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Starlink Quietly Introduces Monthly Hardware Rental Fee

SpaceX’s Starlink has quietly introduced a new monthly fee for its satellite internet hardware, adding to recent price increases that have already

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Jun 9 • 7:59 AM EDT • Technology • miragenews.com
David Jolly taps Sean Pittman as Transition Chair, assuming he wins in November

'The transition process is where ideas become action, and we intend to be ready.'

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Jun 9 • 4:30 AM EDT • Politics • floridapolitics.com
Big spending by Super PACs in congressional primaries

Millions of dollars have already been spent by outside groups known as Super PACs to try to sway voters in the upcoming congressional primaries

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Jun 8 • 7:37 PM EDT • Politics • ny1.com
5 things I already love from the iOS 27 beta

The update is off to a strong start.

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Jun 8 • 7:30 PM EDT • Technology • theverge.com
Download the official macOS 27 Golden Gate wallpapers here

And even though macOS 27 Golden Gate won’t launch for a few more months, you can already get the new light and dark wallpapers from the gallery below.

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Jun 8 • 7:09 PM EDT • Technology • 9to5mac.com
4 of the best iOS 27 features Android already has

Apple rarely does things first, which is one of the reasons we love Android so much.

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Jun 8 • 6:31 PM EDT • Technology • androidcentral.com
Are Titans ready to embrace tight end trend in 2026?

Additions of Daniel Bellinger, Kylen Granson, Jaren Kanak could signal more multiple TE formations in 2026

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Jun 8 • 4:45 PM EDT • Sports • nashvillepost.com
We can create the future of science right now

Paul Litvak is the founder and Executive Director of the Robyn Dawes Institute and a Visiting Scholar at UC Berkeley. He has a PhD in Behavioral Decision Research from Carnegie Mellon where he studied emotions and the sunk cost bias. Over 15 years in industry, he solved a wide range of challenging technical problems. At Meta he created models optimizing the ad review process. At Google he ran experiments to measure social influence. At Airbnb, he was a product manager leading machine learning teams optimizing search ranking and price suggestions. He also co-founded and led product at Rhythmic Health, a venture-backed biosensing startup, creating an accurate low cost system using a color changing strip and a smart phone to measure salivary lactate. The bottleneck At this point, it is uncontroversial to say that science needs to stop using the PDF article as the unit of knowledge and currency. The unbearable slowness of scientific publishing, the profit motive and margins: I’m not saying anything new. The PDF also sucks because it’s hard to extract structured information, which makes it hard to do evidence synthesis. As a result, we do much less evidence synthesis than is needed. And evidence synthesis ultimately undergirds most policy and medical decision-making. I can see second-by-second real-time odds for any sporting or newsworthy event, but a school board can’t see the best evidence on whether their 8th graders should be taught algebra. As a society, we don’t treat this as an important problem. Again, not controversial. Not only is the problem well understood, but the solution has already been laid out. What we need is AI-assisted living evidence synthesis - (1) an open knowledge graph of atomic claims, (2) claims linked to evidence, (3) assessment and synthesis of each piece of evidence, and (4) continuous updating with new data. What few realize (yet) is that the technical capacity to build this vision for a significant portion of science already exists. Not only that, scientists and startup teams are already building many of these components. I know this because I’ve been surveying the space and talking to many of the builders. There are some missing pieces: for example, evaluations of how well some of the components work. But at this point, most of what’s missing is a fully end-to-end working integration of all of these parts. In the rest of this essay, I’m going to lay out all the parts of a working living evidence layer for science and who is working on them, and propose concrete next steps for building this system. What’s now possible The diagram above outlines the components of a living evidence synthesis platform, including some of the teams working on each component1. Scientific PDFs are processed into claims with associated evidence. The evidence is subjected to a forensic audit, methodological evaluation and robustness and reproducibility checks. Finally it’s given a weight in a continuously updating synthesis. What follows is a description and status of each component and a few of the teams working on them. Document understanding The first thing you need to be able to do is turn an article into structured data. Mostly that means parsing PDFs. There are often multicolumn layouts that confuse non-specialized PDF to text processing libraries. For scientific papers, there is the added complexity of parsing formulas and tables and figures. This is a really hot area - there are startups offering APIs, and it seems like a new open source package gets posted to Github every few weeks. What follows isn’t exhaustive. A package called GROBID was the state of the art for a while, they didn’t update their package for nearly two years until very recently. In the meantime reducto.ai released an AI powered PDF extraction API, PaddleOCR became popular, IBM released a model called Docling, and both Mistral and Gemini created models and libraries. I also know of at least one other well-funded psychology research group working on a paper parser. By contrast, there are few open evals in this space, with no extensive evals for complex table comprehension in particular. Nonetheless, I’m confident this will be a solved problem soon, given the combination of LLM advances and developer interest. Hypothesis level extraction There has been increasing interest in comprehending the extracted text of papers and linking information to evidence for each hypothesis. A lot of work has already been done. Trialstreamer (Marshall et al. 2020) and RobotReviewer LIVE (Marshall et al. 2023) demonstrated automated extraction of trial population, intervention, and outcome at scale on clinical RCTs. PaperQA2 (Skarlinski et al. 2024) and Ai2 ScholarQA (2024) extended this to retrieval-augmented question answering with citation grounding. Elicit, Consensus, and SciSpace operationalized claim-level extraction for end users. OpenEval (Booeshaghi et al. 2026) is the most recent and most ambitious: 1.96 million atomic claims extracted from 16,087 eLife manuscripts using Claude Sonnet 4.5, grouped into ~299,000 results, with LLM evaluations showing 81% agreement with human peer review on a 2,487-paper subset. None of these solutions link claims to test-statistics, as you would need to evaluate randomized controlled trials. This is why I built the evidence.guide API - to extract hypotheses and associated test statistics from behavioral science papers. The best public eval of this kind of extraction I’m aware of comes from the recent SCORE project - they had humans code thousands of psychology papers to extract their claims by hand. It would be extremely helpful to the world if all scientific PDFs were available as structured open data. I’ve been working to make this happen, both directly at Berkeley and through coordination with large entities I can’t yet speak of; as hard as it is to do, I think it’s possible2. Forensic audit A lot of work has been done on forensic audit, but some gaps remain. Of course, for biology papers that rely on images for evidence, there are a variety of tools (notably Proofig and ImageTwin) to spot anomalies. These are still well short of what sleuths like Elizabeth Bik can do on her own, but these tools are constant companions among fraud analysts. There’s someone working on auditing Excel files for anomalies, and a number of teams are automating numerical checks like GRIM and SPRITE, including Scrutiny project, the INSPECT-SR team as well as statcheck. The regcheck team is building a way to use AI to compare preregistrations to analyses in papers, to ensure there aren’t significant deviations. Nonetheless, there are many other kinds of anomalies to screen for, both public and less publicly known. And there are no formal evals for anomaly detection that I’m aware of. Still, there’s a lot to draw from in this space and I’m pretty certain we will be able to scan papers for most kinds of obvious anomalies in the near future. Methodological review This area has been white hot, though I fear for many of the startups in this space, because this capability may become commoditized. There are at least six different AI peer review companies, including Refine.ink, Reviewer3, ReviewerZero.ai, Q.E.D. Science, Paper Wizard, and Isitcredible. Coarse (a pun on refine) was also recently created as an open source alternative. These systems provide qualitative feedback on the content of papers, spotting methodological weaknesses and mathematical errors. They seem to work pretty well, and many academics report bitterly that they exceed the average quality of typical peer reviewers. But there are few evals here either. What evals exist so far involve using LLM-as-judge (circularity problems abound) or comparing against human reviews of questionable quality. What you’d ideally want is an eval that measures capturing known errors in papers3. Reproducibility and robustness Another active area has been using AI agents to automate computational reproducibility4 and robustness5 checks in papers that report numerical results. For more recent papers where data and code are available, AI agents can see whether they can re-run the analyses and produce the numbers reported in the published paper. In addition to a handful of individual academics who have been experimenting using Claude Code for this, the Institute for Replication is a leading group working on building an end to end system. The evals related to this problem are the most mature, with CORE-Bench (Siegel, Kapoor, Narayanan 2024) and PaperBench (OpenAI 2025) available to benchmark agents on this task. There is also work on getting AI agents to test alternative ways of analyzing the data to ensure the results are robust to small analytic design choices. Synthesis This is the most underdeveloped area where significant investment is required. Although some automated evidence synthesis systems exist — for example, otto-sr is building an AI agent to write systematic reviews — none of these incorporate the full range of paper level signals to weight evidence appropriately. Nor is there anything like an eval or a gold standard for a good systematic review. Arguably Cochrane reviews are the closest we have to gold standard human systematic reviews, though I’ve heard academics in the know complain about their uneven quality. A key question for a synthesis platform is how to weight anomalies and methodological issues in assessing the quality of a piece of evidence. This is an unsolved problem and one I’m very keen to work on. Continuous updating There are many pieces of basic infrastructure available for monitoring for new research and initiating updates. OpenAlex is the current open citation graph. Retraction Watch integrated into Crossref in October 2023. Scite tracks how citations support, contrast, or mention prior claims. The Living Evidence Network demonstrated continuous-update workflows in clinical guidelines. Engineering this is a relatively straightforward task. When you look over this technical architecture and all the progress being made, it’s hard not to be optimistic that a living guide to scientific evidence will be built. The stakeholders are ready The social infrastructure for this is starting to coalesce — it’s not just a pie in the sky academic exercise to imagine this coming into existence. Institutions like the Center for Open Science, the Institute for Replication, the INSPECT-SR, the Living Evidence Network and more are all working on scaling work to improve research quality. Funders are also aligned. The Sloan Foundation has funded living evidence work through COS. Coefficient Giving supports the Institute for Replication and COS. The Astera Institute and the Institute for Progress have shown interest in this space. NIH has established an Office for Replication and Reproducibility. Although there are (very unfortunately) serious headwinds in science funding generally, there is an active group of funders interested in metascience. A brief word about what I’ve been doing at RDI. First, as a Visiting Scholar at Berkeley I’ve been actively figuring out how a non-profit and a public university can conduct and make public the results of large-scale academic article data mining. With some of the money I raised from donors, I commissioned a legal analysis of recent case law and publisher text data mining (TDM) agreements in order to understand whether a massive open data mining of academic articles is possible (with caveats, it is). I’ve also been working to bring together stakeholders in this space, and identify gaps. I’ve also been doing some software development in this space, with more to come. A pilot proposal The assumption undergirding all of this is that an AI, given all this information, would make the right judgment about a scientific claim with lots of conflicting evidence, weighing all the factors appropriately. That’s the hypothesis we need to test. Randomized control trial research is the best place to focus on first. RCTs are used to make many of the important decisions in society - from medical trials to public policy changes. And they use a relatively uniform set of inferential statistics with lots of known and available diagnostics. Behavioral science experiments, within the broader realm of RCTs, should be first used as a testbed whose results can be generalized. Because behavioral science is at the vanguard of open science practices, replications abound (there are thousands of them) to serve as ground truth training data. Key Hypothesis Therefore the pilot would test, in behavioral RCTs that have been replicated, whether the quality of evidence for a claim can be used to accurately predict whether that claim will replicate. Secondary Hypotheses Compared to claims that replicated, non-replicated claims demonstrate a greater share of forensic anomalies in their source literatures. Hypothesis level claim and statistic extraction is accurate enough to scale living evidence without onerous human review costs. Replication prediction is more accurate than prediction markets6 or journal prestige. If all the different quality signals we gather do accurately predict which studies will replicate, then we can use that model to score evidence to power the living evidence layer. Why this is informative regardless of outcome If the pilot succeeds, the architecture extends to medical RCTs (where Living Evidence already operates and integration is mostly about claim representation), then to slices of basic biology with stable replication structure. If it fails, the field learns which quality signals are load-bearing and which ones metascience has oversold. Either result is a contribution to knowing what the literature supports. Implications for funders Because this burgeoning ecosystem of builders already exists, a well-informed philanthropic or government funder could play a crucial catalyzing role in bringing this future about. They could play at least three roles: creating open structured datasets, publishing open benchmarks and incentivizing the solving of key technical challenges. First, open archives of papers that the government maintains, like PubMed, could be turned into structured data amenable to large scale metascience and claim aggregation. I know the US government already has an interest in doing this, though some key open questions remain unanswered. How do you determine the best models and systems for accurately extracting information from papers? How can you establish a robust way to allow researchers to flag errors and correct them? And finally, how do you create a legal regime in working with publishers to maximize the scope of available papers? For the latter, a university or a private philanthropy may be better positioned to make structured data publicly available under journal subscription terms or fair use. Philanthropists or government funders could also coordinate to create or commission benchmarks that evaluate whether important problems have been solved. For example, an open benchmark for claim extraction from a range of different scientific article types would be extremely helpful. Ensuring the underlying data are accurate is vital for creating these evaluations. I’ve discussed opportunistically using various human-created datasets for this purpose, but a consistent problem is that errors in human data make it difficult for them to serve as a gold standard. Finally, with structured data and benchmarks available, the government or private philanthropy could use them to incentivize groups to develop machine learning systems that meet these benchmarks. Prizes are one potentially valuable tool for this. For example, you could establish a prize for a system that accurately updates a living meta-analysis for a small set of claims. Prizes are particularly useful as signals of problem importance, and can help create vibrant ecosystems of public and private research—see, for example the role the government played in kickstarting the current work on nuclear fusion. Conclusion The drawbacks of the current scientific publishing system are known. Scientists agree, metascientists agree, philanthropists agree: the published PDF plus citation graph isn’t the right substrate for maintaining a representation of the evidence base in science. The pieces needed to build the alternative either already exist or are rapidly taking shape. The community is forming around exactly this problem, with concrete partnerships and shared infrastructure. A pilot should start on behavioral science RCTs because that’s the slice of empirical science most amenable to legibility, where replication ground truth is richest, and where the failure modes are best documented. What’s been missing is the galvanizing mission to assemble these pieces into something that works. That’s what I’m proposing to build. *** 1 I have a broader field map that I’ll release publicly soon. This is me, building in public! 2 If this is something that you are excited about, please reach out and talk to me. 3 More on this very soon too! 4 This tests whether, given the code and the data, you can get the same statistics as reported in the published paper. 5 This tests whether the results are the same as a paper’s given alternative analytical decisions in conducting the analysis (like outlier omission). Closely related is the idea of a “multiverse” where you come up with many different ways of answering the same underlying research question with the same data, and test whether the results hold in all those alternative methods. There’s been work on the latter as well. 6 Some of the replications, e.g. those from the SCORE project, had paired the experiments with forecasts from prediction markets. So we get to look at this for free.

