In the new trailer for the upcoming move The Batman starring Robert Pattinson, there are explosions, balls of fire, gritty voiceovers about retribution, and…latte art?

Yep, one of the most talked-about moments involves a cup of coffee. Specifically, an artisanal flat white with a foam pour that depicts Batman villain Riddler’s (Paul Dano) calling card: A question mark.

“I think the latte art really stole the show,” Rohan Cooke, a long-time Melbourne barista who runs the TikTok account for his coffee roastery, gear, and media company, Golden Brown Coffee, said.

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The opening scene of the trailer shows (probably) Paul Dano, who plays Riddler, sitting at the counter of a grimy late night diner. The cops bust in, and he puts up no fight as he’s taken into custody. The camera then pans to the coffee mug sitting in front of him, showing the message in the coffee, the question mark.

If latte art could ever be menacing, this is it.

But, of course, the internet has questions. How did Riddler get this latte art? Did he specifically ask the server for it? Or is Riddler himself the artist working at the diner, which would make the man at the counter taken into custody a faker? How did he happen to have a perfectly formed, non-faded question mark latte art in front of him at the exactly moment he was hauled away by the cops?

“I like to think that the Riddler received his latte with just a circle of milk foam on top of his latte and then drew the question mark himself, perhaps with a spoon or utensil,” barista Morgan Eckroth, a latte art pro who has 5.4 million followers on their TikTok, @morgandrinkscoffee, said. “Or even with his finger, perhaps!”

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Yes, yes, the answer to most of these questions is Because The Movies. But we all know that’s not good enough.

Mashable spoke with TikTok baristas Eckroth and Cooke for their takes on the mystery of the question mark latte art.

1) How is the question mark latte possible?

Eckroth: “The latte art that was shown in the trailer is probably not possible through a “free pour”. Since the question mark is of a darker color and placed within a circle of milk foam, it would have had to be hand-drawn on top of the milk foam after adding it to the latte. It’d take a good amount of knowledge and steady hands to make something as crisp and precise as what was shown.”

Cooke: “The one in the video looks fantastic. Whoever did that had a lot of skill. But for any other barista, you need to steam the milk, pour it into the center to create that big white circle, and then with another shot of espresso, you can spoon around the creamer to make that question mark on the top.

“The funny thing with this latte art, is that normally latte art would be a brown background with a white drawing. But obviously the director really wanted the question mark to stand out, so they’ve inversed the colors to really make it pop.”

Spooky!

2) How do you think this latte appeared before the Riddler just at the right moment before his arrest? Good timing on the barista’s part!

Cooke: “He must have been working in cahoots with the barista behind the bar for that coffee to arrive just at the right time.

“The other theory is that the Riddler was a barista in a past life. I can tell you as a barista, making hundreds of coffees a day, you can go a little loopy. So maybe there’s a new origin story.”

3) How long does latte art last before it starts to lose its shape? 

Eckroth: “Latte art will generally begin to lose its shape after a few minutes. I’d say that it’s a pretty safe bet to say that your latte art will begin to look very blob-like after five minutes, when the milk and air have really started to separate.”

Cooke: “Latte art isn’t necessarily going to lose its shape. But between 2-5 minutes, it’s going to start to bubble, it’s going to start to dissipate. So we can safely say by the latte art sitting on the counter, that that was fresh. That milk looks silky, and looks all one texture. So you know that that was definitely put down in the last 30 seconds or one minute.”

Hmmm, Eckroth’s finger drawing method is sounding more and more convincing… Unless the barista was in on it!

4) Did you find it odd that this latte art appeared in what seemed like a dingy diner?

Cooke: “That was my first thought, I’m thinking, do they have an espresso machine? Do they have the equipment to be pulling this? You’d think he was behind the counter at a Stumptown or Blue Bottle.”

5) As a master latte artist, how did it feel to see latte art appear in a trailer for a huge new movie?

Eckroth: “It was quite exciting! It’s always fun to see an everyday part of my job appear in such a major way in pop culture. While not a traditional latte art pour, I think the shot of the question mark in milk foam was very clever.”

