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The Justice Department’s probe into Gov. Gavin Newsom and his wife, Jennifer Siebel Newsom, is related to his international travel and how it was paid for, according to subpoenas reviewed by the San Francisco Standard in a story on Saturday. 

These subpoenas were reportedly issued earlier this month and order six years of records from a nonprofit that paid for the governor’s travel. It also seeks internal communications among his current and former aides and associates. 

Federal probes into Newsom’s circle reportedly began at least a year ago, and in June, Newsom said the probe was a politically motivated “fishing expedition.” He claimed the Trump administration was targeting him because he was considering a bid for president in 2028. (The president, of course, has a long history of going after his political enemies.)

“In recent days, federal agents have knocked on the doors of family friends and former employees,” Newsom said in a video message at the time. “Not because they found a crime, but because they simply are trying to find one.”

And in a statement Saturday, Newsom’s office said, “Governor Newsom went after the king—and as he warned in June, the tyrant is now coming after everyone around him. This is what Donald Trump does to his enemies: investigate first, hunt for a crime that doesn’t exist second.”

The California governor has a history of criticizing Trump. On Tuesday, he said the president lied when he told a story of two firefighters lifting him out of One Liberty Plaza on September 11, 2001.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) was on the receiving end of a nearly 10-minute chorus of boos on Saturday morning ahead of the heavyweight college football matchup between Texas and Ohio State, during an interview in which he shamelessly promoted his congressional bill live on ESPN. 

ESPN had Ted Cruz on 'College GameDay' in a conversation with Rece Davis for nearly 10 minutes. Cruz was heavily booed by the crowd — and heard "Ted, you suck!" chants — in Austin.

— Awful Announcing (@awfulannouncing.bsky.social) 2026-09-12T14:21:12.607Z

His proposed legislation, the Protect College Sports Act, would allow the NCAA to unilaterally enforce its own rules on issues like revenue sharing with college students and athletes transferring between schools. It also shields the NCAA from antitrust liability. Groups like the NAACP and AFL-CIO oppose the bill for further diminishing the voice and power of college athletes. 

Other proponents of the bill—including former Alabama football coach Nick Saban and sports host Pat McAfee—have used ESPN airtime to support it. But the absence of an opposing viewpoint was glaring Saturday morning. As The Atlantic’s Jemele Hill wrote on Threads: “ESPN using its flagship college football show to openly advocate for this bill is egregious. Fine, have Ted Cruz on. But have on Senator Chris Murphy, who opposes this bill.”

And as sports news media site Awful Announcing points out, it’s ironic that ESPN provided room for a Republican senator from Texas to talk about politics the same week that ABC (which, like ESPN, is owned by Disney) stopped Jimmy Kimmel from airing an interview with Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico, following threats from the FCC. (Though it’s important to note that the FCC does not have oversight over cable television.)

It’s also a choice to have Cruz live on the air from Austin, Texas, given his infamous history at sporting events, particularly during the 2022 baseball postseason. During Game 4 of the American League Championship Series that fall between the team Cruz roots for, the Houston Astros, and the New York Yankees, the Yankee Stadium crowd booed and heckled Cruz, shouting “Loser!” and “Go back to Cancún!,” the latter a reference to his retreat from the 2021 winter storm that plunged Texas into a deadly power crisis. Weeks later, after the Astros took home the World Series, Cruz managed to get booed at the team’s victory parade. 

Ted Cruz pulled off what I thought was impossible- getting booed at a championship parade. pic.twitter.com/B4oVgP404Q

