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Clint Kisker, Sean Kisker, Jason Kandar Launch Twin Pines Entertainment Aimed Heartland Audiences
Twin Pines Entertainment was founded by Clint Kisker, Sean Kisker and Jason Kander to produce sports-themed series and movies for heartland America audiences.
Test your pop culture: From Hollywood to the Heartland
From a surprising Marilyn Monroe family connection to candid revelations about Hollywood relationships, see how closely you followed this week's entertainment headlines.
Heartland Health: What to know about measles
Heartland Health: What to know about measles
Black Tooth Business Park Final Plat
The Sheridan City Council met for their first regular business meeting of October Monday night. Sheridan Media’s Ron Richter has the details. A resolution for the final plat of the Black Tooth Business Park located at 3150 Heartland Drive in Sheridan was approved by the Council. City Planner Kelly Schroeder says the applicant, Heartland Assets, […]
Heartland Catfish Unveils New Website
Heartland Catfish Company recently launched a new website in celebration of its 30th anniversary. The site has been refreshed to focus on retail and food service partnerships, give a detailed look at the company’s products and processes and emphasize consumer education about the benefits of U.S. Farm-Raised Catfish as a versatile and healthy protein source. […]
Huntsville Honored As ‘Secret Sauce Community’ At Heartland Summit
What’s Huntsville’s “secret sauce?”
With the Expansion of Tampa General to DeSoto County, Florida’s Premier Academic Health System Strengthens Access to Exceptional Care in Rural Communities
DeSoto Memorial Hospital is Now TGH DeSoto OCTOBER 2, 2026 – Tampa General Hospital (TGH) today welcomes patients in Florida’s Heartland to TGH DeSoto, formerly DeSoto Memorial Hospital. As Florida’s premier academic health system, TGH continues to expand its reach across the state, bringing greater access to exceptional care and specialized services to rural communities. […]
Small business owners beginning to adopt artificial intelligence, Fed study says
Small business owners are beginning to adopt artificial intelligence and are using the technology as a part of their daily operations, according to a survey by Heartland Forward.
Small business owners beginning to adopt artificial intelligence, Fed study says
Small business owners are beginning to adopt artificial intelligence and are using the technology as a part of their daily operations, according to a survey by Heartland Forward.
Heartland Forward Launches First-of-Its-Kind Tool to Improve Maternal Health and Economic Outcomes
/PRNewswire/ -- Today at the 2026 Heartland Summit, Heartland Forward announced the launch of the beta version of its Maternal Resiliency Index, an...
Heartland Small Businesses Match the Nation on AI Adoption as Owners Say AI Boosts Their Bottom Line
/PRNewswire/ -- Heartland Forward, a non-profit think-and-do tank accelerating economic growth across the heartland, today released a new survey titled "AI on...
IndyStar's entertainment staff recommends these Heartland Film Fest picks
Choosing which of the 100+ films to watch at Heartland is tough work. Let these 10 IndyStar entertainment staff picks help you with decision-making.
Heartland Whole Health Launches 'Blueprint for Rural Healthcare Transformation'
Bentonville's Heartland Whole Health Institute has launched Heartland Whole Health Connect, which it calls a pioneering initiative designed
Trouble in the Heartland
The G.O.P. is on defense in the so-called “blue wall” states and beyond as gas prices remain high.
Ohio governor’s race is a battle over Covid, health costs, and trust in science
The race between Amy Acton and Vivek Ramaswamy could be the election’s most direct test of where the heartland stands on health care and the pandemic.
Ohio governor’s race is a battle over Covid, health costs, and trust in science
The race between Amy Acton and Vivek Ramaswamy could be the election’s most direct test of where the heartland stands on health care and the pandemic.
Marion, Carbondale to host free health fairs for Heartland seniors Sept. 22-23
Both fairs are free to the public and will feature local healthcare providers, senior service organizations, and legislative information.
To "Back the Blue," Iowa leaders must choose the badge over politics
Tony Thompson, Ken Runde, and Kevin Techau: "Back the Blue" must mean supporting officers when it is politically inconvenient.
Heartland Whole Health Institute tests ways to expand health care
The institute is testing ways to expand access and lower costs.
Healthy Moms, Healthy Babies pledges $100M to cut US maternal mortality rate in half
Healthy Moms, Healthy Babies America, the bipartisan campaign founded by Olivia and Tom Walton’s nonprofit Heartland Forward, announced a $100 million pledge Thursday to make giving birth in the United States safer.
Spanish Grand Prix 2026: Can football-obsessed Madrid embrace F1?
After F1’s explosion in popularity away from its European heartland the sport is coming home. Why Madrid? Because it is beautiful… and has a very big expo centre on the outskirts.