Cooke: “If you had asked me beforehand, do you think latte art is going to appear in the new Batman trailer, I’d never think that that was going to be the case.”

6) What would you do if a customer (the Riddler??) asked for a question mark in their latte?

Eckroth: “I’d absolutely oblige to the best of my ability! I’ve actually had customers request designs before and while they’re not always possible, it’s a fun challenge to do something out of the ordinary.”

Cooke: “To be honest, I’ve been asked to draw a lot worse things. So probably wouldn’t think twice about it. However, if the police raided my cafe, I probably think the question mark was a little suspicious. Careful for anyone who gets a question mark in their coffee. If you do, it’s probably time to get out of there.”

Apple wants to be the privacy Big Tech company. But it won’t say no to some extra cash as a result.

Earlier in 2021, Apple instituted a new App Store policy that limited apps’ ability to track user behavior without getting express permission first, which has made targeted advertising more difficult.

The result may very well be less snooping on our iPhone habits by companies like Facebook and Google. However, a new report from Financial Times shows there was an unexpected (for us, at least) upside for Apple, too. Speaking with multiple analytics firms and advertisers, FT found that Apple’s own App Store advertising business skyrocketed after initiating the policy change.

Apple sells advertising space in the App Store. For example, if you search for a specific iPhone game, you will see sponsored results for other games, or other related apps, at the top of the results. This is a form of targeted advertising, according to the FT.

One analytics firm noted in the report that, in the last six months, Apple went from capturing 17 percent of all sponsored app store downloads, to now having 58 percent. Its revenue from this business is expected to double, and advertisers said they were spending more advertising with Apple, as opposed to Google. The advertisers said they could get more granular, real-time data, with retargeting capabilities through Apple ads — something advertisers like Facebook can no longer offer.

If this is all too much business and ad talk, the simple takeaway here is: Apple’s move to safeguard user privacy is also enriching Apple itself. Why? Less outside advertising appearing in your App Store feeds means more room for Apple-hosted ads.

Mashable reached out to Apple but did not hear back before the time of publication. Apple told the FT that the new advertising policy was about protecting users, not “advantaging” Apple.

Apple’s privacy updates were a welcome change for users. But that doesn’t make the FT’s report any less eyebrow-raising, especially as Apple continues to be investigated for monopolistic business practices. Even if making things more difficult for its competition while creating some new business for itself wasn’t Apple’s (public) intention, we’re sure the company is not mad at the result.

In a devastating turn of events, Y: The Last Man showrunner Eliza Clark confirmed on Sunday that FX decided against moving ahead with a Season 2.

It’s a surprising move for a series that is still three episodes away from finishing its first season, and one which has also received relatively high praise from critics and audiences alike. In sharing the news, Clark made it clear that she’ll do what she can to ensure the story doesn’t end here.

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“Y: The Last Man is about gender, about how oppressive systems inform identity. We had a gender diverse team of brilliant artists, led by women at almost every corner of our production,” Clark wrote. “It is the most collaborative, creatively fulfilling, and beautiful thing I have ever been a part of. We don’t want it to end.”

She goes on to praise FX as “an amazing partner” despite the parting-of-ways. But, she adds, the focus now is on ensuring the story, which is adapted from an excellent though now somewhat outdated comic book series by Brian K. Vaughn and Pia Guerrera, continues.

“[W]e know that someone else is going to be very lucky to have this team and this story. I have never experienced the remarkable solidarity of this many talented people. We are committed to finding Y its next home.” She concludes with a hashtag: #YLivesOn.

The long-in-the-making TV adaptation of Y: The Last Man has taken on many forms and creative configurations over the years. It’s a tricky story to adapt for today’s audience, with the comic’s original premise of “all men on Earth are wiped out by a plague that targets people with a Y chromosome” not really resonating with a 2021 audience whose understanding of sex and gender has deepened in the almost 20 years since the first issue published.

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The FX on Hulu take conceived by Clark and her team moves the setting to our modern world. It intentionally strays from the source as it expands on certain characters and adds new ones in a way that allows the story to engage more directly with the gender politics of this current moment, but not in a way that betrays the spirit of the original.

