How The Last Voyage of the Demeter Revamps a Chilling Chapter From Dracula

Warning: This post contains spoilers for The Last Voyage of the Demeter.

The seventh chapter of Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula, titled “The Captain’s Log,” chronicles the fate of the crew of the doomed merchant ship the Demeter through a series of logbook entries detailing the vessel’s disastrous voyage from the Black Sea port of Varna to Whitby, England.

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Unaware that Dracula is onboard, the captain writes how, over the course of their journey, crew members went missing until just he and the first mate were left on the Demeter. After the first mate caught sight of “a man, tall and thin, and ghastly pale,” he jumped overboard rather than die by the vampire’s hand. Eventually, the captain lashed himself to the wheel with a crucifix in hand to try to bring the ship into port.

“I shall tie my hands to the wheel when my strength begins to fail, and along with them I shall tie that which He, It, dare not touch,” reads the captain’s final log entry, which is found rolled up inside a corked bottle in his pocket after the Demeter arrives in Whitby with no one alive onboard. “And then, come good wind or foul, I shall save my soul, and my honour as a captain. I am growing weaker, and the night is coming on. If He can look me in the face again, I may not have time to act.”

The Last Voyage of the Demeter, in theaters Aug. 11, takes this chilling interlude in the original story and turns it into a full-length fright flick. “I wanted to make a genuine horror movie about this little part of the novel,” says director André Øvredal (The Autopsy of Jane Doe, Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark). “I found that to be a great challenge and a great way of doing something that could be part of [Dracula‘s] huge, wonderful legacy, but wouldn’t risk standing next to giant movies [that have come before]. It’s its own thing.”

The long journey of The Last Voyage of the Demeter

Øvredal signed on to helm Demeter from a screenplay by Bragi Schut Jr. and Zak Olkewicz in October 2019, nearly two decades after Phoenix Pictures acquired Schut Jr.’s original script in 2003. Prior to Øvredal’s involvement, a variety of directors, from Robert Schwentke to Neil Marshall to David Slade, had been attached to the project at different points in time.

The single chapter is such a captivating one that Demeter producers Mike Medavoy and Bradley J. Fischer say they were determined to get a movie adaptation made no matter how long it took.

“Dracula is obviously a very iconic and well-tread piece of IP that’s been in the public domain forever. But this particular story was one that hadn’t really been dramatized. It’s been used as connective tissue in other Dracula adaptations,” says Fischer, referencing scenes in 1922’s Nosferatu and 1992’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula. “But no one had told the story of what happens on this ship across the body of a single film.”

Demeter traps its characters in a contained, isolated setting at the mercy of an elusive monster, a narrative arc that Medavoy says brought to mind one iconic horror movie in particular.

“It reminded me of Alien with Dracula in it. Dracula is the alien on the ship,” he says. “That’s what drew me to the story.”

Dracula at sea

Demeter stars Liam Cunningham as Captain Eliot, David Dastmalchian as first mate Wojchek, and Jon Jon Briones, Martin Furulund, Stefan Kapicic, Nikolai Nikolaeff, and Chris Walley as the ship’s crew. It also introduces some additional main players who don’t feature in the book: Captain Eliot’s grandson Toby (Woody Norman), Dr. Clemens (Corey Hawkins), and a stowaway named Anna (Aisling Franciosi) who is smuggled onboard by Dracula as a food source.

The role of Dracula (or Nosferatu) belongs to veteran creature actor Javier Botet, who has terrified audiences for years playing monsters in movies like 2013’s Mama, 2016’s The Conjuring 2, 2017’s IT, and 2018’s Slender Man. “[Botet] breaches that careful relationship between human character and monster,” Øvredal says. “He can find intelligence just through body language in how a creature is portrayed on screen.”

That’s a quality Øvredal needed in his Dracula, as Demeter paints the vampire as a vicious, bloodthirsty beast rather than the sophisticated, seductive count he often appears as.

“Depicting Dracula as a monstrous, more freaky character was very alluring,” Øvredal says. “I wanted to lean into the fact that he’s lived for 400 years. I didn’t want to see a beautiful Hollywood actor being charming and suave.

“We also removed the sexuality that Dracula is often depicted with because it’s essentially just a survival tale for everyone, including him,” he adds. “I wanted to see that he has survived and survived and that he will survive this journey as well because, as we know, the story of Dracula continues on.”

How The Last Voyage of the Demeter ends

In Stoker’s Dracula, the Demeter arrives in England amid a great storm. Witnesses see a large dog disembark from the ship and find only the corpse of the captain still on board.

The Last Voyage of the Demeter offers an inside look at all the horrors that play out on the ship throughout its final journey.

“One of the great thematic elements of the story that is profound in its horror is the way that Dracula takes from each character the thing that person loves the most, including turning the ship itself into a living nightmare of the sea,” Fischer says. “It’s not enough that it’s sustaining itself off of the blood of these people. It wants them to suffer in a way and enjoys it.”

However, unlike in the book, the movie ends with one person who was onboard the Demeter, Clemens, surviving the passage and making his way to London with the intent of hunting Dracula down. When asked whether this twist opens the door for a sequel, Øvredal says it would be “quite a revisionist take” on what happens in the book from that point on.

