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Rosscienda is making a name for itself in Aptos with expressive estate wines, including the 2025 Big Char Chardonnay, a bright, layered bottle with notes of nectarine, lemon custard, white peach and baking spice.

From sumo wrestling and Duck Island Festival to Capitola Beach Festival, Fiesta en la Playa and Laurie Anderson, Brad Kava surveys an unusually packed Santa Cruz weekend.

Readers weigh in on the proposed Seahawk battery storage project in Aptos and a Good Times review of composer Sarah Hennies at the Cabrillo Festival.

Amber Williams first entered Janus as a 17-year-old mother struggling with addiction. More than two decades later, she leads the Santa Cruz County nonprofit as it celebrates 50 years and prepares for a major expansion in Watsonville.

The Rainbow Conference returns to Watsonville High School Sept. 26, bringing LGBTQ+ students, families, educators and allies together for workshops, resources and a day centered on community and celebration.

For 10 months, The Vessel operated in the shadows of Santa Cruz’s mainstream music scene, hosting 75 shows and more than 300 punk, metal, hardcore and alternative bands before closing for good.

Most leaders on a trade mission stick to the pitch, but when I interviewed Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis this week, he also admitted that no government is ready for what AI is about to do.

US president Donald Trump has decided the term “artificial intelligence” must be abandoned, in favour of his preferred term “superintelligence.” “The word ‘artificial’ makes intelligence fake, it makes it sound fake,” Trump told the United Nations general assembly on Tuesday. “From this point forward, all United States documents and hopefully the world will be changed to use the much more accurate term ‘super’ as opposed to ‘artificial.’” The president allowed that the acronym “SI” might be used as a substitute for his polysyllabic suggestion, seemingly without a thought for that acronym already being taken by the world’s system integrators. The leader of the free world also appears not to have given much thought to how the term might be adapted: The Register can see the term “AI slop” evolving into “superslop” – a term that might have wide applicability to debate on how best to name the technology. Trump also offered the following comment about AI regulation: “The United States also totally rejects any attempt to construct a globalist scheme to control for … artificial intelligence being spoken of so much now … here and after officially called superintelligence.” He also said the danger of AI is a ”hoax,” as is anthropogenic climate change, despite the USA’s own National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration last month reporting that July was the warmest month on record for the contiguous United States. Despite his belief AI/SI doesn’t need oversight, Trump pledged the USA will watch the technology “closely through the Department of Justice.” That appears to be a change from his recent promise to create an “AI Force” – presumably now a Superintelligence Force – patterned on a branch of the US military to regulate AI/SI. It is unclear what Trump meant by the “globalist scheme” to regulate AI. It might be a reference to calls to “pace the frontier” of AI/SI development, some of which come from leading AI companies. Or maybe Trump was referring to the Call for Control of Frontier AI Models issued on Monday by the government of Finland, and signed by leaders from the European Union, Norway, Australia, Bahrain, Canada, Denmark, Estonia, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Latvia, Moldova, the Netherlands, Singapore, Spain, South Africa, Türkiye, and the United Arab Emirates. Many of those nations are US allies. Signatories to the Call suggested three outcomes: Companies to develop transparent safety protocols, including mandatory pre-deployment testing and independent evaluation, with qualified evaluators granted sufficient access to assess risks. Governments and regional organisations to further develop and coordinate common standards, strengthen transparency – including shared reporting of serious safety incidents – and ensure that countries across all regions have access to scientific capacity, expertise and trusted evaluation. UN member states to build on existing international mechanisms and explore creating an international institution, able to set standards, enable verification, and convene states when capability thresholds are crossed. Trump previously renamed the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America and recently changed Lake Ontario to Lake America. He also reversed a past decision to use the indigenous name Denali for the USA’s highest mountain. If you can think of another technology that deserves presidential re-naming, hit the comments. ®

According to Discord, 90% of users will not have to verify their age.

