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⚡ Quick Take

• Season two of X-Men ’97 will introduce the mutant strike team X-Force, led by the cyborg Cable.
• The X-Force comics in Marvel history has a strange and varied set of adventures.
• X-Force has had several iterations over 35 years.

One of the new heroic teams coming in season two of X-Men ’97 is the militaristic mutant freedom fighters known as X-Force. Although the X-Force we’re introduced to in the series, led by the cyborg mutant Cable, isn’t a roster from the pages of Marvel Comics, it is based on several different versions of the team. But X-Force has a long and strange history in the Marvel Universe, going back to the early ’90s. Although their genesis really goes back well before that, to one of the very first X-Men spin-off teams, the New Mutants.

Marvel Comics The New Mutants Laid the Foundation for X-Force

To truly understand the origins of X-Force, we have to go back a decade earlier, to Uncanny X-Men’s first spin-off series, The New Mutants. Launched with a graphic novel in 1982, The New Mutants was created by X-Men architect Chris Claremont as a junior X-Men team. However, they were formed as a response to the apparent death of the X-Men. (They’d have a few of those.) A distraught Professor Charles Xavier gathers young mutants just coming into their own power from across the globe. But unlike the X-Men, they were meant to be trained in controlling their abilities only, not becoming mutant heroes. However, that plan didn’t quite work out. These kids got into all kinds of trouble.

Marvel Comics

The original New Mutants consisted of teenagers Cannonball (Sam Guthrie), Sunspot (Roberto DaCosta), Wolfsbane (Rahne Sinclair), Mirage (Dani Moonstar), and Karma (Xuân Cao Manh). They were soon joined by Colossus’ sister Illyana, now called Magik, and Doug Ramey (Cypher), the alien Warlock, and Magma (Amara Aquila). But Xavier eventually left for outer space after nearly dying, leaving his old friend/rival Magneto in charge. Needless to say, that didn’t work out, and Magneto eventually returned to his terrorist ways. By the late ‘80s, the New Mutants were without a mentor, and without a home after the X-Mansion was destroyed. After a brief time with the original five X-Men, now called X-Factor, they fused their rescued young mutant charges, like Boom-Boom and Rictor, with the New Mutants.

The Cyborg Soldier Cable Transforms the New Mutants into X-Force Marvel Comics

The New Mutants was still one of Marvel’s best sellers, thanks to writer Louise Simonson. But by 1989, it was running out of steam. So, Marvel hired a young artist named Rob Liefeld, tasked with bringing youthful energy to the series. He created a cyborg soldier named Cable, militant like Magneto, but believed in mutant/human coexistence like Xavier. He felt Xavier was too soft with his students, and molded them into a paramilitary unit. Introduced in New Mutants #87 in 1990, Cable proved instantly popular, giving The New Mutants new buzz.

Marvel Comics

As New Mutants‘ centennial issue approached, the “New” part of the title no longer applied. After issue #100, Marvel re-branded the title as X-Force with an all-new first issue, written by Fabian Nicieza. It sold a staggering 5 million copies, a world record at the time, broken a mere two months later by X-Men #1. We should note, a very important Marvel character emerged in the buildup to X-Force. New Mutants #98 was a Marvel milestone, as it introduced Deadpool to the Marvel Universe. Originally, he was meant to be a villain, but years later, he’d join a version of X-Force. Even more than the X-Men, Deadpool would forever have ties to the team.

X-Force Becomes A Marvel Comics Bestseller

X-Force only retained two members from the New Mutants, Cannonball and Boom-Boom. Another young mutant, the Native-American Warpath, brother of the long-dead X-Man Thundebird, also joined. Liefeld created all the rest of the members, including the alien mutant Shatterstar, the lucky Domino, and the catlike Feral. Former New Mutants like Rictor and Sunspot would soon rejoin, along with Banshee’s daughter Siryn. At the height of the ’90s comics boom, X-Force was selling hundreds of thousands of copies monthly, outstripping any previous sales from its former incarnation as New Mutants.

Marvel Comics

Cable remained mysterious for a time, but within a year, Marvel revealed him as the son of Cyclops and Madelyne Pryor, sent to the future as an infant. After growing up in this dangerous future, he went back in time as an older man. His goal was to return to the era of his birth to stop the rise of the villain Apocalypse, who ruled his future with an iron grip. X-Force was a very “of its era” series, with lots of big battles, big guns, and big shoulder pads. It also had a lot of teen soap opera elements. Think 90210, with powers. But while it sold well, the writing was often lackluster, with a far bigger focus on art and big action. When the trend of “extreme” comics died late in the decade, X-Force felt like a relic of an earlier era. One that was slightly cringe.

