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Earlier today, Mayor Eric Adams pleaded not guilty to the five federal counts unveiled this week in a damning 57-page indictment that alleges that he engaged in a quid pro quo corruption scheme with Turkish nationals, among other campaign-funding violations.

23andMe is not doing well. Its stock is on the verge of being delisted. It shut down its in-house drug-development unit last month, only the latest in several rounds of layoffs. Last week, the entire board of directors quit, save for Anne Wojcicki, a co-founder and the company’s CEO. Amid this downward spiral, Wojcicki has said she’ll consider selling 23andMe—which means the DNA of 23andMe’s 15 million customers would be up for sale, too.

Israel said this afternoon that it had carried out an air strike on the “central headquarters” of Hezbollah, in the southern suburbs of Beirut. Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah was reportedly the target of the attack; his fate remains unclear.
The strike caps a sequence of Israeli attacks over the past two weeks that have wreaked havoc on Hezbollah as an organization. The pager and walkie-talkie attacks that began on September 17—which former U.S.

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A disaster is brewing on dark-web forums, in messaging apps, and in schools around the world: Generative AI is being used to create sexually explicit images and videos of children, likely thousands a day.

While working on his latest film, Megalopolis, Francis Ford Coppola had an idea: What if viewers interacted with the movie itself? He’d have microphones placed throughout audiences at every screening, so that at a predetermined moment, everyone who wanted to could ask the characters a question—and someone on-screen would respond. It would bridge the gap between fact and fiction. It would prove that cinema-going could truly be a unique experience.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.
Back in 1999—the good old days—a Canadian band that called itself Great Big Sea released a wonderful song titled “Consequence Free.” It was a gentle poke at social conformity, guilt, and, yes, perhaps even what was then called political correctness.

Photographs by Andrej Vasilenko
In 1999, a remarkable book was published in Poland. Its author, Kazimierz Sakowicz, had died 55 years earlier, and it’s not clear whether he hoped, let alone expected, that what he had written would ever be published. The first edition appeared under the one-word title Dziennik (“Diary”), with the explanatory subtitle “Written in Ponar From July 11, 1941, to November 6, 1943.

This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present and surface delightful treasures. Sign up here.
Over the past week or so, my X feed has been overtaken by Moo Deng, the baby pygmy hippopotamus whose glistening skin, jaunty trot, and rippling neck rolls have won the internet’s devotion.

This is an edition of The Weekly Planet, a newsletter that provides a guide for living through climate change. Sign up for it here.
Living in the days of climate change means we are living in the era of ecological grief. The emotional phenomenon has inspired funerals for glaciers in Iceland, Oregon, and Switzerland. Scientists have reported feeling shock and loss with each consecutive return to the Great Barrier Reef, as new expanses of coral bleach and desiccate.

Ellen DeGeneres has been raising chickens. She loves those chickens, and the feeling, she thinks, is mutual. She watches them play on a little swing. It’s been two years since the comedian was last in the public eye, and she’s eager to chat about what she’s been doing in the interim. “Let me see what else I can tell you about that’s been going on,” she muses in her latest—and, according to her, last—stand-up special, Netflix’s For Your Approval. She’s stopped getting Botox injections, she notes.