"Its James Talarico. Can you please please please please pretty pretty please rush in even just $1?"

"Who's working to elect James Talarico? Marxists."

"Wow! Wow! Wow! Mark Kelly just made a HUGE announcement!"

"We asked Ben Verlander, MLB analyst and former Tigers prospect, to record a quick video about the election this Tuesday, November 3rd."

"See which of your friends or family members have voted in the past and remind them to vote this year."

If any of these messages sound familiar, it's likely because they're part of the massive stream of text messages flooding your phone leading up to the US midterm elections on Tuesday. The scal …

Read the full story at The Verge.

I was only 17 when I moved out of my folks' house. I was ready to leave—desperate to leave—and landed in Chicago's Wicker Park neighborhood in the early '90s. This was back when apartments there were still big and cheap and the whole neighborhood had recently transformed into a haven for artists and musicians and weirdos. It was, in that moment, a perfect place. Sure there were pretty regular gunshots at Duks Red Hots down the street and the park itself was something you walked past quickly at night, but it felt like a place that was ours. (Of course, it was someone else's first, and the displacement that we brought to the neighborhood would be echoed by wealth displacing us years later, but that's a different story for a different day).

Knowing that you had to leave home and knowing what you were doing once you got out are very different things. I was so young, still a child really, and there was so much I did not know. My art school roommates and I were all too young and too broke to go out much, so we stayed home most nights, sitting on a crusty old hand-me-down couch and watched fuzzy reruns of Star Trek: The Next Generation on Channel 50.

When news of the death of Patrick Stewart—who I probably don't need to tell you played Captain Jean Luc Picard on the show—hit yesterday, I was instantly flooded with memories of being 17 and trying to figure out how to walk in the world and it made me realize just how interlinked those memories are with The Next Generation.

You never totally know where the lessons you learn might come from, but definitely for me, impossibly young and on my own, a lot of them came from this kinda corny low-budget show that claimed to be about space exploration, but was really about seeking knowledge and helping where you can and about possibility and kindness and wrestling with what it meant to be a person trying to do all those things and not always succeeding.

It was a deeply human show and a lot of that was thanks to Patrick Stewart, a Shakespearean actor who came from a fucked up home and found refuge, and himself, in the arts (a story that, looking back on it now, feels familiar). Stewart brought so much more to the role than the material—especially early on—warranted and, in the process, elevated the whole show to his level.

I was never a Trekkie, and beyond Deep Space Nine I didn't continue to follow the voyages of the Starship Enterprise or the many other Starships that followed. But that part of my life—that inflection point where you move from a child to an adult—is so intertwined with Captain Picard saying "Make it so" that it's hard to untangle the two. And maybe I don't want to.

Because The Next Generation offered a glimpse of a future that was better than the world we lived in then and certainly the world we live in now. It offered a vision of a world that was less cruel and more equitable, a world where people weren't struggling to survive and instead worked to better each other's place in it. It was, of course, a fictional world but it was a good fiction to believe in as I sorted out how to navigate the world outside my apartment.

I miss its optimism.

Or maybe I miss my own.

I've written before about how unrelentingly negative the internet feels now. It is, of course, a reflection of an era that is, itself, unrelentingly negative. We live at a time when cynicism reigns, where burnout is rampant, and where disengaging feels like the only option.

We live at a time where we are constantly questioning what is right in front of us. Where gaslighting is prevalent, and where insisting that the things that you see are the things that are there is harder than it looks.

In thinking about all this after hearing the news of his death last night, I was brought back to what I think is the finest episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, "Chain of Command," a two-parter that sees Stewart's Jean Luc Picard taken prisoner, interrogated, and tortured by the Cardassians, a race of militaristic lizard-like fascists.

During the interrogation, Picard's Cardassian handler asks him how many lights are shining in front of him. Squinting, Picard responds that there are four. The Cardassian insists that there are five lights, and tortures him.

Every time, endlessly, the same question—how many lights—elicits the same answer—four—and the beatings continue until, finally, Picard seems well and truly broken.

