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The Justice Department has filed a lawsuit to block Alaska from certifying its Senate election results in the event that Republican incumbent Dan Sullivan loses to Democrat Mary Peltola. This move is the Trump administration’s most blatant effort to swing ballots in Republicans’ favor this November.

The lawsuit alleges that the Senate election should be nullified if Sullivan loses because there’s another “Daniel J. Sullivan” on the ballot also running as a Republican, and the Trump administration thinks voters will be too confused—even though Dan Sullivan is properly listed as the incumbent on the ballot.

“Daniel J. Sullivan decided to run for Senator in 2026 as a Republican with the intention of misleading supporters of Senator Sullivan into voting for him,” the DOJ lawsuit alleges. “The sole purpose of his candidacy is to benefit the Peltola campaign by reducing the number of votes for Senator Sullivan.”

The lawsuit raised alarm across the political sphere.

“Surprising that the president who tried to end American democracy and stay in power even though he lost is queuing up additional ways to try to end democracy in America,” the Center for American Progress’s Bobby Kogan mused online.

“Election Day isn’t the end of the fight,” the Lincoln Project’s Rick Wilson wrote. “Get ready to get loud.”

“Trump isn’t going to try to interfere in the midterms, he’s already getting started,” chimed journalist Pedro L. Gonzalez. “They’re going to do this everywhere they think they can get away with it.”

This lawsuit comes just a day after Attorney General and former Trump personal attorney Todd Blanche admitted that he was open to blocking states from certifying elections. Now his DOJ is attempting to do just that.

Again, it is extremely abnormal for the Justice Department to be involved in election certification.

The Cook Political Report on Friday shifted its ratings of 19 House races toward Democrats, now officially projecting that the party will win a majority on Nov. 3—even if none of the toss-up, lean, or likely Republican races go their way. Of course, if polling and history is any indicator, Democrats will win a good chunk of those other races, widening the majority the party will have when the…

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President Donald Trump blew up at a reporter Friday who questioned his vile defense of Vivek Ramaswamy’s ugly attack ad featuring Ohio Democratic gubernatorial candidate Amy Acton’s estranged mother. 

Speaking to reporters, Trump struggled to defend the campaign ad featuring Donna Arthur, who lost custody of Acton after years of documented issues, including homelessness and sexual abuse by her stepfather. 

“A mother is saying, don’t put my daughter there because she’s a terrible person, and she’s a liar,” Trump said. “Why shouldn’t somebody use that?”

“But do the sexual abuse allegations mean nothing to you, sir?” the reporter asked. “But do the sexual abuse allegations make no difference?

“Wait, wait, wait, slow down. Who are you with? Who are you with?” Trump said.  

“I’m with NBC, sir,” the reporter replied. 

“One of the worst networks you have,” Trump sneered, but the reporter continued to press him.

“Quiet,” the president snapped. “Isn’t she a fresh person? You’re a horrible little reporter, aren’t you? If my mother said bad things about me, you think the Democrats would put it up? I think so. But my mother thought I was wonderful!”

Of course, the issue isn’t that the advertisement featured Acton’s mother—it’s that it featured a woman who was estranged from her daughter because of alleged sexual abuse by Acton’s stepfather. In 1978, Arthur’s husband Cledith “Bud” Arthur was charged and indicted for rape. Court documents indicate he’d engaged in sexual contact with Acton when she was less than 13 years old. After her stepfather pleaded not guilty, he skipped bail, and Arthur left town with him, Acton said in a 2019 interview. 

This wouldn’t be the first time Trump has downplayed, or outright ignored, serious allegations of sexual abuse. The president has repeatedly dismissed the government’s own findings about his old friend Jeffrey Epstein, an alleged sex trafficker, as a “hoax.” The Department of Justice initially withheld documents relating to three interviews with a woman who accused Trump of sexually assaulting her as a child. Additionally, Trump has railed against a court that found him liable for sexually abusing author E. Jean Carroll. Meanwhile, dozens more women have accused the president of sexual assault.

Sipping on an iced caramel latte with whipped cream and talking about “squadding up” with his daughters on Fortnite, Brian Poindexter doesn’t necessarily fit the stereotype of a “manly man,” which is how another magazine characterized the congressional candidate in mid-July. 

For what it’s worth, it’s his political opponent, Republican Rep. Max Miller, who recently testified about taking testosterone and frequenting half-a-dozen different gyms. Whatever muscles Poindexter has, he confirms, are the result of 19 years spent placing rebar and erecting the steel skeletons of buildings, and before that, working as a cross-country mover for people with too much Ethan Allen furniture.

“I figured out what armoire is French for,” he told me at a coffee shop in late August. “Heavy as heck.”

With a hearty catalogue of dad jokes, Poindexter is running for a seat representing northeastern Ohio as an inversion of Miller, an heir to a real estate fortune whose campaign has been overshadowed by serious domestic disputes in his personal life. So despite being divorced himself, Poindexter is positioning himself as a family man who has paid his dues helping his blue-collar community of Brook Park as a city council member for the past nine years. 

He begins our interview by telling me about his kids: His oldest daughter is 25. She works in accounting, and is—he’s excited to share—newly engaged. He has another daughter who is 19, a college sophomore studying nursing. (By the way, did I know the Trump administration tried to remove nursing from the professional degree list? “Kind of upsetting. Nurses are very much professionals,” he said.) Poindexter’s long-term partner (he got divorced in 2022) also has a high-schooler whom Poindexter calls his “bonus daughter.”

“Everyone knows me as a father of two daughters, but I want to make sure I include her because she’s a good kid and I’m proud of her too,” said Poindexter.

I haven’t met them, but I’ve seen them star in an advertisement for their dad. They call him “dorky,” make fun of his dance moves, and thank him for being a present community member and parent. “He always shows up… For family dinner. For games. For help with homework—even when he’s not helpful,” the three girls say, laughing. 

Poindexter is running as an inversion of Miller, an heir to a real estate fortune whose campaign has been overshadowed by serious domestic disputes in his personal life.

It is an unsubtle rebuke of Miller, whose ex-wife, Emily Moreno, has accused him of throwing boiling water at her, holding a gun against her head, and shoving her against a wall. According to court filings Mother Jones reported on extensively in July, some of these alleged incidents occurred in front of their child. The documents also showed that Moreno was worried that Miller could have caused their two-year-old’s broken collarbone. She told police their daughter was in Miller’s custody when the injury happened. Child abuse investigators said the bruising near the injury resembled a “handprint,” making the injury “suspicious.” Miller had previously been accused of slapping a girlfriend, and pushing a girl down the stairs while in high school. Accusations that would give many parents pause. 

Miller has repeatedly denied having ever been violent towards women or his child, and the investigation into possible child abuse was ultimately “unsubstantiated.” But for a moment, over the summer, the series of allegations seemed like they might force him out of the race. His former father-in-law and fellow Ohio Republican, Sen. Bernie Moreno, said Miller “should not serve in the House of Representatives” and that he needed “serious psychological help.” 

As evidence of Miller’s alleged depravity, Sen. Moreno accused Miller of withholding a stuffed animal from a toddler. “My granddaughter, she has a little blue bunny that she sleeps with. Max would not hand over the little blue bunny. Literally held it hostage for 48 hours,” Moreno told reporters. “This girl is crying at night because she can’t sleep without her little blue bunny. And his answer is, ‘I’m just not going to give it to you.’” (Miller called Moreno’s characterization “lies,” but Mother Jones obtained texts showing there were multiple incidents in which Miller withheld the stuffed animal.)

When Miller declined to drop out in time for another Republican to replace him on the ballot, Cook Political Report shifted the race from “likely Republican” to “toss-up” in a region that Trump and Miller both won handily in 2024. The odds were suddenly looking much better for Poindexter, who had launched his long-shot campaign out of the garage of his buddy-turned-campaign-manager. Though far from an indication of how people in the district tend to vote, Polymarket shows 89 percent of wagerers think Poindexter will win. A poll from early August showed Poindexter ahead of Miller by 8 points. David Niven, a political science professor at the University of Cincinnati, called the race a “tremendous lesson in the importance of candidate quality.” 

“Republicans should be strong, and they have the most loathed incumbent in probably Ohio congressional history running on the Republican banner,” Niven said.

But back in late August, Poindexter was increasingly worried that the Miller controversy could wind up hurting him. What was once a low-profile race between a small town’s city council member and a well-resourced incumbent was now a frequent topic on CNN. The extra attention invited powerful Republicans to come to Miller’s defense—and eventually, dredge up things from Poindexter’s past. 

The White House pleaded for House Republicans not to wage a “public pressure campaign” against Miller. President Donald Trump, whom Miller worked for as a campaign and White House aide, called Miller a “good guy.” House Speaker Mike Johnson demurred when asked if he thought the allegations of physical abuse were disqualifying. “People have domestic disputes. It’s part of being flawed humans, as we are,” the Louisiana Republican told Politico.

“I hope he wins reelection. He’s done a good job as a member of Congress,” said Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio). 

Of course, people outside the district weighed in to support Poindexter too. When we spoke, I brought up a new advertisement by the anti-Trump Lincoln Project. The one-minute spot featured an ominous voice flipping through screengrab after screengrab of court documents and headlines that detailed the serious allegations Miller faces, concluding that he’s a “domestic abuser” who “belongs in jail.” 