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Jun 8 • 4:44 PM EDT • Science • goodscience.substack.com
Nick Pachota flexes fundraising, first responder support in HD 74 bid

The Primary is already hard-fought, with multiple candidates taking significant strides forward as the race moves along.

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Jun 8 • 4:38 PM EDT • Politics • floridapolitics.com
Who's building and who's buying in Greater Baton Rouge

A look at the latest property transactions and issued permits in East Baton Rouge Parish. Los Angeles investor Andrew Fay purchased an industrial property at the corner of South Choctaw Road and … Already an INSIDER? Sign in. Already an INSIDER? Sign in

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Jun 8 • 2:58 PM EDT • Business • businessreport.com
St. Pete faith leaders endorse Ken Welch for re-election

The endorsements add to backing from many local elected officials, unions and community figures already supporting Welch's campaign.

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Jun 8 • 12:23 PM EDT • Politics • floridapolitics.com
3 Southern Ohio VA facilities go live on Oracle Health EHR

Before logging on to the long-awaited electronic health record system, employees at the Dayton Veterans Affairs Medical Center were reportedly "tense, but ready."

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Jun 8 • 11:36 AM EDT • Health • healthcareitnews.com
Local small business “pop up" in downtown Atlanta thanks to unique program

The World Cup is about to bring visitors from around the globe to Atlanta — and more than a dozen locally-owned businesses are ready to take advantage of the tourism to grow their brands.

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Jun 8 • 10:49 AM EDT • Business • fox5atlanta.com
Your YouTube Premium Price is Going Up Right Now

When Google told us that a YouTube Premium price increase was coming, they set June 8 as the day most would see it arrive on their bills. Well, today is June 8, so be ready for that monthly...

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Jun 8 • 9:45 AM EDT • Technology • droid-life.com
🏀 Y! Sports AM: Game 3 at the Garden

The NBA Finals are back at Madison Square Garden, and New York City is ready to explode.