X-Force’s Brief Off-Brand Era Marvel Comics

By the early 2000s, the ‘90s style of X-Men comics, pioneered by Jim Lee and Liefeld, had grown stale. Especially as Lee and Liefeld had left to form Image Comics years earlier. New Marvel EIC Joe Quesada decided Marvel needed an injection of indie comics energy, and with issue #116, X-Force totally transformed. Madman creator Mike Allred created a whole new team called X-Force, stars in a reality TV show. This concept proved popular, but it really wasn’t X-Force in any way. So, after the original X-Force show up demanding their name back, they rebranded as X-Statix. But technically, they were an X-Force team, so we had to mention them.

X-Force: The X-Men’s Secret Black Ops Team Marvel Comics

In 2007, a proper X-Force returned in a new series by Craig Kyle and Christopher Yost. Cable’s father, Cyclops, reformed the team as a secret strike force to hit the X-Men’s enemies first. And, to use lethal force if necessary. This team was formed after the Scarlet Witch removed the power of most mutants, now an endangered species. Cyclops recruited Wolverine, X-23, Angel, former members Warpath, Wolfsbane, Caliban, and others. This team lasted about three years, ending in 2010. But this time, X-Force would be back much sooner. But it was during this era that the concept of X-Force shifted from a group of teen mutants to a deadly unit made up of established, adult X-Men. And that has remained ever since.

Uncanny X-Force Becomes the Team’s Best Iteration Marvel Comics

In 2010, Uncanny X-Force launched, with Wolverine returning once again as leader. This team featured several A-list X-Men, like Archangel, Psylocke, Deadpool, and Fantomex. Wolverine formed this team behind Cyclops’ back, created in order to stop emerging threats like Apocalypse. Thus, going back to the original intent of the team. This became the most critically acclaimed version of X-Force, thanks largely to Rick Remender’s writing, and art by Jerome Opeña and Esad Ribić. This version of the team lasted about two years. But it remains the most beloved run. A new version of Uncanny X-Force launched with Psylocke, Storm, Bishop, Spiral, and Alpha Flight’s Puck soon after. But this version only lasted a couple of years as well.

Cable Leads a Competing X-Force Title Marvel Comics

Oddly, there was a second X-Force series at the same time as Uncanny X-Force, which once again featured a team led by Cable. In Cable and X-Force, Nathan Summers gathers a team consisting of Colossus, Domino, Forge, and Dr. Nemesis. This was a bit more like the original ’90s X-Force, with Cable and his unit coming into conflict with the Avengers. This was the only time that X-Force was a franchise of its own, with two separate teams using the same name, with separate missions. In 2018, the original X-Force reunited in a new series by Ed Brisson and illustrated by Dylan Burnet, and that series ran about 10 issues only.

Marvel Comics X-Force in the Modern Marvel Comics Era

In the 2020s, X-Force evolved yet again. In the Dawn of X/Krakoa era from writer Jonathan Hickman, when mutants lived in a prosperous island nation for their kind only, a new X-Force formed as a kind of CIA-style team designed to go after Krakoa’s enemies, despite the nation’s official stance of “harm no human.” This team consisted of X-Men founders Jean Grey, Beast, original X-Forcer Domino, Sage, Kid Omega, and Colossus. More than any previous X-Force, this version did a lot of shady things.

Marvel Comics

Post-Krakoa, X-Force became yet another proactive militaristic team, featuring well-known mutants like Betsy Braddock, Rachel Summers, Forge, Colossus, Sage, and other established X-Men. The current Inglorious X-Force comic has gone back to its roots once more, with Cable going back in time and assembling a mutant kill squad with members like Archangel, Hellverine, and original member Boom-Boom. It seems that X-Force, in some iteration, will always exist as long as Marvel publishes X-Men comics.

X-Force in X-Men ’97 Marvel Comics

In X-Men ’97, we’re introduced to a version of X-Force inspired by several versions of the team. Cable is clearly the leader, just as he was back in the day. He recruits Sunspot, a former student of Xavier’s, who matched the original 1991 concept. Archangel and Psylocke represent the popular Uncanny X-Force team. Jubilee, however, was never an X-Forcer in the comics. Will they add other classic members to their ranks? We know Colossus is in the season, so it’s possible. We’re excited to see how this quintessentially ’90s Marvel team meshes with the world established in the X-Men: The Animated Series universe. We wouldn’t be shocked if the animated version is one of the best iterations in the team’s long history.

The post The Marvel Comics History of X-MEN ’97’s X-Force appeared first on Nerdist.

