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Despite campaigning to bring back free speech, President Trump has been a serial violator of the First Amendment to the Constitution, according to a new report. 

A Reuters investigation found 75 rulings from federal judges that Trump infringed on constitutional freedoms such as religion, freedom, and the press. Many had to do with the Trump administration’s attacks on pro-Palestine advocacy, and the rulings came from judges appointed by both Democratic and Republican presidents. In September, for example, a Reagan-appointed federal judge found that the administration illegally revoked visas and deported foreign faculty and students over their stance on Palestine and Israel.

“The President’s palpable misunderstanding that the government simply cannot seek retribution for speech he disdains poses a great threat to Americans’ freedom of speech,” Young wrote in his ruling.

Other judicial rebukes had to do with Trump’s attacks on law firms, his termination of grants for universities that seemingly go against his ideological agenda, and use of excessive force against protesters. 

Trump has attacked federal judges who rule against him, leveling insults and accusing them of being activists. While most of the president’s legal losses came from judges appointed by Democratic presidents, 10 of them came from Republican appointees. Many of the lawsuits filed against Trump came from media outlets or organizations that ideologically oppose Trump, Reuters found.  

Oftentimes, lawsuits were challenging Trump executive orders, which have sought to take revenge against Trump’s enemies or target ideological viewpoints that the president opposes. Trump has attacked everything from diversity, equity and ⁠inclusion to gender ideology with executive orders, with only federal courts standing in the way thanks to an unwilling Republican-controlled Congress. All of this goes to show that Trump may be the most anti-free speech president ever.

President Trump’s Justice Department lost yet another attempt to access a state’s unredacted voter rolls, bringing their record to 0 for 20.

U.S. District Judge Philip Brimmer on Monday delivered the Trump administration its 20th straight loss, ruling that the Justice Department could not offer a legitimate reason for the executive branch to be granted access to Colorado’s voter rolls. The lawsuit was filed against Colorado’s Democratic secretary of state, Jena Griswold.

Brimmer, a George W. Bush appointee, dismissed the case with prejudice, as he could not identify a legitimate reason for the executive branch to be granted access to something that has never been under its constitutional jurisdiction.

“In cases where the United States has sought [statewide voter registration list] pursuant to § 20703, courts have found that ‘a voter registration list is not a record subject to retention and preservation under § 20701,’” Brimmer wrote. “Title III’s commands therefore pertain to records and papers that election officials receive from prospective voters to support the exercise of the suffrage by the prospective voters, not lists or other tools created by election officials for the purpose of preserving the information provided by voters and ensuring that persons appearing to vote are registered.”

“The Attorney General is simply not entitled to the NYSVoter List under Title III,” he continued. “This conclusion is supported by six recent district court decisions which have determined that voter registration lists are not records subject to retention and preservation.”

Colorado’s loss likely won’t be the administration’s last. U.S. District Judge Kymberly Evanson on Tuesday appeared to reject the DOJ’s argument using Title III of the Civil Rights Act (which states that all voting records should be retained and preserved “for a period of twenty-two months”) to justify gaining access to the Social Security numbers, driver’s licenses, and birthdates of American citizens.

“By my count, this is the 20th court to address this exact issue,” Evanson said. “Is there any meaningful basis on which to distinguish this case from the many other district courts and the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals across the country that have dismissed the government’s complaints or denied their motion to compel?”

“No, your Honor,” DOJ attorney Raymond Yang admitted. “Relevant facts are similar to all the other cases.”

It’s abundantly clear that this is not a winning strategy in Trump’s greater mission of purging voter rolls to exert his executive will upon elections that are already free and fair.

“Rather than addressing any real problem, these lawsuits seek private voter information that is protected under state law,” Washington Secretary of State Steve Hobbs said. “The DOJ’s demands for complete voter rolls are another example of federal overreach and an attempt to exert control over our elections. My office will continue defending Washington voters’ private information while ensuring the integrity of our voter roll remains secure, accurate, and trustworthy.”

While Evanson is a Biden appointee, Brimmer and 11 other judges who rejected the Trump administration’s voter suppression efforts were appointed by Republican presidents—with eight being appointed by Trump himself. The DOJ has now sued in 30 total states and the District of Columbia: California, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, Colorado, Hawaii, Nevada, Massachusetts, Georgia, Illinois, Wisconsin, Utah, Oklahoma, Kentucky, West Virginia, New Jersey, Connecticut, Arizona, Virginia, Idaho, and Washington — all unsuccessfully.

⚡ Quick Take

• Neil Jordan’s original film adaptation of Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire, starring Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt, is coming to 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray and digital at last.
• Interview with the Vampire will also feature a ton of new bonus features including NEW deleted scenes.
• More than ever, we’re applauding physical media, so we can’t wait to bring this one home.

Before it became a beloved TV series, the first adaptation of Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire was Neil Jordan’s 1994 movie. This version of Interview with the Vampire starred Tom Cruise as the Vampire Lestat, along with Brad Pitt, Antonio Banderas, Christian Slater, and a young Kirsten Dunst. This Gothic blockbuster became the most successful vampire movie of all time. (Well, until those sparkly vamps from Twilight). Currently, Interview with the Vampire is only available on a standard Blu-ray or on streaming in standard HD. But Warner Bros. Home Entertainment has announced that Interview with the Vampire will be released on 4K UHD Blu-ray this September. Yes, just in time for spooky season. You can check out the new standard cover art for Interview with the Vampire in 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray, as well as that for the steelbook edition, down below:

Interview with the Vampire Heads to 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray Warner Bros. Home Entertainment

Louis, Lestat, and Claudia are sure looking good on the covers for the arrival of Interview with the Vampire on 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray, a dark gift as the devil intended. The steelbook version even invites you to drink from Lestat and live forever. We say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ to that… But we guess we’ll have to settle for just watching Interview with the Vampire in high definition.