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Jun 8 • 8:11 AM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com
The $4 billion coffee pod business faces its biggest threat yet

Billions of coffee pods are sold every year. Coffee giant Lavazza is betting that consumers are finally ready for a different approach.

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Jun 8 • 8:00 AM EDT • Business • fastcompany.com
Stepful banks $55M to scale AI-powered medical training to boost the workforce pipeline

Healthcare staffing shortages are a near-universal problem for healthcare providers. | The company currently works with more than 35 major healthcare systems and has graduated over 32,000 practice-ready healthcare workers since its founding.

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Jun 8 • 8:00 AM EDT • Health • fiercehealthcare.com
Trump Escalates War on Science

The Trump administration, having already made cuts to research on topics it disfavors, now wants scientists to submit to political control.

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Jun 8 • 5:00 AM EDT • Science • washingtonmonthly.com
Front Porch Forum could become employee-owned when its founders retire

Michael and Valerie Wood-Lewis, who founded Front Porch Forum in 2000, are exploring the possibility of selling the company to its employees when the couple is ready to retire.

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Jun 8 • 5:00 AM EDT • Business • vermontpublic.org
Fable is getting some post-launch DLC already, with an extended look at gameplay planned for later this week

Fable: Order of the Hero will bring a new region and storyline to the upcoming fantasy RPG.

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Jun 8 • 4:40 AM EDT • Technology • eurogamer.net
Major sports investor wants to bring MLB to Raleigh. Is it competition or collaboration with Dundon?

Marc Lasry’s Avenue Sports Fund is already invested in the NC Courage. He now wants to invest in big-league baseball in Raleigh, telling WRAL he’s willing to partner with Carolina Hurricanes owner Tom Dundon, who also has MLB ambitions.

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Jun 8 • 4:00 AM EDT • Sports • wral.com
Buffalo Bills ranked best new quarterback-head coach duo in NFL

The Bills changed their head coach, but Josh Allen's familiarity with Joe Brady already has Buffalo's new pairing ranked No. 1 in the NFL.

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Jun 8 • 3:01 AM EDT • Sports • democratandchronicle.com
🚨 Colombia v Jordan line-ups ready

All set for action! Colombia will face Jordan this afternoon to play their final warm-up match for the World Cup, and this time, James will get minutes from the start of the game. Colombia Starting X...

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Jun 7 • 6:18 PM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com
😐 Neutral (-1%)
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100%
Sea of Stars gets a Nintendo Switch 2 version

Sea of Stars is receiving a dedicated Nintendo Switch 2 version. That’s according to a listing on the Japanese Nintendo eShop. It’s already live on the store with other regions to follow – likely tomorrow. Sea of Stars previously launched on Nintendo Switch. Note that the new release is not a Nintendo Switch 2 Edition, so save data will not...

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Jun 7 • 4:36 PM EDT • Technology • nintendoeverything.com
Lane County warns businesses to be ready for increased wildfire danger

As a potentially active fire season nears, officials say business owners should ensure they are as ready at work as they are at home.

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Jun 7 • 12:42 PM EDT • Business • klcc.org
😐 Neutral (12%)
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58%
wow
42%
'Fatal Fury' to join the ranks of fighting games-turned-movies

Get ready for films, TV shows, and a webtoon based on SNK's South Town games.

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Jun 7 • 12:29 PM EDT • Entertainment • mashable.com
Deep dive
😐 Neutral (17%)
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love
40%
What time are the 2026 Tony Awards on tonight? How to watch, full nominations list, start time and more

Are you ready to watch the cast of 'Hamilton' reunite at the 2025 Tony Awards?

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Jun 7 • 6:05 AM EDT • Entertainment • yahoo.com
Euro giants confirm what Liverpool already knew about 'special' star

Liverpool are going to go through a lot of changes this summer. The Anfield outfit massively underperformed this season and, without some new faces being brought in, it's hard to see how they'd do any...

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Jun 7 • 2:10 AM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com
WHO urges targeted action to strengthen emergency workforce capacities for shared health risks across the Asia-Pacific region

Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, 11 June 2026 – At a time when the world is more interconnected than ever, the World Health Organization (WHO) is disseminating a comprehensive regional analysis of shared health risks across Asia and the Pacific, urging Member States to invest in enhancing workforce capacities regionwide to mitigate these risks and ensure health systems are better prepared to anticipate, tackle and withstand a range of crises and shocks. Over 100 delegates from 49 countries and areas in the Asia-Pacific region reviewed results from the regional risk analysis during the WHO-led Asia Pacific Health Security Action Framework (APSHAF) Stakeholders Meeting in Malaysia. Synthesizing insights from 21 strategic risk assessments and more than 800 multisectoral experts, the regional analysis highlighted an urgent imperative: countries must proactively invest in emergency workforce preparedness to navigate a landscape where climate hazards, disease outbreaks and geophysical events increasingly overlap. These complex converging crises create devastating, compounding impacts on health systems and communities - reiterating the need for investing in a fit-for-purpose regional health workforce and multisectoral action. Key findings: an evolving risk landscape More than half of the participating countries ranked flooding, cyclones, dengue and pandemic-potential respiratory pathogens as being of high or very high risk, while antimicrobial resistance, landslides and gastroenteritis remain widespread concerns as well. “Given that 51% - over half - of these assessed hazards are deeply interconnected, isolated health interventions are no longer sufficient,” said Dr Saia Ma’u Piukala, WHO Regional Director for the Western Pacific. “Extreme weather events like cyclones and floods directly trigger subsequent disease outbreaks, while environmental degradation - driven by sea-level rise, coastal erosion and saltwater intrusion - fuels health risks across the Pacific. Mitigating these cascading risks requires unified, cross-sectoral action linking environmental, agricultural and public health policies to build true regional resilience.” Priority recommendations for action To address critical vulnerabilities, WHO calls on Member States in the Asia-Pacific region to urgently prioritize the following strategic actions: Bridge workforce capacity gaps. Embed and standardize emergency preparedness within academia to promote regional workforce interoperability. Foster multisectoral coordination. Address ad-hoc taskforce responses and fragmented surge support through formalized contingency plans and standard operating procedures that are frequently updated and tested. Secure sustainable financing for emergencies. Overcome systemic barriers to access dedicated funding for both immediate anticipatory actions and long-term emergency preparedness initiatives. Enable emergency-ready primary health care. Embed emergency management into public health workforce readiness planning. Ensure that emergency planning is inclusive. Establish clear pathways for inclusive emergency planning that actively involves communities most at risk and other vulnerable groups. Optimize communication. Update risk communication and community engagement strategies, aligning them with seasonal risk calendars. Elevating workforce readiness to meet regional health risks While the gaps identified are significant, the Asia-Pacific region possesses solid foundational pillars, including dedicated clinicians, laboratory staff, rapid response teams, emergency medical teams and extensive community networks. However, to adequately address the compounding nature of modern crises, the various components of the emergency workforce must collaborate cohesively. True resilience depends entirely on transforming this currently fragmented workforce into a highly trained, interconnected and rapidly deployable asset. To achieve this, WHO is actively advancing regional workforce capacities through the Global Health Emergency Corps initiative. This initiative - supported by the Gates Foundation and Institute of Philanthropy - seeks to build a seamless network of emergency workforce across borders and sectors, ensuring that when a crisis strikes, a standardized, well-coordinated and trained workforce is immediately ready to respond. “Scaling up emergency workforce readiness is no longer optional,” said Dr Gina Samaan, Regional Emergency Director for WHO in the Western Pacific. “It is the definitive factor that will determine how effectively the Asia-Pacific region safeguards health and protects lives in an increasingly unpredictable future.” For more information, or to arrange media interviews, contact: Ara Johannes, WHO Western Pacific Health Emergencies Division: johannesa@who.int WHO Western Pacific Communications: wprocom@who.int

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Jun 7 • 1:23 AM EDT • Health • who.int
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Vampire Survivors getting a Nintendo Switch 2 version

A new Nintendo Switch 2 version of Vampire Survivors is in development, according to Poncle. The game is already on the original Nintendo Switch where it’s had a ton of success. It’s also playable on Nintendo Switch 2 via backwards compatibility. However, now the console is getting its own dedicated version. According to Poncle, Vampire Survivors will have better performance...