Mercy health fair brings vital medical checkups and nutritional aid to Heartland families
The event is designed to provide critical medical screenings, vaccinations, and wellness resources to Heartland families.
Update: What We’re Watching, Sept. 4, 2026
This update covers the latest federal health policy news and its potential impact on Kansas.
Nebraska Department of Health and Human services detects two tickborne viruses
The Nebraska Department of Health and Human Services reported on Thursday detections of Heartland and Bourbon viruses in Nebraska.
Goodbye, Dolly Parton: a gay icon whose appeal reached across age, class and politics, and into the Maga heartlands
Straight women loved her, so did Eminem. Even Donald Trump found something nice to say. Her allure had no boundaries and was truly unique, says Guardian columnist Emma Brockes
It's Your Business has Heartland Dermatology and GO Topeka
News about the latest hires, retirements and more in the Topeka area.
Test your pop culture: From Hollywood to the Heartland
From a $330 million ranch purchase and a royal return to romantic escapes and bikini-clad vacations, see how closely you followed this week's biggest entertainment headlines.
Update: What We’re Watching, Aug. 21, 2026
This update covers the latest federal health policy news and its potential impact on Kansas.
Why the middle of the country is back in the center of American politics
The heartland Democrat is making a comeback.
Test your pop culture: From Hollywood to the Heartland
From Mediterranean bikini getaways to major career moves, see how well you know the stars making entertainment headlines this week.
Test your pop culture: From Hollywood to the Heartland
Test your knowledge of entertainment with this quiz on celebrities, trends and headline-making moments. Featured this week: bikini-clad vacations, an unbelievable survival story, a post-divorce splurge and a romance decades in the making.
After Hobbes vs Rousseau: Politics must move beyond human nature
Since the great debate between Hobbes and Rousseau, our political theory has been organised around a single question: is human nature essentially good or essentially corrupt? Graham Harman, the philosopher behind object-oriented ontology, argues that this is simply the wrong question to be asking. The real forces governing our collective fate - climate change, artificial intelligence, geography, and pandemics - are non-human; therefore, questions about human nature are not the central ones. Instead, Harman proposes a politics reorganised around our relationship to non-human objects and environments, in which quasi-government institutions incentivise and deter actions with the aim of extending the survival of the human race. “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” This has become one of the most popular phrases among twenty-first-century intellectuals. Often misattributed to Fredric Jameson, it has been warmly embraced by such influential authors as Slavoj Žižek and the tragically departed Mark Fisher, and has fueled the notion that the major problem with the political Left is that it simply needs to become more speculative and creative. Naturally, this is never a bad idea in any human pursuit. But what if the political distinction between Left, Right, and Center itself results from a failure of imagination? SUGGESTED READING Hobbes vs Rousseau: are we inherently evil? By Robin Douglass This particular division has been with us only since the summer of 1789. During the simmering prelude to the French Revolution, it referred originally to the physical position in the National Assembly of radical figures on one side and loyal monarchists on the other. These positions are linked with two entirely different camps of modern political theory. On the Left we find a series of authors ranging from the moderate (Locke) to the supercharged (Rousseau) to the truly radical (Marx), all of them contending that exploitation of the many by the few justifies revolutionary overthrow of the existing order. On the Right they are countered by the likes of Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Schmitt, a group of thinkers convinced that corrupt human nature can be tamed only by force. In the words of the Nazi supporter Schmitt: “One could test all theories of nature and state and political ideas according to their anthropology and classify these as to whether they consciously or unconsciously presuppose [humans] to be by nature evil or by nature good.” This is the division we continue to face today, even in the daily retail politics of Western democracies.___Our species has regularly proven itself capable of both the noblest gestures and the most scathing cruelties, making it hard to define us as essentially either emancipatory or brutal in our aims.___The most refreshing feature of David Graeber and David Wengrow’s 2021 book The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity was their awareness that the forced choice between Rousseau and Hobbes (as they put it) is no longer sufficient. Our species has regularly proven itself capable of both the noblest gestures and the most scathing cruelties, making it hard to define us as essentially either emancipatory or brutal in our aims. Far from being stationed “beyond good and evil,” we seem to be fully entangled with both. We are not naturally good or evil, Graeber and Wengrow contend, but naturally experimental and imaginative. They rest their case on the archaeological record, which seems to bear witness to numerous episodes of seasonally shifting governments and festivals, which vacillate in the same society (even in the same year) between the egalitarian and the dictatorial. Such praise of political experiment makes a good fit with the generally anarchist position defended by these authors. Yet it is also what I find most disappointing in their position. Although they are right that the forced choice between Hobbes and Rousseau falls short of what our new situation requires, the authors simply replace it with praise for the human being as a political tinkerer and performer. In other words, they give us just another theory of human nature, one that would not have been out of place in the sixteenth or seventeenth century. What other options might we have?