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FBI Warns Microsoft Users—New Attack Gains Access To Accounts
If you see one of these emails — check carefully, you may be under attack.
The Email Of The Future In 1986
With so many online messaging services to choose from it’s almost as though the daddy of them all, email, has faded into the background as something you only use for more formal contacts. But…
'I'm happy if they're happy' : Thousands flock to Capitol grounds for Vandalia Gathering
The 49th annual Vandalia Gathering in West Virginia State Capitol grounds features traditional music, dancing, food trucks, and competitions, bringing together lovers of Appalachian culture. Logan Hoy placed third in the bluegrass banjo competition.
Bond breakout? Big effects of bad data. Immigration and thermostatic politics & dad-chat is coming for dad-books.
Thank you for opening your Chartbook email. Anna Airy, A Shell Forge at a National Projectile Factory, Hackney Marshes, London, 1918 Bond breakout - John Authers Across the developed markets, bond markets are staging a slow-motion car wreck. Looking at the drastic moves in the US, Japan, the UK and France, Barclays’ Ajay Rajadhyaksha commented: “Last week, long bonds broke. Not in one country. In all of them. Simultaneously. Four countries. Four different political systems. Four different central banks. But the same trade — “get me out of duration!”” Each country has its own contributing political problems, but the uniformity of the shift out of long-term bonds with high duration makes clear that something broader is afoot. For Rajadhyaksha, it is “simple and uncomfortable.” The developed world “has too much debt, too little fiscal discipline, and no political appetite for fixing either.” If there’s a trigger, it has been the Iran war and the resulting shock to oil supply. Source: Bloomberg G7 countries are now borrowing at rates that were enjoyed by EM in the early 2020s For contributing subscribers only. Subscribe Trade between China and Russia has grown in recent years For contributing subscribers only. Subscribe Big effects of bad data A decade ago nearly nine in ten Americans, when approached, agreed to fill out the Current Population Survey, which is administered to about 60,000 households each month and asks about, among other things, employment. Fewer than seven in ten do so now (see chart 1). For the Consumer Expenditure Survey, which tries to capture 3,700 households monthly, the response rate is down from 68% to 40%. … When the information becomes less reliable, investment decisions get more difficult to make. Some may be delayed, creating a potential drag on the economy. A new working paper by Nicholas Bloom of Stanford University, Erica Groshen, former head of the Bureau of Labour Statistics (BLS) now at Cornell University, and Duncan Hobbs and Michael Strain of the American Enterprise Institute, a think-tank, hazards an estimate. Preserving trust in “the integrity and quality of official statistics”, the authors claim, generates economic benefits of about $25 for every $1 spent on the BLS, the agency with an annual budget of $700m that is responsible for many of these data. To arrive at their conclusion the quartet analysed an ignoble episode in the BLS’s recent history. On August 1st 2025 Donald Trump sacked Erika McEntarfer, appointed as the agency’s commissioner by his predecessor, Joe Biden. The president alleged, without evidence, that the BLS’s steep downward revision to recent jobs numbers had been “RIGGED in order to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad”. In fact, it was the wanton dismissal that looked bad in the eyes of many observers. In the following seven days there was a 50% leap, relative to the week before, in the average value of the index of Economic Policy Uncertainty (EPU), which tracks the number of articles mentioning such uncertainty that are published daily in American newspapers. This was a discernible jump even when compared to the chaos caused by Mr Trump’s trade war in April 2025 and his real one in Iran in the past two months (see chart 2). Based on Mr Bloom’s earlier study with other colleagues of the EPU’s impact on business investment, industrial production and employment, the authors estimate that the jump reduced American GDP by over $100bn (0.3%) and non-farm payrolls by 168,000 (0.1%). Source: The Economist Immigration and thermostatic politics (Sarah O’Connor in the FT) A strange thing happened a year and a half ago. No sooner had Americans elected Donald Trump as president on an explicitly anti-immigration platform than US public opinion began to swing much more favourably towards immigration. … to political scientists who study “thermostatic” politics, this development is no surprise at all. Public opinion often moves against the prevailing party, especially if they are perceived to have gone “too far” in one direction. The phenomenon was first explored in the 1990s with reference to fiscal policy, but in recent years it has been particularly evident in the realm of immigration policy. While these swings in opinion polls can make it seem as if people don’t know their own minds, they can be a useful democratic check on governments by sending bright flashing warning lights when policies stray too far from the public’s comfort zone. The problem comes when politicians misinterpret those signals. When people tell pollsters they want less immigration, or think it is bad for the country overall (or the converse), they are often expressing an opinion about how things appear to be going in that moment relative to their preferences, rather than a deep shift in their underlying views. According to Alexander Kustov, a political scientist, most Americans’ views are quite stable and moderate: they support immigration that is controlled and in the national interest, and oppose flows that are disorderly or under-enforced. In the US, he argues the Trump administration over-interpreted dissatisfaction with high immigration under Joe Biden, and implemented policies that went too far for many voters. “People don’t necessarily change their idea about their ideal immigration policy, but they can react to what the government is currently doing,” he told me. “A lot of people are not happy with what the Trump administration are doing — right now we’re not talking about border enforcement, we’re talking about people not just getting harassed, but killed.” But similarly, he added, pro-immigration advocates would be making a mistake to interpret the recent, more favourable swing towards immigration as a deep-seated ideological shift in attitudes. The recent history of UK immigration policy offers another cautionary tale. After the 2016 Brexit referendum, public concern about immigration fell. This was partly because net migration statistics declined, but also because people felt a sense of catharsis and control, says Sunder Katwala, director of British Future, a think-tank. By 2019, the public ranked immigration as only the ninth biggest issue of concern, according to Ipsos polling. But when the Conservative government liberalised visa routes for students and care workers between 2019 and 2022, that helped net migration to surge. And so, too, did public concern. Today’s Labour government has implemented another sharply restrictive turn in immigration policy. As Kustov and researcher Caitlyn Yates argue, thermostatic public opinion should be a useful check on politicians. Instead it seems to have helped to magnify the pendulum swing in the UK. The government over-interprets and overreacts to a change in public opinion, which reacts in turn, prompting a sudden swing the other way. Source: Financial Times HEY READERS, THANK YOU for opening the Chartbook email. I hope it brightens your day. I enjoy putting out the newsletter, but tbh, what keeps this flow going is the generosity of those readers who clicked the subscription button. If you are persuaded to click, please consider the annual subscription of $50. It is both better value for you and a much better deal for me, as it involves only one credit card charge. Why feed the payments companies if we don’t have to. Subscribe Anna Airy, Shop for Machining 15-Inch Shells: Singer Manufacturing Company, Clydebank, Glasgow, 1918 Racing for a vaccine … we have been here before! The deadly Ebola outbreak in two African countries driven by a virus species with no vaccine has triggered an urgent search for a potential jab, in a test of troubled global efforts to avert threats posed by emerging diseases. A World Health Organization advisory group is due to would meet on Tuesday to recommend candidate jabs to prioritise for clinical trials, the global health body said. It will assess data including an analysis by the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (Cepi), which was set up after failures in the international response to a previous Ebola crisis. The latest Ebola outbreak in Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda has infected hundreds of people and killed more than 80, health authorities say. Cepi’s reaction will be a crucial indicator of its progress towards its wider goal of producing vaccines for pandemic threats in just 100 days, despite steep cuts to international health funding. “If there was ever a time that we could show the world why Cepi is needed and show the world why the 100-day mission is needed, it’s now,” Nicole Lurie, the organisation’s executive director for preparedness and response, told the FT. “We’re happy to accept that responsibility, but obviously we need help from partners — particularly financial help in the long run.” DR Congo and Uganda would make the final decision on whether to press ahead with any vaccine candidates endorsed for clinical trials by the WHO experts, the global health body said. “Other ethical and community acceptability issues will be considered,” said the WHO, which declared the latest outbreak a public health emergency of international concern on Sunday. “This will be important to make sure that the trial, if it happens, will be adequately communicated to the population.” Lurie said Cepi had provided information from a survey of research teams and companies working on drugs that might be effective against the Bundibugyo virus behind the outbreak. The organisation hoped soon to announce partners in the quest for a jab, she added, although she declined to give a timescale for when one might be developed. Cepi’s Nicole Laurie said global health bodies were ‘getting some live-fire drills’ with hantavirus and the latest Ebola outbreak. The hunt for a vaccine should be helped by scientific advances including the use of artificial intelligence to find drugs active against viruses, Lurie said. Existing jabs against the Zaire Ebola virus responsible for many previous outbreaks might provide a basis for tackling the Bundibugyo species, she added. “We’ll see how far and how fast we can get,” Lurie said, adding that Cepi had done preliminary work recently on a possible jab for the rat-borne hantavirus responsible for a recent fatal outbreak on a cruise ship. “Both with hantavirus and now with Ebola, [we] are getting some live-fire drills.” Source: Michael Peel in the Financial Times Dad-chat is coming for dad-books. (By Pamela Paul and Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg in the WSJ) They were the go-to gifts for Father’s Day: a book about some little-known chapter of World War II, the sweeping narrative of a shipwreck, perhaps the latest presidential biography. These days, dad books are a dying breed. Nonfiction book sales have been in decline for the past four years, and are now the most challenged segment of the print book market. Publishers say certain types of books still fare well—including celebrity memoirs and religious titles. But in recent years, print sales in such categories as biography, current affairs and business and economics—what publishers refer to as “serious nonfiction” and which tend to resonate especially with men—have fallen considerably. Sales of nonfiction print titles were down nearly 8% through May 9 this year, and sales of books about politics and current affairs were down 19%, according to book tracker Circana BookScan. Publishing has long been subject to cyclical changes, with trends in format and genre taking over bookshelves in grand sweeps. (Remember the adult coloring-book craze? Or the stratospheric rise of romantasy?) But many in publishing believe the decline in serious nonfiction is more existential. “The trend couldn’t be clearer,” said Jonathan Karp, the former chief executive of Simon & Schuster and publisher of the new Simon Six imprint. “This is a sea change and people should wake up and realize we’re living in a new world.” One culprit for the shift: a new media diet for fans of more serious nonfiction. … Sixty-two percent of men and 54% of women consumed a podcast in the prior month, according to a recent survey by Edison Research at SSRS, up from 46% and 39%, respectively, in 2023. “When we have internal meetings to talk about this problem, it always comes around to podcasts,” said Jonathan Burnham, president and publisher of the Harper Group at HarperCollins Publishers. “The man who wants to read American history is now tuning into one of the many good podcasts about history that lends the quiet attention to a serious subject he’s looking for. It makes the idea of sitting down with a 700-page Ron Chernow book less appealing. You’ve scratched that itch.” Source: Wall Street Journal Remarkable report by Novara from the nationalist rally in London in mid May. Anna Airy, Leopard Moth and Plums, 1915 If you’ve scrolled this far, you know you want to click: Subscribe
The Live Moment Effect: Genius Sports and MediaScience Study Finds Specific Moments in Live Sports Can Double Unaided Brand Recall | News
Genius Sports and MediaScience study reveals ads shown after high-intensity live sports moments can double unaided brand recall.
Scammers are abusing an internal Microsoft account to send email spam
The loophole allows spammers and scammers to send emails from a legitimate Microsoft email address typically used for sending genuine account alerts.
How to call for mental health help in Chicago
From 911 and 988 to a new email address, each service is for a different situation.
Ex-prosecutor charged over handling of sealed Smith report on Trump classified files probe
A former federal prosecutor in Florida sent to her personal email account a special counsel report from the investigation into President Donald Trump's hoarding of classified documents despite a judge's order that it remain sealed, according to an indictment made public on Wednesday.
Read Meta's layoff email to employees
Meta emailed thousands of employees notifying them that they'd been laid off. Read the email explaining how the layoffs will work.
Xbox expands leadership team with major hires
Xbox has added two big names to its leadership team: Matthew Ball and Scott Van Vliet. The new recruits are part of an on-going drive from Xbox CEO Asha Sharma to move faster, build better products, and make more focused business decisions. The Game Business can reveal that Ball is joining as Chief Strategy Officer. He is a popular industry analyst who is responsible for the annual The State of Video Gaming report, which is widely read across the business. His first job will be to strengthen the console side of Xbox, which is facing significant pressures, not least from the rising costs of memory and storage. In an interview with The Game Business earlier in the year, he admitted he was “pretty frightened” by the situation for the console sector. Ball had previously worked as head of strategy and planning for Amazon Studios, and wrote the 2022 international best-seller The Metaverse. He is currently CEO of Epyllion, a venture partner at investment group Makers Fund and senior advisor at KKR & Co. Meanwhile, Scott Van Vliet joins as Chief Technology Officer. He was previously in charge of Azure OpenAI and AI Core infrastructure at Microsoft, and he also led engineering for Microsoft Teams during the COVID 19 pandemic. But he has a games background. He previously worked across games for Amazon, including Alexa, Amazon Game Studios and the Amazon App Store. He directly worked on the Minecraft: Fire TV Edition. Prior to that, he was VP of Digital Play at Mattel, and worked across brands such as Batman, Barbie, Angry Birds, Fruit Ninja and Cut The Rope. His job will be to improve how Xbox builds products so teams can move faster and deliver stronger results. For more breaking stories, sign-up to The Game Business today Subscribe In addition to these new hires, Xbox has promoted Chris Schnakenberg to Corporate Vice President, Partnerships & Business Development. He was previously VP of partnerships and business development, and joined from Activision Blizzard, where he spent 12 years in various strategy, business development and partner relations role. His focus is on third-party games, publishers and developers working with Xbox. The news follows a number of new hires and promotions earlier in the month, including Jason Ronald taking leadership over Xbox’s upcoming Project Helix console. “These changes are about strengthening our foundation by creating more clarity and improving execution,” Sharma said in an email to staff. “As we head toward Showcase and beyond, we’ll continue making the changes needed to position XBOX for the future.” Matthew Ball is speaking with Christopher Dring at The Game Business Live on Monday, June 8. More details on the event can be found here.