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Jun 6 • 10:40 PM EDT • Technology • nintendoeverything.com
Local businesses prepare ahead of massive crowds expected for World Cup in Houston

Just around the corner from Shell Energy Stadium is the local bar Chapman & Kirby, where the staff is getting ready to be part of an event that will put Houston in the global spotlight.

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Jun 6 • 10:34 PM EDT • Business • abc13.com
Gallery: Carolina Country Music Fest draws crowds for another year in Myrtle Beach

Locals and visitors alike had their cowboy hats and country music vibes ready to roll on Saturday, June 6, as the Carolina Country Music Fest action took place in Myrtle Beach.

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Jun 6 • 9:15 PM EDT • Entertainment • myhorrynews.com
🙂 Positive (50%)
Kyle Pitts ascension just getting started for Atlanta Falcons

The NFL offseason has already delivered a few surprises. One of the biggest involves the Atlanta Falcons and tight end Kyle Pitts. After weeks of trade speculation leading up to the NFL Draft, Atlanta appears committed to keeping Pitts on…

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Jun 6 • 5:04 PM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com
Liverpool Transfer Talk Grows After Chiesa Comments on Midfielder

Liverpool Transfer Talk: Chiesa Offers Insight on Jones and AlissonFederico Chiesa has added another layer to what already feels like a summer of considerable change at Liverpool, with the Italian for...

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Jun 6 • 1:55 PM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com
I Tested All 4 of Microsoft's New AI Models. Here's the Brutal Truth

Microsoft says its new MAI models revealed at Build 2026 are the future. After testing them, I'm not convinced they're ready for that spotlight.

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Jun 6 • 12:00 PM EDT • Technology • pcmag.com
Create Amazon-Ready Business Books with This AI Book Creator for a One-Time $48.99

From idea to manuscript quickly.

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Jun 6 • 12:00 PM EDT • Business • entrepreneur.com
Borussia Dortmund president expects Erling Haaland to join Real Madrid

As part of his Real Madrid presidency push, Enrique Riquelme claimed that he will bring Jurgen Klopp and Erling Haaland to the Bernabeu. However, the representatives of both have already dismissed the...

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Jun 6 • 12:00 PM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com
What’s that? Bay City restaurateur adding new cocktail lounge to business mix

The new restaurant represents the latest business venture undertaken by local restaurateur Vince Stuart, who already owns multiple eateries in the Bay City area.

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Jun 6 • 11:10 AM EDT • Business • mlive.com
A tale of two debates

By Vince Bzdek Ballots go out Monday as the June 30 state primary elections bear down on us. As a result, it is suddenly the season of proliferating political debates, and there have been some doozies already. I had the chance to see two very different debates in the last week, and comparing and contrasting them speaks […]

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Jun 6 • 9:00 AM EDT • Politics • coloradopolitics.com
A tale of two debates

By Vince Bzdek Ballots go out Monday as the June 30 state primary elections bear down on us. As a result, it is suddenly the season of proliferating political debates, and there have been some doozies already. I had the chance to see two very different debates in the last week, and comparing and contrasting them speaks […]

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Jun 6 • 9:00 AM EDT • Politics • coloradopolitics.com
Riq Woolen already making strong impression on Eagles in spring

Free agent pickup Riq Woolen is just a handful of practices into his Eagles career but is already making a strong impression.

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Jun 6 • 7:00 AM EDT • Sports • nbcsportsphiladelphia.com
Wildlife ecologist says her favorite science talk this year was in her children's classroom

"The kids are alright, and they sure are ready to protect the natural world into the future."

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Jun 6 • 5:35 AM EDT • Science • yahoo.com
Column: Summer screen selections

Summer officially doesn’t start until June 21, but on the big screen, we’re already weeks into the summer movie season.

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Jun 6 • 5:00 AM EDT • Entertainment • thesheridanpress.com
Trump says he wants Pulte to further slash staffing at national intelligence office

President Donald Trump said Friday that he wants his new acting director of national intelligence, Bill Pulte, to cut the office, which has already been significantly scaled back during his second term.

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Jun 5 • 9:25 PM EDT • Politics • pbs.org
'Unbelievable' star confirms he's ready to join Liverpool

Liverpool had a massive fall from grace this season. Arne Slot hugely underdelivered which led to many fans falling out of love with their football team for some time.In fact, some weren't even tuning...

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Jun 5 • 5:05 PM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com
Trump's deportation agenda is about to get a $70B infusion from Congress

For those aligned with Trump’s campaign promise for the largest mass deportation operation in U.S. history, it all but guarantees an uninterrupted flow of money to carry out the administration's immigration enforcement operations — and comes on top of some $170 billion Congress already approved for the department last summer, as part of Trump's big tax breaks bill.

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Jun 5 • 4:12 PM EDT • Politics • pbs.org
Jon Maples has big lead over Jonathan Rubin in HD 87 GOP Primary, and he’s got room to grow

Even with more than 1/3 of voters undecided, Maples already has majority support.

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Jun 5 • 9:38 AM EDT • Politics • floridapolitics.com
Is former first-round pick ready to be Commanders' WR2?

Can Treylon Burks live up to his potential and become the Commanders' No. 2 WR?

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Jun 5 • 4:51 AM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com
Hospitals Are Leading Efforts to Make Health Care More Affordable

Affordability is front and center in conversations across the country, as Americans feel pressure from the rising cost of living and policymakers search for solutions. Hospitals and health systems share their concerns because we see the impact of high costs every day on the patients and families we serve. Hospitals are not waiting to do their part. Across the nation, they are already implementing efforts to make healthcare more affordable and accessible, as well as providing solutions that could lower costs across the entire health care system.

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Jun 5 • 4:09 AM EDT • Health • aha.org
Google Health App Gets Massive Update Fixing 15+ Core Bugs After...

The Google Health app rollout hasn't been received well, but Google has at least committed to making big changes over the next few weeks and months. Some have already arrived, while the rest are...

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Jun 4 • 6:55 PM EDT • Technology • droid-life.com
Valve says it’s ready to launch the Steam Machine this summer

Steam hardware summer.

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Jun 4 • 6:48 PM EDT • Technology • theverge.com
Samsung Galaxy Z Flip8 to have both Exynos and Snapdragon chips

Which one you get will depend on where you're located, apparently. We've already heard that Samsung would be using the Exynos 2600 SoC in the upcoming...

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Jun 4 • 5:59 PM EDT • Technology • gsmarena.com
Great River Children’s Museum Teams With Science Museum of Minnesota for “Forces in Motion”

(KNSI) - Kids ready to push, pull, roll, and race will have a place to burn that energy Friday as the Great Ri...

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Jun 4 • 4:33 PM EDT • Science • knsiradio.com
Would Bengals already trade second-round project?

An interesting name comes up as a Bengals trade candidate.

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Jun 4 • 4:30 PM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com
Baton Rouge’s economy is booming, report says

Baton Rouge is outperforming many of its regional competitors on several key economic measures, from job growth and pay to housing affordability and worker productivity. That’s according to the G… Already an INSIDER? Sign in. Already an INSIDER? Sign in

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Jun 4 • 3:15 PM EDT • Business • businessreport.com
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No excuses as Wilkinson insists Wales will be ready

Head coach Rhian Wilkinson says Wales cannot let travel chaos affect their performance in Friday's Women's World Cup qualifier in Montenegro.

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Jun 4 • 12:28 PM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com
Newcastle Announce Matt Targett News After 2025-26 Season

Newcastle United confirmed on Tuesday that defender Matt Targett will leave the club following the expiry of his contract at the end of June. The full-back was named on the club’s retained list for summer 2026, with Newcastle announcing that four more senior players will depart after Kieran Trippier and Emil Krafth had already been […]

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Jun 4 • 12:00 PM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com
New Dignity Health program helps identify mental health risks for pregnant and postpartum women

A new maternal mental health initiative in the Sacramento region is already helping connect pregnant and postpartum women with critical support services, according to Dignity Health.

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Jun 4 • 11:44 AM EDT • Health • kcra.com
Visit Warwick Mall for your shopping, dining, and entertainment fun!

Whether you are looking for terrific shopping options, a place to eat, or just a fun place to relax, Warwick Mall is just the spot for you and they have some new additions that are ready to welcome…

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Jun 4 • 8:47 AM EDT • Entertainment • wpri.com
iPhone 18 Pro: Dark Cherry, Light Blue, and Dark Gray Chassis Leaked

The color options Apple is reportedly planning for the upcoming iPhone 18 Pro and ‌iPhone 18 Pro‌ Max have appeared online today in the form of images of chassis parts of unknown origin. Shared by the account name "yeux1122" on the Korean-langauge Naver blog, the images show what appear to be production-ready frames for three of the four colors Apple is rumored to be planning.