In the hands of a less accomplished actor, the inexpensive sets, syndicated TV lighting, and reptillian makeup might have made the torture feel less visceral, but Stewart made you truly feel his spirit breaking. Skinny and weak, wearing a torn tunic that hung off his body, he is asked one last time: How many lights. Picard is gasping, blinking, you can feel his confused, tortured, anguish.

It feels like it takes forever before he finally screams, "There! Are! Four! Lights!"

I've thought of that scene so many times over the years, as those in power try to insist that what we see right in front of us isn't what is happening. It was a story that is as resonant now as it was then, when I began to see the home I left in a new light. The exhaustion that comes with insisting that reality is, in fact, reality and the punishment that can come from standing by that insistence is very, very real. Then, now, forever.

We have all lived through so much—I'm reminded that one year ago was when ICE was at its worst right around me—and it would be so easy, so simple, to just fall for it all. It would be so easy to give up, to give in, and to admit that there are five lights.

But of course I can't, you can't, none of us can. No matter how hard it gets—and whatever the results of the election on Tuesday it's going to get harder—we can never forget the lesson that Patrick Stewart taught us: There are four lights.

There are four lights.

There.

Are.

Four.

Lights.

GREAT BEND — A class action usury lawsuit filed Thursday accuses U.S. Sen. Roger Marshall and his former Great Bend medical practice of routinely charging patients illegal interest rates on unpaid medical debt.

The lawsuit was filed in Barton County District Court in the final days of a bitter race between the incumbent Republican and Democrat Adam Hamilton, a Methodist minister from Johnson County. The race could determine the balance of power in the U.S. Senate.

The New York Times in September reported Marshall sued 700 of his patients for unpaid medical bills when he was an OB-GYN. In 81 cases, patients were arrested for missing court dates.

One of those arrested patients, Meischa Zimmerman, appeared in a TV ad for Hamilton and now is the lead plaintiff in the class action lawsuit.

The lawsuit alleges Marshall and his practice, Heartland Regional OBGYN, routinely subjected patients — many of them low-income, uninsured, or underinsured mothers — to a “callous and predatory” debt-collection scheme with illegal interest rates. He frequently assesses 18% annual interest, which exceeds Kansas’ statutory limit of 15%.

Zimmerman, an obstetrics patient of Marshall’s in 2009, said the practice sued her over a $3,596 bill for the delivery of her child, plus an 18% annual interest rate. According to the court filing, debt collection efforts linked to the usurious debt led to her arrest on three separate occasions.

Ellinwood attorney Kent Roth said the lawsuit stems from predatory billing against economically vulnerable patients.

“Obviously, I think a jury will place a dollar value on our complaint over charging 18% usury rate on medical debt, but I will let the legal document speak for itself,” Roth said.

He is serving as local counsel on the lawsuit, alongside lead counsel Edward F. Haber and Ian J. McLoughlin of the Boston firm Shapiro Haber & Urmy.

Marshall was contacted for a statement and declined to comment, referring questions to his communications team. The staff members didn’t immediately respond to emails sent Thursday night.

Earlier this week, 750 medical professionals in Kansas signed a letter expressing their concern with Marshall’s debt collection practices.

Thursday’s court filing asserts four causes of action: Common law usury, violating K.S.A 16-207, which caps allowable interest at 15% per annum; unjust enrichment by unlawfully retaining collected interest above statutory limits; breach of the Implied Covenant of Good Faith and Fair Dealing: Enforcing contractual provisions to collect excessive interest rates without disclosure; and breach of fiduciary duty by failing to act in the best interest of patients and failing to disclose the assessed interest exceeded state caps.

The lawsuit says many of Marshall’s patients didn’t have health insurance or had insurance with high deductibles and co-pays that did not pay all the amounts Marshall charged them. Many were reported as having “to decide between paying medical bills or buying groceries.”

The lawsuit cites reporting from the New York Times story, as well as Kansas City Star reporting that no other regional medical practices charged comparable interest rates.

Addressing potential statute of limitations issues, the complaint states the filing deadline was paused due to “fraudulent concealment” by the defendants, as patients only discovered the illegal nature of the rates through news reports in September and October 2026.