I had sort of expected Poindexter to be pleased by their marketing work; a group founded by Republicans who rebuked Trump was spending $20,000 to batter his Republican opponent. The video cost Poindexter and his campaign $0. Since he didn’t make the advertisement, he didn’t even have to worry about a potential defamation lawsuit from his highly litigious opponent. But Poindexter seemed dejected.

“I did see the ad and I’m not a fan,” the 47-year-old Democrat told me. “What I don’t want to happen is make this a bigger fight. Then they start dumping resources into it.”

Brian Poindexter, Max Miller’s opponent for Ohio’s 7th congressional district, spoke at the Strongsville Democratic Club meeting back in August.Nate Manley/AP

By “they,” Poindexter meant moneyed interests. And he was right. The Congressional Leadership Fund and National Republican Congressional Committee quickly got involved, dumping more than $5 million into the district in the final months of the contest. 

Those millions were largely spent on media buys painting Poindexter as the dangerous one. At least two ads focused on a police report from the 1990s, which alleged Poindexter tried to “swallow a rock of suspected crack cocaine during a police stop.” One of the ads characterized that incident as part of a “30-year rap sheet for drugs and violence” with charges as recent as this year. Another said Poindexter “wants to go from crack to Congress.” (Poindexter’s campaign notes that he has taken random drug tests for the last 20 years as a union ironworker and never failed one.)

The “crack” allegation stems from a 1998 police report in which Poindexter, then 18, was accused by cops of swallowing what they suspected to be crack cocaine. The officer specified in the police report that past drug-related complaints in the area made them give “special attention” to the block. That’s when they saw Poindexter in his car. They went up to his window, at which point, he allegedly tried to swallow something.

“I tried to recover the objects and the [adult male] struggled to prevent me. We fell to the ground at which time I recovered the above rock of susp. Crack cocaine from the ground near his mouth,” the report says. Though Poindexter was arrested and taken into custody, he wasn’t ultimately charged with a crime. That’s because, he says, “I absolutely did not do that.”

“I did see the ad and I’m not a fan. What I don’t want to happen is make this a bigger fight. Then they start dumping resources into it.”

Former Brook Park mayor Mike Gammella, who worked with Poindexter on the city council, began laughing when I asked him about the police report’s characterization.

“Brian grew up hard. Brian didn’t grow up with a silver spoon in his mouth,” said Gammella, who was elected as an independent the same year Poindexter joined the council. “They mentioned he was in a crack-infested neighborhood. Well, guess what? That’s the neighborhood he grew up in.”

Mother Jones reviewed Poindexter’s legal records dating back three decades. Poindexter faced charges for other violations in the ’90s and early 2000s: In 1999, when he was 20, he received a citation for carrying an open container in Pinellas County, Florida. In 2000, at age 21, Poindexter received two citations for possession of marijuana (under 100 grams). He pleaded guilty to alcohol-related disorderly conduct in 2002. Although Cuyahoga County has since destroyed the physical files under standard retention rules, archival remnants indicate he spent a brief time in custody. A year later, a 24-year-old Poindexter was charged with “aggravated disorderly conduct.” He was found guilty of a lesser misdemeanor and paid a $250 fine. In 2013, Poindexter was removed from a Major League Baseball game after allegedly slapping a stranger. That man told the Washington Free Beacon that the slap was over a comment the man made about Poindexter’s apparent ability to eat a hot dog in one bite. Poindexter was not convicted; the man he was accused of slapping declined to press charges.

Poindexter’s next brush with the law came a decade later, in 2023, when he pleaded guilty to a charge of setting off fireworks illegally over Fourth of July weekend. Ironically, as a member of the Brook Park City Council, he had previously voted against allowing fireworks in city limits. This year, Poindexter received two traffic violations for failing to leave enough distance from the car in front of him and texting while driving—a first-time offense. 

Poindexter chalks many of these indiscretions up to being “young and dumb,” which is how Miller also characterized a series of incidents in his youth: punching a guy in the back of the head and running from the cops (2007), breaking a window at an apartment building (2008), crashing his car into a light pole (2011) with ecstasy and Klonopin in his system. In another, previously unreported police report that I obtained, Miller was said to have been caught smoking weed and then running from the cops while at University of Arizona’s freshman orientation in 2007. 

Miller never responded to Mother Jones’ questions about these events. He previously told the Washington Post that, “growing up, everyone makes mistakes.”

For his part, Poindexter eventually fired back at the negative ads with his own aggressive blitz in September and October. One 30-second clip features an Ohio Sheriff saying she would not support Miller because of the serious allegations he faces. “Thirty-four years in law enforcement tells me Max Miller does not belong in power,” Summit County Sheriff Kandy Fatheree said. A later ad from Poindexter’s campaign focused entirely on the blue bunny saga, quoting Sen. Moreno, who called the debacle “the seventh layer of hell.”

But when I followed Poindexter on the trail, he didn’t want to go there. Emulating Sen. Bernie Sanders, who endorsed Poindexter in March, the candidate was focused on the cost of living, which is also what 64 percent of Ohio voters ranked as a top-two issue in a recent poll. It was the only thing he covered in his stump speech.

“Does anybody in here feel like the economy is doing great? How about gas prices?” he asked the 30 to 40 people sitting in a bonus room of the Bedford Branch public library. “How about the grocery store? You guys feel comfortable going to the grocery? I mean, I don’t know about you all, but I have experience putting things back on the shelves.”

Poindexter is doing better than many in his district. His union job as an ironworker and side gig as a Brook Park city councilman are stable—netting him $110,350 in 2025, according to his House financial disclosure form—though his attire doesn’t necessarily reflect a six-figure income. The tops of his gray Nikes have holes and the back pocket on his stained and faded blue jeans is permanently imprinted with the outline of his wallet. 

As one of six kids raised on the west side of Cleveland by a bolt-maker and a stay-at-home mom, Poindexter says he’s never been accustomed to fancy things. As Poindexter tells it, vacations growing up were spent camping, and clothes were all hand-me-downs.

“We didn’t have everything, but we had the basics in life: You know, a strong family unit, a roof over our head. We knew we were going to eat every day,” he said. 

It’s another way he differs from Miller, who is an heir to a real estate empire that sold to an international conglomerate for $11.4 billion in 2018. Miller now lives in the wealthy enclave of Bay Village, which runs along the southern shore of Lake Erie. Its annual per capita income of $69,148 is nearly double that of the industrial suburb near the airport where Poindexter lives, 12 miles southeast. 

Poindexter says he’s running for office because the math—even to replicate his modest childhood—just doesn’t add up in his area anymore. 

“I don’t know anybody who has six kids right now, and if they do, they’re not doing it on one income,” he said. 

Miller has leaned on Sanders’ endorsement of Poindexter to characterize his opponent as a “socialist” who wants “higher taxes and government-run healthcare.” But Poindexter’s populism is less in-your-face. When asked about his views on implementing Medicare for All at an August event, he was non-committal, promising to look at how any proposed legislation on the issue would affect Ohioans first. “I don’t know if I could support that,” he said.

He told me his initial goal was merely to prevent his neighbors from having to turn to crowdfunding for medical emergencies. “We’re in the richest country on the planet, and we got to pay for medical bills through a GoFundMe. I think that’s way out of touch,” he said.

Far from advocating for a sweeping social safety net, Poindexter said his primary objective for his own daughters is for them to “find a career they love, find something that helps provide for them and brings them security.”

When Poindexter’s two biological daughters were growing up, he said that he and his ex-wife didn’t always have that. On top of his full-time job, he said he worked part-time as a bar-back at a Cleveland night club. His ex-wife worked full time as a chef, mostly during evenings and weekends. The two were like ships in the night. And when they did see each other? “We were arguing over, ‘This bill didn’t get paid, this didn’t get done.’ And it really drove us apart as time went on,” he said.

“That’s what ultimately led to our separation,” he said of his 2022 divorce.

At the time, the split caught Gammella, the former town mayor, by surprise. “When he came in and told me he was in a divorce, I was floored, you know, because I liked his ex-wife. They got along great. I never saw him arguing or fighting or anything like that. I thought he was an excellent father to his children,” Gammella said.

I really wanted to check in with her, but she didn’t respond to my messages. However, as was the case with Miller, there were divorce and child custody legal filings I could look through for clues. The public records were concise. The two shared custody of their younger daughter who was 15 at the time. Their other daughter was, by then, an adult. Poindexter would cover the minor’s health insurance and cell phone bill and contribute to her future college education. 

Mutually, they agreed to “treat the child as a unique person with respect to feelings and needs” and “provide the child with an emotional environment in which she is free to continue to love each parent and to spend time with each of them.”

I hadn’t received records from the Cuyahoga County clerk when I spoke to Poindexter in August. But the contents resembled something he said during our interview—about what it means to be “manly” in such a machismo world. 

“When my daughters come home with a broken heart or a bumped knee, I don’t have to be super macho. It’s okay to pamper your girls and show them that the world isn’t all brass and crass all the time,” he told me. “I don’t know where we went wrong in society, where we think that being a jerk is showing masculinity. It just tells me you’re an asshole, and I think if you look at any real tough guy, they take care of the people that need taken care of.”