FBI Director Kash Patel’s girlfriend and wannabe country singer Alexis Wilkins just got added to the lineup for tonight’s extremely prestigious Freedom 250 rally starring President Donald Trump—and she wants you to know that she totally got there on merit. After the Freedom 250 music festival collapsed spectacularly—with artists racing to wipe their names from the garbage—Trump declared that…

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It’s looking like another tough week (month? year?) for Switchzilla amid reports of new serious vulnerabilities under attack. First up is a server-side request forgery bug in its Unified Communications Manager tracked as CVE-2026-20230. Cisco disclosed and patched this flaw in early June. The comms control platform doesn’t properly validate some HTTP requests, and an attacker could exploit this bug to gain root privileges on a compromised device. At the time, Cisco said that a proof-of-concept exploit was available – and now it seems unknown miscreants are putting that exploit code to use, with threat intel company Defused warning that it observed miscreants exploiting CVE-2026-20230 over the weekend. “The observed chain abuses the WebDialer SSRF to deploy a rogue Apache Axis service, uses that service to write a first-stage JSP file-writer, then drops a second-stage command-execution shell under /platform-services/axis2-web/,” the firm noted on LinkedIn. Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN zero day Then, a Mandiant advisory on Wednesday warned that a Cisco SD-WAN zero-day tracked as CVE-2026-20245 was exploited much earlier than initially disclosed, including at a communications service provider where the attacker elevated a compromised admin account to full root-level access. While the Google-owned threat hunting biz said it can't assess the full scope of the intruders' post-compromise activity, this SD-WAN device compromise could have been dire, potentially giving the attacker total visibility across an entire corporation's internet traffic. This is what makes SD-WAN zero-days such a hot target for government-sponsored spies looking to set up shop for long-term snooping activities. It also explains the rash of attackers battering Cisco SD-WAN devices since the start of the year. Cisco had issued an advisory for CVE-2026-20245 in early June, admitting that attackers had a head start on abusing this security hole. “In June 2026, the Cisco PSIRT became aware of exploitation of this vulnerability,” the vendor said at the time. In a Wednesday report, however, Google’s Mandiant incident response and consulting biz reported that exploitation of this bug – Cisco’s sixth SD-WAN vulnerability listed as under attack since the start of the year, and the second zero-day in two months – began much earlier. “In early 2026, Mandiant identified a threat actor targeting SD-WAN infrastructure at a service provider,” Mandiant threat hunters Chester Sng, Pete Boonyakarn, and Logeswaran Nadarajan wrote. “After gaining initial access, the threat actor exploited a zero-day vulnerability (CVE-2026-20245) in Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN to escalate privileges from a compromised administrative account to root-level access.” The attacker gained initial access via an unauthorized peering connection, abusing the SD-WAN fabric to authenticate between network components and facilitate Secure Shell (SSH) access. In this case, they authenticated to the SD-WAN manager device via SSH using the vmanage-admin account on the same victim devices. Then, they changed the default password on the admin account, authenticated directly to the SD-WAN Manager web application interface using the admin account, and exfiltrated SD-WAN fabric configurations. Likely in an effort to cover their tracks and not get caught, the attacker changed the password of the admin account back to its original one before terminating their active session. Neither the vmanage-admin nor the admin accounts on Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN controllers possess root shell access, however. To gain root access, the attacker exploited CVE-2026-20245, which allows an authenticated, local attacker to execute arbitrary commands as root by supplying a crafted file to the vulnerable system. The attacker uploaded a file named evil_tenant.csv that contained the exploit payload. Upon execution, the digital intruder created a user account named troot with full root privileges. Mandiant says it later observed the miscreant accessing this new troot account from the admin account using the substitute user command. The Register reached out to Cisco about the reported exploitation of CVE-2026-20230, plus Mandiant’s investigation into CVE-2026-20245, and did not receive any response. We will update this story when we hear back from the networking vendor. ®

Santa Cruz County will receive $500,000 to help expand its litter cleanup and community beautification efforts.

The county has received $300,000 from the Clean California local grant program through the California Department of Transportation, which supports community cleanups and beautification statewide. The other $200,000 is from an anonymous donor, according to a media release. 

Currently, the county invests more than $1.4 million annually in litter abatement services and partnerships with nonprofit organizations such as Community Action Board of Santa Cruz County for local cleanup projects.

“This funding will expand our ability to reduce litter, address illegal dumping and strengthen environmental stewardship efforts to preserve and protect our environment for future generations,” county planning director Matt Machado said in the release. 

Have news that should be in Lookout Briefs? Send your news releases, including contact information, to news@lookoutlocal.com.