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Jun 4 • 8:18 AM EDT • Technology • macrumors.com
Greenwood is Roma’s top target as opening offer ready

Reports in Italy claim that Roma are ready to make their opening offer for Mason Greenwood, who is valued at €50m by Olympique Marseille.Several sources in Italy claim that English winger Greenwood ...

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Jun 4 • 5:55 AM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com
World Cup 2026: Top 🔟 contenders for the title

With the 2026 World Cup set to take place in the United States, Canada and Mexico, excitement is already building around the biggest sporting occasion on earth.Recent form, squad depth, tournament ped...

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Jun 4 • 5:47 AM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com
What are the Ebola vaccines under research, and when will they be ready?

At least three vaccines are being funded, research being fast-tracked as the outbreak spreads faster than the response.

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Jun 4 • 2:22 AM EDT • Health • aljazeera.com
Watch Commanders' Jayden Daniels connect with Chig Okonkwo during OTAs

Could the Commanders' WR2 already be on the roster and not who you think?

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Jun 4 • 2:00 AM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com
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Oncology providers ready to swipe right on mobile health apps

Oncology providers are embracing the potential for mobile health apps to support cancer patients, highlighting opportunities for inclusive, evidence-based care.

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Jun 3 • 9:37 PM EDT • Health • fredhutch.org
Anthony Levine Sr. sees big future for Keondre Jackson

Special teams coordinator Anthony Levine Sr. says Keondre Jackson is ready for a bigger role after a strong spring.

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Jun 3 • 9:30 PM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com
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San Jose businesses gear up for multi-week World Cup boost

With the World Cup kicking off next week, businesses across San Jose are preparing for a massive influx of soccer fans—and they are hoping the economic benefits will stretch far beyond downtown.

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Jun 3 • 9:12 PM EDT • Business • ktvu.com
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New Topeka vehicle repair business celebrates grand opening

There is a new vehicle collision repair business in Topeka ready to serve the capital city.

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Jun 3 • 7:03 PM EDT • Business • wibw.com
Trump Agitates Brazil’s Politics, Again

President Trump appears ready to lend a hand to a new right-wing ally ahead of a crucial election this year that will be the biggest test for Latin America’s left.

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Jun 3 • 5:59 PM EDT • Politics • nytimes.com
SpaceX sets the stage for a record $75 billion IPO

Elon Musk’s SpaceX unveiled plans Wednesday to set a $135 share price in its initial public offering price, for a sale worth $75 billion. The blockbuster debut would make Musk – already the world’s richest person – the first-ever trillionaire.

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Jun 3 • 4:44 PM EDT • Business • cnn.com
2027 NFL Draft Summer Scouting Report: Ahmad Hardy, RB, Missouri

Another Summer scouting report is ready, this time on Missouri RB Ahmad Hardy.

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Jun 3 • 3:55 PM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com
Alphabet's record-breaking $85B raise for Google's AI business is a helluva good signal

If Alphabet's record-breaking, $85 billion stock sale signals investor appetite for AI-related offerings, we can see that investors are ready to chow.

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Jun 3 • 3:38 PM EDT • Business • techcrunch.com
Has 49ers' Super Bowl window already closed?
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Jun 3 • 2:21 PM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com
Fertitta Entertainment to Acquire Caesars Entertainment, Inc. (CZR): A Top Sin Stock to Buy

Caesars Entertainment, Inc. (NASDAQ:CZR) is one of the best sin stocks to buy now. On May 15, reports emerged indicating Tillman Fertitta is moving closer to acquiring Caesars Entertainment, Inc. (NASDAQ:CZR). Several banks have already committed to a multi-billion-dollar debt financing package. Following these reports, on May 28, Caesars Entertainment, Inc. (NASDAQ: CZR) officially announced […]

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Jun 3 • 1:49 PM EDT • Entertainment • finance.yahoo.com
‘Tulsa King’ Season 5 Could Introduce Big Change: All the Details

Season 4 hasn't yet hit the streamer but already details about what might be next are in.

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Jun 3 • 12:53 PM EDT • Entertainment • wyomingnewsnow.tv
2027 NFL Draft Summer Scouting Report: Gavin Sawchuk, RB, Northwestern

Another Summer scouting report is ready, this time on Northwestern RB Gavin Sawchuk.

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Jun 3 • 11:32 AM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com
Microsoft and OpenAI broke up — now they’re ready to fight

“We have to prove that we can do everything that we need to from the ground up,” said AI chief Mustafa Suleyman.

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Jun 3 • 10:04 AM EDT • Technology • theverge.com
'Survivor 50' players name the best moment of the season

'Survivor 50' players name the best moment of the season, and while one clear winning answer emerges, get ready for a few twists in the replies.

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Jun 3 • 9:21 AM EDT • Entertainment • ew.com
Popular GLP-1 weight-loss drugs linked to lower risks of addiction and overdose

A massive study of more than 600,000 U.S. veterans suggests that popular GLP-1 drugs such as semaglutide may do far more than help with diabetes and weight loss—they could also fight addiction itself. Researchers found that people taking these medications were less likely to develop substance use disorders involving alcohol, nicotine, cannabis, cocaine, opioids, and other drugs, while those already struggling with addiction experienced fewer overdoses, hospitalizations, emergency visits, and drug-related deaths.

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Jun 3 • 8:00 AM EDT • Science • sciencedaily.com
From spider silk to science: a new way to access hidden fungal diversity

A new study from Thailand demonstrates that the debris-heavy webs of orb-weaving spiders can serve as natural, non-destructive tools for collecting and culturing viable environmental fungi. Through the isolation of living organisms, this innovative approach has already uncovered potentially new, undocumented fungal diversity within tropical rice fields.

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Jun 3 • 8:00 AM EDT • Science • eurekalert.org
The cult of objectivity has broken consciousness science

