Ratings rush: The NFL is still dominating TV viewership

A Halley’s Comet-level event in the world of subscriptions is occurring at Microsoft: the company announced it will lower the price of its Game Pass Ultimate from $29.99 to $22.99.

The move comes a little over a week after reports revealed an internal memo from new Xbox head Asha Sharma in which the exec told employees that Game Pass has “become too expensive.” Back in October, before Sharma’s tenure began, Xbox hiked its Game Pass subscription by 50%.

With the price drop, Game Pass will also see a major shift: new “Call of Duty” titles will no longer be added to the service at launch, instead joining the library about a year later during the following holiday season. The subscription will still cost a bit more than it did before the popular titles were added in 2024.

According to estimates reported by Bloomberg, the decision to put “Call of Duty” on Game Pass cost Xbox more than $300 million.

New data published Tuesday by the US Census Bureau has revealed the most common names provided in the 2020 Census, in the first release to include forename data since 1990.

As described in the brief, Michael was the most popular name for males in the US, with roughly 3.5 million American men reporting having this name or a close variant. This is up from fourth place in the 1990 Census, when the top US male name was James — though there were still 3 million Jameses in 2020’s tally.

Despite a three-decade gap, Mary remained the top name for American females in both censuses, with the 2020 survey counting almost 1.8 million females with this given name. Interestingly, Mary was one of just two predominantly female names that broke the top 10 given names in the US, with the overall list dominated mostly by male monikers.

In all, American females had far more first-name diversity than male counterparts: 16% of US males had one of the top 10 most frequent names among men, compared with 7.8% of women. Zooming out, almost 3x as many given names were needed to cover a quarter of the US female population than that of males.