In my own review, I called the show a “lovingly unfaithful” adaptation that asks and attempts to answer many of the questions the comic either didn’t address or only lightly touched upon. You should definitely read this excellent deep dive into the show’s handling of the “tricky trans politics” from Vox’s Emily VanDerWerff.

There’s a long history of cancelled TV shows being picked up by networks and (more often) streaming services. Y, with its mix of a compelling story, its direct engagement with ongoing conversations, and its deep IRL history as a comic book series and long-in-the-making adaptation, seems on the surface like the perfect candidate for such a revival.

In internal documents obtained by the Wall Street Journal, a whole host of people have been pushing back against Facebook for hate speech for some time now — and that list includes pop star and Only Murders in the Building comedy breakout Selena Gomez.

It all started in 2016 when Gomez visited the company’s Menlo Park headquarters to celebrate becoming the most-followed account on Instagram. When a particularly hateful response to her post on the photo opp stuck with Gomez, a spokesperson told the Journal, she reached out to Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg during the pivotal 2020 election year, urging them to take action in DMs that she later shared widely.

Now, thanks to the WSJ‘s reporting, we know Gomez also emailed the Facebook executives privately to voice her issues. Sandberg responded, saying that Facebook’s AI detected 91 percent of the 1.5 million posts it removed for violating its rules on hate speech. That was not enough for Gomez, who responded firmly.

“You refuse to even mention, let alone address, the problem Facebook has with white supremacists and bigots,” Gomez wrote in an Oct. 10, 2020 email to Sandberg and other executives. She included screenshots of Facebook groups that she says promoted violent ideologies, according to the Journal, and said there were plenty of groups “full of hate and lies that might lead to people being hurt or, even worse, killed.”

Gomez apparently took her concerns to email after her private DM to Zuckerberg and Sandberg went unanswered, and her attempt to publicly shame their lack of a response went nowhere. She told them in her previously shared DM that there was a “serious problem” at Facebook, with the platform “being used to spread hate, misinformation, racism, and bigotry.”

“I am calling on you both to HELP STOP THIS,” she said in her note, which later surfaced for public viewing in one of her Instagram Stories. Her subsequent email outreach is what’s new here, and it comes from the Journal‘s ongoing bombshell Facebook Files reports.

The documents revealing Gomez’s attempt to reach Facebook leadership were released as part of a story by the Journal that depicts how Facebook uses AI to detect hate speech — even though its AI kind of sucks. According to the Journal, the platform cut the human reviewers’ focus on hate-speech and became more dependent on AI two years ago. But the company’s AI has trouble consistently identifying the differences between videos like first-person shootings, car crashes, and cockfighting.

This comes at a particularly difficult time for the tech giant, due, in no small part, to the Facebook Files reporting. Whistleblower Frances Haugen, who leaked the documents to the Journal, also attended a Congressional hearing and plans to brief the Facebook Oversight Board. Shortly after Haugen revealed on an episode of 60 Minutes that she was the source of the leaked documents, Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp shut down for nearly six hours.

From Get Out to Us, Jordan Peele has taken on directing his share of horror films about racism. Up next? A biopic about Prince that turns into a horror film about racism.

That is, if you’re watching Saturday Night Live. During a sketch on the latest SNL, Kenan Thompson, Rami Malek, and surprise guest Daniel Craig each audition to earn the starring role in Peele’s (Chris Redd) pretend film.

At first, the competition is only between Thompson and Malek — playing themselves — as they’re asked to have a “Prince-off.” Redd has them each act out things like Prince stepping on a Lego brick or getting hit with a football. Thompson earns the role because Malek is not Black, but when Craig enters the room it flips. Craig is dressed as a prince, not the Prince, and he still takes the role from Thompson. This is because, after all, Craig is (was) James Bond.

This isn’t Craig’s first time on SNL — he hosted the show in 2020, and his appearance turned into a legendary meme. His latest, and final, film as James Bond, No Time to Die, is in theaters now.

Saturday Night Live‘s latest Weekend Update segments were highlighted by some actually-strong one-liners about COVID-bearing bats and, unexpectedly, trickle-down economics. But Chris Redd’s appearance cast a shadow over all of it.