With 22 competing theories and no consensus in sight, the science of consciousness is lost. In this exclusive IAI interview, Berkeley psychedelics researcher and bestselling author of a new book on consciousness Michael Pollan insists that even though consciousness lies beyond traditional forms of scientific investigation, we should resist becoming dualists who see it as something radically different from ordinary stuff in the world. Instead, he makes the case for reimagining science itself: it must stop reaching for objective descriptions of physical reality, and instead embrace subjectivity as the indispensable core of all inquiry. Alasdair Craig: How did your experiences with psychedelics get you interested in consciousness?Michael Pollan: One of the things that happens on psychedelics is that they foreground consciousness. What formerly seemed perfectly transparent and ever present—and yet, non-existent, as water is to fish—suddenly you see it. The metaphor I use in the book is that psychedelics sponge the windscreen. Suddenly you realize: wow, there’s a windscreen, there is this phenomenon that’s mediating my relationship to reality. This is not an unusual realization on psychedelics. I think a lot of people are called to think about consciousness after psychedelic experiences. So that was the proximate inspiration for A World Appears: A Journey Into Consciousness (2026).And then there was a more specific way in which psychedelics influence the book. That was a particular experience I had on psilocybin. I had the sensation that the plants in my garden were conscious and returning my gaze, with their own point of view and agency, and I got curious as to how to evaluate an insight like that. I mean, what’s the truth quotient of insights you have on psychedelics? And I was reading William James—who, of course, wrote beautifully about mystical experience—and he said, we can’t judge the metaphysics here, but we should pay attention to two criteria: (1) How useful is it to think this is true? He was a pragmatist, of course. And (2) can we subject it to other ways of knowing to validate it? Because maybe we should treat these insights as hypotheses. And that’s kind of how I approach psychedelics, as a great generator of hypotheses, but they need to be tested against other ways of knowing. And so that led me down this long path exploring the science of plant intelligence and plant sentience.AC: I love your phrase, “smudging the windowpane of conscious experience.” So do you now start to think, actually, even when I’m not on psychedelics, I’m just seeing a screen all the time, which is not reality, but rather is my conscious experience, behind which reality is hidden?MP: Well, you know, not when I’m brushing my teeth and making breakfast! But yes, in meditation, certainly. I mean, one of the things you realize is that my experience happens to be this way now, but it could be another way. And many things can affect it. My morning coffee changes the screen in various ways, sharpens certain things.___The only tool we have to understand consciousness is consciousness.___There’s this wonderful metaphor in Aldous Huxley’s book, The Doors of Perception, where he thinks we channel consciousness, and that what the brain does is edit it, and there’s a reducing valve. And psychedelics open the reducing valve wider. I don’t know that I’m ready to buy into the idea that consciousness exists outside brains, but I do love that metaphor because there are times when you are more conscious than others. I know I’ve switched from window pane to valve, but you know, a camera aperture can open wider or narrower. And I do have a sense of that. I have a sense of when I’m being less conscious, and when I’m being more conscious, by which I mean, you know, more present, taking in more sensory information. So when you start thinking about consciousness as a matter of degree, that changes things also.I think when we scroll on social media, obviously, we’re conscious. But minimally so, because we don’t have to generate our own thoughts. We’re basically taking these little hits from other people and thinking their thoughts.The process of writing this book made me kind of relativize everyday consciousness as just one type, which is exactly what William James said. Normal consciousness is one type, separated by the flimsiest of screens from the other types.AC: If we stick with the metaphor of the smudge on the window that you get when you take psychedelics, it seems like we’re saying that consciousness has become like an object that you’re looking at, right? You’re looking at the smudge and that just is consciousness. But sometimes we’ll talk about consciousness as a state that you’re in, rather than an object you can perceive. You’re either conscious or you’re not conscious. So it’s difficult to really know what sort of thing we’re talking about when we talk about consciousness, right?MP: Yeah. When you say that consciousness is an object, what’s the subject? Consciousness also? The only tool we have to understand consciousness is consciousness. So we’re in a closed loop and when we get a perspective on consciousness, we’re not achieving any distance from it. That’s one of the problems with studying consciousness. Science is predicated on an objective, God’s eye view of things, and you never get that. There’s no such thing. SUGGESTED VIEWING The brain filters consciousness With Àlex Gómez-Marín But, yeah, there is this sense, I think, that consciousness is something you can approach. Certainly, when you’re writing and trying to recreate a conscious experience, it’s a fiction, but you’re standing back from it, and looking at it. But there’s no real subject-object distinction.AC: That’s so interesting, because when philosophers start talking about consciousness, they often talk about what they call “qualia”, which is their word for the felt experience of, say, the color red. And I think that way of speaking often makes us think of the qualia as an object, which you can see out there: the redness of red. But, as you say, we also want to collapse the subject-object distinction when we talk about consciousness. So there’s something strange going on here…MP: Oh, yeah, there are many strange things going on! *AC: Let’s talk about the varieties of consciousness. Apart from perceptions, there are, pains, emotions, thoughts, and so on. What is it that holds all this diversity together so that they all count as instances of consciousness? What is it that they all have in common?MP: Yeah, that’s a really good question. I mean, there is sensory information, right? Which we perceive coming from the world outside ourselves. And then there’s internal information, which is what’s called interoception. And this is very important too. This is where feelings come from—what are sometimes called homeostatic feelings—that are intended to get the brain to keep us in these narrow ranges of temperature and glucose and so on. That’s a very important part of consciousness. And according to some researchers, who I think are probably right, this is where consciousness begins, with these very primal feelings, like hunger and thirst and warmth and itch, and things like that. And then there’s this third thing, which is our thinking about thinking.And what holds all this together is, I think, the sense of self. Consciousness generates a self: it is probably an organizing principle. All this stuff is happening to the self. It’s a construct, I think, but it is very useful. It can connect all these different streams of consciousness to a single being or a place, metaphorically speaking.* AC: The first half of your book is about the science of consciousness. Is consciousness just another thing, like black holes or the origin of life, which we don’t yet understand, but which we should have every hope that science will one day get to the bottom of, or is there something special about consciousness that makes this unlikely?MP: It depends how you define science. As we define science now, it’s going be very difficult. Science since Galileo has had a set of rules or assumptions, which is that the proper remit of science is to deal with the objective, quantifiable, third-person world. And the physical sciences have done amazing work under that set of limitations. Galileo—for tactical reasons, not for philosophical reasons—said science should not deal with the soul, which at the time was what consciousness was considered to be. So what is subjective, what is qualitative, what is first person, we’re going to leave to the church, he said. And this was a good agreement, and it probably kept many scientists from getting burned at the stake. But it leaves science in an awkward spot, now that it wants to venture into that territory of qualities, of first-person experience. And I don’t think it has the proper tools. I think it will have to add to its toolkit in some way, and find a way to bring in phenomenology, or lived experience and introspection, which science is usually dismissive of.The challenge—we alluded to it earlier—is that the only tool you have to study consciousness with is consciousness. And what I mean by that is, the whole scientific enterprise is a manifestation of consciousness. As much as scientists like to flatter themselves with this idea that they attain a godlike perspective on what they study, when it comes to consciousness, there’s no such thing. And it’s fine for all the things you can step outside of and study from that perspective. But two areas it won’t work are consciousness and cosmology.___It could be that we live in this anomaly of not believing nature is conscious. And maybe psychedelics are teaching us something we’ve forgotten.___With cosmology, too, you have to study the universe from inside the universe. It’s not that cosmologists haven’t made progress. We know a lot about the age of the universe and expansion and things like that. But we can’t penetrate what happened before the Big Bang. We just don’t have the tools because we can’t stand outside.The fact that there are 22 full-scale theories of consciousness tells you all you need to know: we’re kind of lost. And I was surprised to find that we are more lost than I thought we were when I started this. I thought that there’d be leading theories, or that we had experiments that we could conduct that would nail some of this down. And the fact is, we don’t.So, I don’t know if science can solve it. But, of course, we can change the rules of science. A really influential book for me was a book called The Blind Spot, by two physicists, Marcello Gleiser and Adam Frank, and a philosopher, Evan Thompson. It’s a reminder that science is a social practice. It’s organized in a certain way and it can be organized in a different way. But it has this huge blind spot at the center of it, which is its failure to recognize that it is a form of consciousness itself, and it doesn’t have a good way of taking account of lived experience.AC: On the one hand, I think you want to resist traditional dualism, which would say that consciousness is something magical, something supernatural, right? But on the other hand, you’re accepting that there is this division in reality between the stuff that you can investigate objectively and measure, and so on—the stuff that science has been good at finding out about—and consciousness, which, for some reason, you can’t objectively measure. Some would take this to suggest that the dualism is actually right. Is there a way of reconciling these two strands of your thinking?MP: To call it magical is full of value judgement. I mean, you could just say immaterial. The interesting thing is, I think, that intuitively we’re all dualists. And I don’t know whether that’s because we’re children of Descartes and other cultures are less dualist than we are. Or it may be because that’s how consciousness feels. It feels different than the body. It feels separate from the body. But I don’t think we should trust that intuition.AC: So let’s think about ways that science might be changed to get at consciousness. I suppose the starting point would be the way that you begin the second half of your book. You have this nice line from William James, where he says, “We now begin our study of the mind from within.” Could you give us some sense of the ways of studying the mind from within? What does this involve?MP: I don’t know what that science looks like. But one of the points I’m making is that it depends on the humanities. I found that I learned as much, if not more, about consciousness, from reading novels and poetry. There is a sense of the fullness and complexity of consciousness that you don’t get in any scientific account. I interviewed this stream-of-consciousness writer and I approached her as an expert on consciousness, and she is. So I think that dialogue is really important.I’m reading Ben Lerner’s new novel, Transcription. Just read the first page of this novel: it’s a man falling asleep on a train, going to conduct an interview, and there is the experience of being in the train, facing backwards, there’s the view outside, but there’s a reflection of himself through which he’s seeing outside. There’s the memory of dropping his kids off at school. All this is going on in one moment of consciousness. Scientists aren’t going anywhere near that. But I think it’s useful for them to think about. That’s where we’re trying to go: like, how does such a layered experience happen? You know, it also makes you wonder, could a computer ever do this? And it gives you some doubt.*AC: Before we get to computers, perhaps we could talk briefly about plants. How did you come to feel that they are sentient?MP: Well, it was a psychedelic experience, and it’s not unusual on psychedelics. In fact, there’ve been studies about how people become animists during psychedelic experience. Their belief in animism arises after a single psychedelic experience.You know, most scientists would say this is all a myth. But we have only 400 years of the age of enlightenment and science. Before that, we were animists, and if you go around the world, most indigenous cultures are still animists, and children are animists, by and large, until they go to school. So it could be that we live in this anomaly of not believing nature is conscious. And maybe psychedelics are teaching us something we’ve forgotten.As I said, I wanted to test this idea, and see whether there was conventional scientific evidence for it. And there’s fascinating work going on in a field that calls itself—in a rather cheeky way—plant neurobiology. These are people who fully realize there are no neurons in plants, but they’re trolling conventional botanists! And they’re doing experiments that are demonstrating that plants can learn and remember, which is kind of amazing: how do you store a memory without neurons? They’re finding plants that can solve problems, that can hear and see. In fact, they have 20 senses to our five or six. For example, a bean plant looking for something to twine, and given a pole within eight inches or so of it, knows where that pole is and will aim its spiraling reach at that pole. What is that about? Is it bouncing signals off of it?One of the spookiest things is the fact that the same anesthetics that put us out put plants out. You might think that plants are already out, but they’re not. They’re just slow. If you take a plant with a fast behavior, like a Venus flytrap, and give it an anesthetic, it will stop reacting. So you have to ask yourself, what is lost when the plant is anaesthetized? Some state of alertness, of awareness, of its environment, of reactivity. I’m not prepared to call that consciousness, but maybe it’s sentience—which is a simpler form of consciousness, and involves the ability to sense what’s going on in your environment and assess what’s good and bad for you and act appropriately. That may be a universal quality of life.AC: Let’s turn from plants to AI. You point out that LLMs are trained on the internet rather than direct interactions with reality. You put this really nicely when you say the internet is not the world so much as a shadow cast by the world. So LLMs are living in this kind of shadow world, or in Plato’s cave, as you put it. What’s the significance of this for AI consciousness and moral consideration? And, to recall the beginning of our conversation, if we’re stuck behind a veil or screen of consciousness, are we also stuck in a kind of shadow world?MP: I don’t think they’re the same shadow worlds because our world includes nature and other people. And even if it’s mediated in some ways... There is a reality out there, and we are in relation to it, through consciousness. There’s friction with it. What’s missing from the LLMs is that friction with the real world. There’s more to the world than human representation, which is what they’re dealing with. And that means that so far, AI is a cultural technology for combining thoughts we’ve already had. SUGGESTED VIEWING Cracking the code for thought With Roger Penrose, Sabrina Gonzalez Pasterski, Max Tegmark, Güneş Taylor Genuine creativity is more than collage. A lot of what AI does now is tantamount to collage, putting this with that and you know, that’s part of art, certainly. But there are also genuinely new ideas that come into the world that don’t come in through manipulating the representations we already have. So it remains to be seen whether AIs can be truly creative in that more radical sense.But my arguments against AI becoming conscious have to do with the fact that the idea of AI consciousness is based on this faulty metaphor that the brain is a computer. There are dimensions in which the brain is like a computer—it certainly does its share of computation. But computers have this sharp distinction between hardware and software, and brains don’t. In a brain, hardware and software are identical. Every memory is a physical change to the brain. Brains are not interchangeable in the way computers are. So this idea that you could take the consciousness out and somehow run it on another substrate, a silicon substrate, seems foolhardy.Anyway, it’s a more extended argument, and I may be wrong. And when we move to computers that aren’t based on silicon—neuromorphic computers and things like that—all bets may be off.AC: Regarding your point about LLMs being stuck in the world of our representations—the internet or whatever—and not being able to interact with reality, are these representations, the world of the internet, themselves part of reality? We’ve created the internet, but it’s still a real thing that exists. And so while the LLMs may be trapped within that part of reality, they’re nevertheless within reality and interacting with it and so on. So it’s not obvious that there’s a barrier there to them becoming conscious and being creative.MP: Yeah, I mean, if our consciousness is built out of human culture, which is what we’re talking about with all those representations. But I tend to think consciousness comes a bit more out of nature and friction with the natural world, but...AC: So there’s a fundamental divide between the natural world and human artefacts?MP: And we lose track of that, and especially people in this computer world. You know, the people who are creating these AI systems, my guess is they’ve been into video games since the age of three, and they didn’t go outside a lot. And their own contact with nature is somewhat limited. I could be wrong, it’d be a very interesting thing to ask, all the wizards of AI, whether they like to go fishing and hiking and do things like that. Or were they on computers from a very early age? I interviewed Blake Lemoine, the Google engineer who came to believe that LaMDA, the Google LLM out at the time, was conscious and deserved personhood. It was very clear that he didn’t see a distinction between this bubble in which he lived and the real world. And I think we’ve all been distanced from the natural world, and this is taking us even further away. But it’s still there, you know, and we still have bodies, and we’re still mortal, and we don’t live in a simulation.AC: I think that’s a great place to finish. Michael Pollan, thank you very much!