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The post Santa Cruz County receives $500,000 to support ongoing cleanup and beautification efforts appeared first on Lookout Santa Cruz.

ph @l_e_ba
#365cafeesoupresque

New York City’s right-wingers, who evidently cannot handle losing elections, are dealing with their anger by once again attempting to fearmonger Jewish Americans into leaving New York, the most Jewish city in the country.

Last night, allies of Mayor Zohran Mamdani swept the New York City Democratic primaries. Claire Valdez, Brad Lander, and Darializa Avila Chevalier—all of whom have condemned Israel’s genocide in Gaza—each won a congressional seat, consolidating socialist power in New York. The socialist New York Jews of generations past might perhaps have jumped for joy. But the Republican party figureheads of today would like Jews, specifically, to panic instead of celebrating.

“To my beautiful Jewish friends in America. We love you. You are not alone. We are just as freaked out as you are and see with clear eyes exactly what is happening,” Meghan McCain wrote on X. As a beautiful Jew in America, I was not initially sure what she was talking about.

Far-right activist Laura Loomer joined McCain in telling the one million Jews who call the five boroughs their home to go on ahead and pack their bags. Loomer, helpfully, made it clear that unconditional support for Israel is not and has never been about American Jewish safety: for her, it is about fighting the supposed “Islamic takeover of America.”

If you’re a Jew in NYC, now is your time to move. After tonight’s election in New York, nobody who is Jewish is safe.

I’d love to see the Trump administration address this Islamic takeover of America and the exploding Jew hatred.

We need leadership on this issue. It’s…

— Laura Loomer (@LauraLoomer) June 24, 2026

Loomer is, of course, a crank. But more serious people, like Dan Goldman—the Congressman ousted by Brad Lander last night—have also invoked the specter of antisemitism in this week’s elections.

Rep. Dan Goldman (D-NY), in concession speech: “Jews have given back so much to this country. As history has taught us, antisemitic tropes and stereotypes, some of which I heard personally on this campaign, will ultimately be the undoing of our democracy if we all don’t lean in…

— Josh Kraushaar (@JoshKraushaar) June 24, 2026

Goldman, who is Jewish, lost by an absolute landslide to the also-very-Jewish Brad Lander, a man who named his children after a Jewish leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and a Jewish labor organizer. Nonetheless, Goldman reportedly accused Lander of using “dangerous antisemitic tropes” to win. It is not clear whether the trope in question was Lander’s attack of Goldman for taking AIPAC money, something Goldman did do while publicly disavowing AIPAC donations.

Serious conversations beginning over whether there is a future for Jews in the United States. Israel is in a dangerous neighborhood but it controls its own borders. Nobody voted for the kind of migration that allowed New York to go from Jewish capital to capital of antisemitism.

— Joel Pollak (@joelpollak) June 24, 2026

Some serious thinkers have once again begun to wonder whether New York Jews might be better off living in Israel than in the United States. Joel Pollak of the California Post wasted no time casting the blame for antisemitism vaguely on “migration,” by which he presumably means “very scary Muslim mayor” and/or “very scary immigration.” Stephen Miller and Katie Miller joined in: “New York will now be run by foreign communists.”

Jews, who not so long ago were being blamed for encouraging hatred of white people by supporting immigration, are now being told that in a city of immigrants they should be afraid of immigrants, because some of those immigrants might not like Israel.

When Zohran Mamdani was elected earlier this year, the very same commentariat crowed for a Jewish exodus from Gotham. Such an exodus, by all accounts, did not happen then, and won’t happen now.

Why would it? Antisemitism is real, but it isn’t caused by critics of Israel winning elections. And it isn’t solved by Jews fleeing New York.

While AI dominates the layoff narrative, engineers are actually making up a larger share of new hires, according to SignalFire data.

Top AI researchers Jonas Adler and Alexander Pritzel are leaving Google for Anthropic, following departures from top scientists Noam Shazeer and John Jumper.

