After devastating Florida with historic flooding, a weakened Ian regained strength and is expected to hit South Carolina as a hurricane today. The entire SC coast has been placed under a hurricane warning.

Florida is picking up the pieces

Ian, one of the most powerful storms ever to hit the US, knocked out power to more than 2.5 million Florida customers after it came ashore on FL’s west coast on Wednesday afternoon. Its winds and storm surge of up to 18 feet trapped people in their homes, leveled buildings, and cut off water supplies to some hospitals—forcing patients to be evacuated.

At least nine fatalities have been reported, but there will likely be more amid ongoing rescue efforts. After receiving a briefing from FEMA yesterday, President Biden said that early reports show “what may be substantial loss of life.”

Other officials offered similarly grim assessments. Lee County Sheriff Carmine Marceno, who viewed the devastation by helicopter, said, “When you look at Fort Myers Beach in particular, there’s no words to describe it.” FL Gov. Ron DeSantis called Ian a “500-year flood event” and estimated it would take years to fully rebuild.

As for the impact on business…

• Major Florida airports remained closed yesterday and thousands of flights were canceled. Tampa International Airport will reopen this morning.
• The Tampa Bay Buccaneers said their Sunday home game against the Kansas City Chiefs will go on as planned.
• The citrus industry is assessing the impact on Florida’s prodigious orange groves, which supply the vast majority of OJ in the US. The damage to the already struggling sector is expected to be significant.

What else?

• Videos captured heroic rescues.
• Sharks were spotted on the roads of Fort Myers.
• A hurricane hunter shot video of flying through Ian. He called it the “roughest flight of my career so far.”
• Here’s how you can help with relief efforts.—NF

Ian, in photos

Russia makes brazen play to get bigger. Vladimir Putin will push ahead with his illegal land grab by announcing the annexation of four Ukrainian regions today, citing election results that show residents in those areas want to join Russia. Ukraine and the West have called those votes completely bogus. As for the mysterious Nord Stream pipeline leaks in the Baltic Sea, NATO declared them acts of sabotage and said the alliance would respond to any deliberate attacks on its critical infrastructure.

The Biden administration reverses debt relief for some borrowers. The Education Dept. is cutting back its student debt relief program for roughly 800,000 borrowers whose debt is held and managed by private banks (although guaranteed by the federal government). Facing legal challenges to the program, the administration is looking to avoid lawsuits from private companies that could threaten or hold up debt relief. But other lawsuits have already arrived. Yesterday, six Republican-led states sued to overturn Biden’s plan to forgive up to $20,000 in student debt for borrowers making less than $125,000.

Google boards up the Stadiam. The tech giant said it’s shuttering its cloud gaming service, Stadia, less than three years after its release. The gaming world reacted with a very sarcastic “oh no we’re so surprised!” Stadia had skeptics since its launch because of its ill-defined audience and weak game library. And last year, when Google shut down its in-house game development studios, everyone’s eyebrows flew even higher. The service will officially power down January 18, 2023.

Rapidly evolving from a zero-effort way to see what Dr. Phil would look like as a Dragon Ball Z villain into a tool for creating award-winning gallery pieces, AI-generated art just hit yet another milestone. Yesterday, machine learning engineers at Meta announced a new AI tool called Make-A-Video that produces videos from users’ text prompts.

Currently, Make-A-Video clips are audio-free and last less than five seconds but, at the industry’s current growth rate, we can probably expect that to change by the time you finish this newsletter.

As with other recent AI tools, Make-A-Video comes with risks: It could one day threaten the jobs of artists, it raises thorny ethics and copyright questions, and it poses a potential privacy risk in its ability to create fake videos of real people. In a paper detailing their work, Meta’s researchers also note that, like other AI, it has “learnt and likely exaggerated social biases, including harmful ones.”

AI art is in its Big Bang era: On Wednesday, OpenAI announced that it’s removed the waitlist for DALL-E, which means users can sign up and begin using it immediately. And earlier this month, an AI-generated graphic novel received US copyright registration—potentially the first piece created using the process to do so.—MK

Kids these days are still obsessed with YouTube, even if they aren’t exclusively using it to binge 10 hours of Smosh videos. The video platform is Gen Z’s No. 1 brand, according to a new report from Morning Consult.

Back in our day, we had to Ask Jeeves uphill both ways. After YouTube, Gen Z favored tech behemoths Google, Netflix, and Amazon.

And growing young adults need snacks for all that Google searching: Half of the top 40 most popular Gen Z brands were food and beverage companies, more specifically—junk food. M&Ms ranked the highest at No. 5, followed by Doritos (8), Kit Kat (9), Oreo (10), and the only appropriate drink to wash it all down came in at No. 11: Gatorade.

Some other highlights that might help you connect with your coworker who keeps calling you “mid”:

• No shock here, but unimpressed Gen Z’s average favorability rating over all brands was 27%, lower than 33% of all participants and 36% of millennials. (A brand’s favorability score was determined by asking participants if they had either a “somewhat” or “very” favorable opinion of each brand.)
• But, more Gen Zers saw fast-fashion giant Shein favorably (44%) compared to all adults in the survey (22%).—MM

Stat: This statistic from Bloomberg is the best illustration yet of just how unaffordable buying a home has gotten this year. With mortgage rates around 3% in early 2021, if you wanted to spend $2,500/month on a home you could buy a house that cost $758,572. Now, with mortgage rates more than double that, that same monthly payment would get you a house that costs $476,425.

Quote: “Maybe Oprah would be interested in joining the Twitter board if my bid succeeds.”

Floating Oprah as a Twitter board member to CBS anchor Gayle King is just one of many juicy Elon Musk texts that were released yesterday ahead of the Musk v. Twitter trial. Also included in the treasure trove: Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison pledging $1 billion to Musk’s take-private bid because “it would be lots of fun” and former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey endorsing Musk’s attempted takeover because, “It’s too critical for humanity.”

Read: The magical bookstore you thought only existed in stories. (Melissa Caruso)

The feeling of getting a 5/5 on the Brew’s Weekly News Quiz has been compared to looking at your Friday calendar and seeing zero meetings.

It’s that satisfying. Ace the quiz.

Data, visualized: An interactive analysis of celebratory gunfire and the US cities with the largest median home size.

How much can you “find out”? This guy will show you using a simple formula (language warning).

Happy Friday! Here’s an endless doomscroll.

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Jigsaw: Strap on your scuba gear and dive into today’s Jigsaw puzzle. Play it here.

Friday puzzle

This intricate puzzle should help you stay stimulated during a slow Friday at work.

The following two 4x4 grids each contain a 12-letter word. Each word is formed by a chain of letters. A word can begin with any of the letters in the grid. The second letter of a word is adjacent (either horizontally, vertically, or diagonally) to the first letter, the third letter is adjacent to the second, and so on. No letter can be used more than once. Four letters in each grid will be unused. Can you find the words?

DNNW
UEIE
ROKT
NGAR

LAME
CNNG
IOIL
LDUT

Meet two young singles who went on a blind date and got intimate immediately by discussing finances. See if they’re a financial match.

This week on Business Casual: Media mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg explains why you’re more vulnerable to hackers than you might think. Listen or watch here.

Suffering from writer’s block? A lineup of successful creators will share their tactics to help you push through. Sign up for Morning Brew’s Strategy for Creators course today.