It’s not just his rant wanting to know who the hell drive blimps, though that part is hilarious. It’s also not his incisively funny take on angry people overreacting to a bisexual Superman. The bit that really lands is when Redd is forced to face an off-the-cuff comment he made on a Feb. 2020 Weekend Update, where he declared — in a very poorly aged attempt at humor — “Black people can’t get the coronavirus!”

To his credit, Redd is a great sport about the whole thing. He’s also a gifted comedic talent who doesn’t always get his due. So watch, and be entertained.

There’s nothing like a good Saturday Night Live earworm, especially when it’s Pete Davidson (and his uncanny lookalike Rami Malek) doing the singing.

This absolute winner of a musical comedy sketch finds Davidson and Malek crooning a heartfelt country number about loss, desperation, and a homicidal game show popularized by Netflix. Yup, it’s time for the inevitable marriage of classic country music tropes and… Squid Game?

It works. It works so well! You’ll be humming this tune in your head long after the sketch is over. And probably firing up the old Netflix app to find out just how much of the over-the-top bloodletting seen here is a reflection of the actual series. (All of it. This is Squid Game.)

Grab your magnifying glass and get ready to investigate as Mashable uncovers Big/Little Mysteries.

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Who doesn’t like a good fictional detective? The genre, which sprang out of nowhere in the 19th century, has become arguably our most enduringly popular over the last 120 years. Sherlock Holmes spawned armies of imitators, many with quirks as curious as his coke habit. The amateur sleuth begat the PI, the superhero detective, and more police inspectors, pathologists and lieutenants than you can shake a rumpled trenchcoat at.

Personally, my tolerance for detective fiction is limited. I can take a story or an episode at a time — but in a binge watch or binge read, the unreality of endless mysteries leaves me cold. How many murders are taking place in this sleepy town? What grim dystopia is this, with crime rates far higher than our real-world average? Why we love paranoia-inducing stories about nice people turning out to be stone-cold killers: this itself is a mystery.

But hey, since we’re apparently never going to lose the cultural obsession, why not lean in and celebrate the bload-soaked ridiculousness of it all? What follows is a kind of fictional detective Olympics. Here we award medals to the meddling kids and other gumshoes who achieved the most unrealistic superlatives: worked for the most decades, solved the most cases, found themselves dealing with the most inexplicably large body count over their inexplicably long careers.

Using the little grey cells

We examined dozens of beloved and historically important detectives from TV, movies, books and comics over the last 180 years. Our definition of detective: a main character who investigates crimes. Yes, Batman fans, this includes the superhero who got his start in Detective Comics and styles himself the “world’s greatest detective;” whether his Olympic performance lives up to the hype remains to be seen.

Where a detective is popular in multiple media, which is pretty much all of the heavy hitters, we’ve entered the version with the most stories or episodes into consideration. (For example, Agatha Christie wrote 88 novels, plays and short stories featuring Hercules Poirot, which beats the 77 episodes of the Poirot TV show.)

But let’s begin at the beginning, with a winner you’ve probably never heard about.

The first detectives

Gold medal: C. Auguste Dupin (1841). Silver: Sherlock Holmes (1880). Bronze: Father Brown (1910).

Sorry, Sherlockians. Arthur Conan Doyle may have created the best-known detective in history (with 60 stories and novels to his name, plus dozens of TV adaptations and movies), but an American author got there first.

Edgar Allan Poe wrote his short story “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” in 1841, in which a Frenchman named C. Auguste Dupin methodically solves the grisly killings of a mother and daughter in a room that was locked from the inside. That plot isn’t the only element that sounds like it was ripped from today’s crime dramas: there are also clueless police officers, a wrongful arrest, and a twist ending. (Spoiler alert: An orangutan did it.)

These days, Poe’s pilot would have networks scrambling to pick it up for a full season. As it was, he penned just two more Dupin tales before he died. But the stories influenced Conan Doyle, as well as fellow Victorian author G.K. Chesterton, who created the crime-solving Catholic priest Father Brown (53 stories, expanded to 80 by a BBC adaptation in 2012).

