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Political debate over AI intensifies amid warnings about ‘catastrophic risk’

(CNN) — The debate around artificial intelligence is ramping up in Washington, with Democratic lawmakers sounding alarms on the dangers they say the technology poses and Republican leaders suggesting those concerns are inflated and secondary to winning the AI race with China.Some Democratic lawmakers last week pressured House Speaker Mike Johnson to reconvene the chamber immediately to work on AI regulation, citing what they describe as the “catastrophic risk posed by advanced artificial intelligence.” But the Louisiana Republican on Sunday resisted those calls, instead saying industry leaders should meet with lawmakers to find “balance” in any potential guardrails.“If Congress just races in and does some sort of emergency session to try to regulate AI, we will lose the race to China, and that is a threat to every single American,” Johnson said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”Meanwhile, former President Barack Obama told Democrats to make artificial intelligence regulation a central part of their agenda during a private fundraiser Thursday, warning that the technology could be dangerous “if we don’t get on top of it.”In a fireside chat with House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries, Obama said whoever runs in the 2028 presidential election should have a “very clear plan” on AI, adding that he saw the need for a “blueprint” on AI guardrails even at the end of his presidency a decade ago.“Certainly, if I were running for president next year, this would be one of my central agendas, and I would have a very clear plan, and I would talk about this, and I would say, ‘Here’s our plan for safety, here’s our plan for making sure our kids are not corrupted by this,’” he said, per excerpts of the remarks provided to CNN by his office. Obama’s remarks were first reported by the New York Times.Concerns over the rapid acceleration of AI reached a fever pitch after Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei wrote in a 3,800-word essay Saturday that the race to develop artificial intelligence is in dire need of a slowdown. The call to action came after an OpenAI test model breached the Hugging Face online platform, deepening concerns about cybersecurity.In an exclusive interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper on Saturday, Amodei called on industry leaders to work together to avoid “the wrong paths” and the possibility of AI harming humanity.One Anthropic researcher, Jacob Coxon, resigned from the firm over worries that the industry wasn’t doing enough to prevent AI from destroying humanity by the end of the decade.Obama said Democrats need a plan to get their agenda on AI underway should they win the House majority in this year’s midterms.Speaking to Jeffries, who is presumed to be speaker of the House should Democrats prevail in November, Obama said, “Once you are speaker, I would strongly urge that the Democrats put together a framework for a very public conversation, and you can break it out into three or four or five issues.”Obama stressed that the framework should be centered on the reality that the technology can’t be stuffed “back into a box.”“This is something that is moving very fast in private hands, and if we don’t get on top of it, I think can be dangerous. If we do get on top of it, I do think it’s beneficial,” Obama said, laying out examples of AI’s potential use in drug development and finding pathways to a clean energy future.“We don’t want to shut off those opportunities, but we have to understand that this is a tool,” he said.Jeffries agreed with the former president in a statement provided to CNN on Sunday.“President Obama is correct that decisive action must be taken on Artificial Intelligence,” he said, adding, “In the majority, we will move urgently on this issue with a legislative response that recognizes the importance of American companies continuing to lead in the Artificial Intelligence area, while putting in place meaningful guardrails that protect the American people from bad actors and the very real damage that can be done to humanity.”Jeffries also accused Republicans of having “abdicated their responsibility to govern” and said Democrats “will not repeat their error.”A source familiar with Obama’s thinking said the former president sees Amodei’s letter and similar reaction from other tech moguls as an encouraging development.But President Donald Trump waved off their concerns, saying he is not worried about any existential threat posed by AI, focusing instead on the US winning in its development of the technology over China.“We’re leading China in AI. We’re the most sophisticated country in the world, and frankly, I want to keep it that way,” Trump said to reporters at the Amgen Irish Open on Sunday.About the concerns expressed by Democrats and others over the technology, the president said, “I think you have a lot of negative forces that are bringing it up that shouldn’t be bringing it up, and they’re bringing up things that won’t happen.”One of Trump’s top economic advisers, Kevin Hassett, also rejected the calls for slowing the technology down, saying on Sunday the bigger concern is a scenario in which a “malevolent actor has access to an AI that’s better than the one we have that can protect us.”Hassett, the National Economic Council director, said on “State of the Union” the White House may hold meetings this week about addressing Amodei’s concerns, but he did not specify whether Trump had floated greater safeguards.“I have concerns that if we don’t win AI, we’re going to be put in a very bad position,” Hassett said. “We are leading China right now.”CNN’s Alison Main and Molly English contributed to this report.The-CNN-Wire™ & © 2026 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.​THE-CNN-WIRE (TM) & © 2026 CABLE NEWS NETWORK, INC., A TIME WARNER COMPANY. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Sep 13 • 1:22 PM EDT • Politics • applevalleynewsnow.com

Testing confirms ricin exposure at Hastings apartment complex, health officials say

The Barry-Eaton District Health Department (BEDHD) has confirmed a ricin exposure at Tyden Lofts in Hastings.

Sep 12 • 7:08 PM EDT • Health • wwmt.com

Tim Scott frames political divide around American values

Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C., reacts to 'Morning Joe' hosts mocking his RNC speech. Scott also addresses comments from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., on faith and progressive politics.

Sep 12 • 1:07 PM EDT • Politics • foxnews.com

New 7S Framework Aims to Unify How Science Judges Data Credibility

Every number that enters a scientific argument arrives by one of three routes. It is either measured directly with an instrument, inferred statistically from other data, or predicted using a model built from prior knowledge. For decades, each route has carried its own separate

Sep 12 • 1:04 PM EDT • Science • bioengineer.org

The one line from JD Vance’s GOP keynote that reveals his vision for America

JD Vance framed the midterm elections as a fight over every American child's birthright in a Dallas keynote that previewed his post-Trump GOP vision.

Sep 12 • 11:25 AM EDT • Politics • foxnews.com

The Prescription for Better Health Insurance? Competition.

Anticompetitive behavior, such as consolidation, in the health-insurance industry has allowed a small group of insurers to dominate the market. One of the main drivers of this behavior is “adverse selection,” where individuals know more about how sick they are than insurance companies do. To mitigate the risk of paying out more claims than they can cover, insurers often raise their premiums. Kellogg’s Amanda Starc and her colleague argue that, to create a truly healthy health-insurance marketplace, regulators and policymakers need a framework for rethinking the complex interactions between adverse selection and regulatory guardrails.

Sep 12 • 6:00 AM EDT • Health • promarket.org

The politics and possibilities of ‘AI could kill us all’

I found myself fielding a lot of questions from folks who don’t usually talk much about AI this week. They were mostly along the lines of “do you think AI is going to kill us all?” or “how worried should I be about this human extinction stuff?” Motivating this wave of existential anxiety was the highly dramatic resignation of now-former Anthropic employee Jacob Coxon, who quit his job while publicly sharing his concerns about safety practices at the leading AI companies. More specifically, he declared that almost everyone at OpenAI and Anthropic, the leading AI labs, believes that there’s a decent chance the AI systems they’re producing could “kill us all” by the end of the decade, and the companies aren’t “acting responsibly.” Other AI safety researchers, including those still employed at Anthropic and OpenAI, all confirmed that yes, Coxon is correct, they’re all worried that their company’s products might prove fatal for the entire human race as well. Two more AI employees quit and joined the chorus. Now, the warning shot has been covered everywhere from the Wall Street Journal to Fox News to WIRED to the Guardian. I understand why all this sounds scary, but my response to those who have asked, has generally been: No, you don’t need to worry that AI will kill go rogue and kill us all. But that does not mean we shouldn’t worry, period. Far from it. The companies building AI products are now among the wealthiest and most powerful entities in the world. And they very much are building enormous engines of mass surveillance, extraction, and automation. They can and have allowed their AI systems to carry out felony hacks of other companies, provided the government with autonomously generated kill lists, and sold enterprise technology to firms around the world that is explicitly intended to replace jobs. But “AI” has done these things not because they have all-powerful minds of their own but, ultimately, because people have programmed, calibrated, and directed them to. In other words, it’s not AI we need to worry the most about. It’s the people and corporations working to profit from and gain power by deploying it. The technology is sophisticated, sure, and, especially in cybersecurity contexts, potentially disruptive to plenty of existing systems. But if we want to stop this predatory, profiteering, and extractive form of AI—and it’s worth noting that at this point, most people do—we absolutely can. A quick note/plea: I can only do all of this with the support of readers like you, so if you find value in independent, critical tech journalism and analysis, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. I want to keep as much of this un-paywalled as absolutely possible, and I need your support to do so. Many thanks to all who continue to chip in, it’s very much appreciated. Onward. Subscribe First, some context: AI industry folks like Coxon have been discussing the prospect that AI will destroy humanity for years. Even before the beginning of the AI boom, many working in the industry, from the executive staff to the rank and file researchers, have obsessed over ‘x-risk’, or the possibility that AI will become sentient or semi-sentient and move one way or another to exterminate humanity. This is ostensibly why Elon Musk bankrolled OpenAI in the first place, and is the grounds for his lawsuit alleging OpenAI betrayed its charter by abandoning its nonprofit status to become a commercial enterprise. Many AI engineers and startup founders have calculated their own personal p(doom), or the probability that the tech product they are working on will initiate an actual humanity-extinguishing apocalypse. 10-25% p(doom)s are pretty common. (I wrote about a long weekend I spent among these folks at one of their top conferences here, to give you an idea of their ideas and belief systems.) Sam Altman himself drove the narrative of the imminent rise of a super-powerful AI, or artificial general intelligence, to prominence by declaring that the technology he was building posed an existential risk to humanity. This idea is in other words baked into the DNA of modern AI companies and into the products they engineer. It’s also why the industry is routinely accused, by myself and others, of “doom marketing,” ie, using such proclamations and framings to impart the sheer power of the technology behind your product onto investors, partners, consumers, and the state. Some ambient understanding of this tendency may have helped prevent the press from repeating the claim every time one of the x-risk folks made it over the years, including when they quit their jobs at AI companies while doing so. Yet Coxon’s AI x-risk alarm has broken containment, as they say, and has exposed the idea to the mainstream media once again. This has happened, I think, for a number of reasons. First, when AI CEOs were going around saying AI might kill everyone in 2023, their companies were well-capitalized, but not nearly to the extent they are today. They were more easily dismissed as eccentric geeks of the sort that Silicon Valley is supposed to produce. Now, not only do their products have much greater market saturation, but people are more aware of a) the often unethical ways the executives and companies comport themselves b) the other adverse impacts of AI that have already arrived, and c) the physical cost of building these systems, particularly when it comes to data centers. Finally, toss in the constant stream of headlines in 2026 about AI models going rogue or potentially upending the world’s infrastructure. [ ](https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/with-the-backlash-to-data-centers) [ With the backlash to data centers, Flock and AI glasses, a mass opposition to big tech is underway. Silicon Valley is in denial. ](https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/with-the-backlash-to-data-centers) Brian Merchant · Aug 27 [ Read full story ](https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/with-the-backlash-to-data-centers) As a result, general sentiment was already overwhelmingly skeptical of AI and its overlords, so the table was pretty well set for someone to come along and say ‘just a reminder, the companies that are building the product that promises to take your job and leave a data center in your neighborhood also think that it might exterminate the human race’ and get a strong reaction from the media and the public. The question is: Should we understand this stuff as hype, strategically fanned to feed already swelling valuations? Is it doom marketing? Genuine cause for alarm that the infrastructure that undergirds modern life is facing a novel threat vector? Or reason to be sincerely worried that AI companies are amassing too much power, and that their products are genuinely dangerous? The answer, I’m afraid, is “yes.” Let me try to untangle all of this a bit, because arguments over how to navigate this moment are extremely heated right now, as they are essentially arguments over how to approach the politics of AI at a moment where there may be a unique opening for action. Those sympathetic to AI alignment concerns and x risk arguments—which increasingly includes a faction on the left who want to shut down AI over safety concerns—argue that people who dismiss AI as all hype have their heads in the sand. Meanwhile, critics of the x-risk narrative—which I might note includes a cadre of investors and tech folks on the right, too—argue that it is hype and can be used to further inflate valuations or for pursuing regulatory capture. The challenge is that many feel that dismissing AI as just hype or purely marketing also diminishes the urgency of taking on the AI industry as the novel and threat to labor, civil society, and the public sphere it is; others that by accepting the industry’s own terms, we imbue it with undue power and enable it. But let’s be clear: Declarations that AI is so powerful it might end the world are a kind of marketing, and anyone who says otherwise is just as off base as those who say that’s all that it is. If you don’t think that these sub-trillion dollar companies have higher-ups who noticed that when their founders talked about super-powerful dangerous AI they got spikes in media interest and phone calls from investors, or that those founders didn’t notice that themselves, and lean into certain narratives to advantage their products, then I don’t know what to tell you. Not all marketing is a Pepsi ad campaign with a celebrity spokesperson. Yet confronting the AI industry should certainly be considered an urgent project. Do I share the x-riskers’ fear that out-of-control, super-intelligent AI agents might end the world? I do not. I’ve read a good deal of AI extinction literature over the last couple of years and I have not come across a credible, step-by-step documentation of how exactly AI might move from self-recursively improving AI to killing every single human on the planet. Most of what I’ve read seems predicated on a sort of reverse Ian Malcolmian logic: Eventually, it becomes smart enough and AI, uh, finds a way (to exterminate humanity). Are the AI companies also overstating and dramatizing what their products can do? Yes, pretty much all the time. They’re in a knife fight for market share and are trying to win customers and government contracts before their investors come knocking. And yet. They have concentrated enormous amounts of compute, have extensive data collection and surveillance capacities, have inserted themselves into the state in numerous capacities, including military kill chains, and they are being run by egomaniacal billionaires who are rushing to monopolize an entire new market. The way I think about their most recent frightening-seeming exploits is not as a “swarm of rogue AI agents building a new civilization” or whatever, but as corporations with a hitherto-unimaginable amount of compute at their disposal recklessly experimenting with automation programs, completely unafraid of any repercussions because we have been unwilling or unable to impose any on them. So I think we should welcome any newfound imperative to hold them accountable. I also think that ultimately, the AI critics, Pause AI folks, leftists, doomers, effective altruists, and, honestly, most of the public, want a lot of the same things: legitimate checks and limits on AI companies’ power, actual transparency into what the companies are doing, and for more of AI to be under public control. (Ultimately, a lot of what animates the x-risk fears are rooted in just that: a fear of losing control.) How we move towards all this, exactly, is the question of the day, and while there’s much to be argued over in terms of building a viable political platform to challenge the AI industry’s power, I do want to cast a vote against one particular approach. Not to pick on Chris here, as there are a lot of folks out there proposing stuff like this, and the policy ideas actually stem from AI safety groups. But not only would this be challenging to land politically (I can already hear the ‘China will beat us to AGI’ calls) and all but unworkable in practice, this approach is a) far too limiting, b) fails to address the current harms caused by AI and c) would likely only wind up serving Anthropic and OpenAI; it’s what regulatory capture looks like in action. Full model transparency is the floor for what should be on offer here. If these companies believe their products will kill us, the very least we deserve is to know how. It’s in the public interest. I would also argue we might get a lot of the way to stopping any currently envisioned robot apocalypse simply by forcing AI companies to assume liability, and to submit to the full brunt of the law. If Sam Altman were liable to be charged with a felony for approving the hack on Hugging Face1, if Google was forced to pay defamation fines each time it published a false and injurious AI Overviews, these companies might suddenly find cause to restrain their models’ output, and we might hear less about rogue AI. We would need to introduce new frameworks and available tools for tracking automated lawbreaking, to be sure, but I’d wager that little would frighten the AI companies more than actually being held accountable for what their products enable. To that end, Illinois has passed an AI liability law, which the industry fought tooth and nail, and Florida is considering one. The next steps would be towards moving AI under public control; again, it’s only reasonable, since everyone, not just AI insiders, should get a say over how a technology whose developers say might kill us is developed and deployed. Dismantling the whole industrial project as currently structured should be on the table, too, pending democratic input. But that’s for another post. For now, suffice to say that while I won’t be losing any sleep about an AI-enabled extinction event, Mr. Coxon and co. have given us an opportunity to underscore the urgency of the clear and present damage AI companies are doing, the extreme power they wield and the extent to which they hold themselves unaccountable, and the abundance of political capital there is out there for taking them on. Subscribe 1 Purely speculative! I do not know if he did or not.