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Jun 3 • 8:00 AM EDT • Science • iai.tv
UTC REACH Fund supports community-driven health research across the Chattanooga region

The Research for Evidence-based Action in Community Health (REACH) Fund was established earlier this year through the Journey Health Foundation Research Center housed in the Gary W. Rollins College of Business at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. In less than one year, it’s already funding 10 interdisciplinary projects focused on improving community health across Southeast Tennessee.

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Jun 3 • 7:57 AM EDT • Health • blog.utc.edu
Angelino to restart with Gasperini

Angelino, after almost an entire season out of action, is ready to start again. In his first year in Rome, Gian Piero Gasperini couldn’t rely on the quality of the Spanish winger, who had completed ...

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Jun 3 • 7:30 AM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com
STAR Seminar

This Stress, Trauma, and Resilience (STAR) Seminar is about transitional age youth — young people between the ages of 16 and 25 navigating child welfare, mental health systems, and schools in a world that has already formed opinions about them before they walk through the door — and specifically about Black and brown youth, who are overrepresented in every one of these systems.

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Jun 3 • 6:05 AM EDT • Health • uclahealth.org
Top NC lawmakers say budget negotiations are on track. Gov. Stein won’t bet on it

North Carolina’s state budget is already a year late. Is it still on schedule for June? Lawmakers say yes. The governor won’t bet on it.

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Jun 3 • 6:00 AM EDT • Politics • newsobserver.com
Cesc Fabregas wants to sign 'beautiful' Liverpool star

Liverpool's team is going to look completely different by the start of the 2026-27 season. The Anfield outfit may have already spent over £450 million on new players last summer but, most of their si...

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Jun 3 • 5:05 AM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com
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Trump’s Medicaid work requirements have an unwelcome surprise for some states and patients

Advocates were already dreading Medicaid's work requirements. New rules are worse than they feared.

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Jun 3 • 4:30 AM EDT • Health • statnews.com
😐 Neutral (25%)
Alex Scott: Bournemouth’s asking price revealed

Manchester United have already agreed their first deal of the summer, with more in the pipeline.The Red Devils have agreed to pay an initial £35 million to Atalanta for Ederson, with INEOS keen to si...

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Jun 3 • 1:10 AM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com
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Pokémon Champions Comes to Android and iOS on June 17

Preregister now and get ready to battle on your mobile device. A new Mega Stone distribution awaits too.

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Jun 2 • 8:00 PM EDT • Technology • pokemon.com
5 things to watch in Tuesday's primaries in California, Iowa and beyond

Democrats are banking on a rare chance to regain ground in Iowa, a rural state that has repeatedly eluded them in recent years. Republicans, meanwhile, are grappling with a New Jersey congressman whose unexplained absence could put their already slim majority at risk.

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Jun 2 • 6:45 PM EDT • Politics • pbs.org
Madison’s ‘The Gallery’ entertainment district set to break ground this summer

Bellamare Development, the Mississippi-based company behind The Gallery, said all city permits have been approved and the 70-acre site off I-55 has been cleared and is ready for vertical construction.

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Jun 2 • 6:19 PM EDT • Entertainment • wlbt.com
Business owners discuss the impacts of low water levels at Smith Mountain Lake

WDBJ7 spoke with business owners in Franklin County about the low water levels and how they’re already having an impact on summer business.

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Jun 2 • 5:46 PM EDT • Business • wdbj7.com
Steelers already looking to replace fired coach, says Mike McCarthy

Pittsburgh Steelers head coach Mike McCarthy discussed the firing of Derius Swinton II and revealed that the team was in the process of replacing him.

