Hurricane Helene has quickly intensified into a massive Category 4 storm, with hurricane-force winds extending up to 60 miles outward from the eye. Forecasters warn that Helene — which has wind speeds of near 120 miles per hour — could be deadly for those living in coastal Florida, where it’s expected to make landfall this evening. The National Hurricane Center predicts storm surge as high as 20 feet in some parts of Florida’s Big Bend, a region between the panhandle and the peninsula. Storm surge, which describes a rise in sea level, is the most dangerous part of tropical storms and has a deadly track record: In 2022, storm surge killed more than 40 people during Hurricane Ian. The storm is also expected to inundate inland regions across much of the southeastern US with rain, dumping a foot or more in parts of southern Appalachia. “This rainfall will likely result in catastrophic and potentially life-threatening flash and urban flooding,” the National Hurricane Center said early Thursday afternoon. Helene could also disrupt part of the epic monarch butterfly migration, which typically passes through the Big Bend’s St. Marks National Wildlife Refuge in early October. Helene is the eighth named storm in what has so far amounted to a somewhat puzzling hurricane season. It started with a bang — June’s Hurricane Beryl became the earliest Category 5 storm on record — and then much of August and September was unexpectedly quiet. Many meteorologists, though, have been warning not to be fooled by this late-summer lull.  “Having multi-week periods of quiet and then multi-week periods of activity is very normal throughout a hurricane season,” Brian McNoldy, a climatologist at the University of Miami, told me earlier this month. “I definitely would not read too much into it.”  Plus, McNoldy said, the ocean in the Gulf of Mexico has been — and still is — exceptionally hot, and hot water fuels hurricanes. Ocean heat content, a measure of how much heat energy the ocean stores, is at a record high for this time of year. Take a look at the chart below. The red line is 2024 and the blue line is the average over the last decade. This record ocean heat is a clear reason why Hurricane Helene — which has been traveling through the Gulf on its way to Florida — has intensified so quickly. Put simply, hotter water evaporates more readily, and rising columns of warm, moist air from that evaporation are ultimately what drive hurricanes and their rapid intensification. “The sea surface temperature and the ocean heat content are both record high in the Gulf,” McNoldy, who produced the chart above, told me. “That heat at the surface and available through a depth will give Helene all the fuel it needs to rapidly intensify today and into tomorrow.” The record Gulf temperatures are just one signal of a more widespread bout of warming across the North Atlantic that ramped up last year.  It’s not entirely clear what’s causing this warming, though scientists suspect a combination of factors including climate change — which raises the baseline ocean temperature — as well as lingering effects of El Niño, natural climate variability, and perhaps even a volcanic eruption. “This is out of bounds from the kinds of variability that we’ve seen in [at least] the last 75 years or so,” Ben Kirtman, director of the Cooperative Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Studies, a joint initiative of the University of Miami and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), told Vox in August. “That can be scary stuff.” Update, September 26, 6:50 pm ET: This story, originally published September 25, has been updated with new information as Hurricane Helene approaches the Florida coast.

The long-delayed Stephen King adaptation from Gary Dauberman (Annabelle, The Nun, It) arrives on Max October 3.