___The time is ripe for a retheorization of politics on the basis of something other than human nature… We are not just alienated and limited by objects, but also empowered and unleashed by them___One fresh approach would be to treat politics within a broader framework than human nature, given that the polis does not exist in a vacuum filled exclusively with people. When Bruno Latour went to observe the baboons of Kenya with the San Diego anthropologist Shirley Strum, they jointly concluded that these primates were more socially interdependent than our own species. Each baboon is so reliant on the dynamics of the group that they find themselves locked into constant surveillance of their potentially dangerous peers. The group structure turns out to be inherently volatile. Humans, by contrast, are able to stabilize their societies to a large degree through the mediation of inanimate objects. Although one’s position in society may seem to fluctuate over time, considerable stability is produced through such items as apartment keys, wedding rings, and identification cards, all of them serving to secure us a place distinct from that of our fellows. The Italian philosopher Maurizio Ferraris has written at length about the crucial role of documents in establishing social relations, making him a hero among notaries in his country. Proper names and license plates cement our position amidst other humans, as do symbolic achievements such as graduation from a top university or distinguished wartime service with its various medals and ribbons. None of this is found among baboons, despite their closeness to us on the evolutionary tree: after all, we did share a common ancestor just 25 to 30 million years ago. SUGGESTED VIEWING The goodness paradox With Richard Wrangham The time is ripe for a retheorization of politics on the basis of something other than human nature, whether understood in the manner of the Left or of the Right. We are not just alienated and limited by objects, but also empowered and unleashed by them. But initially, it is true, we face non-human things primarily in the form of constraints. It would be difficult, perhaps impossible, to form a human civilization underwater, deep underground, atop Mount Everest, or in outer space. Human dependence on the non-social background takes on subtler form in discussions of political geography, especially unloved on the more idealistic Left. Consider the luckless position of Poland during World War II, sandwiched between Hitler on one side and Stalin on the other. By contrast, note the good fortune of the United States in not having a military peer positioned on any land border. Anglo-American geopolitics, since the writings of the American naval commander Alfred Thayer Mahan and the British geographer Sir Halford Mackinder, has been wedded to the notion that one or more liberal offshore naval powers should prevent any authoritarian “heartland” regime from gaining effective control of Eurasia. That remains the case whether the opponent is the impatient Napoleon, the swashbuckling German Kaiser, the villainous Hitler, the murderous Stalin, or the industrial juggernaut Chinese. In their current Foreign Affairs article “Heartland vs. Rimland,” Michael Beckley and Hal Brands analyze the current and coming state of the world on the basis of these same rather durable principles. In recent years a similar outlook has been embraced, in inverted form, by the Putin-loving Russian philosopher Aleksandr Dugin, an icon of the Rightist intellectual underworld. For Dugin, the Anglo-Saxons are an evil force bent on destroying the spiritually superior people of the land: much like Athens in its failed war with Sparta, or Carthage in its eventual collapse against Rome. But the shared notion on both sides is that any strategy that fails to take geography into account is likely to end up as a defeated form of excessive optimism.___When dealing with environmental degradation, then, we are doing business with forces that promise dire effects on our species as a whole.___More striking for us today than geography is the non-human object called climate, which threatens rimland and heartland equally. Even if we contend that humans are one hundred percent responsible for triggering the climate crisis, it remains non-human in the sense of being an independent force beyond our effective control. In a major work published just before his death in 2002, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, the American paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould noted the tendency of evolutionary theorists to focus too closely on the fate of individuals in view of their successful or failed adaptation to circumstances. With climate change, however, we confront a force that goes well beyond the scope of any individual life. Whereas Richard Dawkins extended evolutionary questions downward from individuals to the sub-individual gene, Gould pushed it upward, speaking of entire species or clades as impacted by environmental change. The asteroid that struck the Yucatán 66 million years ago is only the most famous example of this sort. In the wake of that catastrophe, large animals needing abundant supplies of food were at a fatal disadvantage by contrast with the smaller birds and mammals of the planet. When dealing with environmental degradation, then, we are doing business with forces that promise dire effects on our species as a whole. The effect is to shift our attention away from individual beings towards the survival of the group.In the United States in particular, the COVID-19 pandemic sparked considerable backlash among those who asserted a nearly absolute degree of individual freedom. In California I encountered those who demanded that their businesses be allowed to reopen, that it was enough to cover their mouths but not their noses, or that they should have the right to enter any public area despite refusing vaccination. Yet public health is probably the clearest argument against libertarianism, which often merely asserts the autonomy of individuals against any claims of the commons. In