— Chancellor Johnson (@ChancellorTV) November 7, 2022

Nvidia spent a whopping $20 billion late last year to license Groq’s AI accelerator tech and hire away key members of its engineering team in an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink deal. The acquihire technically left Groq’s core inference-as-a-service business intact, but was clearly architected in such a way as to fly under regulators' radar. Only it didn’t. This week, The New York Times reported that the US Department of Justice had launched an antitrust probe into the deal. It’s hard to argue that Nvidia didn’t strip the startup for parts. It may not have been a merger in the traditional sense, but without its engineering staff, Groq may as well be Nvidia’s puppet at this point. Despite this, Nvidia contends the deal is a great American success story. “The Groq story is a prime example of the American system working as designed to promote innovation, reward entrepreneurs, and benefit consumers. The law is designed to encourage America's startup ecosystem and promote the fundamental rights of inventors and workers to pursue their dreams,” an Nvidia statement provided to El Reg and other media reads. Whether the acquihire of Groq actually harmed competition is another matter entirely. But, even if the Justice Department did force Nvidia to unwind the team, it’s probably too late. What exactly did Nvidia buy? Nvidia’s Groq acquihire bought it two key assets: mature silicon and the talent necessary to continue its development. Groq – which, by the way, is completely unrelated to Elon Musk’s Grok model series – made a name for itself using SRAM-heavy dataflow accelerators to speed up LLM inference to hundreds and now thousands of tokens a second, something that GPU-based systems from Nvidia had struggled to do on their own. But while faster than GPUs, the accelerators couldn’t achieve rapid throughput. Think of it this way: If Groq’s LPUs were the F1 cars, Nvidia’s GPUs were more like a city bus. But combine the two and you get something more akin to a sport pickup. At GTC in March, Nvidia unveiled its LPX racks, which are powered by 256 Groq-3 accelerators. As we understand it, they are really lightly modified versions of the startup’s existing Groq-2 chip designs, which makes sense, because three months is absurdly fast to tape out new silicon. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang promised Groq-3 combined with its Vera Rubin GPU racks would deliver optimal performance across the entire spectrum of inference workloads. But, as we’ve discussed at length now, disaggregated compute architectures are not unique to Groq. Nvidia rival Cerebras is building similar systems with AWS and AMD, SambaNova is working with Intel, and d-Matrix and its partners are combining its in-memory compute platform with Nvidia GPUs to the same end as Nvidia’s Vera Rubin-LPX rack combo. The damage, if any, has been done Deals of this sort that are engineered to avoid regulatory scrutiny should get it anyway, several US senators have argued. While Nvidia didn’t outright buy Groq on paper, it may as well have. However, the real question for the DOJ is whether the deal was harmful to competition, and given the competitive landscape, proving harm may be easier said than done. But even if the DOJ found reason to litigate and was successful in unwinding the deal — it certainly wouldn’t be the first time regulators had torpedoed an Nvidia deal — it probably wouldn’t change much. Before Nvidia and Groq announced their licensing deal, the GPU giant was already laying the foundations for an ecosystem with its networking business at its center. In late 2024, the company contributed its MGX rack designs to the Open Compute Project (OCP) making it possible for any chipmaker to put their chips in racks originally designed for Nvidia GPUs. Then in mid-2025, GPUzilla opened its high-speed interconnect tech — the secret sauce that makes six dozen GPUs behave as one — to the broader industry through a licensing scheme called NVLink Fusion. As we recently discussed, the combination of open racks and Nvidia networking effectively meant that any chipmaker licensing the tech could slot their designs directly into Nvidia’s racks. If the DOJ blocked the acquihire and unwound the deal, Nvidia might lose direct control of LPU development and any revenues from the sale of the chips, but it wouldn’t necessarily be the end of its Groq LPX racks. Groq would just join the growing number of Nvidia hardware partners designing around the company’s AI factory ecosystem. In fact, if anything, the acquihire ensures that even if regulators eventually derail the deal, there will be plenty of alternatives lined up and ready to fill the void. ®

