He catches nascent changes in the political weather. "During early, he kept telling me, 'Crime--there's something here,' " DeBoo told me. DeBoo studied the latest crime statistics and saw nothing unusual. He brushed off the worry. Then new numbers came out, showing a large pandemic spike in shoplifting and car theft, and concerns about crime exploded into the headlines. Last March, judging the winds, Newsom launched a podcast, "This Is Gavin Newsom."

San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie: 'We Are a City on the Rise' Since taking office, San Francisco's mayor has been on a quest to revitalize the city and increase public safety. He's also kept the National Guard out--with a little help from some very powerful friends. I first met Daniel Lurie, San Francisco's newly minted mayor, about five minutes before we walked onstage at WIRED's Big Interview event, held in his city last week. Lurie's team let me know ahead of time that his window for this conversation was tight: He'd just come from announcing a new city police chief, and had about half an hour for me before he needed to be on to the next thing. Which was? "No idea," Lurie quipped, shortly before we were foisted from backstage and into our conversation in front of several hundred attendees--a local crowd, who, judging from their boisterous reactions to Lurie's every word, are among the 73 percent of San Franciscans who approve of the job he's done since taking office in January of this year. To Lurie's credit, the story of San Francisco right now is largely a positive one. The city is indisputably the global hub of AI innovation and the billions of dollars that accompany it, with companies like Anthropic and OpenAI, along with smaller startups, investors, and plenty of young, AI-focused technologists all calling San Francisco home. Yes, that means rents are up and housing stock remains precariously low. But office vacancy rates are dropping, retail outlets are coming back to the city's downtown, and as Lurie's office is quick to tout, several key metrics measuring municipal crime--including homicides and car break-ins--are at historic lows. I wanted to talk to Lurie about all of that, but I was also curious about the bigger picture: his administration's dynamic with the federal government, particularly in the context of President Trump's October plan to send the National Guard into San Francisco--an endeavor that Lurie managed to thwart, according to The New York Times, by recruiting a powerful coterie of technology executives to work the phones in his favor. Lurie wasn't exactly forthcoming there, in keeping with his diligent efforts to focus conversations on San Francisco, and perhaps avoid attracting the attention, or the ire, of the current administration. It's a different tack than other Democrats governing progressive parts of the country have taken, from New York City mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani to California governor Gavin Newsom. But if the response in the room last week was any indication, Lurie's local fans don't seem to mind his "say less" strategy--at least for now. Someone has a 70-something percent approval rating.

The future of self-driving cars in Italy it seems needs not only technology but also (possibly above all) political backing. The good news, then, is that more than 60 mayors in Italy have decided to take the field for the cars of the future. On July 14, in the hall of the MEET Digital Culture Center in Milan, Pierfrancesco Maran, a member of the European Parliament for the Italian Democratic Party, launched the Autonomous Driving: Italy in the Front Row initiative, which has backing from administrators from all over the country. Among the signatories to the scheme are Milan mayor Beppe Sala and Turin mayor Stefano Lo Russo, as well as dozens of other mayors of medium-size and small cities. The goal, apparently, is to make Italy the European leader in autonomous vehicles, turning municipal territories into open-air laboratories for testing the automotive technologies of the near future.

In Ari Aster's movies, the price of understanding how the world really works is your sanity, if not your life. His first three movies--Hereditary, Midsommar, and Beau Is Afraid--center on characters whose feeling that there's something sinister going on beneath the surface of their existence is eventually proved to be correct, but it's as if their bodies aren't equipped to contain that knowledge. One way or another, their minds are gone. The people in Aster's polarizing fourth movie, Eddington, a Western-inflected psychodrama set during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, don't get off so easy. The stress test of a rapidly spreading virus with no known treatment exposes innumerable cracks in society's facade: the gap between remote workers and people forced to risk their lives in order to earn a living; between people who breathe a sigh of relief when they see a police car approaching and people who have to be sure to keep their hands in plain sight.