We knew it was coming, but now it's official: Qualcomm is making a major push into the datacenter market. And though it is late to the game, the mobile-chip giant believes it can make an impact by delivering a lower total cost of ownership and better performance per watt than rival platforms. It has to go somewhere, and the company is already dominating the chip space elsewhere, Qualcomm's datacenter EVP and GM Tony Pialis said during the company’s Investor Day presentation on Wednesday. Pialis said that Qualcomm is already a winner in mobile, PC, and automotive, but will now be able to play in a market with well established competitors such as Nvidia. He started by addressing the obvious question of "are you too late" to the market. "When the company turns its attention to solve a new problem, we revolutionize the solution and push our way to the forefront," he said. "And folks I'm here to tell you today that is what we will and are doing in datacenter." Pialis’ portion of the presentation included the formal unveiling of the Dragonfly compute platform we’ve been hearing about for weeks, the … ahem … core of which is the C1000 CPU he showed off. Pialis claimed that the new datacenter-grade chips offer 2x better performance per watt and 30 percent more speed than competitors' processors. The CPU cores, Pialis explained, are based on Qualcomm's custom Oryon architecture and will operate at more than 5 GHz in a chiplet-based design featuring more than 250 cores. Most interestingly, Pialis argued that the design of the C1000 chips addresses the memory bottleneck facing AI datacenters with what Qualcomm is calling "High-Bandwidth Compute" (HBC) technology. Pialis described HBC as combining compute and memory more closely by integrating an XPU beneath a DRAM stack, claiming it delivers SRAM-like performance advantages inside a high-bandwidth memory package while reducing data movement and improving performance per watt. Those Dragonfly C1000 processors are expected to enter production in the second half of 2028. Qualcomm plans to offer multiple C1000 variants targeting agentic AI, general-purpose computing, and AI head-node workloads. But CPUs alone do not a datacenter pivot make, and Pialis said that there are three other datacenter segments Qualcomm is targeting along with new CPUs: connectivity, custom silicon designed for individual customers, and AI accelerators. There are also the aforementioned AI accelerators, which Qualcomm says will use its HBC technology to address memory bottlenecks in AI workloads. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg made guest appearances during Investor Day. Qualcomm said Microsoft plans to use its HBC-based AI accelerators, while Meta separately announced plans to deploy Dragonfly C1000 CPUs under a multi-generation agreement. Pialis also detailed new connectivity technologies that form part of the Dragonfly portfolio. According to Pialis, Qualcomm wants to enable new distances in cluster-to-cluster optical connectivity up to 20 kilometers with its new QAM16 coherent-lite optical modules. “We have everything you need to scale from millimeter technology to tens of kilometers,” Pialis said. As for custom silicon, that’ll involve making bespoke chips for what Pialis said will be Qualcomm’s “highest tier of customer” who needs someone to design and fabricate AI and cloud DC CPUs from end to end. What Qualcomm is bringing on the hardware side will be supplemented by Modular, a company that develops AI software stacks. Qualcomm announced on Wednesday that it had reached an agreement to acquire Modular in order to flesh out the software side of its Dragonfly endeavors, which the company said will give it access to hundreds of billions in new market space. ®

Revenue quadrupled to $41.45 billion compared with the same period a year ago. The company's profit, meanwhile, rose from $1.88 billion to an incredible $28.2 billion year-over-year.

President Donald Trump abruptly canceled a bill signing ceremony Wednesday for a landmark bipartisan housing bill that aims to make it more affordable to buy a home, saying he won’t sign it because Congress has yet to pass his voter suppression bill. “Today’s Housing News Conference and Signing is hereby cancelled until such time as we pass the desperately needed SAVE AMERICA ACT…

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It was a good night for a young and charismatic nepo-baby, leveraging his name to inject new energy and ideas into a moribund Democratic party. But it was a very bad night for John F. Kennedy’s grandson.

On Tuesday, as a slate of candidates backed by Mayor Zohran Mamdani knocked off two incumbent members of Congress and cruised to victory in another open House district, Jack Schlossberg finished a distant third in a race the Democratic Socialists had stayed clear of—the Democratic primary to replace retiring Rep. Jerry Nadler. The Kennedy scion, a Democratic activist and content creator, entered the race last fall as a front-runner, but, with most of the votes counted, was hovering at just under 11 percent.

Instead, the race for a seat centered on some of Manhattan’s most affluent neighborhoods became an extraordinarily expensive proxy battle between Silicon Valley donors. Alex Bores, a state assemblyman who positioned himself as a Big Tech skeptic, benefited from $11 million in spending from Public First Action, an Anthropic-funded vehicle. Leading the Future, a super-PAC that’s been funded by the venture-capital firm Andreesen-Horowitz and OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman, spent $8 million attacking Bores—which boosted eventual winner Micah Lasher, another state assemblyman and a former Nadler chief-of-staff.

There’s an urgency in politics now that makes dynastic inheritance look small.

It would be unfair to view the results in the nation’s most geographically compact congressional district as a straightforward referendum on the Kennedy family (even if Schlossberg did helpfully include his more famous surname on the ballot). But the results suggest that voters weren’t exactly clamoring for a dynastic reboot, either—his loss is the third successive defeat for a prominent Kennedy in a Democratic primary, after uncle Bobby’s abandoned campaign against then-President Joe Biden, and cousin Joseph Kennedy III’s 2020 defeat to Massachusetts Sen. Ed Markey. Caroline’s 33-year-old son learned the hard way that the Kennedy brand just doesn’t mean what it used to. His strange campaign only underscores why.