Xbox expands leadership team with major hires
Xbox has added two big names to its leadership team: Matthew Ball and Scott Van Vliet. The new recruits are part of an on-going drive from Xbox CEO Asha Sharma to move faster, build better products, and make more focused business decisions. The Game Business can reveal that Ball is joining as Chief Strategy Officer. He is a popular industry analyst who is responsible for the annual The State of Video Gaming report, which is widely read across the business. His first job will be to strengthen the console side of Xbox, which is facing significant pressures, not least from the rising costs of memory and storage. In an interview with The Game Business earlier in the year, he admitted he was “pretty frightened” by the situation for the console sector. Ball had previously worked as head of strategy and planning for Amazon Studios, and wrote the 2022 international best-seller The Metaverse. He is currently CEO of Epyllion, a venture partner at investment group Makers Fund and senior advisor at KKR & Co. Meanwhile, Scott Van Vliet joins as Chief Technology Officer. He was previously in charge of Azure OpenAI and AI Core infrastructure at Microsoft, and he also led engineering for Microsoft Teams during the COVID 19 pandemic. But he has a games background. He previously worked across games for Amazon, including Alexa, Amazon Game Studios and the Amazon App Store. He directly worked on the Minecraft: Fire TV Edition. Prior to that, he was VP of Digital Play at Mattel, and worked across brands such as Batman, Barbie, Angry Birds, Fruit Ninja and Cut The Rope. His job will be to improve how Xbox builds products so teams can move faster and deliver stronger results. For more breaking stories, sign-up to The Game Business today Subscribe In addition to these new hires, Xbox has promoted Chris Schnakenberg to Corporate Vice President, Partnerships & Business Development. He was previously VP of partnerships and business development, and joined from Activision Blizzard, where he spent 12 years in various strategy, business development and partner relations role. His focus is on third-party games, publishers and developers working with Xbox. The news follows a number of new hires and promotions earlier in the month, including Jason Ronald taking leadership over Xbox’s upcoming Project Helix console. “These changes are about strengthening our foundation by creating more clarity and improving execution,” Sharma said in an email to staff. “As we head toward Showcase and beyond, we’ll continue making the changes needed to position XBOX for the future.” Matthew Ball is speaking with Christopher Dring at The Game Business Live on Monday, June 8. More details on the event can be found here.
Why renaming this common hormonal disorder is a huge deal
You probably know someone who has a condition that, until last week, was known as PCOS, or polycystic ovary syndrome. It affects one in eight reproductive-aged women. But despite it being such a common disorder, patients are often misdiagnosed and have delayed treatment. Now, medical professionals are trying to change that. After 15 years of work, the condition has been renamed to PMOS, or polyendocrine metabolic ovarian syndrome. The new name reflects the real driver of the condition: disruptions in hormones. But how much can changing a name really do? Click here to access resources about PMOS in multiple languages. Interested in more science? Email us your question at shortwave@npr.org.Listen to every episode of Short Wave sponsor-free and support our work at NPR by signing up for Short Wave+ at plus.npr.org/shortwave.
Marc Rowan accused of misusing Apollo resources for political work
Chief executive of private capital group used company email and staff for lobbying, unions say
Layoff day at Meta has arrived
Meta has begun sending layoff emails to roughly 10% of its workforce. The cuts are expected to eliminate around 8,000 roles.
You can now talk to your Gmail inbox, as seen at Google IO 2026
Google expands Gmail’s AI Inbox with conversational voice search, letting users ask Gemini to find buried email details.
‘Gmail Live’ is a new way to search emails as AI Inbox comes to AI Plus, AI Pro
At I/O 2026, Google announced two big updates for Gmail, starting with a new Live voice search experience.
Google's AI now lets you talk to your Gmail inbox
Google expands Gmail’s AI Inbox with conversational voice search, letting users ask Gemini to find buried email details.
Quartz
Quartz is a guide to the new global economy for people who are excited by change. We cover business, finance, economics, technology, lifestyle, and leadership.
Microsoft is killing SMS codes for Microsoft account sign-in, aggressively pushes passkeys on Windows 11
Microsoft is ending SMS login codes for personal accounts and replacing them with passkeys, authenticator apps, and backup email on Windows.
Whoa! Netflix is Sending Narnia Heading to Theaters...What This Means for the Future of Film
(Welcome to the “Most Important Story of the Week”, my bi-weekly strategy column analyzing the most important (but often not buzziest) news story of the last two weeks. I’m the Entertainment Strategy Guy, a former streaming executive who now analyzes business strategy in the entertainment industry. Please subscribe.) Here’s a funny thing about the debate over whether streamers should release their movies in theaters first: Both sides think the other side represents the “conventional wisdom”. If you’ve been reading me for any amount of time, or even just scanned my front page, you know I think movies make more money by having a robust theatrical window compared to going straight-to-streaming. I’ve published thousands of words on this topic. And for years, I felt like I was standing up to a wave of opposition. See, while the “put your films in theaters to make money” take was obvious at any point before 2019, post-streaming revolution, most of the trendy thinkers took the opposite point of view. Big names argued that Netflix putting their film straight-to-streaming (“S-to-S” from here on out) actually made more money. Netflix was “disrupting” theaters, just as they disrupted Blockbuster Video, and since innovation is always good, this too was a great idea. This thinking then leaked into the mainstream business outlets like the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg. I read many articles whose take boiled down to “Netflix makes tons of money from S-to-S releases” and “theaters were in structural decline” anyways. Covid-19 shutting down theaters and the 2023 strikes shutting down film production seemingly justified this point of view, as the box office struggled to return to 2017-2019 heights. Yet I’ve also read folks arguing the opposite point: the conventional wisdom says to put films in theaters! From some writers’ points of view, “everyone” actually agrees/agreed with my “send your films to theaters” take—especially the stodgy traditional studios—and folks still didn’t understand Netflix’s genius. I feel like, for the last two years, many people have argued this point as if it’s conventional wisdom. You know what? I may have been wrong. At this point, the “S-to-S strategy makes money” might be the minority viewpoint. Especially with the news this month that Netflix will put at least one film—Greta Gerwig’s Narnia film The Magician’s Nephew—in theaters in 2027 for a full 49-day run is big news. So that’s the story of the week, but I’ll also explain why they’re making this move now and why Netflix may not completely embrace theaters, along with other topics, like how I don’t buy Disney’s “super app” strategy, the latest good news out of the unions, my take on the latest attacks against free speech, and a whole lot more. Let’s get started. Subscribe Most Important Story of the Week - Netflix Goes to Theaters! Listen, I promise not to victory lap too hard today. As I just wrote, I’ve argued against sending films straight-to-streaming for—checks calendar—eight years now. Since 2018. Yikes. That’s a long time. And for years, others painted my thinking as “conventional” in that I was standing up for the status quo against trendy, cool disruption. And that’s not cool! But math is math, and I never could make the S-to-S numbers work. The only thing that ever enabled that model was Wall Street’s brief exuberance for it. It seems like the heads of Netflix now agree with me. (There were always rumors that former head of film for Netflix Scott Stuber argued internally for theatrical releases as well.) As they announced: “The Magician’s Nephew_—the first film in a Narnia series of films—will open on 12-Feb-2027, with a 49 day theatrical exclusive run.”_ I’m a little surprised at how little coverage this big change actually got. Credit to Bloomberg for leading with it and Matt Belloni’s The Town for highlighting it with the provocatively titled podcast “Hell Hath Frozen Over”. But after that? Instead of getting as much coverage as, say, the FCC’s latest egregious crackdown on free speech, this news story got crickets. But it’s massively more important for the future business of entertainment. So let’s start with the obvious question… Why Put Your Movies in Theaters? So…why should Netflix put (some!) of their movies in theaters? Well, I’ve already written that in a very, very, very long article from 2022: [ ](https://entertainment.substack.com/p/the-data-is-in-theatrical-films-massively) [ The Data Is In: Theatrical Films Massively Outperform Straight-To-Streaming Films ](https://entertainment.substack.com/p/the-data-is-in-theatrical-films-massively) Entertainment Strategy Guy · April 5, 2023 [ Read full story ](https://entertainment.substack.com/p/the-data-is-in-theatrical-films-massively) To summarize, theatrical runs make much more money, especially blockbusters, because they earn more money per viewing,1 and that helps boost home entertainment sales. Theatrical films also perform as well or better than the streaming-only films. Now, partially this is driven by increased marketing for said films, but said marketing ultimately boosts the awareness of the movies and drives improved streaming and library performance as well. Again, I’ve made this case after reviewing the economic models and streaming data for years. Just last week, Emily Horgan also made the case for kids films! Yes, it is probably conventional wisdom, but that’s also because it’s true! I’d also argue we’ve seen a lot of data in the various studios’ behavior. As I’ve noted before, the more a studio needs to make money, the likelier they are to put films in theaters. As such, Disney, Universal, Warner Bros., Paramount and Sony all send their major films to theaters. Even if they once made a big S-to-S push (*cough* Disney *cough*), they’ve since relented and returned to theaters. The tech companies don’t need to make money, per se, so it took them years to embrace theaters. Apple doesn’t need to make money because it doesn’t disclose their (likely) Quibi-sized losses each year. (They fear bad press more than losing money.) Amazon announced two years ago that they planned to make Amazon-MGM Studios/Prime Video profitable on its own, and guess what? Now they’re putting films in theaters. That leaves Netflix. They’re in between the “no need to make money at all” and the “desperately need to make money to offset linear TV declines”, so they had less pressure to put some films in theaters. Plus, for years, they were the sexy disruptor, and Wall Street rewarded them for that. (Honestly, they still do.) Yet, even Netflix likely saw the money they were leaving on the table (I’ve estimated it at an easy billion dollars before) so they changed their course. I heard one pundit argue that, because Netflix already makes so much money, they don’t need to make more money, which sort of goes against everything I’ve ever learned about business and economics. Again, to be super-nuanced, sending “films to theaters” does not mean EVERY film. TV movies have been a thing for decades. Lifetime films, Hallmark holiday films, Disney Channel Original Movies, and so on, don’t need theatrical runs. But films above a certain budget level (say $25 to 50 million) almost certainly need theaters to maximize their revenue. The Scenarios (with a Dose of Skepticism) Now time for some skepticism: it won’t surprise me at all if Netflix re-changes course. Specifically, Netflix announced that their Narnia film will go to theaters. And I’d bet anything we see KPop Demon Hunters 2: The Huntering2 also goes to theaters, cause it’s the surest hit outside of a Disney animated sequel right now. But how much does Netflix truly commit to theaters? They’ve already tried to emphasize that this is a one-off move. I see three broad scenarios:
New MatterChat Model Helps AI to ‘See’ the Language of Science
From writing emails to generating computer code, much of the artificial intelligence prevalent in our daily lives has succeeded by mastering one domain: text. However, this leaves a major blind spot in the physical sciences, where models depend on the high-resolution, three-dimensional data of the physical world, like the intricate lattice of atoms in a crystal. Delivering on the promise of using AI for science requires teaching these data-driven text models to seamlessly “talk to” physics-based models. Now, a new AI framework from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), called MatterChat, solves this problem by creating a specialized “bridge.” It connects the conversational power of a Large Language Model (LLM) with a physics-based AI that models “interatomic potentials”: the complex physical forces between atoms. The resulting system already significantly outperforms general-purpose AI tools like GPT-4 at predicting material properties, and the team hopes it can accelerate scientific discovery by serving as a robust research partner that provides grounded insights and generates step-by-step instructions for synthesizing novel materials. A paper describing this work was recently published in Nature Machine Intelligence. “Traditional simulations can provide the physical rigor required for materials science, yet their computational cost remains prohibitive for high-throughput screening. Conversely, while LLMs excel at rapid knowledge synthesis, they inherently lack the ‘structural vision’ to interpret materials directly from their underlying atomic coordinates,” said Yingheng Tang, a postdoctoral researcher in Berkeley Lab’s Applied Math and Computational Research Division (AMCR) and lead author on the paper. “MatterChat was built to solve this dilemma, empowering LLMs with a structural ‘vision’ that allows researchers to leverage their full potential for solving complex, real-world materials challenges.” Empowering language models to solve complex challenges in materials science To build MatterChat, the Berkeley Lab team drew inspiration from technologies like Vision Question Answering (VQA) and Text-to-Image (T2I) generation. In these tasks, AI must translate high-level text concepts into visual images, or vice versa. Doing so requires developers to build tools that “bridge” two fundamentally different forms of data. The researchers adapted this concept to the physical sciences. With MatterChat, they created a “bridge model” that successfully connects an LLM’s general knowledge with the deep understanding of the atomic-scale world encoded in scientific interatomic potentials. Until now, researchers using LLMs to solve materials problems usually had to feed them raw data files as if they were just strings of text. It’s like asking an AI to understand a complex 3D engine based only on a parts list: the LLM can read the names, but it can’t “see” how the atoms fit together in space. MatterChat solves this by training a specialized AI bridge model, pre-trained on millions of crystal structures and an LLM, to align the LLM’s representation of the world with the interatomic potential’s representation of the world. The bridge model can translate physical insights into a format the LLM can actually understand. By giving the LLM these “scientific eyes”— a scientific “inductive bias” in the terminology of AI — the Berkeley Lab team has transformed it into a robust research tool capable of providing grounded scientific insights into complex materials challenges, such as predicting thermal stability or analyzing electronic band gaps. “We think of atoms as living in a physical space, but from a machine learning perspective, they are just vectors living in some very non-trivially structured manifold in a high-dimensional Euclidean space; and, of course, the same is true for the sentences and paragraphs that we