New York City Mayor Eric Adams has been indicted by federal authorities for allegedly accepting illegal donations and perks from a Turkish government official and Turkish businesspeople, and providing favorable treatment in return.  The indictment follows months of investigations by federal prosecutors, who’ve also been looking into many of Adams’s current and former associates, including Schools Chancellor David Banks and Police Commissioner Edward Caban, who recently resigned after having their phones seized. Others in Adams’s orbit — including the former head of the Buildings Department and a former police inspector — have faced their own scandals and charges as well.  Adams has denied breaking the law, saying in a Wednesday video statement, “I am innocent, and I will fight this with every ounce of my strength and spirit.”  Adams’s indictment, made public on Thursday, involves five federal corruption charges. The charges make Adams the first ever sitting New York City mayor to be indicted, and will likely have a significant effect on the upcoming mayoral race in 2025, which he was expected to run in.  First elected as mayor in 2021, Adams previously served as Brooklyn borough president, state senator, and a New York City police officer. He’s known for his aggressive push to increase policing and combat crime as mayor, as well as bombastic comments he’s made about migrants and kooky catchphrases about governance. Now, his tenure as a public servant could be approaching its end. Below is a rundown of what we know about the indictment, and its implications.  The charges center on Adams’s mayoral campaigns. They allege that he knowingly accepted illegal donations facilitated by a Turkish government official, and favors — like luxury plane tickets — as part of a quid pro quo relationship with the country. Together, they paint a picture of a foreign government official cultivating a prominent US politician over a period of years. The charges are:  Conspiracy to commit wire fraud, solicit foreign contributions, and accept bribes (1 count): Adams is accused of setting up an illicit system to accept foreign donations as part of his mayoral campaigns, of accepting multiple plane tickets and luxury travel perks from a Turkish government official and Turkish businesspeople, and of helping a Turkish consulate building in New York City circumvent regulatory requirements in return.  Wire fraud (1 count): Certain campaign donations in New York City can be matched with public funds to help encourage candidates to seek small-dollar donations. The indictment alleges that Adams fraudulently solicited matching funds for donations that he knew were from “straw donors,” or donors used to funnel money from another source. He’s accused of using straw donors in both his 2021 and 2025 campaigns, and of securing $10 million in public matching funds in this way. Solicitation of a contribution by a foreign national (2 counts): US political candidates are barred from accepting donations from foreign citizens, something Adams is accused of knowingly doing by taking money from Turkish nationals.  Bribery (1 count): This charge is also related to Adams’s alleged exchange of certain travel benefits, like expensive plane tickets, for relaxing the regulatory requirements faced by a new Turkish consulate building. The building had yet to pass a fire safety screening ahead of a visit by Turkey’s president, and Adams reportedly pressured a Fire Department official to obtain expedited approval. The perks he received are alleged to have been valued at around $100,000.  Nearly two dozen people are involved with open investigations and litigation concerning Adams and his allies, not all of them related to corruption.  Those investigations include scrutiny of the campaign’s ties to six different foreign countries, as well as allegations of extortion and bribery allegations related to a consulting firm run by the sibling of Adams administration officials. Adams and one of his advisors also face allegations of sexual misconduct. Thus far, two powerful people with links to Adams have also been indicted: Other officials, including the former Police Commissioner Caban, Schools Chancellor Banks, Deputy Mayor for Public Safety Philip Banks, and First Deputy Mayor Sheena Wright have yet to be charged, but have had their phones seized. Former Adams chief fundraiser Brianna Suggs, senior adviser Winnie Greco, Interim Police Commissioner Thomas Donlon, and an aide who’s on leave, Rana Abbasova, have also had their homes searched.  Adams does not have to step down because of the indictment, experts tell the news outlet The City.  There are ways to potentially force his removal, however. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul has the ability to first suspend, then remove, him from the position, though it’s a power that the state executive has rarely used.  New York City officials could also set up a panel known as an “inability committee” that then empowers a group of city councilmembers to vote on whether Adams is unable to do his job. If two-thirds agreed with that assessment, he’d be required to leave his post.  If Adams leaves, Public Advocate Jumaane Williams would serve as acting mayor, and a special election for the job would have to be held within 80 days of Adams’s departure. New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is among the national lawmakers who have urged Adams to resign. She first did so ahead of his indictment, in light of the ongoing investigations into other members of his administration. “Nonstop investigations will make it impossible to recruit and retain a qualified administration,” Ocasio-Cortez said in a statement on X, formerly known as Twitter. “For the good of the city, he should resign.” I do not see how Mayor Adams can continue governing New York City.The flood of resignations and vacancies are threatening gov function. Nonstop investigations will make it impossible to recruit and retain a qualified administration.For the good of the city, he should resign.… Others who’ve joined in the chorus include multiple New York City Councilmembers like Tiffany Cabán, Lincoln Restler, and Chris Banks.  Adams was scheduled to be up for re-election next year, though broad dissatisfaction with his tenure had prompted several others to join the fray.  Even ahead of the indictment, the contest was slated to be a packed one that includes current City Comptroller Brad Lander, former Comptroller Scott Stringer, state Sen. Zellnor Myrie, and state Sen. Jessica Ramos.  Adams is in the running as well, and is not required to step aside due to his indictment. However, he was not a popular figure before his recent legal troubles — and if he opts to stay in office, and in the race, he’s likely to find the contest to be a difficult one. 