Most programming languages were written for human programmers, but that's about to change. University of Michigan professor Jason Mars has developed an academically ambitious language called Jac, and a runtime called Jaseci, that treats AI and AI agents as first-class entities.

Mars demonstrated the language and runtime in a talk at the All Things Open conference, held in Raleigh, North Carolina, this week.

The tools we use to create software – everything from programming languages to build toolchains – were made for human consumption. They were created before generative AI and are ill-fitted to understand agentic needs.

Currently, agents are drowning in polyglot complexity, he argued. "We're not using these tools anymore. We're using the agents, and the agents are using those tools. So I don't want new tools, but I want tools [for] my agents," he told the audience.

One big hungry language

In his talk, Mars cited Jarred Sumner, creator of the Bun framework, who spent $165,000 in Anthropic tokens to convert Bun’s Zig code into Rust earlier this year using a pre-release version of Mythos. Mard argued the heavy expense wasn't so much because the job itself was complicated; it was because everything had to be translated between two human-centered programming languages.

“Mythos is supposed to hack into our nuclear reactors and take over the planet like Skynet, but it can't translate Bun to Rust unless you spend $165,000,” he noted.

In Mars’s theory, Jac is a new type of programming language designed to “gobble up” other languages. Specifically, it's a Python-like language that integrates both the TypeScript and Python runtimes and toolchains. It compiles to Python bytecode, JavaScript, and native machine code. It can make full use of any libraries both in the PyPI and npm ecosystems.

And there’s more! Jac has also incorporated the LLVM compiler to implement Rust-style borrow checking and ownership semantics, allowing Jac code to directly benefit from these memory safety rules and performance gains. It can also import C and C++ libraries, thanks to the very same LLVM integration.

Mars also described an “eject function,” which can reverse-compile the user’s Jac code into TypeScript, Python, or C to meet corporate compliance.

One currently missing language is Java. “If you really need Java, Jac isn’t for Java,” he said.

Happy bot, happy lot

Just as Jac’s design sets out to battle ecosystem fragmentation, it also attempts to unify architectural fragmentation by defining data structures as graphs.

Instead of building and populating a database table, or creating objects from a class, the data’s attributes are defined under node keywords. The relationships among different nodes are defined by edge connections. Local program logic can still use objects, but the core data will be a graph, which can reside in local memory, a storage disk, or cloud server.

So, yeah, graph computing. Creating a graph from all your data is more work than just creating database tables and some foreign keys to tie ‘em together, but graphing saves agents a lot of work down the line, he posited. No longer will the agent have to burn tokens extracting data from databases, object blobs, JSON strings, or Python objects.

Instead of the agent fetching data hither and processing it over yonder, the agent can dispatch a “walker” to traverse the data structure and process it on the go. Multiple walkers can go down different paths of the graph, resulting in natural parallelism for faster execution.

Tidy the abstraction

For his All Things Open talk, Mars conducted a bake-off between Jac and LangGraph, an agent orchestration framework that uses Python libraries to build agents.

He asked an AI agent to use each platform to build a replica of Greptile, an AI code review tool. With Jac, the agent autonomously built a sophisticated multi-stage app that could call multiple tools in parallel.

Using LangGraph, the agent produced a crude linear state machine that could not work in parallel. It was probably weighed down by all of the tools it had to use, Mars concluded.

Mars’s takeaway from this exercise: The tools we provide the AI determine the quality of the output.

Thus far, the language and runtime have been used in a number of smaller commercial AI-related services, such as the GraphClaw multi-agent AI platform, the Skooch scheduler, and Tobu’s personal memory platform.

Whether developers and agents gravitate towards Jac’s promise as a unified language remains to be seen, but it certainly is giving other Python agent frameworks a run for their money. ®

The long, sad American story of Donna L. Hollopeter Arthur, the 80-something mother of Dr. Amy Acton, the physician and Democratic candidate for governor of Ohio, may never be fully told.

Arthur achieved notoriety earlier this week when she joined up with MAGA billionaire Vivek Ramaswamy, her daughter’s opponent in the gubernatorial race. Starring in a $4 million attack ad, Arthur called her daughter a liar and expressed contempt for the child she abused, rejected, and abandoned 48 years ago.

Maybe the Ramaswamy campaign hoped that Donna Arthur, who spoke to the camera from a cozy kitchen, would seem like a salt-of-the-earth type. Perhaps viewers would believe she’d been left behind by a heartless, upwardly mobile daughter.

They did not, because the history is clear. On July 14, 1978, in Austintown, Ohio, Donna Arthur appeared in court alongside her 43-year-old husband, Cledith Arthur, who had been arrested and charged with raping Amy, his stepdaughter, then 12. After the arrest, Amy was removed from her mother’s custody. Her mother then fled the state with Cledith.

“In the courthouse after they were charged, I went to give her a kiss, and she just turned her cheek away,” Acton told the Youngstown Vindicator in 2019. “That was the last time I ever saw her.”

On Wednesday, as blowback against Ramaswamy’s exploitative and cruel ad reached fever pitch, the Acton campaign made public an official chronicle of Arthur’s “long history of fraud, abuse, and legal jeopardy.”

Arthur has indeed been charged repeatedly over the years with financial fraud and animal abuse, as well as innumerable lesser charges, including driving while texting and violating laws meant to protect wildlife.

In 1995, Arthur pleaded guilty to passing bad checks and misleading someone into giving her money.  In 1996, she was found guilty on fresh charges of the same crimes and sentenced to two years in prison. It’s not clear if she served any time.

More recently, in 2021, according to court documents, Arthur, who was then living in her car, was found “keeping several cats and/or newborn kittens in a locked and filthy vehicle.” The car was 120 degrees inside, and one of the days-old kittens had died of heat exhaustion. A second died shortly after, while being cared for in a sanctuary.

During her 2021 hearing for the animal abuse charges, Arthur accused a police officer of trying to ruin her reputation. “In light of other credible evidence and testimony to the contrary,” say court documents from the case, “the court found [Arthur] to be not credible.”

According to public records, Donna Arthur was born around 1944 to Hazel and Lambert Hollopeter in Pennsylvania.

In the 2019 Vindicator interview, Acton says her mother was an artist of about 20 when she met a young man, Gerald Stearns, at a theater party at Youngstown State University. After getting pregnant, Acton says, Donna felt forced into early marriage with Stearns in 1965, and gave birth to Amy shortly thereafter. When Amy was three, her parents, who also had a baby son named Philip by then, divorced. Things got dangerous for Amy and Philip. “I spent so much time being scared as a kid,” Acton said.

In the Ramaswamy ad, Arthur says she worked at something called the “Children and Family Service Association,” but her employment history has proven elusive. Acton says her mother had a range of boyfriends, and the family lived in some 18 places during Amy’s first 12 years. Many of these places were unsafe, including an unfurnished basement with a sump pump on Youngtown’s North Side and, in the winter, a tent on a campground outside the city.

At one point, Donna moved with the kids to California, then drove partway back east, only to put 8-year-old Amy and 5-year-old Philip alone on a bus from Nebraska back to Ohio. In 1975, Donna married Cledith Arthur, who Acton says had already been accused of molesting children. Arthur sexually abused Acton for years until his arrest in 1978.

Acton has regularly said that her mother is unwell. Indeed, women who stay with partners who abuse their children are often suffering domestic abuse, too. When Donna left her kids in Ohio to leave with Cledith Arthur, she may have felt coerced. Or maybe motherhood had simply become too much.

After their mother left, Amy and her brother went to live with their father. Both began to thrive. After earning an M.D. and a public health M.A., Amy married Eric Acton, a middle-school teacher and track coach, in 2010. They have six children in a blended family. Acton rose to national prominence when she led Ohio’s early response to Covid. She won a John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award in 2021.

By contrast, Arthur, whose husband Cledith died in 2004, has spent the last several decades showing up in American courthouses, sometimes for financial misconduct, sometimes for traffic violations, sometimes for bankruptcy proceedings.

Donna Arthur bears a remarkable resemblance to another troubled daughter of Ohio: Beverly Carol Aikins, the mother of J.D. Vance. As Vance documented in his memoir, Aikins had her first child at 19, divorced when her son was three, developed an opiate addiction, lost custody of her kids, and married five times.

Under other circumstances, Vance, a former Ohio senator, could have decided that he might actually work together with Acton—who has a bipartisan record of working closely with GOP Governor Mike DeWine on the state’s pandemic response—to improve the lives of Ohio women like their mothers. About 18 percent of Ohio women live in poverty, and 35 percent of female-headed households with children live below the poverty line.

Instead, Vance is stumping hard for Ramaswamy, who famously called Medicaid and Medicare a “mistake,” and supports work requirements that would threaten food assistance for nearly 1.4 Ohioans. “Whether the ad was appropriate or not is not really my concern,” Vance said, referring to the Ramaswamy campaign spot. “Stop whining about an advertisement and go win the race.”

As of this writing, prediction markets give Acton an 83 percent chance of being Ohio’s next governor.

The Arc browser has flatlined, with its maker announcing it will be sunsetting it altogether on December 22, 2026. The Browser Company announced the news on October 22, just over three years after we noted Arc's arrival.

