Launched by FanDuel and owned by gambling giant Flutter, FanDuel Picks is a new peer-to-peer fantasy sports app, bringing a new way for fans to pick their favorite athletes and form fantasy teams ahead of the 2025 NFL season. The new product offers the chance to win up to 1,000x the entry fee, as players build line-ups and guess whether athletes will exceed their projected stats during games throughout the season.

Newcomers to FanDuel who play $5 will get $60 in bonus funds as an incentive to try out the new fantasy sports offering.

“Just in time for NFL season, we are excited to bring fans a social way to engage with the sports and athletes they love with the launch of FanDuel Picks,” said Rob Cullen, FanDuel Picks General Manager.

“The ‘more’ or ‘less’ selection model offers a streamlined fantasy sports experience, and we look forward to offering our customers another way to interact with games this season.”

How does FanDuel Picks work?

You can download FanDuel Picks on iOS and Android in 17 states across the US. To get started, users can pick between three and six players, then predict ‘more’ or ‘less’ on the players’ projected stats ahead of a game. You can set a contest entry amount to officially enter your guesses.

You’ll then earn points for every correct selection for your players. Customers with the highest score win a share of the prize pool, funded by the mandatory entry amounts.

FanDuel Picks is now available on Android and iOS across 17 states, including Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Georgia, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, and Wisconsin. It joins other FanDuel products, like FanDuel Sportsbook and FanDuel Casino, as well as a recently launched event contracts platform.

Featured image: FanDuel

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The Sundance Film Festival is venturing to a new town.

After a year of deliberations, copious site visits and scores of plane rides, the board of the Sundance Institute has chosen Boulder, Colo., to host its film festival beginning January 2027.

“Boulder is a tech town, a college town, it’s a really creative town,” Eugene Hernandez, the festival’s director, said. “It’s just a really creative place. And that integration of the artsy community with the university side of it all is really dynamic.”

It’s also 10 times the size of Park City, Utah, where the festival has been held since the actor and director Robert Redford started it in 1981. As the festival kept growing, Park City began bursting at the seams.

Ebs Burnough, chair of the Sundance Institute, said the move to a town at the base of the mountains would help Sundance maintain its connection to the natural world. “It’s easy to get drawn into that amazing thing that Robert Redford really believed in, which was that commune between the artist and nature, and to actually be able to get away from the verticalness of cities.”

To frequent Sundance goers, the move to Boulder is likely to be less jarring than shifting the location to Cincinnati, one of two other finalist cities. Salt Lake City was also in the running, and the loss of the festival will be significant to the state of Utah. The festival generated $132 million in revenue for the state in 2024, according to a report released by the festival.

Sundance announced last April that it was exploring the possibility of a new home. Park City just didn’t have enough movie theaters, and lodging prices had become exorbitant. A good portion of the locals were ready for it to go, too. While Sundance added 1,730 jobs, according to the festival, it also kept skiers away during a prime month of winter snow.

“Words cannot express the sincere gratitude I have for Park City, the state of Utah and all those in the Utah community that have helped to build the organization,” Mr. Redford said in a statement.

Boulder, about 30 miles outside Denver, has around 100,000 residents, compared with Park City’s 8,200. The festival intends to center its activities in the city’s downtown and its nearby theaters and venues and the Pearl Street Mall, a pedestrian street with restaurants and cafes. The festival will also collaborate with the University of Colorado Boulder.

Initially, over 100 U.S. locations offered to host the festival. Sundance winnowed them down to the 67 that could meet a variety of requirements, including adequate screening and lodging locations and proximity to a sizable international airport. The Sundance selection committee then invited 13 of those cities to submit a proposal. Six of them — Atlanta; Boulder; Cincinnati; Louisville, Ky.; Salt Lake City; and Santa Fe, N.M. — were later selected for site visits.

Sundance will not be the only significant film festival held in Colorado. The Telluride Film Festival has been operating over Labor Day weekend in Telluride, a mountain town in the southwest part of the state, for over 50 years.

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We’re back at the White Lotus, gang. That means Sunday night social media, equal parts wealth porn and hatred, and the return of the “braggy beach book.”

In previous seasons, the show’s conspicuous titles have served a satirical purpose. There’s a lot of laughs to be mined from the ways the idle rich try (and evidently fail) to self-improve.