"Eddington" is a slog, but a slog with ambitions--and its director and screenwriter, Ari Aster, is savvy enough to cultivate an air of mystery about what those ambitions are. His earlier chillers, "Hereditary" (2018) and "Midsommar" (2019), had their labyrinthine ambiguities, too, but they also had propulsive craft and cunning, plus a resolute commitment to scaring us stupid. Then came the ungainly "Beau Is Afraid" (2023), a cavalcade of Oedipal neuroses both showy and coy, in which Aster didn't seem to lose focus so much as sacrifice it on the altar of auteurism. With "Eddington," his high-minded unravelling continues. No longer a horror wunderkind, Aster, at thirty-nine, yearns to be an impish anatomist of the body politic.

An Israeli drone strike that has killed one person in a south Lebanon village targeted a municipal worker operating a water well, not a Hezbollah member as the Israeli military had claimed, according to the Mayor of Nabatieh al-Fawqa Zein Ali Ghandour. Ghandour said on Thursday that the victim, Mahmoud Hasan Atwi, was "martyred" while on his official duty of trying to provide water for the people of the town. "We condemn in the strongest terms this blatant aggression against civilians and civilian infrastructure as well as the Lebanese state and its institutions," the mayor said in a statement. Ghandour called on the international community to press the issue and put an end to Israeli violations. The Israeli military had claimed that it fired at a "Hezbollah operative" who it said was "rehabilitating a site" used by the group.

A former NASA astronaut has come forward to reveal that he personally witnessed'two metallic spherical orbs' whizz by his plane this August while flying above Texas. Leroy Chiao, who served as the commander of Expedition 10 to the International Space Station (ISS) in 2004 and 2005, was 9,000 feet in the air when objects'zipped' on the left side of his airplane. He said one flew on top of the other and each was about three feet in diameter. 'It's just kinda dumb luck that they didn't hit me,' said Chiao. The former NASA astronaut estimates that the orbs were only'about 20 feet away.' 'It could've been a bad result, if they had actually hit me,' Chiao said.

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has announced a temporary drone ban in New Jersey, citing'special security reasons.' At least 22 towns in central and northern New Jersey fall under the alert, which is in place until at least January 17. The temporary flight restriction (TFR) areas include parts of Camden, Gloucester City, Winslow Township, Evesham, Hancock's Bridge in Lower Alloways Township in Salem County, Westampton, Burlington, and Hamilton in Mercer County. Flying drones is also banned in Bridgewater, Cedar Grove, North Brunswick, Metuchen, South Brunswick, Edison, Branchburg, Sewaren, Jersey City, Harrison, Elizabeth, Bayonne, Clifton, and Kearny. The FAA warned that'deadly force' could be used against drones that present an'imminent security threat.'

Updated November 2024: This story has been updated with the new availability of Stardew's 1.6 update. The popular farming sim and ultimate cozy game Stardew Valley dropped a major update on Tuesday after months of anticipation. Stardew's 1.6 update has an insane amount of new content that touches every area of the game, from new menus and DIYs, to a new farm layout, new crops, and the ability to have multiple pets and play with seven friends at once. It's enough updates to make the game feel fresh, but it isn't so new that you can't ease back into a beloved farm and toil away. As of November 4, 2024, the free update is available for players on all platforms.

New York City Mayor Eric Adams--who truly believes that God put him in that job--was indicted this week on five federal charges related to bribery, wire fraud, and accepting straw donations from foreign officials. The acts detailed in the nearly 60-page indictment from the Southern District of New York span a full decade of Adams' political career, dating back to his tenure as Brooklyn borough president and extending up through his current mayoral reelection campaign. Despite being the only mayor in NYC history to be charged during his tenure, Adams is still doing what he does best: refusing to budge an inch and clumsily making his case before a city that's long tired of his shenanigans. "From here, my attorneys will take care of the case so I can take care of the city," he declared during a rainy Thursday morning press conference, sheltering under a pavilion with members of the city's Black clergy. "My day-to-day will not change. I will continue to do the job for 8.3 million New ...