Warner Bros. Home Entertainment

Set in late 20th-century San Francisco, a 200-year-old vampire, Louis de Pointe du Lac (Brad Pitt) tells his story–of desire, love, yearning, grief, terror, ecstasy–to a young reporter (Christian Slater), weaving the history now known as Interview with the Vampire. But we get to see and hear it like never before.

The newly remastered Interview with the Vampire movie also includes new bonus content. Below you can check out the new special features included in this long-anticipated Interview with the Vampire 4K Blu-ray release.

Interview with the Vampire 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray New Bonus Features Eternal Night and Deadly Light

Director Neil Jordan and film editor Mick Audsley reveal the approach to the cinematography of Interview with the Vampire, with a focus on the gothic romanticism achieved by director of photography Philippe Rousselot.

Interview with the Vampire: Creating the World

Step inside the darkly beautiful world of Interview with the Vampire with director Neil Jordan and production designer Dante Ferretti as they unveil the art of the detailed sets, the augmented locations, and the exquisite costumes of the film.

Warner Bros. Interview with the Vampire 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray Will Include DELETED SCENES

For the first time, this edition of the Interview with the Vampire movie will include several deleted scenes. Fans of Anne Rice’s universe have been clamoring to see many of these deleted scenes for DECADES. We don’t yet know which deleted scenes will be included in the Interview with the Vampire 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray, but we are SEATED to find out.

Additional Bonus Features

Warner Bros. has also included special features from previous Blu-ray and DVD releases. These include commentary with director Neil Jordan, and an introduction by Anne Rice, Jordan, and Antonio Banderas. Also, two featurettes from previous releases, In the Shadow of the Vampire along with Lestat, Louis and the Vampire Phenomenon, are part of the package.

When Will the Interview with the Vampire Heads 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray Release?

Interview with the Vampire will be available to purchase on 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray Disc on September 22. It will also be available for purchase Digitally from Amazon Prime Video, AppleTV, Google TV, Fandango, and more.

Currently, Interview with the Vampire is available to stream in standard HD.

The post INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE 4K ULTRA HD Blu-ray Releases This Fall appeared first on Nerdist.

President Donald Trump’s destruction of Washington, D.C., is so fast-moving and widespread that sometimes things get lost, so you’re forgiven if you’ve missed the new helipad on the White House lawn—which is now costing taxpayers double. Let’s recap for the full flavor of stupidity here. In May, Trump decided that he needs a new helipad for Marine One, which—unlike a lot of things…

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A cartoon by Clay Jones. Related | GOP freaks out when Fauci refuses to play their games…

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Getting a small local language model running on a notebook or even smartphone in 2026 is trivial. But what about something even smaller and lower-power. Say, like an ESP32 microcontroller that costs less than $10? It might sound impossible — the device is primarily designed for things like remote sensors, IoT, and other embedded applications, not running generative AI models — yet, that's exactly what a developer who goes by the handle SlvDev has managed to do. In a process detailed on GitHub, and recently showcased on the Better Stack YouTube channel, SlvDev documented how he managed to get a small language model running at nearly 10 tokens a second locally on a microcontroller that costs about the same as a fancy cup of coffee. Tiny stories on a tiny microcontroller Cramming a large language model (LLM) onto something as small as a ESP32 microcontroller isn't a trivial task. There's a reason that these models are trained and run on GPUs. LLMs are memory-hungry beasts that typically require between one and four bytes per parameter just to hold their weights in memory. With just 520 KB of SRAM and 8 MB of pseudo SRAM (PSRAM) on the ESP32-S3, you aren't going to be running a model like DeepSeek V4 Flash . To make it work, the dev had to drop the "large" from the language model and settle for something nearly 10,000 times smaller: TinyStories, a 28.9 million-parameter model originally developed by Microsoft Research. However, even this model is asking a lot of an ESP32-S3 module. At 16-bit precision, the model requires about 60 MB of memory that the ESP32 simply doesn't have. So, the dev employed several techniques, some of which we've previously explored, to shrink the model’s footprint. The first is quantization, a process by which weights are compressed by reducing their precision from something like 16-bits of precision to eight, or even four. This enabled SlvDev to trade a bit of accuracy for a 75 percent reduction in memory required. Instead of about 60 MB of memory to hold the weights, they now require just 14.9 MB. But that still wasn’t enough. Thankfully, in addition to the 8.5 MB of working memory, the ESP32-S3 can also be bought with up to 16MB of flash storage. By borrowing a technique called per-layer-embedding (PLE) from Google's Gemma family of models, the dev was able to offload the majority of the model's weights, about 25 million parameters or about 12 MB worth, to flash with minimal performance degradation. Offloading model weights to NVMe storage is an old trick for getting massive frontier-class models like DeepSeek V3 running on hardware that wouldn't have the necessary memory and GPU capacity to serve it otherwise. The downside of this approach, historically, is that it murders performance. Instead of tokens a second, you're usually looking at seconds, or in some cases minutes, per token. It works but it's not remotely practical. PLE manages quite a bit better because these weights are accessed rather sparingly, which keeps the flash's glacially slow bandwidth relative to DRAM or SRAM from nerfing performance. The result is that rather than trying to cram 14.9 MB into the ESP32's memory, the model now only needs about 2 MB. Specifically the output head, embeddings, and KV cache are kept in the chip's PSRAM, while activations are handled in the chip's 520 KB of SRAM. Using this approach, the dev says they were able to get 9.88 tokens a second out of the microcontroller, which is faster than the average person can read. So, what can I do with it? While you may be able to get a small generative AI model running on a microcontroller like an ESP32, you won't get much from the practice beyond dumb simple pride. Tiny Stories is a great proof-of-concept, but aside from generating short, reasonably coherent stories on demand, it can't do much. You aren't going to build a chatbot with it, generate code, or power an agent. There is another model, called Barista, that can answer questions at roughly twice the performance, but only on topics pertaining to espresso. TinyStories and Barista are, well, just too tiny to do much else. Yet the fact these models run on an ESP32 at all is impressive in itself That said, if you've got a device with just a bit more memory and compute, say a Raspberry Pi or a smartphone, there are far more capable models out there. Google's Gemma 4-E2B-it, launched back in April, employs the same quantization and PLE offload techniques to cram a 5.1 billion-parameter vision language model into just over a gigabyte of memory when using 4-bit weights. Higher degrees of quantization and offloading can get this down to around 500 MB. While its memory footprint is several orders of magnitudes less than what's required to run a frontier model, it is still capable enough to power local chatbots, orchestrate local agents for things like managing a user's calendar, and free you from your reliance on OpenAI or Anthropic so long as you can put up with the occasional hallucination. ®