normal times the individual is worth defending; under conditions that threaten the survival of part or all of our species, compulsion may be our only resort, as with perfectly reasonable blackouts and rations in wartime. To rebuild human society under the constraints of climate change will be one of the great challenges of the century to come, as will our improvised grappling with artificial intelligence. Such phenomena pose existential risks for humanity, and leave far less room for tolerance of individual brattiness. Cases are mounting of devastating wildfires caused by arson. Recently it was reported that there is even a website where one can bet on the location of coming wildfires, raising the specter of deliberate blazes set to collect on wagers. The death penalty has steadily lost support in a world where many stress the infinite value of human life. But if we focus instead on entire ecosystems, those who purposely burn the forests may begin to look worse than serial murderers.___The politics of the future may be splintered by disagreement over such topics as how to manage our environing background and how to permit or restrict the entry of new objects into the political sphere.___So far I have spoken of force, authority, and punishment: measures sure to have greater appeal to those who identify with what we know as the Right. But other implications of the post-anthropocentric world are likely to have different backers. If non-human objects are seen as structuring political space, it stands to reason that they can no longer be introduced solely by the pace of technical breakthrough. Fields ranging from cybernetics to energy will demand increased politicization once they are reconceived not just as products of individual human investment, but as renovations of collective political geography. This need not involve world government, with its inherent risk of tyranny, but may involve quasi-governmental enforcers of prestige along the lines of a less corrupt FIFA or International Olympic Committee, punishing deviant states not with violence but with less tangible incentives.Politics will never lose its historic links with conflict and faction. But rather than factions aligned by differing theories of human nature, the politics of the future may be splintered by disagreement over such topics as how to manage our environing background and how to permit or restrict the entry of new objects into the political sphere. This will prove just as incommensurable with the modern Left/Right spectrum as a globe is with a two-dimensional map.
Test your pop culture: From Hollywood to the Heartland
Test your knowledge of entertainment with this quiz on celebrities, trends and headline-making moments. Featured this week: on-set drama, bikini photos and wardrobe malfunctions.
Inside the "We Buy Houses" Business
Have you ever gotten a text asking if you'd sell your house? Or maybe someone called out of the blue wanting to buy a property you didn't even know was connected to your name. In this episode of Entrepreneurial Shades of Gray, Dani and Chelsey sit down with Rhen Bartlett, CEO of Heartland Buys, to answer the questions so many homeowners have. How do these companies find you? Why do they target certain properties? And when does selling directly to a home buyer actually make sense? From inherited homes and rental properties to fixer-uppers and probate, Rhen pulls back the curtain on an industry most people know very little about. He also shares red flags to watch for and practical advice to help homeowners make informed decisions when they're approached about selling.
Missouri health facility failed to protect kids from sexual abuse, lawsuit says
Two former residents say they were abused by staff, while a third was assaulted under the facility’s care by a nursing home resident, according to the lawsuit.
Highest compensation at Tapestry 360 Health
Tapestry 360 Health, formerly known as Heartland Health Centers, is a Federally Qualified Health Center with locations on Chicago's North Side in Albany Park, Lincoln Square, Rogers Park, Uptown, Lakeview and seven school-based health centers.
Moving Sioux Falls Forward: Heartland Energy
You've likely experienced its service and didn't even know it: How Heartland Energy literally helps power the growth of the Sioux Falls area.
'Amazing heartland of the US': Some Kansas City-area businesses thriving after World Cup experience
"I feel like it's been great for the city": The World Cup business bump may not have been universal, but many KC-area businesses say the influx of visitors has made a major impact.
Test your pop culture: From Hollywood to the Heartland
Test your knowledge of entertainment with this quiz on celebrities, trends and headline-making moments. Featured this week: patriotic getaways, a stunning health transformation, Greek vacation photos ...
Students get hands-on science education during Camp Invention
COLUMBIANA – Students of Heartland Christian School in Columbiana recently spent a week experiencing what it is like to create a product, develop a proposal and market the product. The students in grades two through six participated in Camp Invention, a nationally recognized summer STEM camp designed to make innovation fun. Camp Invention is one […]
Students get hands-on science education during Camp Invention
COLUMBIANA – Students of Heartland Christian School in Columbiana recently spent a week experiencing what it is like to create a product, develop a proposal and market the product. The students in grades two through six participated in Camp Invention, a nationally recognized summer STEM camp designed to make innovation fun. Camp Invention is one […]
Yana Rusovski Analyzes Fair Housing Compliance Challenges in Heartland Real Estate Business
Spencer Fane attorney Yana Rusovski authored the article What Housing Providers Need to Know About the IDHR Process, recently published by Heartland Real
Test your pop culture: From Hollywood to the Heartland
Test your Taylor Swift knowledge with this quiz celebrating the pop superstar's headline-making romance with Travis Kelce. Featured this week: wedding details, memorable moments from their love story ...