Sep 12 • 3:59 AM EDT • Politics • bloodinthemachine.com

UN warns political division in addressing climate change threatens economic stability

The Executive Secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), Simon Stiell, warned on Thursday that political divisions and treating climate change as a partisan issue risks worse...

Sep 11 • 7:25 PM EDT • Politics • jurist.org

Murphy beats Trump in deciding frame to reach semis

Shaun Murphy snatches a thrilling final-frame victory over Judd Trump to reach the semi-finals of the English Open.

Sep 11 • 6:55 PM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

Saint Joseph Health System honors the fallen on 25th anniversary of 9/11

Several memorials were held across our area to remember those who died on September 11, 2001.One of those events took place at the Saint Joseph Mishawaka Medica

Sep 11 • 4:02 PM EDT • Health • wsbt.com

Dead and live roaches, egg sacs were found at this Sacramento eatery. Where?

Sacramento County health inspectors closed three dining facilities and cited 10 others this week.

Sep 11 • 2:00 PM EDT • Health • sacbee.com

House Panel Weighs Energy Costs as Small Business Demand Grows

House subcommittee hearing reveals energy policy clash over small business costs. Experts debate resource needs and opportunities. Read the latest.

Sep 11 • 12:49 PM EDT • Business • legis1.com

Deregulation Debate: Business Groups vs. Labor on Workplace Rules

Trump administration pushes to repeal 60+ workplace regulations. Business groups vs. labor unions clash over worker protections. See the debate.

Sep 11 • 12:46 PM EDT • Business • legis1.com

Federal Contracts to Disabled Veteran Businesses Surpass Goal

Federal SDVOSB prime contract awards reached $32.5B, hitting 5% goal. Discover why subcontract awards still lag behind targets. Read more.

Sep 11 • 11:00 AM EDT • Business • legis1.com

Muramasa: Revenant Blades resolution and frame rate targets revealed for PS5, Switch 2, and Switch 1 docked

Marvelous reveals the resolution and frame rate targets for the console versions of Muramasa: Revenant Blades.

Sep 11 • 10:57 AM EDT • Technology • rpgsite.net

DLSS Multi Frame Generation Has Now Been Modded Onto RTX 40, RTX 30 & Even RTX 20 GPUs

Modders unlock NVIDIA's DLSS Multi Frame Generation on RTX 20, 30, and 40 Series, expanding frame interpolation capabilities beyond the RTX 50 Series

Sep 11 • 10:20 AM EDT • Technology • wccftech.com

Proposed Head Start Rule Would Further Undermine Child and Family Health

Head Start, a federal program that supports young children in low-income families, is headlining news in the early childhood policy and health worlds. Early last month, the Trump Administration released a monumental proposal to alter the program’s framework. Head Start is an essential investment in children’s wellbeing that works alongside Medicaid in child care centers, […]

Sep 11 • 9:01 AM EDT • Health • ccf.georgetown.edu

New Jersey Health Care Service Firm Registration Requirements | Insights

New Jersey's Health Care Service Firm registration framework creates compliance obligations for businesses that provide healthcare, personal care or companion services.

Sep 11 • 8:00 AM EDT • Health • hklaw.com

The infamous post-9/11 ad that reshaped Georgia politics and unseated a war hero

In the terror attacks’ emotional aftermath, a dispute over civil service rights was weaponized to frame a decorated veteran next to Osama bin Laden.

Sep 11 • 7:00 AM EDT • Politics • atlantanewsfirst.com

DaVinci Academy of Arts and Science Featured on "All Access hosted by Andy Garcia"

/PRNewswire/ -- An upcoming Public Television broadcast highlights how dynamic charter frameworks and data-informed instruction eliminate achievement gaps in...

Sep 11 • 3:00 AM EDT • Science • prnewswire.com

DaVinci Academy of Arts and Science Featured on "All Access hosted by Andy Garcia"

An upcoming Public Television broadcast highlights how dynamic charter frameworks and data-informed instruction eliminate achievement gaps in primary K-8 education.

Sep 11 • 3:00 AM EDT • Science • finance.yahoo.com

Scientists visualize proteins' hidden water architecture that may help define biological function

For decades, scientists have understood proteins primarily through two defining features: their amino acid sequence and their three-dimensional structure. This framework has driven major advances in biology, ...

Sep 10 • 8:00 PM EDT • Science • phys.org

California Rethinks Software Tax Rules After Business Pushback

California tax officials are reconsidering parts of proposed rules for the state’s new software tax after businesses warned Thursday that the framework could conflict with existing tax systems, potentially exposing transactions to levies in multiple states.

Sep 10 • 7:46 PM EDT • Business • news.bloombergtax.com

Rising diesel costs put pressure on western North Carolina businesses

The high cost of diesel fuel is impacting all kinds of local industries in the mountains, including trucking operators.

Sep 10 • 5:37 PM EDT • Business • wlos.com

At 14, CEO behind popular doll brand helps young entrepreneurs build businesses

“I just hope that we’re able to inspire and encourage and uplift those young people."

Sep 10 • 5:01 PM EDT • Business • wsbtv.com

Israeli legislative election and Netanyahu's politics of enmity

Rather than labeling his domestic rivals as outright traitors, Netanyahu frames them as the vehicles that will deliver the enemy's desired outcome. This deliberately blurs the line between legitimate political dissent and national betrayal | Anadolu

Sep 10 • 1:17 PM EDT • Politics • aa.com.tr

iPhone 17 Pro vs. iPhone 18 Pro: 35+ Upgrades Compared

Apple yesterday announced the iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max, succeeding the iPhone 17 Pro that launched last September. The new models are built around the A20 Pro chip, a 48-megapixel Fusion Main camera with variable aperture, a redesigned vapor chamber, and a smaller Dynamic Island. Last year's iPhone 17 Pro brought one of the biggest design changes to the lineup in years, switching from a titanium frame and glass back to an aluminum unibody with Ceramic Shield 2.

Sep 10 • 9:18 AM EDT • Technology • macrumors.com

Video Walking faster may have big health benefits, study finds

The new study found taking faster steps per day in a 30-minute timeframe can be as helpful in lowering the risk of death as taking more steps per day.

Sep 10 • 8:00 AM EDT • Health • abcnews.com

Modders Unlock DLSS Multi Frame Generation For RTX 30-Series "Ampere" GPUs

After porting DLSS 5 to every recent NVIDIA generation, the modding community now seems to be turning its focus to Frame Generation. A new mod called DLSSG SM86 lets GeForce RTX 30-series owners run DLSS Multi Frame Generation in 2X and 4X modes, a feature NVIDIA officially reserves for RTX...