use to express our ideas about those atoms,” said co-author Michael Mahoney, Berkeley Lab’s Scientific Data Division (SDD) AI Initiative Research Lead. “The bridge model basically gets those two structures to ‘talk with’ each other.” As a proof-of-concept of this general approach, the team trained their bridge model on a dataset curated by pairing nearly 143,000 stable atomic structures from the Materials Project with their corresponding physical properties. This training data was automatically assembled using the Materials Project’s API and deliberately enriched with properties fundamental to microelectronics design — like formation energy and bandgap — allowing MatterChat to learn the complex patterns connecting a material’s atomic blueprint to its functional performance. To validate their model, the researchers benchmarked MatterChat against a suite of other AI systems, from general-purpose LLMs to other specialized scientific AI methods. The results show that MatterChat consistently outperformed its competitors across a range of tasks. The model was more accurate in classifying material types and demonstrated superior precision in predicting numerical properties. For example, it excelled at predicting a material’s bandgap, a property critical for designing new electronics from high-capacity energy storage to next-generation computer chips. “Our design is significantly more efficient because we don’t have to build a massive AI model from the ground up,” said co-author Zhi (Jackie) Yao, a research scientist in Berkeley Lab’s AMCR. “Instead, we take two powerful, pre-trained models — a structural encoder for materials physics and an open-source LLM — and use them off-the-shelf. The only component we actually train is the lightweight ‘bridge model’ that translates between them. It’s the difference between building an entire car factory and simply designing a smart adapter that connects a world-class engine to a world-class navigation system. This approach is not only computationally efficient, but also makes the system modular, so we can easily upgrade components or adapt the bridge for other scientific domains in the future.” Crucially, this modular design highlights exactly how institutions like Berkeley Lab and the Department of Energy are carving out a highly valuable niche in the booming AI landscape. Rather than competing with Silicon Valley tech giants to build ever-larger language models from scratch, the lab is focusing on the specialized connective tissue that makes commercial AI useful for hardcore science. Because the bridge model approach underlying MatterChat is forward-compatible, it is perfectly positioned to leverage these parallel tracks of innovation. As Mahoney pointed out, “We expect that industry will continue to develop improved LLMs, and we expect domain scientists and facilities will continue to generate new data. An important part of scientific machine learning is not simply to solve problems on today’s data, but instead to develop general methods that will be forward-compatible with orders of magnitude more data, whether from scientific domains or from LLMs.” According to Yao, the MatterChat project, which was initially developed and enhanced with funding from a Berkeley Lab Laboratory Directed Research & Development (LDRD) Program, will now expand its capabilities. In a collaboration with Fermilab, MatterChat is already contributing to a U.S. Department of Energy Genesis Mission project — called Accelerating eXtreme Environment Specs-to-Silicon (AXESS) — that aims to speed up the development of next-generation, high-speed, radiation-hardened detectors for challenging particle physics experiments by using advanced 3D integrated circuits (chiplets) and AI-driven data analysis. In addition to the LDRD support, the team also credits supercomputing resources at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), located at Berkeley Lab, with MatterChat’s success. “We are incredibly grateful to NERSC; this research simply would not have happened without access to the Perlmutter supercomputer through their AI for Science program,” said Tang. Wenbin Xu, a NERSC postdoctoral fellow at the time, was also a major co-author of the work, as was Benjamin Erichson, a research scientist in Berkeley Lab’s SDD, highlighting the benefits of AMCR-SDD collaboration on AI for science. ### Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) is committed to groundbreaking research focused on discovery science and solutions for abundant and reliable energy supplies. The lab’s expertise spans materials, chemistry, physics, biology, earth and environmental science, mathematics, and computing. Researchers from around the world rely on the lab’s world-class scientific facilities for their own pioneering research. Founded in 1931 on the belief that the biggest problems are best addressed by teams, Berkeley Lab and its scientists have been recognized with 17 Nobel Prizes. Berkeley Lab is a multiprogram national laboratory managed by the University of California for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science. DOE’s Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States, and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit energy.gov/science.
Those GTA 6 Preorder Rumors Appear To Be Another False Alarm
Reports stemming from alleged emails from Best Buy pointed to a Monday start for preorders.
A prayer festival calls for more religion in politics, not less
A prayer festival on the National Mall in Washington, DC was partially organized and funded by the federal government. Its evangelical Christian messaging and call for more religion in politics not less, aligns with the Trump administration's fusion of faith and governance. NPR's Emily Feng went to the event to understand the audience for this approach, and she spoke with author Eric Metaxas, a speaker at the Rededicate 250 festival.For sponsor-free episodes of Consider This, sign up for Consider This+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org. Email us at considerthis@npr.org.This episode was produced by Henry Larson, with audio engineering by It was edited by Sarah Robbins and Daniel Burke.Our executive producer is Sami Yenigun.
Now What? With Carbon Pricing Eroded and Pipeline Politics Advancing, Here Are the Pathways for Climate Success
At the end of a whirlwind week of news on carbon pricing and electricity strategy, capping a madcap year of pretty much non-stop, dramatic change, the word across much of Canada’s climate and energy transition community is that climate policy in this country has been shredded. Eviscerated. Hit with a sledgehammer by policy rollbacks that have pushed the country’s 2050 net zero target “well out of reach”. That means it’s never been more important to look for the rays of hope and glimmers of possibility. To glimpse the seeds of the next set of strategies to get Canada’s climate pollution under control and the country into the accelerating global dash away from fossil fuels. And then, once we’ve spotted those possibilities, get on with the hard, day-to-day slog of trying to make them a reality. Nothing takes away from the frustration and the deep disappointment so many climate and energy hawks are expressing, the sense of betrayal by the author of Value(s) and the former UN special envoy for climate action and finance. But we knew two things as the week drew to a close. We’re looking at the world as it most definitely is. And we don’t get to give up finding the pathways to confront climate change and deliver faster, deeper carbon cuts that leave no one else behind. So really, the first question we all have to ask ourselves is: What’s next? Subscribe All the Oxygen in the Room The outpouring of anger and grief over the carbon pricing deal between Prime Minister Mark Carney and Alberta Premier Danielle Smith has been absolutely understandable. So much of the climate community poured years, more than a decade, into dragging the current federal pricing regime across the finish line, then defending it from a deluge of three-syllable rhymes after the Trudeau government proved utterly incapable of delivering its own message. The policy foisted on us by neo-classical economists took up all the oxygen in the room, burned through years of climate response time that we won’t get back, while cornering climate hawks into the position that the best response to the crisis of our lifetimes is a new tax…in an era of historic anti-tax sentiment. I mean, really—what could possibly have gone wrong? Against that history, let’s appreciate columnist Max Fawcett’s point that even a modest carbon pricing agreement with a government as off-the-wall libertarian/conspiracist as Danielle Smith’s—those adjectives are mine, not Max’s—is a win worth savouring (as long as Smith keeps her promises for a change). But part of living in the world as it is (no, I’m not letting that go) is to be clear-headed about what we can and can’t control. And one thing we get to decide, after seeing this week’s carbon price festivities take up all the oxygen yet again, is whether we want to keep letting that happen. Particularly when success down that road depends on a factor that no one with a climate agenda can control or influence—a provincial carbon pricing mechanism that has been manipulated and eroded beyond its lowest possible denominator. Thankfully, that’s not the way it has to go. Not when we have so many other powerful, practical tools at our disposal, including the ones still available to us through this abominable Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between Canada and Alberta. Tools In Our Toolbox When I started roughing out this list, I didn’t expect it to grow to nearly a dozen bullet points. It’s probably still incomplete. Some of the greatest hits in today’s climate solutions toolbox include: • No Carbon Capture, No Pipeline: On Friday, Prime Minister Mark Carney explicitly stated that there’s been no change to the MOU provision that there will be no West Coast pipeline without an industry commitment to build its massive, $16.5-billion carbon capture and storage (CCUS) hub in Northern Alberta, and vice versa. The two megaprojects were joined at the hip when the MOU was signed Nov. 27, and the implementation agreement this week affirmed that they still are. A parade of independent analysts have spent years pointing to the economic and technical flaws in CCUS, while the industry kept postponing its investment decision until it could arm-twist the government for more “clarity” (by which it meant even more lavish taxpayer subsidies) on the project. Now the industry itself is running away from the CCUS hub and insisting the pipeline should proceed without it, but Carney doesn’t seem to be budging from a central tenet of the MOU to which Smith has signed on. • No Subsidies, No Investors: Climate analysts and advocates have quite rightly been hammering away at Carney and his team, insisting that any new capacity the industry wants to build must proceed without new subsidies. The government has responded with a growing collection of funding and financing mechanisms for the very wide menu of industrial development and nation-building projects they say they want to take on, and that menu always includes fossil fuel infrastructure. But it’s hard to see how even the combined fiscal clout of the federal and supportive provincial governments will deliver the financial backing private investors would need when the business case for new fossil fuel development is evaporating before their eyes. Particularly when… • No Market, No Demand, No Investors: As our friend Markham Hislop at Energi Media (our apparently sleepless friend, given the massive volume of great material he’s been churning out) points out this morning, the biggest vulnerability in any pipeline deal is the assumption that Asian buyers will want the oil or liquefied natural ga that our fossil industry is so keen to send them. Hislop writes in part: Ottawa and Alberta are effectively betting that countries like China and India will continue increasing oil imports for decades as their economies grow and energy consumption rises. That assumption underpins the entire economic rationale for expanding oil sands production and building billions of dollars in new export infrastructure. But Asian energy systems are changing rapidly… China, India, South Korea, and other major hydrocarbon importers are now investing hundreds of billions of dollars into electricity systems built around wind, solar, batteries, nuclear, hydro, and expanded transmission infrastructure. Domestic “energy sovereignty” is increasingly replacing the old energy-security model based on stable oil and gas imports. Those investments are expected to sharply slow oil demand growth and eventually reverse it, even as overall energy consumption continues rising. There are also refining constraints. Many Asian refineries and petrochemical complexes are already optimized to process discounted heavy crude from the Middle East and Latin America. That raises serious questions about how much additional Canadian bitumen Asian markets can absorb at profitable prices. Small wonder that there’s still no private sector investor for the project, despite Smith’s government desperately beating the bushes to put together a deal. For now, Alberta is acting as proponent and covering early start-up costs for a pitch to the federal Major Projects Office, which could actually turn into the next tough hurdle for Smith and her pipeline to jump. • Canada Day Looms: How ironic that Canada’s birthday this year could become a major chokepoint for the provincial premier who’s been working so diligently to tear the country apart! The July 1 target date for Alberta’s pipeline proposal is baked into the MOU, was reaffirmed by the implementation plan, but it hadn’t dawned on me that it cuts both ways. As one very smart colleague wrote in an email yesterday, “they’ve thrown the ball into Alberta’s court to get the project proposal on the table really quickly and to have to do a whole pile of work to put together a massive, complicated project that would typically take years to assemble, and they’ve given them weeks to do it.” That makes July 1 a looming deadline that Smith won’t be able to run away from politically, especially with the separatists in her party and her caucus breathing down her neck. (See previous ref to off-the-wall.) But if Alberta comes in with a sloppy, incomplete submission, even after Carney bent over backwards to simplify the application process and the rules that govern it, it may be harder for the province or the industry to blame Ottawa and insist on the faster process they claim their investors are demanding. (Oh, wait—which investors would those be??) • We’ll See You In Court (Then We’ll See You Again): If Carney did cave, that would be just one more reason for Indigenous and other affected communities to take the government and the process to court—Just as Alberta First Nations did, successfully, in response to Smith’s half-baked separation referendum. Veterans of the Harper era have been warning that a shoddy process around fossil fuel infrastructure or other major projects will be a recipe for the very delays that process seeks to avoid. And now more than ever, with renewable energy and energy storage eating fossil fuels’ lunch in import markets around the world, a delayed pipeline or LNG terminal may be as good as a cancelled one. • Charged Up, Ready to Go: With its goal of doubling Canada’s electricity supply to meet a doubling of demand by 2050, the national electricity strategy that Carney unveiled Thursday has a lot to like. With its explicit language about speeding the shift from fuels to more efficient and affordable electricity, global investment and deployment patterns that already favour that shift, an emerging bidirectional power grid, the role of front-line options like rooftop solar and heat pumps, the emergence of electric vehicles as behind-the-meter energy storage, and the domestic jobs and manufacturing to make it all happen, the document doubles down on the essential cornerstone of a faster shift off fossil fuels. The strategy envisions a more prominent role for gas and nuclear power. But some of those provisions were already in the Clean Electricity Regulations that climate hawks are now fighting so hard to defend, inserted as a compromise in a futile attempt to mollify the industry and its political representatives in Alberta and Saskatchewan. But once again, gas will be a tougher sell when it’s more expensive and now so much more unpredictable than the clean alternatives. The new nuclear technologies are still