Nothing will happen immediately, other than an end to new Arc accounts. Starting November 23, lights will begin turning off on iOS and Android, with several AI features disabled and sign-ins to sync tabs removed. Finally, on December 22, it will no longer be possible to access or use Arc on macOS and Windows. Accounts will be deactivated, and data deleted within 30 days.

The solution? According to The Browser Company, a move to its AI browser, Dia, is one way forward. Users can import their profiles into the brave, new AI-native world and carry on as before. Sort of.

When it launched, the Chromium-based Arc was an innovative browser with a workflow unlike its rivals. Instead of a plethora of tabs, there was a sidebar. The browser attempted to change how users interacted with the web but… frankly… it never really caught on.

The writing was on the wall for a while. In 2025, The Browser Company pivoted to AI and its Dia browser, dropping Arc into maintenance mode. Later that year, the vendor was snapped up by Atlassian, although Arc continued to plow its lonely furrow.

However, a year on, the time has come for Arc. CEO Josh Miller wrote: "We have so much pride and love for what we made alongside the Arc community," but it seems that wasn't enough to keep the browser maintained alongside Dia development.

Hopes that Arc might be open-sourced so that its community could continue development were dashed in 2025, when Miller explained that "Arc isn't just a Chromium fork … It runs on custom infrastructure we call ADK — the Arc Development Kit."

Dia also uses ADK.

Arc's innovations have found their way, at least in part, into other browsers. Many users have found solace in the Zen browser, and there is always Vivaldi for power users. There is also a level of risk in going all-in on AI-native browsers in an increasingly crowded marketplace. For example, Strawberry, currently in beta, leverages AI agents to smooth a user's workflow. Dia might be a successor to Arc, but there is a risk that users will consider something else.

As for Arc itself, The Browser Company plans to focus on Dia going forward. So for the Arc community, it is time to move on. ®

Jared Kushner threatened to sue Vanity Fair for publishing an excerpt of a forthcoming book describing how the president’s son-in-law oversaw foreign slush funds filled by the leaders of the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia.

In the new book Princes and Thieves: Jared Kushner and Mohamed bin Zayed’s Secret Plot to Remake the Middle East, author Matthew Cole revealed that Kushner oversaw roughly $2 billion in secret foreign bank accounts filled by the Saudis and Emiratis.

In a post on X Thursday, Kushner claimed the allegations were “completely insane and never happened.”

“These are outrageous fabrications being presented as investigative journalism. This is not journalism. It is a mixture of fantasy, fiction, and advocacy, written by someone who is either deeply disturbed or acting with sinister intent,” he wrote.

Kushner’s lawyer, Chad Mizelle, also hit back at the Vanity Fair article on behalf of his client—and threatened to sue the publication.

“Before publication, we sent Simon & Schuster a detailed 13-page letter responding to and categorically denying the extraordinary allegations made against my client, Jared Kushner, and challenging the total absence of supporting evidence,” Mizelle wrote on X.

“Vanity Fair has now published an excerpt amplifying these false and defamatory allegations. We have seen no credible evidence substantiating any of these claims, and we question what independent verification Vanity Fair conducted before publishing them,” he wrote. “We intend to pursue legal action against those responsible and hold them accountable.”

In the 13-page letter, another of Kushner’s lawyers, Alejandro Brito, insisted that Kushner had “no knowledge of, or involvement with, any such accounts.”

“Any allegation that Mr. Kushner knew of, had access to, had authorizations for or engaged in or directed any conduct related to any government-funded or government-linked bank account is totally false and defamatory,” the letter stated.

Speaking to reporters Friday, Donald Trump denied the potentially damning story about his son-in-law. “It’s a false story. It’s a false story. It’s a totally false story. It was totally an incorrect story. It was just fake news. Amazing,” Trump said.

The allegations contained in Cole’s book carry considerable legal weight. In 2017, Kushner was a government employee who worked in the White House, meaning he was required to submit both public and confidential financial forms and disclose any bank account to which he had access as a signatory or beneficiary. Kushner also failed to disclose himself as an agent of a foreign government, having been paid nearly $2 billion in total by foreign leaders. If he offered anything in return for the money, even just conversations with his father-in-law, then he would have violated U.S. bribery laws and the foreign agent statute.

Quick Take

• Fallout Shelter: The Experiment has set its premiere date and shared its release schedule. This Fallout competition series is coming soon.

It’s not quite time for more of Prime Video’s Fallout, the best-ever video game adaptation series. But those eager to return to the world of Lucy, The Ghoul, and Maximus won’t have to wait too much longer. Fallout Shelter: The Experiment has set its premiere date for January 13, 2027. This upcoming unscripted competition series will take place in the Fallout universe, and we expect it will draw inspiration from both the universe of the games and from Prime Video’s incredible TV show. We don’t know too many details about Fallout Shelter: The Experiment yet, but we do know it will involve ordinary people entering Vault-Tec’s bomb-proof vaults to test their mettle in the face of Fallout‘s post-apocalyptic world. Join us as we break down Fallout Shelter: The Experiment‘s release schedule and what we know about it so far.

Fallout Shelter: The Experiment Release Schedule and Premiere Date

As mentioned, Fallout Shelter: The Experiment will release on January 13, 2027. The Fallout competition series will consist of 10 episodes. It will have the following release schedule: The first four episodes will premiere on January 13. Then three episodes will release weekly through January 27, 2027.

Fallout Shelter: The Experiment Release Schedule

• January 13: Episodes 1-4
• January 20: Episodes 5-7
• January 27: Episodes 8-10

What Will This Fallout Competition Series Be About? Prime Video

A release reveals more about the plot of this Fallout competition series. It shares, “From the epic world of the smash hit drama series and one of the most celebrated video game franchises of all time, Fallout Shelter: The Experiment is a new reality competition series that invites everyday participants to test their aptitude for the apocalypse in Vault-Tec’s state-of-the-art bomb-proof vault shelters. They will go head to head in a series of high-octane drills, psychological dilemmas and morally challenging behavior trials until one special dweller emerges to win the prize of a lifetime–$1,000,000“

RELATED ARTICLE

What’s Really Going on With The Enclave and Vault-Tec on FALLOUT?

Well, if there’s one thing we love, it’s more from the world of Fallout. We also don’t hate a million dollars. How will this new adventure unfold? We’ll have to wait and see. But it certainly feels like it will be exciting. In the meantime, you can watch Fallout season one and two on Prime Video today.

Rotem Rusak is the Editor-in-Chief at Nerdist. She is a great lover of the anti-hero and is always ready for a new ship to set sail. In her work, she likes to combine fandom passion with journalistic sensibilities. Follow her on Instagram.

The post FALLOUT SHELTER Sets Release Date appeared first on Nerdist.

Quest is the latest in a series of healthcare technology companies that have been hacked in recent months.

Despite throwing a massive, and expensive, fit over the proposed billionaire’s tax, some of California’s wealthiest seem to be staying put. In a deal hammered out with his own board, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg will be staying put in California for at least eight years regardless of how the vote on Proposition 40 goes. Proposition 40 is on the ballot in the Golden State to apply a one-time 5%

Source

The far-right Germany political party German Alternative für Deutschland, or AfD, has tried to enlist support from President Trump and his MAGA allies for over a decade.

The Guardian, citing a data leak from the AfD, reports the party has lobbied Trump going back to his election in 2016, with the party debating on how to word a congratulatory telegram. The final message included the wish that Trump’s “hopes as a person be fulfilled.”

The leaks comprise over 420,000 emails, documents, and personnel records from the AfD since 2013, though the info thins out after 2019. They were given to reporters by Distributed Denial of Secrets, a hacker activist group.

After Trump’s election, the AfD didn’t just congratulate him, but asked that he support its efforts to remove the “enemy state” clause from the U.N. charter, a post–World War II vestige that allows action against “any state which during the second world war has been an enemy of any signatory.” The clause is irrelevant today, but the AfD, alone among German political parties, sees it as an attack on German sovereignty.

AfD leaders also sought to make contact with Richard Grenell, who during Trump’s first term was ambassador to Germany, but was unsuccessful, and pursued contacts with former White House adviser Steve Bannon, according to the leaks.

The party holds hardline anti-immigration and Islamophobic views, and some of its members have displayed sympathies and connections to Nazism. The party’s leader in the Thuringia region, Björn Höcke, was convicted of using a banned slogan from the Nazi Party’s paramilitary wing in 2024. AfD is currently leading national polls with 30 percent support in Germany’s multiparty democracy, and in September, it won 43.8 percent of the vote in the state of Saxony-Anhalt, where it is trying to form Germany’s first far-right state government since the Nazis.

German intelligence labels the AfD as a suspected domestic extremist organization. Germany’s leading political parties refuse to govern or form any coalitions with it. That hasn’t stopped Trump and his MAGA allies from praising the group. Vice President JD Vance, as well as numerous State Department employees, have frequently met AfD politicians, including the party’s leader, Alice Weidel.

The party’s deputy leader, Beatrix von Storch, and her husband Sven were at Trump’s “Make America Great Again Victory Rally” just before his inauguration last year, and she bragged in a newsletter that she met Steve Bannon and Donald Trump Jr.