Heartland business collecting donations for tornado victims
As the community of Mount Vernon begins to move forward, one local business is stepping up in an effort to aid those impacted by Sunday’s deadly tornado.
Test your pop culture: From Hollywood to the Heartland
Test your knowledge of entertainment with this quiz on celebrities, trends and headline-making moments. Featured this week: a music icon's glamorous appearance, a surprise soccer sighting, a bikini-cl...
Entersong Entertainment & The Heartland Network Enter Joint Venture
Entersong Entertainment, the live events company founded by Rob Hatch and Mike Every [...]
Test your pop culture: From Hollywood to the Heartland
Test your knowledge of entertainment with this quiz on celebrities, trends and headline-making moments. Featured this week: a country music comeback, a surprising celebrity romance, standout red carpe...
Heartland Sports on The Breakfast Show 6/13
Heartland Sports on The Breakfast Show 6/13
Test your pop culture: From Hollywood to the Heartland
Test your knowledge of entertainment with this quiz on celebrities, trends and headline-making moments. Featured this week: a red-hot new romance, runway-worthy bikini moments, candid Hollywood reflec...
Test your pop culture: From Hollywood to the Heartland
Test your knowledge of entertainment with this quiz on celebrities, trends and headline-making moments. Featured this week: a red-hot new romance, runway-worthy bikini moments, candid Hollywood reflections and a smashed piano that stole the show.
Update: What We’re Watching, June 4, 2026
This update covers the latest federal health policy news and its potential impact on Kansas.
Heartland Sports on The Breakfast Show 5/31
Heartland Sports on The Breakfast Show 5/31
Heartland Sports on The Breakfast Show 5/31
Heartland Sports on The Breakfast Show 5/31
Heartland Sports on The Breakfast Show 5/31
Heartland Sports on The Breakfast Show 5/31
Heartland Sports scores from Wednesday 5/27
Here are Heartland sports scores from Wednesday 5/27.
Free ‘Grow Local’ workshop series for Heartland small business owners set for May 29
The four sessions will be at the Union County Extension Center in Anna. Organizers say each one is an hour long and beginner-friendly.
Heartland Tournament Sports scores from Monday 5/25
Here are Heartland Tournament Sports scores from Monday, May 25.
Heartland Sports on The Breakfast Show 5/23
Heartland Sports on The Breakfast Show 5/23
Update: What We’re Watching, May 22, 2026
This update covers the latest federal health policy news and its potential impact on Kansas.
Heartland Food Products Group to Acquire Whole Earth Brands' Americas Business
/PRNewswire/ -- Heartland Food Products Group, owner and manufacturer of the Splenda® Brand, SlimFast®, and Java House®, today announced it has entered into a...
EU’s Carbon Border Levy Is Growing Source of Tension for Ukraine
In the fourth year since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine’s industrial heartland, Kyiv faces another challenge—this time from a partner: the European Union’s carbon border adjustment mechanism.
Heartland tournament sports scores from Thursday, 5/21
Here are Heartland Tournament final sports scores from Thursday 5/21.
Data center politics and Kirk Bangstad’s attention-seeking run for governor (with Emily Mills!)
Dan Shafer is a journalist from Milwaukee who writes and publishes The Recombobulation Area. In 2024, he and the publication joined Civic Media, where he is currently a Contributing Editor. He’s written for The New York Times, The Daily Beast, Heartland Signal, Belt Magazine, WisPolitics, and Milwaukee Record. He previously worked at Seattle Magazine, Seattle […]
Test your pop culture: From Hollywood to the Heartland
Test your knowledge of entertainment with this quiz on celebrities, trends and headline-making moments. Featured this week: mystery collaborations, red carpet close calls, celebrity confrontations and...
Test your pop culture: From Hollywood to the Heartland
Test your knowledge of entertainment with this quiz on celebrities, trends and headline-making moments. Featured this week: mystery collaborations, red carpet close calls, celebrity confrontations and a dream cave wedding.
HHS Announces Heartland Forward MOU to Advance Maternal Health
HHS Announces Heartland Forward MOU to Advance Maternal Health
Emerging picture shows Reform gains as Labour counts losses in heartland seats
So far, we have a chunk of the results around the parts of England that have had contests and no results yet from Scotland or Wales.
Test your pop culture: From Hollywood to the Heartland
Test your knowledge of entertainment with this quiz on celebrities, trends and headline-making moments. Featured this week: guess the star-studded families and who wore what.
Leading on health care solutions - Talk Business & Politics
In Arkansas and across the heartland, we are used to solving problems together. That instinct — to step up for our neighbors, to find practical solutions and to work together...