“We try to stay reasonably true to the novel in this depiction,” he says. “This movie is really about honoring the novel. But if you go further with Clemens’ character, he obviously doesn’t exist in the book.”

source https://time.com/6302588/last-voyage-of-demeter-dracula-movie/

The Alarming Rise of the Wholesome Romance

Once upon a time, in a universe much like our own, the United States of America had a female President. And that female President had a son. His name was Alex Claremont-Diaz, and he had a plan to help his mom flip Texas blue. Then he met Henry, a literal British prince. It was mutual rancor at first sight; down-to-earth Alex thought Henry a snob, and haughty Henry thought Alex an ill-mannered commoner. This antipathy escalated into an international incident at the royal wedding of Henry’s older brother, which climaxed in a giant cake toppling and burying them under layers of fluffy icing.

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Fast-forward through a handful of publicity stunts designed to sell the public on their friendship, and the two young men are hopelessly, hornily in love. But neither is openly queer. “Prince Henry belongs to Britain,” Henry explains.

If you’re worried this is all destined to end in heartbreak (and geopolitical catastrophe) then you probably aren’t familiar with Casey McQuiston, who dreamed up the scenario in their hit 2019 novel Red, White, and Royal Blue. Now back on bestseller lists in anticipation of a frothy new adaptation, debuting Aug. 11 on Prime Video, Royal Blue is emblematic of a new generation of love story that has conquered pop culture. I call it wholesome romance.

Decorated with cute illustrations of adorable couples, wholesome-romance covers leap out from bookstore displays in gummy-candy hues. Whether shelved as contemporary romance, YA, or new adult (coming-of-age stories about people in their 20s), these buoyant books take place in more idyllic versions of our reality, full of gentle humor and blessed with happy endings. The stakes are low, the people kind, the sex scenes PG-13 or vanilla. And the books—like Heartstopper (based on Alice Oseman’s comic), which just dropped its second season on Netflix; and Amazon’s The Summer I Turned Pretty, whose author Jenny Han’s YA romances have fueled three movies and two TV series since 2018—are getting snapped up by Hollywood. The sensibility has breached the romance-novel-to-rom-com pipeline and spilled over into literary fiction, reality TV, podcasts.

Unassuming as they may be, the titles represent a dramatic shift in the fantasy lives of their mostly female audience. The multiplatform romance (and adjacent) juggernauts of the recent past, from Twilight and The Fault in Our Stars to Fifty Shades of Grey, seduced fans with bloodsucking dreamboats, BDSM billionaires, and terminally ill teens. Now, when we immerse ourselves in a love story, fewer of us seem to seek that frisson of danger. What has become more exotic, and thus more desirable, is comfort, safety, stability. That our collective daydreams now seem so healthy and achievable is not necessarily a sign of progress.

No story epitomizes this new sensibility like Beach Read, the breakthrough novel by erstwhile YA author Emily Henry. Published two months into COVID lockdown, in May 2020, the book hinges on the classic rom-com trope enemies to lovers. After the sudden death of her father and a breakup with her boyfriend of many years, romance writer January Andrews moves into the secret beach house that her seemingly perfect dad used to conduct an affair. She’s got all summer to deliver a new manuscript but can no longer bear to write happily-ever-after love stories. Then she realizes her next door neighbor is an old college rival who has grown up to be an acclaimed literary novelist. They fall in love, brought together by the challenge to swap genres for the summer.

Beach Read—like Henry’s subsequent novels, including 2023’s Happy Place, now in its fourth month on bestseller lists—has all the elements of a comforting romance. The characters are normal humans, albeit attractive ones with glamorous careers, who have familiar problems. (For further reading: Hannah Grace’s recent hit Icebreaker, which stars an Olympic figure skating hopeful and the captain of her college’s hockey team.) The reader-surrogate female narrator is independent and outspoken. (The female protagonists of queer romances also tend to be firecrackers, as in McQuiston’s 2022 YA novel I Kissed Shara Wheeler.) The setting, a Michigan beach town, is beautiful but not ostentatious. (See also: the family-owned California winery of Jasmine Guillory’s Drunk on Love.) The ratio of witty banter to explicit lovemaking is high. (Like Henry and McQuiston, many of the authors straddle the YA and adult romance worlds.)

Read more: The 10 Best TV Rom-Coms of the Streaming Era

Henry and many of her peers play to their audience by writing the stories they treasure into the book. (There’s a whole subgenre of romance novels about people who love to read and write, including Henry’s Book Lovers.) Like Laura Jean in Han’s To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, January was a romance reader first; she discovered the genre when she picked up a paperback in the waiting room of her cancer-stricken mom’s radiologist. “It was the first wave of relief I’d felt in weeks, and from there, I binge-read every romance novel I could get my hands on,” she recalls. “Mom’s first diagnosis taught me that love was an escape rope, “but it was her second diagnosis that taught me love could be a life vest when you were drowning.”

That life raft is a booming business. After a lockdown bump, and as the genre continues to trend in the corner of TikTok known as BookTok, Publisher’s Weekly reported a precipitous 52.4% increase in romance book sales in 2022. This summer, along with Happy Place and Icebreaker, romances by Ali Hazelwood, Ann Napolitano, Taylor Jenkins Reid, and publishing powerhouse Colleen Hoover dominate bestseller lists. A new streaming adaptation of a wholesome romance seems to pop up weekly, from Netflix’s take on Katherine Center’s novel Happiness for Beginners, whose premise is more or less Wild as a rom-com, to Paramount+’s Love in Taipei, a breezy new adult romance based on Abigail Hing Wen’s YA novel.