Trump celebrated the AfD’s September win in Saxony-Anhalt on Truth Social, posting, “Wow! The Populist Party in Germany just had a really big night. They finally got tired of the absolutely horrible Immigration rules and regulations which have hurt Germany so badly. THEY ARE ON THE RISE, and not going to take it anymore! MGGA!!! President DJT.”

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Inside Washington

Florida’s gubernatorial race is heating up. In a sign that Republicans are eager to turn out their base and boost voting numbers, President Donald Trump plans to hold a rally on Friday with Republican candidate Byron Donalds in Fort Myers. Earlier this week, the Democratic Governors Association, or DGA, announced that it would funnel $1 million into Democratic candidate David Jolly, whom polls put within striking distance of his Republican opponent. Florida hasn’t elected a Democratic governor in 28 years. Can Jolly overcome major fundraising and voter disadvantages to break that streak? And does it help that he himself used to be a Republican House member, before leaving the party in 2018?

When I asked Fernand Amandi, the managing partner of public opinion firm Bendixen & Amandi, about the key issues in the race, his reply was simple: “There’s only one issue, and it is that Florida over the last 10 years has become totally unaffordable for Floridians.” Rising grocery costs and high gas prices due to the war with Iran have added to a long-brewing home insurance affordability crisis in the state. “All of these factors combined have created a Category 5 economic hurricane in Florida,” Amandi said. That’s likely why Jolly could beat Donalds, despite the plain numbers game that gives Republicans an advantage—there are 1.5 million more registered Republicans than Democrats in the state. Jolly used to be one of those Republicans, but he left the party in 2018 due to his opposition to Trump and his influence over the GOP. After identifying as an independent, Jolly officially joined the Democratic Party in April 2025, months before launching his campaign.

Donalds holds a two-point lead over Jolly in a recent poll from the University of North Florida’s Public Opinion Research Lab, which surveyed 1,471 likely voters. That’s well within the poll’s 2.8-point margin of error. The same poll also asked about the Senate race and found that GOP Senator Ashley Moody has a four-point lead over state Representative Angie Nixon, the Democratic nominee. Other polls show Donalds with a larger lead, including a poll from last week that found Donalds up by nine points. Though the candidates are different, both the gubernatorial race and the Senate race show the Democratic candidate closer than one might expect. Like Nixon, Jolly will need the support of no-party affiliation voters to overcome the state’s Democratic registration disadvantage.

Donalds has enjoyed a major lead in fundraising, which could help him overcome the unfavorable national environment for Republicans. “This whole year is sort of an interesting sort of experiment on how important money can be in overcoming deficiencies in campaigns,” explained Kevin Wagner, a professor of political science at Florida Atlantic University.

More than $170 million has poured into the race as of Tuesday. Donalds has $33.3 million more in cash on hand, with much of the money coming from special interest groups. His top donors are private prison corporations, sports betting groups, and the AI industry, according to an analysis from OpenSecrets. His third-largest donor is the Seminole Tribe, which holds a monopoly on sports betting in the state and earlier this month filed a lawsuit against online sports betting platform DraftKings. Meanwhile, the Sports Betting Alliance, which includes companies like DraftKings, gave Donalds nearly $1.3 million. Donalds’s fourth-largest donor is private prison company GEO Group, which is headquartered in the state and runs several immigration detention facilities. He has also received funding from NextEra Energy, the parent company of energy providers planning to construct data centers in the state. Donalds told voters in August that “there ain’t no bans coming” on data centers.

“There’s a huge loophole because Florida allows candidates to open affiliated PACs,” said Aubrey Jewett, a professor of political science at the University of Central Florida. These PACs can raise unlimited money, unlike campaigns, which can only receive $3,000 per donor. Billionaire hedge fund manager Ken Griffin, for example, gave $10 million to Donalds’s affiliated PAC in July. Though Jolly is behind in the cash game, he’s still been able to reach voters, especially with the help from the DGA. “He’s not competing on an even playing field in terms of money, but he’s gotten enough where he can at least get his message out,” Jewett said.

Voter frustration is the vital element keeping Jolly in the game. “If Democrats were ever going to have a year where they could compete,” Wagner said, “it would be a year that looks like this.”

—Emma Janssen

Outside Washington

The Trump administration is “again refusing” to cooperate with Minnesota law enforcement’s ongoing investigations into the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, the Minnesota Star-Tribune reported on Thursday. In July, the feds finally handed over “hard drives, body camera footage, and statements from immigration enforcement agents about the killings,” report Jeff Day and Sarah Nelson. But court filings last week, reviewed by the paper, indicate that state officials still don’t have “the cell phone of ICE agent Jonathan Ross, who shot Good” or “the firearms used [by Customs and Border Patrol officers] to shoot Pretti and a recording of a statement by one of the officers who shot him.” Minnesota U.S. Attorney Daniel Rosen apparently told Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty last month that “challenges with D.C.” had halted all evidence sharing “indefinitely.”

Former Michigan Senator Debbie Stabenow has penned an op-ed backing Callie Barr in the state’s 1st district. “For the first time in nearly two decades, a Democrat has a shot at winning the 1st District,” wrote Stabenow in the Detroit Free Press on Thursday. There hasn’t been any public polling on this race since the primaries, and the idea that Barr could win is pretty striking, given that the Cook Political Report rates the district as “solidly Republican” (GOP +11), and Jack Bergman has held the seat since 2017. Stabenow, however, highlights Republican lawmakers’ disavowal of Bergman earlier this year after he endorsed someone in a state race that he’d allegedly promised to stay out of. Also on Thursday, The Detroit News reported that Bergman has for years been renting a D.C. home from one of his campaign donors, before the donor sold the home to Bergman’s daughter “in a favorable seller-financed deal this year.” In her op-ed, Stabenow praised Barr’s “life of public service” as an advocate for veterans.

—Heather Souvaine Horn

The Ideas Factory

On Thursday, more than 100 environmental and other advocacy groups signed a letter opposing a recent permitting bill introduced by Democratic Senators Sheldon Whitehouse and Martin Heinrich and Republican Senators Shelley Moore Capito and Mike Lee. While many climate advocates have expressed at least theoretical support for so-called permitting reform if it could help speed up renewable energy development, these groups say the current bill’s attempt to streamline the permitting process will instead “eviscerate public lands protections, prevent the public’s ability to protect themselves from harmful projects, cede management decisions to fossil fuel polluters, restrict Tribal consultation and cultural resource protections, limit judicial review, and further enable foreign-owned mining companies to seize public lands and contaminate our precious streams and rivers.” The Center for Biological Diversity issued a press release on Thursday with statements from three of the signatories. Said Olivia Juarez, the public land program director at GreenLatinos: “Here in Utah, where 73 percent of voters oppose fast-tracking oil, gas, and mining projects on public land, we say America’s worst ideas come from the desk of Sen. Mike Lee.” (If you want to read further about Whitehouse’s position in all this mess, try this or this.)

At the Roosevelt Institute, Charlie Eaton, Albina Gibadullina, Adam Goldstein, and Marie-Lou Laprise pen a report on the “four interconnected roles” that private equity now plays in the economy: “corporate raider, Main Street invader, monopoly builder, and shadow owner.” Write the authors: “Private equity is often misperceived as a check against corporate concentration. This may flow from lingering memories of hostile takeovers by corporate raiders in the 1980s.” In reality, they argue, “private equity has maintained a long-standing role in monopoly building through mergers and acquisitions (M&A) exit sales to other nonfinancial firms.”

—Heather Souvaine Horn

In Closing

Good Week: Hakeem Jeffries

This week brought lots of evidence that Democrats could win the House by an unexpectedly large margin. That would, of course, make Jeffries House speaker, but the details here are important. The gold-standard New York Times poll just found the Democratic generic ballot lead to be 11 percentage points. Forecasters just shifted numerous districts that Trump carried comfortably (NC-11, WI-03, IA-02, PA-10) from “toss up” to “leans Democratic.” And GOP super PACS are pulling money out of some of these Trumpy districts, suggesting surrender in them. The critical point here: The broadening battlefield suggests not just a Democratic takeover, but a potentially sizable Democratic majority, which would be easier for Jeffries to manage.

Bad Week: JD Vance

The vice president foolishly rushed to defend that loathsome ad from Ohio GOP gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, which smeared Democrat Amy Acton by using comments from her estranged mother, who stayed together with the stepfather who sexually abused her as a child. Many Republicans have now run from the ad. Vance’s bizarre decision to double down may prove to be a more consequential blunder than he realizes. If this saga contributes to a Democratic victory in the Ohio gubernatorial and Senate races—in Vance’s home state—it will raise further questions about his political judgment and staying power heading into 2028.

—Greg Sargent

Political Trivia Question of the Day  

If both Amy Acton and Sherrod Brown win, it will be the first time that Ohio has simultaneously elected a Democratic governor and senator since what year? (Sign up for The TNR Blue Book to find the answer in tomorrow’s newsletter.)

—Michael Tomasky

President Trump is losing young men.

Recent numbers from the Harvard Youth Poll show that confidence in Trump’s ability has cratered among men under the age of 30, with nearly 70 percent of them disapproving of his performance in his second term. That same number also disapproves of the Republican Party at large.