Despite a July open letter from AI company employees calling for frontier AI labs to slow their pace of development, a message echoed by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei earlier this month, major model releases continue to appear at quite a clip. Anthropic and OpenAI each released new versions of their Claude and GPT models on Tuesday: Opus 5.5 and GPT-6 Sol and Luna. "We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models," said Amodei in an online post on September 12, 2026, reiterating the message from AI staff who put their names to "Pacing the Frontier." Ten days later, Anthropic celebrated the arrival of Opus 5.5, calling it "the strongest-performing model we’ve tested to date." The model arrives just 21 days after the release of Fable 5.1 and Mythos 5.1, which followed Opus 5 by 39 days. Overall, the cadence of Anthropic model releases has accelerated from roughly every quarter in 2025 to almost monthly in 2026. OpenAI's release cycle slowed somewhat after a flurry of releases early this year. The upstart delivered several model variants in February and March, followed by GPT-5.5 in April. 77 days later, on July 9, GPT-5.6 reached general availability. GPT-6 Astra debuted September 3, 2026, followed by GPT-6 Sol and Luna 19 days later. The competitive releases from the two rival companies arrive as both prepare for initial public offerings. For Anthropic, that could happen before the end of the year, while OpenAI isn't expected to go public until 2027. Opus 5.5 performs better than its predecessor on software tasks, according to Anthropic, which said the model allows speedy code migrations and can reduce software load times. Artificial Analysis puts Opus 5.5 on par with GPT-6 Astra for agentic work. The Claude model has taken the top spot in the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index with a score of 58, based on performance on 10 different benchmark evaluations. With great power also comes great responsibility – Anthropic says Opus 5.5 is comparable to Mythos 5.1 in cybersecurity and biology, so it too can fall back to earlier models when safeguards kick in. The new Claude family member is also cheaper than its predecessor. "Our tests show that at default settings it will cost 40 percent less than Opus 5 on typical workloads," Anthropic said in its announcement. "Input and output tokens are $4 and $20 per million, 20 percent less than Opus 5. Cache reads are $0.20 per million tokens, 60 percent less than Opus 5. Opus 5.5 also generates output more than 30 percent faster than Opus 5." That's welcome news as cache reads make up the majority of agentic and coding work costs. OpenAI also addressed costs with GPT-6 Sol and Luna, by leaving high performance workloads to Astra. "Improvements in caching and inference let us serve these models at lower cost, and we’re passing those savings directly on to users and customers by reducing API prices for Sol and Luna by 50 percent compared with their GPT‑5.6 promotional pricing," OpenAI said. Artificial Analysis found GPT-6 Sol (max) costs $1.06 per task compared to $1.99 per task for GPT-5.6 Sol, while GPT-6 Luna (max) costs $0.07 per task compared to $0.18 for GPT-5.6 Luna (max). OpenAI clearly believes it can win business from its rival through better pricing. "On AutomationBench, a test of business workflows across apps, GPT‑6 Sol at xhigh effort outperforms Claude Opus 5 at max effort at just 9 percent of Opus 5’s cost per task," the GPT-maker said. Anthropic and OpenAI claim their models improve alignment and safety, though Anthropic's defenses are at least in part intended to protect its business from copycats. Opus 5.5 comes with "preserved thinking," a defense against model distillation – a method of model copying through interrogation – that was introduced with Fable 5.1. It prevents API customers from editing Claude's prior context in order to obtain the model's chain of reasoning. ®

Better Know a Democrat is an interview series to give voters a closer look at candidates in competitive races across the U.S. In recent months, Democratic congressional candidate Brian Poindexter’s name shot across national headlines, spanning far outside of the Ohio district where he was seeking to unseat Republican Rep. Max Miller. In the district, the longtime ironworker was…

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Now more than ever, we modern-day court jesters need your support! Become a paid subscriber to any (or all!) of the platforms below to keep Keef gentleman-cartooning into the future and beyond! www.patreon.com/keefknight keithknight.substack.com ko-fi.com/… kchronicles.com/… Related | New York Democrats slam Trump’s latest racist attack on immigrants…

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Quick Take

• After Nosferatu and the upcoming Werwulf, it looks as if Robert Eggers’ next project is an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.
• Focus Features, which released Nosferatu and will soon release Werwulf, won a bidding war over this project against Warner Bros. and A24, among others.
• Nerdist’s take: While it may be romantic, we expect Eggers’ version of the iconic Shakespeare play to be as Gothic and dark as his other signature films.