But the wholesome-romance sensibility isn’t just a sales trend within an isolated publishing niche. Nor is it simply the latest incarnation of the rom-com, which both entails a more specific format and allows for more variation in tone. It’s about our society’s shifting orientation towards romance, regardless of genre. The yearning for grounded love stories about regular, well-intentioned people with relatable goals—marriage, professional achievement, maybe kids—has become evident across narrative art forms, from high-brow novels to low-brow reality TV.

Elsewhere on nonfiction TV, series like Netflix’s Dating Around, which follows regular people on a series of first dates, and Showtime’s Couples Therapy allow us to eavesdrop on various stages of real-life romance. Vicarious indulgence in the minutiae of other people’s relationships is a trendlet unto itself; Esther Perel’s hit podcast Where Should We Begin? is another option for couples-therapy voyeurism. In this year’s breakout indie romance film, Celine Song’s Past Lives, a young woman must choose between a childhood friend from Korea who might have been the love of her life and the American man she married. In the end, she makes the safe decision.

Compare the Netflix smash Love Is Blind to the waning grand dame of dating shows, The Bachelor. While the latter is a glittering fairy tale of courtship, like Cinderella reenacted by a cast of influencers and models, the former throws a couple dozen millennials into isolated “pods,” where they build bonds with potential mates sight unseen. Before they can gaze deep into each other’s eyes, cast members establish compatibility by comparing values, ambitions, religious beliefs, financial circumstances, desires to procreate. Love Is Blind creator Chris Coelen has built a flourishing brand of shows premised on priming young adults—usually white-collar, middle-class professionals—for long-term partnerships: Married at First Sight, Perfect Match, The Ultimatum and spinoff The Ultimatum: Queer Love.

Some of the biggest recent literary novels have riffed on the tropes of the wholesome romance. Irish author Sally Rooney became an international sensation with books that contrast romance and friendship with the everyday misery of 21st-century capitalism—and posit love as an imperfect refuge. (Rooney’s Normal People and Conversations With Friends were swiftly adapted into Hulu miniseries.) The genre-hopping Nigerian writer Akwaeke Emezi articulates this idea in their acclaimed 2022 romance, You Made a Fool of Death With Your Beauty. “I think we’re just figuring out how to survive a world on fire… that it’s okay to be alive,” says Emezi’s heroine, Feyi. A young widow, she witnessed her husband’s car-crash death and has denied herself love and pleasure since. But Feyi is also an avatar for anyone struggling to feel truly alive at a time when COVID and war and opioids and climate crisis make us all, if we’re lucky enough to survive, witnesses to large-scale death.

Romance, like sci-fi and fantasy, has always promised an escape from reality. But reality has rarely felt as chaotic as it has since the norm-shattering election of Donald Trump segued into a deadly pandemic, as violent backlash to the Movement for Black Lives, feminism, and LGBTQ liberation has accelerated. Romance once offered audiences—whether they were bored housewives or bored with swiping through dating apps—an escape from daily doldrums by exploiting extremes of emotion and experience in what were essentially adventure stories.

It wasn’t until the Sexual Revolution had swept through youth culture that romance novels got explicit about sexuality. The so-called bodice ripper was born in 1972, with Kathleen E. Woodiwiss’ The Flame and the Flower—which follows an 18th-century maiden who falls for the ship captain who kidnaps and ravages her. Erica Jong’s feminist sex romp Fear of Flying and Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris (whose muddled notions of consent were mirrored by Bertolucci and star Marlon Brando’s alleged behavior toward the female lead, Maria Schneider) followed. Around the same time, Deep Throat took porn movies mainstream. By the Reagan ’80s and the Clinton ’90s, as economic prosperity helped cloister Middle America from the tragic fallout of epidemics like AIDS and crack, erotic thrillers from Body Heat to Cruising needled the collective subconscious about infidelity, queerness, female empowerment. The dominant romance franchises of the early 21st century, Twilight and Fifty Shades, put regular girls at the mercy of powerful men who hurt them, consensually or otherwise.

While Twilight traced its roots to the brooding romances of the Brontë sisters, wholesome romance has more in common with their predecessor Jane Austen’s light, witty novels of smart women and the difficult men who learn to love them. Which might explain why Shondaland’s Regency romance Bridgerton, based on Julia Quinn’s blockbuster books, became a phenomenon when it debuted on Netflix over the lonely pandemic holidays of 2020—and why writer-star Joel Kim Booster used Pride and Prejudice as a guide for his gay rom-com Fire Island, which made a splash on Hulu in 2022.

More than anything, though, this wholesome-romance moment reminds me of the vogue for screwball comedies in the 1930s. With the Great Depression raging, Americans scrounged pennies to watch beautiful people flirt. The sequins and nightclubs and Deco roadsters represented a lifestyle that suddenly no longer seemed attainable to the salaried masses.