Seventy-four percent of men under 30 disapprove of how Trump has handled the economy, with the majority of them saying that their financial situations had either gotten worse or remained unchanged since he entered office. Furthermore, over half of young men said they’re entering midterms with the frame of mind to vote against Republicans rather than for Democrats, and 42 percent said their vote was a “vote in opposition to President Trump and his policies”—perhaps an indictment of both Trump and the Democratic establishment.

Trump’s success with young men was a key factor in his 2024 election victory against Vice President Kamala Harris. Men under 30 turned away from Democrats in droves, shifting nearly 30 points to the right since 2020. But much like the Black and Latino red wave that Republicans bragged about after that election, their ability to keep young men in their base has been fleeting. Rising costs, uncontrolled development of artificial intelligence, a lack of future security, and a general disapproval of the direction of Trump’s administration are all playing a part. Aside from the men, only 9 percent of young Americans in general think that the country is currently going in the right direction—presenting an ominous message for Trump as midterms rapidly approach.

View the full polling here.

SparkyOS is a novel distro from the folks behind SparkyLinux: it's a version of Arch that can you can use without installing it at all.

SparkyOS is a new distro from the team behind the Debian-based SparkyLinux, but it's quite different. SparkyOS is based on Arch, and it runs entirely from USB. It's not a conventional live medium – this is a full local install, but shipped as an image of a USB key that you can boot and run. It comes with the Xfce desktop and an array of apps. The idea is that you can boot and run it on any x86-64 UEFI computer, entirely from a USB key, without touching the hard disk at all.

This is quite different from its forerunner, which is a relatively conventional Debian-based distro, one which The Register has mentioned a few times over the years: first back in 2015 in a lightweight distro roundup, and more recently in 2024 when we praised its array of desktop environments. Earlier this year, we noted that the latest SparkyLinux featured a complete 32-bit edition, even though its parent distro has dropped its 32-bit x86 kernel.

This is also not your typical live distro. Unless you're running on some Arm computer with nonstandard firmware, most Linux distros install from an image written to a USB pendrive, the same way that they did decades ago: in the noughties when they installed from a DVD, and back in the 20th century, when it was a CD instead. Most optical media use some form of the ISO standard 9660 filesystem, which is quite limited – despite multiple extensions, the core is a basic structure comparable to the ancient MS-DOS FAT. That's not much use for Linux, which needs long filenames, permissions, and metadata, plus things like symbolic links.

So, to this day, most live Linux media have a few boot files and the OS itself is kept inside a big compressed file called a SquashFS, inside which is a real Linux filesystem. However, because it's inside something akin to a Zip file, it's read-only. You can't update the OS or add new software. Some live media optionally offer persistence, which stores changes in another separate file. That works, but if you update the OS, all the original pre-update files remain untouched, and new ones are stored in the persistence structure in addition to the space still consumed by the originals. So, it's slow, and it's very inefficient; it takes substantially more space than a conventional disk install.

So, although there are dozens, maybe hundreds, of live Linux media images out there, most fall into one of two types of single-purpose product: either stripped-out special-purpose distros, such as SystemRescue, GParted Live, and Grml, or Rescuezilla, or Clonezilla. Alternatively, it's a full OS, but only meant as a sampler, not for daily use, with limited and inefficient tools for updates and changes. We're not sure if twice counts as a FAQ, but there are questions on StackExchange on how to install Ubuntu to USB as well as how to install Debian to USB.

SparkyOS is an answer to this question. It's a complete, pre-configured installation of Arch, directly onto a USB key. That does impose some limits, so for instance, like the Desktop Classic System we looked at in January, it only includes UEFI boot files. You can't use it on a computer with just a "legacy" BIOS, and it requires format conversion to use it in a VM.

The current SparkyOS version 2026.10 is the first release, but there are already some How-to documentation pages covering things like expanding the filesystem to fill the USB medium, changing its settings, and how to crowbar it into a VM. The image is 10 GB in size, compressed to 3.2 GB for download, and because this is an image of an entire key, it won't work with multiboot tools such as Reg FOSS desk favorite Ventoy. We put it onto a 64 GB key, and we chose one that has two connectors for both USB-A and USB-C ports. We tested it on our oldest UEFI box, a 15-year-old Thinkpad W520, and our newest UEFI testbed, a Dell XPS13 new enough that it only has USB-C ports.

We would suggest a USB 3 key, though, and use a blue-colored USB-A port if you have one. It will run on a USB-2 only machine, but a bit slower. We tried it on our X220, currently running OpenBSD 8.0, and it worked fine. It could even see OpenBSD’s 10 separate partitions, although not mount them. SparkyOS worked flawlessly on all three machines.

The team has made some concessions to running from USB flash media. The root volume is mounted with the noatime parameter, which stops Linux from recording the last access time on files. That dramatically lowers the number of writes to the drive. There’s also no swap configured – to our surprise, not even ZRAM, which doesn’t touch the disk.

SparkyOS does what it says: it's a complete, very usable, ready-to-run Linux OS, as fully capable of being updated, customized, and having apps added or removed as any other distro… running off a pendrive. We do suggest a big fast key, though, and don't fill it up. Flash isn't like RAM: you can't change a single byte, or word, at a time. Flash can only erase a whole block at a time, and block sizes vary from 16 kB for the smallest flash chips, up to multiple megabytes. To rewrite one byte on a flash drive, the storage controller has to copy a megabyte or more of data elsewhere, format the block, and then copy it back. So, leaving more free space on a flash drive gives the on-device storage-management chip more room to work. The more free space there is on a flash drive, the longer it will last.

This is one reason flash-based SSDs wear out – and also why we wrote that the end of Optane was bad news for the whole industry. SSDs often have multiple, high-speed flash chips on. Pendrives don't – there’s usually just one.

In a previous life, over a decade and a half ago, this vulture had a small startup company, and one of our products was a live Linux-based OS, pre-installed on bootable USB keys. I did everything I could to reduce writes to the drive: they were formatted with journalling disabled, mounted with noatime, with ZRAM for swap, the temporary-files directory kept in a RAMdisk, and more. The keys sold quite well, but one of the problems was that despite all my precautions, heavy users found that the drives simply wore out.

Flash media do not fail in the same way that industry old-timers know from spinning hard disks. A dying hard disk often struggles on, just with some blocks unreadable. That’s why tools such as GNU ddrescue exist – to try to copy the data off the regions that still work. When flash media fail, they tend to fail totally: you can't read from the device at all, meaning that nothing can be recovered from them.

An example of a fairly extreme adaptation in this direction is the FreeBSD-based XigmaNAS OS. In its Embedded installation mode on a flash drive, it writes its log files to a RAM drive to prevent wear to the flash. (The snag being that they are lost when it reboots.) A user add-on for to the proprietary unRAID NAS OS does the same.

There's room for future enhancements to SparkyOS here. Booting from both BIOS and UEFI is already on the "to do" list at the bottom of the release announcement. Additionally, steps to keep any files the OS writes to in RAM, and only write them out to flash at shutdown time, and so on.

But saying all that, it's here, it works, and it already looks like a handy tool if you regularly use multiple different computers and want to carry your own environment around with you. For routine use, though, use a big fast drive, connect it to USB-3 or USB-C ports whenever possible, and ensure it stays mostly empty — keep it under 50 percent full. Most importantly of all, regularly back up any data you keep on it. ®

The president tried to advance a racist narrative about Minnesota Representative Ilhan Omar Thursday evening, but instead revealed how much he doesn’t know the bare basics of marriage.

“It was just revealed that Ilhan Omar’s name is not Ilhan Omar, the one she used to get elected and sworn into Congress, but rather, it’s an entirely different name, Ilhan Nur Said Elmi,” Trump wrote on Truth Social Thursday night, drudging up a practically ancient GOP attack against the Somali-born lawmaker that baselessly accused her of marrying her brother.

To iron out the record: Omar’s birth name is Ilhan Abdullahi Omar (a spokesperson for the representative confirmed this to Fox News). Trump’s grand evidence that Omar’s ex-husband was actually her brother appears to be that they shared a last name—a cultural expectation of women when they tie the knot. Her decision to keep using “Omar” after their marriage would also strike married women as resoundingly regular, as many career women keep using their maiden names in the workplace to minimize confusion.

“When asked whether or not she married her brother, she said, ‘Not to my knowledge.’ In other words, she somehow didn’t know?” Trump continued. “Therefore, because she used a fake name to be sworn in, I assume she must IMMEDIATELY resign from Congress.”

The president insisted that Omar should “not be legally allowed to be a member of this August Body from this point forth” because of the Republican-created controversy.

MAGA conservatives have rumbled for years—without evidence—that Omar married her brother as a form of immigration fraud into the U.S. The conspiracy first emerged during her 2016 campaign for the Minnesota state legislature in a since-deleted post on the conservative blog Power Line, where an anonymous source was quoted as saying that Omar’s ex-husband, Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, was related to her by blood.

Omar has vehemently and repeatedly denied the unfounded allegations, which have been disproven by her marriage certificate. Responding to the conspiracy in 2016, Omar described the insinuation that she had married her brother to be “absurd and offensive.”

But Republicans have really turned up the temperature against Omar in recent days. Just last week, Homeland Security agents raided her home in a fruitless attempt to uncover evidence that her age did not match her original citizenship paperwork. Omar told reporters that agents “went room by room” and “took 17 items.”