Season one minted the concept of Book Girl Summer when two erudite Zoomers brought Lacan and Fanon to the pool.  Season two saw Aubrey Plaza’s Harper, an immigration lawyer, take a distracted pass at Valeria Luiselli’s The Lost Children Archive. But fretting about her husband’s imagined infidelity regularly trumped that tour de force on the border crisis.

Some wise speculators have noted that so far into season three, the books seem less prominent. But I’ve been assured that this is not a commentary. This year’s crop is supposed to be more or less as literate as previous guests. (Parker Posey’s pill-addled Victoria perhaps notwithstanding.) Titles may be out of focus because of the DP’s preference for close-ups this season. Also, certain publishers levy prohibitive licensing fees, and even the big shows are feeling budget cuts.

But as to the how of it all? I spoke with Michael Cory, props master for White Lotus season three, about the titles that go into a guest’s bag. The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

How you go about book selecting for this specific universe?
I mean it’s one of the more fun things for me on most jobs, because it gets right into either who people are or who they want to be. 

Were titles mentioned in this season’s scripts? Or were books something you got full jurisdiction over?
Well sometimes they are, but on this project I talked to Mike [White] about it, in one of my first meetings with him. I came up with a list of what I liked for certain characters initially, then he sent me a list that he liked. Then, once the actors were cast, it kind of ran off in different directions. But I think the only scripted books this season were fictional.

As in “invented?”
Yeah. Well Piper’s there to visit the monks and possibly join their program, so we created six different titles for that monk. We had them in Thai as well as English. And you see them sort of in the background at the meditation center. I have to rewatch it to see if they’re even visible. I was tooling around with having them in German and Russian, also. But we ran out of time to create all those covers. And that’s sort of the harder thing—to make a fake book look real. 

I imagine so. Especially against recognizable titles. I notice [Natasha Rothwell’s] Belinda is reading something real, in the latest episode…?
Yeah, that was a fun one. 

What was the title of that book?
Somebody figured it out online. But it’s actually Surrounded by Narcissists: How to Effectively Recognize, Avoid, and Defend Yourself Against Toxic People (and not lose your mind). [By Thomas Erickson].

Oh, that’s funny. I love what a big part of the character storytelling that does.
Sometimes it might be a little bit on the nose. But we couldn’t resist. 

Could you tell me a little about how you found the books for this crop of White Lotus-ers?
Some were ideas in advance, and some came from going to the bookstores in Thailand. Bangkok is a wonderland of all sorts of bookstores. Yeah there was one, I think it was called Asia Books? Half stationery store, half bookstore. There was the Thai section and the English section. And we were looking for books for Thai characters as well. Mook [Lalisa Manobal] has a book in her bag, though I don’t think you can ever see what it is.

We had to decide which books characters bought in Thailand, and how many books [they brought from home]. Like for Piper [Sarah Catherine Hook; arguably the show’s most literary character], I was buying from the local bookstores in Durham and Chapel Hill. Like the university bookshops, the university press. And putting their bookmarks in her books.

That’s an amazing attention to detail.
And I’d never stayed at a Four Seasons hotel until we started filming at one, and if you have a book out—and you know I had six or so books on my bedside table—and when I’d come back at night, each one of them would have a Four Seasons bookmark in them. So we stole that idea, too.

We made White Lotus bookmarks and stuck them in books around the hotel. 

How’d you find your way into prop mastery?
A love of film that ran through my whole family. My father always insisted on staying through the credits at the end of everything. So reading the credits and thinking, which job could I do?

I tried a bunch out but just kind of fell in love with the props side of it. It’s creative and problem solving and collaborative. 

Speaking of collaboration! I noticed that you worked on another HBO show, And Just Like That, which also has a pretty conspicuous syllabus. Can you comment on that experience?
It’s similar in a way that books are all over both shows. But [in AJLT] they’re in their own homes, they’re in New York. On White Lotus we can kind of get carried away. Like, how many books did these people actually bring with them to their supposedly weeklong vacation? But AJLT doesn’t have that issue. And Sarah Jessica Parker is a huge reader. Often we get, if not specific titles, genres or things she’s interested in at the time.

We actually have a rolling library that we just keep with us, to see what she wants to read in different scenes. 