speculative and deeply vulnerable to cost overruns. Increasingly, utilities, developers, and investors know it. Carney declared Thursday that “it doesn’t do us good to be sitting in court all the time with provinces. It doesn’t do us good to be talking past each other. What does do us good is to come together with specific projects.” There are no guarantees, but so much of the language and narrative-building in the electricity strategy suggests the lion’s share of those projects will be renewable. • The Party Has Already Started: The electricity strategy only rarely digs down to specific projects, but provinces representing three-quarters of Canada’s population are already embracing a faster transition. Hydro-Québec is working on a 10-year, $185-billion renewable energy and grid buildout by 2035. Ontario recently brought 10 provinces and territories together in a National Energy Corridor Agreement to boost interprovincial and -territorial transmission infrastructure. And the MOU implementation agreement commits Alberta to facilitate investment in renewable energy projects, a big step back from its continuing, punitive restrictions on renewables development. The electricity strategy envisions much of the financing and infrastructure that will be needed to pull those advances together into an integrated whole. • Delivering on Affordability: The MOU implementation plan has little or nothing to say about affordability (are you surprised?), but the electricity strategy does, with a top-line pledge to reduce home energy costs for seven out of 10 Canadian households by 2050, a total saving of $15 billion across the board. It’s just a start, but it puts affordability on the government’s narrative map. If they’re serious and deliberate about patching together a least-cost energy strategy, it’ll have little if any room for oil, gas, or nuclear—not with powerful evidence, for example, that electricity prices are higher when those prices are set by gas. • Smith Proves that Canada Works: By signing a deal that makes it harder to claim the federal government is blocking a new pipeline, Smith has helped prove Carney’s constant anti-separatist refrain that “Canada works”—incurring the rage, no doubt, of her own political base. Canada also needs to work for anyone who depends on a clean environment, healthy and thriving ecosystems, and safe, stable climate. But with Smith and her separatist constituents setting up as a fifth column for annexation by Donald Trump’s United States, let’s set aside any notion that 51st state status for Canada is a recipe for anything other than climate disaster (and so much else). Resisting and withstanding Trump (just 170 more sleeps until mid-term elections, which is a damn sight better than the 730 we started with) doesn’t mean a free pass for a pipeline, but we can still appreciate it that keeping Canada whole and sovereign is still Carney’s Job One. • The Words Not Spoken: Apart from a commitment to export a million barrels of “low-emission” Alberta bitumen per day (memo to Smith and Carney: You realize that that’s less than the industry is already exporting??), the MOU implementation plan says nothing about the international trade and economic sovereignty deals that Carney has been travelling the world to negotiate. It didn’t have to. Carney doesn’t need permission from Danielle Smith, her American enablers, or her separatist allies to continue building the alliances that will ratchet down our economic dependency on our unstable, unreliable neighbour to the south. But every connection he builds with countries outside North America helps align our economy and our future with a faster shift off fossil fuels. Little if any of this was on our bingo cards a year or two ago. But it’s the pathway that has opened up to us. And if it gives Canada any climate or energy gains at all in an era still dominated by Trump and his increasingly ridiculous tariffs, his loutish trade negotiations and his continuing annexation threats, we have to take the wins. Not least because they’ll be the point of departure for what we can achieve in 2027, 2029, and beyond, as Trump’s grip and this era begin to loosen and then fade. What is Carney Doing? If this line of thought is right—and it’s a possibility, not a prediction—it means that Carney’s actions and decisions are largely about buying time. Time for Trump’s power to wane. Time for Alberta’s separatist/conspiracist virus to spread, mutate, die out, or at least die back, with help from a vaccine of federal steadiness and calm (appropriate enough, for a movement populated largely by vaccine deniers) that no conspiracy theory can dismiss. And time for the government’s trade and investment agenda to deliver results—even knowing that some of those results will bring impacts that front-line communities will not and should not accept. In the immediate moment, none of this changes the way the wider climate community has to respond, from campaigners to investors to front-line practitioners. All of our voices are still essential. But those voices will be stronger and more confident if we have a clearer sense of the brutal game we’ve been pulled into, and a plausible path (or two it three) for playing it to the win we need. This conversation also underscores our biggest task for the remaining years of what was supposed to be the “decisive” decade for climate response: if we can shift the energy narrative in Canada, make it a mainstream view that the country’s preoccupation with oil and gas has us falling farther behind a changing world, we’ll see far better results in the 2030s and beyond. For many veteran climate advocates, taking on that part of the fight will begin with recognizing that most of our friends and family, neighbours and colleagues already understand that climate change is real and right in front of us: they’re looking away and staying silent because they don’t have what climate communicator Katharine Hayhoe calls “efficacy”. As Hayhoe recently pointed out in a feature interview with The Energy Mix, it amounts to science denial to keep hammering away at the dire news about global warming without also helping audiences understand what they can do about it, with multiple studies telling us why that won’t work. Far better to open those conversations with the dominant crises like energy security, food security, emergency preparedness and business continuity, affordability, and financial security that have knocked climate change far lower on the list of public priorities, and will likely keep it there. We Knew This Would Happen Climate hawks have always known this day would come. For decades, we warned that everyone had to pay attention to climate change right now, because it would be much tougher to respond once the crisis itself started affecting our daily lives. We were right, and here we are. But now, thanks to decades of hard work, communities and countries have an alternative to doubling down on fossil fuels. “In 10 years everyone will have ‘always known’ that solar and batteries were going to win,” Morgan Solar Executive Chair Mike Andrade writes on LinkedIn. With the disruption in the Strait of Hormuz roiling energy priorities around the world, Canada and the United States are among the shrinking number of countries that are still very keen on fossil fuel development. Understanding that gap is a first, essential step in spotting the opportunities ahead, and averting the deep economic as well as environmental and social risk we face if we don’t seize them. Thanks for reading The Energy Mix Weekender! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support our work. Subscribe Mitchell Beer traces his background in renewable energy and energy efficiency back to 1977, in climate change to 1997. Now he and the rest of the Energy Mix team scan 1,200 news headlines a week to pull together The Energy Mix and The Energy Mix Weekender. Chart of the Week BYD Eyes 20 Dealership Locations After Canada Greenlights Chinese EV Imports ‘Sledgehammer’ Carbon Price Deal Boosts Emissions by 230Mt, Aims for Fall 2027 Pipeline Approval ‘Worse Than Harper’: Regulatory Rollback Would Stop Canada from Assessing Project Impacts, Critics Warn Electricity Strategy Aims for Doubling by 2050, Allows ‘Flexibility’ for Gas Power Plants Opposition Mounts as O’Leary’s Data Centre Approved in Drought-Stricken Utah Diluted Carbon Price Misses ‘Reality of the World We’re In’, Could Impede Diversified Trade: Climate Institute $200B in Clean Energy Investment Will Need On-Time Delivery, Reliable Policies, Trade Association Says ‘Sovereign Pipeline’: CEO Pitches to Keep Trans Mountain in Government Hands What a Supercharged El Niño Could Mean for Canada Canada’s future is electric, and here’s how a power grid superhighway would get us there (Toronto Star) The Perilous Waters of Hecate Strait (Globe and Mail) Saudi Aramco profits jump despite conflict in Middle East (The Guardian) Farmers confront rising cost of fertilizer and fuel as spring seeding under way (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) Clarkson forecasts 24% decline in offshore oil, gas capital expenditures (Oil & Gas Journal) Pipe Dreams: How Oil and Gas Fail to Deliver Economic Development in Africa (Oil Change International) Developing countries must hold the pen to script the fossil fuel transition (Climate Home News) Iran war threatens the dream of a post-oil economy in the Gulf (Washington Post) U.S. Oil, Gas Work Force Hits Lowest Level Since 2022 (Rigzone) Why Polestar Is Doubling Down on Net Zero as Rivals Pull Back on EVs (Bloomberg) Why this Michigan utility plans to sell its hydro dams for $13 (E&E News/Politico) Levees can no longer save New Orleans (Vox)
I used to email myself everything — these 5 Google Drive features fixed that
Drive features that fixed my messy workflow
As global crises multiply, scores of US diplomats say they have been forced out
Amid ongoing foreign policy crises around the globe and as the Trump administration struggles to reach a deal to end the war with Iran, the State Department last week finalized the firings of nearly 250 foreign service officers in a brief, impersonal email.
US moves to end job protections for hundreds of health department workers
President Donald Trump's administration on Friday moved to strip U.S. Department of Health and Human Services workers of civil service job protections, according to an email reviewed by Reuters.
A chemical found in fish could help reinvent your sunscreen
It’s been over 25 years since the FDA approved a new ingredient for sunscreen in the United States. But a molecule called gadusol found in fish and coral reefs is a promising candidate. It absorbs U.V. rays — acting like a built-in sunscreen for fish. But there’s a big hurdle if scientists want to turn gadusol into human sunscreen: They’d need to make a lot of it. A new study out this week in the journal Trends in Biotechnology takes us a big step closer. Their solution? Using the bacteria best known for making your stomach hurt: e. Coli. Interested in more science? Email us your question at shortwave@npr.org.Listen to every episode of Short Wave sponsor-free and support our work at NPR by signing up for Short Wave+ at plus.npr.org/shortwave.
On-Prem Microsoft Exchange Server CVE-2026-42897 Exploited via Crafted Email
CVE-2026-42897 is exploited in on-prem Exchange; crafted emails enable spoofing, forcing urgent mitigation.
After numerous delays, new GTA 6 pre-order leaks suggest November release date finally locked in, and further delays unlikely
US retailer Best Buy has reportedly sent emails out to affiliates, with the pre-order date for Grand Theft Auto 6 listed for next week.
Best Buy May Have Leaked Grand Theft Auto VI Preorders Going Live Monday
Various Best Buy affiliate users have reportedly received emails detailing preorder compensation for next week.
LinkedIn cuts marketing staff, boosts AI usage for growth
LinkedIn is cutting marketing roles and trimming paid media spend as it leans on AI, its CMO Jessica Jensen says in an internal email.
You should probably eat more fiber. Here's why — and how to do it
The average person eats 10-15 grams of fiber per day, according to the USDA. The problem? That’s WAY under the recommended daily amount. Fiber – a type of carb that our bodies are unable to digest – is prevalent in foods like fruits, veggies, whole grains, and beans. And it’s key for everything from feelings of fullness, to gut health, to good poop. That’s why a lot of people online are “fibermaxxing”: trying to meet or exceed the daily recommendation of fiber, in hopes it’ll improve their health. But how should YOU add fiber to your diet… and are the fibermaxxers overdoing it? Gastroenterologist Berkeley Limketkai is here to help parse the science on how little fiber is too little, how much fiber is too much – and, like Goldilocks, how we can figure out the amount that’s just right.Interested in more food and dietary science? Email us your question at shortwave@npr.org.Listen to every episode of Short Wave sponsor-free and support our work at NPR by signing up for Short Wave+ at plus.npr.org/shortwave.
Why Swedish scientists gave salmon cocaine
A recent study caught our eye: salmon on cocaine. Or really, researchers giving salmon cocaine…for science. See, scientists know human drugs pollute aquatic environments – past studies have shown even anti-anxiety drugs can change how fish act. But illicit drugs are less studied. And Jack Brand, an aquatic ecologist at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, wanted to know how illicit drugs like cocaine might change fish behavior, like foraging and mating. To answer that question, Jack and his team gave salmon cocaine. Interested in more science? Email us your question at shortwave@npr.org.Listen to every episode of Short Wave sponsor-free and support our work at NPR by signing up for Short Wave+ at plus.npr.org/shortwave.
The Pixel's best voicemail feature might soon expand to non-Pixel phones, 20+ markets
Google may bring Take a Message to non-Pixel phones and new regions like India and Europe. These could be the new supported markets.
I didn't even know this Pixel feature existed, but it's changed how I use my phone
To be fair, I'd love anything that removed voicemail from my life
Here's how Apple could make its Hide My Email feature even better for iCloud+ users
Introduced in iOS 15, Hide My Email is an iCloud+ feature that does exactly what it says on the tin...
DOH recruits Teen Health and Media Survey participants via email
The Hawai‘i Department of Health (DOH) will conduct the 2026 Hawai‘i Teen Health and Media Survey over the next two months. Information collected will be used to develop and improve health programs and services for Hawaiʻi’s youth.
Former School of Engineering and Applied Science student Rekik Tibebu Demeke has died
Rekik Tibebu Demeke, a former student in the School of Engineering and Applied Science, has died, SEAS dean Shih-Fu Chang wrote in a Saturday email to the community.
Fans Think New GTA 6 Emails From Sony Signal Something Big
It sure does seem like Take-Two and Sony are ramping up for some sort of big Grand Theft Auto 6 marketing push
PlayStation Urges PS4 Players to Upgrade to PS5 for GTA 6
Emails and console messages sent out
Microsoft warns of sophisticated phishing campaign heavily targeting health care organizations
Microsoft Threat Intelligence is warning of a large scale, multistage phishing campaign that disproportionately targeted the health care sector, sending “code of conduct” themed emails to lure users into credential theft and token compromise.
Hantavirus: the risks, the science and what you need to know
On May 2, the World Health Organization got an alarming report: People aboard a ship in the Atlantic Ocean were falling ill. The culprit is now confirmed as hantavirus, a pathogen that some rodents carry that can infect humans in rare, but often deadly, instances. Multiple passengers have died, and more people are showing symptoms. So, we’re talking to Emily Abdoler, an infectious disease doctor at the University of Michigan, about the news – how common is hantavirus in humans, what are the consequences of getting it, and how can at-risk people protect themselves from it? If you found this episode interesting, listen to our episode on Rocky Mountain spotted fever.Interested in more science in the news? Email us your question at shortwave@npr.org.Listen to every episode of Short Wave sponsor-free and support our work at NPR by signing up for Short Wave+ at plus.npr.org/shortwave.
NFL announces in email blast schedule release "is almost here"
It's an announcement of the announcement of the announcement.