In a statement at the time, Omar called it “an outrageous abuse of power and an unprecedented escalation in the weaponization of federal law enforcement to target political enemies.” In an interview with MS NOW, the longtime Trump critic said the raid was “designed” to freak her out.

Nonetheless, Omar decided Thursday that the raid had made her living situation in Washington unfeasible.

“Obviously, I can’t continue to live there,” she told MS NOW. “So we have to figure out where to move to because our address has been public, and with the death threats that I deal with, it’s no longer going to be feasible to be in that house and have my kids visiting off and on, having people track them.”

Quick Take

• Disney Halloween nostalgia: From Halloweentown to Hocus Pocus, these movies capture the magic, spooky fun, and unforgettable characters that make Halloween special.
• An honorable mention for the fans: My Babysitter’s a Vampire may not be a Disney Original, but its supernatural thrills and teen comedy make it a worthy addition to any Halloween watchlist.
• Nerdist Take: I wish I could go back and watch all of these movies for the first time.

There’s something special about Disney Halloween movies. From witches discovering their powers to teenagers fighting monsters, these films made Halloween feel like an entire season of magic. They gave us unforgettable characters, iconic soundtracks, questionable special effects, and the kind of nostalgia that makes us want to revisit them every October. With so many Halloween classics to choose from, narrowing the list down to five wasn’t easy, but these are the movies that deserve a permanent spot on my annual Halloween watchlist. In no particular order, here are five of our fave Disney Halloween movies, plus an honorable mention that deserves some love.

5. Girl vs. Monster (2012) Disney Channel

What’s It About?: Skylar Lewis discovers that her parents are monster hunters after accidentally releasing a group of monsters that feed on human fears.

Olivia Holt was already a Disney Channel favorite, but this movie gave her a chance to take on something a little more supernatural. Between the monster-hunting family, Halloween party, and creatures hiding in the shadows, Girl vs. Monster has all the ingredients for a spooky Disney classic. Is it the most sophisticated movie on this list? Absolutely not. Some of the dialogue is cheesy, and the monsters could have used a little more work. But honestly, that’s part of the charm. The movie captures that early 2010s Disney Channel energy that we just don’t get anymore. Plus, a Halloween movie about fighting monsters with your friends while trying to overcome your fears is a pretty solid premise.

4. Twitches and Twitches Too (2005 and 2007) Disney Channel

What’s It About?: Separated at birth, twin sisters Alex and Camryn discover they are powerful witches destined to save their magical kingdom, Coventry, from the Darkness.

Tia and Tamera Mowry gave us double the magic with Twitches and its sequel, Twitches Too. The first movie introduces us to the sisters and their supernatural abilities, while the second raises the stakes as they continue fighting the Darkness and protecting their world. What makes these movies so memorable is the chemistry between the Mowry twins. Alex and Camryn have completely different personalities, and watching them learn to work together is just as entertaining as watching them use their powers.

The fashion, the spells, the glowing magic, and the iconic “Twitches” dance make these movies essential Halloween viewing. The sequel also deserves credit for expanding the mythology and giving the sisters another supernatural challenge to overcome. If you grew up watching Disney Channel, you probably wanted to discover you had a long-lost twin with magical powers, too. I know I did.

3. Halloweentown High (2004) Disney Channel

What’s It About?: Marnie Piper attempts to bring the worlds of humans and magical creatures together by inviting students from Halloweentown to attend her mortal high school.

By the third installment, Marnie has already proven she can save Halloweentown. This time, she takes on a different challenge: convincing humans and magical creatures that they can coexist. Of all the Halloweentown sequels, this one has a special place in my heart. Seeing witches, goblins, ogres, and other supernatural students navigate an ordinary high school is such a fun twist on the franchise.

The monster designs and costumes bring plenty of personality to the screen, and the enchanted Halloween festivities make the movie even more enjoyable. There’s also a little romance, courtesy of Finn Wittrock playing Marnie’s love interest, Cody. What I love most is that the story goes beyond magic. It’s about acceptance, challenging stereotypes, and making room for people who might seem different. Honestly, I would have been perfectly happy if this had been the final chapter of the franchise.

2. Hocus Pocus (1993) Walt Disney Pictures

What’s It About?: After moving to Salem, Massachusetts, teenager Max Dennison accidentally resurrects three 17th-century witches who are determined to steal the life force of children to remain young forever.

You can’t talk about Disney Halloween movies without mentioning the Sanderson sisters. Bette Midler, Sarah Jessica Parker, and Kathy Najimy bring Winifred, Sarah, and Mary to life in a way that has made these characters Halloween icons. From the moment the sisters return to Salem, the movie delivers a perfect mix of comedy, witchcraft, and spooky fun. Winifred’s dramatic personality, Sarah’s mischievous charm, and Mary’s hilarious expressions make the trio impossible to forget. And then there’s the music, because “I Put a Spell on You” is practically a Halloween anthem at this point.

What makes Hocus Pocus stand out is that it appeals to audiences across generations. It has enough spooky moments to feel like Halloween, but the humor keeps it from becoming too frightening for younger viewers. The movie may not have been an immediate box-office phenomenon, but its lasting cultural impact speaks for itself. Three decades later, the Sanderson sisters are still showing up every Halloween.

1. Halloweentown (1998) IMDb

What’s It About?: Thirteen-year-old Marnie Piper discovers that she comes from a family of witches and travels with her grandmother, Aggie Cromwell, to a magical town filled with supernatural creatures.

This is the one. If there’s a Disney movie that captures the spirit of Halloween, it’s Halloweentown. From the moment Marnie steps off the bus into a town filled with witches, ghosts, trolls, and other magical creatures, the movie makes you wish Halloweentown were a real place. The colorful sets, quirky residents, and charming world-building create an atmosphere that feels completely different from an ordinary Halloween movie.

Kimberly J. Brown is wonderful as Marnie, a teenager eager to discover who she is and what she can do. Debbie Reynolds is equally memorable as Aggie, the grandmother determined to help Marnie embrace her magical heritage. Of course, the movie also has a genuinely menacing villain and a plot that puts both the magical and mortal worlds at risk. It balances family-friendly fun with enough suspense to keep the story engaging.

But the real magic is the movie’s message: being different isn’t something to hide; it’s something to embrace. Halloweentown is more than a nostalgic Disney Channel favorite. It’s a reminder of why we fell in love with Halloween in the first place. Every October, I will happily return to Halloweentown, no questions asked. A Halloween classic that deserves its crown, this movie gets a ten out of ten from me!

Honorable Mention: My Babysitter’s a Vampire (2010) Teletoon/Fresh TV

What’s It About?: Teenager Ethan Morgan discovers that his seemingly ordinary babysitter, Sarah, is actually a vampire. When supernatural threats begin appearing around town, Ethan and his friends find themselves fighting creatures of the night.

Although My Babysitter’s a Vampire isn’t technically a Disney Channel Original Movie, it absolutely deserves a place in the conversation. The Canadian supernatural comedy premiered on Teletoon before finding an audience among Disney Channel viewers. With vampires, zombies, demons, and other supernatural threats, the movie leans into a slightly darker kind of teen horror than many Disney Channel favorites. It also balances its supernatural storyline with high school drama and plenty of comedy.

The movie eventually inspired a television series, giving fans even more time with Ethan, Sarah, and their supernatural adventures. For anyone who grew up watching Disney Channel’s spooky programming, this one is a must-watch. There wasn’t a “Monstober” where I wasn’t watching this show, hearing the theme song alone brings me back to my childhood. It may not officially belong to the DCOM family, but it certainly belongs on my Halloween watchlist.

These rankings are, of course, my personal opinions, and everyone has their own Disney Halloween favorite. Whether you’re revisiting your childhood classics or discovering these movies for the first time, there’s no shortage of Disney magic to enjoy this Halloween. What’s your favorite Disney Halloween movie, and which one deserves the top spot on your list?

Kendall Gayle Washington writes about movies, TV, games, comics, and all things nerdy for Nerdist.

The post From Witches to Monsters, These Disney Halloween Movies Are Delightful appeared first on Nerdist.

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Quick Take

• In honor of Nerdoween, we are highlighting six cosmic horror games that are sure to unsettle, disquiet, and terrify you this spooky season.
• We break down exactly what cosmic horror means and jump into games spanning a couple of decades that you should enjoy.
• If you’re dying for more Nerdoween content, check out the cosmic horror movies you should watch.

Cosmic horror is a subgenre that goes back over a century, but even now, there’s still a lot of debate about what exactly cosmic horror is. Oftentimes, I think people mistake set dressing for genre. A Lovecraftian aesthetic does not necessarily mean that a piece of media falls under the banner of cosmic horror. Sometimes people get hung up on the cosmic bit, taking it too literally. Cosmic horror does not necessarily need to involve space, though it often does. What is space, if not a void-like God stretching on into an endless nothing we will never be able to comprehend?

“The basis of all true cosmic horror is violation of the order of nature, and the profoundest violations are always the least concrete and describable.” —H.P. Lovecraft

To me, cosmic horror is more about the feeling it gives you. While I think the quiet terror of known unknowns is at the center of what makes cosmic horror work as a genre, there’s still that certain ‘It’ factor that needs to be there to pull the experience together. That feeling of your brain running up against something…and not being able to convert it from abstract to concrete.

