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The New Yorker – Gift Article – “The tech world assumes that A.I.-aided education is necessary and inevitable. A growing number of parents, educators, and cognitive scientists say the opposite. I don’t like A.I., and I am raising my children not to like it. I’ve been telling them for years now that chatbots are manipulative …
OpenAI: “Our state of the art model for masking personally identifiable information (PII) in text. Today we’re releasing OpenAI Privacy Filter, an open-weight model for detecting and redacting personally identifiable information (PII) in text. This release is part of our broader effort to support a more resilient software ecosystem by providing developers practical infrastructure for …
The New York Times: “The Trump administration is creating a new office that critics say could weaken the environmental oversight of oil drilling and seabed mining in territorial waters. The new agency, the Marine Minerals Administration, will be formed by reunifying two offices that had been split up after the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill …
Department of Justice (DOJ) Deputy Inspector General Performing the Duties of Inspector General William M. Blier announced today that: The DOJ Office of the Inspector General (OIG) is initiating an audit of DOJ’s compliance with the Epstein Files Transparency Act. Our preliminary objective is to evaluate the DOJ’s processes for identifying, redacting, and releasing records …
BloombergLaw: “The Justice Department is curtailing election year coordination aimed at protecting state-run voting processes, increasing risks of the Trump administration interfering in the November midterms or unwittingly exposing precincts to threats, said multiple state officials and former DOJ election crime lawyers. Ahead of an election that will determine whether Republicans retain control of Congress, …
Washington Post [no paywall]: “Stars and Stripes ombudsman Jacqueline Smith said the Defense Department dismissed her without giving a reason, according to an email reviewed by The Post. Three months after the Pentagon decried the U.S. military newspaper Stars and Stripes as “woke” and announced it would be overhauled, Defense Department official Sean Parnell fired …
ProPublica: “Researchers at Stanford University modeled how many people could die or be disabled in 25 years if vaccines for polio, measles, rubella or diphtheria were no longer available. Before vaccines, death and disability stalked children. Then shots turned once-common infections into something doctors only read about in textbooks. When immunization rates drop, however, plagues …
FBI investigating deaths and disappearances of staff at secretive government laboratories. Here’s what we know. “At least 10 scientists and researchers connected to U.S. nuclear and aerospace programs have died or gone missing since 2023, prompting concern in Congress and a House Oversight Committee investigation. Lawmakers, including James Comer, are seeking answers from federal agencies …
The Atlantic – Gift Article: “The best thing I watched in the past year was an epically long movie about retired militants, but it wasn’t One Battle After Another, the Oscar winner for Best Picture. It was The Sorrow and the Pity, a four-hour documentary from 1969 about life in Nazi-occupied France. Reviewing the film …
CounterSpin interview with Lia Holland on the Internet Archive. “Janine Jackson: A recent report by Wired‘s Kate Knibbs leads with the contradiction: USA Today published a story recently on how ICE is misinforming about its detainment policies, a case that the paper built on data from the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, a nonprofit digital library …
The “State of the Air” 2026 report “finds that even after decades of successful efforts to reduce sources of air pollution, 44% of Americans—152.3 million people—are living in places that get failing grades for unhealthy levels of ozone or particle pollution. We found that nearly half of American children (46%, or 33.5 million people under …
Literary Hub: “Lately there has been a lot of hand-wringing, and rightly so, about if and how the publishing industry will deal with AI in the wake of the cancelation of the first major book deal due to suspected AI usage. There is no easy solution to AI detection for many reasons, partly because large …