Some of these titles I see Carrie holding are very buzzy, and therefore time-bound. Have you ever had to switch out a title, as production creeps closer?
That’s part of the trick. In that show, her character’s in the publishing world, so she thinks she has access to galleys. But that’s tricky for us because we never know when the show is coming out. And we try to work closely with the publishers to get things that aren’t necessarily released yet, but often times it fails because by the time the show actually airs the books are out. You can only get so far ahead.  

Well since you brought up your own TBR stack, did you manage to read any of your own vacation books in Thailand?
I thought I’d have more free time! But in Thailand I read Miranda July’s All Fours, and I read Jonathan Lethem’s Brooklyn Crime Novel, which is set in my neighborhood in New York. And before I went to Thailand I read Bangkok Wakes to Rain, a novel by Pitchaya Sudbanthad.

And there was a book I originally intended for Laurie. [Carrie Coon’s frazzled single character.] Which was Olivia Laing’s The Lonely City. 

Tee-hee.
Weirdly, the actress who played Piper became interested in that one, and she wanted to read it between scenes. There was one scene—which may be on the cutting room floor, but could pop up in a future episode—where she just pulled it out of her bag and started reading it. And we panicked, because most of the publishing companies are fairly friendly but some require licensing fees, and that one did.

As she pulled it out of her bag and we were like, “well, I guess we’re buying that book now…” Where normally, anyone who wants to charge us a fee we try to avoid.

It’s such a close way of looking at characters. Imagining what they’re reading.
Oh, yeah. We basically try to get in their heads as much as possible. What they’re reading, what they have in their bag. With [every object], we create our own little story of where they got it, why they have it, what it means to them.

I’m thinking of that old fiction adage about “what’s in your character’s purse…”
It’s also what people will tell you is in their purse vs. what’s actually in their purse. It goes with that thing of, which books you’ve actually read and which books are sitting in your house unread. 

Image via 

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President Trump on Saturday initiated an investigation into whether imports of lumber threaten America’s national security, a step that is likely to further inflame relations with Canada, the largest exporter of wood to the United States.

The president directed his commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, to carry out the investigation. The results of the inquiry could allow the president to apply tariffs to lumber imports. A White House official declined to say how long the inquiry would take.

An executive memorandum signed by Mr. Trump ordered the investigation and was accompanied by another document that White House officials said would expand the volume of lumber offered for sale each year, increasing supply and helping to ensure that timber prices do not rise.

The trade inquiry is likely to further anger Canada. Some of its citizens have called for boycotts of American products over Mr. Trump’s plans to impose tariffs on all Canadian imports beginning on Tuesday. The president, who also plans to hit Mexico with similar tariffs, says the levies are punishment for failure to stem the flow of drugs and migrants into the United States.

Many Canadians have contested Mr. Trump’s assertion that fentanyl is flowing from its country into the United States.

Canada and the United States have sparred over protections in the lumber industry for decades. The countries have protected their own industries with tariffs and other trade measures, and argued about the legitimacy of those measures in disputes both under the North American Free Trade Agreement and at the World Trade Organization.

Canada provided $28 billion of lumber to the United States in 2021 — the most recent year statistics were available from the U.S. International Trade Commission — or nearly half of all U.S. lumber imports. Canada is distantly followed by China, Brazil and Mexico as import sources.

The United States also exported nearly $10 billion of lumber to Canada in 2021, as well as $6.5 billion to Mexico.

White House officials said that lumber was an industry in which the United States should be almost entirely self-sufficient based on its resources, but that American lumber mills had been undermined by cheap imports from bad actors, some of whom were putative allies.

Peter Navarro, the senior counselor for trade and manufacturing, said in a call with reporters Friday that “disastrous” timber and lumber policies “drive up construction and housing costs and impoverish America through large trade deficits that results from exporters like Canada, Germany and Brazil dumping lumber” into the U.S. market.

“That stops today with a pair of Trumpian actions designed to both bolster supply of and demand for American timber and lumber,” he said.

If they are not offset by matching increases in supply, lumber tariffs would likely push up the price of imported wood and raise prices for various industries, particularly construction. The U.S. investigation will include derivative lumber products, like kitchen cabinets.

The investigation is also likely to raise questions and pushback about whether lumber imports really constitute a threat to national security.