Schlossberg is not the worst kind of Kennedy, by any stretch. He didn’t kill anyone, for instance. He didn’t appease Hitler, grope a waitress, send troops to Vietnam, promote eugenics, or publish a book trampling on the legacy of Reconstruction. If the decline of the WASPs (and their WASP-like Hyannisport cousins) has taught us anything, it’s that there are much worse things in this world than over-educated, well-meaning dilettantes. But you can also perhaps understand why, in this moment of all moments, the Democratic voters of Manhattan weren’t lining up for someone who so closely matched that description.

Schlossberg’s qualifications were slim. None of his previous jobs could historically be described as stepping stones to Congress. He was a political correspondent for Vogue for a period of several months. He was a Democratic content creator—a role that often consisted him doing weird vocal impressions of personas he’d made up. (“I think satire is a really powerful political tool,” he told the New Yorker, which is the kind of statement that never seems to accompany powerful satire.) He was part of the committee that handed out the Profile in Courage awards, a prize that takes its name from the aforementioned book his grandfather mostly didn’t write. He may have meant to merely shore up his district bona fides, but it felt appropriate that the first candidate I’ve ever seen list his pre-school on campaign literature was a Kennedy—and that it came with a boast that he’d graduated not just from Yale, but from Harvard. Twice. (Do you know how hard it was for Boston Mayor John Fitzgerald’s great-great-grandson, Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy’s great-grandson, and President John F. Kennedy’s grandson to get into Harvard?)

In an interview with CNN’s Dana Bash last May, Schlossberg boasted that his campaign was catching fire because it had released more policy plans than anyone else in the race. You could argue that the idea that people (including House Speaker emerita Nancy Pelosi) were lining up to support JFK’s grandson because of his position on Social Security was as insulting as anything in Profiles in Courage.

Again, there are worse things than having a familial sense of responsibility to public service that you don’t quite know what to do with—you could instead have a familiar sense of responsibility to selling cryptocurrency and hotels. As Reeves Wiedeman reported in a deeply illuminating New York magazine story last year, being one of the political Kennedys can be a grind. No one’s sitting around the old compound telling you you should really become a dentist.

But if there’s one thing Tuesday’s results showed, it’s that there’s an urgency in politics right now that makes dynastic inheritance look small. The energy that’s animating Democrats in the city where Schlossberg attended pre-school isn’t nostalgia for the lost Kennedy idyll. Across much of the city, primary voters showed up at the polls to tear down the old way of doing things, newly empowered by their 2025 defeat of Andrew Cuomo, another Kennedy-adjacent scion. Like it or not, they’re motivated by idealism and a desire for something new—ironically, the kind of vibe shift the family once purported to embody.

The last few years ought to have once and for all blown up the myth of Camelot—that it was desirable, that it was ever even real. American politics is haunted by a different sort of Northeastern family, ruled by a calcifying and domineering patriarch, digging its pincers into the national story and flaunting its multi-generational ambitions in the service of a misbegotten golden age. The Kennedys are down to their last and thorniest public servant—a sun-baked, worm-addled, crank incubated in a world of entitlement and unaccountability.

Now all that’s left is the ruins. I’m reminded, like a good Kennedy, of Shelley: Look upon their works and despair.

White House advisor Stephen Miller spent his Wednesday posting racist, anti-immigrant dog whistles on X as he coped with the election sweep for Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s endorsed progressive candidates in New York City the night before.

“In 2026, half of NYC residents speak a language other than English as their primary language and one-quarter of NYC residents lack English language proficiency,” Miller wrote Wednesday morning.

“Half of all college graduates in NYC are immigrants or from immigrant households,” Miller said in another post hours later. “So when observers say college grads in NYC are embracing communism this is not a home-grown phenomenon.”

“Change the voters, change the country,” he said in yet another post, alluding to kicking out legal immigrants to make his right-wing white nationalist agenda more tangible.

Miller’s posts was immediately lambasted by commenters noting that NYC is historically the hub of east coast immigration—which Miller’s immediate ancestors were a part of.

“The guy’s great-grandfather was a Yiddish-speaking peddler who arrived at Ellis Island in 1903, and somehow New York endured his presence,” journalist David Klion wrote in response. “No one kidnapped him off the street or sent him to a concentration camp in El Salvador.”

