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Originally scheduled for Christmas Day, the legendary host’s final episode of the long-running game show has been moved to early 2021.

Alex Trebek’s last episode of Jeopardy will air on January 8, bringing the beloved host’s tenure on the iconic game show to an end after more than three decades.

Trebek was filming in the Jeopardy studio through late October, not long before his death at age 80 on November 8. Because the game show is produced with a relatively long lead time, new episodes featuring Trebek have continued to air posthumously. His final episode was originally slated to air on Christmas Day; however, the show is now closing out the year with “10 of his best episodes,” which kicked off on December 21. The host’s last week of episodes has been rescheduled to run from Monday, January 4 through Friday, January 8, 2021.

Trebek took over as Jeopardy host in 1984, when a revived version of the classic show premiered. (The original version of Jeopardy, hosted by the actor Art Fleming, ran from 1964 to 1979, airing every weekday afternoon on NBC.) Trebek went on to become one of the most familiar faces on American television, and was intent on continuing to stay that way for as long as possible, while keeping an eye on both his age and his health.

In 2019, Trebek revealed to the public that he had been diagnosed with stage 4 pancreatic cancer. But he remained on the job as much as he could while pursuing aggressive treatment, adamant that he did not want to leave Jeopardy in light of his diagnosis.

Speaking to reporters at the Television Critics Association winter press tour in January 2020, Trebek said he planned to only inform his producers that he was stepping away from the series on the day he taped his final program.

“I made this decision a long time ago. What I would do, it would be the same as when I shaved my mustache. I would do it on a whim,” Trebek said. “On that particular day, I will speak to Harry [Friedman, executive producer], and I will speak to Clay [Jacobsen], our director, and tell them, ‘Give me 30 seconds at the end of the program. That’s all I need to say goodbye, because it’s going to be the last show.’”

The beloved TV personality received immense public support in his decision to continue hosting Jeopardy, including from contestants. One memorable episode that aired in the fall of 2019 ended with a contestant writing “We love you, Alex!” as their Final Jeopardy response. Trebek responded to the message with tearful gratitude.

We don’t know exactly what to expect from Trebek’s final episodes of Jeopardy, or whether he was able to follow through with his plan to end his reign with a surprise on-air goodbye. (According to TVLine, Trebek did deliver at least one heartfelt speech that has yet to air.) No matter what those episodes hold, Trebek will always be an inextricable part of Jeopardy’s legacy, and a huge reason why Jeopardy is an inextricable part of weeknight TV.

Update December 23: Trebek’s final episode of Jeopardy was originally scheduled to air on Christmas Day. It was later rescheduled for early January. We have updated this story to reflect that change.

This January, we’re talking lesbian necromancers in space.

The Vox Book Club is linking to Bookshop.org to support local and independent booksellers.

To make it through this long, hard winter, the Vox Book Club is reading a pair of delightful novels about lesbian necromancers in space. Together, Gideon the Ninth (our December pick) and Harrow the Ninth (our January pick) make up one of the most fun and absorbing reading experiences I’ve had in a long, long time. They’ve got rich and velvety prose, a twisty and complicated mythology, and a deeply shippable love story at their center.

So far, we’ve started talking through some of the remixed genre tropes of Gideon the Ninth, and we’ll tackle Harrow the Ninth on January 15. After that, our discussion of both books will culminate in a conversation with author Tamsyn Muir herself, live on Zoom at the end of January. And you can join!

We’ll be meeting Muir for a live discussion at 12 pm Eastern on Thursday, January 28. (If you’ve attended one of our live events before, you might be used to them starting at 5 pm Eastern, so note that this one will be a lunchtime event.) We’ll chat for about 45 minutes, and audience questions are encouraged. You can RSVP right here, and in the meantime, subscribe to our Vox Book Club newsletter to make sure you don’t miss anything.

The Apple car, if there is one, could be on the road by 2024.

The long-rumored, long-dead Apple car may have been resurrected. Reuters reports that Apple is planning to start production of its own line of electric cars with pioneering battery technology in 2024. Apple has not confirmed the report, but investors took the news seriously enough to send Tesla’s already volatile stock into a dip.