The characters in Netflix’s breathless adaptation of Heartstopper are teenagers, but when it comes to emotional intelligence, they are wise beyond their years. At the center of the show’s whirlwind of LGBTQ first love are the openly gay Charlie (Joe Locke) and his crush turned boyfriend Nick (Kit Connor), a rugby star who spends much of the new season slowly coming out. One night, Nick apologizes for failing to tell his friends he’s bisexual at a party when he’d promised Charlie he would do so. Charlie’s response is remarkably mature. “I think there’s this idea that when you’re not straight, you have to tell all your friends and family immediately—like you owe it to them. But you don’t,” he says. “I want you to come out when and how you want to. And if that takes a long time, that’s completely OK.”

It sounds like the kind of thing a person who had been through therapy would say. But this sort of talk is a lingua franca for the sensitive teens and young adults who populate wholesome romances. Sometimes they are literally in therapy. More often, they drop pop-psychology buzzwords like processing—a term that accurately describes the frequent heart-to-hearts in which the lovers share the experiences that made them who they are.

Mental health is central to the wholesome romance’s fantasy of safety, as manifested in relationships built on emotional intimacy. Like Charlie, who once faced bullying after being outed, many of the protagonists in this otherwise cheery subgenre have trauma in their past. This is where these stories overlap with Hoover’s wildly popular, darker romances. In her biggest hit, It Ends With Us, flower-shop owner Lily meets irresistible lothario Ryle hours after her abusive father’s funeral. But when Ryle becomes violent, she finds the courage to leave. Instead of eroticizing abuse, as early bodice rippers did, Hoover’s novel (soon to be a movie starring Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni) is built around the dream of breaking a destructive cycle, even if its compassionate portrait of Ryle can come worryingly close to justifying his behavior.

Hoover notwithstanding, many of these romance narratives also diverge from the straightness and whiteness that have suffused the vast majority of mega-mainstream romances in the past. In the wholesome romance, love isn’t just a refuge from old trauma or contemporary cataclysms. It’s also a safe space for characters—and audiences—who regularly experience sexism or racism or homophobia. Published midway through Trump’s term, Red, White & Royal Blue projects that same sense of security into the political sphere, imagining a Democratic female President (along with a Black, female British Prime Minister) who loves her queer son.

In many ways, the wholesome romance is an encouraging trend. And I can personally attest to its comforts. But I’m not convinced it says anything positive about the state of the world. Escapism is not meant to be rational; on the contrary, it’s a means of imagining the impossible. It’s no coincidence that 50 years ago, the powerful gains of the women’s movement—culminating in Roe vs. Wade—coexisted with romances that often placed female characters in positions of powerlessness. What’s taboo becomes titillating. Women who devoured the violent “rape sagas” of the ’70s were not lining up to be sexually assaulted. Twilight fans did not actually want to have their bodies ripped asunder by a super-strong fetus with a vampire for a father.

The great recycling center that is American pop culture in the 21st century has, inevitably, endeavored to bring back the steamy, scary, kinky entertainment of generations past. Yet erotic-thriller auteur Adrian Lyne’s 2022 comeback, Deep Water, was unintentionally funny more than exhilarating; Paramount+’s attempt to reimagine Lyne’s Fatal Attraction fell disastrously flat. On the heels of five years’ worth of #MeToo revelations, Hollywood’s conflation of love with predation no longer seems so exotic.

What we want instead are gentler, less stressful romances. And the more popular they become, the more that popularity looks like a red flag for society at large and female audiences in particular. Why would anyone need to escape into a story where lifestyles are comfortable, relationships are respectful, women are financially independent, and mental health is paramount if that was already their reality—or even an achievable goal? It isn’t such a wholesome thought.

source https://time.com/6303477/red-white-and-royal-blue-wholesome-romance/

A True New Yorker Would Never Give Up Carrie Bradshaw’s Apartment

And Just Like That… has been filled with shocking life changes for Carrie Bradshaw, most recently her controversial decision to get back together with her former fiancé Aidan for the fourth time. But in episode 9 of season 2, which dropped on Max on Aug. 10, the stylish Manhattanite considers a decision that’s truly unthinkable: selling her beloved Upper East Side apartment.

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In the season 5 premiere of Sex and the City, which aired in July 2002, Carrie mused that her one great love may actually be New York itself—and her apartment was a major part of that. A constant through her every relationship and phase, the cozy space served as her home, office, and styling center: it was the place where did her writing, hosted her boyfriends, and stored her seemingly endless collection of Manolo Blahniks. Aspects of the apartment have become visual emblems of the show, from her iconic walk-through closet spilling over with party dresses to the brownstone stoop where she hailed cabs and made out with dates. And storylines that centered the apartment—including Aidan’s failed attempts to change it into a home where he fit and Carrie’s use of it as a safe haven in the first Sex and the City movie after she broke off her engagement with Mr. Big and again in And Just Like That… when he died—have only driven home the point that Carrie’s place is a huge part of who she is.

Which is why it feels so wrong that in the most recent episode of And Just Like That… Carrie declares she’s ready to sell her apartment in favor of buying a four bedroom on Gramercy Park to help her make it work with Aidan. Since the woodworker’s return earlier this season, the reunited lovebirds have been in a state of bliss—except for the fact that Aidan refuses to enter Carrie’s place because of the bad memories it holds for him. The man can’t exactly be blamed for being triggered by the apartment where he once put in hours of labor refinishing floors in hopes of a future that was dashed away first by Carrie’s infidelity and then by her cold feet. But having Carrie sell her apartment—the home that has seen her through six seasons of Sex and the City, two movies, and a season of And Just Like That…—feels like a wild turn. Not to mention laughably unfathomable in this economy. 