Plaintiffs are seeking class action certification, restitution, damages, and pre- and post-judgment interest to be determined at a jury trial.

Born in El Dorado, Marshall earned his medical degree from the University of Kansas School of Medicine in 1987 and served seven years as a captain in the U.S. Army Reserves. He practiced as an OB-GYN in Great Bend for more than 25 years.

In Congress, Marshall has focused on agricultural and healthcare policy, serving on key Senate committees, including Agriculture, Finance, Budget, and Health, Education, Labor and Pensions.

Earlier today, we detected evidence of a security incident on AO3. We are still in the early stages of response to this security incident and determining its scope. AO3 will remain down while we continue investigating and addressing what has been found so far. However, we want to make some things clear:

First, no AO3 data has been deleted. All your works, bookmarks, kudos, etc., are safe.

Second, while we currently don’t believe that the user database was stolen, we are also unable to rule it out. The AO3 database contains account information that may include your username, email address, IP address, and a hashed version of your password.

We use industry-standard techniques for storing passwords in a scrambled form that cannot easily be reversed. Even so, no hashing method can fully protect a weak or reused password from being cracked. As a precaution, we recommend that you change your passwords on any other sites where you use the same password as on AO3.

AO3 does not collect real names, so none could be exposed. Additionally, our donor information is held in an entirely separate system and is never linked to AO3, so that data has also not been exposed.

We will update everyone as our investigation continues; we may be unable to respond to individual inquiries from users. Please keep an eye on our official outlets for updates. Our next update will be posted when we have further information available.

Our current expectation is that AO3 will be down for a minimum of two weeks; however, it could take up to four weeks. During that time, we may be able to bring the site back up in a degraded state, meaning that not all features will be available and/or the site may be read-only. If we are able to do that, please be aware that we might have to bring the site back down unexpectedly as part of our recovery efforts. We will keep you in the loop for any developments.

In the wake of fanfiction repository Archive of Our Own (AO3) announcing a weeks-long security incident outage, readers and writers are reflecting on why the site is important to the fanfiction community, and how they’re coping with the downtime.  

On Thursday, the Organization for Transformative Works (OTW), the non-profit organization that runs AO3, posted that the site was down for maintenance, eventually updating to say the site restoration will take around two weeks, but could take up to a month. OTW confirmed in an updated status report Friday morning that this outage is due to a security incident. 

Some have speculated that the outage is a result of the PHP scramble this week that led to several sites going down to update their security, but AO3 doesn’t use PHP. An OTW representative told CNET: “I can let you know that this is not related to the PHP security issue as the Archive uses Ruby on Rails.” 

A lot of people are grieving the loss of Kinktober, AO3’s annual group writing exercise where writers upload a chapter or fic every day throughout October based on a prompt of the day. (The prompts are horny, if that’s not clear.) Several of the writers and readers who reached out to me following the outage brought up the poor timing around Kinktober.

One writer I spoke to who posts her writing and reads others’ writing on AO3, told me that she was in the middle of racing to finish a work that was deliberately timed to Kinktober and Halloween when the outage happened. She was hitting “next chapter” while reading a fic on Wednesday night when she got the message that the site was down for maintenance, “which I initially took as a sign from the universe to go to bed,” she said.

“The outage hasn’t derailed my desire to write. If anything, I want to have more chapters ready to go so my readers can eat good once it’s over,” she said. 

Some writers are considering posting elsewhere while they wait for AO3 to return, but it’s not an ideal workaround. AO3 author who goes by Selkie Myth told me they’re moving to Space Battles, another fanfiction site, during the outage. “I'm shrugging and just posting on SB [Space Battles] while the site's down. Hopefully I'll remember to post the chapters over on AO3 once it's back up — the story is projected to end during the outage. I anticipate the same is true for a lot of other authors,” they said.

Some people have said they’ll try fanfiction.net in the meantime, but it’s a much more bare-bones website. Fanfiction site Sufficient Velocity added a banner to its homepage welcoming AO3 refugees: “We’ve had a big influx of guests due to the AO3 outage. If you've been affected by the outage we're sorry to hear that and hope that they're able to get that fixed soon.” Wattpad, which many fanfiction writers and readers really, really hate for reasons I won’t get into here, posted on X: “we're here to support you during this difficult time.” Overwhelmingly, the replies are from people telling Wattpad to go away.