BioShock, game prices, GTA, the disappearing NFL deal and more: An interview with Take Two CEO Strauss Zelnick
In 20 years of covering the video game beat, I’d probably not spoken more than 20 words with Take Two chairman Strauss Zelnick, who’s been running the company behind NBA 2K, Grand Theft Auto, BioShock and Red Dead Redemption for, you guessed it, nearly 20 years. Last week, though, ahead of a panel I was hosting at the iicon event in Las Vegas, I had about 20 minutes to interview Zelnick. I could ask one question for each year, I joked, as we settled into our seats on opposite sides of a conference table. Take Two’s longtime head of corporate communications, Alan Lewis, was seated at Zelnick’s side. I didn’t quite conduct our chat that way, but we wound up going through a lot, including… The state of BioShock The ramifications of the rising costs of game development The fate of Take Two’s recent multi-game deal with the NFL Some hints about Take Two’s mobile plans Whether Zelnick’s answer to me about Civ VII was a good one The do’s and don’t’s of NBA 2K microtransactions Take Two’s take on the Switch 2 Oh, and GTA VI (Spoiler: if Zelnick had spilled the beans on the price of the game or a release date for a PC version or whether there will be a polka radio station, that would have been this article’s headline). Before all of that, I would learn what it’s like to interview Strauss Zelnick, who is confident, calm and focused on delivering precise answers. To wit, I thought I’d start our chat with something fun, a bit insidery but maybe safe for him to share. The team at Take Two’s Rockstar label delays their games a lot, I noted. Of course, those delays, however painful, tend to be worth it. So, I was wondering how Zelnick finds out about them. Take the most recent postponement back in November 2025, when Rockstar said that GTA VI would not hit its May 26, 2026 release date (just 20 days from now!) and would instead come out on November 19, 2026. Was that news delivered via a call? An email? How does it work? “I work super closely with my team,” Zelnick said. “It's a very thin team at Take Two. The entire senior management team is six executives who sit in one hallway and share two assistants. And then, basically, there are two people who head up each of our labels.” They meet weekly to discuss their business, he said. So no one emails him about a delay? Nothing like that? Zelnick craned his neck to look at my left hand. He asked if I was married. I am, I said. “Does your partner email you to give you information?” he asked. Fair enough. I didn’t get the sense Zelnick was going to read me the minutes of the management meeting where the GTA VI delay was discussed. Slight pivot, maybe I could get some personality insights about one of the most successful gaming execs of the last 20 years, before getting to my big list of questions about specific Take Two games, franchises and policies. I asked: How do you deal with delay news like that? Go for a run? Meditate? “I tend to default to being very calm,” he said. “I’m not a person who freaks out easily.” He noted that he has a daughter with special needs due to an illness, and he shared that that situation had gotten him worked up. It was a personal, family emergency. “But, you know, business is not that,” he said. “I have no trouble distinguishing between, like, a business challenge and an emergency.” He turned to his left to ask Lewis, his colleague of 17 years, a question. “Have you ever seen me freak out?” “Never,” Lewis replied. “You’ve seen me upset,” Zelnick told Lewis. “Have you seen me raise my voice? Maybe how many times? Be honest, because we might as well be.”
Opinion: Politics has come to work, once an apolitical space
A colleague recently emailed me a picture of a seemingly political gesture that was roiling her office and asked me what I thought. The picture was of a 10-by-3-inch sticker,
How science is taking tripping mainstream
President Trump recently signed an order to speed up the evaluation of psychedelics to treat the brain. That’s coming after decades of strict prohibition on psychedelic drug use dating back to President Nixon. So how did we go from that to a psychedelic renaissance? A look into a key institution in the world of psychedelic research may give us some clues. This episode, NPR’s brain correspondent Jon Hamilton shares insight from a recent trip. (No pun intended.) Want more psychedelic content? Catch our episode on ketamine therapy here, or learn why some scientists want to take the trip out of psychedelics here. Have other questions about psychedelics and the brain? Let us know by emailing shortwave@npr.org!
See how federal workers respond to Elon Musk's '5 things' emails
Nonprofit Citizens for Constitutional Integrity released the first batch of emails from federal workers responding to Elon Musk's DOGE directive.
‘The reality, for better or worse’: Columbia comp sci students and faculty grapple with AI’s disruption of the field
‘The reality, for better or worse’: Columbia comp sci students and faculty grapple with AI’s disruption of the field ‘The reality, for better or worse’: Columbia comp sci students and faculty grapple with AI’s disruption of the field A field that once seemed like a direct path to stable, lucrative work is becoming less certain under AI, students and faculty told Spectator. By Ria Vasishtha and Arjun Menon May 3, 2026 Shanying Liu / Deputy Illustrations Editor Asia Genawi, SEAS ’29, first encountered artificial intelligence during her sophomore year at her high school in Indiana. Back in 2023, policies on AI varied widely—even within the same district—and some schools had no guidance at all. As Genawi began to see the effects of AI trickle into her classroom, she turned to guidance from her home state’s Department of Education, which she said she found “outdated and inaccessible.” Genawi spent the rest of her high school career dedicated to the issue, including writing a 15-page memo exploring varying AI policies across Indiana schools, which she sent to every Indiana state senator and representative whose contact information she was able to find. She later helped draft a bill that would have required public high schools to establish and share their own AI policies with students in an accessible format. But with so many other bills already awaiting referral, hers never made it to committee. When Genawi arrived at Columbia to study computer science, she found that the gaps she had spent years trying to address in Indiana had followed her there. Many students and professors were also grappling with what AI meant for the field. Across Columbia’s undergraduate schools, computer science has become the most popular major—accounting for around 11 percent of degrees awarded in Columbia College, 32 percent in the School of Engineering and Applied Science, and 12 percent in the School of General Studies in 2024. While the number of computer science majors in SEAS grew from 166 to 173 during the 2024-25 academic year, the total number across the three schools fell around 4.5 percent from 393 to 375, driven by declines at Columbia College and General Studies. At Barnard, it has grown to become the second most popular major as of 2025, up from third the year prior. The number of degrees awarded have grown fivefold since 2016. Faculty members and students in the department told Spectator that the surge in the major’s popularity has been driven in large part by its apparent promise of a secure, well-paid career path. However, they noted that the recent rise of generative AI has compromised the sense of stability that once defined the field, even as interest in technical skills among students persists. According to data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in 2024, out of 74 majors tracked, computer science had the fifth highest unemployment rate among majors at 7 percent, while computer engineering had the second highest at 7.8 percent. “Anecdotally, people are moving away from CS as a major,” Daniel Bauer, a senior lecturer in the computer science department, said. “They’re still taking some of our classes, right, because they think they need that, but they’re instead majoring in other things.” Bauer described a field that had shifted from what he called a “nerdy outlier discipline” to one that “everyone needs,” a sign that technical skills have become a baseline expectation across industries with the emergence of AI. “A lot of people thought, ‘Oh, it’s a guaranteed path to a stable income. You get a six-figure job right out of your undergrad,’” Bauer said. Now, companies may see AI as a way to reduce demand for entry-level programmers, especially in what he calls “code monkey jobs,” roles where a large number of employees are “just writing out code nine-to-five.” Chris Murphy, a senior lecturer in the computer science department, described the current moment as the convergence of two forces: the downturn of the job market and generative AI coming onto the scene. “Things kind of started to really pick up in 2014, 16,” he said, recalling the years after the weaker 2010 market. Murphy added that this was also a period where “students were getting more experience outside of class than they were inside of class” through internships, jobs, and side projects. Murphy suggested that the earlier momentum helped make computer science feel like both an academic program and a reliable pathway into work. That feeling is harder to sustain now as the industry reconfigures, which is a shift that students are seeing firsthand. Rebecca Yu, SEAS ’27, said that during a recent internship in Big Tech, she saw that “every single tech company was racing to integrate” large language models. She added that her manager said her intern class was the first to complete their assigned projects, which she attributed to the increased efficiency that comes with AI. Frank Liu, SEAS ’29, said that with AI lowering the barrier to coding, companies now expect everyone to write code. “A lot of companies outright say if you’re not using coding in your job, you might get fired for not being productive enough,” Liu said. Yu similarly expressed that students increasingly have to accept AI being a part of industry workflow, adding that many also “make use of it to maximize their productivity.” Richard Li, CC ’28, described a “franticness” among his peers as the pace of change accelerates. He explained how “some new tool” is released regularly, noting that tools rise and fall in prominence within weeks. He has come to believe that he doesn’t need to “match that speed all the time” and keep up with every development. Li has learned that AI tools allow him to “take a breath” and “get back into the loop much easier than before” when he needs to. While some companies specifically target Columbia when hiring, sending representatives to campus career fairs and recruiting large numbers from Columbia, a computer science degree cannot be treated as a static credential, Yu described. “You can’t just get your degree and stop learning after that. You have to always be learning,” Yu said. “That is something you basically have to expect for your job.” AI has not only affected students’ decisions to major in computer science, but also reshaped how the subject is taught. Across departments, faculty members no longer treat work done outside the classroom as a reliable measure of understanding, shifting instead toward in-person exams, quizzes, and attendance checks. While homework once made up as much as 60 to 70 percent of a student’s grade in computer science classes, Murphy said that breakdown has since flipped, with exams and quizzes now accounting for the majority. “The assumption—especially among pessimists—is that they’re using it to do their homework,” Murphy said. “They take the homework assignment. They put it into generative AI. Out comes the solution. Submit solution. The end.” Murphy said that faculty members ranged in their responses from fully prohibiting AI use to actively teaching students how to effectively work with AI. He said he shifted his approach this year after his teaching assistants called his belief that students weren’t using the technology “naïve,” and now permits students to use AI on assignments. His surveys of students in his introductory classes have told a more complicated story than the one so-called pessimists offer: Around 60 to 70 percent of students who reported using AI said they used it to have concepts explained to them, to clarify assignment instructions, to generate test cases, or to create practice questions. “Those are all ways that you might have had a tutor in the past to do that, and now you have this AI essentially as your tutor,” he said. Bauer has taken a different approach, teaching students how to use AI productively without sacrificing the core principles of the discipline. “People who are trained to actually use AI tools productively, while being in charge of designing the overall project, will be very much in demand in the next couple of years,” he said. Over the past year, a working group of computer science faculty has been redesigning the introductory and intermediate programming sequence to integrate generative AI as both a subject and a tool, representatives from SEAS wrote in a statement to Spectator. The effort is “coordinated” across the department, “not course-by-course,” with a systematic assessment of how AI integration is affecting student outcomes underway to shape the next round of changes. The goal, the department explained, is for students to be able to “read, verify, and reason about code, whether they or a model wrote it.” Tony Dear, senior lecturer in the computer science department, is piloting individualized AI feedback in a discrete mathematics course, while a machine learning course is also testing a Socratic AI dialogue system designed to “guide inquiry rather than supply answers,” the statement reads. Beyond individual courses, SEAS funded seven cross-departmental faculty projects in generative AI this past academic year, spanning biomedical engineering, chemical engineering, industrial engineering, and computer science, according to the statement. This phenomenon extends beyond the computer science department. SEAS’ new AI minor, which it announced in November 2025, reflects the University’s attempt to adapt. The minor is specifically designed for noncomputer science majors and aims to provide “essential AI knowledge” while emphasizing practical and responsible use across disciplines, according to the SEAS website. At the center of the minor is AI in Context, a course taught by a team of faculty from the departments of computer science, applied mathematics, philosophy, music, literature, and the Writing Center, the representatives told Spectator. Bauer described it as targeted at students who want to bring AI into fields like economics or biology, rather than as a path into software engineering itself. At the graduate level, SEAS announced a new Master of Science in artificial intelligence in February, with the inaugural cohort starting in the fall. While recognizing how AI has helped them navigate coursework, students also described its rise as isolating, even among members of the Application Development Initiative, one of Columbia’s largest computer science clubs. “As people start to ask AI for questions that they would normally ask students and members, it starts to isolate people” Li said. Alexa Kafka, BC ’27, echoed Li’s sentiment, pointing out that computer science has always been a collaborative discipline with code reviews and pull requests, even as AI makes independent work easier. Despite this, Kafka noted that she hasn’t been to office hours “in at least a year.” Bauer added that faculty are exploring long-term solutions to the assessment problem. “One of the things that we’re trying to do at the department or school level is to maybe move towards computerized testing facilities,” Bauer said, referring to ideas in the department to revitalize computer labs as an alternative to pen-and-paper exams. “We have to accept that this is the reality, for better or worse.” But more exams, students say, does not mean better learning, nor does it reflect how computer science is actually done. “Code is so variable and can be approached in so many directions, there’s never just going to be one correct answer. There can be multiple optimal solutions,” Kafka said. Students also expressed concern that the shift toward exam-heavy grading pulls focus away from the applied, project-based work that better reflects both discipline and industry expectations. ADI has tried to respond more quickly than the curriculum can. Through a vibe coding workshop this past semester, club members said they wanted to help students understand not just that AI exists, but how to use it deliberately. “Vibe coding” refers to the practice of prompting AI to write code for a task or project, and has become widespread enough that ADI felt the gap in formal instruction was worth addressing, according to Sophia Huang, BC ’29. The workshop introduced students to the concept of context engineering, which Shaina Sahu, SEAS ’27, described as not just writing a prompt, but optimizing “the rest of the relevant information that you would feed into the model.” Without that, students said that AI-generated code can fail at scale or introduce difficult-to-detect bugs. Genawi said the shift toward AI has changed what it means to be good at computer science. “I think the shift has kind of gone towards what can you create and what can you do, instead of, what do you know,” she said. Indeed, during ADI DevFest, its annual hackathon, Li said more teams are trying to complete their projects than in years past. While sign-ups have historically outpaced submissions, Li said this is beginning to change because teams “have a tool that completes the vision for them.” While many students see AI as an equalizer that lowers the barrier to entry for coding and technical work, Murphy said it also creates new equity concerns inside the classroom around who can afford stronger tools and who already knows how to use them. “The equity issues I worry about are students who have access to paid versions of things versus free versions of things,” he said. Although popular AI models like ChatGPT and Claude have free versions available, both have paid models that can reach over $100 per month, which output different qualities of code. Murphy also pointed to differences in prior exposure to AI literacy itself. “Students who go to high schools or K-12 education, where they’re taught AI literacy, prompt engineering, context engineering, they understand how to do this, as opposed to students who go to schools who don’t teach that,” he said. “Then they come in, and then they’re somehow expected to know how to use these tools.” For Genawi, those disparities begin long before students arrive on campus. “It’s very interesting to consider how lucky you were geographically,” she said. “To be born where you were is influencing your ability to get access to these spaces.” Students like Yu, though broadly apprehensive about the future of computer science, are not without hope. “I’m optimistic, because I think if you’re truly passionate about CS, there will definitely be a place in the field to do something you want to do,” she said. Senior Staff Writer Ria Vasishtha can be contacted at ria.vasishtha@columbiaspectator.com. Follow Spectator on X @ColumbiaSpec. Staff Writer Arjun Menon can be contacted at arjun.menon@columbiaspectator.com. Follow Spectator on X @ColumbiaSpec. Want to keep up with breaking news? Subscribe to our email newsletter and like Spectator on Facebook. Produced with Spectate by Emily Ta