Honorable mention: Shout-out to Cadfael, a murder-solving monk from the 12th century. He’s far from the first in our world (Historian Edith Pargeter, writing as Ellis Peters, created him in 1977). But he is first in the fictional timeline of detectives, beating Friar William of Baskerville (played by Sean Connery in The Name of the Rose) by all of two centuries.

Longest detective careers, immortal character category

Gold medal: Frank & Joe Hardy (94 years). Silver: Nancy Drew (91 years). Bronze: Dick Tracy (90 years).

Here’s the first event where you might expect Batman, created 82 years ago and still not looking a day over 30, to romp to victory. Bad news, Bats: There are four detectives as ageless as you, who started life before you did, and have also been solving crimes constantly ever since. Some small consolation for Bruce Wayne: he comes in fourth rather than fifth, because two of the characters ahead of him are effectively joined at the hip.

We speak of course of the Hardy Boys, those forever adolescent sleuths from the fictional town of Bayport. Their multiple book series’ began in 1927, and haven’t slowed down since; even in the 21st century, Hardy Boys adventures sell more than a million copies a year. Nancy Drew was created by the same publisher in 1930, and has also starred in endless books, some of them co-starring her elder crime-fighting brethren. But Nancy was no mere knock-off. She went on to appear in more TV and movie adaptations than the relatively bland brothers, and became far more of a cultural icon.

And then there’s Dick Tracy, the daily comic strip character created by Chester Gould in 1931. One of the earliest fictional police detectives, Tracy was created as an homage to real-life Chicago investigator Eliot Ness. But he soon became known for his array of crime-fighting technology, years before Batman arrived on the scene. And as if to rub it in the Caped Crusader’s face, Tracy’s most famous gadget actually anticipated the future. That two-way wristwatch radio is very Apple Watch.

Longest detective careers, mortal category

Gold medal: Hercules Poirot (59 years). Silver: Sherlock Holmes (34 years). Tied for bronze: Philip Marlowe and Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins (29 years).

Sometimes, fictional detectives actually grow old and die — even when their age stretches beyond the bounds of reason.

Case in point: Hercules Poirot. Agatha Christie’s fastidious Belgian investigator first appeared in The Mysterious Affair at Styles, published in 1920 but set in 1916. A World War I refugee, Poirot was already supposed to be retired at this point. But he went on to assist the British police (and to solve murders whenever he went on vacation, on the Orient Express, on the Nile) for decades in real time until the publication of Curtain in 1975, where Christie finally killed off the detective she’d come to loath. “What a mistake I made there,” the author said of Poirot’s first retirement, admitting that it made him well over 100 years old at his death.

At least Christie wasn’t forced to bring her creation back. That was famously the fate of Conan Doyle, who bowed to public pressure and brought Sherlock Holmes back after sending him to his apparent death at Reichenbach Falls in 1893. Holmes would go on to investigate cases through His Last Bow, a series of stories set during his retirement. Though we never see Holmes’ actual death, His Last Bow ends in 1914.

We also never saw the ends of our bronze medalist book detectives, Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe and Walter Mosley’s Easy Rawlins. Mosley, at least, is still alive, and once suggested he’d bring Rawlins’ story (which so far covers 1939 through 1968) closer to the present day. If he does, Rawlins — America’s most famous African American detective — could slide past Marlowe in the longevity stakes, moving up to challenge the most famous detective of all.

Honorable mentions: On the television side of detective life, we must give shout-outs to Olivia Benson and John Munch. The two stars of the Law & Order franchise have recently become the longest-lasting prime-time TV characters of all time. Benson wins, with an astonishing 505 episodes to her credit since she first hit our screens in 1999.

Meanwhile, the Baltimore-based Munch (370 episodes) has the distinction of appearing in more series than any other detective ever. He began in Homicide in 1993, and now you can catch him in shows as varied as The Wire, X-Files and The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt.

Most murders, big city category

Gold medal: Dexter Morgan (138). Silver: Lt. Frank Columbo (92). Bronze: Adrian Monk (82).

