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On the new episode of Equity, we discussed what actually prompted the administration's latest moves against Anthropic, and what this might mean for the AI ecosystem.

By Cara Anthony and Blake Farmer, Nashville Public Radio, for KFF Listen in and play along as hosts Cara Anthony and Blake Farmer test their knowledge with a HealthQ quiz on detecting early-onset cancers. Bryce Ramsey of Madison, Mississippi, was 33 when she was diagnosed with colorectal cancer. Upon noticing blood in her stool, she blamed the hemorrhoids she’d developed…

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Siri’s AI overhaul may have grabbed the headlines at WWDC, but some of Apple’s most useful AI features are arriving elsewhere in iOS 27.

Black Music Sunday is a weekly series highlighting all things Black music, with over 300 stories covering performers, genres, history, and more, each featuring its own vibrant soundtrack. I hope you’ll find some familiar tunes and perhaps an introduction to something new. Even though I have posted soundtracks for Father’s Day, I did not know the history behind the establishment of the…

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A cartoon by Clay Jones. Related | Trump takes phony victory lap after Iran disaster…

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Julia Monahan, of Get The Flock Out, listens during public comment at a city council meeting at Santa Cruz City Hall on Nov. 18, 2025. (Amaya Edwards — Santa Cruz Local/CatchLight Local)

Alexandria Bordas is the Managing Editor at Santa Cruz Local.

SANTA CRUZ COUNTY >> We’ve heard from hundreds of residents via Instagram, email, surveys and in-person listening events that government transparency is top of your list when it comes to our recent news coverage. Our reporters responded, and in one of our most important reporting feats to date we examined the use of automated license plate readers operated by Flock Safety: an Atlanta-based company contracted with hundreds of agencies across the country.

Our ongoing investigation into Flock Safety started in August, 2025, when we first started hearing pushback from the community to contracts with Flock being approved by Watsonville Police Department. The main concerns first brought up by anti-surveillance advocates were mostly centered on local law enforcement agents potentially handing over information to federal agencies like U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE. State law has legally prevented law enforcement agencies within California from sharing data collected by Flock cameras with out-of-state agencies since 2016, but critics said there might still be ways around the law.

Then in November, senior reporter Jesse Kathan uncovered a damning truth: throughout 2024 and early 2025, federal and out-of-state law enforcement agencies searched Capitola Police Department’s database of automatic license plate readers more than three million times, violating multiple laws. At least 190 were done by sheriffs offices and police departments running searches on behalf of ICE. Similar data breaches occurred in the City of Santa Cruz, which Jesse revealed less than two weeks after the Capitola story broke. In the immediate aftermath, thousands of people took to social media to demand local leaders weigh in on the issue and take action. As a result, residents and activists collaborated to engage on the issue of data privacy and the role of local government. 

The impact of our reporting is clear and growing:

• On Jan. 13, the Santa Cruz City Council voted to end its contract with Flock Safety.
• In Capitola, the police chief announced new audits and processes to comply with the law.
• Local advocates are trying to start discussions over Flock with elected officials in Watsonville, which contracts 37 cameras – the most out of any city in the county. 
• Candidates running for office in this year’s election cycle are consistently including talking points about Flock and data surveillance in their campaigns. 
• Hundreds of people reached out to us on Instagram asking about how we reported the story, and Jesse teamed up with in-house visual reporter Amaya Edwards to tell the tale.

We’re not the true heroes of this story – we’re only a catalyst. It’s because of residents and advocates like Get the Flock Out, who pressured elected leaders on Santa Cruz City Council to cancel its contract with Flock Safety on Jan. 13, that we’re seeing real policy change.

Flock cameras are in thousands of communities across California and the country and we’ve gotten requests from other journalists, activists, researchers and curious residents across the state about how to replicate the data process we used to look into our local agencies. We want local governments to be transparent about how the data is used, and empower residents and other journalists to demand these public records. In response, we’ve created this guide on how to investigate Flock in your community. 

Our guide for requesting, tracking and analyzing Flock Safety data in your own communities. Also, check out our civic engagement tracker to see what other critical topics we’ve been following in Santa Cruz County.