We’re still a few months away from the release of director Robert Eggers’ new Gothic horror film Werwulf . But the man behind Nosferatu and The Witch already has his next project lined up. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Eggers’ next film will adapt William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet at Focus Features. Focus, Universal Pictures’ indie arm, released Eggers’ Nosferatu to great critical and box office acclaim back in 2024. And it will also release Werwulf on Christmas Day. From the looks of things, Focus seems very eager to stay in the Robert Eggers business. Romeo and Juliet seems to be taking precedence over recently announced Eggers projects like A Christmas Carol and a Labyrinth sequel.

Paramount Pictures/CBS Sunday Morning/YouTube

With Romeo and Juliet, Eggers aims to keep his promise to never make a film set in the present day. According to the original report, the film hopes to maintain all that Shakespearean Olde English dialogue as written in 1490. So don’t expect any modernization of the text like when Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes did their Baz Lurhman adaptation in 1996. Eggers is literally “keepin’ it old school” here. We fully expect every young up-and-coming actor to try to play the leads for this one. And although Eggers likes to maintain faithfulness to the time period and original text, we don’t expect the leads to be 13 years old.

Nerdist’s Take: Romeo and Juliet Will Likely Be As Dark and Bleak as Any Robert Eggers Film

Eggers has created quite a brand for himself, mostly making horror or horror-adjacent projects like The Lighthouse. We’d like to say Romeo and Juliet is his way of branching out from those kinds of dark subject matters. But if you know how that play ends, maybe it’s just as bleak as anything else he’s made. Focus has not announced a start date for Romeo and Juliet quite yet. However, even since The Lighthouse, Eggers has been able to put out a movie roughly every two years, so we’d wager Romeo and Juliet shows up in theaters by 2028. We’ll just have to wait and see what year we’ll officially return to fair Verona in.

Eric Diaz is a staff writer at Nerdist and a Swiss Army knife of fandoms. Eric loves DC, Marvel, horror movies, and even Star Wars and Star Trek equally.

The post Robert Eggers’ Lines Up an Adaptation of ROMEO AND JULIET appeared first on Nerdist.

A company that owns more than 300 Wendy’s restaurants across 15 states recently filed for bankruptcy, citing rising beef costs as a major contributing factor. At the same time, the Trump administration has worked tirelessly to downplay the impacts of rising beef costs on businesses and families. Meritage Hospitality Group filed for Chapter 11 on Sept. 17, saying that sales had been…

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Founders shouldn't have to learn the hardest lessons the hardest way. TechCrunch Founder Summit is designed to make the challenges of starting a company easier and the highs that much greater.

Vice President JD Vance announced Tuesday that the Trump administration is kicking more than 750,000 enrollees out of the Affordable Care Act insurance markets as a part of the administration’s fraud-and-abuse charade. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Mehmet Oz also debuted a six-month pause on new brokers selling ACA policies, hurting healthcare exchanges that are…

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After nearly 10 months of bargaining, workers at Verve Coffee Roasters cafés in the Bay Area reached a tentative agreement on Monday with the Santa Cruz-based company. If the majority of workers vote to approve the contract in October — as union leaders expect they will — it will represent an historic win for employees within the specialty coffee industry. 

In September 2025, workers at the Pacific Avenue and Fair Avenue cafés in Santa Cruz and the Market Street location in San Francisco declared their intent to unionize, seeking more equitable pay, consistent hours and a greater voice within the company. Since then, three more cafés – at the headquarters of Meta, Slack and Levi Strauss & Co. – joined the bid. 

How many employees at a multibillion dollar company see an ad before it is shared with the world? Apparently, not enough. Or, at least, not the right people. Converse has officially pulled an ad that caught all the wrong attention for imagery that resembles a lynching. “We’re sorry,” Converse said in a statement Saturday. “We understand why this image is deeply upsetting and…

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The seven-year-old startup has raised a $350 million Series E to fuel its data-as-a-service approach.