Again, Batman should romp to victory in this category. He’s been around for roughly 2,500 issues in various comic book titles; even if the average is way less than one murder per issue, there must have been many hundreds of killings coming to the Dark Knight’s attention in Gotham during all that time.

But any judge of a fictional detective Olympics will run into a couple of problems here. The first is that Batman has been rebooted enough times in the comics (in 1956, 1986 and 2011, we literally started following alternate universe Bruce Waynes) that you’re not sure which Batman we’re dealing with. The second is that no reader, to our knowledge, has ever take on the daunting task of reading every Batman comic and counting the number of murders.

The same holds true for Batman rival Dick Tracy and his decades of appearances. So until a comics nerd can come forward and give us definitive body counts, we are reluctantly forced to disqualify them both.

In their absence, the gold medal goes to a vigilante detective who’s actually creating the body count himself: Dexter. (The character is about to return to Showtime, so expect this number to climb.) Columbo racked up an impressive 92 murders solved in his decade on screen, and Monk comes in third with 82. Though given that Monk had less time on TV (7 years) and lived in San Francisco, which is smaller than Columbo’s LA or Dexter’s Miami, you could say Monk has solved the most city murders per capita.

But, uh, just one more thing. Neither of them hold a candle to the most blood-soaked TV detective of all time, a resident of the tiny fictional Maine town of Cabot Cove.

Most murders, small town category

Gold medal: Jessica Fletcher (274). Silver: Detective Chief Inspector Barnaby (210). Bronze: Father Brown (71).

Step forward to receive your medal, Jessica Fletcher (Angela Lansbury), star of Murder She Wrote. In fact, we could easily give her two gold medals. The 274 slayings she solved over 268 episodes isn’t just a TV record. It’s also a per capita record. Cabot Cove has a mere 3,500 residents, which according to one calculation, gives it a murder rate more than twice that of the most murderous countries in the world.

Solving this many murders in a small town likely puts Fletcher ahead of any other detective in the world, living or dead, real or fictional. She has a good claim to be the world’s greatest murder detective. Which begs an unsolved mystery that was occasionally, briefly referenced in the show: how come all these murderers tend to congregate around Fletcher, anyway?

As for the unknown Batman and Dick Tracy murder numbers: Gotham is said to have 10 million residents, and Chicago has nearly 3 million, so even thousands of deaths over those series’ would not make their locations as deadly per year as Cabot Cove, 1984-2003.

The silver medal goes to the star of Midsomer Murders, a UK show little known in the U.S. outside of hardcore PBS viewers. Technically, it has starred two consecutive detectives — but since Detective Chief Inspector Tom Barnaby’s successor was Detective Chief Inspector John Barnaby, his cousin, we’re going to give them a Hardy Boys-style pass. Midsomer has been on TV for 24 years and still going strong, which should give the Barnaby boys time to catch up to Fletcher’s total body count.

Midsomer is a fictional county roughly the size of Oxfordshire. Which, as we saw in the multiple Inspector Morse series, was pretty murdery in itself. Again, Morse is mostly known to the PBS crowd — but as a student in Oxford during the years he was most active on British TV, I can confirm that there are not that many Oxford professors mysteriously falling from bell towers. Midsomer was clocked at murder rates three times higher than the Oxfordshire average.

Ultimately, the case of Cabot Cove and Midsomer‘s 2.6 murders per episode are prime examples of the strange inversion of detective fiction: the more charmingly rural a location, the more likely it is to kill you. This is why, if you ever enter the alternate universe of murder mysteries and get invited to a country estate for the weekend, you should run as far away as possible.

Team event

Gold medal: Los Angeles. Silver: New York City. Tied for bronze: London, San Francisco and Miami.

It wouldn’t be an Olympics without the opportunity for team sports. When applied to detective fiction, this raises the question: Which city has the largest number of famous fictional detectives?

There’s no question about the answer: It’s Los Angeles, home of the hardboiled. Columbo, Marlowe and Rawlins all ply their trade in the city of angels, as do Perry Mason, Jim Rockford (The Rockford Files) and Alex Delaware (hero of the Jonathan Kellerman novels). New York City can be proud of its strong showing too, with Olivia Benson and fellow Law & Order franchise star Robert Goren leading the charge alongside other famous fictional detectives like Jessica Jones.