Not because the story is unclear, not because you’re confused. It’s just unable to be processed or understood in a meaningful way by the human mind. It’s like when you try to imagine a very large sum, like one trillion dollars. Numbers of that size mean nothing to humans, outside of the sociopolitical context. We’re not built to think about numbers that big. That push back, that resistance when you try to make that tangible in your mind? That’s cosmic horror, baby.

Here are some games stuffed with things we’re not built to think about.

Dredge (2023) Black Salt Games/Team 17/Alex Ritchie

A few years back, Worms masterminds Team 17 tagged with Black Salt Studios to make a cute little fishing adventure game. You’ll spend your serene seaside days improving your boat and equipment, and exploring the five archipelagos available in Dredge‘s open world. Then, at night, it transforms into a psychological horror game, filled with sea monsters and other aberrations fit to haunt any hardworking fisherman, and managing your panic meter becomes essential.

As the game continues, your fisherman gains supernatural powers, and becomes entangled in the stories and lives surrounding the five archipelagos and its most terrifying monster, the Leviathan. There are multiple endings as well, which keeps players coming back for another round. To me, the psychological horror element of this definitively cosmic horror game is one of its strongest storytelling elements, eclipsed only by its fabulous dialogue writing. But! I don’t want to give any big spoilers. Play Dredge, it’s great, and seriously—keep an eye on that setting sun.

Bloodborne (2015) From Software

From Software’s magnum opus, Bloodborne, first comes across as a Victorian, gothic horror. However, as the game goes on and you’re drip-fed the lore of Bloodborne’s world, the true horror slowly makes itself known. Or rather, just how little you know makes itself known. From Software has always preferred an indirect style of storytelling. You can go through Bloodborne and pretty much ignore the visual clues and lore drops. You have to seek it out. And the more you look, the more terrifying it becomes.

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Bloodborne is a masterclass in ambiguity in world-building. It will never really give you enough to confirm any certain theory, but It gives you just enough evidence to draw your own conclusions, all of which will not come close to the true scope of what is happening to the ancient city of Yharnam. The horror of finding your limit of understanding and being unable to push past it is an element of the game that, while optional, makes the experience of playing all the more human.

Pathologic (2005) Ice-Pick Lodge

Few things have ever made me feel as powerless as Russian survival horror game Pathologic. Now, when I say Pathologic, I mean both the original and Pathologic 2, its significantly improved and reimagined remake. A lot of the fuel behind the horror of cosmicism (the philosophy that birthed cosmic horror) is the idea that our fates are utterly out of our control, so small and insignificant as we are. Pathologic talks a lot about determinism, about free-will, and who has it and who doesn’t. Even ignoring that, the mere presence of the Polyhedron—an inexplicable reality and physics defying structure towering above the steppe town where the story takes place—is enough to make the hair on the back of your neck stand up.

In this Russian novel of a video game, you have a role, and you will find yourself helpless but to play it. This town on the Ghorkon River has become overrun with an awful plague, and you play as one of three healers trying to save the town. Pathologic is…not what I would call a fun game. At least not in the traditional sense. Most people, upon realizing the torture they’ve signed themselves up for, play for an hour or two before uninstalling it. Still, it sucks you in nonetheless. Pathologic is the hardest game I have ever played, but it’s also one of the most thought-provoking games I’ve ever played.

No, I’m Not a Human (2025) Trioskaz/Critical Reflex

Here’s another Russian game, although No, I’m Not a Human is much, MUCH easier to play. Though, to my delicate constitution, No, I’m Not a Human is scarier than Pathologic in a number of ways. For all its horrors, Pathologic has a somewhat quirky and amusing tone to much of its dialogue. Not so much with NINAH. We could talk about the haunting score, or the daringly unique and unsettling art style, but I want to focus on the plot itself, the set dressings of the end of the world.

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In No, I’m Not a Human, the sun has become hostile to life. It is impossible for humans to be out in the sun for any length of time without dying to the intense heat. This, naturally, causes the world to fall into chaos. You are a man living in a cabin alone outside of a city. No clue where or when, and that feels intentional. While the sun incinerates society metaphorically and literally, things…awful things…are starting to make themselves known. They’re called Visitors, and they could look just like you or me.

No one seems to truly understand what they are. Some say human corpses, reanimated to serve a death god. Some say they’re just humans infected with a disease, or a brain parasite. Some say they’re aliens. There are many theories in-universe and in the real world about what exactly they are, and what’s heating up the sun. No, I’m Not a Human will scare the shit out of you, maybe give you some nightmares, and really make you rethink getting cremated. Depending on what ending you get, it may be more cosmic horror-y or less, but you’ll find the same paranoid, helpless fear crawling up your spine either way. I won’t spoil too much—just go give it a play.

Amnesia: The Dark Descent (2010) Frictional Games

Okay, confession time: I’ve always struggled a little bit with horror games. For a long time, I had a bad habit of throwing controllers, closing my eyes, screaming, etc. I’m easily startled, okay? I’ve got some prey instinct thing going on. Which is why my decision to pick up and play Amnesia: The Dark Descent about eight years ago was baffling. Published by Swedish game development studio Frictional Games, Amnesia: The Dark Descent is oft mentioned in lists of the best psychological horror games of all time, and rightly so. To me, it felt like a spiritual successor to Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem, a game that also had a Sanity meter, which Amnesia is famous for.

In Amnesia: The Dark Descent, you play as Mayfair-born amnesiac Daniel. You find yourself in a castle called Brennenberg in Prussia, circa 1839. Other than your first name and where you come from, you only really know one thing: something is hunting you. Daniel finds a note he left to himself explaining how he wiped his own memory on purpose, and is being pursued by the ‘Shadow’, a horrific eldritch abomination not of this world, whose influence can be seen in the form of fleshy, acidic growths throughout the castle. Your old self gives you instructions to enter the Inner Sanctum and kill Alexander, the baron of the castle. As you follow Daniel through the castle, you’ll learn more about its history, and Daniel’s own past. And you’ll be terrified pretty much the whole time, which is perfect for spooky season!

SOMA (2015) Frictional Games

One day, you’re a brain-damaged man mourning the loss of the love of your life, going for a brain scan to see if a doctoral student can help you. The next, it’s 2103 and you’re stranded in a hellish underground facility with Cronenberg-esque machinery/flesh combos that speak as though they’re authentically human. Meaning…they feel pain. And that’s just where the horror starts. The fear of the unknown, the lack of understanding of how such a thing could happen, or how the f*ck you ended up 100 years in the future, haunts each step just like the menacing, mutated constructs that stalk you through the Pathos-II Facility.

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That’s hardly where the horror ends with SOMA, another terrifying creation from Frictional Games. Many claim that SOMA has one of the most disturbing endings in the entire horror genre. It asks naked and painful questions about what makes us human, and it doesn’t provide you an answer. It plays with subjective reality and memory, especially since you’re seeing everything through the eyes of the protagonist Simon, who, again, has brain damaged so bad he’d been given less than a year to live before going to his mysterious brain-scan. This is all backed with some of the most skin-crawling environmental sound design I’ve heard since, well, Amnesia: The Dark Descent. SOMA in particular I really don’t want to spoil too much, so this is another case of, “Go on, get! Go play it!”

Horror is a genre that takes all kinds. Video game horror especially. There’s a home for fans of any kind of scares, from grindhouse nightmares to psychological thrillers that make you question everything, especially yourself. My favorite is cosmic horror. I seek out narratives that will stick with me in the long-term, that will haunt me answers I’ll never truly have. If you dig that vibe, any of the games on this list should hit the spot.

This post has affiliate links, which means we may earn advertising money if you buy something. This doesn’t cost you anything extra, we just have to give you the heads up for legal reasons. Click away!

Jess Harshbarger writes about movies, TV, games, comics, and all things nerdy for Nerdist.

The post 6 Cosmic Horror Games to Haunt Your Nightmares This Fall appeared first on Nerdist.

President Donald Trump won’t stop inserting wild sound effects into his already incoherent rants.

After holding 21 campaign rallies in the span of just two months, the evidently exhausted 80-year-old president appeared to short-circuit repeatedly during a rally in Iowa Thursday.

“If you don’t want Communists controlling the Senate, which is between JIIIAAAAT,” Trump slurred. “How about the gentleman from a place called Michigan, he’s in a jihadist. He’s a jihadist!”

Trump was referring to Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, who is Muslim and a Democrat—not a Communist or jihadist.

Later, in a desperate attempt to appeal to normal people, Trump once again pretended he could relate to struggles with landscaping equipment, with some … creative insertions.

“You got to be very smart to turn on a lawnmower. I don’t want you to have to think too much. I’d like you to POWW or BIIING,” Trump said.

It appears that Trump’s post-verbal outbursts are becoming a commonplace communication tactic for the commander in chief.

At a rally in South Carolina Wednesday, Trump declared “EUHH” when discussing former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, announced “PEW, PEW, PEW” when lying about his unlawful military strikes on alleged drug smuggling boats, and shouted “POW” when describing how oil would supposedly flow when his extended military campaign against Iran finally ends.