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Milton’s reclassification to a Category 3 storm suggests it is weakening, but the scale accounts only for wind speed and not hurricane size, storm surge heights, or rainfall—which are all catastrophically large.

One of the favorite series on this site — at least, as far as many of our staff are concerned — is “What’s on your desk?” where we look at the home workspace of some of the people here at The Verge. (For one thing, it’s reassuring to know that most of us share the same clutter syndrome, and that’s after cleaning the space up for the photos!) We checked to see if any of the interesting stuff we have found in the home office setups of our staff — office chairs, string lights, drawing tablets, etc. — was on sale during this fall’s Amazon Prime Day event, and we came up with these. I just had to look up the name on Amazon: it’s the “HON Office Chair Black | Ignition 2.0 | Ergonomic...

The latest health check on wildlife is in, and it’s not pretty. A new report by two of the world’s leading environmental groups reveals that the average size of wildlife populations worldwide has shrunk dramatically, by what the report calls a “catastrophic” 73 percent in the last 50 years.  The Living Planet Report, published by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and the Zoological Society of London (ZSL), found that creatures living in rivers and lakes, such as the Amazon river dolphin, have experienced the most severe declines. Populations of these freshwater species have declined by an average of 85 percent, according to the Living Planet Index (LPI), a tool for measuring wildlife populations on which the report is based. Across the animal kingdom, meanwhile, wildlife populations are vanishing fastest in Latin America and the Caribbean — part of the globe that’s home to a tremendous diversity of life. The research does not include invertebrates such as insects and snails. Losing wild animals isn’t good for anyone. Bats eat insect pests and lower the use of pesticides, yet many of them are imperiled. Parrotfish, which have declined in some regions, can improve the health of coral reefs that safeguard coastal communities. All kinds of birds and mammals help pollinate plants and spread seeds throughout the forest, sustaining forests and the rainfall they generate; many of them are vanishing, too. “This is not just about wildlife,” Daudi Sumba, WWF International’s chief conservation officer, said on a press call Monday unveiling the report. “It’s about the essential ecosystems that sustain human life.” The new report is an alarming status check on the state of our planet, and the headline numbers it reveals will likely be cited in countless news and government reports. The Living Planet Index is one of the key metrics used to track global progress in efforts to conserve the environment. But … is it accurate? Coming up with simple figures to describe the state of the world’s wildlife is inherently difficult, but more than half a dozen scientists told me that the methods used to calculate the index may cause it to overstate wildlife declines, and perhaps significantly so. Some even called it misleading. One researcher voiced concerns that if leading environmental groups exaggerate wildlife declines, it could ultimately erode trust among the public, making action on a very real crisis that much harder to achieve.  While there’s no question that biodiversity is in decline, growing criticism of WWF’s estimation casts doubt on the scale of loss — or at least on science’s ability to accurately measure it.  Before digging into the report, it’s important to reiterate: There is indeed a crisis of biodiversity loss. This is unequivocal. Coral reefs are overheating and dying en masse. North America has lost some 3 billion birds. Insects are indeed vanishing. The rate of extinction is accelerating. In Hawaii, which has been called the extinction capital of the world, entire species of birds — and all the cultural heritage they carry — are blinking out as I write this. The new WWF report underscores this frightening trend. We are living in a time of profound biodiversity loss. Calculating a single figure to encompass all of this loss isn’t easy. Ecosystems are incredibly complex, and counting animals year after year is difficult and time-consuming. “Generating a single estimate for all species in all locations is extremely challenging,” said Laura Melissa Guzman, a quantitative biologist at the University of Southern California. “I don’t think we have reached consensus as a scientific community of what is the best way to do that.” WWF’s approach relies on something called the Living Planet Index, which is produced by ZSL. It measures the average change in animal populations worldwide since 1970. To come up with the global LPI, scientists first calculate how individual populations of birds, mammals, reptiles, amphibians, and fish have changed, as I wrote in 2022, when WWF published its previous installment. A population of, say, 1,000 manatees that has lost 500 has decreased by 50 percent. The same is true for a population of 10 that has lost just five. Then they average up all of those changes, be they increases or decreases, to produce one number. That means the index is an average of changes in population sizes, not the average of the number of creatures lost.  This is confusing. In the past, many media stories misinterpreted figures from the index and reported that Earth lost more than two-thirds of its wildlife in the last 50 years. That’s wrong. The headline number — two-thirds, or in the case of the new report, 73 percent — refers to the average decline of thousands of different animal populations, not the total number of animals.  But a more fundamental issue than bad headlines is that the index — the basis of the new report — is not calculated correctly, according to a team of researchers at the Center for Theoretical Study in the Czech Republic, a joint institution of Charles University and the Czech Academy of Sciences.  Earlier this year, they published a paper in the journal Nature Communications that pointed out what they considered mathematical flaws in the LPI. Those flaws, the authors claim, bias the index and cause it to exaggerate the decline of wildlife. The study takes issue with a number of things, including the math used to calculate the index and how ZSL handles poor-quality population data. That lower quality data includes population trends — ups and downs in the number of animals — based on counts from only a few points in time. For a variety of complicated reasons, the authors say, ZSL’s choices in how to calculate the index bias the data toward declines. In reality, declines and increases are more balanced, they say. One example relates to sampling errors, cases when scientists don’t accurately report the number of animals in a wildlife population, perhaps because they’re hard to spot. If the population is small to begin with, accidentally counting fewer animals has a more dramatic, negative effect on the population trend than accidentally counting more.  “I’m really convinced that the decline of vertebrate populations is not as serious as the LPI says,” David Storch, a study coauthor and researcher at the Center for Theoretical Study, told Vox. Several scientists who were not involved in the Nature Communications study told Vox that the concerns the article raises are valid and that biases embedded in the calculation may indeed exaggerate wildlife declines. Rodolfo Dirzo, a biodiversity researcher at Stanford University who reviewed the new report, said that while the scale of wildlife population declines is extreme, it’s likely smaller than what the WWF report suggests due to how the LPI was calculated. (Disclosure: Dirzo was one of my advisers in graduate school.) “Given the broad adoption of the LPI in global biodiversity policy arena, the kind of comprehensive sensitivity analysis of the LPI that Tószögyová and colleagues performed is long overdue,” Bruce Young, chief scientist at NatureServe, a nonprofit wildlife data organization, said in an email. “I was always nervous about the certainty with which the LPI authors presented their results.” Although an early version of the Nature Communications study was available in 2023, WWF did not tweak how the LPI is calculated in response to the paper. Storch believes there’s an incentive to keep the index as is. It’s not so much a scientific tool, he said, but a tool to raise awareness of the biodiversity crisis — and raise money. “I see these indices more as a communication tool,” said Rahel Sollmann, a quantitative ecologist at the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife in Berlin, who was not involved in the new report or the Nature Communications study. “I wouldn’t put too much trust into its actual numerical value.” I posed these criticisms to WWF and scientists at ZSL. Robin Freeman, a scientist at ZSL who was involved in the LPI analysis, said he doesn’t agree that biases overestimate the measure of wildlife declines. Changing the way ZSL calculates the index to remove what some researchers see as statistical biases would have consequences of its own, he said. Freeman argues that removing less detailed or more error-prone data from the calculation — much of which is from poorer regions in the tropics where there’s less research — could fail to capture the full picture of wildlife declines.  Louse McRae, another ZSL scientist who also works on the index, added that it’s also possible that the LPI actually underestimates the scale of declines. That’s because the index tends to include more population data from birds and mammals, well-studied groups that are typically declining less than, say, reptiles and amphibians, she said.  “We do an awful lot of work to test the datasets, test the impact of outliers and extreme shifts in population,” Andrew Terry, ZSL’s director of conservation and policy, said in a Monday press briefing. Speaking about the index, he said ZSL remains “confident in its robustness.” (ZSL also published a technical document alongside the new report that details its testing.) A spokesperson for WWF, Amy Fallah, said the main purpose of the Living Planet Report “is to raise awareness about the scale of environmental challenges facing our planet and drive urgent action that prioritizes nature in global decision-making.” That’s why the group published it ahead of COP16, a major UN biodiversity conference, where environmental leaders will meet to hash out plans for conserving nature. “The LPR’s central aim has always been to inform and influence policy decisions that put nature at the heart of solutions to the challenges our planet faces,” Fallah said. Yes and no. If the leading research and advocacy groups, such as WWF, are seen to overstate the problem, the public could lose the sense of urgency and may be less likely to lend support for what is a very real problem. “There’s a real risk to overstating the magnitude of the biodiversity crisis,” Young of NatureServe told me. “The public could get the impression that the conservation community is prone to exaggeration and therefore calls for action to reduce wildlife loss could go unanswered.”  Young also mentioned that the “extinction denier” community — comprising people who deny that we’re living through a sixth mass extinction fueled by humans — feeds off examples, real or not, that show that wildlife is doing better than we thought. That makes it ever more important for measures of biodiversity loss to capture examples of successful conservation. Then again, we’re just talking about shades of decline — whether the biodiversity crisis is really, really bad, or really, really, really bad. Regardless of how precise the LPI is, it portrays a trend of profound nature loss that no serious scientist disputes. “The report has been useful in bringing attention to the fact that there is a significant decline in populations of many species of vertebrates,” Dirzo said. If the figure ultimately serves as a communication tool, it’s an effective one, judging by how widely the LPI is reported and cited. “Our goal is to use it as a tool for raising awareness about the dual crises of nature loss and climate change and urging the public and private sector to take action,” Fallah said.  And to be clear: Communication really matters. The decline of wildlife remains a somewhat fringe issue with low public awareness, even compared to other environmental concerns like climate change. This in itself is alarming, considering the sheer scale of the problem and how it impacts us all. We are talking about the ongoing collapse of ecosystems with immeasurable spiritual and cultural worth that provide human communities with clean water, healthy food, and other basic needs. They are irreplaceable.  If WWF’s new report — and the LPI index — can help communicate the problem, that ultimately seems useful. “It shows us that we’re still not doing enough,” said Gerardo Ceballos, an ecologist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). “The most important thing to understand is that unless we can save biodiversity there’s no way we can save humanity.” “People have accused me and other people of being alarmists,” Ceballos told me. “We are alarmists because we are alarmed.”

