The Atlantic Gift Article: “…Alabama willfully drew a map that flouted the District Court’s preliminary injunction and hoped that this Court would eventually see things its way,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in her dissent, which was joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson. “After today, it is hard to call Alabama’s cynical gambit ...

404 Media no paywall: “A surveillance company plans to add sensors to automatic license plate readers (ALPRs) that would mean the devices, as well as capture the license plate of passing vehicles, would also sweep up unique identifiers of mobile phones, wearables, and other Bluetooth-enabled devices in those cars, potentially letting law enforcement identify specific ...

Lee, E.H., Yin, Y., Jia, N. et al. Relying on AI at work reduces self-efficacy, ownership, and meaning while active collaboration mitigates the effects. Sci Rep 16, 13583 (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-026-42312-6 “Artificial intelligence (AI) promises major productivity gains, but it also raises fundamental questions about how technology can reshape people’s relationship to their work.…

Employees’ Religious Objection to Using AI at Work: “Pope Leo XIV’s lengthy encyclical on AI sparked a larger public debate on AI regulation. But it also raised a fundamental question about what role religion and religious views should play in this debate — and in the use of AI generally. We are beginning to see ...

NOTUS: “President Donald Trump says “if you don’t have honest voting, you can’t really have a nation.” But five months out from the midterm elections that will determine control of Congress, his Justice Department has canceled election-integrity training sessions for prosecutors and FBI agents, deleted a 281-page guide to prosecuting election offenses, fired most of ...

rxansmithmedia: “You’re not paying for food. You’re paying for a system engineered to extract from you at every step—while calling it a free market. The conversation about grocery prices in America gets framed as economics. Supply and demand. Inflation. Bird flu. Ukraine. Pick a villain. Blame the moment. Move on. But the real problem isn’t ...

GeekWire: An AI agent that dives into ocean data “Skylight, the free ocean-monitoring platform built by Seattle’s Allen Institute for AI (Ai2), launched an AI agent that gives maritime analysts answers to plain-language questions about what’s happening across the world’s oceans, from illegal fishing to vessels that have gone dark. The agent, dubbed Shippy, runs ...

The Chronical of Higher Education- no paywall: “The generational collapse in literacy is measurable, persistent, and likely to get worse…Every generation of professors has complained that their students cannot read. The lament is usually overblown, but data have caught up to anecdote, and what I am seeing in my classroom is no longer a hunch. ...

Follow up to CIA ends publication of its popular World Factbook reference tool – Manuel Longo: “When the CIA World Factbook faded as a free, machine-readable source, a swath of public-interest country data was effectively orphaned. Bamwor rebuilds it as open data: 261 countries and 5.2M cities, in four languages, as CSV/JSON with a permanent ...

AP: “As the U.S. prepares for an extravagant celebration of its founding principles, fewer Americans see their country as exceptional, a new poll finds. The survey from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research highlights many Americans’ feeling of unease over the future of its representative government — particularly among young people. It presents ...

Summary of Results from the 2025 State of the Nation Report – Americans share the same struggles despite deep political divides, new bipartisan report finds – The purpose of the State of the Nation Project is to provide an overall assessment of how the country is doing on a wide range of factors that we, ...

Washington Post Gift Article: The agency is facing pressure to improve medical care in its facilities after reporting the deaths of 18 detainees in the first five months of this year. As the number of immigrants dying in government custody rises, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is shrinking the scope of which deaths it will be ...

WSJ via MSN: “Trump has gotten involved in regulatory decisions big and small that once were made by independent agencies, according to interviews with business executives, lobbyists and administration officials, dramatically shifting the balance of power across Washington and reordering how influence campaigns are waged. Lobbying targeting the White House – Political appointees by nature ...

404 Media: The Agency Is Redacting Essentially Everything – “Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) contracted with a spyware company that tells customers it ensures they can use the tool without the agency being caught doing so, according to documents obtained by 404 Media through our ongoing lawsuit against ICE. In September, we sued ICE for ...

Wondertools: “Google’s Pinpoint is now open to everyone. It’s a surprisingly powerful free tool for making sense of giant piles of digital stuff. (Before June 3, it was restricted to journalists and academics). Read on to learn more about creative ways to use Pinpoint; its new AI features and their limitations; and how Pinpoint differs ...