Do you have suggestions on what we should cover next? Reach out to senior reporter Jesse Kathan: jesse@santacruzlocal.org.

Questions or comments? Email info@santacruzlocal.org. Santa Cruz Local is supported by members, major donors, sponsors and grants for the general support of our newsroom. Our news judgments are made independently and not on the basis of donor support. Learn more about Santa Cruz Local and how we are funded.

Learn about membership Santa Cruz Local’s news is free. We believe that high-quality local news is crucial to democracy. We depend on locals like you to make a meaningful contribution so everyone can access our news. Learn about membership

The post Civic impact: our continued reporting on Flock Safety appeared first on Santa Cruz Local.

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The oceanic phenomenon known as El Niño, which increases temperatures worldwide, has officially begun, according to US weather forecasters at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. 

Meteorologists have warned that this could be the strongest El Niño this century. It is expected to drive extreme weather events around the world, including both severe droughts and heavy rainfall, likely leading to major disruptions in agricultural production and food security. 

El Niño is part of a cyclical, naturally occurring weather pattern that redistributes warm air, surface water temperatures, and moisture across the tropical Pacific Ocean. During El Niño, trade winds that typically blow east-to-west from the Americas to southeast Asia slow down or sometimes reverse. Normally, these winds push warm water along the equator—but during El Niño conditions, that warm water shifts back east. Although El Niño does not follow a specific timeline, it typically occurs every two to seven years. 

Certain policies may ensure there’s “enough food,” but “that’s not going to take care of the people whose livelihoods depend on” agriculture.

Beginning in the summer, El Niño typically peaks around December or the following January. (The pattern was named El Niño—Spanish for little boy—by fishermen in South America who noticed warmer waters around Christmas time, and associated it with the birth of Jesus Christ.) That means the most significant impacts of the cyclical weather phenomenon may not be felt until months from now.

NOAA’s most recent calculations show a high likelihood of a “very strong” El Niño, meaning average surface temperatures in the Pacific jump by more than 2 degrees C. (Some experts are calling this year’s a “super” El Niño, although some agencies, like the World Meteorological Organization, reject this language.)  

Because it impacts a “diverse set of geographies,” said Weston Anderson, a climate scientist at the University of Maryland, “there is no one set of impacts.” El Niño can contribute to severe droughts in one part of the world and heavy rainfall in others—both of which can disrupt growing seasons in key breadbaskets of the world. 

But the ways in which this year’s El Niño will interact with the effects of global warming—and what that means for food security—is something scientists are still actively observing and untangling. “That question is still really important open science,” said Jennifer Burney, a professor at Stanford’s Doerr School of Sustainability whose work focuses on climate and food security. 

History can give us some examples. In 1877, one of the strongest El Niños ever recorded was associated with historic droughts across Asia, as well as in parts of Brazil and northern Africa. These droughts, “along with colonial policies, contributed to famines in many regions which were really devastating,” said Deepti Singh, an associate professor at Washington State University who co-authored a study on this period of global famine. 

The fatalities associated with these famines, upward of 50 million people, said Singh, “are humbling to think about.”

The last El Niño occurred in 2023 and 2024. It was one of the five strongest El Niños ever recorded, according to the World Meteorological Organization, and is considered to have contributed to the historic temperatures in 2024, making it the hottest year on record. 

The exact way that this El Niño will unfurl is yet unknown.

That year came with devastating consequences for growers, especially in arid regions where agricultural producers primarily rely on rainfall to irrigate their crops. Droughts driven by El Niño across southern Africa contributed to increased food insecurity and malnutrition in several countries. 

Burney noted that in some vulnerable regions, local governments may have adaptive strategies in place to grow key crops earlier in the growing season or to increase imports during El Niño years, which can help offset food insecurity. But even in those cases, local farmers who depend on growing and selling crops to support themselves and their families may still experience economic setbacks. In other words, certain policies may ensure there’s “enough food,” but “that’s not going to take care of the people whose livelihoods depend on” agriculture, Burney said. 