London (Holmes, Poirot), Miami (Dexter, Crockett & Tubbs) and San Francisco (Sam Spade, Adrian Monk) had two famous fictional detectives each in our list, so we’re giving them all bronze medals. Each location could make the argument that they deserve more detectives included, but let’s leave that debate to the next fictional detective Olympics.

In the meantime, let’s give a special global Olympics commendation to Mma Precious Ramotswe of Botswana, star of the No.1 Ladies Detective Agency series over the last 23 years. She’s the hardest-working detective who doesn’t work the mean streets of the U.S. or Europe. And sure, let’s give a shout-out to that one lonely contender waving the flag for somewhere called Gotham City. He really did try his hardest.

Another week, another case of the National Football League stumbling over attempts to explain and address the deep-rooted bigotry of one of its top names.

By now, most of us know that former Las Vegas Raiders head coach Jon Gruden is out of a job because he couldn’t keep his hateful opinions on women referees, gay players, and racial justice protests to himself. It’s been headline news all week. That’s what led Saturday Night Live to ditch some rather obvious political targets in favor of a cutting takedown of the NFL for its latest cold open.

While the chaos of this mock press conference is littered with reminders of the NFL’s “we’ll deal with it when it’s news” strategy for addressing the toxic leadership issues of individual teams, the inevitable appearance of Colin Kaepernick (Chris Redd) is the sharpest because of the brutal contrast it draws.

Here was a talented young quarterback who got pushed out of a career in sports when he used his very public platform to say something meaningful about racial injustice in the United States. All while management dipshits like Gruden — don’t fool yourself into thinking he’s alone here — snickered behind Kaepernick’s back as the NFL held a torch to his career in pro football.

Like shopping for any used car, you’ll want to check an electric vehicle’s crash and repair history, along with the odometer. But the most important thing to know before buying an EV: the state of its battery.

“The main problem is not knowing battery health,” said Recurrent CEO Scott Case. The company provides battery reports, kind of like a Carfax for electric vehicles.

Used car sales hit record highs this year, propelling the average cost of a used car to over $25,000. That’s almost 30 percent higher than the 2020 average.

Looking at zero-emission options, used car platform Vroom found the most popular makes and models based on its buying data. The Nissan Leaf, BMW i3, and Tesla Model S are at the top of the list. Here’s the top 10 with the average selling price:

1. Nissan Leaf ($13,541)

2. BMW i3 ($21,000)

3. Tesla Model S ($48,000)

4. Chevrolet Bolt EV ($22,500)

5. Tesla Model 3 ($42,000)

6. Fiat 500e ($9,200)

7. Volkswagen e-Golf ($15,000)

8. Tesla Model X ($71,000)

9. Chevrolet Spark EV ($10,100)

10. Kia Soul EV ($14,000)

This list also shows how young the used EV market is. The Leaf first came out in 2010 with under 75 miles of range. The BMW i3, the company’s first EV, came out in 2013. Tesla released its first car in 2008.

But it can feel like “you have to have a Ph.D. in statistics” to understand if you’re getting a good deal or buying a car about to plummet in range, Case said.

Here are some tips so you won’t regret buying a used electric vehicle.

1. Do a battery and range check

When buying a gas-powered used car, you probably first check the odometer. But when it comes to EVs, the battery is most important. And a battery’s health isn’t always reflected in the number of miles driven. An EV with high range could have been overcharged or kept in a cold climate. So even a car with a low odometer reading could have dismal range.

Recurrent, the battery analysis tool, helps uncover the mysteries hidden within the power train. The company provides free reports for the following cars as of mid October:

• Tesla Model 3

• Tesla Model Y

• Tesla Model S

• Tesla Model X

• BMW i3

• VW e-Golf

• Nissan LEAF

Head to the “Shoppers” tab on the Recurrent website. Once you’ve set up a free account, you can plug in the VIN or license plate info of the car you’re looking into buying.