Heartland Sports on The Breakfast Show 4/26
Heartland Sports on The Breakfast Show 4/26
Heartland Sports on The Breakfast Show 4/25
Heartland Sports on The Breakfast Show 4/25
Heartland Sports on The Breakfast Show 4/25
Heartland Sports on The Breakfast Show 4/25
Test your pop culture: From Hollywood to the Heartland
Test your knowledge of entertainment with this quiz on celebrities, trends and headline-making moments. Featured this week: guess the viral moment and rare photo appearences.
Test your pop culture: From Hollywood to the Heartland
Test your knowledge of entertainment with this quiz on celebrities, trends and headline-making moments. Featured this week: guess the celebrity behind the Instagram post and what couple has made it official.
Heartland Sports on The Breakfast Show 4/12
Heartland Sports on The Breakfast Show 4/12
“AI polls” are fake polls
A few weeks after Donald Trump’s second presidential win, I took the train up from London (where I was living at the time) to Oxford to attend a conference on polls and forecasts of the 2024 election. Most of the attendees were pollsters or academics, but I also watched presentations from Aaru and Electric Twin, two companies that do what is interchangeably called synthetic sampling, silicon sampling, or synthetic audiences. Stripped of startup jargon, that means they use large language models (LLMs) to simulate responses to public opinion polls by having AI agents take on the role of survey respondents. I had already heard of Aaru thanks to some articles with eye-catching headlines like “No people, no problem: AI chatbots predict elections better than humans” in the months leading up to Election Day. The founders were making some big, some might even say far-fetched claims, such as: “within two years, we will simulate the entire globe — from the way crops are grown in Ukraine to how that impacts production of oil in Iraq, trade through the strait of Malacca, and elections for the mayor of Baltimore.” When Semafor asked Aaru’s cofounders — Cameron Fink and Ned Koh — about my boss, they said “we respect all those who came before us.” Nate (as he so often does) shared his thoughts on Twitter: Fink and Koh were relatively good-natured about this back-and-forth when we spoke at Oxford. They even offered to mail me one of the t-shirts featuring Nate’s quote they apparently had made. I never took them up on the offer, which I now somewhat regret. These synthetic sampling companies fell off my radar for a while, but they do still exist. In fact, Aaru recently received a $1 billion valuation. Is what they’re doing anywhere close to the most important frontier in AI development? Not by a longshot, especially when Anthropic just developed a model so adept at exploiting software vulnerabilities that it’s only being released to 40 companies. Still, silicon sampling is increasingly finding its way into public polling. Axios reported in March that “a majority of people trust their own doctors and nurses” based on findings from Aaru — without mentioning that the “people” in that sentence were actually LLMs. Around the same time, the Public Sentiment Institute “boosted” their online sample of 373 real survey respondents with 114 AI agents.1 (Spoiler alert: even the co-founder of Electric Twin doesn’t think that’s a particularly defensible approach.) Polling companies like Qualtrics and Ipsos are also developing synthetic data panels. So, what should we make of these … “polls”? Let’s get one thing out of the way: whatever they are, they’re not polls in the way that term is usually defined. Subscribe You can’t replace polls with AI On one hand, using LLMs to essentially make up fake survey respondents sort of sounds like the dumbest idea ever, one that will at best imperfectly replicate real polls while introducing all sorts of biases. On the other hand, with LLMs improving at a remarkable, perhaps even alarming rate, maybe that means I’m a dinosaur at the ripe old age of 24 because I still want to rely on polls that talk to actual people. I’m not going to argue that synthetic samples are completely useless. In fact, as I’ll return to later, there is evidence that some techniques can replicate topline survey results quickly and cheaply. But the marketing from certain companies can be slightly optimistic. “No traditional poll will exist by the time the next general election occurs,” said Fink in 2024. We’re just 206 days away from the midterms, and based on the fact that I still have to collect a bunch of polls every day, I’d say he should have run that prediction by a sample of AI agents before the interview.2 To see why synthetic samples can’t replace polls, here’s a quick primer on how they work. The simplest version of these models involves taking a LLM (like ChatGPT or Claude), giving it a demographic profile (e.g., a white, college-educated woman who lives in Utah and makes $70k a year), and then asking it to respond to a survey question. You repeat that process a few thousand times using different demographic profiles and end up with a sample of synthetic survey responses. The actual models used by private companies are more sophisticated than this, usually because they incorporate more hypothesized demographic characteristics for each agent and provide them with extra information. Aaru, for example, feeds agents a diet of news and information they’d be likely to consume, while Electric Twin incorporates their customers’ proprietary data about the audience they’re trying to replicate. The way Ben Warner, the co-founder of Electric Twin, explained it to me was “we have a large amount of data on […] for instance, 5,000 people. Can we make an accurate prediction of how they would respond to another question?” Still, it should be obvious why synthetic samples can’t replace polls. Polling is fundamentally a data collection process. We might use surveys to make predictions by feeding them into election forecasts, but