This year, El Niño conditions are expected to impact a number of growing areas—another setback for agricultural producers who have faced higher input costs stemming from the Iran war. Although the United States and Iran are potentially set to unveil an agreement to reopen the all-important Strait of Hormuz, through which much of the world’s oil flows, farmers worldwide have already been impacted by fertilizer shortages and price hikes since the passage closed this spring. 

Weather variability fueled by El Niño will add to growers’ woes. India, where the majority of the world’s rice comes from, is projected to have a weaker monsoon season, which could reduce yields. Drier, hotter conditions could lead to diminished maize production in southern Africa. The southern US states, from California all the way to the eastern seaboard, will experience a wetter year than normal, which could lead to flooding and upend crop production. 

But the exact way that this El Niño will unfurl is yet unknown. As El Niño interacts with the additional warming and moisture currently in our atmosphere caused by climate change, “there is likely to be a change in which regions are likely to be affected” by extreme weather, said Singh. Still, she added, we can expect “the severity, extent, and likelihood” of extreme weather events like droughts “to be higher” in today’s warmer climate.

A Dungeons & Dragons program offered by Santa Cruz Public Libraries offers a welcoming and fun environment for people interested in the game thanks to an enthusiastic volunteer, who’ll be leaving the program to embark on a new chapter living in Europe.

Santa Cruz’s iconic surfer statue has long celebrated the city’s surf culture – but it tells only half the story, write two veteran Santa Cruz surfers, Kaila Pearson and Sarah Gerhardt, the first woman to surf Mavericks in 1999. From Antoinette Swan and the Hawaiian princes to generations of pioneering women who challenged barriers in the lineup, women have helped shape Santa Cruz surfing from the beginning, they argue. A companion statue honoring the women of the water would, they write, recognize women’s often-overlooked contributions and reflect the full history of our surf town. If Santa Cruz values its surfing heritage, they believe, it should make that legacy visible for future generations.

In the wake of Operation Epic Fury, both supporters and critics of the president have described the joint U.S.- Israeli bombing campaigns as “exquisite.” Iran’s supreme leader, in addition to vast swaths of the security cabinet and IRGC command were wiped out at the same time that Iranian missile production capabilities were severely degraded. The intelligence was, in some senses, so captivating, so advanced, and so hyper targeted, that military experts on both sides of the political spectrum set aside the liabilities of escalating a hot war to celebrate the god-like perfection of its initiation. But if this new intelligence apparatus, powered by AI and irresistible to America’s top commanders is hastily integrated into the nuclear arsenal, the fallout will be anything but “exquisite.” 

An examination of government documents, private sector contracting records, and the little noticed statements of military commanders suggests that the same artificial intelligence that allowed frictionless decapitation in Iran is now coming to the nuclear arsenal—with potentially world-altering consequences. While much noise has been made about safeguarding the nuclear command from AI, with constant reassurances of “human-in-the-loop” safeguards, a different escalatory threat has fallen by the wayside: left of launch operations. 

With worst-case scenarios of nuclear engagement, most people think of Strangelove-esque military planners fomenting support for a doomsday machine. During the Cold War, near-misses occurred with terrifying frequency, such as the occasion when a flock of geese was mistaken for a soviet nuclear bombing campaign. Most of these almost catastrophic mistakes revolved around mistaking things for missiles that had already been launched. 

With the integration of AI into the nuclear command and control infrastructure, escalation may soon begin on the ground, before the launch codes have been entered and the bunkers sealed. This new doctrine is known as “left of launch” and AI is increasingly being integrated into the systems used to predict when a nuclear weapon is being launched, as well as the assets that could be degraded to prevent a first strike. 

As we have seen time and time again, the frictionless intelligence that led to  a perfect exfiltration in Venezuela, or the targeted killings in Iran, may soon grease the wheels of preemptive strikes on nuclear capabilities, an escalation into untested terrain for both artificial intelligence, and humanity.

What Is “left of launch?” The first public use of the term appears to be a 2014 memo between Army and Navy chiefs discussing the need for new technologies for U.S. missile defense. That memo states that “Now is the opportunity to develop a long-term approach that addresses homeland missile defense and regional missile defense priorities—a holistic approach that is more sustainable and cost effective, incorporating ‘left-of-launch’ and other non-kinetic means of defense. The proposed strategy would serve as the capstone for the Department to balance priorities, inform resourcing decisions, and restore our strategic flexibility.”