⚡ Quick Take

• We spoke to X-Men ’97 supervising director Jake Castorena about that big Magneto moment and bringing in all the characters for season 2.

I can’t believe we’re almost done with this season of X-Men ’97. Not content to bask in the glory of season one, the writers, directors, and animators continue to make the most vibrant, action-packed animated series we’ve seen in a while. The mutants never disappoint. Not only is season two giving us Apocalypse in all his glory, it’s given us X-Force, X-Factor, the Acolytes, and more. We spoke to supervising producer Jake Castorena about the metric ton of new characters, big moments, and who we won’t see in season three.

Marvel Television

NERDIST: Going from season one to season two, what was the biggest challenge after seeing the success of the first season?

JAKE CASTORENA: Honestly, that. We’re all fans, we’re all nerds, we’re all artists and creatives on our end. So it’s like, cool, now we just got to do better than what we did before. And that’s sort of the same synergy that we already have amongst the crew, especially when we have animatic screenings or when we have meetings where every so often we all come together. Whether it’s in the episode getting animated or whether it made the cutting room floor, just like to highlight the work.

Because when you work remote or hybrid, you don’t get to see what everyone else is working on. So we try to make an effort to make sure we showcase what everyone’s working on together and that can’t help but just, “Oh man, oh, so-and-so did that. Damn, all right, I want to step it up now. Oh, they did that such-and-such cool thing. Okay, cool. I want to do something cool now too.” So we already have that synergy. So that wasn’t too much of a leap for season two. It was just doing it after already being timed from season one. But yeah, man, it never falls short on the responsibility and the genuine gratitude that we have to get to bring these characters and these stories to life.

Marvel Television

I’m always blown away every episode by the action sequences and how big they get and how it seems like they translate the panel into this massive, extended sequence. What was your favorite and/or most challenging one from this season to get timed out properly?

Honestly, for me, Magneto’s death.

Oh, man, yeah.

The death of Magneto because we’re killing off a main character and we want to give a good sendoff, but it’s as much about the main character’s death as it is about Xavier watching Magneto die. And it’s also about apocalypse coming into his own as Apocalypse. So there’s three things you have to juxtapose against all each other. All need the same amount of screen time, all need the same amount of justice and all need to hit. And so delicately balancing that.

Also, just shout out to Chase Conley, director for that episode, because he and I got to work together closely and craft that whole thing together, which is pretty awesome. And just as you see, just making it all work. For me, it’s in a fast-paced show like us always remembering, and our team does this in kind, not being afraid to let things breathe, not being afraid of silence. Because ideally what you slow down helps to sped up stuff and vice versa.

So for me, the challenge was making sure that Magneto stuff hit. And then the other challenge was something that’s not out yet, but in the finale, just a certain character coming back and molly whopping a whole bunch of Multiple Men.

Marvel Television

Intriguing! Speaking of multiple men and multiple characters, this season has several different X-teams and dozens of new characters. That has to be a very hard situation to be like, we have to make sure we’re giving every new character the same kind of gravitas as some of the returning characters without forgetting some of the returning characters. What was that sort of like in the prepping process for this season?

Yeah. One thing I’ll say is I don’t envy our head E.P. Matthew Chauncey and our writers room. I don’t envy them. It’s like, oh, 22 new characters plus the other 18 to 20 that we already know? But the cool thing is my unique position and my ability is, I don’t necessarily work on the scripts in Genesis phase, but I do get to have a say or get to have some input.

Matt Chauncey is gracious enough to ask me, “Hey, how do you feel about this? Is this hitting the way I’m looking for it to hit? Or what would you do? What are you looking for? ” Or sometimes it’s even like, “Hey, I wrote this and this. Whatever the action says, I’m not really married to it. Please work with directors and whatever you want to do to that, just as long as we hit this and this. ” It’s like, great. That’s not different from season one either.

Is there a new character this season that you’ve felt came out the best?

Honestly, I’m loving everything about having X-Factor and X-Force. I’m a little partial to X-Factor because that was my first foray into the actual X-Men Comics. So X-Factor, when the original X-Men were part of X-Factor before Havok and the secondary team came. So that was my intro, I’m very partial. Even though it’s only a name, it’s not the right team, but it’s okay, I’ll take it.