Some of the hottest styling gadgets are on sale for Big Deal Days—these are the WIRED Gear team’s favorites.

Amazon is continuing many of its best headphone and earbud discounts on the second day of its October Prime Day sale. If you want to get a jump on your holiday shopping — or just treat yourself to a new upgrade — this is a great opportunity to do so. Apple’s AirPods Pro, which are about to receive significant hearing health features, can be had at a great price, but there are also excellent options from Sony, Bose, Samsung (like the Buds 3 Pro I just reviewed), Sennheiser, and other mainstays in this category. If you want to take out the guesswork, check out our best earbuds buying guide, and you’ll find that many of my favorite picks are available at tempting prices.

Lego just released Luke Skywalker's lightsaber from Return of the Jedi as a set and it's got a hidden gem, literally.

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Nintendo is inviting people to apply to play test a new feature for Nintendo Switch Online — though the company isn’t specifying what the feature is. Considering that this company just launched a gesture-controlled alarm clock, this could mean just about anything up to and including a preview of features for the much-anticipated Switch 2. Guesses from Verge staffers ran the gamut of bringing GameCube games to Switch Online to a preview for a Wii mini retro console or perhaps another long-lost Star Fox game. Feel free to leave your best guesses in the comments. Applications will be open from Thursday, October 10th, at 11AM ET to Tuesday, October 15th, at 10:59AM ET. You can apply by clicking the “To Application Page” link on this page....