“Every day a Republican on here tells me Zaid we only oppose illegal immigrants and every day on here Stephen Miller makes clear he hates all immigrants, legal or not,” journalist Zaid Jilani chimed in. “Pay attention to your own leaders!”

Miller—who is seemingly unfamiliar with the basic history of New York City—is once again making his biases loud and clear. Immigrants aren’t embracing communism—they’re voting for progressives and the Democratic Socialists of America because the cost of living is too high. Forcing people to speak English won’t change that.

President Donald Trump berated Senate Republicans during a visit to the Capitol Wednesday for allowing a vote to block his war in Iran, further escalating a feud that has diverted GOP efforts to focus on election-year affordability issues and brought much of the chamber’s business to a halt. Invited to speak at the GOP luncheon by Florida Sen. Rick Scott, Trump had signaled ahead of time that…

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⚡ Quick Take

• Heritage Auctions Comic Book Signature Auction has one of the biggest treasure troves of first appearance issues.
• This auction has not one, but two editions of Action Comics #1.
• It also contains the first appearances of Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four, the X-Men, Captain America, and Iron Man.

We’ve seen some significant vintage comics sold over the past few years at auction for astronomical prices. But the current Heritage Auctions Comic Book Signature Auction has one of the biggest treasure troves of first appearance issues we’ve ever seen together at one time. We learned about this massive sale via Comic Book. This auction has not one, but two editions of Action Comics #1, the iconic first appearance of Superman from 1938. But it also contains the first appearances of Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four, the X-Men, Captain America, and Iron Man. It’s exceedingly rare to have this many significant comics sold together at one time.

DC Comics/Marvel Comics

The first copy Heritage Auctions has of Action Comics #1, graded at 6.5, is currently going for $160,000. That’s actually pretty low for that particular book. The second copy has a rating of 4.5, and is going for $912,500. That one will surely fetch more than a million when all is said and done. That issue remains the Holy Grail of comic books, and a pristine copy once sold for over $15 million. The first issue of Superman’s solo series also recently sold for $9 million. Yes, other characters are arguably more popular than Superman. But since he started the superhero genre, his first appearance will always fetch a huge amount.

Other comics of historical significance up for auction include copies of Batman #1 and Wonder Woman #1, and Fantastic Four #5, the first appearance of Doctor Doom. With Robert Downey Jr. soon to play the character in Avengers: Doomsday, the value of that book is about to skyrocket. There are plenty of other culturally significant comic books in this particular auction. The very first Marvel comic, titled Marvel Comics #1 (Namor the Sub-Mariner’s first appearance) is part of this, as well. Even if you’re not a millionaire, there are plenty of significant issues in this auction at far more reasonable prices, so you may want to check them out if you’re a serious comic book collector. To place a bid yourself, head over to the Heritage Auctions website.

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According to a new site, 24% of the most popular websites in the world don't offer support for passkeys, which are considered the most secure way to log into apps and services.

President Donald Trump and outgoing Republican Senator Bill Cassidy got into a shouting match over the war in Iran at a GOP lunch Wednesday.

Cassidy told Morgan Rimmer of CNN that he “lost his temper.” One source said that Trump called Cassidy a “lunatic.”

CNN reports that Bill Cassidy lost his temper with Trump and "berated the president for what has transpired in Iran, for not being clear with Congress about his actions in the region" pic.twitter.com/4tq7GC3pU1

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 24, 2026

Many suspected the lunch would center around discussion of the SAVE America Act that Trump is trying to push through the Senate, but instead the conversation turned to Iran. On Tuesday night, the Senate voted to limit Trump’s war powers, and remove U.S. military forces from the country.

Louisiana Senator Bill Cassidy was one of four Republicans who voted with Democrats to pass the law. When Trump asked why these Republicans voted for the resolution, Cassidy reportedly responded, “Is that a rhetorical question, or do you really want to know the answer?”

Cassidy then berated the president for not being clear with Congress about his actions in Iran, and argued that until he got a fuller briefing of what was going on, he’d keep voting to limit Trump’s powers.

Trump raised his voice in response, and Cassidy did so as well. Cassidy reportedly called the war a “blunder,” according to Andrew Desiderio of Punchbowl News, and the president interrupted him. Cassidy joked to CNN that he shouldn’t have lost his temper but that it was “the Irish in him.” However, the senator had no regrets.

“I make no apologies for standing up to the president,” Cassidy told CBS. “I am sticking up for the American people, even if I’m speaking to the president.”

⚡ Quick Take

• In Anne Rice’s books Armand calls Daniel, “My Beloved.” But will “Beloved” arrive in The Vampire Lestat? Who knows. But we have this.