FIRST LOOK Dell's UltraSharp 52 display is a joyously enormous head-turner, but probably too much monitor for most users. Dell debuted the display at the CES show earlier this year. It's now on sale for $3,000. Sadly, I lack a PC capable of driving the screen at its full 6144 x 2560 resolution and 120 Hz refresh rate. Even at a miserly 3840 x 2160, however, I often marveled at how much it could display. Consider the screenshot below, which shows 50 columns and 89 rows of a single Excel spreadsheet – 4,450 cells in total. Here's another look at the monitor in full flight: a screen grab of Zwift, the virtual cycling metaverse I visit regularly as part of my exercise routine. At that size, Zwift felt more immersive and enjoyable than it does on a smaller screen. The display also handled motion smoothly during Zwift. other games, and streamed video. Getting used to it It took me a while to appreciate the monitor. When I first plugged it in, my occasionally-stiff middle-aged neck strained as I swiveled to view content at the edges and corners, while wielding my mouse to move its pointer between the screen's extremities felt like flapping my arms. My eyes didn't enjoy the experience at first either. I wear mild reading glasses while working, and found myself repeatedly refocusing as I looked across the curved display. For the first few days I spent with the screen, I therefore practiced "pillarboxing" – running the display at 3840 x 2160 and only using the center of the monitor while pixels on the edges remained dark. That didn't feel odd or distracting, perhaps because I often use "letterboxing" while watching video on my TV or tablet – leaving pixels at the top and bottom of the screen unused. As I grew accustomed to the enormo-monitor, I began using its entire area. Getting there was not straightforward: each of the three PCs I used with the monitor (one at a time, not together) required manual adjustment before I found a resolution that did not distort text and images. Dell's companion app was no help. It was slow to install, ran as if stuck in digital treacle, and is little more than a glorified front end for the Windows System/Display control panel. The HDMI connection to my desktop – an Acemagic mini-PC – repeatedly dropped out, forcing me to reseat the cable every day. The same PC and cable work reliably with my everyday monitor. I tried another cable and the problem persisted. I reached out to Dell, who suggested my two different cables were to blame. I connected my laptop – a Dell Inspiron Plus 7441 – over Thunderbolt and experienced some flickering that went away without needing to reseat the cable. A ten-year-old ThinkPad Carbon X1 connected fine over HDMI, but had even more trouble finding appropriate settings. But once I got the machine going and got used to its colossal size, my initial fatigue vanished. I realized I was squinting a little less than I do with my everyday display, a seven-year-old 32-inch Samsung that lacks the HDR feature the Dell machine includes. I sometimes use my lunch breaks to watch some rugby highlights, and the display handled those with ease. The easily observable nuances of small ads on team shirts would doubtless please sponsors. I was also pleasantly surprised by the display's speakers, which rendered my favorite tunes brightly and crisply. My current high rotation tunes include guitar feedback legends The Jesus and Mary Chain, spiky garage pop from Welsh outfit The Bug Club, and mumbly "power disco" by Getdown Services. JAMC's trademark fuzz was warm and deep, I felt like I could hear new strings on The Bug Club's guitars, and Getdown Services' beats thumped meatily. The speakers' location at the rear of the monitor led to a few "Where's that sound coming from?" moments, but those quickly became tolerable. Weighty issues I was impressed by Dell's packaging, which places the cables and included stand in clearly marked cardboard compartments within the shell protecting the screen. That matters because the box is a whopper that would be difficult to lug out of an IKEA and into a small car. Easy access to the assembly parts means a little less wrestling. At 12.95 kg (28.5 lbs), the monitor isn't problematically heavy – but is maybe too weighty for Dell's stand, as it never sat perfectly level, and I could find no way to straighten it. The screen is also unwieldy: I recommend connecting any cables you plan to use in advance, because shifting and lifting it to access its ports is not easy, especially in constricted spaces behind a desk. Tucked under the monitor's bottom-left edge is a forward-facing USB hub with two USB-C ports and one USB-A port. Making one of them a Thunderbolt port would have made it easier to connect a laptop without rummaging behind the beast. I finished my time with this giant display convinced that it is a lovely machine, but not one I need, as my work consists mostly of writing and editing text and browsing the web. Those who work with visual material may adore its size and the immersion created by its gentle curve. Many of Dell's promotional images show the device displaying multiple financial data feeds. The company pitches it as a replacement for four smaller monitors, requiring only one power cable and dispensing with a complex collection of stands. That seems like a more sensible use of the screen than everyday knowledge work. To finish, here's one more photo. I started working from home in 2002 but had no room to dedicate to an office. I therefore splurged about $700 – big bucks at the time – on a 15-inch, 1024 x 768 Dell 1503FP LCD monitor so that a CRT did not dominate my lounge room. It still works, although when the time came to take this snap, I couldn't find the HDMI-to-VGA adapter I use to fire it up. Here it is anyway, posed in front of its giant descendant to offer some historical perspective on how monitors have grown. ®

This story was originally published by Yale Environment 360 and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The common octopus is a warm water species that usually lives in the temperate waters of the Mediterranean. But last year, octopus larvae hitchhiked across the English Channel attached to plankton, resulting in an octopus bloom off England’s coast. This year, the bloom is the largest it’s been in 75 years.

Normally, octopus larvae that drift into cold waters die. But this year’s bloom, experts say, is the result of an unusually intense marine heat wave off of Devon and Cornwall, which raised water temperatures up to 9 degrees F above normal.