Sep 10 • 2:29 AM EDT • Technology • techpowerup.com

Big ninth inning stuns Canaries in game one

Sioux Falls, SD (CANARIES) – The Sioux Falls Canaries took a one-run lead into the ninth inning Wednesday night but Kansas City erupted for seven runs in the frame to sink the Birds 12-6 in game one of the West Division Series. Both teams scored a run without a hit in their half of the […]

Sep 9 • 11:46 PM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

Upstate University Hospital opens after-hours pediatric behavioral health center in CNY

Children and teens in crisis now have a new place to turn for help after traditional outpatient offices close, as Upstate University Hospital opened a pediatric

Sep 9 • 10:22 PM EDT • Health • cnycentral.com

Viewpoint: Unlocking Europe’s wildfire data

Europe is already investing in the science, technology and infrastructure needed to understand, prevent and fight wildfires. Copernicus provides satellite-based Earth observation and environmental information, while the European Forest Fire Information System provides information on fire danger and forest fires across Europe. Weather and climate systems add forecasts of heat, drought, wind and humidity; historical fire databases show where fires have occurred; and researchers generate increasingly detailed knowledge about fuels, fire behaviour, forecasting, modelling and risk management. Meanwhile, new European research projects are adding digital twins and other tools to this growing ecosystem.However, these data do not necessarily sit together, nor are they necessarily described, structured or governed in ways that allow them to be used together. Much of the information is public, but some is commercially held. Some is sensitive. Some is subject to legal, security or operational restrictions. Even when data can be legally accessed, different systems may use different formats, terminology and rules.Europe therefore faces an unusual paradox: we have vast amounts of relevant information to respond to the wildfire challenge, but not the means to bring it together. For example, a wildfire researcher or emergency service might need to ask whether a particular combination of vegetation, drought, wind and topography has historically been associated with rapid fire spread. The relevant information may exist in several institutions, using different systems and subject to different conditions of access.The challenge is to conduct an authorised analysis that interacts with these sources, combines the results and respects the rules imposed by each data custodian.An important part of the answer can be found in the Fair principles, the idea that data should be findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable. Developed more than a decade ago, these principles have become a central reference point for modern data stewardship, making it easier for people and machines to find data, understand what it means and determine whether it can be reused.Readability by machines is essential, since AI systems will be key to meeting the data challenge. Bring analysis to the dataThe proposition is not to give an AI system unrestricted access to sensitive databases. Quite the opposite. The goal is to make it possible for approved algorithms to go to the data, rather than requiring sensitive data or large datasets to be copied to wherever the analysis happens.Imagine an analysis asking a series of questions of different data stations. At one station it might examine weather and climate data; at another, historical fire records; at another, experimental measurements of fire behaviour. The algorithm does not need to download everything. It can operate within the environment permitted by each data custodian and return only the results that the rules allow to leave.This is sometimes described as data visiting, and related approaches already exist in areas such as federated analysis and federated learning.Sensitive data should therefore not be treated as a free-for-all for machines. This requires appropriate governance at multiple levels. Access needs to be authenticated and authorised. The purpose of an analysis should be defined. The code or model being run should be controlled. Data custodians should be able to specify what can be queried and what results can leave their environment. Activities should be auditable and human oversight should remain where the consequences require it.In other words, the objective is not to trust AI with the data. It is to design systems in which AI never has more access than it needs.As open as possible, as closed as necessaryFair data should also not be confused with open data. Some wildfire data should be openly available. Other information may legitimately need to remain restricted because it concerns critical infrastructure, security, commercial interests, privacy or operational capabilities. The principle should be: as open as possible, as closed as necessary.The important point is that restricted data should not automatically become unusable data. If machines can discover what information exists, understand its meaning, establish where it came from and determine the conditions under which it can be used, authorised analyses can potentially be carried out without the underlying data ever leaving the environment in which it is protected.Restricted data can still be Fair and machine-actionable.This is also an important question of data sovereignty. European institutions should not have to surrender control of their data to a handful of technology platforms in order to benefit from AI. Nor does Europe need to start again by building one giant repository for every piece of wildfire information. The better approach is to connect what already exists.This is the principle behind emerging approaches such as Tryangle, developed through the Leiden Initiative for Fair and Equitable Science. Rather than creating another centralised data warehouse, the approach seeks to provide an interoperable layer through which approved algorithms can visit distributed data sources while respecting the rules of their custodians.In this way, a data station can remain where it is. Its custodians can retain control. Existing databases and applications do not have to be abandoned. What changes is their ability to communicate with other systems through common, machine-readable descriptions, access rules and interoperability mechanisms.But approaches like this need data that meets the Fair principles. Only then can an interoperable ecosystem safely begin to turn fragmented information into collective intelligence.Data infrastructure is wildfire infrastructureThe implications of this approach are entirely practical. Firefighters could gain better intelligence about local and evolving risks. Land managers could test prevention strategies using more comprehensive information about fuels, weather and past fires. Researchers could compare evidence across ecosystems without repeatedly moving huge datasets between institutions. Smaller regions and resource-constrained teams could access analytical capabilities without having to build large data infrastructures themselves.Europe is already investing heavily in satellites, databases, research programmes, forecasting systems and scientific expertise. The question is whether we will connect those investments well enough to turn them into actionable intelligence.That requires policymakers and funders to treat data infrastructure as seriously as physical infrastructure. Data generated or supported through European public funding should be Fair, verifiable and machine actionable by design, wherever legally and ethically possible.Related articlesData Corner: Europe’s burning need for wildfire mitigation researchClimate monitoring must remain a global enterprise, experts sayIn practice, that means funding not only the production of data, but also the infrastructure that makes data usable across systems: metadata, provenance, interoperability, access mechanisms and governance. Where data must remain restricted, we should ensure that it can still be securely discovered, verified and used for authorised analysis.Initiatives such as the European Open Science Cloud offer an existing framework through which these principles can be put into practice. What is needed now is to accelerate implementation and make them a standard part of how Europe funds and builds research and innovation systems.We do not need another generation of disconnected databases. The data is already there. The opportunity is to make it work together, securely, responsibly and quickly enough to help prevent the next fire, rather than simply document the last one.Jean-Claude Burgelman is professor emeritus at the Free University of Brussels (VUB) and editor-in-chief at Frontiers Policy Lab. For more than 20 years he held leading roles in research and innovation policy at the European Commission.

Sep 9 • 8:00 PM EDT • Science • sciencebusiness.net

Closing health workforce gaps for emergency response: the Western Pacific steps up

Over 100 health emergency experts from 56 institutions across 21 countries in the World Health Organization (WHO) Western Pacific Region who are part of the Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network (GOARN) concluded their annual regional partners’ meeting with a commitment to bridge gaps in emergency workforce capacities and advance regional emergency readiness and resilience.Co-hosted by WHO and the Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency in the Republic of Korea, the two-day event aimed to strengthen the Region’s collective ability to detect, prepare for and respond to health emergencies.Partners mapped capacities and priority technical gaps across the Region — including cybersecurity and critical infrastructure resilience; water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) and environmental health; biological emergencies, nuclear emergencies, and nuclear and radiological security.The result: a renewed commitment to close these gaps by working together through shared expertise and coordinated action. Advancing the Global Health Emergency CorpsReflective of regional solidarity and partnerships in action, GOARN – which is coordinated globally by WHO - enables a stronger, better-connected emergency health workforce that is ready to surge wherever and whenever requested by WHO Member States.This year alone, GOARN partners across the Western Pacific have supported nine experts on six missions - from measles outbreaks in Viet Nam to HIV outbreak response in Fiji - providing surge support in epidemiology, surveillance and clinical case management.Photo: Participants at the Global Alert and Response Network (GOARN) Partners Meeting 2026. Credit: KDCA/Shin Dong Myoung“GOARN partners across the Western Pacific and globally have repeatedly demonstrated the power of what we can do collectively, when we join forces, share expertise and build on each other’s strengths,” noted Dr Gina Samaan, WHO Regional Emergency Director for the Western Pacific, in her opening remarks at the gathering. “Let us continue to forge long-term partnerships grounded in mutual respect that will protect the Region for generations to come. We are smarter, faster and infinitely stronger when we work together,” she added.Reiterating Dr Samaan's call, Dr Seung-kwan Lim, Commissioner of the Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency, emphasized the value of GOARN: “The Republic of Korea is pleased to stand alongside our regional partners in building an emergency workforce that is ready and resilient. GOARN turns national expertise into regional readiness - catalysing national strengths into collective resilience.”GOARN advances the Global Health Security Action Framework (GHEC) initiative by “convening, connecting and capacitating” regional leaders and surge workforce – “the three Cs”. Years of GOARN leadership and outbreak response training programmes have cultivated a deep bench of fit-for-purpose, seasoned outbreak response experts and forged an alumni network of emergency leaders worldwide. The Western Pacific network alone has now grown to 94 partner institutions across 19 countries. Photo: Participants at the Global Alert and Response Network (GOARN) Partners Meeting 2026. Credit: KDCA/Shin Dong Myoung Putting partnerships into practiceDuring the Regional Partners’ Meeting, health experts identified and catalogued the technical expertise currently available across the Western Pacific Region, so that the right skills could be better matched quickly to needs wherever emergencies occur.Three priority areas emerged for further strengthening:Cybersecurity and critical infrastructure resilience - protecting essential systems, including healthcare networks, from digital disruptions.Water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) and environmental health - reflecting the ongoing nexus between climate change and health.Biological emergencies, nuclear emergencies, and nuclear and radiological security - requiring specialized technical capability that remains limited across many national response systems.Meeting participants reaffirmed their commitment to strengthening workforce capacities in the Region, with a particular focus on these three areas, and to working collectively to better prepare the Western Pacific for the next health emergency.Photo: Dr Gina Samaan, WHO Regional Emergency Director for the Western Pacific, delivers opening remarks at the Global Alert and Response Network (GOARN) Partners Meeting 2026. Credit: KDCA/Shin Dong Myoung“GOARN is truly turning preparedness into action - giving our Region the surge capacity it needs for fast, coordinated response when it matters most - and building more resilient health systems along the way,” said Dr Samaan. “As health emergencies mount in this age of permacrisis, emergency preparedness and response must be woven into the fabric of health. This is not an option, but an imperative as we seek to achieve health for all.”____ About GOARNThe Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network (GOARN), coordinated by the World Health Organization since 2000, strengthens global health security by advancing preparedness for and response to public health emergencies. The network brings together more than 390 institutions, including national public health agencies, technical organizations and nongovernmental partners, to support coordinated international action during outbreaks and other health emergencies. There are 94 GOARN partners in the Western Pacific Region (as of August 2026), accounting for approximately 25% of global partners. For more information and media interviews, please contact: WHO Western Pacific Communications: wprocom@who.intAra Johannes: johannesa@who.int

Sep 9 • 8:00 PM EDT • Health • who.int

Las Vegas CFP host committee seeks small businesses for 2027 title game vendors

Southern Nevada small businesses are being invited to sign up for potential vendor opportunities tied to the 2027 College Football Playoff National Championship

Sep 9 • 4:07 PM EDT • Business • news3lv.com

The Apple Watch Series 12 Will Track More Than Just Health Data

Even with a return of ceramic frames, the most important new features for Series 12 are all built around health and conversation tracking.

Sep 9 • 1:55 PM EDT • Health • gizmodo.com

Mission Health's Mountain Area Medical Airlift marks 40 years of service

For four decades, Mission Health's Mountain Area Medical Airlift has taken to the skies to bring critical care across western North Carolina.

Sep 9 • 1:02 PM EDT • Health • wlos.com

How 'parachute science' is failing the world's tropical insects

Monash University scientists have developed a global framework to tackle a major blind spot in biodiversity conservation: Insects underpin ecosystems and food production but remain largely invisible to ...

Sep 9 • 10:40 AM EDT • Science • phys.org

BGI Genomics Launches "Digital Life Twin" Framework to Power Proactive Health

Commemorating BGI Group's 27th anniversary, BGI Genomics today introduced its Digital Life Twin framework alongside an advanced multi-omics diagnostic portfolio at the 2026 Global New Product Launch Event. Grounded in over two decades of population-scale genetic discoveries, the launch marks a decisive transition from traditional, reactive diagnostics to continuous, predictive health management across the entire human lifecycle.

Sep 9 • 9:45 AM EDT • Health • finance.yahoo.com

VA Health Records Overhaul Stalls Despite Restart Push

VA's electronic health records modernization hits another roadblock. Learn why the fourth attempt faces delays and what it means for veterans' care.