The president has also initiated national security investigations into steel, aluminum and copper, but those metals are directly used by the military to make planes, ships and weaponry. Asked about the national security justification, the White House official said that the military was a major consumer of lumber.

Alan Rappeport contributed reporting.

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It’s been another long year, and ending it with a book club pick sounds like a pretty good choice. Especially since these December book club picks offer a wide range of options, from genre to mood. The book clubs themselves are all unique, and while all offer remote options—allowing you to participate as much or as little as you’d like—some also host in-person events. Plus, many have chats with the author. There’s plenty to explore and tons of great books, and clubs, to dive into.

You can end the year reading a sapphic Christmas romance, a historical novel based on a real Chinese physician, a poet’s essay/memoir collection that deserves all the awards, historical fiction following two timelines 800 years apart, a timely essay collection, a Palestinian poet’s collection, a pop culture essay collection, a novel centering Russian ballet, a cozy winter romance with a Hanukkah festival, a popular thriller author’s new fantasy adventure, an Irish novel with an adaptation starring Cillian Murphy, a beautiful poetry collection, and a graphic nonfiction by John Lewis. Enjoy!

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The Map of Salt and Stars by Zeyn Joukhadar

About the book club: Tiffany and Alexandra, longtime friends, created the Subtle Asian Book Club in 2020 with the goal of uplifting Asian voices and storytellers. You can read along with the monthly book pick, join in on discussions on social media, and watch videos of their live author interviews.

About the book: If you’re a fan of lyrical historical fiction with past and present interweaving storylines—800 years apart!— this is your book club this month.

Follow Subtle Asian Book Club on social media: Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Discord

Forest of Noise: Poems by Mosab Abu Toha

About the book club: “A modern book club for the modern reader” that invites casual readers to bibliophiles to join in on social media to talk about exciting books.

What Amerie said about the book: “Beautiful and utterly devastating, Mosab Abu Toha’s poetry collection documents and explores the genocide currently unfolding in historical Palestine. In the near future, when such destruction is studied, read, and discussed, Forest of Noise will exist as a testament, a monument, and a legacy.”

Follow Amerie’s Book Club on social media: Instagram, YouTube

City of Night Birds by Juhea Kim

About the book club: Every month, Reese Witherspoon picks a book for Reese’s Book Club that centers a woman in its story.

What Reese said about the book: “For our December @ReesesBookClub pick, we’re exploring the fierce and beautiful world of ballet with City of Night Birds by Juhea Kim (@juhea_writes)! In this powerful story, Natalia faces a choice: return to the demanding world of Russian dance that nearly broke her or walk away for good. This story left me thinking about the ways we overcome setbacks and redefine what truly matters. Listen to it on @AppleBooks, our official audiobook partner, all month long! ”

Follow Reese’s Book Club on social media: Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, YouTube

Tacky: Love Letters to the Worst Culture We Have to Offer by Rax King

About the book cub: Hosted by Traci Thomas, The Stacks is a podcast that chats all about books, and there’s a monthly book club! The book chosen for the month is discussed on the podcast the last week of the month with a selected special guest.

What The Stacks Book Club said about the book: “#TheStacksBookClub selection for December is Tacky: Love Letters to the Worst Culture We Have to Offer by Rax King. This essay collection is a sharp, funny, and heartfelt celebration of the pop culture that often gets dismissed as “lowbrow” or “uncool.” Through witty and poignant reflections, King explores how our guilty pleasures—from chain restaurants to reality TV—can hold deep emotional meaning and shape who we are. Be sure to listen on December 4th to find out our guest, and then tune in on December 25th (yes, Christmas) for the TACKY episode.”

Follow The Stacks on social media: Instagram, Facebook, TikTok

Love You a Latke by Amanda Elliot

About the book club: Lillianne Leight and Amanda Spivack created this book club with a focus on Jewish books and characters “with varying relationships to Judaism” that welcomes all readers—Jewish and non.

What Matzah Book Soup said about the book: “We’re so excited to be getting into the Holiday spirit this month with our December pick, Love You a Latke by @AmandaPanitch! It feels like the perfect time of year for a cozy romance, and we hope you’ll read along with us. We’ll be meeting via zoom with Amanda Elliot to chat about the book on December 26th @ 8 PM EST via zoom!”