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Jun 2 • 1:01 PM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com
Washington Commanders sign veteran tight end during OTAs

The Commanders added a veteran tight end in Anthony Firkser to an already deep position group.

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Jun 2 • 12:30 PM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com
Microsoft launches MXC, an OS-level sandbox for AI agents, with OpenAI and Nvidia already on board

Microsoft launches MXC, an OS-level sandbox for AI agents in Windows, giving enterprises secure runtime controls, identity, and policy enforcement.

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Jun 2 • 12:30 PM EDT • Technology • venturebeat.com
'Not normal business': Judge orders Trump officials to explain tariff refund holdup

Tens of billions of dollars in tariff refunds have already gone out the door, but the Trump administration and the nation's top trade court are locked in a standoff over issues like the progress of the program and whether future payouts can be limited.

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Jun 2 • 12:11 PM EDT • Business • finance.yahoo.com
NJ Entertainment Lawyers Eye Opportunities as Showbiz Spotlight Falls on Garden State

The Garden State has become a hot spot for major film and television production companies lured by the presence of generous tax incentives, and entertainment attorneys say a shift in the practice area is either already happening or may be waiting in the wings.

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Jun 2 • 11:05 AM EDT • Entertainment • law.com
The work you can't always see: Beer is political, part 2

Recently I published a piece about beer, politics, and the question of who speaks up and who doesn’t. I meant every word of it. I still do. And then my inbox opened up. Cleveland Prost is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Subscribe I’ve been writing about beer since 2014. For most of that time, I kept things deliberately light — taproom profiles, new releases, the people behind the pints. Gradually, over years of building this thing, you gave me something I didn’t expect: permission. Permission to go deeper. To say what I actually saw in this industry and what I actually believed about it. That trust isn’t something I take lightly. It’s why that piece existed at all, and it’s why this one does too. I’m not walking anything back. But I want to go further. In that piece, I wrote that beer has never existed outside the system. That immigration policy affects who staffs breweries and harvests ingredients. That labor policy affects taproom workers. That civil rights policy affects who feels safe walking into a taproom. That “beer does not exist in a vacuum. The idea that it does is comforting. It is also false.” I believe that as much now as I did when I wrote it. But one idea came back at me, in different forms, over and over (from reader emails, comments, and conversations): that beer itself isn’t political — that it only becomes political when someone decides to make it that way. That what we’re really seeing is a choice by individuals to inject division into something that doesn’t inherently require it. It’s a comforting idea. It’s also wrong — and I think it’s worth being precise about why. That framing assumes that breweries operate outside the conditions shaping everything else. That politics is something you choose to bring into a room that was, until then, clean and neutral. That if you stay quiet, you stay clear of it. But the room was never neutral. It was never clean. Politics is already in the room. It’s in who walks through the door comfortably and who hesitates. It’s in whether a space can be used for organizing without fear. It’s in whether helping someone quietly might carry consequences you have to think carefully about in advance. It’s in who staffed the brewery, who harvested the grain, who can afford to be a regular. The idea that you opt out of all that by staying quiet is an illusion. You only change how visible your response to it is. This is, I realize, a hard thing to hear if you came to a beer newsletter for something lighter. I wrote recently that “beer, for me, has always felt like a refuge — a third place in an increasingly fractured world.” I meant that. I still do. But a refuge is not an escape from reality. It’s a place to gather strength to face it. Here’s what I actually missed — and what I want to correct. Multiple people in the industry reached out to me. I’m not naming them and I’m not identifying their businesses, because that’s not my call. If and when they want to be loud about what they’re doing, that agency belongs to them. What I can share is the substance of what they said, because it complicated something I presented too cleanly. The overall message: *You don’t know what we all are doing.* And they’re right. I don’t. One example involved a collaboration brewed quietly to support another business facing serious challenges in a whole different region, with proceeds directed toward solidarity, community, and keeping operations afloat. No announcement. It could have been broadcast widely. The point was never publicity. Another example involved logistical support for community efforts: organizing safe transportation, providing space for meetings on otherwise closed days, facilitating gatherings under difficult conditions. All of it happening while balancing real financial pressure and genuine concern for personal safety. None of what they described is a brewer “deciding to make beer political.” It’s people responding to the conditions around them — conditions that are already shaping who feels safe, who has access, who can gather, who needs help, and who has the capacity to offer it. Politics, again, already in the room. Already shaping choices. Whether anyone announced it or not. I’ve spent decades in taprooms, at barrel releases, at festivals, in back offices and brewing floors, talking to the people who built this industry from nothing. I know how much happens that never makes it onto social media. I know the owner who quietly comp’d a tab for someone having a crisis. The brewer who drove an hour to pick up a stranger who needed a safe ride. The taproom that stayed dark on a Tuesday so a community group could use the space without it becoming A Whole Thing. None of that gets a post. Most of it never will. So when I wrote recently about silence — when I said that “silence right now doesn’t feel neutral, it feels like complicity” — I was writing about what I could see. And I was right about what I saw. The public silence of breweries that have the platform, the stability, and frankly the safety to say something and choose not to? That still troubles me. I’m not softening that. But some of what I read as silence is actually something else entirely. It’s people doing the work with their hands instead of their phones. It’s people who are genuinely afraid — not of being canceled, but of real consequences for their families, their employees, their ability to keep the doors open at all. That deserves more than a footnote. It deserves to be named clearly. Here’s the tension I want to sit with honestly: public statements matter. They matter because people can’t rally around something they can’t see. Visibility creates awareness and solidarity. It helps people find each other. It tells someone standing outside your taproom door, uncertain whether they’ll be welcomed inside, something they need to know — or whether it’s even safe for them to be in public at all. That’s not performative. I wrote recently that the craft beer movement “was built on collective defiance. It was built on rejecting consolidation. On pushing back against homogeneity.” I believe that too. And I’ll extend it: breweries should be at least as loud about their values as they are when they drop a new seasonal. Your hazy IPA gets a full rollout — the label art, the tap handle photo, the countdown post. Human dignity deserves the same energy. Be as loud about human rights as you are about your beer. There is no reason those two things should require different levels of courage from you. But visibility isn’t the only form of courage. And not everyone can be visible right now without real consequences — financial, personal, sometimes physical. There are people in this industry doing hard, unglamorous, sometimes risky work in the background, and announcing it would compromise it or paint a target on someone who’s already stretched thin. That’s not silence as complicity. That’s operational discipline under pressure. What I want to push back on — clearly, not gently — is the idea that behind-the-scenes action and public visibility are in competition with each other. The person organizing quietly in the back room and the person posting a statement of solidarity on a Tuesday morning are both doing something real. We need both. We need the quiet infrastructure and we need the visible signal. We need people to know that this industry — at its best, at its most independent, and human — gives a fuck. I closed that piece with a question: “Reactive and fearful? Or clear and values-driven?” That question still stands. But having heard from you, I’d add a corollary: the values-driven path isn’t always the loudest one. Sometimes it’s a phone call and a recipe. Sometimes it’s a room made available on a closed Tuesday. Sometimes it’s a drive across town for someone who needed a safe ride home. All of it is political. All of it was always political. You don’t get to opt out of that — you only get to decide what you do with it. I’ve spent more than a decade writing about this industry because I believe it can be exactly that. I’ve been lucky enough to build an audience that lets me say so plainly. That’s a privilege I intend to use. The work is happening. Some of it you’ll see. Some of it you won’t. Support it either way. Cleveland Prost is a reader-supported publication covering beer and brewing across New York state. To receive new posts and support this work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Cleveland Prost is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Subscribe

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Jun 2 • 10:13 AM EDT • Politics • clevelandprost.substack.com
Impressive U21 Fini potential for Napoli in swap with Genoa

Sky Sport Italia claim Napoli are ready to pick up Italy Under-21 international Seydou Fini from Genoa in exchange for Nosa Obaretin.The idea is said to be in the early stages, but negotiations betwee...

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Jun 2 • 10:05 AM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com
WATCH LIVE: Rubio testifies on Capitol Hill for the 1st time since start of Iran war

The Republican former senator will sit before House and Senate committees to make the State Department's annual budget request. But the focus is likely to shift quickly to the already unsteady ceasefire between Washington and Tehran, which has been further tested in recent days by back-and-forth attacks.

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Jun 2 • 9:25 AM EDT • Politics • pbs.org
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