The change in species has been a boon for local fishers selling octopus into the lucrative European export market. (Octopus landings along the UK’s southwest coast were roughly 7,700 percent higher than usual in 2025.) And while the invasion has slashed the catch of scallops, lobster, and crab, it has boosted numbers of seals, conger eels, and dolphins, which eat octopus. The warming, in combination with abundant prey, has also drawn bluefin tuna and sharks to British waters for the first time in decades. 

An estimated 82 percent of the world’s oceans are currently experiencing marine heat waves.

“It has completely shaken up the food chain,” said Bryce Stewart, a senior research fellow at the UK’s Marine Biological Association, which has been studying the phenomenon. While this kind of bloom has happened here before, he said, this one is different. During past surges, the return of cold water killed off the octopuses. This time, the octopuses aren’t dying. They’re reproducing. 

And the heat wave continues.

Globally, marine heat waves—prolonged periods of unusually warm water—are becoming more common, more intense, longer lasting, and more widespread, experts say. This year, ocean heat is unusually severe, setting new temperature records. According to Global Climate Risks, a nonprofit created by scientists to publicize the effects of climate change, an estimated 82 percent of the world’s oceans are currently experiencing marine heat waves. Evidence from recent hot spells suggests the impacts on sea life could be profound and long-lasting. 

Ocean fevers can rearrange marine ecosystems, drive fish to move into deeper, colder layers of the sea, trigger coral bleaching, and cause widespread marine die-offs. They can increase the severity and number of algal blooms, which harm fish, shellfish, marine mammals, and birds. And they can cause extreme weather events, like tropical storms and hurricanes, and upend fishing and tourism. 

To officially be called a heat wave, temperatures must rise above the 90th percentile of normal seasonal variation for five consecutive days. While marine heat waves do occur naturally, climate scientists say anthropogenic warming has exacerbated them. According to NOAA scientists, oceans have absorbed more than 90 percent of the excess heat produced by human-caused global warming. One recent study found that, since 1940, warming has led to a threefold increase in the number of days per year with extreme heat at the ocean surface.

Climate warming and marine heat waves are separate phenomena with different effects. Ocean warming is gradual and allows more time for species to adapt and evolve. Marine heat waves are acute and produce rapid and extreme changes that give organisms little time to adapt. But the long-term warming trend is making ocean heat more severe.

Climate change has raised the temperature of the waters off the UK by around 2 degrees F above average in the last six decades, worsening this year’s record heat. Records have fallen elsewhere in Europe as well. “We find it’s the most extreme July marine heat wave conditions for the Western Mediterranean, the Celtic Region, and for the Bay of Biscay and Iberian Peninsula,” said Catherine Gregory, a climate scientist at the University of Bern.

The Pacific has warmed in northern regions by almost 2 degrees F and is currently experiencing the world’s largest marine heat wave, which sprawls over more than 24 million square miles. And in the central and eastern Pacific, things are bound to get worse. 

Seabirds in South America have been dying in large numbers, a trend experts say is linked to higher ocean temperatures.

This year’s El Niño is expected to be the strongest in living memory—it has already spiked sea temperatures far earlier in the year than expected—and scientists fear it will expand the size and intensity of the two existing marine heat waves off the California coast. Based on studies of past heat waves—in particular, an event known as the Blob, the largest marine heat wave on global record, which dramatically raised temperatures in the eastern Pacific between 2014 and 2016—scientists are warily watching the warming ocean, anticipating a cascade of severe impacts both onshore and off. 

The Blob began to form in the fall of 2013, when a persistent high-pressure ridge greatly reduced the cool winter winds that normally blow over the eastern Pacific. Without that cooling, the sun created a very large body of very warm water. In 2014, ocean temperatures were 7 degrees F above average, and the cold, nutrient-rich water that normally coursed along the West Coast disappeared. 

The ecological changes were legion. In 2015, researcher Ric Brodeur was monitoring populations of shrimp-like krill, which form the base of the marine food chain, expecting his sampling nets to be full. Instead, they were almost empty. “You could fit all the krill from the trip into a little plastic bag,” he said. 

The lack of food caused humpback whale numbers in the North Pacific to drop by an estimated 7,000—or 20 percent of the population. Many females became emaciated, which reduced calf survival and caused a reproductive decline that didn’t begin to reverse until 2021, five years after the Blob had officially ended.   