Marvel Comics

Well, congrats on the season and thank you very much for your time. I do want to say one thing. People here on staff are big Kitty Pryde fans. We would really like to vouch for Kitty Pryde going forward if that’s ever a possibility.

We would love that too. The one thing I can and will say is, and this comes from the OG show too, so long as Jubilee is present, we most likely won’t get Kitty Pryde.

X-Men ’97 drops Wednesdays on Disney+.

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. He hosts the weekly pop culture deep-dive podcast Laser Focus. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Letterboxd.

The post X-MEN ’97 Supervising Producer Jake Castorena on Magneto, Apocalypse and More appeared first on Nerdist.

SpaceX has ramped up its purchases of Tesla Megapacks for its xAI data centers.

In the face of an epidemic of AI-enabled cheating and research suggesting its products hamper learning, OpenAI is doing the sensible thing and pushing more AI on students and teachers. Wait, did I say sensible? My mistake. The House of Altman announced a trio of new education-focused offerings on Tuesday: one for K-12 teachers, another for college educators, and a third for college students. The new plugins, the company explained, will help students and educators make more use of ChatGPT’s agentic capabilities for both studying and teaching. The new features are available through ChatGPT Edu, an institutionally licensed suite for higher education, and ChatGPT for Teachers, a free resource available to verified US K–12 educators and school districts. The new offerings, says OpenAI, build on its educational AI philosophy that “AI should support learning, not shortcut it, and the best learning experiences keep educators and students in control.” Plenty of educators might disagree. Cheating with AI has become a sad norm in schools around the world, and the US is no exception. Many young people admit to using AI to cheat on school assignments, and college students have been caught doing it, too. Mexico's largest university, the National Autonomous University of Mexico, last week suspended enrollment for incoming students after suspected widespread cheating in its admissions exams. The university also decided this week to require about 58,000 applicants who qualified in the remote entrance exam to take an in-person proctored control exam after scores surged during its first remotely administered admissions test. As for how teachers relate to AI in the classroom, a 2025 study from the Center for Democracy and Technology suggests it’s going to take more than some new OpenAI software to help teachers feel more comfortable. CDT said last year that K-12 teachers widely complained of not being given the necessary resources to understand how to integrate AI into schools, or how to tackle the potential harms AI may be causing to their students' ability to learn and personal development alike. Rather than helping teachers and professors regain control of the academic process or better understand how AI is affecting their students, however, OpenAI wants to simply let them foist off more of their work to ChatGPT, too. “The K–12 Educator plugin is designed to help teachers plan and create for their classrooms,” OpenAI explained. The tool can use materials teachers already have on hand “to create differentiated resources, design interactive visuals, and surface actionable insights.” Integration with educational AI infrastructure outfit Learning Commons allows ChatGPT to automatically consider local educational standards for anything it creates for teachers, the company explained, while educators get to remain “in control of pedagogical decisions, grading, and agentic actions.” The plugin for college professors is largely the same. “The College Educator plugin enables course design, teaching, and academic planning,” OpenAI said in its announcement. “Faculty can update syllabi, create interactive websites or multimedia assessments, adapt materials for diverse learners, or package content for their Learning Management System.” For college students, the plugin is designed to bring ChatGPT further into students' study routines, the latest expansion of AI tools that have already complicated essay writing and take-home testing. “The College Student plugin helps students turn what they are already studying into more personalized learning experiences,” said the ChatGPT maker. AI tutors are available (sorry, grad students), as are AI-generated quizzes, study guides, flashcards, and AI-generated visual explanations. “The plugin draws on learning science to prioritize deeper understanding and build stronger study habits,” OpenAI claims. You’d be right to doubt that. Aside from being used to cheat on exams, AI also has a demonstrable effect on harming learning outcomes. MIT researchers last year hooked a group of students up to EEGs to study their brain activity while writing essays. Some of them were allowed to use the internet to conduct research, while others were told to use AI. Not only did the AI cohort have far less ability to recall what they wrote when asked about it later, but they also showed far less brain activity, suggesting that relying on AI simply doesn’t lead to better learning. It’s not much of a leap to go from AI lowering brain activity while doing essay research to figuring that relying on AI tools to help one study, create flashcards, or receive tutoring will likely lead to similar outcomes. Real learning still takes legwork, and other studies suggest overreliance on tools like ChatGPT can undermine deeper learning. Why teachers and professors would want to embrace an expansion of AI into their workflow when they’ve seen what it can do to their students is a question for OpenAI. The AI giant didn't initially respond to our questions for this story, but we'll update if that changes. ®

⚡ Quick Take

• Delainey Hayles returns to The Vampire Lestat as new character Regina. But who is Regina? Is she related to Claudia? And how does Louis fit?

We knew for quite some time that Delainey Hayles would be back in The Vampire Lestat. But we didn’t know what character Hayles would play in her return. In Interview with the Vampire, we witnessed the death of Delainey Hayles’ original character, Claudia. Claudia was the vampire daughter of Lestat and Louis, and she was murdered by the Paris Coven for “breaking the Great Laws” of the vampire, while Louis was just barely spared. Uncovering the truth of her death was a core part of Louis’ journey in Interview with the Vampire. And reckoning with the grief of losing Claudie remained a major part of Louis’ story in The Vampire Lestat. But did Delainey Hayles actually return as Claudia in The Vampire Lestat? Yes, and also no. In The Vampire Lestat episode three, Hayles appeared in the form of someone else, a human. But who is The Vampire Lestat‘s Regina, Delainey Hayles’ new The Vampire Lestat character? Let’s take a closer look at what the series revealed to us about this familiar face with a new name.