This memo marked a strategic shift, putting an increasing focus on the idea of stopping adversaries’ nuclear missiles before they’re launched, a tactic that proved effective during the Obama era for degrading North Korea’s ballistic missile tests. Since the 2014 memo, cyber attacks and sabotage have been added to preemptive air or missile strikes on foreign missile launchers and facilities under the umbrella of “left of launch.” 

Five years after the term “left of launch” began cropping up inside the Department of Defense, the Trump administration commissioned and released a review of American “policies, strategies, and capabilities…to counter the expanding missile threats posed by rogue states and revisionist powers.” The report called for an escalatory build-out of new capabilities. Among those was a new framework for advancing the notion that preemptive action is actually just another form of defense. 

As Laura Grego of the Union of Concerned Scientists wrote at the time, the report increased the escalation cycle with America’s enemies by “bringing attack operations into the overall missile defense posture as a triad along with active defenses, such as interceptors, and passive defenses, such as hardening and dispersal of potential missile targets.” This, according to Grego, created what amounts to “a kinetic version of left of launch” that no longer reflects traditional deterrence but instead is a first-strike capability. 

Grego also pointed out that the report’s interpretation by other nuclear powers, namely Russia and China, will not abide by America’s framing that new satellites and hypersonic ballistic missiles are for defensive capabilities, something Russia quickly made explicit. 

During the Cuban missile crisis, President John F. Kennedy was pushed from all sides, including by the joint chiefs of staff, to launch a preemptive bombing campaign against the Soviets to obliterate their nuclear capacity on the island. Instead, JFK opted for a passive blockade and diplomatic back channeling that resolved the issue without kinetic force or the potential for catastrophic escalation. But new AI technology being sold to the U.S. government may forestall a similarly de-scalatory approach in the coming decades. 

In June of 2010, General Stanley McChrystal, then America’s top commander in Afghanistan, was forced to resign after a long string of incidents suggested contempt for civilian control of the American military. First, he publicly called for tens of thousands of troops to surge in Afghanistan before a confidential document codifying his opinion leaked to the press, two breaches in protocol that resulted in accusations of subversion of the chain of command.  Soon after he and various other commanders and staff were revealed to have disparaged the president andvice presidentv in an article for Rolling Stone. He prepared his resignation the same day it was published. 

Now, McChrystal is advising an AI technology firm that bills itself as being better at predicting the future of nuclear warfare than both civilian and military commanders. In a lengthy opinion piece penned in Foreign Policy, McChrystal wrote that the firm Rhombus, where he serves as an advisor, predicted the invasion of Ukraine by Russia better than the American national security apparatus. “The quantity of data we analyze helps predict the next card in an opponent’s deck with previously unimaginable confidence.”

Rhombus CEO Anshu Roy cites Sun Tzu to summarize his firm’s premise: “Battles are won before they start.” Roy’s firm has won a $200 million dollar contract from the U.S. Air Force for “an artificial intelligence platform for strategic decision making in defense and national security enterprises,” and has been sanctioned by the CCP for his firm’s work on behalf of the Taiwanese military. In 2024, Carrier management wrote that Rhombus Power also tracks North Korean missile launches for an unnamed government client, suggesting its potential for left of launch applications has been in motion now for some time. 

As The New Republic reported last year, Rhombus’s Ambient product, described as a “digital nervous system, made approximately 32,000 predictions in 2023. Of those tens of thousands, 25,000 were accurate. That’s a .780 batting average, which while great for baseball, might not be high enough for initiating nuclear conflict. 

In his article, McChrystal acknowledges that “while AI can make the picture clearer, it only makes decision-makers’ choices more complex”—an apparent nod to civilian control of the military. Nonetheless, there is a subtle un-truth to the idea that AI integration into systems used to detect adversaries’ nuclear command and control infrastructure will be a merely passive tool to provide commanders options in the situation room. 