CNN – no paywall: “The deal that President Donald Trump reached with his own administration to set-up an “anti-weaponization fund” for his allies is the latest example of how his second stint in the White House has focused on undermining checks on presidential power and insulating himself from future investigations. The agreement highlights the new ...

The Pudding: An analysis of 200,000 similes from popular fiction. Similes are all around us. But, if you haven’t considered this figure of speech since grade school, here’s a refresher: similes compare a shared quality of two things, often using “like” or “as.” I pulled every simile in the form “as ___ as ___” from ...

Washington Post [no paywall] Diabetes researchers ejected from conference after criticizing White House Five diabetes researchers, including the editor of a leading journal, were removed from the field’s premier conference in New Orleans on Friday morning, after handing out copies of an editorial criticizing the Trump administration’s “dismantling” of the biomedical research enterprise. The…

Via LLRX Tracking hallucination marketing claims from legal tech vendors – Damien Charlotin tracks the claims made by some LegalTech vendors in the past and today with respect to how they handle hallucinations from their offerings. Charlotin is relying on internet-based written marketing material, trying to highlight the changes in how these products are and ...

404 Media: “Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) contracted with a spyware company that tells customers it ensures they can use the tool without the agency being caught doing so, according to documents obtained by 404 Media through our ongoing lawsuit against ICE. In September, we sued ICE for documents related to its $2 million contract ...

DeFlock: “Automated License Plate Readers (ALPRs or LPRs) are AI-powered cameras that capture and analyze images of all passing vehicles, storing details like your car’s location, date, and time. They also capture your car’s make, model, color, and identifying features such as dents, roof racks, and bumper stickers, often turning these into searchable data points. ...

Henry Farrell and Cosma Rohilla Shalizi, AI as Social Technology, 26-5 Knight First Amend. Inst. (May 11, 2026), https://knightcolumbia.org/content/ai-as-social-technology [https://perma.cc/25BX-GUQL]. “…Authors of speculative non-fiction about AGI are less inhibited, offering sweeping visions of how information technology will completely transform society, economy, politics, or all three. They…

Via LLRX – Trump Administration’s Continued War Against Science, Research, Public Health and the Rule of Law – Part 9 – This article is the ninth in a series by Sabrina I. Pacifici focused on the Trump administration’s unrelenting policy of attacking science, healthcare, public health, and the rule of law. The cornerstone of this series ...

Raw America: “The Trump administration’s $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization fund” may be dead, but the effort to pay Trump’s allies with taxpayer dollars is very much alive. After Republican lawmakers threatened to sink an ICE funding bill if the slush fund moved forward, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche told Congress the Justice Department wouldn’t proceed with ...

Email Markup Consortium: “This report serves as a technical audit of the senders, platforms and email clients that define the modern inbox. The results below are from analysis of over 376,000 emails across senders and geographies, looking at how each email scored on a detailed accessibility scorecard. This year’s report also looks beyond the sender, ...

The Guardian – The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau deleted at least 2,200 webpages from its website last month, a move advocates say is part of the Trump administration’s latest effort to dismantle the federal consumer finance watchdog. The removed content was all published before Trump’s second term, and includes press releases, consumer advisories, congressional testimonies, ...

Washington Post [no paywall]: “The administration is laying the groundwork for chatbots that can diagnose illness and prescribe medicine, but physicians say AI can introduce more problems…Today, chatbots can only legally offer medical guidance with a disclaimer attached: Neither the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, nor any state licensing board, allows a fully autonomous AI ...

ZDNET: “Prior to MacOS Tahoe, Spotlight was a search tool. You could call it up with the Cmd+Space keyboard shortcut, type whatever it was you were looking for, and there it was. Before Tahoe was released, I was using a tool called Alfred because it was more like the tools I’d been accustomed to, and ...

Raw America – “Scores of retired federal judges are now waging war against Trump in the courts, filing briefs challenging his administration. And they’re not pulling any punches. In Florida, a federal judge took a motion from 35 former federal judges so seriously that she ordered the Trump administration to respond to their request to ...

Indicator: “”Seventy percent of the “face swapping” apps available in Apple’s and Google’s app stores allowed the generation of nonconsensual deepfake nudes, according to a working paper by researchers at Cornell and Georgetown. The apps market themselves as playful AI editing tools that can edit a photo to replace someone’s face with that of another ...