AMC Table of contents; Jump To:

• Who Does Delainey Hayles Play in The Vampire Lestat?
• Who Is Regina in The Vampire Lestat? Here’s What We Know
• Regina Was Working for Armand Throughout The Vampire Lestat
  • The Vampire Lestat Clued Us in That Regina Was on Armand’s Team All Along
• Is Regina Related to Claudia at All?
• Nerdist Take: Delainey Hayles’ Regina Storyline with Louis in The Vampire Lestat Was Intense But Effective
• Will We See More of Delainey Hayles’ Regina in Queen of the Damned ? Could Regina Become a Vampire?

Who Does Delainey Hayles Play in The Vampire Lestat?

Delainey Hayles plays Regina in The Vampire Lestat. We meet Hayles’ new character, Regina, in The Vampire Lestat episode three, but we hear Louis talking about her as early as episode two. Hayles’ Regina plays a role in the entire season.

Who Is Regina in The Vampire Lestat? Here’s What We Know AMC

In The Vampire Lestat, Regina is a human who works as a waitress at a NYC diner called “Brick and Bacon.” Louis describes Hayles’ Regina to Daniel as follows: “I saw Claudia in New York, coming out of the subway… Someone who looked like her, but in her twenties, if she’d made it to her twenties. So I come up, I watched her turn the corner. I saw her walk into a diner. I couldn’t help myself. I go inside, I grab a booth. It’s not her, she’s not there. Chased a ghost, I guess. I ordered a donut and coffee, just to pass. And she comes out the back in uniform. It’s not her. This one’s got a different walk, accent. I’m not in her section. I walked out.”

RELATED ARTICLE

THE VAMPIRE LESTAT Is Unlike Anything Else on TV (Review)

But indeed, when we finally see Regina in The Vampire Lestat episode three, played by Delainey Hayles as she is, the new character is an exact copy of Claudia. Her accent is British when she speaks to Louis, and she’s aged to Hayles’ age at the present. But we understand how intense this is for the character.

In episode four of The Vampire Lestat, we learn more about what we believe to be Regina’s background. Regina reveals that she’s quite poor, living in an apartment that’s falling apart, full of mice and dangling wires, and populated with too many roommates. And Louis discovers that she’s been struggling. Among other things, Regina has a debt looming over her and a criminal record that includes a history of credit card scams and stealing cars. Of course, all of this makes engaging in a relationship with Louis look quite tempting, but also makes the relationship between them, not exactly healthy to begin with, even more so, born of desperation and unequal power dynamics. But… it turns out there’s more to the story.

Regina Was Working for Armand Throughout The Vampire Lestat AMC

Alas, it turns out parts of Regina’s tale of woe were true in The Vampire Lestat and parts of them… Weren’t. Delainey Hayles’ new character was actually sent into Louis’ orbit by Armand, who was seeking vengeance, we suppose, of some kind for Louis’ abrupt conclusion of their relationship, and perhaps for Armand’s vision of the way Louis mistreated him and never loved him throughout the 77 years they spent together, and perhaps for the many things that had gone wrong in his life that had nothing to do with Louis at all.

In any case, in The Vampire Lestat finale, Armand reveals that he found Regina by using facial recognition software on his iPad, along with an old photo of Claudia. He shares that Regina does indeed have a “grifter’s resume,” but that in addition, there was a “years-long tale of seduction and cold commerce” between the two, which culminated in Armand setting Regina up in New York and sending her into Louis’ orbit. Armand notes that Hayles’ Regina passed in front of Louis 19 times before he finally noticed. And then, when they did cross paths, Armand guided her to manipulate him with the mind gift… But not fully. Regina was good at her job, he suggests, and did some of it of her own volition. And her job was to allow Armand “the aperture with which to rip Louis’ innards out.”

AMC

Ultimately, though, it seems that Regina really did come to care about Louis in The Vampire Lestat. And that part feels sincere. And on Louis’ end, Claudia and Regina are obviously entwined in ways he’ll never be able to separate. In the end, Louis offers Armand the amends he wants so much, although they are not wholly sincere, and Armand lets both Regina and Louis leave alive. Delainey Hayles’ Regina runs out of the room before Louis’ head fully re-attaches to his body, and we don’t see her again in The Vampire Lestat.

The Vampire Lestat Clued Us in That Regina Was on Armand’s Team All Along

Before the finale, we received a new fascinating insight into Regina from The Vampire Lestat‘s marketing team. Since the beginning of the series, The Vampire Lestat had been releasing character posters that were either pink or yellow-colored. Eagle-eyed fans realized that these colors implied the formation of two teams. Speculation abounded that the color marks a character’s allegiance, either to Lestat or to Armand, or perhaps their feelings about the Great Conversion. Regina’s poster was yellow, like Daniel and Armand, not pink, like Lestat and Louis. And that gave us our earliest clue that Delainey Hayles’ Regina was actually on Team Armand in The Vampire Lestat. (Kind of, anyway)

akasha está vindo para desequilibrar isso #tvlspoilers pic.twitter.com/deEjIdDAOg

— Liz ᵀⱽᴸ (@lestatgothic) July 3, 2026 Is Regina Related to Claudia at All? AMC

Even after the finale, we don’t know if Regina and Claudia have any kind of cosmic connection on The Vampire Lestat. Anne Rice’s universe is full of all kinds of magic and powers, though, so we guess we can’t entirely rule it out either.