As a culture, Americans are coming to better understand the injustice that was done to Lyle and Erik Menendez. The brothers were convicted in 1996 of murdering their wealthy parents, Jose and Kitty Menendez, seven years earlier in a gruesome double homicide, when Lyle was 21 and Erik just 18. Their trials unfolded amid a tabloid media frenzy that emphasized the brothers’ presumed greed and sociopathy while mocking the decades of emotional and sexual abuse they claim to have experienced at the hands of their father. Despite overwhelming witness testimony presented in their first trials that they were telling the truth about their abuse, they were each ultimately sentenced to life without parole. Netflix’s recent Ryan Murphy docudrama, Monsters, takes a frank look at the brothers’ allegations of abuse, but it doesn’t do them any favors either, buying into the possibility that the pair made the whole thing up for sympathy and even implying an unfounded incestuous relationship between them. So it makes sense that in order to balance out those rather jarring claims, Netflix also recently launched a documentary film, simply titled The Menendez Brothers, that backs the abuse claims with an impressive number of first- and secondhand sources — including the brothers themselves, who appear via recorded phone calls from prison. Several members of the Menendez family appear on the documentary with stories of the abuse the brothers suffered from their father, including Joan Vander Molen, Kitty Menendez’s sister, and Diane Vander Molen, a cousin of Lyle and Erik.  Diane spent most of her summers growing up with the Menendez family and has never deviated from the story she testified to at the brothers’ first trials — that Lyle had told her about their father’s sexual abuse when he was just 8 years old. Her testimony also implicated Kitty Menendez, who, she alleged, knew about Lyle’s claims and either disbelieved them or chose to ignore them. After that, the brothers have said the alleged abuse went on for years after that, with the brothers claiming that their father’s sexual abuse of Erik continued into Erik’s adulthood, with Lyle learning that his brother was still being abused just days before the murders. Multiple Menendez family members recalled several chilling stories of abuse, but one about a trust fall gone wrong in Lyle’s childhood, the first story Diane Vander Molen relates in the documentary, seems particularly revealing as a glimpse into the lives the brothers lived. “One time Jose put Lyle on a kitchen counter and prompted Lyle to jump off, and he was going to catch him. As Lyle did so, Jose backed off and let him fall to the ground, telling him that you can never trust anybody.” Taken as an isolated example, we might consider this an anecdote of a cruel prank played on an innocent child. But in the context of everything we know about Jose Menendez and his children, it becomes much more significant. It’s a simple but revealing look at a man whose behavior seemed to be a textbook example of coercive control — a long-term behavior pattern in which a family member carries out an ongoing strategy of manipulation and emotional abuse against his partner and/or his children. This was just one example of a lifetime of alleged psychological torture. It’s anguishing to think what such an environment would do to two young boys forced to play these kinds of mind games by a parent whom they loved and trusted. Coercive control often accompanies other dysfunctional behaviors, including domestic violence and sexual abuse. Although the term was first coined in 1982, it wasn’t popularized as a concept until the late aughts (via an influential book on the subject) and still has yet to be fully or widely understood by the general public. More and more states are beginning to incorporate coercive control into their civil procedures and guidelines for understanding domestic violence, but as of 2024 only a handful of states, including Hawaii and Massachusetts, actually prosecute coercive control as a criminal offense.  While most people recognize that strategic manipulation is a key factor in situations involving long-term domestic abuse, the justice system lacks sentencing guidelines that incorporate that understanding, including where juvenile and young offenders are concerned. In the case of Lyle and Erik Menendez, the court failed even to accept that prolonged abuse could be a defense to murder.  Lyle and Erik were initially each tried separately in 1993; both trials, in which the defense relied heavily on testimony supporting their abuse claims, resulted in hung juries. The next trial began in October 1995, just eight days after the O.J. Simpson acquittal — the timing of which, the documentary implies, may have increased a public thirst for vengeance against wealthy defendants. For this trial, which saw them being tried together, the judge rejected what he called the “abuse excuse” and thus disallowed nearly all of the expert and personal testimony corroborating the brothers’ claims.  The jurors in that trial, according to one juror who appears in the documentary, were also dissuaded from considering manslaughter as an option, which could have dramatically reduced their sentences. Given the overwhelming number of witnesses who back their claims of an abusive household of coercive control and the increased understanding we have of how long-term abuse can affect children, it’s generally understood — and their defense attorneys have argued — that their trials would have gone much differently today. The law increasingly recognizes coercive control and prolonged abuse as supporting a defense of diminished capacity, which can frequently result in a conviction on a lesser degree of a crime.  Fortunately, the brothers have a shot at a reprieve: a recently rediscovered letter purportedly written by Erik Menendez eight months before the murders in which he details his ongoing sexual abuse by Jose has been used as the basis for a motion to vacate the brothers’ convictions. A recent story in People magazine notes that the Los Angeles district attorney’s office will give the court a formal recommendation on the motion on November 26. That means the nightmare for the Menendez brothers could finally end.

Now is not the time.

This is the latest chapter of the Kamala Harris campaign’s effort to reach young male voters.

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