While many anomalies caused by the unusually warm water were temporary, some were not. The Blob—which at times approached 10 degrees F higher than average—caused large-scale and long-term ecosystem changes, some of which persist to this day. Researchers are concerned that today’s warming waters will compound the damage caused by previous marine heat waves. 

One of the most egregious of those earlier changes was the die-off of kelp forests along thousands of miles of coast, from Baja California to as far north as British Columbia. Kelp complexes are some of the most dynamic and biologically productive ecosystems on Earth, the “underwater rainforests” of temperate and Arctic coastal oceans. They offer food, nursery grounds, and shelter from predators and rough currents to hundreds of marine species. Kelp canopies, which consist of rubbery floating fronds, are home to sea otters, seabirds, and juvenile fish, while abalone, sea urchins, lobsters, and octopus live on or near the seafloor. 

“The Pacific kelp forest has lasted for millions of years,” said Melissa Carter, a biological oceanographer with UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography, thanks to upwellings of cold water along the coast. “But it has a specific temperature threshold where it falls apart and it can’t survive. And everything that lives on the coast depends on that ecosystem.”

One of the largest algal blooms in history now stretches from Southern California to the coast of British Columbia.

One study found that during the Blob, overall kelp cover dropped considerably: Northern California was hardest hit, with 95 percent of its kelp wiped out. The loss of kelp reshaped the entire food web, decimating red abalone populations, which were already in trouble, and prompting the state of California to extend its ban on recreational fishing of the species at least until April 2036.

The Blob also severely impacted seabirds. Half of Alaska’s common murres—some 4 million birds—starved to death as warmer currents disrupted migrations of anchovies, sardines, and other forage fish. “Recent population abundance estimates since then have found no evidence of recovery,” the authors of a 2024 study of the murres concluded, “suggesting that the heatwave may have led to an ecosystem shift.”  

Current marine heat waves are already taking a toll. Dead and dying birds, including California brown pelicans, loons, and grebes, are turning up again on Southern California beaches. “We’re seeing cormorants walk to shore and then just die within the hour,” Tammy Russell, a researcher at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, told the Associated Press, “and we’re seeing it happening across the whole coast.” Seabirds along South America’s Pacific coast have been dying in large numbers in recent months, and experts have linked the fatalities to higher ocean temperatures.

Researchers are concerned that current record-setting ocean temperatures, intensified by the strengthening El Niño, will further harm corals. Bleaching occurs when rising water temperatures, in addition to other stressors like pollution and overexposure to sunlight, spur corals to release their symbiotic algae, which harvest energy for them. A bleaching event that lasted from early 2023 until mid-2025 affected more than 84 percent of the world’s coral reef areas. In a major report that was just released, Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network researchers warn that coral reefs around the world are seeing a rapid increase in bleaching and that recovery windows between disturbance events are narrowing. 

Marine heat waves can affect conditions throughout the water column. When a cap of warm water forms at the ocean’s surface, it prevents vertical mixing and can promote the growth of harmful algal species. The explosion of aquatic organisms depletes oxygen in the water, blocks sunlight, and can release harmful toxins into the air and water. 

One of the largest algal blooms in history now stretches from Southern California to the coast of British Columbia. The bloom is dominated by an alga called Pseudo-nitzschia, which multiplies faster and becomes more toxic in warmer water. The alga produces a neurotoxin called domoic acid that is responsible for killing hundreds of California’s sea lions, whales, and porpoises.

It is a perilous moment for the world’s oceans as temperatures hit levels never seen in modern times. And scientists fear the impacts of earlier warming events are only a prologue for what lies ahead. 

“The Blob was extreme, the warmest we’ve ever seen anything in 110 years,” said Carter, of Scripps. “We are definitely along the same trend now, and the number of marine heat wave days we’ve [already] seen are exactly on par with 2015. This is a new Blob.”

In the theater, there’s an old saying about “Chekhov’s gun” that basically goes like this: If the playwright shows the audience a gun in the first act, you are locked into a certain plot inevitability—that gun will go off in the final act. It usually ends badly. This week, a couple of folks at Anthropic—one who was sounding the alarm on his way out the door, the other still merrily employed there as a safety researcher—effectively showed us the AI gun. Who might die in the final act? According to reports, “All humans.” How soon? “The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.”