That said, in episode five of The Vampire Lestat, Louis asks Lestat to meet Regina and confirm for him whether she’s “Claudia come back to him” or not. Lestat becomes emotional about seeing Regina, who does look like Claudia, but confirms to Louis that she is nothing like their dead daughter. Chiefly, Lestat cites that “it’s not her,” because of “the eyes.” And Louis agrees, “No spark, right?”

After this meeting, Lestat is moved to write a song about Claudia called “Stained Glass Eyes,” so we’re feeling like the lack of Claudia in Regina’s eyes implies she isn’t connected to Claudia. Still, anything could happen.

Nerdist Take: Delainey Hayles’ Regina Storyline with Louis in The Vampire Lestat Was Intense But Effective AMC

Although The Vampire Lestat brought back Delainey Hayles as ghost Claudia for a fascinating scene, it was Hayles’ Regina that had the biggest impact on Louis and the narrative this season. While it was Armand’s doing that the situation Louis and Regina found themselves in arose in the first place, Louis’ inability to let go of his grief, guilt, and loneliness, his inability to move on, and, in some senses, his selfishness about his own pain made Armand’s job much simpler than it needed to be. After his first encounter with Regina, Louis returned to the diner several times, as Regina notes, “three times in five nights,” to engage with the Claudia look-alike and try to get to know her. And that was a wild thing to do, whether or not Armand was pulling all the strings.

Having Regina speak with Claudia’s New Orleans accent, putting her in a position to be an emotional support for a situation she couldn’t understand, even hiring someone to play Claudia’s dead lover, Madeleine, were all facets of the relationship that intensely crossed a line. And yet, we got a real look into where Louis’ head is in The Vampire Lestat. And that place is, like every other character, very messed up. Even though the journey was an intense one, it very effectively helped us to see where all of Louis’ trauma has taken him.

AMC

And, credit where credit is due: Louis really tried hard to kick the habit with Regina in the end, something that was no easy feat with Armand behind the scenes. He also tries desperately to save her life, even forcing himself to offer Armand sentiments that dug deep into his soul. And that’s the essential goodness of Louis that we love so much. Hopefully, Louis’ run-in with Claudia’s ghost also cemented this feeling. And if Louis and Regina DO meet again, they’ll be able to engage in a more productive way.

The idea of seeing someone we love come back to life is, of course, a temptation that no human and vampire could withstand easily. But even if Regina was just a coincidental Claudia look-alike, she couldn’t have actually helped Louis with his grief over Claudia. And, especially for a vampire, intense grief can be a dangerous thing. We want healing for Louis, and this was absolutely not the path to it in any form. We’re crossing our fingers that going so far down this dangerous road with his grief will help Louis to see that it is time to work through his feelings more productively. And at present, he has admitted he has some work to do on himself in The Vampire Lestat; hopefully, he’ll hold onto that feeling in Queen of the Damned.

Will We See More of Delainey Hayles’ Regina in Queen of the Damned? Could Regina Become a Vampire? AMC

It’s unclear if Delainey Hayles will be back as Regina after the final episode of The Vampire Lestat. But with season four of the series, Queen of the Damned, officially confirmed, we bet there will be more of Hayles to come.

Hayles tells us that even after the intensities of The Vampire Lestat finale, Regina is still thinking about Louis. She offers, “I think we saw her leg it out of the room, and I think in her mind she was like, ‘I need to get out of here.’ But I don’t think it’s escaped from her mind that Louis was doing everything he could in the room to try to save her. So maybe it’s one of those things where it’s like, I don’t know, she goes back to waitressing, and then she’s like, ‘Oh, yeah. I wonder what he’s up to.'”

And that’s just the line of thought that could bring Hayles’ Regina right back into the mix of things.

The Vampire Lestat (or season three of Interview with the Vampire) is now streaming on AMC and AMC+. You can also read Anne Rice’s The Vampire Lestat book today.

Rotem Rusak is the Editor-in-Chief of Nerdist. She cannot take any more Interview with the Vampire/The Vampire Lestat devastation for Louis or anyone else.

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Originally published on June 21, 2026.

The post Who Is Regina in THE VAMPIRE LESTAT? Delainey Hayles’ Ne Role, Revealed appeared first on Nerdist.

⚡ Quick Take

• Starbucks has officially revealed its fall 2026 menu, including old favorites, new products, and its famous Pumpkin Spice Latte.
• Pecan is coming back for a third year to its fall flavor rotation.
• The oddest choice has to be banana flavoring used in the shop’s Iced Banana Bread Latte and Iced Banana Bread Chai.

The announcement of Starbucks’ fall menu, helmed by its famous pumpkin spice latte, has become the heralding event signifying the “official” start of autumn. Take that, changing of the leaves—your nature-given job has been stolen by a huge corporation with questionable morals.

Starbucks

This year’s menu has its iconic, irreplaceable PSL, alongside Pecan flavors introduced in 2024. The coffee giant’s newest innovation is Chaider, and it’s exactly what it sounds like: its famous chai concentrate mixed with apple flavors. In terms of food, the Pumpkin Cream Cheese Muffin and an upgraded Hedgehog Cake Pop are both coming back. Capitalizing on the trendiness of high-protein food, the new Chicken Bacon Protein Pocket packs 20 grams.

A particularly odd and intriguing choice is… banana. I am a huge fan myself, but then again I was the weird kid who was actually happy to find the banana Laffy Taffy in my trick-or-treat basket. Believe me, people get really weird and divided about banana flavoring. The Iced Banana Bread Latte and Iced Banana Bread Chai combine fall flavors with banana. Someone be brave enough to spend $7 on this and tell me how it goes.