the main purpose of a poll isn’t prediction, it’s gathering new data about what people think and how they feel. Silicon sampling, on the other hand, produces no new data. It’s simply a model: you input LLM training data, demographic prompts, and a bunch of other information, and it spits out a prediction for what a poll would say. We love models here, but models aren’t polls. That difference is an important philosophical sticking point for most pollsters I talk to. “I think politics should stay away from [synthetic sampling], because we’re trying to […] represent the voice of the people,” said Natalie Jackson, a vice president at GQR Insights. Democratic pollster John Hagner told me: “I think I’m just incredibly skeptical of this idea. I don’t think it’s research. At that point, you’re asking the machine to tell you what you already believe.” Hagner has seen some presentations of early synthetic sampling experiments, but so far, “if it’s being used in a campaign, people are keeping it incredibly quiet.”3 But Eli, I hear you saying, aren’t polls themselves increasingly governed by modeling decisions? Indeed they are: pollsters’ choices on which sampling method to use, how to define their likely voter models, and how to weight their samples can and do lead to dramatic differences in the results they publish. Aaru even referenced these limitations in the methodology statement included with that maternal mortality “poll” — although I’m using the term “methodology statement” loosely here, because it doesn’t really explain how the model works at all. We can ignore the (frankly preposterous) implication that synthetic sampling isn’t subject to a separate set of biases. The important point is that there’s still a meaningful difference between using weighting and other statistical techniques on actual polling data and using a model to predict what a poll would say. The latter is far closer to election forecasts or techniques like MRP — potentially useful models, but not a replacement for polls.4 To be fair, other synthetic sampling companies are perfectly happy with the distinction between polls and models. Warner compared polling and synthetic sampling to different tools in a toolbox. “The mistake I think we make is we think that these new tools should either work in exactly the same way or somehow replace these old tools,” he said. “Rather than thinking of it as, okay, so we’ve always had the hammer, we’ve always had the screwdriver, now we’ve got a saw. But don’t use a saw to try [to] do the job of a hammer.” A quick comment from Nate Eli didn’t ask me for a comment — rather rude of him, don’t you think? But since I’m editing this story, I figured I’d add a few quick thoughts rather than putting words in his mouth. Beyond the frequently misleading marketing, what bothers me about the AI “poll” hype is that as AI tools make statistical inference cheaper and/or better (note that these are not synonyms) that actually increases the comparative value of collecting original data. You might be able to train a model to make a reasonable estimate of what some hard-to-reach poll respondent would say — say, a young Black man who voted for Trump. (Such a person checks a number of boxes for a voter who is usually hard to reach in surveys.) Indeed, this is closely related to what models like the Silver Bulletin forecast already do. They essentially smooth out the kinks in noisy survey data by making inferences based on past voting patterns or national polls or surveys of other states. But you don’t actually know what these voters think unless you’re reaching them directly. If there’s a shift in opinion among this subgroup, you’re not going to detect it. So if I were running a campaign, I’d invest more in going the extra mile to find a representative sample of those voters. And then I’d hire some smart quants — or Claude? — to figure out the implications for campaign strategy based on proprietary data that my competitors didn’t have access to. -Nate Silver Are these models any good? If synthetic surveys are just a new type of model, the next obvious question is whether the models are at least accurate. The answer very much depends on who you ask. On one end of the spectrum, you have the maximalist argument that synthetic sampling is more accurate than actual polls. “It’s an incredibly challenging problem to go to someone and say ‘hey, we’re going to be more accurate at predicting human behavior than you, even when you talk to your customers directly’,” Koh recently told CNBC. In his view, synthetic sampling isn’t a saw to polling’s hammer, it’s “magic.” There’s certainly evidence that synthetic samples can replicate certain survey toplines. But if Aaru does have any examples of their approach outperforming the polls, they’re keeping those to themselves.5 Aaru’s 2024 election model, for example, had Kamala Harris leading in Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin on November 4th. And although they’ve since taken down their forecast page, they gave Harris a 50.5 percent chance of winning the race on November 2nd.6 After the election, Fink told Semafor he was happy enough with those results because they were “within margin of error,” a term that is completely meaningless when applied to a “sample” of AI agents. And of course, Aaru says their models have improved since 2024, so supposedly now they’d be more accurate than the polls? Still, their stronger argument is on cost: “We are significantly faster and cheaper than traditional polling, and still more accurate,” said Fink. The first two claims are undeniably true, but the third brings us to the opposite end of the spectrum. Both Jackson and Hagner are skeptical that these models are reliable for anything beyond replicating common survey toplines. “I just […] don’t think the machines are what we want when we’re looking for nuanced views. My example on this is people in Arizona and Nevada in 2024 who voted