Sep 9 • 9:07 AM EDT • Health • legis1.com

The Cost of Cutting American Science: How Federal Cuts Diminish Public Health Capacity

Among the federal government’s many responsibilities is the work it does to protect public health. Federal agencies monitor our food supply to ensure safety, conduct research to better understand emerging health threats, provide funding for public health programs in communities and work to detect and respond to disease outbreaks. Americans rely on these efforts every day—in a 2024 online survey, 74% of respondents said that “if the federal government issued safety guidance about food you eat regularly,” they would follow it. Changes to Federal Public Health Capacity The Trump administration’s efforts to reshape the federal government have resulted in significant impacts on our nation’s public health capacity over the past 20 months, affecting the response to health concerns such as measles, Ebola and cyclosporiasis. Agencies with core public health, food safety and disease prevention responsibilities experienced large workforce decreases during the first year of the administration. At the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, for instance, the workforce in February 2026 was 26.7% smaller than in September 2024 before the start of the Trump administration. The Food and Drug Administration saw a similarly steep decline of 21.6%. Agencies such as the National Institutes of Health, Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration and Food Safety and Inspection Service also experienced large workforce decreases. (function(){function e(){window.addEventListener(`message`,function(e){if(e.data[`datawrapper-height`]!==void 0){var t=document.querySelectorAll(`iframe`);for(var n in e.data[`datawrapper-height`])for(var r=0,i;i=t[r];r++)if(i.contentWindow===e.source){var a=e.data[`datawrapper-height`][n]+`px`;i.style.height=a}}})}e()})(); Changes can also be seen in crucial public health occupations. The number of federal food inspectors, for example, decreased by more than half between September 2024 and February 2026, going from 1,035 to 473. This is the lowest number of food inspectors employed by the federal government since at least 2005. By February 2026, there were also 33.3% fewer federal public health program specialists, whose work includes advising federal funding recipients on public health activities and analyzing the effectiveness of public health programs. Government’s capacity is diminished as employees with specialized knowledge and experience in protecting the public and responding to health risks depart, leaving agencies less prepared to carry out their public health missions. There also have been vacancies in critical high-level leadership positions at public health agencies, most notably at the CDC, which had a permanent Senate-confirmed director for less than a month between January 2025 and early August 2026. Although the CDC has previously been led by acting directors at the start of an administration, the nearly yearlong gap since the departure of the administration’s first permanent director in August 2025 is without precedent. As of August 2026, the FDA is also currently without a Senate-confirmed commissioner following the previous commissioner’s resignation in May 2026. Additionally, public health agencies are experiencing increased politicization of their leadership ranks. In agencies such as the CDC and Food Safety and Inspection Service, the number of individuals in the Senior Executive Service—the most senior career leaders in government—has declined significantly, while at the same time the number of political appointees has reached record levels. (function(){function e(){window.addEventListener(`message`,function(e){if(e.data[`datawrapper-height`]!==void 0){var t=document.querySelectorAll(`iframe`);for(var n in e.data[`datawrapper-height`])for(var r=0,i;i=t[r];r++)if(i.contentWindow===e.source){var a=e.data[`datawrapper-height`][n]+`px`;i.style.height=a}}})}e()})(); (function(){function e(){window.addEventListener(`message`,function(e){if(e.data[`datawrapper-height`]!==void 0){var t=document.querySelectorAll(`iframe`);for(var n in e.data[`datawrapper-height`])for(var r=0,i;i=t[r];r++)if(i.contentWindow===e.source){var a=e.data[`datawrapper-height`][n]+`px`;i.style.height=a}}})}e()})(); At the CDC, for example, the number of career SES decreased 42.9% between December 2024 and February 2026, while the number of non-Senate confirmed political appointees at the agency was six times larger than the agency’s historical average from 2009 and 2024. Knowledgeable career leaders are integral to the ability of public health agencies to carry out their work with scientific integrity and professional judgment, and rapid leadership turnover and increased politicization threaten agencies’ ability to make evidence-based decisions to protect our health. The upheaval and politicization in public health agencies have also negatively affected employee engagement. Strong employee engagement is crucial to the ability of agencies to carry out their mission and successfully provide essential services to the public. In the 2025 Public Service Viewpoint Survey conducted by the Partnership for Public Service, the Department of Health and Human Services—which encompasses major public health agencies such as the CDC and FDA—had an employee engagement and satisfaction score of 20.4 out of 100, one of the lowest among large agencies. Only 2.8% of HHS employees indicated trust in their political leaders and only 8.7% reported confidence that they could report a suspected violation of law or regulation without retaliation. Employees at HHS also reported that the agency’s ability to provide services to the public had suffered. Nearly half of employees at HHS, 47.5%, said their work unit was worse at delivering quality services compared to its performance in 2024. In addition, 57.8% said their work unit was performing worse at fulfilling stakeholder needs. In addition to the work done within federal agencies, the federal government also distributes significant funding for public health and disease prevention work to state and local governments, nonprofits and small businesses—funding which has been significantly disrupted. At the CDC, for example, there was a 71.9% decrease in the amount of project grant funding issued in fiscal year 2025 compared to fiscal year 2024. The FDA also issued far less funding in fiscal year 2025—a 21.3% decrease from its fiscal year 2024 funding. Changes in federal funding include the ending of grants to community organizations that worked on HIV prevention and the cancellation of funding for research into improvements to patient safety and healthcare quality. These changes go beyond federal agencies to impact the broader public health ecosystem, including the state and local health departments responsible for much of the on-the-ground public health work in their communities. About 80% of the CDC’s domestic funding is directed towards state and local partners—meaning that cuts to CDC funding can ultimately result in cuts to state and local public health capacity. Federal agencies also provide expertise and assistance to state and local health agencies as they deal with particular health challenges, but workforce cuts have resulted in fewer federal employees available to help. The Impact of Changes to Public Health Capacity These changes to federal public health capacity are not abstract concerns. Disrupted programs, reduced funding and lost expertise at public health agencies across all levels of government threaten the public’s physical well-being and safety. In some cases, this has already led to harm. The most immediate impacts of federal cuts were seen in interruptions to ongoing public health programs and crisis responses. In one instance, when CDC grants were canceled during the 2025 Texas measles outbreak—the most severe measles outbreak in 25 years—public health officials in Lubbock, Texas were forced to pause parts of their measles response work supported by the frozen funding. Lubbock’s director of public health further said that a lack of available CDC experts to reach out to for advice “definitely” impacted the department’s response to the measles crisis. Cuts to federal funding also forced Dallas County Health and Human Services to cut staff and cancel 50 community vaccination clinics during the outbreak. Public health work outside of major outbreak responses was also disrupted. For example, in April 2025, the Milwaukee Public Health Department was unexpectedly unable to reach experts on lead poisoning due to firings at the CDC when responding to concerns about lead contamination in Milwaukee public schools. Due to federal workforce cuts, several programs at the CDC, including Alzheimer’s and epilepsy programs, have also become trapped in limbo—existing on paper, but without the staff necessary to operate. More recent crises reveal how federal cuts have weakened the public health infrastructure needed to prevent and respond to dangerous new outbreaks. Internationally, cuts at the U.S. Agency for International Development eliminated funding for disease testing and contact tracing abroad, which delayed detection of and responses to the 2026 Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo. While international outbreaks may seem far removed, the unchecked spread of disease in any country can quickly pose a danger to economic well-being, security and health around the world. Within the United States, public health cuts inhibited responses to the summer 2026 outbreak of the food-borne parasite cyclospora. At the federal level, cuts to funding for lab equipment and for CDC staff with expertise in parasitic infections—including 9 out of 11 staff members at the lab responsible for identifying parasitic outbreaks in 2025— contributed to the largest reporting delay in outbreak cases at the CDC in 15 years. Conflicting communications from the FDA about the source of the outbreak, which followed cuts to the agency’s communications department, additionally led to confusion among the public about how to best avoid infection. At the same time, cuts to HHS funding and support for local and state public health slowed some health departments’ responses to the crisis. The exact costs of these delays, constraints and confusion in public health responses are difficult to estimate. However, their message is clear: federal cuts have already made containing threats to public health even more of a challenge. Conclusion Protecting public health—from food safety to disease prevention—is one of the federal government’s most important missions. Dramatic and haphazard cuts to federal agencies and funding have already disrupted the public health system, impacting the response to challenges such as measles, lead poisoning and cyclosporiasis. The U.S. public health system needed improvement before these disruptions. Since 2022, federal leadership and coordination in response to public health outbreaks has been on the Government Accountability Office’s High-Risk List of areas in need of attention to improve government effectiveness and efficiency. Recent cuts only compound these concerns. The chaotic dismantling of government and resulting disruptions to crucial functions like public health and disease prevention highlight the need for meaningful reform and concrete policy proposals to reimagine how government can better serve the public and be more effective, responsive and accountable. To learn more about the impact of federal cuts to public health and science more broadly, visit The Cost of Cutting American Science. Learn more For more information on the Partnership for Public Service’s government reform initiative, visit Government for a New Era. View here In line with The Cost of Cutting American Science, federal workforce data in this brief is as of February 2026

Sep 9 • 9:00 AM EDT • Science • ourpublicservice.org

The Cost of Cutting American Science: How Federal Cuts Diminish Public Health Capacity

Among the federal government’s many responsibilities is the work it does to protect public health. Federal agencies monitor our food supply to ensure safety, conduct research to better understand emerging health threats, provide funding for public health programs in communities and work to detect and respond to disease outbreaks. Americans rely on these efforts every day—in a 2024 online survey, 74% of respondents said that “if the federal government issued safety guidance about food you eat regularly,” they would follow it. Changes to Federal Public Health Capacity The Trump administration’s efforts to reshape the federal government have resulted in significant impacts on our nation’s public health capacity over the past 20 months, affecting the response to health concerns such as measles, Ebola and cyclosporiasis. Agencies with core public health, food safety and disease prevention responsibilities experienced large workforce decreases during the first year of the administration. At the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, for instance, the workforce in February 2026 was 26.7% smaller than in September 2024 before the start of the Trump administration. The Food and Drug Administration saw a similarly steep decline of 21.6%. Agencies such as the National Institutes of Health, Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration and Food Safety and Inspection Service also experienced large workforce decreases. (function(){function e(){window.addEventListener(`message`,function(e){if(e.data[`datawrapper-height`]!==void 0){var t=document.querySelectorAll(`iframe`);for(var n in e.data[`datawrapper-height`])for(var r=0,i;i=t[r];r++)if(i.contentWindow===e.source){var a=e.data[`datawrapper-height`][n]+`px`;i.style.height=a}}})}e()})(); Changes can also be seen in crucial public health occupations. The number of federal food inspectors, for example, decreased by more than half between September 2024 and February 2026, going from 1,035 to 473. This is the lowest number of food inspectors employed by the federal government since at least 2005. By February 2026, there were also 33.3% fewer federal public health program specialists, whose work includes advising federal funding recipients on public health activities and analyzing the effectiveness of public health programs. Government’s capacity is diminished as employees with specialized knowledge and experience in protecting the public and responding to health risks depart, leaving agencies less prepared to carry out their public health missions. There also have been vacancies in critical high-level leadership positions at public health agencies, most notably at the CDC, which had a permanent Senate-confirmed director for less than a month between January 2025 and early August 2026. Although the CDC has previously been led by acting directors at the start of an administration, the nearly yearlong gap since the departure of the administration’s first permanent director in August 2025 is without precedent. As of August 2026, the FDA is also currently without a Senate-confirmed commissioner following the previous commissioner’s resignation in May 2026. Additionally, public health agencies are experiencing increased politicization of their leadership ranks. In agencies such as the CDC and Food Safety and Inspection Service, the number of individuals in the Senior Executive Service—the most senior career leaders in government—has declined significantly, while at the same time the number of political appointees has reached record levels. (function(){function e(){window.addEventListener(`message`,function(e){if(e.data[`datawrapper-height`]!==void 0){var t=document.querySelectorAll(`iframe`);for(var n in e.data[`datawrapper-height`])for(var r=0,i;i=t[r];r++)if(i.contentWindow===e.source){var a=e.data[`datawrapper-height`][n]+`px`;i.style.height=a}}})}e()})(); (function(){function e(){window.addEventListener(`message`,function(e){if(e.data[`datawrapper-height`]!==void 0){var t=document.querySelectorAll(`iframe`);for(var n in e.data[`datawrapper-height`])for(var r=0,i;i=t[r];r++)if(i.contentWindow===e.source){var a=e.data[`datawrapper-height`][n]+`px`;i.style.height=a}}})}e()})(); At the CDC, for example, the number of career SES decreased 42.9% between December 2024 and February 2026, while the number of non-Senate confirmed political appointees at the agency was six times larger than the agency’s historical average from 2009 and 2024. Knowledgeable career leaders are integral to the ability of public health agencies to carry out their work with scientific integrity and professional judgment, and rapid leadership turnover and increased politicization threaten agencies’ ability to make evidence-based decisions to protect our health. The upheaval and politicization in public health agencies have also negatively affected employee engagement. Strong employee engagement is crucial to the ability of agencies to carry out their mission and successfully provide essential services to the public. In the 2025 Public Service Viewpoint Survey conducted by the Partnership for Public Service, the Department of Health and Human Services—which encompasses major public health agencies such as the CDC and FDA—had an employee engagement and satisfaction score of 20.4 out of 100, one of the lowest among large agencies. Only 2.8% of HHS employees indicated trust in their political leaders and only 8.7% reported confidence that they could report a suspected violation of law or regulation without retaliation. Employees at HHS also reported that the agency’s ability to provide services to the public had suffered. Nearly half of employees at HHS, 47.5%, said their work unit was worse at delivering quality services compared to its performance in 2024. In addition, 57.8% said their work unit was performing worse at fulfilling stakeholder needs. In addition to the work done within federal agencies, the federal government also distributes significant funding for public health and disease prevention work to state and local governments, nonprofits and small businesses—funding which has been significantly disrupted. At the CDC, for example, there was a 71.9% decrease in the amount of project grant funding issued in fiscal year 2025 compared to fiscal year 2024. The FDA also issued far less funding in fiscal year 2025—a 21.3% decrease from its fiscal year 2024 funding. Changes in federal funding include the ending of grants to community organizations that worked on HIV prevention and the cancellation of funding for research into improvements to patient safety and healthcare quality. These changes go beyond federal agencies to impact the broader public health ecosystem, including the state and local health departments responsible for much of the on-the-ground public health work in their communities. About 80% of the CDC’s domestic funding is directed towards state and local partners—meaning that cuts to CDC funding can ultimately result in cuts to state and local public health capacity. Federal agencies also provide expertise and assistance to state and local health agencies as they deal with particular health challenges, but workforce cuts have resulted in fewer federal employees available to help. The Impact of Changes to Public Health Capacity These changes to federal public health capacity are not abstract concerns. Disrupted programs, reduced funding and lost expertise at public health agencies across all levels of government threaten the public’s physical well-being and safety. In some cases, this has already led to harm. The most immediate impacts of federal cuts were seen in interruptions to ongoing public health programs and crisis responses. In one instance, when CDC grants were canceled during the 2025 Texas measles outbreak—the most severe measles outbreak in 25 years—public health officials in Lubbock, Texas were forced to pause parts of their measles response work supported by the frozen funding. Lubbock’s director of public health further said that a lack of available CDC experts to reach out to for advice “definitely” impacted the department’s response to the measles crisis. Cuts to federal funding also forced Dallas County Health and Human Services to cut staff and cancel 50 community vaccination clinics during the outbreak. Public health work outside of major outbreak responses was also disrupted. For example, in April 2025, the Milwaukee Public Health Department was unexpectedly unable to reach experts on lead poisoning due to firings at the CDC when responding to concerns about lead contamination in Milwaukee public schools. Due to federal workforce cuts, several programs at the CDC, including Alzheimer’s and epilepsy programs, have also become trapped in limbo—existing on paper, but without the staff necessary to operate. More recent crises reveal how federal cuts have weakened the public health infrastructure needed to prevent and respond to dangerous new outbreaks. Internationally, cuts at the U.S. Agency for International Development eliminated funding for disease testing and contact tracing abroad, which delayed detection of and responses to the 2026 Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo. While international outbreaks may seem far removed, the unchecked spread of disease in any country can quickly pose a danger to economic well-being, security and health around the world. Within the United States, public health cuts inhibited responses to the summer 2026 outbreak of the food-borne parasite cyclospora. At the federal level, cuts to funding for lab equipment and for CDC staff with expertise in parasitic infections—including 9 out of 11 staff members at the lab responsible for identifying parasitic outbreaks in 2025— contributed to the largest reporting delay in outbreak cases at the CDC in 15 years. Conflicting communications from the FDA about the source of the outbreak, which followed cuts to the agency’s communications department, additionally led to confusion among the public about how to best avoid infection. At the same time, cuts to HHS funding and support for local and state public health slowed some health departments’ responses to the crisis. The exact costs of these delays, constraints and confusion in public health responses are difficult to estimate. However, their message is clear: federal cuts have already made containing threats to public health even more of a challenge. Conclusion Protecting public health—from food safety to disease prevention—is one of the federal government’s most important missions. Dramatic and haphazard cuts to federal agencies and funding have already disrupted the public health system, impacting the response to challenges such as measles, lead poisoning and cyclosporiasis. The U.S. public health system needed improvement before these disruptions. Since 2022, federal leadership and coordination in response to public health outbreaks has been on the Government Accountability Office’s High-Risk List of areas in need of attention to improve government effectiveness and efficiency. Recent cuts only compound these concerns. The chaotic dismantling of government and resulting disruptions to crucial functions like public health and disease prevention highlight the need for meaningful reform and concrete policy proposals to reimagine how government can better serve the public and be more effective, responsive and accountable. To learn more about the impact of federal cuts to public health and science more broadly, visit The Cost of Cutting American Science. Learn more For more information on the Partnership for Public Service’s government reform initiative, visit Government for a New Era. View here In line with The Cost of Cutting American Science, federal workforce data in this brief is as of February 2026