Another AO3 writer who goes by Ren told me she has two long works in progress right now with nowhere to post them. Posting elsewhere poses continuity and discovery problems, as some of these fanfiction works span chapters and hundreds of thousands of words of character and worldbuilding. “I could technically keep posting updates on sites like tumblr through the downtime, but both of these fics are quite long and I haven't been posting them anywhere other than AO3 — if I drop a new chapter for my 130k Pokemon Black and White fanfic on Tumblr completely out of context, people just now finding my work aren't going to be able to read the rest for a while :(“ she told me in an email. “I have seen other authors posting their gdocs and Ellipsus reader links in the meantime, but my draft files aren't exactly presentable... I will keep marinating but what will probably happen is my wips [works in progress] will just be on hiatus for a bit. My readers are used to hiatuses at least.” 

Another writer said she’s not considering posting elsewhere. “Wattpad can piss off,” she said. “But I may go back to fanfiction.net to save and physically print some of my favorite fics from way back in the day (the ancient/sacred texts, if you will) to ensure I have copies of those somewhere. This outage is a good reminder that things can vanish in the blink of an eye, whether a website crashes or is hacked or an author decides to suddenly delete their fic. If you love something, smash the kudos button, comment on it, bookmark it, subscribe, and consider downloading it. You never know.” 

A reader who emailed me following the outage said they’ve been enjoying getting into AO3 as a new fan. “I was a big fanfic skeptic, but that’s changed lately. I’ve found some truly excellent writers, and real creativity. The free nature of it in this increasingly horrifying stage of capitalism is refreshing,” they said.

AO3 has said in status updates and to journalists that they don’t expect any data loss. Losing works would be devastating for writers and readers, but AO3 is more than just a repository for writing; it’s a community of people commenting and reacting to those stories. Selkie mentioned the rigorous tagging habits of AO3 members, where stories are tagged with sometimes dozens of fanfiction tropes, character names, content hints and warnings, and can constitute a language specific to the platform and its readers; “Crack Treated Seriously,” for example, means writing a silly premise with a straight face, while “Idiots in Love” is self explanatory. 

“To me, the more devastating thing would be to lose the comments and kudos on my fic. Technically I have them saved elsewhere because I get AO3 email alerts, but seeing them threaded in one place at the end of a chapter hits different,” a writer said. “Comments can turn an author’s entire day around and restore their will to live. I often reread them if I have writer’s block or a bad bout of imposter syndrome. They also turn the otherwise solitary act of writing into something communal. Seeing someone experience your story chapter by chapter is incredibly motivating and makes the writing process feel less isolating.” 

OTW is entirely volunteer-run, and people on social media and in speaking to them directly have said they hope AO3 users go easy on staff during this time. “So many people rely on AO3 as an outlet for creativity and escapism as the real world burns, myself included. It’s also important to remember that the site is run by volunteers,” that writer said. “The work they do to protect writers, fight censorship and safeguard freedom of expression is extremely important and necessary, especially right now. They deserve all the respect and patience in the world as they work to get the archive back up and running. Be kind.” 

Ren, echoing those sentiments, sent me a meme: 

“An additional sentiment I've seen is ‘ok so when AO3 comes back we're all going to tell our favorite authors how much we missed their work, right?’ which I hope catches on — I'm writing for niche fandoms and had to disable guest comments due to bot spam, so comments are few and far between as it is,” Ren said. “I do kind of hope that the extended outage serves as a sort of wake-up call to anyone who's been taking ao3 for granted lately. It certainly was for me.” 

On Friday, Andy Yen, the CEO of Proton, cancelled a series of nearly company-wide ‘re-interviews’ that would have forced employees to explain how they are using AI, with the clear intention that they may be fired if not using it enough in the eyes of Proton leadership, according to six current Proton employees and audio of an around two hour all-hands meeting obtained by 404 Media.