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The politics of Trump's ballroom
WEST PALM BEACH, Florida — President Trump was about a half-hour into his second speech of the day, musing about the danger he faced last week at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. “Saturday night, it was good for one thing. People are loving my ballroom now,” Trump told a crowd last night. “That’s the only thing. They love my ballroom.” Ever since he was hustled off stage at the Washington Hilton last week, after an attempted shooter breached the dinner’s security perimeter and sent guests diving to the floor, the president has argued that the incident is proof for why his White House ballroom is needed. Only his planned $400 million, 90,000-square-foot project, Trump has reasoned, can keep a president truly safe at major events. It’s true that a bunch of GOP lawmakers have jumped on board with new legislation and words of support for Trump’s project. House Speaker Mike Johnson, Sen. Rand Paul and other prominent Republicans went on TV to talk about the need for a ballroom. But as we reported at The Washington Post this week, “people” aren’t really changing their minds on Trump’s ballroom. A new Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll found that most Americans still oppose the ballroom project: 56 percent against it versus 28 percent in favor. The numbers are the same as a poll from last year, the Post’s polling whiz Scott Clement found. Other new polls have found similar margins, too. “I’m just not a giant fan, especially of extravagance,” one independent voter told me. “I mean, in the era we’re in right now, given how much people are struggling, it just doesn’t make a lot of sense to me to spend $400 million on a ballroom.” How we got here The Washington Post has followed Trump’s ballroom project very closely. (My colleague Jonathan Edwards may have written the most total words of any reporter about the project; I may be second.) The project exploded as a national issue after Trump tore down the White House’s East Wing after initially promising not to touch it.1 Historic preservationists sued, and about a month ago, a federal judge ordered a halt to ballroom construction.2 The only way the ballroom could proceed, U.S. District Judge Richard Leon ruled, was if Congress explicitly authorized Trump’s plans. (An appeals court has stayed Leon’s order for now.) The judge’s ruling raised an obvious question: would Congress authorize the project? Keep in mind, “authorization” doesn’t mean that Congress needs to necessarily fund the planned $400 million project; they could just sign off on the private donations that Trump has solicited to pay for the ballroom.3 But GOP lawmakers really didn’t want to talk about the ballroom, we reported at The Post just a few weeks ago. One major reason was the ballroom’s bad polling — not a small detail with many of their own midterm elections looming. The White House Correspondents’ Dinner incident, and Trump’s advocacy, may have changed the political conversation around the ballroom. As this week’s polling shows, it doesn’t seem to have affected the fundamental questions surrounding the project. To put it another way, voters still say that cost-of-living concerns are top-of-mind heading into the midterms. Some Republican and independent voters have told me that they see the ballroom as a vanity project that will help Trump but do nothing for their own lives. It might not help Republicans that Trump has dismissed some of the cost-of-living concerns. He’s described “affordability” as a buzzword manufactured by Democrats whose policies helped cause inflation. “They’ve got one good line of bullshit,” Trump said in his first speech yesterday, delivered at a Florida retirement community known as The Villages. Thanks for reading Dan Diamond's newsletter! Subscribe for free to stay up-to-date on my work. Subscribe Speaking of Trump’s speeches… I’m down in Florida because it’s my “duty week” as a White House reporter — basically, I follow the president wherever he goes. (And then hand the baton off to one of my Washington Post colleagues next week.) As part of my duty week, I’ve spent a few days covering the White House’s reaction to Saturday’s attempted shooting, including officials’ review of the security protocols to protect the president. Trump was restrained in the wake of the incident, addressing the nation from the White House briefing room about the need for peaceful dialogue and trying to lower the temperature. But he’s clearly been itching to get back out of the White House, and I was curious to hear how his Florida speeches would go. And — to my ears — it was an unburdened Trump. Not the one we saw Saturday night in the White House briefing room, but the one we witnessed on the campaign trail in 2024. Loose, dropping profanities, mocking everyone, including members of his team. “We have a man here who knows more about Medicaid, Medicare, medical crap than any human being. Where’s Dr. Oz? Where the hell are you, stand up,” Trump said, referring to Mehmet Oz, the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. “It’s the most boring trip I’ve ever made. He’s telling me about Medicare, Medicaid. All I want to do is take care of you, I don’t care. I said, ‘You work out the details.’” I wrote up the speech, as Trump headed to West Palm Beach to deliver more remarks a few hours later. The White House didn’t like my story. Their rapid-response team called it the work of a “total loser”4 and “a miserable TDS-ridden moron.” You can be the judge of whether it’s a fair story or the product of someone afflicted with “TDS.” (The White House’s shorthand for “Trump Derangement Syndrome.”) I’ve pasted the story below with a gift link, meaning that you don’t need to be a Washington Post subscriber to read it. It might prompt you for an email address, though. Meanwhile, I’ll be down in Florida for the rest of the weekend, covering the president. It’s TBD whether those stories will be deemed TDS-afflicted, too. 1 Jonathan details the past six months of ballroom fallout, reactions and the implications for executive authority here. I also had a great time talking about Trump’s ballroom and other projects with Australia’s ABC News Daily on a podcast this week. 2 The judge allowed underground construction and national security-related work to continue. But that hasn’t been enough for Trump, who says the ballroom itself is essential for his protection. 3 The ballroom donors include companies like Palantir, Google and Amazon. For transparency, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post, where I work. No one has ever interfered with our team’s coverage of the ballroom or our mentions of Amazon or Bezos, and if that changed, I’d speak out. 4 To be fair, I’ve spent the morning working on stories and writing this Substack post rather than enjoying the beautiful Florida weather. So they may be onto something about who’s winning and who’s losing.
Punk Politics/Camp Costume is a fashion exhibition curated by (some of my) brilliant Parsons students!
I have the most amazing students. I teach Fashion Journalism at Parsons, as part of its MA Fashion Studies degree, though I have students of all different disciplines throughout the New School in my class — from fine-art photographers to investigative journalists to textile designers. And I learn about all sorts of fascinating things from them, like that designers are adding faux sweat stains to their garments now (part of a trend piece about “anatomy core”) and that real “French girl style” is actually about being “cunti cunta” (aka loud, rude, too much, liberated). So when I found out that some of my students were curating a fashion exhibition opening tonight(!!!), I just knew that it would be brilliant too. Wearable Art is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Subscribe It’s called Punk Politics/Camp Costuming1, and it’s up through May 10 at La Sudestada, the wonderful gallery and concept store in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. I asked the exhibit’s lead curator, Ella Birney (a talented costume and knitwear designer from Belfast who also happens to be in my class), all about it. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. Tell me about the idea of this exhibition and how it came about. Ella Birney: For our Fashion Curation class, we had to pitch [exhibition] proposals to our professor, Jessica [Glasscock], and I really wanted to continue on the themes that I was exploring in my BA when I was studying in London a couple of years ago. My BA was very punk-inspired and very political. Everything I do, as you know from my writing, always has a slight Irish, political twist to it2. So in my BA project, it was looking at knitwear as a conveyor for exploring political identity in somewhere like Ireland, where identity is such a point of contention. And looking at the images that I generated from that project, there was something so camp about the whole thing. Like, it’s so playful and in bad taste to do a political message — like a knitted Union Jack — out of mohair. There’s something very camp about that. So that’s where it kind of became punk politics/camp costuming — looking at how from the 1970s to now there’s been protest through costume and clothing. What was your BA in? It was fashion textiles, knitwear. Very craft heavy, which — craft is never taken seriously either. That’s also a kind of spin [on the punk/camp thing]. The Union Jack knit that you made is included in the show — what is camp about knitting a Union Jack out of mohair? The whole ethos of camp is kind of bad taste, doing things that are tongue in cheek and a bit wink, wink, nudge, nudge. Like, this is a bit silly. Everything I do is like, this is a bit silly. Like, being from the North of Ireland, everything you do is political. So it’s like, everything is going to be looked at in a certain lens anyway, so we may as well lean into it. So the Union Jack was because I come from a mixed marriage — Protestant-Catholic. And in the North of Ireland, that’s still a big deal. And even though I’m a Catholic and brought up in a very like Catholic Nationalist family, there [were] Union Jacks [the symbol of the United Kingdom] on my street. So I was like, then I’m gonna make your Union Jack out of knitwear. And then that kind of all linked back to the punk movement that Vivian Westwood forefronted in the late 70s, [with her stores] Let It Rock and Seditionaries. How did you source your items? Once we decided on this exhibition idea, everyone in the class was put to [think about] what do you think can fit into punk politics/camp costuming and finding designers that fit that brief. Me and my co-curators, Dulcinea Flores and Allison Gramando, made a brief to send out — with a mood board and color stories, stuff like that — and then everyone kind of got to work emailing people. We reached out to other Parsons grads. Even through Instagram stories we’ve been able to reach so many people who were like, Yeah, of course, I’ll write something for this, or Please — let me submit stuff. It actually was quite easy sourcing things. … The Parsons thing gets you quite far. What were some great pieces you got? There’s a Brooklyn-based, nonbinary artist called Buzz Slutsky. I can’t even remember how I found them, but I came across this crazy, shoe thing — they had made all these different shoes out of papier-mâché, and the story behind them is so fantastic, so interesting. They were just so obliging, like, Of course, you can have these for a few weeks. I was really happy about that. And then we have art from a collective here called Art Comes First. And they lent loads of really amazing pieces that just tied everything together. You have your Union Jack knit in the show too. Any other pieces that you made? There’s three of my BA mohair knits. There’s the Union Jack. There’s a mohair with the word “No” — which is based on an old political campaign in Ireland that was “Ulster says no to sodomy.” And then there’s another one that is red, white and blue, like the Union Jack, but has the word “Catholic” on it and lots of holy medals. I’m so happy I got to include those. How many pieces are in the show? Between 49 and 52, something like that. A load of clothing and accessories, shoes. There’s a Brooklyn-based Irish photographer who’s given us photos. There’s also a shopping cart that is an art piece by Art Comes First that has gold knuckle dusters as the handles. There’s also lots of T-shirts, original pins from the 70s and 80s that were from people’s dads. I also brought my record player, and all of [co-curator] Allison’s dad’s original albums so everyone could play records. Oh my gosh! Yeah, it’s cool. Anything else you would like to add? If we get to do an exhibition, why would we not make it political in this day and age? I hope that people come. There’s a lot of history, because it starts back in the 70s. It’s not like chronological or anything, but there are historical objects. I hope people come out of it thinking, out of all the really horrendous decades of the 70s and 80s and 90s, all these amazing subcultures happened. There are horrible political times, but there’s art that comes out of it that lasts. Punk Politics/Camp Costume is on view May 1-10 at La Sudestada, 67 West St. Suite 513, Greenpoint, Brooklyn. RSVP for the opening Friday May 1 6pm-8pm here. There’s also a button-making and patch-making workshop and artist talk May 9. Follow the show’s Instagram page @punkxcamp.parsons. Special shout out to all the students who put on this show: Ella Birney (lead curator), Dulcinea Flores (curator), Allison Gramando (curator), Pierre Sanon (lead exhibition designer), Eliana Daneshvari (exhibition designer), Reilly Lowell (editor), Jess Gayo (researcher/writer), Joyce Gayo (researcher/writer), Maria Magdalena Ugarte Montero (researcher/writer), Cassidy Colarik (exhibition press officer), Shelby Shovein (educator), Sarah Mahnke-Baum (educator), Trinidy Coleman (graphic designer), and Leonie Soravia (project manager). Jessica Glasscock was the faculty advisor. 1 The website is definitely worth checking out. 2 This is true!
30,000 Facebook Accounts Hacked via Google AppSheet Phishing Campaign
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Coffee is complex. Can science standardize it for the better?
Ask any coffee aficionado, and they’ll tell you: A good cup is about more than the beans. The flavor is affected by lots of things – the roast and fermentation of the beans, the coarseness of the grind, the brewing temperature and even the chemicals in the water used to brew it. But there are very few quantitative ways to assess all the flavor variations. Current industry standards measure the concentration of coffee, but they often miss qualities like the acidity, brightness and fruitness. Scientists at the University of Oregon are trying to change that using a tool called a potentiostat that’s often used to measure the charge in batteries.Interested in more food and beverage science? Email us your question at shortwave@npr.org and we may turn it into an episode!Listen to every episode of Short Wave sponsor-free and support our work at NPR by signing up for Short Wave+ at plus.npr.org/shortwave.