Apple has been trying to get a car project rolling for years with little public success so far — which makes the prospect of it actually producing its own car by 2024 no sure thing. That said, building a new car line is a daunting process that will always take time, especially if the company behind it is hoping to incorporate new technology into the project. Apple, being Apple, almost surely will want to do this. The company has always been interested in doing its own thing, from its operating system to, most recently, its M1 chips.

Also, it’s Apple, one of the richest and most innovative companies in the world. Never count Apple out.

We first learned of a possible Apple car in early 2015 when the Wall Street Journal reported that the company was trying to build a Tesla competitor. The project, dubbed “Titan,” was approved by CEO Tim Cook about a year earlier, the paper said. But Apple car plans may date back much earlier: Founder Steve Jobs reportedly considered building a car in 2008. The plan then was to build an electric car as opposed to creating a self-driving one, which is what Google and Uber were trying to do at the time. While it would take a considerable amount of time and money to actually get a car on the road, Apple had plenty of both, according to the report. About 1,000 people were said to be working on the project. Apple declined to comment on the story.

By the end of 2016, however, it seemed that Apple had shifted from making its own cars to making self-driving technology that would be used in other manufacturers’ cars, and hundreds of people left the project. Even so, it had apparently already yielded some results: The New York Times reported that Apple had a “number of fully autonomous vehicles in the middle of testing, using limited operating routes in a closed environment.”

There was also some hard evidence that something automotive was in the works at Apple. In 2017, the company got a permit from the California Department of Motor Vehicles to test self-driving on public roads in the state. Cook also said that the company was working on autonomous driving software around this time. And in 2018, an Apple test car (made by Lexus) was rear-ended by another car (driven by a human), offering further proof that Apple was still doing something in the space. But an actual car produced by Apple seemed increasingly unlikely though not completely out of the question. Meanwhile, Apple had yet to confirm it was working on an actual car.

At the beginning of 2019, it looked like Project Titan, whatever it was, was on the brink of death. Apple laid off 200 people on the Titan team in January, but in June, it acquired a struggling autonomous-driving startup, renewing hopes that Titan was still going. Other than that, it seemed as though the company’s interest in self-driving technology was waning; its test cars logged far fewer miles in 2019 than in 2018.

While there have been reports throughout 2020 that indicate that Apple has revived plans to produce its own cars — the rumor blog Apple Insider has dutifully cataloged patents filed by the company for everything from motors to self-tinting windows — the latest Reuters report is perhaps the most definitive yet. It also says that Apple will use its own self-driving technology and build its own cars, marrying the two phases of Project Titan into one product that could be on the road within five years.

And, according to Reuters, Apple is hoping to bring something new to the table with a battery design that will make electric car batteries cheaper and last longer. One person involved in the project described the battery technology as “next level.” Apple’s focus on battery design makes a lot of sense given Apple’s work on improving batteries in its existing products. We may be seeing some of the technology Apple hopes to incorporate into Project Titan now; the iPhone 12 Pros and iPad Pros come with lidar sensors, which self-driving cars use to map out their surroundings and detect nearby objects.

The report, though unconfirmed, had an impact, even as some analysts seemed unconvinced that a car will actually happen. Lidar stocks soared, and Apple got a bump as well. Tesla, which would likely be the Apple car’s biggest competition, had a bad few days. Founder Elon Musk, on the other hand, didn’t seem too thrown by the report. He also admitted that he tried to sell Tesla to Apple, but Cook wasn’t interested.

During the darkest days of the Model 3 program, I reached out to Tim Cook to discuss the possibility of Apple acquiring Tesla (for 1/10 of our current value). He refused to take the meeting.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 22, 2020

Of course, any report about Apple’s future comes with plenty of caveats and little certainty, as demonstrated by the car’s path up to this point. But there does appear to at least be a path now. Now we’ll see if anything drives down it.

As it has all along, Apple declined to comment.

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