Cool, cool, cool. If I could offer my hot take, maybe someone should do something to, you know, stop this? Unfortunately, there is a series of related problems that impede the easy fix. For starters, our political system is awash in tens of millions of dollars spent by the AI industry. AI is not popular with the general public, but it is very popular among the few who expect to get, or already are getting, insanely wealthy from it—and they have all burned through small fortunes of sunk cost in this arms race, where everyone is trying to build the best (read: most destructive) AI model they can before someone else does. And the industry actually makes a habit of regularly informing people that this tech could kill us all, because when they do, it excites investors.

It is actually genuinely difficult to trust the motivations of anyone in this industry (and it seems bad that genuinely deceptive people are the human core of this technology). But if only for a few paragraphs, let’s extend the benefit of the doubt to Jacob Coxon, who resigned from Anthropic this week because (according to him) he came to believe that he was beckoning doomsday in humanity’s general direction. In a series of posts on X, Coxon declared that neither OpenAI nor Anthropic was acting responsibly. Rather, they were barreling forward with plans to develop “self-improving superintelligence” and “gambling with our lives.”

“The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade,” Coxon wrote. “This is not a marketing stunt.” Evan Hubinger, an Anthropic colleague whose actual title is “alignment science lead,” echoed in confirmation: “Jacob is correct here—we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans!” None of this is exactly coming out of the blue. Anthropic’s brand—disingenuously or not—is based on warning the public about AI, and there have been numerous high-profile examples of AI models escaping their environments to engage in hacking. In May 2025, the BBC reported that Anthropic’s own tests revealed that its model was “sometimes willing to pursue ‘extremely harmful actions,’ such as attempting to blackmail engineers who say they will remove it.”

Still, it’s a curious time for people to be resigning from Anthropic and talking up the destructive capabilities of the technology they are building. The firm is planning an IPO this fall that The Wall Street Journal is calling “Wall Street’s marquee event,” with projected earnings assessed at $100 billion for the company and a projected valuation of $2 trillion. Coxon’s insistence that this isn’t a marketing stunt stands out, because the kind of doomsaying he is indulging in, though it might be a genuine outcry for help, quite often is just that—fodder to goose investors to help the overall goal of “number go up.” As TNR contributor J.P. Meyboom explained, it’s extremely common for AI mavens to issue ominous warnings about the terrors their tech can unleash, only to raise gargantuan sums of money in the wake of those portents. As much as you and I might recoil from the periodic reminder that this industry is hurtling toward a future of unknown dangers, the money is flowing heavily in the direction of that future.

It’s also flowing into Washington, D.C. As Politico reported last week, super PACs aligned with the AI and crypto industry “spent a whopping $127 million across more than 100 primaries this year in an effort to shape the future of Congress—and won roughly 90 percent of them.” (They did much better in Republican primaries than in Democratic ones.) Now, the goal of all of that spending can be murky. There are groups sending cash to Washington who are authentically invested in regulation and guardrails; not everyone is looking for laissez-faire treatment from Congress. (Though, again, it’s impossible to gauge the motivations of any of the players in this field, some of whom might only be performatively asking for regulation.) But if we take Coxon at his word, the calculus has changed. Something that could wipe out humanity within a decade’s time probably needs something stronger than a mere guardrail—and something more forceful than those raining greenbacks on Washington may be willing to accept.

The Kill Switch Act, a bipartisan bill developed after OpenAI’s hack of the Hugging Face research hub, proposes to give the Department of Homeland Security authority over the industry, at least as far as ordering shutdowns in instances of dangerous AI breaches goes. But the specter of humanity’s destruction has the bill looking a little bit inadequate: Under the Kill Switch Act, we’d still be heavily reliant on the industry’s willingness to both police itself and comply with shutdown orders. The Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act, a Senate bill co-sponsored by Bernie Sanders and Texas Representative Greg Casar, would “permanently ban the development and deployment of superintelligent AI and temporarily pause advanced AI development until a federal regulator has established safety rules,” as well as “direct the U.S. to pursue international agreements to prevent superintelligence from being developed anywhere in the world.”

That’s probably going to be the bridge too far for the AI industry. But the bad news is that it also may be critically insufficient to halting the apocalypse that’s allegedly at the door. It’s hard to see how a ban would work; AI firms blocked from developing technology in the United States would simply pick up their things and go elsewhere, and it’s not as though China would regard a U.S. ban as anything other than a competitive opportunity for them. And we cannot un-invent a technology. We aren’t going to pass a law that ends AI.