Starbucks

Of course, we can’t forget everybody’s favorite: consumerism. The fall drinks will blow into stores with a PSL-colored merch collection on the side. From an Owala water bottle to insulated cups and fall-inspired mugs, the collection has exactly what any PSL lover could want. Their press release also mentions a hat, which is not shown in their promotional photos.

The PSL, along with a sprinkle of inflation and high demand, has made Starbucks into the giant it is today. In 2003, Starbucks sold the PSL for the first time in 100 stores across Vancouver and Washington. That year, the company’s net revenue was $4.1 billion. In 2024, it was $36.2 billion.

All of the aforementioned drinks and items will be available on August 25, as Starbucks has declared this the beginning of autumn.

The post Move Over Fall Classics, Starbucks Is Bringing… Banana? appeared first on Nerdist.

In a letter to the editor, the chairman of the Santa Cruz County Republican Party urges readers to vote against all tax increases proposed on the November ballot.

SpaceX doubled its revenue compared to last year, according to its first quarterly earnings since going public in June.

⚡ Quick Take

• Hulu has released a trailer for Christ Carter’s R-rated director’s cut of The X-Files: I Want to Believe – Vrach Frankenshteyn.

I was there in 2008, day one, in theater to see Chris Carter’s The X-Files: I Want to Believe. A huge fan of the TV series (like, it was my first big fandom), even an apologist for some of the lesser seasons, I wanted to support and spend some time with Mulder and Scully again. But the theatrical film was, if nothing else, a bit underwhelming? The plot was fine, but I didn’t quite see why it needed to be a movie.

That might have been because it wasn’t what creator Carter wanted in the first place. Now, in a little under two weeks, we’ll get to see the gorier, scarier director’s cut of the movie, The X-Files: I Want to Believe – Vrach Frankenshteyn, on Hulu. And now we have a trailer for that new cut below.

The press materials call this cut a “darker, frightening thriller exploring a real-life Dr. Frankenstein.” I’m assume it’s “real-life” in terms of the movie, not a guy who actually existed.

The official synopsis says:

When a group of women is mysteriously abducted, it becomes a case right out of The X-Files. Years after walking away from the FBI, Fox Mulder and Dr. Dana Scully are pulled back from the shadows when a federal agent vanishes without a trace. In a case you’d never see on TV, their only lead is a disgraced, defrocked priest claiming to have horrific psychic visions of the crime. Forced to confront the ghosts of their past, the partners must navigate a chilling winter landscape and an even darker human monstrosity. The truth of these crimes is out there somewhere … and it will take Mulder and Scully to find it.

Hulu

The prospect of this movie, even way after the fact, is pretty exciting to an X-Phile like myself. I always dug the chilly vibe of the movie, I just never fully understood why I was watching it. Now, hopefully with Carter’s original vision restored, we’ll get to see. Plus, Vrach Frankenshteyn is just an objectively cool as shit subtitle. So, maybe naive, but I really do want to believe.

The X-Files: I Want to Believe – Vrach Frankenshteyn will drop on Hulu August 14. The original cut of the movie will also drop that same day, for compare and contrasties.

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. He hosts the weekly pop culture deep-dive podcast Laser Focus. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Letterboxd.

The post Believe in the Trailer for THE X-FILES Second Movie Director’s Cut appeared first on Nerdist.

Next.js coders toiling on complex React applications live with an ongoing low-grade anxiety about running out of memory. It’s not dementia; it’s the software. The dev can fill RAM all day long until the JavaScript engine (often V8) chokes, causing the underlying Node.js engine to crash entirely, leaving only a “FATAL ERROR” message. Cognizant of such frustrations, the core development team behind Next.js have released a new version of the open source React framework that dramatically lowers memory usage by up to 90%, the team report. The 16.3 release, the first feature update since October 2025, also boasts faster rendering and better runtime performance, all with complete backward compatibility. Turbopack packs a punch The memory enhancements come from several sources. One is Turbopack, an embedded high-performance bundler that cloud provider and Next.js maintainer Vercel added to the project. Turbopack is an incremental builder, compiling only those portions of the code since the last build time. It replaces Webpack. Turbopack has been bundled into Next since version 13, though the core team twiddled some defaults for this edition. Disk caching and memory eviction are both on by default. For example, an instance of the new Next.js managing 50 routes (each route basically equals a full URL) will consume 840 MB, or about 82% less memory than the ~4.6GB that the previous version would require. One developer from the White Room digital agency noticed an early release of 16.3 cut memory usage from ~4GB down to ~1.5GB, which seems “back to normal again,” they noted. Another early release user reported a drop in memory from ~20 GB to ~5GB. Disk caching was tested on v16.1, and made default for the build process on 16.3. It reads the cache before compiling new changes, so only the new bits get compiled again. Vercel tests have shown that a project that once took 21 seconds can now be done in 9.2 seconds, representing a respectable 2.3x compilation speedup. Likewise, memory eviction, enabled by default for the “next dev” development environ, evicts unconsulted artIfacts to disk when the OS starts to hit a predetermined threshold, reloading them into memory if needed later. For those willing to venture onto the bleeding edge, the package also includes an early (“experimental”) version of a React Compiler written in Rust, which would eliminate hand-tuning memoization ( a job that previously required running the code through the Babel transpiler). This compiler, built directly in Turbopack, could cut page build times by 34% for cold builds and 46% for warm ones. Runtime gets a bump too Although technically a TypeScript improvement, the Next project will take credit for TypeScript 7’s performance improvement that came by rebasing on the Go language. Simply bumping the local dependency to TypeScript v7 within the Next configuration will usher in a 10x performance improvement by the Next team’s reckoning. On the runtime side, this version of Next also offers faster server-side rendering, namely by eliminating the conversion of web streams in favor of native Node.js streams across the rendering layer. This allows the engine to execute 22% more requests without any changes to the code itself. Other performance-enhancing features include payload bundling for fewer pre-fetch requests, and better caching for static assets, thanks to the reuse of immutable assets. A new debugging tool called Instant Navigations “surfaces” slow-acting components for the frustrated developer. Other new features for this version include versioned docs for AI agents, custom error boundaries, and wild-card (“glob”) imports of multiple files at once. Next.js not kaput yet Next.js haters claiming that the framework is losing relevance to upstarts such as Remix, Astro, or Gatsby don’t have the numbers on their side yet. This year, Next.js has surpassed a billion downloads, according to a recent accounting by Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch. That’s almost twice the number of downloads last year or approximately 520 million.®