for Trump and voted for expanding abortion in their states on ballot initiatives,” said Jackson. Hagner identified another issue. Maybe the synthetic respondents, like sycophantic LLMs, are inhuman in one important way: they’re too nice. “The reports that have come through at the meetings that I’ve been at are that the early experiments on this, they cannot get respondents to be as racist or sexist or, frankly, as negative as human respondents,” he said. Academic research mostly agrees on this point. While there are some papers that show promising results when using LLMs to replicate polling data, most show that LLMs suffer from various quirks like producing too few “don’t know” responses and can seriously overpredict the favorability of politicians like Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. They also seem to struggle with too little variation between demographic subgroups, so the difference in predicted opinion between Democrats and Republicans, for example, is too small. When I asked Warner about these studies, his response to these papers was that just because academics can’t get synthetic sampling to work doesn’t mean that the technique doesn’t work in general. “Actually, the argument is, okay, yours does not [work]. That does not mean […] for this complex set of machinery, which uses a lot of investment, a lot of time, a lot of money, you can’t get it to work.” Cards on the table, I’m somewhat sympathetic to this argument because academics aren’t exactly great at making election forecasts. Usually, the people with skin in the game are the most accurate. Warner’s argument is that the approach Electric Twin takes — which includes, for example, making multiple predictions for each synthetic respondent using different models and prompts and subsequently averaging those to get a final prediction in a sort of ensemble forecast — produces better results than the simpler academic models. Warner shared a comparison between his method and the method from a recent academic paper with me, and Electric Twin was indeed able to get more accurate replication. But even still, he acknowledged that synthetic sampling “is not a crystal ball.” “If you asked me, do I think using other data sources will be more accurate than asking somebody who they will vote for, I would probably say no. But if you asked me ‘would your system be useful for our turnout modeling today?’ I would say yes.” For better or worse, it looks like the method is already getting more popular in the market research world. Most of the clients Aaru touts these days are businesses like EY and McDonald’s. And AI will probably begin to pop up in other parts of the political polling process. Pollsters are already using it to code open-ended survey responses, and some firms, like YouGov, are testing using LLMs to ask survey respondents questions. More worryingly, one danger to actual polls is that AI agents can be used to infiltrate online surveys. Most online polls use various checks to prevent that from happening, but there’s conflicting evidence on how effective those filters are and how prevalent AI agents currently are in online panels. If those agents ever become impossible to detect, it might spell the end of online polling, but the solution isn’t to replace all of your respondents with ChatGPT. Silver Bulletin is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a subscriber. Subscribe 1 That particular poll obviously doesn’t meet Silver Bulletin standards for aggregation. But we exclude all Public Sentiment Institute polls from our averages because we classify them as an amateur polling firm. 2 You could argue that Fink meant the next presidential election, but (a) I’m also confident we’ll still have real polls in 2028 and (b) in that case he should have asked an LLM to define “general election.” 3 Quick caveat: that’s reporting from a Democratic pollster. It’s possible that Republicans are more willing to use AI in political campaigns. 4 Indeed, Silver Bulletin does not include “polls” produced by MRP in our forecasts or averages, and we think it’s extremely misleading when their practitioners describe them in a way that suggests original data had been collected among a large number of states or Congressional districts. 5 A recent report from Aaru and EY did show two examples of a synthetic estimate being closer than a survey to a real-world benchmark — but I’d take those findings with a grain of salt because the report reads more like an ad and didn’t involve any sort of prediction being made ahead of time. 6 For comparison, our odds for Harris on the same day were 48.2 percent.
Heartland Sports on The Breakfast Show 4/11
Heartland Sports on The Breakfast Show 4/11
From Hollywood headlines to Heartland buzz: Are you on the pulse?
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GenNx360 Capital Partners Announces Heartland Business Systems Acquisition of Applied Tech Solutions
NEW YORK, April 06, 2026--GenNx360 Capital Partners ("GenNx360"), a New York City-based private equity firm focused on investing in middle market services companies, today announced that its portfolio company, Heartland Business Systems ("HBS"), has acquired Applied Tech Solutions, LLC ("Applied Tech" or the "Company"), a provider of managed IT and cybersecurity services to clients in the Midwest and Rocky Mountain regions. The acquisition of Applied Tech represents the first acquisition by HBS
Donald Trump: trouble in the heartlands
The president’s absence from the annual Conservative conference has caused dissent amongst Maga support base
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Davids Visits Community Health Center, Highlights Medicaid Cuts’ Impact on Kansas Health Care Access
OTTAWA, KS — Today, Representative Sharice Davids visited Heartland Community Health Center’s Healthy Futures mobile dental program at Ottawa High School, which provides dental exams and cleanings to local students.