Press gala shooter / Political violence / Iran war price tag
Saturday’s attack at the White House Correspondents' Association Dinner was the third assassination attempt on President Trump.Host Mary Louise Kelly speaks with NPR National Security Correspondent Greg Myre and NPR Justice Correspondent Ryan Lucas about what the attack says about the state of political violence in the U.S. and the debate over whether the Secret Service was ready to protect Trump and those around him. Email the show at sourcesandmethods@npr.orgNPR+ supporters hear every episode without sponsor messages and unlock access to our complete archive. Sign up at plus.npr.org.
The Chinese Government Has Been Targeting Journalists in an Entirely New Way
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Writing science fiction with Daniel H. Wilson
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Trump Fires All 22 Board Members of National Science Foundation
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Thanks to Musk v. Altman lawsuit, it's now public record that Gabe Newell emailed Elon Musk to get his pal Hideo Kojima a tour of SpaceX and OpenAI
The man really wants to go to space.
Sony clarifies recent PlayStation DRM update
PlayStation fans and gaming preservations have been alarmed since late last week that a new 30-day timer attached attached to newly-purchased digital games for PlayStation 4 and 5 might render those games unplayable if the system they’re on is offline for longer than a month. But a rep from Sony told Game File today that new system will require only a single online check before it functions as a perpetual license for the digitally purchased game. That is consistent with a newer theory that emerged by gamers testing the 30-day timer over the last two days. “Players can continue to access and play their purchased games as usual,” a rep for PlayStation told me over email. “A one-time online check is required after purchase to confirm the game’s license, after which no further check-ins are needed.” The rep’s explanation squares with the current understanding among players about what’s happening. A multi-day mystery A post last Friday by YouTuber Lance MacDonald spread awareness over the 30-day timer. Quickly, players began stress-testing the system, removing a battery within their PlayStations and checking what would happen if their systems were offline past the timer window. They noticed that setting a PS4 or PS5 to be the “primary” console—a common Sony-authorized method to retain rights to a digital game—wasn’t overriding the 30-day limit. On Tuesday came the breakthrough: A gamer called Andshrew on the Resetera forums posted the results of some tasting. They found that digital games purchased on PS4/PS5 after some time in mid-April would get a 30-day timer that could then be removed and replaced with a perpetual license that would allow the game to be played offline. The transition to the perpetual license occurred some number of days after the digital game was purchased and the system was connected to the internet. They believed that a PlayStation’s online check-in would trigger the license change no sooner than 15 days after the user had purchased the game. This synced with the theory that Sony’s new system is related to the 14-day window that PlayStation users have to request a refund for digitally purchased games. The new timer/check-in system could be a way to defeat some exploit in that refund system, some users theorized. Game File is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Subscribe In a follow-up, I asked the Sony rep if the 15-day timeline is accurate or if the perpetual license can be activated sooner after purchase. If they share more, I’ll update this post. Sony has not said why they’ve introduced the timer and whether it is designed to stop people from exploiting the refund system. But their explanation suggests that this new DRM method should not result in long-term loss of access to digitally purchased games, just because a PlayStation is offline for a month or Sony’s servers are down. Xbox flashback For many some gamers, the initial reporting of the 30-day timer conjured memories of Microsoft’s disastrous May 2013 announcement of the Xbox One, which was going to require an internet-connected check-in once a day, lest your games become unplayable.1 After widespread backlash, Microsoft abandoned that plan, ahead of the Xbox One’s launch. 1 Fun fact: That 24-hour check-in detail was my scoop from an interview I had that day with then-Xbox exec Phil Harrison. I was EiC of Kotaku at the time and rushing from one Xbox One preview appointment on Microsoft’s campus to another. I phoned the news in to reporter Jason Schreier, who wrote it up for the site.
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Mental health series presented by MSPR and campus partners
Morehead State Public Radio, in collaboration with the Department of Sociology, Social Work & Criminology, Counseling & Health Services, and the JED Foundation, will present a five-part radio series throughout May 2026 in recognition of Mental Health Awareness Month. The series, “Call to Mind,” is produced by American Public Media and hosted by veteran journalist Angela Davis. The hour-long programs feature sound-rich storytelling and expert insight, highlighting the experiences of individuals navigating mental health challenges and exploring ways to support well-being. You can listen to WMKY at 90.3FM at www.wmky.org, via a phone app, or by smart speaker (“Play WMKY”). For additional information, email Hitchcock at p.hitchc@moreheadstate.edu or call 606-783-2334.
My Friend Butt-Dialed Me and Left a Voicemail. Now I Know Something I Shouldn’t.
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Former Health Official Charged With Concealing Emails About Covid-19 Grants
David Morens, who was a senior adviser at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, is accused of evading document requests.
Trump fires independent board overseeing National Science Foundation
Positions ‘terminated, effective immediately’, says email to scientists sent on president’s behalf, in move labelled ‘dangerous attack’ on US innovation
Trump fires independent board overseeing National Science Foundation
Members of the National Science Board received an email on Friday sent from the Presidential Personnel Office stating that their position was terminated.
Is Outlook Down? Microsoft Reports Sign-on Issues With Email Client
You might have trouble logging into your email Monday morning.
Broncos draft grades Reacts survey: Grading the full 2026 class
Welcome to SB Nation Reacts, a survey of fans across the NFL. Throughout the year we ask questions of the most plugged-in Seahawks fans and fans across the country. Sign up here to participate in the weekly emailed surveys. The 2026 Draft has come to a close, and the Broncos have added some key players […]
I landed a job from a hack I found on Reddit
A job-seeker landed a role at a major retailer by using a free, AI hack she found on Reddit for locating recruiter emails.
Marion County Health & Human Services leaders abruptly depart under unclear circumstances
Ryan Matthews, Marion County’s Health & Human Services administrator, and Deputy Director Katrina Griffith are no longer working for the county as of Wednesday, April 22, according to an email to staff obtained by Salem Reporter. It did not clarify the circumstances of their departure. To comment on this story, use the form at the end of the report.
Sheridan School District will stop health insurance coverage for staff as teachers strike hits 3 weeks
Some district staff were told they owe the district for insurance premiums, according to an email sent to employees
Goodbye, OTPs and magic links: Signing up for new Android apps just got a lot easier
Google has introduced a new Verified Email feature to Android, and it's about to make signing up for new apps much easier.
Is tit-for-tat political gerrymandering the future of US politics?
Virginia voters delivered a major win to Democrats on Tuesday.A narrow majority voted to allow lawmakers to bypass the state's bipartisan redistricting commission. That means the Democratic-led legislature will create a map that’s more favorable to them in the midterms.It's the latest chapter in a redistricting saga that President Trump started last year, but is the tit-for-tat redistricting battle the future of US electoral politics?We speak with Democratic Virginia governor Abigail Spanberger to hear her perspective.For sponsor-free episodes of Consider This, sign up for Consider This+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org.Email us at considerthis@npr.org.This episode was produced by Tyler Bartlam and Matt Ozug. It was edited by Tinbete Ermyas. Our executive producer is Sami Yenigun.
WV’s shortage of psychiatrists worst in the nation, report says
Trilliant Health, a Tennessee-based health care analytics and market research firm, released its 2026 Behavioral Health Report in April 2026 and reported that West Virginia has 5.7% of the adequate supply of psychiatrists needed to serve the state’s population, which is the lowest percentage of any state in the nation. Brad Story, the CEO of the West Virginia Behavioral Healthcare Providers Association, said this is the result of several converging challenges.
Entertainment calendar
Please email entertainment listings to entertainment518@digitalfirstmedia.com. Thursday, April 23, 2026 COHOES MUSIC HALL: 58 Remsen St., Cohoes. Cry Baby, 7 pm. www.thecohoesmusichall.org. SARATOGA PERFORMING ARTS CENTER: 108 Avenue …
Exclusive: Redwood Materials lays off 10% in restructuring to chase energy storage business
The company is restructuring some teams to accommodate a booming energy storage business, according to emails viewed by TechCrunch.
Redwood Materials lays off 10% in restructuring to chase energy storage business
The company is restructuring some teams to accommodate a booming energy storage business, according to emails viewed by TechCrunch.
Despite Fast-paced Momentum, AMC Entertainment (AMC) Is Still a Bargain Stock
AMC Entertainment (AMC) made it through our 'Fast-Paced Momentum at a Bargain' screen and could be a great choice for investors looking for stocks that have gai
'Sports come second': Student-athletes work to balance between classroom, competition
For many college athletes, balancing academics and athletics isn’t achieved through last-minute emails or excuses about missed assignments.
Former Pinterest team redesigns email with Extra — and it’s actually good
Extra, from a team of former Pinterest designers and engineers, reimagines email around your life instead of the traditional inbox.
Shaky political science: using "simulated" elections over real-world elections
[Dear DSOS readers – this article is the latest in our “Shaky Political Science” series. In our 38 page report, “Shaky political ‘science’ misses mark on ranked choice voting,” released in early December, we examined over 40 studies focused on ranked choice voting. We found that many of these studies suffered from puzzling research methodologies, poorly constructed surveys, unrealistic simulated elections, cherry picked data, and faulty analyses that often were contradicted by results from real-world elections (a link to our full paper is here). Here are links to the first three articles in our series: the first one summarizing the overall results of our report, the second one analyzing a study co-authored by University of Minnesota academic Larry Jacobs, which was one of the most error-prone of all the research we reviewed in our report, and a third article showing an admirable example of two political scientists holding two other political scientists accountable for their flawed, sloppy research]. In this fourth article in our “Shaky Political Science” series, we shine a spotlight on seven studies that were web-hosted and funded by New America’s Political Reform Program and its Electoral Reform Research Group (the ERRG is an ad hoc committee headed by New America’s Political Reform Program and joined by the American Enterprise Institute, the Unite America Institute and Stanford University’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law). This research consortium has been led by Lee Drutman, senior fellow with New America’s Political Reform Program. These seven studies are simply not credible from any objective standard about how political “science” is supposed to illuminate our understanding of either ranked choice voting or politics in general. The feature that six of these seven studies have in common is that they all used surveys – artificial, simulated elections -- to attempt to say something cogent or interesting about ranked choice voting (RCV) elections. None of them used real world data from actual RCV elections – either the 1000+ elections in the US or the many thousands of elections from places like Australia, Ireland and elsewhere where RCV has been used for 100 years. While a few of these studies conclude with some mixed positives about RCV, our analysis here is content neutral. The idea that, with a political reform like RCV, you can ask respondents in a mock, artificial election to vote with that method, with only the barest of explanation about how RCV works or its likely impacts (i.e. no spoiler candidates, majority winners, voters liberated to pick their favorite candidates, coalition-building), and then ask them their thoughts/reactions about voting in that system, with fake candidates and no real campaigning, no real exposure to an actual election or actual candidates, rests on some very puzzling assumptions. The findings of these seven studies actually are contradicted by the findings from many other studies based on real-world RCV elections. These New America studies also failed to list the real-world RCV studies in their own citations, instead including those studies that reinforced their conclusions. The seven studies featured in this article were chosen because they form a cohesive cohort which precisely illustrates one of the main points of our research paper, namely that using surveys, i.e. artificial elections, or mathematical/theoretical models, instead of real-world data, is in fact “shaky political science.” Below are summaries of our analysis of five of the seven New America studies. You can read our complete analysis of all seven studies at our paper, “Shaky political ‘science’ misses mark on ranked choice voting.” Choosing to “Vote As Usual” by Andre Blais, Carolina Plescia, and Semra Sevi. New America. (Blais et al., 2021). This study, web-hosted and funded by New America’s Political Reform Program and its Electoral Reform Research Group, used two surveys in which respondents completed ballots for simulated elections using plurality, approval, RCV and point (Score) voting. In both cases the authors provided the respondents with only minimal explanation of each method. For example, the entire explanation for RCV was “For this vote, rank the candidates from your first to your last choice (you do not need to rank them all). This is called the ranked vote.” That’s it. The study did not provide any context or explanation to survey respondents about why she/he might want to rank multiple candidates. Participants were not even told that ballots would be tabulated using an “instant” runoff, not to mention any description of RCVs ability to eliminate the spoiler effect or liberate voters to rank their favorite candidates without fear of helping the “greater evil” candidate to win. That’s like taking an iPhone back in time to 1970 and asking someone if they like it better than their rotary phone without explaining how it works. Their first survey targeted states that held 2020 Super Tuesday Democratic primaries and used the real candidates’ names in the survey; the second survey used fictitious candidates. In other words, they surveyed respondents who had only ever participated in plurality elections, had no history or background with using RCV or any of the other methods, had no clue about its likely impacts, and did not communicate how the alternative methods would be counted, and then asked them: “How satisfied are you with using each system?” Predictably, the winner was plurality elections, the system used for president, Congress, gubernatorial and state legislative elections – in other words, the method they have been using, year after year, all their voting lives. With so little explanation of RCV and its impacts, this study is simply not credible in discovering anything useful about real-world RCV elections. It merely shows that a basic voter education campaign is needed when adopting a new election system. Additionally, the result contradicts many other post-election surveys following real RCV elections, asking opinions from voters who had just participated in a RCV election, that showed a great deal of satisfaction with RCV (see details on that in Studies 22-25 in our paper, as well as the four studies cited in the review for Study 28). Share Other studies on “satisfaction” and “understanding” make similar mistakes, in terms of basing their surveys on inadequate explanation to respondents and lack of education about context. How could any survey ever hope to measure accurately, in essence simulate a real-world election, without actual campaigning candidates, the media writing about those