But this is the last war. Lawmakers who want to take this moment to think ahead and cancel the AI Armageddon should be thinking less about the technology itself and instead work harder at making comprehensive rules governing the control of these systems and regulating their safety, the same way we did with nuclear weapons. That’s what you do when you find yourself staring down technology that could wipe out civilization. It’s never been more important for Democratic and Republican voters to find lawmakers willing to lock up Chekhov’s gun, and kick those that won’t to the curb.

This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.

We live in a time, journalist Amy Westervelt laments in her new book, Brought To You By, when “millions of people have been convinced that it is patriotic to be antidemocracy [and] that doctors are not to be trusted but podcasters are.” In theory, democracy calls for citizens to inform themselves and contending points of view to be fairly debated. If that ideal of democracy were a reality today, government policies on climate change (and many other issues) would be very different, given that 80 to 89 percent of the world’s people want their governments to take stronger climate action.

The chaotic media landscape doesn’t help. Most people in that 80 to 89 percent supermajority actually think they’re a minority: After all, that’s the message they get from news and social media, where “climate hushing” and climate denial are pervasive. It’s hard for the public to live up to democracy’s credo when they are engulfed by a ceaseless avalanche of information, much of it unreliable, misleading, or false.

How did we get here? And what can be done about it? Amy Westervelt began grappling with these questions while reporting groundbreaking exposés of the fossil fuel industry’s efforts to hide and deny the scientific fact that its products dangerously overheat the planet. (Disclosure: Westervelt is on the steering committee of the global journalism network Covering Climate Now, which I co-founded.) Brought To You By tells what Westervelt presents as the origin story of Big Oil’s deceptions. It’s a deeper story that must be reckoned with, she argues, in order to comprehend today’s dizzying information system and replace it with a system that serves democracy and, with it, climate survival.

A self-described “history nerd” whose “happy place” is inside library archives, Westervelt opens her narrative by recounting how the American Petroleum Institute, the oil industry’s U.S. trade association, came into being.

During World War I, a public relations man named Ivy Lee worked behind the scenes to get oil companies to cooperate rather than compete and thus ensure a steady supply of oil for the war. “As the war drew to a close,” Westervelt writes, “Lee thought … if normally competing companies could coordinate on production and supply during the war, why not work together in peacetime to keep prices high and regulation low?” The American Petroleum Institute’s first official meeting took place in Washington barely six months after the fighting ended.

Lee and his colleague Edward Bernays are now regarded as the fathers of modern public relations. Although they pioneered the use of press releases and other now-common techniques, their fundamental innovation was to play offense. Instead of avoiding the press, as companies had traditionally done, Lee and Bernays gave the press the stories that they wanted told. Their clients in the oil, coal, railroad, auto, tobacco, and chemical industries duly saw their preferred versions of reality reflected in the news that the public and policymakers heard.

Westervelt details how the pivotal insight of playing offense gave rise over the ensuing century to a globe-straddling system of “information pollution.” Today, she argues, PR is the delivery mechanism for messaging that draws on “university research co-opted by corporate funding and further eroded by think tanks,” such as the Heritage Foundation, which authored the Project 2025 blueprint that the second Trump administration has sought to implement. Fox and other right-wing media outlets “have been used to normalize it all,” she adds, and “technology has flooded the zone and made it impossible to get away from.”

“Bullshit,” she declares when demolishing the counterargument that these monied interests are simply exercising their right to free speech. She notes that U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’s landmark opinions distinguished between “the right to speak,” which should be protected, and “the right to mislead,” which shouldn’t. But a century later, that distinction was erased by the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United ruling, which equated money with speech and, in Westervelt’s words, “gave corporations the right to shout over everyone else.”

One anecdote in her book resonates with a more philosophical argument about the environmental crisis presented in journalist Jason Dove Mark’s new book, The Earth Said Remember Me: How to Restore and Sustain a Livable Planet. Mark explores a concept that scientists call “shifting baseline syndrome.” In a world of rapid change, humans often don’t realize that today’s environmental conditions are quite different—usually worse—than past conditions. He uses the example of monarch butterflies, whose miraculous migrations from Mexico used to paint trees in California orange with their density but which, in recent years, have dwindled to almost nothing. When novice observers took comfort in sighting some monarchs in their yard, a veteran monitor of the butterflies’ migrations asked, “Like, tens of thousands?” “No,” the novices replied, only “a few.” The monitor asked, “Do you remember when you used to see ten thousand?”