Follow Matzah Book Soup on social media: Instagram, Facebook

The Last One by Rachel Howzell Hall

About the book club: Read along with Good Morning America Book Club, which aims to “showcase book picks from a wide range of compelling authors.”

What GMA said about the book: “ December The Last One by bestselling author Rachel Howzell Hall is this month’s #GMABookClub pick!
The action-packed novel novel blends fantasy and adventure, following Kai as she navigates a dangerous and mysterious world. 

Kai wakes in a desolate land, surrounded by sickness and monstrous beasts, with no memory of how she got there. Her only hope lies in reaching the Sea of Devour, but to do so, she reluctantly accepts the help of a skilled—and infuriating—village blacksmith.”

Follow GMA Book Club on social media: Instagram, Facebook

Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan

About the book club: Oprah’s book club has taken on different forms over decades, starting in 1996 on The Oprah Winfrey Show. She’s still book clubbing, and this month she picked her 103rd title!

What Oprah said about the book: “Our next Oprah’s Book Club selection is: Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan. Set in the 1980s, this award-winning tale tells the story of an Irish coal merchant and father who must choose between protecting his own and standing up for the powerless.

 But there’s also more good news. For every monthly book club pick, @oprah will sit down with the author for a brand new podcast titled, “Oprah’s Book Club: Presented by @Starbucks.” Our goal: Great books. Great coffee. Great Conversation. And the first one is available for your viewing pleasure now—tap the link in our bio to watch it!”

Follow Oprah’s Book Club on social media: Instagram, Twitter

Run by John Lewis

Looking for more options for your book club? Check out December’s Best Book Club Books and The Best Books Coming Out in December.

The post The Book Club Picks of December 2024, From Oprah to Reese’s appeared first on Our Story Insight.

Welcome to Today in Books, our daily round-up of literary headlines at the intersection of politics, culture, media, and more.

The New York Times Picks Its 10 Best Books of 2024

If there is a list you want to be on at the end of the year as an author, it is this one. Less expansive than the 100 Notable books lists, which is arguably more interesting just for the range, the 10 best list is the NYT’s real stamp of approval. It can sometimes in the course of reading the NYT’s book reviews to have a sense of how good the reviewer themselves thinks the book is, but this list leaves no doubt. Quite humorously, or maddeningly depending on your angle, the list includes a couple of books we confessed to not loving on the Book Riot podcast (All Fours and Good Material), but taste is subjective of course. And I think if there were a single, last-work standing award, it goes to James. Why not go the extra mile, NYT?

Oprah is Launching a Podcast “Anchored” By Author Interviews

First thing in my inbox this morning was a press release announcing The Oprah Podcast, which frankly is surprising didn’t already exist. Here is what it will be, according to the release: “Oprah will welcome today’s foremost thought leaders, global newsmakers, best-selling authors, visionaries and cultural changemakers to explore timely themes including happiness, resilience, consciousness and connection to help listeners on their journey to lead their best life.” The show will be “anchored” by monthly interviews with authors of Oprah Book Club selections, and the whole shebang is sponsored by Starbucks. Seems like the most obvious thing in the world to me. This is not the sort of thing you throw together in a month (or is it?), but if you were going to draft a “Joe Rogan podcast for the left,” this feels pretty ready to wear.

Costco to end book sales in hundreds of stores starting next year

We first heard rumblings of this earlier in the year, but it looks like Costco’s plan to reduce dramatically the real estate it gives to books is upon us. Though, it is not quite as dire as the worst reports made it seem: a hundred or so stores will keep year-round book tables and the rest of the stores will have them in prime holiday season. If you didn’t follow this story the first time around, it was interesting to note that it wasn’t the sales so much that caused Costco to look at this move, but the logistics. Books have to be unpacked one at a time, are bought one at a time, and get switched out all the time. If sales were AMAZING, I am sure they would have kept things as is, but Costco has long favored simplicity. Would be fascinated to know what the actual difference in the gross sales of books Costco sees on the whole. Might be less than you might think.

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These are the Most Read Books of the 2024 Goodreads Reading Challenge

The sort of people who participate in the Goodreads Reading Challenge are somewhat different than the general book buyer. And so it is that the most read books for Goodreads’ Annual Reading Challenge lean a little more literary/indie bookstore than what we will see on the NPD BookScan list for the year.

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