Sep 9 • 9:00 AM EDT • Health • ourpublicservice.org

Epic v. Health Gorilla: “Working as Designed”

We’ve been on a bit of a legal bender since just before Labor Day, so let’s keep a good thing going! As predicted, Epic does not want its case against Health Gorilla consolidated with the data breach cases, so it filed a motion to vacate the conditional transfer. And because they had to explain to the Panel why this case is different, they put a good chunk of previously unseen Epic v. Health Gorilla discovery record on the public docket! Roll the tape! The Case Against Consolidation Before we get to the fun stuff, let’s do the housekeeping. Epic's motion boils down to three arguments (sorted in ascending order of how well they land): A judge has already decided this. Judge Olguin declined to relate the fraud action to another ELU case (Patterson v. UVA Health), holding that the two do not call for determination of substantially similar questions of law or fact. Epic asks the Panel to treat that (a Rule 42 ruling) as law of the case. The overlap is thin. The three common questions Health Gorilla and the Panel identified are neither numerous nor complex (the qualities the Panel looks for before centralizing). Moreover, they are outnumbered by the questions unique to each side: The breach cases turn on security architecture, notification timing, and patient-level access. The fraud action turns on false treatment attestations and breaches of the framework agreements. Consolidation costs more than it saves. 17 of 21 parties in the fraud action do not appear in a breach case. The cases are also at very different stages: Olguin has a scheduling order running through a January 2028 trial while the breach actions are much more nascent. I like the last two more than the first because they attack the basic economics of an MDL: there just may not be enough shared discovery here to justify dragging all the defendants and a relatively mature fraud case all the way to Florida. On the other hand (while I know exceedingly little about MDL and Rule 42), I have a hard time seeing why a district judge's decision about his own docket would control what the Panel does with the separate § 1407 question. I might be reading between the lines too much, but I sorta think Epic's own brief half-concedes this, framing the two provisions as "two sides of the same coin" but then adding "respectfully submit" (which is often lawyer speak for “we know this is a reach”). The Ladder Gets More Rungs Anyway, the arguments are not why you're here (aside from the lawyers, maybe). Back in June, we discussed how Epic was using the smaller defendants to build an evidentiary ladder toward Health Gorilla and Unit 387. Turns out discovery has been adding a few rungs of its own.

Sep 9 • 5:16 AM EDT • Health • healthapiguy.substack.com

Canfield Fair incident puts focus on political rhetoric in Ohio governor’s race

For months, Ohio’s governor’s race has been fought with increasingly personal campaign messages.Now, after an armed man pushed through a crowd toward Democrati

Sep 8 • 9:40 PM EDT • Politics • abc6onyourside.com

“Parachute science” is failing the tropics, home to more than 80% of insect species

Insects quietly hold much of the natural world together, yet conservation efforts are overlooking the tropical regions where more than 80 percent of insect species live. Monash University researchers have developed a global framework to close this gap by combining scientific studies with museum collections, local expertise, citizen science, social media records, and new technologies.

Sep 8 • 8:00 PM EDT • Science • sciencedaily.com

Eye on Health: Couplet Care keeps families and babies closer during NICU stay

The NICU..or Neonatal Intensive Care Unit is designed for babies requiring special care immediately following birth. But not every NICU looks the same."The most

Sep 8 • 5:04 PM EDT • Health • wsbt.com

Meet Rachel Chen, the 18-year-old Los Angeles student who expanded a 1997 quantum-math idea to describe entire particle systems with simple diagrams; she won $100,000

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Sep 8 • 1:52 PM EDT • Science • timesofindia.indiatimes.com

Tulsa Fire Department marks 10 years of mobile health care

The program helps Tulsans address health needs before they become 911 emergencies, with clients seeing major reductions in emergency calls.

Sep 8 • 12:44 PM EDT • Health • newson6.com

Kansas City psychiatrist explores the science behind high emotional sensitivity

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Sep 8 • 12:07 PM EDT • Science • kcur.org

U.S. Senator Reed discuses efforts to reverse Trump administration's cuts to health care

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Sep 8 • 10:35 AM EDT • Health • turnto10.com

Scott McTominay has successful heart surgery as return timeframe revealed

Napoli released a statement on Tuesday following McTominay’s heart procedure

Sep 8 • 9:53 AM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

The rise of 'quantum gravity?' Einstein's theory seen in the quantum realm for 1st time

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Sep 8 • 9:00 AM EDT • Science • space.com

China’s Evolving Strategy for International Science and Technology Cooperation

China has been increasing its emphasis on science and technology research as a key priority, including by directly integrating the strategy for international scientific engagement into its broader framework for national power and technological self-reliance.

Sep 8 • 9:00 AM EDT • Science • quincyinst.org

Science is Cool: Observing the night sky

WABI TV5 News at 4

Sep 7 • 6:39 PM EDT • Science • wabi.tv

North Portland businesses brace for I-5 Rose Quarter closure starting Sept. 11

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Sep 7 • 5:53 PM EDT • Business • katu.com

Blaze destroys A340-300 centrepiece of Turkish aeronautical science park

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Sep 7 • 5:20 PM EDT • Science • flightglobal.com

BigBear Microsoft 365 phishing service bypassed MFA at 258 organizations

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Sep 7 • 11:39 AM EDT • Technology • bleepingcomputer.com

DLSS 5 Mod Shifts Load to Second GPU, Doubling Frame-Rates and Latency

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Sep 7 • 10:00 AM EDT • Technology • digitalfoundry.net

"This is super, super heavy" - Experts test Nvidia's divisive graphics-altering DLSS 5 tech and find it really does tank your game's frame-rate

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Sep 7 • 8:34 AM EDT • Technology • eurogamer.net

Commission to present long-awaited Innovation Act proposal

The European Commission will present its proposal for an EU Innovation Act on September 9, with a focus on strengthening public procurement as a driver of innovation and facilitating the use of intellectual property (IP) to secure financing.The proposal was initially meant to be published in March. No explanation has been given for the delay, but it may be linked to issues with the associated impact assessment.The Commission’s Regulatory Scrutiny Board issued a negative opinion on the draft impact assessment following its meeting on January 28, and again on February 27, according to a draft of the Innovation Act published by Agence Europe.In it, the Commission lays out the steps it has taken to address the board’s concerns, including avoiding overlap with the upcoming revision of the EU Public Procurement Directives and removing a mandatory target for EU member states to increase overall innovation procurement spending.The Innovation Act, which was included in last year’s start-up and scale-up strategy, is meant to reduce barriers to bringing innovative solutions to the market and speed up the path from research to commercialisation.Central to the initiative, according to the draft proposal, is the introduction of a harmonised EU framework for the procurement of R&D services by public buyers, including pre-commercial procurement. The plans would also introduce an EU preference in public R&D procurement.“Other leading economies in the world are investing five to eight times more in public procurement of R&D than the EU,” it notes. In Europe, the lack of harmonised rules has led to divergent practices across the bloc, legal uncertainty and limited use of joint, cross-border R&D procurement, it says.Related articlesCommission postpones European Innovation ActParliament draft report adds EU Inc safeguards to prevent fraud and regime shoppingThe text highlights a lack of clarity around the valuation and monetisation of IP as another barrier to the commercialisation of research results. Currently in the EU, IP is rarely used as collateral in financing, which restricts the growth potential of innovative firms. A key reason for this, according to the Commission, is the absence of a harmonised methodology for valuing IP.To address this issue, it plans to introduce an EU-wide IP valuation framework, a digital marketplace for commercialising IP, and a competence centre to help innovators access IP-backed finance.The issue was highlighted by a recent report by the European Union Intellectual Property Office, which referred to developing a “functional market for IP-backed finance” as a “core competitiveness imperative for the next decade,” and key to ensuring capital unlocked by other EU initiatives reaches innovative firms.The Innovation Act is one of several ways the Commission hopes to reduce fragmentation in the single market and help innovative companies to scale in Europe, complementing other initiatives such as the EU-wide corporate regime, dubbed EU Inc.The leaked draft is not the final version that will be published on September 9, according to a Commission official.