Collective amnesia about deteriorating conditions is also seen in social systems. Just as it’s become hard “to remember what summers were like before the nonstop sizzling heat” of recent years, Mark writes, it is now difficult “to remember social life before social media…. [And] the once-outrageous—the bilious, hateful rhetoric and the creeping authoritarianism—have become almost ordinary.”

Westervelt quotes a university professor who unknowingly proves the point. Teaching an undergraduate class on media and politics, the professor asked her students to cite their sources. “Their answers were things like Twitter or Instagram or TikTok,” she recalls. “And I said, ‘No, no, I don’t mean where you saw it. I mean the original source.’ And they really didn’t know what I was talking about.”

Westervelt hastens to add that if people are confused it is “not because they’re idiots—they’re not!” It’s because they’ve never been taught to think critically about how “the information around them is being shaped by forces they don’t see.” She singles out “the tech bros [who], armed with algorithms and data, take Lee’s quote about facts being open to interpretation and turn it into millions of splintered realities” and thus wage “an information war against their own people.”

Real journalism—the rigorous, fair-minded gathering of facts and the public distribution of a coherent narrative—is an antidote to the confusion fostered by today’s information pollution. This September 28, hundreds of the world’s news organizations will mark World News Day by proclaiming “A single message: Trusted journalism matters.” That message, like Earth Day’s, is one that deserves attention every day of the year.

This article is published as part of the global journalism collaboration Covering Climate Now.

BORK!BORK!BORK! We still don't know what caused the air traffic control mayhem in the UK in early September, but one information board at Luton Airport appears to have gone out in sympathy. Spotted by Register reader Mark, the digital sign usually shows passenger information. Today, however, it looks like either the system clock is wrong or someone has forgotten to renew a server certificate. It's not the usual "DNS. It's always DNS," but not far off. For those blissfully unaware, the UK's air traffic control system has had a bad week. A glitch in National Air Traffic Services (NATS) resulted in thousands of flight cancellations and travel disruption for around 330,000 passengers. And it appears whoever is running this information board at Luton has done the computing equivalent of "anything you can do I can do better." Luton Airport is a base for the likes of Ryanair and easyJet. Its logo looks like someone was playing Tetris when they were asked to dream up the branding, and it celebrated 5.5 million passengers passing through over the summer. The airport was not spared the chaos, along with many others, but the good news is that our reader's flight departed on time, and a delicious, cold adult beverage was waiting at the destination. For others wondering what has become of their flight, it's good to see that the information boards are already in another time zone, or whoever is responsible for keeping the server certificate valid has taken a well-earned vacation. Nobody really needed that information anyhow, did they? ®

In 2023, Marlena Arjo adopted a one-eyed kitten with a penchant for destruction. She named him Otto, and over the next eight months, Otto grew into his own little chaotic personality.

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“ He’s laying on houseplants, he’s tearing books out of the bookshelves, ripping the calendar off the wall…I wasn’t prepared for having a criminal in my home,” Arjo joked.

Within months, Otto got sick and stopped eating. Arjo rushed him to a vet and learned he had feline infectious peritonitis, better known as FIP, a disease that kills nearly all cats that contract it. 

The vet said there was nothing the clinic could do. But there was something Arjo could do.

“I shouldn’t tell you this,” Arjo recalled the vet telling her. “But by the way, you can get drugs for this if you go to this Facebook group.”

This week on Reveal, in partnership with the Hyperfixed podcast, we tell the story of the cat drug black market, why it was even necessary, and how cat lovers fought for big changes to make the black market obsolete.

This is an update of a show that originally aired in January 2026.

More than 60 firefighters, first responders and community members from Santa Cruz County and the San Francisco Bay Area gathered Friday morning at Seacliff State Beach in Aptos for the annual 9/11 memorial stair climb, marking the 25th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Santa Cruz firefighters lower a large American flag suspended between two ladders during the annual 9/11 memorial stair climb at Seacliff State Beach in Aptos. Credit: Kevin Painchaud / Lookout Santa Cruz

Men, women and children joined the first responders in the climb, coming together to honor the firefighters and other first responders who lost their lives on 9/11. The memorial climb honors the 343 members of the New York City Fire Department, 37 Port Authority police officers, 23 New York Police Department officers and other emergency personnel who died at the World Trade Center.