As we’ve seen in the Trump administration’s use of incredibly powerful weaponry and detection technology, intelligence fueled by AI greases the wheels of the national security apparatus, whether the outcomes of kinetic action will have long term beneficial impacts or not. In an interview with Politico, Rhombus officials countered this point by pointing to de-escalating a flare up of hostilities between India and Pakistan by “identifying activity at Pakistani bases that could have been mistaken for nuclear arms escalation…but was not.”

But while the generals advising Rhombus about the promise of AI’s use on the battlefield are charging full steam ahead, not every retired general is in alignment. Prior to his retirement, Lt. Gen. John N.T. Shanahan served as director of the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, a Department of Defense component studying the integration of AI onto the battlefield. 

In an article for the Arms Control Association Shanahan wrote: “One especially destabilizing scenario involves the widespread application of AI to detect and continuously monitor the ground, sea, and airborne nuclear forces of other states. Adversary integration of AI-enhanced systems … could erode confidence in a state’s assured retaliation posture. This loss of confidence could in turn increase incentives for preemptive strikes, weakening the logic of deterrence and undermining strategic stability. The problem becomes even more acute if such surveillance and tracking technologies are paired with AI-enhanced automation of decision-making or launch processes, heightening first-strike incentives during a crisis.”

His conclusion ultimately found that even small scale errors at the input level of AI systems could “produce disproportionate upstream consequences once multiple AI models are embedded across interconnected platforms and decision-support systems.”

As AI integration into “left of launch” ramps up, job listings obtained by The New Republic show the extent to which AI is already being injected into United Strategic Command, which is responsible for maintaining and operating the nuclear arsenal. The command’s official remit includes overseeing Strategic Deterrence, NC3 (Nuclear Command, Control, and Communication) Enterprise Operations, Joint Electromagnetic Spectrum Operations, and Global Strike and Missile Threat Assessment.

These job offers include a General Dynamics listing for an AI engineer to work at Stratcom to reduce the complexity of command and control through AI and machine learning, and an AI advisor to oversee AI integration into the Tomahawk weapon systems threat mission planning center. 

Elsewhere, a contractor called DEFCON AI is hiring a subject matter expert to support the development of a modeling and simulation environment who has “deep expertise in U.S. Strategic Command (STRATCOM) programs to help model strategic capabilities, planning constructs, and operational decision frameworks” to “support analysis across the nuclear deterrence mission set.”

Meanwhile, Lockheed Martin posted a listing for a staff AI research engineer based out of STRATcom’s headquarters in Nebraska to work on integrating AI into the nuclear deterrence mission. Taken together, these postings show that AI is being increasingly integrated into both the nuclear command and control infrastructure and into the conventional weapons systems that could be used in a “left of launch” first strike scenario. 

AI integration across the Department of Defense has ramped up with executive orders and a new AI-styled space race with great power competitors like China and Russia. But one development over the past two years has integrated AI into the “left of launch” framework with the result of escalating tensions with nuclear powers who claim a new “defensive capability” is an outright escalation on the nuclear battlefield. 

In his second term, Donald Trump unveiled his plans for the Golden Dome, a network of space detection satellites, high energy weapons, and ground and sea based interceptor missiles to shield America from missile threats. The program is expected to cost $185 billion, with an initial capability delivered by 2028 and the full system in place in 2035. (Some analysts have put the figure closer to $3.5 trillion.) 

The U.S. Space Force has already handed out billions in contracts for prototype interceptor missiles, but the escalatory potential for the system is not found in explosive hardware, but the detection capabilities proposed for the system. Firefly Aerospace and its recently acquired SciTec have touted their products for the Golden Dome, including missile warning systems, surveillance and reconnaissance, autonomous command and control, all in addition to “AI-enabled systems designed for low latency operations to support advanced threat tracking and response across multiple domains.”

Also involved in AI, data processing, and command control systems for the Golden Dome are Palantir, Anduril, and Booz Allen Hamilton. The Space Force General in charge of the Golden Dome, Michael Guetlein, let slip in an interview to the Washington Examiner that “left of launch counterattacks” will also be a core component of the Golden Dome. 