Read More: Why Carrie and Aidan’s Reunion on And Just Like That Makes No Sense

The apartment—an exceptionally large alcove studio in a pre-war brownstone building located at 245 East 73rd St. (an address that doesn’t exist in real life)—was introduced on Sex and the City in the early 2000s as a rent-controlled property that Carrie lived in for the astonishingly low price of $700 a month. In one of the major plot points of her relationship with Aidan, the building became a co-op, so he bought the apartment for them to live in as a couple. When they broke up, Charlotte offered Carrie her engagement ring to help buy the place back.

For Madison Sutton, a Manhattan-based real estate agent with Serhant who also runs a TikTok account giving tips on NYC real estate, Carrie’s decision to sell her longtime home doesn’t make sense. Sutton estimates that the Upper East Side apartment would sell for anywhere from $650,000 to $750,000 while the tony Gramercy Park apartment Carrie is considering would go for about $4.5 million (an estimate Sutton calculated based on similar properties currently for sale)—plus fees, taxes, and closing costs. All of this amounts to a jump in housing costs that most people just wouldn’t choose to make. “I don’t think a financial advisor would advise it,” Sutton says.

Sutton also points out that given the current housing market, Carrie might have a hard time selling her apartment, especially since her co-op building is older and doesn’t have amenities like a doorman or gym. “Right now, we’re heavily affected by interest rates, especially in the sub-one million market,” she says. “Less people are buying right now than they are renting because of how high the interest rates are, so her place would likely sit on the market.”

Sutton estimates that Carrie’s maintenance fees for her Upper East Side home would realistically be between $1,000 and $1,200 per month. Assuming the writer has fully paid off her mortgage, that’s a relatively low cost for keeping a New York City apartment. She would advise Carrie to either sublet the place if her co-op allowed it or keep the property for use in the future. “If she has the financial freedom to hold on to her apartment for $12,000 a year, I would not sell in this market,” Sutton says. “From what we know of her financial background and what she likely inherited from Big, I’m not sure it makes sense for her to let go of this property.”

A true New Yorker appreciates the value of good real estate. And anyone who’s lived in the city as long as Carrie should understand the math here—to sell her UES apartment would be a loss and a risk on multiple levels, especially considering the volatility of her past with Aidan. Home ownership often has more longevity than romantic relationships do. “People come and go, but that apartment has been in her life for 30 years,” Sutton says. “A true friend would advise her to hold on to that—and a good agent would say the same.”

source https://time.com/6303369/carrie-selling-apartment-aidan-and-just-like-that/

Trump Valet Walt Nauta Pleads Not Guilty to New Charges in Classified Docs Case

FORT PIERCE, Fla.—Donald Trump’s valet pleaded not guilty on Thursday to new charges in the case accusing the ex-president of illegally hoarding classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate while the property manager had his arraignment postponed because he still hasn’t secured a Florida-based attorney.

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Trump waived his right to appear alongside valet Walt Nauta and property manager Carlos De Oliveira at the hearing in the federal court in Fort Pierce, and the judge accepted a not guilty plea he made in court papers last week.

De Oliveira’s failure to finalize local counsel marks the latest delay in the case, which is scheduled to go to trial in May — a date Trump’s lawyers made clear they want to push back. The judge set a new arraignment date for De Oliveira on Tuesday.

An updated indictment brought by special counsel Jack Smith late last month accuses Nauta and De Oliveira of scheming with the Republican former president to try to delete Mar-a-Lago surveillance video sought by investigators. They face charges including conspiracy to obstruct justice in the case stemming from secret government documents found at the Palm Beach club after Trump left the White House in 2021.

Nauta and Trump were charged in June and previously pleaded not guilty, but a new indictment added more charges and De Oliveira to the case. De Oliveira made an initial appearance in court in July but didn’t enter a plea because he hadn’t retained local counsel.

Trump was already charged with dozens of felony counts, and the indictment added new counts of obstruction and willful retention of national defense information.

It’s one of three different criminal cases Trump is facing this year as he tries to reclaim the White House in 2024. He’s also gearing up for a possible fourth indictment, in a case out of Fulton County, Georgia, over alleged efforts by him and his Republican allies to illegally meddle in the 2020 election in that state. The county district attorney, Fani Willis, a Democrat, has signaled that any indictments in the case would likely come this month.

Trump has denied any wrongdoing and has characterized all the cases against him as politically motivated.

He pleaded not guilty in Washington’s federal court last week in a second case brought by Smith that accuses him of conspiring with allies to overturn his 2020 election loss to Democrat Joe Biden.

Smith’s team is expected on Thursday to propose a trial date for that case. Trump is already scheduled to stand trial in March in a New York state case stemming from hush money payments made during the 2016 election and in May in the classified documents case.

The updated indictment in the documents case centers on surveillance footage at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate. Trump is alleged to have asked for the footage to be deleted after FBI and Justice Department investigators visited in June 2022 to collect classified documents he took with him after leaving the White House.

Video from Mar-a-Lago would ultimately become vital to the government’s case because, prosecutors said, it shows Nauta moving boxes in and out of a storage room — an act alleged to have been done at Trump’s direction and in an effort to hide records not only from investigators but also from Trump’s own lawyers.