Showrunner Jac Schaeffer talks about finally making a mention of a long-anticipated character in the WandaVision spinoff.

For one entire minute in Ellen DeGeneres’s new Netflix special, DeGeneres receives a standing ovation for stating, “I’m a strong woman.” DeGeneres soaks in the applause, staring into the rafters of Minneapolis’s Orpheum theater like she’s witnessing a holy miracle, and the entire audience rises to its feet. It’s one of the more absurd things happening in For Your Approval, a night of taped comedy that DeGeneres and Netflix have been promoting as the comedian’s response to being “kicked out of Hollywood.” Nabbing a comedy special on one of the biggest entertainment platforms on the planet should probably disqualify anyone from saying they were “kicked out of Hollywood,” but we do not live in a world where sentences make sense. (Netflix reportedly paid DeGeneres $20 million for her 2018 set Relatable.) Instead, we have a packed-house show by an alleged Hollywood outcast filmed for Netflix, with an audience hooting and hollering for a 2016 girlboss platitude.  What the former talk show host really means by “kicked out of Hollywood” is that her brand took a hit. DeGeneres, who was blacklisted and shunned in the industry after coming out in the ’90s, should know the difference between those things better than anyone.   The severity of DeGeneres’s second “cancellation” is debatable. In 2019, DeGeneres had actress Dakota Johnson on her eponymous show and that interview quickly turned into a meme. The host questioned the actress about her recent 30th birthday party, claiming she hadn’t been invited, which prompted Johnson’s famous reply: “Actually, no, that’s not the truth, Ellen” — saying in fact, DeGeneres had skipped the festivities. (It was later discovered that DeGeneres was hanging out with George W. Bush at a Dallas Cowboys game.) The back and forth went viral, prompting a semi-playful examination of whether DeGeneres was actually a nice person, which built into more serious reports of a toxic work environment at The Ellen Show, with accusations of racism and sexism. Eventually, The Ellen Show was quite literally canceled in May of 2022.  DeGeneres doesn’t get into these specifics in the special.  For her applause-ready audience (at one point they cheer when DeGeneres name-drops a producer named “Andy”), she glosses over the more serious parts of the fallout, saying simply that the reason she was booted from the industry was because people didn’t realize her kindness was part of the act.  “You can’t be mean and be in show business,” DeGeneres deadpans. “No mean people in show business.” DeGeneres paints herself as a less kind person than the Ellen we see on TV, recounting complaints from her wife Portia about how she’s comically impatient. She admits she’s rude at parties, saying that her talk show trained her to only pay attention in segments.  When it comes to the toxic workplace allegations, she explains that she didn’t really know how to be a boss, which she chalks up to her love of playing pranks on producers. She also speaks about how complicated she is — having been diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder and attention-deficit disorder — and how that can manifest in being a bad manager.  At the same time, DeGeneres asserts that she’s definitely kinder and nicer than the person we read about in the news. She can’t stop wanting to help lost animals, she says, and she finds beauty in how caterpillars liquefy themselves and turn into butterflies. That ties into what she lets on about her peaceful, post-talk-show life: She’s gardening more, surrounded presumably by butterflies, and tending to a roost of chickens. DeGeneres also reveals that she wears sweatpants in the home and cannot be pried out of them once she slips them on, not even for “Mick” (as in Jagger).  “I’m 66 years old,” she tells the audience, who respond with raucous applause. DeGeneres follows that statement up with a joke about how restaurants’ menu font size makes her feel old.  For all the time she’s spent imagining the thought process of a just-hatched butterfly or the seemingly brainless organization scheme of her car’s dashboard or how the width of the two “bankrupt” panels flanking the million-dollar panel in Wheel of Fortune is unfair, DeGeneres barely examines the obvious question about her “niceness.”  “Nice” wasn’t simply a byproduct of being Ellen; DeGeneres ultimately turned being kind into one of the most profitable business plans in Hollywood. And she did so after gaining first-hand knowledge of what it’s actually like to be professionally blacklisted.  At one point in the special, DeGeneres compares this current time in her career to the period after she came out publicly. The comedian had announced she was a lesbian on The Oprah Winfrey Show just prior to her eponymous character coming out on her sitcom, Ellen, that same year. She also famously appeared on the cover of Time magazine, with the cover line reading, “Yep, I’m Gay.” It was, undeniably, new ground for the country, and a brave claim of self. After “The Puppy Episode,” as it was called, DeGeneres says she struggled to find work — a rejection based on who she was, even if the sitcom character wasn’t exactly her.   