Platformer: “Brookings Institution researcher Molly Kinder on why she’s leaving her job to create solution for AI’s “messy middle.” Molly Kinder has spent the past three years at the Brookings Institution leading a multiyear project on how generative AI is transforming work. In a recent widely discussed essay, she predicted the coming of what she ...
“Welcome to Season 8: The News. This 8-part series will explore the deep challenges facing American journalism, and the nation’s news and information crisis. It seems everyone’s mad at the media, but we’ll ask, what’s really wrong with the news? Is it what we think it is? What would a more independent and democratic media look like? By ...
Today, the U.S. General Services Administration released the Elimination, Optimization and Automation (EOA) Handbook, a practical guide for federal leaders seeking to improve operational efficiency, strengthen mission delivery, and reduce administrative burden through process improvement and emerging technologies. The handbook compiles lessons learned and best practices from implementation…
Perplexity – Frontier AI systems are closing the gap between model intelligence and real-world utility. New models, compute architectures, and orchestration patterns are enabling these systems to accomplish tasks deemed impossible just a few months ago. This rapid innovation has proved a boon to AI users by magnifying their leverage and agency. Yet it has ...
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 ...
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 ...
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. ...
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.…
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 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 ...
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, ...
LLRX https://www.llrx.com Trump Administration’s Continued War Against Science, Research, Public Health and the Rule of Law – Part 9 – Sabrina I. Pacifici Tracking hallucination marketing claims from legal tech vendors. Damien Charlotin Deep Coverage – Right now the dominant AI strategy in law is using AI to replace or augment human labor on work ...
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 ...
The Guardian: “Watchdog makes ruling on search summaries after publishers complain about drop in click-through traffic and revenue. Online publishers and news organisations are now able to block their content from appearing in Google’s AI summaries in UK search results, the British competition watchdog has announced.The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) said the new requirement ...
LifeHacker: “You probably use Perplexity as a quick answer machine. Instead of Google Search, you ask Perplexity questions, and it responds with citations you can check yourself. While Perplexity is good at this, the scope of what the service can do (especially in the paid tiers) goes way beyond. After integrating some built-in features, harnessing ...
The American Prospect: “The world’s largest advertising conglomerate has proposed merging with the company that has built detailed profiles on every American. A disturbing story at the intersection of innovations in war and our surveillance economy broke last week. Reuters reported on a letter sent by U.S. Central Command to Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) back ...
Ethan Mollick – One Useful Thing: “If you go to your favorite social media site, you will find it full of posts that start to look suspiciously similar to each other: Many of the comments to these posts are also generated by AI. So are an increasing number of academic papers and New York Times ...
What does the geography of incarceration in the United States look like: Prison Map is not a map — it’s a snapshot of the earth’s surface, taken at various points throughout the United States. It was made by Josh Begley, a graduate student studying Interactive Telecommunications at New York University. The United States is the ...
Publisher A.G. Sulzberger warns A.I. companies are violating settled law and urges news organizations to stand up for their rights to ensure a sustainable future for reporting.
NBC News: “Roughly 2,000 U.S. diplomats have been laid off or forced to retire, taking with them decades of institutional knowledge, crisis response experience and highly specialized language skills…” See also At the Breaking Point – The State of the U.S. Foreign Service in 2025 – A Report by the American Foreign Service Association
The New York Times Gift Article: “President Trump’s upheaval of the federal government has led to an exodus of more than 10,000 lawyers since the beginning of 2025, a striking loss of legal talent that has left some agencies pushing to find attorneys to carry out his agenda. Roughly one in five lawyers who worked ...
FT.com [no paywall]: “Kirkland & Ellis has set aside $500mn to create its own AI platform, as the world’s highest-grossing law firm seeks to develop proprietary technology rather than rely only on tools available to its competitors. The US-based firm expects to spend more than $100mn this year and hundreds of millions more in the ...
Gizmodo – Wait, this costs money?: “Just last month, the most important metric in Silicon Valley was tokens burned—the units of measurement for the computing power being used by AI models. CEOs were giving employees the Matthew McConaughey “those are rookie numbers, you gotta pump those numbers up” speech from The Wolf of Wall Street. Now, ...
Check Point – 2026 U.S. Election Threat Outlook: “The 2026 U.S. midterm election cycle is expected to drive elevated cyber threat activity across the broader election ecosystem, including political organizations, fundraising and media platforms, government services, campaign personnel, and the providers that support them. Current intelligence and reporting indicate that the most likely 2026…
Reuters: “What if you could get feedback from your firm’s best litigator at 2 a.m., without waking them up? Vorys, Sater, Seymour and Pease is trying to do just that. The 375-attorney Ohio firm has partnered with a Stanford Law School research lab to build “AI personas” of 19 of its partners, tools that can ...
The Verge – “After the Wikimedia Foundation abruptly dissolved a beloved team of engineers, Wikipedia’s volunteers are angry — and discussing how they can push back. Wikipedia is one of the last bastions of trust on the internet. But last week, volunteer editors and contributors were alarmed to hear that a small but important team ...