Russia and China have taken note, releasing a joint statement criticizing the integration of “left of launch” into Donald Trump’s new project, describing it as a “complete and ultimate rejection to recognize the existence of the inseparable interrelationship between strategic offensive arms and strategic defensive arms, which is one of the central and fundamental principles of maintaining global strategic stability. The project also provides additional impetus to the further development of kinetic and non-kinetic means providing for the left-of-launch defeat of missile weapons and the infrastructure that supports their employment.” In other words, a new arms race is on. 

Over the past year, members of congress have introduced tepid legislation to curb the integration of AI into weapons systems and the nuclear arsenal. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand introduced the Secure and Accountable Military AI Act. The bill would essentially mandate something that already exists: a human in the loop for AI targeting and control systems. This will accomplish little more than introduce a new button-pusher into vast and allegedly omniscient AI systems. 

Sen. Elissa Slotkin introduced her own bill months before that sought not only to ban AI for the use in a first strike nuclear launch but also to restrict the application of AI to domestic surveillance. But even if these bills were to pass, the full-scale AI arms race with China suggests there may be little hope of stopping the ever-present drift towards a frictionless Department of Defense that moves towards strikes with a will of its own. 

As “left of launch” capabilities are streamlined with AI, potential response times for action may decrease. The grace period for escalatory phone calls and meetings also becomes condensed. Both America and its enemies will have access to vast flows of satellite data, social media intelligence, internal communications from hostile actors, and even psychological profiling, all wrapped together into a blaring warning strobe. Maybe this technology really will make us safer, enabling first strike or cyber attacks to prevent and degrade a future launch. But maybe it won’t.

In the Stanley Kubrick film Dr. Strangelove—the most famous on-screen critique of the nuclear arms race—the president asks the mad Dr. Strangelove about the contours of the doomsday machine, an ultimate deterrence mechanism that would bring about the total annihilation of the world. “How is it possible for this thing to be triggered automatically and at the same time impossible to untrigger?” He asks. “Mr. President,” Dr Strangelove replies, “it is not only possible, it is essential.” As AI creeps into “left of launch” operations, in addition to every other nook and cranny of the Department of Defense, the logic underpinning this drive to replace human judgment with a tangle of AI algorithms sounds very Strangelovian indeed. 

Local female surfers Kaila Pearson and Sarah Gerhardt explain why the statue project matters to the Santa Cruz County community and to them personally.

⚡ Quick Take

• The Vampire Lestat’s Rolin Jones, Assad Zaman, and Eric Bogosian gave us a TON of Devil’s Minion teases about Armand and Daniel.
• When asked about the state of the romance, Rolin Jones confirmed, “We have been writing it from the beginning. We are continuing to write it, and we’re right there now.”
• Assad Zaman and Eric Bogosian also noted that it was “a work in progress.”

It might not come as a surprise to many of you, but here at Nerdist HQ, we’re particularly interested in what The Vampire Lestat has in store for Armand, Daniel, and, of course, the romantic relationship between them, known as Devil’s Minion. Devil’s Minion is a romance that’s canon to the Anne Rice books. And so, after two seasons of meaningful gazes, surprise flashbacks, and one vampiric turning, eager fans have been patiently hoping to see the love between Armand and Daniel bloom in full force on our screens this year. But what does The Vampire Lestat have in store for DM? The showrunner of The Vampire Lestat, Rolin Jones, and stars Assad Zaman and Eric Bogosian, who play Armand and Daniel, respectively, gave us a SLEW of insights. And these teases of what’s to come have us feeling pretty excited for the future of Devil’s Minion. You can check them out below.

Nerdist: We know the love between vampires can be many things. Or it can be one thing. As far as a romantic thing, where are Armand and Daniel (or Devil’s Minion) this season?

Rolin Jones: I think we’re in a very good place. That’s what I think. The old DM, right, has been hurtled at me right from day one at Comic-Con. When we were first coming out, even, and nobody had seen anything yet. People were coming to the microphone, going, “Where is this?” We have been writing it from the beginning. We are continuing to write it, and we’re right there now. And so, just like everything else, have patience; we will try to beat your expectations.

AMC

Eric Bogosian: Romantically? It’s problematic.