candidates, organizations endorsing candidates and voters being inundated with crucial information? More than anything, what these “studies” based on surveys show is that if you ask voters about something they don’t know very much about, and fail to adequately educate them, their responses will unsurprisingly reflect their confusion. Equally puzzling is that New America’s Electoral Reform Research Group, headed by political scientist Lee Drutman, found this to be a credible enough study that they not only published it but highlighted it in Drutman’s own discussion of research related to ranked choice voting. This pattern was repeated in study after study featured by New America’s Electoral Reform Research Group. For example in Ranked-Choice Voting and Political Expression: Voter Guides Narrow the Gap between Informed and Uninformed Citizens by Cheryl Boudreau, Jonathan Colner, and Scott MacKenzie, the researchers based their analysis on a survey which found that respondents who were asked to vote in a simulated RCV election, with minimal explanation of RCV or how it works, displayed less evidence of being informed about how to use RCV effectively, with the least informed voters ranking fewer candidates. As pointed out under the study above, in a real election voters are informed by a wide variety of methods, including public education by the election administration, by interested political groups, the media, and the candidates themselves who benefit from voters being aware of how to vote in the new system. In Support for Ranked-Choice Voting across Race and Partisanship by Joseph Anthony, David C. Kimball, Jack Santucci and Jamil Scott, the researchers used respondents from different parties and races voting in simulated plurality and RCV elections, who indicated their satisfaction with each voting method. Instead of using real world election results, the authors fell back on the easy, armchair and less reliable academic research methodology of making up mock elections. As with the other studies, little explanation was given of how RCV works or what its implications might be (electing majority winners or eliminating spoilers, for example). Unsurprisingly, this study found that respondents were not very satisfied with RCV. However, when the authors added an explanation that RCV has a tendency to elect more women and people of color, they found that this greater explanation increased the preference for RCV. The more voters were familiar with it, and the more they understood potential positive impacts – surprise! -- the more they were open to switching away from the status quo. Of note, the results from this study are thoroughly contradicted by a number of other studies whose data was obtained from real RCV elections with real voters. Those studies show a great deal of satisfaction with RCV. More “fake election” research An interesting wrinkle on this “research by fake elections” approach, which only served to illustrate how unreliable such “research” can become, was taken in Ranked-Choice Voting, Runoff, and Democracy: Insights from Maine and Other U.S. States by Joseph Cerrone and Cynthia McClintock_,_ also web-hosted and funded by New America’s ERRG. It gets high marks for creativity, but an eye-roll for thinking this could possibly add anything meaningful to our understanding of real world RCV elections. This study tried to determine whether RCV, plurality or two-round runoff elections provided greater voter satisfaction and acceptance of election results. To determine that, the authors conducted a survey asking if voters were satisfied with a fictional newspaper report of an election, with three different versions given to respondents – plurality, runoff and RCV, with variations of Republican/Democrat winners and variations of “come-from-behind” winners,” i.e. candidates not initially in first place but who win the “runoff.” Again, a minimal explanation of RCV or how it works was given, and the survey showed that respondents had the greatest unfamiliarity with RCV than the other methods. The unsurprising result? Respondents were much more satisfied with “come-from-behind” victories in a traditional two-round runoff election than in RCV, even though RCV is also a runoff system but with a single round of counting. Interestingly, the dissatisfaction with RCV disappeared for those who were more familiar with RCV. In fact, among those respondents who were “very familiar” with RCV, they were equally satisfied with RCV, runoff and plurality. Surprise, surprise. Again, what this study revealed, more than anything, is not only the inadequacy of the explanation for RCV given by the authors of this study, but the failure of the research format itself, thinking that such an artificial mock election could somehow simulate what actually happens in the real world in a real RCV election. Those four studies reviewed above are fitting examples of inadequate and shaky political “science.” Other studies reviewed in our paper from the New America/Electoral Reform Research Group cohort which also used mock elections included: Ranked-Choice Voting is an Acquired Taste by Joseph Anthony and David C. Kimball. New America. (Anthony et al., 2021). Ranked-Choice Voting is No Refuge for Extreme Candidates by Melissa Baker. New America. (Baker, 2021). Also included in this New America cohort is Does Ranked-Choice Voting Reduce Racial Polarization? by Yuki Atsusaka and Theodore Landsman, which actually did use real-world election results data but applied an odd and unconventional methodology to the data which relied on shaky assumptions and non-real-world scenarios that were too divorced from reality. To determine levels of “racially polarized voting,” the researchers imagined “ethnic parties,” by which they mean political parties for each ethnic group, which was especially odd since the election data they were using came from nonpartisan RCV races. But then they made an even odder assumption, namely that since race and ethnic characteristics of studied voters were not available, the authors tried to infer that information based on who voters selected and the racial make-up of voters in each district. This amounted to little more than vague and ambiguous guesswork dressed up with a bunch of mathematical equations used to give it a veneer of scientific appearance. Indeed, it seemed to assume racial polarization in order to prove racial polarization. Based on this questionable methodology, the authors concluded that RCV doesn’t reduce racial polarization. But the premise of this study missed an obvious reality: since RCV incentivizes more candidates to run and can result in more diverse fields of candidates, one would expect more racially-polarized voting in voters’ top rankings, not less, because more voters would have someone on that ballot who represents their racial or ethnic identity and more freedom to vote for their real first choice. By encouraging more diverse candidates and eliminating the spoiler effect, RCV facilitates voting for a favorite candidate of your own race and then selecting a second choice with the best likelihood of winning. The real measure is what voters do with their additional rankings – do they consider other candidates and vote “for the best of the rest”? This study didn’t tell us anything useful about that. But readily available data shows this is common in real RCV elections, and candidates act on this knowledge by engaging with voters outside their racial group. So the authors of this study failed to consider or account for what actually happens in real-world elections, and their conclusions are tainted by this failure. New America has contributed a great deal over the past 2.5 decades to our understanding of many policy areas, including politics and political reform (full disclosure: Steven Hill, one of the authors of this article and of the “Shaky Political Science” research paper and series, is a former senior fellow and former director of New America’s political reform program, 2005-2010). So it was especially disappointing that New America funded and published such a large batch of dubious studies about ranked choice voting. The stated praiseworthy goal of its Electoral Reform Research Group was to inspire new academic research about ranked choice voting that would shed light and help the public better understand the impacts of RCV. Instead, the ERRG research did just the opposite. It produced dubious research that created more confusion and misinformation. In so doing, New America’s political reform program contributed to “shaky political science.” Steven Hill and Paul Haughey Share Upgrade to $5 subscription Thanks for reading DemocracySOS, a reader-supported digital portal for the pro-democracy movement. Subscribe for only $5 per month to receive full benefits and to support our work. Subscribe
Statehouse beat: Ethics in West Virginia politics are dead and gone
We are witnessing an appalling, perhaps unprecedented decline in ethics in West Virginia politics.
Gigs turns your concert history into a personal live music archive
New iPhone app Gigs uses AI to turn old tickets, screenshots, and emails into a personal concert archive with stats, memories, and more.
Venture capitalist and former marine Larry Lawrence, GS ’69, Business ’71, named School of General Studies 2026 Class Day speaker
Larry Lawrence, GS ’69, Business ’71, venture capitalist, chair emeritus of the School of General Studies’ board of visitors, will serve as the General Studies Class Day speaker for the class of 2026, General Studies Dean Lisa Rosen-Metsch, GS/JTS ’90, announced in a Thursday email to the school’s students.
ChatGPT maker OpenAI shifts its focus to business users amid Anthropic pressure
The same ChatGPT chatbot that gave OpenAI’s chief financial officer Sarah Friar a tilapia recipe for a recent Sunday night dinner at home is also now doing her most mundane tasks at work like summarizing her emails and Slack messages.
Entertainment calendar
Please email entertainment listings to entertainment518@digitalfirstmedia.com. Thursday, April 16, 2026 PALACE THEATRE: 19 Clinton Ave., Albany. Fetty Wap, 8 pm. www.palacealbany.org. THE EGG: 1 Empire State Plaza, Albany. Marty…
A new approach to brain health, one neuron at a time
Neuroscientist Paul Nuyujukian likens the brain to a stadium full of people. To eavesdrop on the crowd you could put a microphone in the middle of the stadium. But to understand the conversations you need to record individual people. He thinks about the brain the same way. To understand brain disease, he studies neurons—one at a time. And his insights are shedding light on a big global issue—stroke. The World Health Organization predicts one in four adults will have a stroke in their lifetime. Strokes can cause death, or lead to paralysis or speech problems. But there’s still a lot researchers don’t know about how the brain recovers from an event like a stroke. Nuyujukian directs a lab at Stanford University that studies how the brain controls movement, including after neurological events like stroke. We get into how he does this, and why he hopes his research could eventually help people who’ve been paralyzed. Email us your questions about the brain – or anything else to do with science at shortwave@npr.org. We may turn it into an episode in the future!Listen to every episode of Short Wave sponsor-free and support our work at NPR by signing up for Short Wave+ at plus.npr.org/shortwave.
Apple Launches New All-in-One Apple Business Platform for Device Management, Email, and Customer...
Apple today launched its new all-in-one Apple Business platform, debuting the refreshed Apple Business web portal and accompanying app. Apple Business aggregates several of Apple's prior business-focused products, like Apple Business Essentials, Apple Business Manager, and Apple Business Connect. The service offers organizations a unified platform for managing devices, employees, communications, and customer engagement across the Apple ecosystem.
Microsoft Shuts Down Outlook App For Android Users In 6 Weeks
Outlook Lite is no more — here's what you need to do before you lose access to your emails.
Extra half-mile added to some runner’s course during Covenant Health Knoxville Marathon
The email said the lead vehicle took participants approximately a half mile longer than the advertised distance at the turnaround on Neyland Drive.
Job hunter emailed company after getting ghosted post-interview
After multiple interviews and weeks of silence, a job seeker says she emailed the hiring team to push for better communication.
In praise of popular science
As a kid, I was enthusiastically and unreservedly in favor of a manned space program. Our destiny lay in the stars, I figured. Get people out there. We need Star Trek here and now. As I got older, I became rather disenchanted with the idea. Humans are expensive, fragile, and inefficient as space cargo. We could flood the solar system with 100 robotic probes for the price of any single manned mission and get back just as useful data. Besides, it turns out space travel is dangerous. Tusk is a reader-supported publication. To support this work, please become a paid subscriber. Subscribe When it came to the recent Artemis II mission, my cynical side didn’t really see the point. Flying around the Moon and back is literally something we did before I was born, and I once owned a Members Only jacket. Apollo 8 circled the Moon ten times and returned to Earth safely the same month that “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang” was released. What was the point of repeating a feat that far braver people once did with tin foil and slide rules? Yet I’ve surprised myself with how moving I’ve found the Artemis II mission to be. The photos have been stunning. The crew has been professional and engaging. There have been modest but important milestones — the farthest humans have travelled from Earth; the first woman, person of color, and non-American to leave low-Earth orbit; innovations in communication, and more. One thing that really stood out is that this is really NASA at its finest. Not that this is the most important mission they ever pulled off, but they did this in a competent way that celebrated the achievements and kept the crew and the science at the forefront of the project. This wasn’t some billionaire throwing celebrities or cars into orbit as a vanity project — this was a collective effort to send experts in to do a job and come home safely. We don’t see that sort of thing much these days. I’m guessing few people would describe many government agencies as inspiring, but this one counts for me. We’re living through a profoundly anti-science era, in which pathbreaking, lifesaving discoveries like mRNA vaccines are routinely downplayed or even vilified. As I’ve noted previously, this era is something like that of the Red Scare in the 1940s and 50s, in which “egghead” professors were portrayed as out of touch or even hostile to regular Americans. One of the things that helped break that spell was Sputnik — the Soviet communications satellite that demonstrated that the United States was falling behind in crucial scientific research and applications. Its launch triggered a new appreciation for American science and goaded the federal government into supporting research universities and labs. I’m not saying that Artemis is the equivalent of Sputnik, but it potentially reminds people that there’s some value to scientific endeavors and the human faces attached to them. Despite my love for the show “For All Mankind,” I’m far from convinced that there’s any real value to putting colonies on the Moon or Mars that would justify the capital investment and the massive health risks to the astronauts. But sending scientific good will ambassadors on a trip into space once in a while? Bring it. Share
Google rolls out Gmail end-to-end encryption on mobile devices
Google says Gmail end-to-end encryption (E2EE) is now available on all Android and iOS devices, allowing enterprise users to read and compose emails without additional tools.
Kristin Eschenfelder named interim dean of UW College of Letters & Science
Professor and Academic Associate Dean Kristin Eschenfelder was appointed as interim dean of the University of Wisconsin College of Letters & Science by Provost John Zumbrunnen, according to an email sent to UW students Thursday. The appointment will be effective May 17, when current Dean of UW L&S Eric Wilcots begins his term as interim chancellor,...
Gmail finally offers end-to-end encryption for email on Android and iPhone
Your data will be more secure, provided you're with the right company.
Avec's Tinder-styled email app allows you to swipe through your inbox
Users can use the in-built voice transcription tool to reply to emails
Amazon Pulls Support for Perfectly Fine Older Kindles
In an email to customers, Amazon announced that it would be ending service for Kindle devices older than the 2012 edition. Those devices will lose access to the Kindle Store.
Alarm in health service over Palantir staff being given NHS email accounts
Exclusive: Sources believe AI tech company’s engineers have been granted access to directory of up to 1.5m staff
Amazon is cutting off support for older Kindles
Amazon has sent out emails to some of its users, with a warning that it’s discontinuing support for Kindle ereaders and Fire tables released in 2012 or earlier.
