jan 2026, 1:00 pm by David Pierce
Hi, friends! Welcome to Installer No. 112, your guide to the best and Verge-iest stuff in the world. (If you’re new here, welcome, I hope your home is warmer than mine right now, and also you can read all the old editions at the Installer homepage.)
This week, I’ve been reading about WhatsApp and Gavin Newsom and David Ellison and Andreessen Horowitz, obsessively waiting for every new episode of The Pitt, using the app Monologue to talk to my computer instead of typing to it, joyfully rewatching The Night Manager before diving into the new season, finally getting my Ikea buttons hooked up to my smart home, listening to the Halt and Catch F …
Fear and blogging (and prerelease laptop testing) in Las Vegas
17 Jan 2026, 1:00 pm by Antonio G. Di Benedetto
At CES, I did what you’re not supposed to do: I brought a pre-production laptop to use as my primary workhorse during a hectic event. The unproven rifle in question is the new Arm-based Asus Zenbook A16. It’s a 16-inch laptop that weighs less than a 13-inch MacBook Air and comes with a high-end Snapdragon X2 processor. Going into CES with a Windows on Arm laptop running an unreleased processor sounds like a recipe for disaster. But to my surprise, aside from pre-production hardware glitches, I came away impressed.
The Zenbook A16 that Asus sent me for early testing has a Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme X2E-94-100 chip. It’s one of the flagship …
TCL’s PlayCube projector is more fun than a Rubik’s Cube
17 Jan 2026, 8:55 am by Thomas Ricker
The best all-in-one portable projector is the one that makes all the right compromises. It needs to balance image and sound quality with battery life and responsiveness in a device that’s not too expensive and small enough to take anywhere. TCL’s fun little PlayCube delivers the right mix to justify paying $800 for a 1080p projector in 2026.
I tested the TCL PlayCube running Google TV during a two-month road trip, and then again for a few months at home. It’s so small, adaptable, and enjoyable that I’ve had no problem setting it up at a moment’s notice, day or night, anywhere I’ve been.
TCL PlayCube
Score: 8
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End of today’s The Verge roundup.