The move came after 404 Media published an investigation on Thursday, which showed how Yen was aggressively pushing AI across Proton, in some cases despite security concerns from employees. In one exchange, an employee in the company’s security Slack channel urged Proton to at least take a few days to pentest newly written code before pushing it live. “That’s bullshit and loser thinking. Of course it’s possible to be fast and secure,” Yen wrote in the channel at the end of August. “Stop thinking always of how to be slower, and focus more on how to be faster.” Yen added, “stop lovingly handcrafting all our code and use AI more.”

The re-interview cancellations likely don’t address the concerns of many Proton users, who are more focused on Proton’s deprioritization of security; many Proton users have blasted the company’s leadership on social media over the last 24 hours and explicitly called for Yen to resign.

The investigation was based on conversations with eight current and one former Proton employees, Slack chats, meeting audio, and an AI manifesto written by the company’s CTO Bart Butler. It painted a picture of Proton that is very different to the public’s perception of a company carefully protecting privacy. Instead, Proton is barreling ahead with AI in large part to achieve more annual revenue. The investigation also found a culture of fear across Proton, where employees have genuine concerns about security or being asked to develop security-focused products with AI, but feel unable to voice them because Yen mocks or insults employees in front of everyone else.

“I don’t think he will change anything, and I think the only reason we had this meeting is because he has a rebellion on his hands,” one employee told 404 Media after the all-hands meeting on Friday.

Near the start of the meeting, Yen said, “I want to acknowledge myself, personally, that there was a communication failure on my part and there are many things that probably could and should have been communicated differently, and this is something that I’ll have to reflect on and improve over time. So I will do that.”

“So what does that mean going forward? Going forward, I'm still going to push,” he added.

Yen said leadership gathered in the last couple of days to talk about the re-interviews, and spoke to the Proton board too. “They’re closely monitoring the situation,” Yen said. (Proton is owned by the Proton Foundation, whose board of trustees includes Yen, Sir Tim Berners Lee, Prof. Carissa Veliz, Dingchao Lu, and Antonio Gambardella.) 

After those discussions with leadership and the board, “We’ve decided to actually cancel the re-interviews,” Yen said. “Why? Well, I think actually in a, let’s say, unintentional way, they have actually already served their purpose.” As in, employees are now talking and learning about AI.

Yen also mentioned “org changes,” and said that part of this is “redistributing talent across teams.” He said that the reorganization will happen next month, “but there will be no loss of jobs from AI.” 

Later in the call, Butler said Yen “needs to, and he has committed to, doing better” regarding how he communicates with his employees. “Using AI effectively and pragmatically does not mean that we’ve given up on security, or good architecture, or sound software engineering principles,” he added.

“We fucked up, we know we fucked up,” Butler later said in response to an employee’s comments in the meeting.

“Your old job is gone,” Butler’s AI manifesto, posted to Slack, told engineers, 404 Media reported on Thursday. He wrote that not embracing AI posed an “existential threat to the success of the mission itself.”

Reactions to the re-interview cancellations were split across the Proton employees 404 Media spoke to. One said, “Some are happy as it’s progress. Others believe that this won’t change anything because there isn’t any consequence for Andy [Yen].” The employee added they “would have preferred real accountability from the leadership team.” They said they felt not much could have happened due to Yen having the majority of Proton’s shares.

Another employee said, after Proton canceled the re-interviews, “They said in the next breath they want to continue pushing AI and that the things that were to be measured in the re-interviews would become a component of the performance reviews.”

“They have said clearly the direction had not changed. As a Proton user that doesn’t reassure me,” the employee said. “As an employee, the re-interviews weren’t cancelled until this became public despite concerns raised by many of us. I think it goes beyond communication issues and growing pains.”

“Right now, everything seems consistent with it being damage control,” they said. 

Another employee said they were “mostly happy with how this was addressed including by Andy [Yen].”

Proton did not respond to a request for comment.

After 404 Media published the investigation on Thursday, Yen took to Reddit. Users downvoted his response more than 1,200 times. Many Proton users on social media said they were cancelling their paid Proton plans.