Days after the Justice Department sent a subpoena for video footage at Mar-a-Lago to the Trump Organization in June 2022, prosecutors say, De Oliveira asked an information technology staffer how long the server retained footage and told the employee “the boss” wanted it deleted. When the employee said he didn’t believe he was able to do that, De Oliveira insisted the “boss” wanted it done, asking, “What are we going to do?”

Prosecutors allege that De Oliveira later lied in interviews with investigators, falsely claiming that he hadn’t even seen boxes moved into Mar-a-Lago after Trump left the White House.

De Oliveira’s Washington attorney, John Irving, told reporters after the last hearing that he looks forward to seeing what potential evidence the Justice Department has, and he declined to comment about whether De Oliveira has been asked to testify against Trump.

The new indictment also charges Trump with illegally holding on to a document he’s alleged to have shown off to visitors in New Jersey.

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source https://time.com/6303527/trump-valet-walt-nauta-pleads-not-guilty/

The Mayor of America’s Hottest City Learned a Lot From July’s Heat Wave

Temperatures in Phoenix, Ariz. rose above 110°F for 31 straight days last month, a record-breaking spell of extreme heat that raised sidewalks to scalding temperatures, keeled over mighty saguaro cacti, and inundated hospitals with patients suffering from heat-related ailments. All told, Phoenix’s Maricopa County reported 39 heat-related deaths in July, with more than 300 others being investigated.

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Such conditions are likely to come again soon. The first two weeks of August saw slightly cooler temperatures in the city, but they are projected to rise again in the coming days. And even after Phoenix residents make it through this summer and into the balmy winter months, global climate change likely means that yet more super-heat waves will be back in the years ahead.

The city has made efforts to adapt. Phoenix created the first publicly funded heat response office in the U.S. in 2021, and appointed a former environmental sciences professor as its leader. It’s painting roads with a reflective coating designed to absorb less heat, and it has launched an initiative to improve tree cover in poorer parts of the city. It’s also building new air-conditioned homeless shelters out of shipping containers. 

Still, it remains to be seen if one of the country’s fastest-growing cities can adapt faster than temperatures rise. In the aftermath of the unprecedented stretch of extreme heat, TIME spoke with Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego about the response to the brutal heat wave, and what the city has learned going forward.

The following interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.

Time: Phoenix just got out of an unprecedented heat wave. Can you tell us a bit about where things stand now?

Mayor Kate Gallego: Phoenix is the valley of the sun—we are used to hot summers. We have wonderful weather most of the year, but we know that every summer is going to be hot. This summer was record-breaking, particularly for days above 110 degrees. We got some rain last night so we’re doing a little bit better today. But it was a very tough summer for our community, particularly for those who are most vulnerable.

There’s been a lot written about the desperate plight of poor and unhoused people in Phoenix dealing with these temperatures. What level of resources has that required from the city?

We have a network of more than 60 cooling centers where individuals can go. We have a program called Cold Callers where we can check on people who are likely to be most vulnerable to heat, including people with health challenges and older adults. We have a network of volunteers that can hand out cooling kits throughout our community as well as maps or resources related to heat. We are working as hard as we can to develop new shelter options—that’s everything from hotels to creating housing out of shipping containers. As we speak, people are moving into a shipping container project that the city of Phoenix purchased with American Rescue Plan dollars. It’s powered by solar energy with onsite batteries, and it’s just one example of how we’re trying to get shelter built quickly. Another advantage of the shipping container housing is that it can be manufactured indoors so that the construction workers who are building it have a little bit more protection from the summer heat.

Has this extreme heat meant that the city had to spend more on programs like those to keep people safe? 

We have a lot of long term investments to try to increase the amount of affordable housing and shelter, and then we continue to invest in new programs every year. Every summer we learn more. We’ve learned a lot about mobile cooling units being very positive. We’ve learned new techniques that our firefighters use to cool people down, including getting ice baths out in the field. So yes, we are spending more than we have before, but we’re also getting smarter and tracking which solutions really deliver.

What else have you learned about what solutions really work, and which aren’t as useful in dealing with extreme heat?

We have found that really looking at the built environment, including the materials you choose, can be very important. Green buildings have performed [much better]. We have a cool pavement program where we do a lighter colored sealant on city streets, and Arizona State University has found about a 10-12 degree cooling impact [from that]. We’re looking at a variety of different programs in the water area, which range from protecting our water supply to just getting out water to our community. We have a variety of programs on reducing greenhouse gas emissions. One that has been very popular is in our key transit corridors, such as our downtown, [where] we are pushing towards 75% shade cover—that will be a mix of planting trees and using things like canopies in the built environment. And that makes a really significant impact and allows people to move about more successfully. Having a heat office that is focused completely on this challenge has been a great success for us. Having a one stop shop where people can go with ideas and challenges around heat really gives us more momentum to get things done. 

Do you think there’s any misconceptions among people from other parts of the U.S. about Phoenix’s heat?

One of the lessons we’ve all learned this summer has been that extreme heat happens in every part of the country, as well as all over the world. It is not a challenge that is just associated with sunny communities. We saw some of our colder states hit heat records. Phoenix is on the front lines of climate change, but it is coming to every part of our country, and we all need to do more to prepare. I hope we will also step up and reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and I’m trying to lead Phoenix in that direction.