The domestic violence scandal plaguing Ohio Republican Rep. Max Miller is getting worse by the minute. On Tuesday morning, lawyers for Miller’s ex-wife, Emily Moreno, accused the GOP lawmaker of releasing photos of the couple’s 2-year-old daughter’s genitals. Shortly after, Miller’s attorney admitted to inadvertently releasing sensitive photos of the couple’s daughter…

Source

New findings by the Electronic Frontier Foundation aim to warn app developers that some of the third-party code they place in their apps may also collect their users' location data when they grant permission to the app. 

Republican Senators Thom Tillis and John Cornyn each reneged on their promises to meet with victims of Jeffrey Epstein, with Tillis even leaving them waiting in his office for 45 minutes before they gave up.

A group of Epstein survivors on Tuesday accused Blanche and Cornyn of going back on their word, as the senators prepared to vote in favor of Todd Blanche’s nomination for attorney general after he provided a weak promise in writing to kill President Trump’s $1.776 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund.”

“The treatment we received from senators throughout this process was just as revealing. Senator Tillis publicly invited us, on camera, to come to his office and promised to meet with us. We did. We waited for 45 minutes in his lobby, only to be told by a staffer he would not meet with us after all,” the survivors wrote in a joint statement.

“Senator Cornyn also refused to hear directly from survivors before casting his vote. Senators Tillis and Cornyn were not willing to sit across from us and answer for the vote they were preparing to cast. If they believed they were doing the right thing, they should have had the courage to look survivors in the eye and tell us why. The message was unmistakable: They wanted us to go away. We are not going away.”

Tillis’s snubbing is particularly nasty given that he made a big fuss about not voting for Blanche’s confirmation unless he met with Epstein survivors. Blanche did eventually meet with survivors, but it did not go well, as survivors reported he told them to “get to the point” and to talk to the FBI instead. Survivor Danielle Bensky called the meeting “a box-checking exercise to secure Tillis’ vote,” and noted he “offered no meaningful explanation for how the redaction failures happened, who approved the release, or what steps he would take to prevent survivors from being exposed again.”

Before Tillis ghosted the survivors, he promised on camera to invite them to his office.

“I wanna meet—not with the attorneys, but with the survivors. And have a discussion about that stuff,” Tillis said. “I wanna see specific action items. And some of that could even have to do with investigations. My office is right around the corner.... I gotta rush … but I wanna have that meeting. I don’t want suits in the room. I want victims, and me.”

In case you missed it, here’s the video where he clearly agreed to meet with them, only to stand them up in his office. Beyond disrespectful and cowardly pic.twitter.com/VzDKk5Li8a

— Cheyenne Hunt (@CheyenneHuntCA) August 4, 2026

Tillis and Cornyn are both outgoing senators who would have lost nothing for being genuine and transparent. Instead of actually acting upon any of their own stated principles, they opted to play political theatre with the emotions of these survivors, unable to even offer them the basic decency of coming to a meeting they said they’d be at. We’re talking about women who survived abuse from perhaps the most infamous predator of the century.

Republican Senator John Cornyn tried to claim Tuesday that Republicans didn’t have any power over President Trump.

After Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee, including Cornyn, voted to send acting Attorney General Todd Blanche’s confirmation to the full Senate Tuesday, a reporter asked the Texas senator whether he was concerned about Trump continuing to say he wants to find a way to pay January 6 insurrectionists.

“Well, there’s nothing we could do to, uh, rein in the president when he said he likes the [anti-weaponization] fund and wishes it still exists, but the fact of the matter is it’s dead, and that’s all we could do under the circumstances,” Cornyn replied.

Cornyn: "There's nothing we could do to rein in the president" pic.twitter.com/WdzZTtY4J0

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 4, 2026

Cornyn and his fellow Republicans have had countless opportunities to rein in the president. After making a big deal about Trump’s $1.776 billion slush fund, Cornyn and his colleague, Senator Thom Tillis, settled for a weak agreement full of loopholes. And last week, Republicans shot down an amendment that would have killed Trump’s tax audit immunity, the other big issue with the president’s IRS settlement. In June, all but three Republicans voted against a Democratic attempt to kill the “Anti-Weaponization Fund.”

Senate Democrats also introduced the “Drain the Slush Fund Act” in June, but no Republicans have signed off on it. It all fits a pattern in Trump’s second term: Republicans have a problem with something Trump has proposed or is doing, then the administration reaches out to them, and then they fall in line.