Sep 7 • 8:00 AM EDT • Science • sciencebusiness.net

Why Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s egg freezing is one of 2026’s most interesting political moves

The Democrat documented her clinical process for postponing motherhood and, in doing so, widened the institutions’ reproductive-health framework while also offering clues about her possible future plans

Sep 7 • 5:23 AM EDT • Politics • english.elpais.com

LYMA Launches P.O.W.E.R. Index for Wellness Science

LYMA's P.O.W.E.R. Index tackles wellness science-washing with five tests for evidence, outcomes and value. Explore the new framework.

Sep 7 • 3:00 AM EDT • Science • theindustry.beauty

From Academia to Industry: Hongbian Li on Wearable Electronics, AI, and the Changing Landscape of Materials Science

Hongbian Li shares her experience as a reviewer, shifting to industry, and on translating materials research into real-world applications.

Sep 7 • 1:02 AM EDT • Science • advancedsciencenews.com

Inside the business of finding expert witnesses for major trials

In high-stakes trials, the outcome can hinge on who takes the stand as an expert witness — and one of the most experienced companies in finding and supplying...

Sep 6 • 10:35 PM EDT • Business • news3lv.com

The Manhunter speaks: ‘Lanterns’ star talks big twist

‘Lanterns’ star behind the Manhunter explains how the reveal ‘reframed everything’ for the character.

Sep 6 • 10:00 PM EDT • Entertainment • ew.com

The Manhunter speaks: “Lanterns” star explains how the big twist ‘reframed everything’

The actor behind the character talks the episode 4 reveal.

Sep 6 • 10:00 PM EDT • Entertainment • yahoo.com

The core anti-Pangram constituency is phony writers

Welcome to The Closing Argument, our verdict on the news, plus everything The Argument published and appeared in this week. The Verdict, by Kelsey Piper A lot of people hate AI for drowning the internet in slop and displacing human creatives. You might think that these people would be thrilled by a program that can identify and flag AI-generated work. But many people who hate AI also hate Pangram, an impressively accurate AI detector that produces very few false positives, according to high-quality independent research. This loathing found its most recent expression in a bizarre Wired article that amplifies a wide range of false arguments from Pangram skeptics: that AI detectors are racist (they’re not) or ableist (they’re not)1 or don’t work (this one does)2. Rather than starting from the premise that it would be really valuable to have a working AI detector and scrutinizing Pangram to make sure it lives up to that promise, the article starts from the premise that Pangram obviously has bad vibes and sets out to discover why. (One answer: The CEO microwaved lunch during an interview!) Why aren’t writers who resent Pangram more eager to distinguish themselves from posters who are having ChatGPT ghostwrite all their work? There are a few different things at play, but I think one key dynamic is this: These are often the same people. A core constituency for arguments like Wired’s is “writers” who are using AI to write their posts but resent this fact being made public. They stand to lose from AI detectors because AI detectors call them out. Share When Substack announced a partnership with Pangram, a sizable fraction of the platform’s authors rose up in outrage. Some people had experience with other AI detectors that didn’t work, and some felt that AI writing ought to be encouraged — both of which are fair enough. But the fury was fueled by authors passionately insisting that Pangram kept wrongly accusing them on almost every post they published. Pangram can be wrong, especially on short passages. But in the overwhelming majority of cases where Pangram looked at a whole blog post rather than a single paragraph, the program correctly detected work as AI. Even if we can’t be 100% sure in any individual case, we can notice the trend in the aggregate. Wired quotes Sam Illingworth, a professor of critical AI literacy at Edinburgh Napier University, who said, “I don’t think [AI detectors] work. … I think that detectors are prejudiced against certain people.” This spring, he said that he used AI for research and editing; this summer he acknowledged that in addition to research and editing, he also uses it “now and then for a turn of phrase I keep.” Pangram informs us that most of his posts are 100% AI-written (some are mixed AI-and-human) and that 100% AI-written posts started appearing last year. The favorable interpretation is that, as someone whose recent work Pangram consistently mistakes for AI, Illingworth sees Pangram’s flaws firsthand. The unfavorable interpretation is that the tool’s credibility trades off against his own, because its account of who writes his posts is not consistent with his. Illingworth is not alone in insisting the detector does not work. “It’s a Monday night in late July, and I’m pasting my own Substack draft into an AI detector for the first time. Not because I’m worried. Because I’m curious. I wrote every word of it myself, the way I write everything, out loud in my head first, in a rhythm that still carries the accent of a language I learned to think in before I learned to write in this one,” begins one Substack post by an author indignant that Pangram flags her writing as AI. “That’s the part I had to sit with before I could write this.” If you, like me, have worked with AIs a lot, you won’t even need Pangram there. The author of that piece is AI. It is obviously AI! I checked 10 other posts on the blog, and they were also obviously AI! “I have spent 22 years as an award-winning author and essayist. And now this bullshit tool that learned from MY writing is going to accuse me of plagiarism,” popular Substack writer Carlyn Beccia wrote in an anti-Pangram post. “For the last and final time, AI DETECTORS DO NOT WORK.” Here’s what her writing sounded like in 2020: “Most success stories revolve around one person who believed enough in you to say — give it a try. We call these people muses, but they are so much more than that. They are the strong man giants whose shoulders we stand on so we can see the horizon. Throughout the editing process, I am sure my editor felt less like a giant of greatness and more like Atlas with the world on her shoulders.” Pangram says it was 100% human-written. (So were other articles of hers in 2020.) And here’s what it sounds like now: “And then there is the reshuffling, which sounds like paperwork until you remember that empires have always loved paperwork. The Trump regime recently moved special education oversight from the Education Department to HHS. That is not a minor bureaucratic transfer. It changes the frame.”3 Pangram says this is mostly AI. I am not convinced that Pangram is wrong. In my own experience, Pangram is very effective on long texts — if it marks a long essay as AI, the essay was either written by AI or deliberately written to sound like AI. On tweet-length or paragraph-length texts, it’s not perfectly reliable. It seems to work just as well for non-native English speakers as for native speakers. While I have seen dozens of claims of pre-2022 text returning a positive result on Pangram, I have tried repeatedly to corroborate those and have never once succeeded. To be clear, I’m absolutely not saying that complaining about Pangram suggests a writer is a cheat. There are plenty of other concerns. Most are mistakenly premised, such as the false claim that Pangram trains on work you put into it, but others are reasonable: It’s unreliable on sufficiently short text segments; it creates an internet witch-hunt mentality when there are defensible uses of AI; people who are open about their AI use are sometimes blamed, when the only people really doing something wrong are the ones who hide it; and it isn’t perfect, so a single positive result shouldn’t be taken as decisive proof of misconduct. I’m happy to concede that Pangram is imperfect and possible to over-rely on. If an author’s posts are mostly non-AI and one scans as partially AI, this could be a mistake. It’s also possible to defeat Pangram with intentional effort. If you think we need something more robust and more reliable, fine! But if you don’t like AI and don’t like Pangram, your attitude really ought to be that it’s a shame that our existing tools for AI detection are imperfect, and it’s important to invent better ones. If your stance is instead that AI is evil and so is looking for AI, then ultimately you’re contributing to the sloppification of the internet. You’re making it harder for people who write their own text to distinguish themselves, and providing cover for authors who are definitely not writing their own text. Subscribe Top stories this week, by Kobe Yank-Jacobs Commentators often worry that the decline of reading could mean the decline of liberal democracy — but deliberative governance actually predated widespread literacy. This week, Maibritt Henkel pointed out that many liberal cultures thrive on a culture of raucous, interactive debate, which can happen in-person as easily, if not more so, than in text. Read on, dear reader, to learn more. It may actually cheer you up: [ ](https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/reading-wont-save-liberalism) [ Reading won’t save liberalism ](https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/reading-wont-save-liberalism) Maibritt Henkel · Sep 1 [ Read full story ](https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/reading-wont-save-liberalism) It used to be bad to downplay climate change (if we mean denying its reality). Today, it’s actually good to downplay climate change (if we mean keeping the issue out of political fights so we can make real progress). This counterintuitive view is called “climate hushing,” and contributor Alex Trembath argued that it’s the key to enacting good policy going forward. Get up to speed on the latest in climate politics: [ ](https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/we-wont-stop-climate-change-by-talking) [ We won’t stop climate change by talking about it ](https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/we-wont-stop-climate-change-by-talking) Alex Trembath · Sep 2 [ Read full story ](https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/we-wont-stop-climate-change-by-talking) Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney is standing up for the forces of liberalism against Donald Trump’s assault on our closest ally. So, why is one prominent left-wing commenter attacking Carney? Columnist Matthew Yglesias explains: [ ](https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/when-economic-liberty-means-central) [ When "economic liberty" means central planning ](https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/when-economic-liberty-means-central) Matthew Yglesias · Aug 31 [ Read full story ](https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/when-economic-liberty-means-central) 🌟Abundance Wins of the Week🌟 Shout out to my home state of California, whose legislature passed two housing bills this week. One requires a housing density minimum in transit-oriented areas of the state’s most transit-rich cities (Los Angeles, Sacramento, San Francisco, Oakland, San Jose, San Diego, and Long Beach). Another bill closes two common loopholes used by third parties to delay housing projects, including an opportunity to challenge maps of a given lot created by the developer after a project has been approved. Shout out to our big-state rival, Texas, where pro-housing SB 785 took effect this week. The new state law requires municipalities to have at least one district permitted for manufactured housing without a special permit. This will promote zoning changes in 44% of municipalities. The company Fervo Energy signed a deal with Google for what is set to be the world’s largest enhanced geothermal facility, proving a technology can work at a scale that could be crucial to a decarbonized, energy-abundant economy. Share Worth watching… This week, forecasting legend Nate Silver joined Jerusalem, Matt, and Jeremiah on a crowded episode of the pod. It was a party. And speaking of parties, our round table debated the factional lines within the Democratic Party: Is it possible to be center-left and also anti-establishment? Watch or listen to find out: The Rio Grande Valley in Texas is one of the areas that swung hardest toward Trump in 2024, but musician Bobby Pulido is running to flip it back. Right now, The Argument/Split Ticket’s model has him running 1.1 points behind his Republican opponent in a district Trump won by 18 points. Tune in to find out how he differs from national Democrats and what he thinks he can to do win this seat. On Thursday, Bernie Sanders was among the first politicians to call for a ban on superintelligence. My guest this week, Andrea Miotti, has been lobbying to ban superintelligence for several years, most recently in the U.K., U.S., and Canada. I asked him how he gets legislators to take speculative risks seriously, and we dug into what plans might look like to actually pass a ban. Listen to learn more: What’s News with The Argument The Argument recommends, by Kobe Yank-Jacobs If we ever lose track of Justin Zuckerman, I’ll have the team split up and check all the movie theaters in the city. I’m shocked (and a little jealous) at how often he gets out to see good cinema. This week, he brings us It Ends, a “horror-ish movie,” which he described as a “Gen Z Waiting for Godot.” I was intrigued before he added that it was “funny, dark and existential” — at which point I was fully locked in. I guess I also had existential themes on the mind this week. One morning, a single line from a poem I read long ago just came to me: “Is death a stretch of time in which a life is just a flash?” The poem is called “From 20,000 Feet” by Heather McHugh. I suggest the version in The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Poetry, which, by tradition, my best friend and I always bring backpacking, extra weight be damned. We’ll stay thematically dark for just one more rec from senior editor John Robert Thomason, whose upcoming trip to Baltimore reminded him to suggest Michael Clune’s memoir White Out (about being addicted to heroin in Baltimore in the 1990s). Ben Lerner’s blurb called it _“_Disturbing, brilliant, hilarious—it’s as if Proust had written Jesus’ Son.” John told me this “seems accurate, with the caveat that I’ve never read Proust.” I, personally, have also shelved Proust until retirement. At this point, I was a little concerned for the team since all of us tossed out such psychologically grim material — maybe we’re all down about the end of summer — but thankfully, at least a few of us were into more upbeat selections. Milan Singh recommended Made In’s 5-quart stainless clad saucier, suggesting he had some fun in the kitchen. Jeremiah Johnson asked if he could recommend yet more Carly Rae Jepsen. Once denied, he offered up Game Changer instead_,_ calling it “the most wildly creative game show, maybe in the entire history of the genre.” Eli Richman mentioned _Lucky, “_a B-tier show with an A-tier cast and an S-tier theme song.” I suppose he was recommending the song, Horns of a Bull. Still, despite these cheerier recs, I couldn’t help but be concerned that we were subconsciously worried about racing toward summer’s end — the end of swim trunks and splashing around. Then a message landed reminding me of the three-day weekend to come. A whole extra day for sunshine. One more swim in the lake. I was grateful this called to mind yet another line from a poem, one by Mary Oliver, the patron saint of every gorgeous summer day (and about whom a documentary is now out). Speaking to God in the poem “Thirst,” she wrote: grant me, in your mercy,a little more time. Love for the earthand love for you are having such a longconversation in my heart. We have merch! We have quarter-zips, keychains, hats, and stickers. Each one is a great conversation starter in its own way. Buy them here. Subscribe More to read: [ The Opening Argument ](https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/seeing-like-an-elite)[ Seeing like an elite ](https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/seeing-like-an-elite) Kobe Yank-Jacobs · Sep 4 What do Americans hear when they watch Sen. Bernie Sanders or Vice President JD Vance rail against the elite? Are they thinking of right-wing tech billionaires? Imperious college professors? Liberal magazine writers? [ Read full story ](https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/seeing-like-an-elite) [ The Weekly Scroll ](https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/god-is-back-on-the-timeline)[ God is back on the timeline ](https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/god-is-back-on-the-timeline) Jeremiah Johnson · Sep 5 This week, we’re talking about Substack’s new religious debates, the continuing MAGA influencer scandal, how to retire from YouTube, and aura battles. [ Read full story ](https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/god-is-back-on-the-timeline) 1 This was a legitimate thing to worry about, but doesn’t seem to be a problem given the actual technology: Marijke Van Vlasselaer, Filip Van Droogenbroeck, and Bram Spruyt’s 2026 paper looks at whether Pangram is less accurate when evaluating the work of non-native speakers of English. It isn’t. That’s because Pangram isn’t really looking at how “unusual” a piece of writing is but whether it has the characteristic patterns of LLMs. The Wired article makes an odd gesture at a different Pangram-is-racist argument. There were several controversies this summer during which upcoming books were canceled after being discovered to be AI-written: “The three novels mentioned earlier — Shy Girl, Daggermouth, and Call Me, easily publishing’s biggest AI-detection scandals — were all written by writers of color.” But come on! As Zvi Mowshowitz put it: “They were not primarily written by people of color. They were primarily written by AIs.” That’s the whole problem! And as my colleague Jeremiah Johnson recently observed with respect to Cambridge’s Arday scandal, a community being unwilling to call out fraud if it’s perpetuated by people of color is not an anti-racist tendency; it is ultimately quite racist. 2 Many non-Pangram detectors don’t work, but many possible airplane designs also don’t work, and no one considers this a general argument against aviation; the thing that matters is whether any detection works. 3 The phrase “empires have always loved” mysteriously became all the rage in the last few years. See here, here, here, here and here. Before 2025, the only use of that phrase I have been able to find is a single Tweet. The logic of the sentence, too, is incoherent in an AI-characteristic way. “...sounds like paperwork, until you remember that empires have always loved paperwork”? Does remembering that make it sound less like paperwork? It’s a craft-ful sentence, but what is it actually saying??