Do you think that the recent stretch of extreme heat has strengthened residents’ resolve to lower greenhouse gas emissions?

Phoenix voters have already told pollsters for years that they believe greenhouse gas emissions are a challenge we need to focus on. Our voters passed a [2015] plan that said we wanted to be the most sustainable desert city. But I do think there is added momentum for investments in infrastructure related to heat, as well as supporting innovative solutions such as cool pavement and green buildings. I’m optimistic that we’ll get new resources from the federal level. I’m in my fifth year now as mayor, and this was my first conversation with a president around heat. I’m excited that we have someone in the White House who is so interested in solutions. We’re also seeing new momentum with the federal legislation to make heat a federally eligible disaster, now that so many communities have seen it’s a challenge for them. 

I am also aware though that this is a very polarizing issue for some people. We have elected officials in the Arizona legislature who still maintain that this should not be a priority.

Have you had conversations with any of those folks since this heat wave? Have you sensed any change in their outlook? 

We just negotiated a regional transportation plan for the greater Phoenix area. One of the top priorities for the [conservative] Freedom Caucus in the negotiations was to protect fossil fuel vehicles. They were also very concerned about having a person on the regional transportation oversight committee who was focused on [climate] resilience. Climate change is a settled issue for most Phoenix voters, but it continues to be one on which there is debate at the elected official level.

Are there lingering effects on first responders and residents from the heat wave? 

Our first responders were heroic. They worked in very difficult conditions. We had several very large fires, so imagine wearing tens of pounds of gear and having to go out into a blaze when it’s 110 degrees. We have people who had real medical challenges that will continue, and many residents will see their highest power bill ever in the coming weeks. We’re doing a big push around the Inflation Reduction Act money that is available for residents to invest in solar and energy efficiency. We want to try to find as many long term solutions as possible, and we’re grateful that the federal government is stepping up to help people impacted by high power bills.

source https://time.com/6303354/phoenix-mayor-kate-gallego-interview-heat-wave/

Dianne Feinstein Hospitalized After Fall at Home

(WASHINGTON) — U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the oldest member of Congress, fell in her home and went to a hospital, her office said on Wednesday.

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The 90-year-old California Democrat, who has faced mounting concerns about her health and her ability to perform the duties of a senator, “briefly went to the hospital yesterday afternoon as a precaution after a minor fall in her home,” her office said in a statement.

All of her scans were clear, and she returned home, said her spokesman Adam Russell, who provided no further details.

Read More: Hillary Clinton: Dianne Feinstein Shouldn’t Retire

The San Francisco hospital visit comes after Feinstein missed months of work in Washington earlier this year when she was hospitalized for the shingles virus and its side effects. Since her return to work in May, she has traveled the Capitol halls in a wheelchair and has often appeared confused and disoriented.

Feinstein has defended her ability to perform her job, though her office said in May that she was still experiencing vision and balance impairments from the shingles virus.

Feinstein, who took office in 1992, announced earlier this year that she would not seek reelection in 2024. Several Democrats have already entered the race to replace her.

source https://time.com/6303028/dianne-feinstein-hospitalized-fall/

This Urgent Care Clinic Is Flooding the Internet With Nonsensical Posts. Is AI to Blame?

You might go to an urgent care facility’s website to make an appointment or read an explanation of what causes fevers. But most people are probably not looking to urgent care websites for an explanation of what happens when unicorns consume ketamine.

But that—and millions of other pages about things that don’t make much sense—have suddenly been popping up on the website of a New York City-based urgent care clinic called Nao Medical. The company, which says it has 16 locations in New York City and Long Island, appears to be using AI to generate a vast flood of well-written and sensibly structured—but not particularly accurate—posts about popular topics in an effort to rank higher on Google. 

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One post on Nao Medical’s website explains a medical condition it calls “Derek Jeter Herpes Tree,” which is not actually a medical condition but that Nao says nevertheless is “a rare viral infection” that affects trees. There are posts promising that Ivermectin can help COVID-19 patients regain their sense of smell (not true), about getting iodine poisoning from eating too much shrimp (extremely unlikely), about a “cutting-edge technology” called the Cloud 5 Zinc Shell (not a real thing) and a “revolutionary healthcare solution” called Chicken Par Y (not a real thing either.) Google just about anything you can think of and “Nao Medical” and you will find a long list of posts, some of which appear to make some sense, others which don’t. 

“Are you tired of the traditional colonoscopy procedure? Looking for a more enjoyable and engaging way to protect your health? Look no further than color guard!” one post reads, going on to explain that the color guard (yes, the people who wave flags in marching bands) can be a “fun and effective” alternative to colonoscopy procedures. (It appears to have gotten the color guard confused with Cologuard, an at-home colon cancer screening test.) 

We were promised that AI would change the world for the better, freeing humans from meaningless tasks and putting a wealth of information at our fingertips. But now that AI is here, the first-hand negative consequences are also piling up. Sites like Nao Medical appear to be using AI to generate millions of pages of content that are not only useless, but also spreading or amplifying misinformation that exists in other parts of the Internet.