My Devils and Minions: Sometimes, pieces of a canon are so powerful, they become what Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse would term a “canon event.” That means that no matter what universe a character is living in, the event MUST happen. When it comes to Anne Rice’s universe, if you ask ardent fans, there are quite a few canon events that belong to the relationship between Armand and Daniel, also known as Devil’s Minion. And these canon events NEED to occur in AMC’s adaptation of The Vampire Lestat. One of these is the idea that Armand calls Daniel, “Beloved.” In fandom circles, from fanfic to fan art to memes, the use of “Beloved” is ubiquitous around Devil’s Minion. And, truly, how can one resist the notion when it comes right from Anne Rice’s Queen of the Damned? And, indeed, is so beautifully offered from Armand to Daniel so many times? One can’t! But, alas, for now, the question of whether Assad Zaman’s Armand will call Eric Bogosian’s “My Beloved” in The Vampire Lestat does not yet have a clear answer. But regardless of what happens in the show’s universe, I set out to bring this canon event to our universe. Enjoy Beloveds! We deserve it.

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As to the story behind this moment, it shall remain shrouded in the right amount of vampiric mystery. But I invite you to imagine many cackles, the promise of $5 (not necessary), and Eric Bogosian awakening like a sleeper agent mid-interview to bring it to life. Truly, we are beloved as a fandom.

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For now, Armand and Daniel’s much-anticipated romance has not yet manifested itself. Although, speaking of Devil’s Minion, Rolin Jones told Nerdist, “We’re right there now.” And Eric Bogosian and Assad Zaman shared, “We’re working on it./It’s a work in progress.” So, Devil’s Minion feels a bit inevitable from where I’m sitting. And if we really think about it? How could any good storyteller miss the opportunity to bring such a delicious relationship to life?

RELATED ARTICLE

The Book Inspirations Behind the Armand/Daniel Vampiric Pairing in INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE (And What ‘Devil’s Minion’ Really Means)

Hopefully, one day soon, we’ll get the real “My Beloved” from Armand to Daniel. Perhaps even a “Boss,” in response. But for now, we’ll enjoy this dark gift. I hope this makes the day of many devils and minions out there. And I leave you all with Anne Rice’s words to enjoy.

But Armand gently pulled him upright, held him. The car rocked gently, deliciously
as it moved forward. So nice to sleep at last in Armand’s arms. But there was so much
he must tell Armand, so much about the dream, the book.

“Don’t you think I know?” Armand whispered. A strange light in the eye, what was it?
Something raw and tender in the way Armand looked, all the composure stripped
away. He lifted a tumbler half full of brandy and put it in Daniel’s hand.
“And you running from me,” he said, “from Stockholm and Edinburgh and Paris.
What do you think I am that I can follow you at such speed down so many pathways?
And such danger-“

Lips against Daniel’s face, suddenly, ah, that’s better, I like kissing. And snuggling
with dead things, yes, hold me. He buried his face in Armand’s neck. Your blood.
“Not yet, my beloved.” Armand pushed him forward, pressing his fingers to Daniel’s
lips. Such uncommon feeling in the low, controlled voice. “Listen to what I’m saying
to you. All over the world, our kind are being destroyed.”

Then, again, later in the text, beautifully, “Far away he heard Armand’s voice: ‘What do I do with you, my beloved? Especially now, when I myself am so afraid.'”

Yes, rip our hearts out, why don’t you, Anne Rice?

Much love to you all, Beloveds,

Ro

The Vampire Lestat airs on AMC and AMC+ Sundays at 9 pm ET/PT and midnight, respectively. You can snag The Vampire Lestat by Anne Rice to read, if you’d like to know a little bit more about what’s going on.

Rotem Rusak is the Editor-in-Chief of Nerdist. She’s ready for Devil’s Minion to become canon so one of her ships can finally sail.

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Congratulations to Donald Trump, the first and only president to have both chambers of Congress pass a War Powers Resolution against him. That’s quite the achievement! It’s a testament to how little support there is for Trump’s war in Iran that enough members of his own party peeled off and voted with Democrats, handing him what the media keeps calling a rebuke, framing it as nothing more…

Source

The Vampire Lestat stars Jacob Anderson (Louis), Sam Reid (Lestat), Assad Zaman (Armand), Delainey Hayles (Claudia), Eric Bogosian (Daniel Molloy), Sheila Atim (Akasha), Jennifer Ehle (Gabrielle), and showrunner Rolin Jones sit down with Nerdist’s Ro Rusak to discuss the show’s many messy relationships, queer representation, and who they would want to turn into a vampire!

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