During DeGeneres’s turn as a talk show host, she became less like herself and more like a sitcom character. Her terminal niceness became her identity. All the mean, bigoted things people said about her being a lesbian didn’t have any bearing — she was showing audiences across America that she was a nice person, first and foremost, who just so happened to be gay. She rose above the prejudices.  It was respectability politics, stretched and shaped into an extremely beneficial career.   It must have been difficult to do what DeGeneres did, to sand down the edges and flatten the wrinkles of her whole identity, to fit into this TV host mold and appeal to people who had rejected her. But that was her business, one more crucial than being a TV show host, producer, or comedian. Behind the scenes, it seems, she dropped the ball. After many years of playing nice, DeGeneres wasn’t able to do her job.  Instead of acknowledging that lapse or asserting that there’s a stark difference between being unpleasant to work for and ignoring a toxic work environment, in For Your Approval, DeGeneres pivots to talking about how society is tough on women in the workplace — holding them to impossible double standards and trapping them in roles designed to fail. While those factors were certainly at play, it’s a little obtuse — if not purposely hollow — to use those societal issues to buff out the more serious accusations that sunk her show. I’m not sure those kinds of excuses and obfuscations are what you’d hear from a nice person, but DeGeneres would concede she was never that nice to begin with. 

OpenAI, the company that brought you ChatGPT, just sold you out. Since its founding in 2015, its leaders have said their top priority is making sure artificial intelligence is developed safely and beneficially. They’ve touted the company’s unusual corporate structure as a way of proving the purity of its motives. OpenAI was a nonprofit controlled not by its CEO or by its shareholders, but by a board with a single mission: keep humanity safe. But this week, the news broke that OpenAI will no longer be controlled by the nonprofit board. OpenAI is turning into a full-fledged for-profit benefit corporation. Oh, and CEO Sam Altman, who had previously emphasized that he didn’t have any equity in the company, will now get equity worth billions, in addition to ultimate control over OpenAI. In an announcement that hardly seems coincidental, chief technology officer Mira Murati said shortly before that news broke that she was leaving the company. Employees were so blindsided that many of them reportedly reacted to her abrupt departure with a “WTF” emoji in Slack. WTF indeed. The whole point of OpenAI was to be nonprofit and safety-first. It began sliding away from that vision years ago when, in 2019, OpenAI created a for-profit arm so it could rake in the kind of huge investments it needed from Microsoft as the costs of building advanced AI scaled up. But some of its employees and outside admirers still held out hope that the company would stick to its principles. That hope can now be put to bed. “We can say goodbye to the original version of OpenAI that wanted to be unconstrained by financial obligations,” Jeffrey Wu, who joined the company in 2018 and worked on early models like GPT-2 and GPT-3, told me. “Restructuring around a core for-profit entity formalizes what outsiders have known for some time: that OpenAI is seeking to profit in an industry that has received an enormous influx of investment in the last few years,” said Sarah Kreps, director of Cornell’s Tech Policy Institute. The shift departs from OpenAI’s “founding emphasis on safety, transparency and an aim of not concentrating power.” And if this week’s news is the final death knell for OpenAI’s lofty founding vision, it’s clear who killed it.   When OpenAI was cofounded in 2015 by Elon Musk (along with Altman and others), who was worried that AI could pose an existential risk to humanity, the budding research lab introduced itself to the world with these three sentences: OpenAI is a nonprofit artificial intelligence research company. Our goal is to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return. Since our research is free from financial obligations, we can better focus on a positive human impact. All of that is objectively false now. Since Altman took the helm of OpenAI in 2019, the company has been drifting from its mission. That year, the company — meaning the original nonprofit — created a for-profit subsidiary so it could pull in the huge investments needed to build cutting-edge AI. But it did something unprecedented in Silicon Valley: It capped how much profit investors could make. They could get up to 100 times what they put in, but beyond that, the money would go to the nonprofit, which would use it to benefit the public. For example, it could fund a universal basic income program to help people adjust to automation-induced joblessness.   