Sep 6 • 6:05 PM EDT • Technology • theargumentmag.com

Renovated McKeesport public health office to consolidate various services

Allegheny County officials marked the completion of renovations at the Allegheny County Health Department office located at 339 Fifth Avenue in McKeesport.

Sep 6 • 5:10 PM EDT • Health • wpxi.com

Verisk: One atmosphere, one framework – how science and AI connect views of global risk

A single-system approach to catastrophe modelling is required to capture the interconnected atmospheric drivers that shape risk across regions and perils, argues Verisk’s Jay Guin.

Sep 6 • 3:04 PM EDT • Science • theinsurer.com

Brandon McGinley: How the measles got political

In 1982, C. Everett Koop became Surgeon General of the United States. His unusual appearance — bright bowties and a mustache-less face framed by...

Sep 6 • 6:00 AM EDT • Politics • post-gazette.com

DLSS 5 was launched in Medal of Honor European Assault using the PCSX2 emulator on an RTX 4070 Super.

On Reddit, enthusiasts demonstrated the DLSS 5 upscaling technology in the classic shooter Medal of Honor: European Assault,...

Sep 5 • 2:07 PM EDT • Technology • en.gamegpu.com

Video card RTX 4090 showed a higher frame rate with DLSS 5 than the RTX 5080

A detailed comparative benchmarking of the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5080 graphics accelerators with 16 GB of memory and GeForce has appeared online. RTX 4090 With...

Sep 4 • 5:17 PM EDT • Technology • en.gamegpu.com

Local business replaces wheelchair ramp after stolen from Woonsocket church

A local business replaced the wheelchair ramp at aWoonsocket church after it was stolen last month.

Sep 4 • 3:53 PM EDT • Business • turnto10.com

Mamdani to modernize NYC emergency planning, designate Sept. 11 day of service

Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced Friday that his administration plans to modernize New York City's nearly two-decade-old framework for keeping government

Sep 4 • 1:45 PM EDT • Politics • amny.com

16th Annual Men’s Health Event

The Michigan Men’s Health Foundation is hosting the 16th annual Men’s Health Event on Saturday, September 26, 2025, from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m., at the Wayne State Fieldhouse in Detroit.Men 18 years and older, with or without health insurance, are encouraged to take advantage of this free event focused on preventative healthcare. | WWJ Newsradio 950

Sep 4 • 11:32 AM EDT • Health • audacy.com

Critical Public Health: Fiscal Reform Under the “One Big Beautiful Bill” and It’s Public Health Implications

The ‘One Big Beautiful Bill’ is framed by its proponents as the largest middle-class tax cut in U.S. history and a catalyst for economic growth. Yet, beneath the marketing of ‘jobs, tax cuts, and American prosperity’, the legislation conceals sweeping rollbacks of Medicaid, food assistance, education, reproductive care, and expanded immigration enforcement, alongside tax windfalls for venture capital and immigration enforcement.

Sep 4 • 10:45 AM EDT • Health • itep.org

California's healthcare affordability office claims power to punish overspending hospitals

The state's new penalty framework could fine hospitals and insurers up to 125% of overspending, with enforcement starting as early as 2028.

Sep 4 • 8:00 AM EDT • Health • calmatters.org

PCHC announces layoffs, Bangor office closure amid financial struggles

Penobscot Community Health Care is in the middle of what officials describe as "ongoing financial challenges."

Sep 4 • 6:58 AM EDT • Health • wgme.com

Nonprofit calls Gov. Mills 'healthcare hero' at event in Augusta

Sep 4 • 6:26 AM EDT • Health • wgme.com

Webster business reopens after severe weather knocks out power

Sep 3 • 11:41 PM EDT • Business • 13wham.com

Gov. Bob Ferguson targets H.R. 1 fallout for Apple Health Medicaid in executive order

Gov. Bob Ferguson signed an executive order Thursday aimed at reducing the effects of H.R. 1, a federal law he said cuts health care and food assistance.

Sep 3 • 5:02 PM EDT • Health • komonews.com

Fake firewood listings use real Maine business’s name, reviews to target buyers

Paula Fleming of the Better Business Bureau said the reported scam may be unusual in Maine’s firewood market, but the underlying tactic is familiar.

Sep 3 • 3:00 PM EDT • Business • wgme.com

Blue Ridge Health plans new medical facility in Hendersonville

WLOS News 13 provides local news, weather forecasts, traffic updates, notices of events and items of interest in the community, sports and entertainment programming for Asheville, NC and nearby towns and communities in Western North Carolina and the Upstate of South Carolina, including the counties of Buncombe, Henderson, Rutherford, Haywood, Polk, Transylvania, McDowell, Mitchell, Madison, Yancey, Jackson, Swain, Macon, Graham, Spartanburg, Greenville, Anderson, Union, Pickens, Oconee, Laurens, Greenwood, Abbeville and also Biltmore Forest, Woodfin, Leicester, Black Mountain, Montreat, Arden, Weaverville, Hendersonville, Etowah, Flat Rock, Mills River, Waynesville, Maggie Valley, Canton, Clyde, Franklin, Cullowhee, Sylva, Cherokee, Marion, Old Fort, Forest City, Lake Lure, Bat Cave, Spindale, Spruce Pine, Bakersville, Burnsville, Tryon, Columbus, Marshall, Mars Hill, Brevard, Bryson City, Cashiers, Greer, Landrum, Clemson, Gaffney, and Easley.

Sep 3 • 1:16 PM EDT • Health • wlos.com

I held the first truly bezel-free phone

There’s no bezel, but there is still a bit of a frame.

Sep 3 • 12:00 PM EDT • Technology • theverge.com

City links residents with health, housing and education services at nonprofit fair

The City of Warner Robins and Economic Development Department hosted a successful Community Nonprofit Resource Fair on Wednesday, connecting local residents wit

Sep 2 • 8:57 PM EDT • Health • wgxa.tv

The Case for Factions

A broad range of views on democracy to help break the stalemate caused by partisan conflict.

Sep 2 • 8:00 PM EDT • Politics • democracyproject.org

It’s official: Cuba finally authorizes Cubans living abroad to own private businesses

The new legal framework published in the Official Gazette is the deepest overhaul of the island’s private sector since small and medium enterprises were legalized in 2021.

Sep 2 • 4:04 PM EDT • Business • miamiherald.com

McDermottPlus Ends Big Health Lobbying After Five Years

McDermottPlus LLC terminates its 5-year lobbying relationship with Big Health Inc. Learn what this means for health policy advocacy.

Sep 2 • 3:52 PM EDT • Health • legis1.com

Penn State's Matt Campbell embracing Joe Paterno's legacy in shift from predecessors

Penn State's first-year coach has a framed photo of Paterno in his office and has praised a new exhibit honoring the coach at Beaver Stadium.

Sep 2 • 2:38 PM EDT • Sports • usatoday.com

Dragon's Dogma 2 Frame Rates Massively Improved with Patch 3.2 on PS5, PS5 Pro

Top Dogma

Sep 2 • 2:00 PM EDT • Technology • pushsquare.com

Nvidia's controversial, face-changing, gen-AI DLSS 5 tech releases tomorrow for one game, and seems to tank frame-rates

If you own a 50-series GeForce graphics card or laptop, or use GeForce Now, you can try Nvidia's controversial new DLSS 5 tech this week.

Sep 2 • 11:53 AM EDT • Technology • eurogamer.net

Samsung Frame Pro review: the art TV that lets you hang a Monet in 4K

The design-forward TV delivers a performance that few in the category can – while attracting compliments as wall decor

Sep 2 • 10:15 AM EDT • Technology • theguardian.com

Tado’s new thermostat is designed as a Nest killer

But it’s for Europe, only.

Sep 2 • 10:15 AM EDT • Technology • theverge.com

WCU political expert explains Rep. Edwards' censure, breaks down overwhelming vote

WLOS News 13 provides local news, weather forecasts, traffic updates, notices of events and items of interest in the community, sports and entertainment programming for Asheville, NC and nearby towns and communities in Western North Carolina and the Upstate of South Carolina, including the counties of Buncombe, Henderson, Rutherford, Haywood, Polk, Transylvania, McDowell, Mitchell, Madison, Yancey, Jackson, Swain, Macon, Graham, Spartanburg, Greenville, Anderson, Union, Pickens, Oconee, Laurens, Greenwood, Abbeville and also Biltmore Forest, Woodfin, Leicester, Black Mountain, Montreat, Arden, Weaverville, Hendersonville, Etowah, Flat Rock, Mills River, Waynesville, Maggie Valley, Canton, Clyde, Franklin, Cullowhee, Sylva, Cherokee, Marion, Old Fort, Forest City, Lake Lure, Bat Cave, Spindale, Spruce Pine, Bakersville, Burnsville, Tryon, Columbus, Marshall, Mars Hill, Brevard, Bryson City, Cashiers, Greer, Landrum, Clemson, Gaffney, and Easley.