Read More: The AI Arms Race Is Changing Everything

The eerie thing about the Nao Medical posts is that they are not total nonsense. The article “Why Are Unicorns Healthier Than Dragons” makes a decent case, with bullet points and headers, as to why the former imaginary creature has superior health to the latter imaginary creature. (One explanation: “They often retreat to serene meadows and engage in meditation, allowing them to maintain a calm and balanced state of mind.”) The article extolling the “Surprising Health Benefits of Ginger Bread Shrek” does not describe why the post links the character Shrek to ginger bread, but does provide a recipe and the promise that “by enjoying ginger bread Shrek, you can not only satisfy your sweet tooth but also give your immune system a natural boost.” 

According to Google algorithm and search engine optimization (SEO) experts, Nao Medical appears to be using AI to write millions and millions of posts, structuring them to have headings and keywords that people are using to search in Google. 

“It’s clear to see that AI is being used in some way to falsely inflate this site’s organic visibility through mass content production,” says Nick Boyle, SEO director at the Audit Lab, a British digital marketing agency.

Google looks for what it calls E-E-A-T when it decides which websites show up first in organic search: Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trust. Since Nao Medical is a legitimate group of medical centers with thousands of reviews on Google maps, Google perceives them as having experience and trust. By creating “copious amounts” of content on certain topics, Nao is appearing to try to convince Google that it also has authority on certain topics, says Marie Haynes, a Google algorithm expert with her own consulting firm who looked into Nao Medical’s web strategy for TIME. 

Google could be ranking Nao’s pages higher because it can easily find plausible-sounding information in Nao’s many AI-generated posts, which link externally and which have bolded subheadings with useful titles like “Fish Oil: Pros and Cons” (in a post about which is a better health choice: fish oil or Nao Medical.)

Nao Medical had about 11,000 daily impressions until early June, Haynes says.  Then the volume of pages on the site naomedical.com started to spike—between the first time she checked, on July 27, and the second time, July 31, the site went from about 15 million pages to 25 million. Now, the site has around 1.4 million daily impressions. “That doesn’t happen organically. It has to be black hat,” she says, referring to people who violate laws or ethical standards on the Internet. 

Nao Medical’s president, Arihant Jain, responded to initial questions about Nao Medical and its business model, saying the clinic boomed during the pandemic and then has struggled as patient volume dropped and as insurers refuse to pay for services they had once covered. But Jain did not respond to multiple follow-up queries about Nao Medical’s web strategy and whether the company used AI to create millions of posts. 

The company’s strategy is actually very clever, Haynes says. Nao appears to be addressing topics people are searching for but that don’t turn up a lot of organic results, making it easier for Nao to rise to the top. 

Nao Medical ranks on the first page if you are Googling “caffeine and autism,” for example. This is probably because Nao has created a “topical hub” with around 22 published pages about caffeine and autism, making the site seem authoritative on the subject.. The AI appears to have structured the posts well, with headings addressing topics and subtopics that Google knows people look for, such as “can caffeine worsen anxiety in individuals with autism?”

Nao’s success in getting to the top of Google results also illuminates a problem with the search engine that has been circulating on the Internet: that Google search “is dying” because it is coming up with too many useless results. One reason: that there are too many people whose job it is to “game their way to the top of Google,” wrote engineer Dmitri Brereton in a viral post in Feb. 2022. 

Google search has adapted to address new spam techniques and low-quality content for 25 years, and its goal is to show “helpful, relevant content that’s created for people, rather than to attain search engine rankings,” Danny Sullivan, public liaison for Google’s search business said in a statement provided to TIME. Google regularly launches updates to search to make sure it’s providing relevant information; in August 2022 it released an update that it said would lead to “more content by people, for people.” Using AI to generate content for the sole purpose of manipulating ranking results violates Google’s spam policy, the company says. But despite rising interest in generative AI, Google says, 99% of visits to websites from search have remained spam-free.

Read More: In the Rush to AI, We Can’t Afford to Trust Big Tech

Nao’s strategy seems like it would have limited benefits, given that most of the people running across this content online probably do not live within the clinic’s service area. But Jain told me that after Nao’s in-person patient volumes dropped after the pandemic, the company decided to offer more telemedicine, psychiatry, and nutrition services. “Our plans are to grow outside of New York,” he told me; the company already offers telemedicine in a few other states. 

Experts warned about AI flooding the internet with useless content but much of the AI-generated content popping up so far appears to be misleading or worse.  And there’s something particularly disturbing about a health care company using AI to improve its results. Patients could assume from its post volumes that Nao is more of a medical authority than it actually is.

Haynes, the SEO consultant, says this type of SEO tactic is unlikely to work for long. For one thing, Google is currently  implementing an AI content system that is built to detect “unhelpful” content, and, according to Haynes, many of Nao’s nonsense posts would likely fall into this category. So Google will catch up with Nao sooner or later. 

That’s what happened to a product review website called Conch-House.com, which put up around 6,000 posts a day in 2022, gaining 6 million users by scraping content from Amazon reviews. The site brought in $800,000 in revenue in two months—until Google shut it down. 

Besides, says Haynes, Google is constantly changing how search works. Generative AI could completely upend how Google processes and shows results; one experiment uses generative AI to improve results. That may mean it won’t make sense for websites to use AI to create content to answer questions because Google’s search will already be answering them—thanks, of course, to AI. 

source https://time.com/6302710/nao-medical-google-ai/