The website will ask you to use your phone to take photos of the dashboard while the car is in eco-mode with all the heaters and AC options off. You’ll send in photos of the battery percent listed, range estimate, and odometer reading from the dash. Then Recurrent puts together and sends you a report.

2. Consider where you’ll be driving

Weather and climate can affect your battery performance. If your car is going to be in a super cold or hot place, that’s going to shorten its battery life.

If you need a certain amount of range and you live in Minnesota, you need to make sure the EV’s range won’t drop too low when the mercury drops.

3. Think ahead

With Recurrent’s tool, you get a projection of how your battery will fare for the next three years. If it looks like the range will drop too low for your commute, it’s probably not a good fit.

If you’re considering an older EV for the immediate savings, think about what it’ll be like to constantly charge when the range plummets in the coming years.

If you’re inheriting an old battery, you’ll likely need a new one when the car hits the 10-year mark. It’ll cost at least $10,000 for the battery itself, but you’ll need to pay for service and labor. You can set up a battery replacement through the manufacturer (like Tesla or Nissan) or work with a repair shop that does battery swaps. Ideally, to make things easier, the service center would also be able to sell you a new battery.

4. Consider resale value

Look through buying guides.

Recurrent compiles data from almost 6,000 EVs across the country, with information on how much most models usually sell for. Its guides could give you a good sense of how much that Chevy Bolt will be worth after a few years.

5. Shop at specialty dealers

Throughout the country (well, more so in EV-friendly states like California and New York) there are dealerships that specialize in EVs. You’ll get more information about battery stats, charging recommendations, and general EV expertise compared to traditional dealerships.

The most popular states this year (so far) for EV purchases are Texas, California, Illinois, Florida, and New York, according data from automotive marketplace ACV.

Recurrent works with 25 EV dealers, such as Green Eyed Motors in Colorado, that provide a battery report for free. (The dealership pays for a Recurrent subscription, not the shopper.)

Veloz has a search tool to find an EV dealer near you as part of its “Electric for All” campaign.

6. Dig up everything

If you’re buying an EV through a friend or individual sale, try to get as much info about the car’s life as possible. Was it charged daily, putting a strain on the battery? Or was it only charged weekly?

Did it spend winters in upstate New York or summers in Phoenix, where the battery was exposed to extreme temperatures? Was it part of a recall, like the Chevy Bolt?

You’ll want to know it all, so ask questions even if it seems mundane. It’ll help you paint a picture of the car’s battery health.

7. Compare to other EVs

Tesla’s used car site doesn’t provide a lot of details on the car you’re about to buy. You can see how many miles are on the odometer, if it had previous repairs, and what model year it is.

But for this 2016 Model S, which is selling for $76,000, the estimated range is still 315 miles. That’s the range listed when it was new. Five years later, the battery has at least somewhat degraded — but that’s not noted on the listing.

“Transparency reduces that uncertainty,” Case said.

So you’ll want to compare it to similar Teslas in similar conditions to get a sense of how its battery has aged.

8. Check the warranty

Most EVs offer a battery warranty that covers at minimum eight years or 100,000 miles. If you find a “younger” EV still under warranty, you could potentially get a replacement battery in your pre-owned ride.

But the battery would have to be degraded enough to qualify for a replacement — in most cases, down to around 70 percent of its original range. Let’s say you start with 300 miles of range, but it drops to 200 miles within the first eight years. In that case, you could get a new battery for free. California is considering a measure to raise that threshold to 80 percent, which could increase the number of people eligible for new batteries.

In a year of regular EV use, you should only lose about 1 to 2 percent of the original charge levels.

9. Wait it out

Each year, more EVs are entering the market. Already there are 70 models available in California, the most EV-friendly state. In 2022, another batch of EVs will be available. While you might not want to throw down more than $60,000 for the new Cadillac Lyriq, within a year or two, those new cars will make it onto used car lots and e-marketplaces.

That’s partly why Recurrent’s Case said he created the free battery reports last year. “The new prices on some of these cars are crazy,” he said. “Now middle- and lower-income [drivers] can actually buy something and take advantage of the fuel cost and environmental benefits.”