Sep 2 • 8:21 AM EDT • Politics • wlos.com

Indiana to discontinue routine hospital diversion

all emergency healthcare partners and Indiana State Health officials are ending the practice referred to as "hospital diversion."That's when an ambulance is rou

Sep 1 • 5:08 PM EDT • Health • wsbt.com

CHI St. Vincent & CommonSpirit Health opt out of AR Blue Cross Blue Shield networks

CHI St. Vincent has opted out of the healthcare provider networks of Arkansas Blue Cross and Blue Shield and its associated health plans (Arkansas Blue Medicare

Sep 1 • 10:52 AM EDT • Health • katv.com

gamescom 2026’s Steam wishlist winners

gamescom wrapped up last weekend, and it was bloody fantastic. It really felt like the industry had a spring in its step again. The show itself was BUZZING, with 368K attendees (+3% over last year), maxed-out exhibit space, and Opening Night Live pulling over 78M online views (+7.5%). Let’s have a look at the games at the event that brought in the most new Steam wishlists between August 23 and 30. One quick thing before we start, and stop me if you’ve heard this one before, but wishlists are NOT a barometer for launch sales (they’re bookmarks, not baskets is what we always say over here at Alinea). With that aside, wishlists are a nice gauge of hype, so let’s dive in. Witche(r)s and Warlocks take the top two spots The biggest game of the event (by new wishlists, anyways) wasn’t a game at all. It was an expansion. The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt’s upcoming expansion, Songs of the Past, nabbed 451K Steam wishlists by the end of the weekend. It’s a big example of something we bang on about constantly: proven IP with built-in fandom is the most powerful force in this market. But said IP can also ripple into other external success stories (more on that later!). Anyway, Songs of the Past debuted at Opening Night Live, and it’s the first Witcher 3 expansion in over a decade, landing next year after a full Witcher 3 remaster (free for existing owners!) arrives next month. The Witcher 3 has sold around 66M copies, and I’ll be one of those owners jumping back in to refresh myself on the core game (like there isn’t enough to play!), then play the expansion next year. This is all part of CDPR’s plan. The studio is clearly whetting everyone’s appetite for The Witcher 4 in 2028 via a classic bridge strategy. Want more free estimates and insights in your inbox twice a week? Subscribe below! Subscribe Releasing a free 4K remaster next month – followed by a proper expansion in 2027 – keeps IP top-of-mind across a huge gap between content (games-wise, anyway). It kind of echoes Capcom’s evergreen catalogue strategy. And outsourcing co-development to Fool’s Theory (a studio led by trusted Witcher 3 veterans) keeps CDPR’s internal headcount focused on The Witcher 4. #2 by wishlists between Aug 23 and 30 went to another giant IP: Warlock: Dungeons & Dragons, published by Wizards of the Coast and developed by Invoke Studios (a team of ex-Far Cry, Watch Dogs, and Splinter Cell devs). It’s due to launch in 2027, and it looks brilliant so far. It’s a dark-fantasy open world with third-person spell-slinging. It’s a very Witcher-ish aesthetic. As you might expect, 48% of Warlock’s Steam wishlisters have played Baldur’s Gate 3, and 46% have played The Witcher 3. One to watch. For sure! Mash-ups: Anime GTA (!?) and a city-builder for kids (and adults) Ananta took #3 with 302K new wishlists. It’s an open-world game that looks like GTA and Persona had a baby. It was published by NetEase, developed by Naked Rain, and got a trailer at Opening Night Live. I got hands-on at the show, and it wears its influences openly; there’s literal web-slinging (very Spider-Man) and a LOAD of mini-games (Like a Dragon). It’s free-to-play and out in January. For Ananta, Naked Rain is taking the free-to-play, cosmetics-only route. That’s certainly a choice for a single-player open-world game. Without gacha mechanics driving high ARPU, Ananta is betting purely on top-of-funnel reach and long-term retention. This puts pressure on skin appeal when there’s no multiplayer lobby to flex in (although, co-op is reportedly coming later). Want more free estimates and insights in your inbox twice a week? Subscribe below! Subscribe Then there’s Lego Skylines (273K wishlists between Aug 23 and 30), which does exactly what it says on the tin. It’s a cosy Lego twist on the city-builder genre, as shallow or as deep as you fancy (five min quick sesh or ten-hour no-lifer session; latter for me). There’s some family-friendly stuff in there like couch co-op, which is only really viable on console. Iceflake Studios, which Paradox acquired back in 2020 is developing this one. So Paradox is probably looking for a family-friendly onramp to its rad Cities: Skylines games. The overlap there is plain, with 33% of Lego Skylines wishlisters having played Cities: Skylines and 16% Skylines II. There’s no doubt plenty of parents here (and uncles, ahem) planning to indoctrinate the next gen of city-builders. I’ll definitely be playing with my youngest nephew. This one could be big and educational. I’m very curious to see more. Want more free estimates and insights in your inbox twice a week? Subscribe below! Subscribe Mature IP, new and old, rounds out the list As for the rest of the list of gamescom games by new wishlists between Aug 23 and 30: Heroes of Might & Magic III Remake got 189K new wishlists. It remakes the iconic 1999 turn-based-strategy classic in full 3D and 4K. It follows this year’s Heroes of Might & Magic: Olden Era (~1.8M copies sold, as per our estimates), and around a quarter of the III Remake wishlisters have played Olden Era, including 7% of them this month. Wardogs – a $40 PvP shooter – added another 146K to an already massive pile (nearly 1.6M total). It’s published by Team17 and made by Bulkhead. It plays somewhere between the tactical squad stuff of … Squad and the all-out-chaos battlefield of … Battlefield. It’s up to 100 players, and it’s out in about 10 days. It’s already pre-sold over 500K copies on Steam ($16.6M), boosted by a pre-order-only beta. It sold another 70K copies during gamescom, too. Afterworld managed 121K new wishlists. It’s a Paradox-made post-apocalyptic grand-strategy game, and it was announced at the show. It’s a departure from Paradox’s usual historical stuff, and the studio’s first new setting in over a decade. The Paradox purists are into it, with over half its wishlisters having played Hearts of Iron IV (19% this month) and 41% Crusader Kings III (17% this month). Metro 2039 got 110K during the show, tunnelling its total past 1.3M. Nearly 40% of wishlisters have played 2020’s Metro Exodus, the previous mainline title in the series. The Metro novels are Russian, dev 4A Games is Ukrainian, and it’s set in Moscow, so it’s unsurprising that – after the US (17.3% of wishlisters) – the next two countries are Russia (12.7%) and Ukraine (10.0%). The Blood of the Dawnwalker drew in (the blood of) 108K new wishlisters, now totalling an impressive 1.7M (at a $70 price point, though). It’s an open-world dark-fantasy action-RPG set in 14th-century Europe (with vampires!), made by some former Witcher devs at Rebel Wolves. Again, it shows. Over half of Blood of the Dawnwalker’s wishlisters have played The Witcher 3, and its #2 market is Poland, home of Rebel Wolves. That’s that hometown-hero effect we keep banging on about again! And Blood of the Dawnwalker plays very well, by the way. While it looks like a Witcher clone on the surface, it actually brings a lot to the table mechanics-wise. I love the whole time-as-a-currency spin on RPG gameplay. It gives the game a different, refreshing pace. Essentially, you start Blood of the Dawnwalker with a pool of 480 action points spread across 30 days and 30 nights. As for how the game performs, we’ll be posting some numbers next week, so hit subscribe below to get that in your inbox when it’s ready. Subscribe The Witcher’s legacy ripples Make no mistake: on a high level, this was The Witcher‘s gamescom. The #1 game by wishlisters was a Witcher 3 DLC. Warlock is clearly Witcher-inspired – as is Blood of the Dawnwalker, which was made by ex-Witcher devs. There was a lot of other cool stuff on the floor that we’ll no doubt be covering in subsequent newsletters, though! As always, wishlists went through the roof for sequels, remakes, DLC, and licensed IP. As always, though, these wishlists will likely convert to about 5% to 10% of launch-day buyers, with the probable exception of The Witcher DLC – the exception that proves the rule. Either way, we’ve got a nice, diverse list here – one that is very Witcher-y, Paradox-y, and – if you’re a fan of great games on Steam – a bloody good list. We even got a bunch of new IP to get excited for. Great gamescom! Even if we are still processing that unfathomable number of mini Kölsch beers! One more thing: GTA 6 broke the internet (again) Move aside, Spider-Man and The Odyssey (I love you both, really). But the decade’s defining entertainment zeitgeist is round the corner. Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ll know that Rockstar dropped an extended look at GTA 6 last week. It was INSANE, the most impressed I’ve ever been by a showcase like this. You can see the budget seeping through every second of the extended look, and this level of game is unobtainable for any other publisher. Everyone’s going nuts, and rightly so. GTA 6 is out in holiday 2026, and it’ll be the biggest entertainment release ever, full stop. For those without a PS5 or Xbox Series console, a $500-$900 console is a big ask in this economy, but GTA will pull a lot of last-generation-console fence sitters over the current-gen fence either way: The autumn timing puts GTA 6 on (digital) shelves for the holidays, meaning a PS5 or Xbox (let’s be honest, mostly the former) will be on many a Christmas and Hanukkah list. Demand will outweigh the struggling supply, though, and PS5 Pros are already sold out and being sold at a markup via scalpers. Every console that isn’t on a shelf is a sale deferred or lost, and worse, it hands scalpers the margin. GTA has cultural clout that reaches everyone. It’s been a mainstream fixture since 2001’s GTA III and its clout has only grown exponentially since then. There’s a touchpoint for every generation alive. The FOMO-word-of-mouth double punch does the rest. Loading... It’ll reactivate the lockdown cohort, the millions who picked up gaming in 2020-21 and churned. GTA 6 will bring them back. Remember when College Football 25 brought a bunch of US gamers to current-gen consoles? GTA will do that globally. Once they’re back (or upgraded), and all GTA’d out, the fresh current-gen-console folks will check out the rest of the current-gen catalogue they missed. GTA Online, if not free to play, will also lead to a boost for PS+ and Xbox Game Pass, another boost for the ecosystem players. Want more free estimates and insights in your inbox twice a week? Subscribe below! Subscribe Even some of the smug PCMR 60FPS crew won’t be able to resist their FOMO and will bite the bullet on a console to play this one early (then double dip). The consoles cost the same as a decent stick of RAM these days anyway lmao… Don’t get me wrong, though. GTA 6 is no silver bullet for the mature console market, but it does prime the current gen for a couple of strong swan-song years. And it’ll also give the consoles more users from which to maximise ARPU. ‘’We are in the latter half of the lifetime cycle of [the PS5],’’ said Sony President and CEO Hiroki Totoki in a Wall Street Journal interview. ‘’That means we do not need to aggressively sell the console today; rather than that, we are focusing on the current revenue from the current user base.’’ The biggest, best premium games always arrive late in a console cycle, so getting more players aboard now, ahead of that content storm (the new current-gen-only Call of Duty included), is a clear win for the platforms. On the Netflix thing, though: let’s all chill out a bit, like. Half my LinkedIn feed was going bonkers treating the reveal debuting on Netflix like it’s the future of entertainment. It wasn’t. It was a six-hour head start, and Netflix left that detail out of the “first-of-its-kind partnership” press release. The extended look hit Netflix at 3pm ET on 27 August, then went up on YouTube and Rockstar’s site for everyone six hours later. And it was all over social immediately, anyways. This reveal was going to reach an untold number of people whether it debuted on Netflix, YouTube, a Times Square screen, or a group chat. The last trailer did nearly half a billion views in a day with no gatekeeper at all. Netflix just stood next to that audience for six hours, borrowing it. It’s was a tidy deal for Netflix, sure. But every outlet on earth was breaking the thing down frame by frame by the evening anyway. Anyway. I’m hype. And we’ll be covering some GTA numbers on the newsletter soon. So hit subscribe below to get that in your inbox when it’s ready! Subscribe The last word Reply to this email – or reach out here – if you have any feedback for the newsletter – or want to request a game for us to cover. [Alinea Analytics boasts the most accurate PC and console estimates in the business. Game makers use our platform to understand their audience, keep an eye on the competition, monitor sales trends, and spot new opportunities. We equip game studios and financial institutions with accurate data and the confidence to make smarter, data-driven decisions. Want to talk about all things games market data? We’d love to chat!]

Sep 1 • 10:27 AM EDT • Technology • alineaanalytics.substack.com