Assad Zaman: Problematic is the word. Problematic. It’s just problematic.

Eric Bogosian: We’ve come up with a lot of different metaphors for what it could be. One of the ones I like currently, that I’m sort of meditating on, is when you have a thing for somebody a long time ago, let’s say in high school, and then you run into that same person decades later, and you still feel that way, but they’re not the same person. They’re a different person. This is at the core of this whole show, and all the characters, the question of, “What is a person? A person is their history, or what they think their history is, and doesn’t everybody rewrite their own personal history? There is no objectivity. It’s this constantly changing thing, and definitely, Daniel is going through a changing thing in this season. How does a love manifest itself? Well, we’re working on that.

Assad Zaman: It’s a work in progress.

RELATED ARTICLE

Assad Zaman on What Love Means to Armand From THE VAMPIRE LESTAT Nerdist: In the times between when we see Armand and Daniel overtly come together, do you think there were instances when Armand and Daniel were in one another’s orbits that we haven’t seen on screen yet?

Assad Zaman: It’s always possible. There’s a long 50 years between San Francisco and where we are. There’s always that possibility. Armand, his elaborate lies are often always laced with some truth. If you sort of listen to him, there’s something honest kind of coming out there, shrouded in manipulation and lies. And then in San Francisco, his fascination is real. His fascination with Daniel Molloy is real and way stronger than Louis’ fascination. And so then, why wouldn’t he?

Nerdist: Eric, outwardly, Daniel refuses to acknowledge his “transformational trauma.” But how do you really think he feels about Armand abandoning him to his vampirism?

Eric Bogosian: Well, it does start out with raw anger, but just as we saw when we ended the second season, there’s more to be learned when it comes to Armand; there is a lot more to be learned. As he learns it, he’s really put on his back foot. It’s something that just keeps moving along through the season.

AMC Nerdist: What can you tell us about the Vampiric Bond between Armand and Daniel?

Assad Zaman: Well, from the perspective of Armand, things have shifted quite a lot since season two. He’s no longer part of the status quo of creating this world that he tried to maintain for so long, and he’s very much in a more vulnerable place and self-reflective and on a new mission to redeem himself in some ways and also explore what he did to Daniel and sort of trying to take… I’m struggling because I’m trying to say he’s trying to take blame, but he’s also not, because there’s always something else with Armand. But yeah, that’s where he’s at.

Nerdist: Eric, the show discussed Daniel’s sexuality a little bit in the prior seasons, but I think really confirmed it more as firmly in a queer place in The Vampire Lestat. I know we talked before about sort of the importance of representing queer generations that may have been a bit more lost on our screens. Did you think about that any more while you were all were creating this season?

Eric Bogosian: Well, I mean, Daniel and I have roughly the same timeline. So anything that has to do with queer stuff back in the ’70s has to be also rebellious if it has any sort of public aspect to it. He wasn’t in the closet. He was hanging out in gay bars. He’s not strictly homosexual, he’s kind of like everything. And that is also of the boomer ’70s. If it feels good, do it. That’s pretty much Daniel’s thing. So I think that is a part of Daniel is like he’s against the status quo. The status quo is a straight breeder world, and he’s always been ready to walk into any doorway and taste any flavor. And if it feels good, do it.

To that we say, Amen! The Vampire Lestat airs on AMC and AMC+, Sundays at 9 pm ET/PT and midnight, respectively.

Rotem Rusak is Editor-in-Chief of Nerdist. She is waiting for Armand and Daniel to finally get together so one of her canon ships can finally sail on The Vampire Lestat. Amen.

The post All the Devil’s Minion Teases We Got From THE VAMPIRE LESTAT Cast and Creators appeared first on Nerdist.

Explaining the Right is a weekly series that looks at what the right wing is currently obsessing over, how it influences politics—and why you need to know. President Donald Trump doesn’t understand American patriotism. He certainly believes that he understands the concept—which millions of schoolchildren from coast to coast are able to grasp—but his recent actions underline the fact…

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A cartoon by Jack Ohman. Related | MAGA kooks are drowning in dirty reflecting pool conspiracies…

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