Over the next few years, OpenAI increasingly deprioritized its focus on safety as it rushed to commercialize products. By 2023, the nonprofit board had grown so suspicious of Altman that it tried to oust him. But he quickly clawed his way back to power, exploiting his relationship with Microsoft, with a new board stacked in his favor. And earlier this year, OpenAI’s safety team imploded as staffers lost faith in Altman and quit the company.  Now, Altman has taken the final step in consolidating his power: He’s stripped the board of its control entirely. Although it will still exist, it won’t have any teeth.  “It seems to me the original nonprofit has been disempowered and had its mission reinterpreted to be fully aligned with profit,” Wu said. Profit may be what Altman feels the company desperately needs. Despite a supremely confident blog post published this week, in which he claimed that AI would help with “fixing the climate, establishing a space colony, and the discovery of all of physics,” OpenAI is actually in a jam. It’s been struggling to find a clear route to financial success for its models, which cost hundreds of millions — if not billions — to build. Restructuring the business into a for-profit could help attract investors. But the move has some observers ­— including Musk himself — asking: How could this possibly be legal? If OpenAI does away with the profit cap, it would be redirecting a huge amount of money — prospective billions of dollars in the future — from the nonprofit to investors. Because the nonprofit is there to represent the public, this would effectively mean shifting billions away from people like you and me. As some are noting, it feels a lot like theft.   “If OpenAI were to retroactively remove profit caps from investments, this would in effect transfer billions in value from a non-profit to for-profit investors,” Jacob Hilton, a former employee of OpenAI who joined before it transitioned from a nonprofit to a capped-profit structure. “Unless the non-profit were appropriately compensated, this would be a money grab. In my view, such a thing would be incompatible with OpenAI’s charter, which states that OpenAI’s primary fiduciary duty is to humanity, and I do not understand how the law could permit it.” But because OpenAI’s structure is so unprecedented, the legality of such a shift might seem confusing to some. And that may be exactly what the company is counting on. Asked to comment on this, OpenAI said only to refer to its statement in Bloomberg. There, a company spokesperson said OpenAI remains “focused on building AI that benefits everyone,” adding that “the nonprofit is core to our mission and will continue to exist.” Advocates for AI safety have been arguing that we need to pass regulation that would provide some oversight of big AI companies — like California’s SB 1047 bill, which Gov. Gavin Newsom must either sign into law or veto in the next few days. Now, Altman has neatly made their case for them. “The general public and regulators should be aware that by default, AI companies will be incentivized to disregard some of the costs and risks of AI deployment — and there’s a chance those risks will be enormous,” Wu said.   Altman is also validating the concerns of his ex-employees who published a proposal demanding that employees at major AI companies be allowed a “right to warn” about advanced AI. Per the proposal: “AI companies have strong financial incentives to avoid effective oversight, and we do not believe bespoke structures of corporate governance are sufficient to change this.”  Obviously, they were right: OpenAI’s nonprofit was meant to reign over the for-profit arm, but Altman just flipped that structure upside down.   After years of sweet-talking the press, the public, and the policymakers in Congress, assuring all that OpenAI wants regulation and cares more about safety than about money, Altman is not even bothering to play games anymore. He’s showing everyone his true colors. Governor Newsom, are you seeing this? Congress, are you seeing this? World, are you seeing this?

Enlarge The Tor Project, the nonprofit that maintains software for the Tor anonymity network, is joining forces with Tails, the maker of a portable operating system that uses Tor. Both organizations seek to pool resources, lower overhead, and collaborate more closely on their mission of online anonymity. Tails and the Tor Project began discussing the possibility of merging late last year, the two organizations said. At the time, Tails was maxing out its current resources. The two groups ultimately decided it would be mutually beneficial for them to come together. “Rather than expanding Tails’s operational capacity on their own and putting more stress on Tails workers, merging with the Tor Project, with its larger and established operational framework, offered a solution,” Thursday’s joint statement said. “By joining forces, the Tails team can now focus on their core mission of maintaining and improving Tails OS, exploring more and complementary use cases while benefiting from the larger organizational structure of The Tor Project.”

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