Wall Street Journal – no paywall: “The ultrawealthy aren’t just pulling away from average Americans. Buoyed by a stock-market boom that has added trillions of dollars to their net worth, the extremely rich are even pulling away from other rich Americans. The top 0.1% wealthiest Americans have seen their total wealth more than double since ...

Road & Track: “As large infotainment screen and other high-tech, often connected features have become standard across the automotive industry over the last 10-plus years, vehicles have begun passing data out from the vehicles as well as taking it in. And it may be more prolific, and expansive, than you realize: a new study from ...

Reuters: “California Governor Gavin Newsom has signed into law first-of-its-kind state legislation setting rules for how lawyers are permitted to use generative AI in their work. Newsom signed the bill, SB 574,, on Wednesday alongside a slate ​of other AI-related measures that he said are intended to protect workers, empower doctors and ‌prevent fraudsters online. ...

Wall Street Journal (Gift Article): Google Pushed AI Into Schools—and Even Students Say It’s Gone Too Far. “’We’re doing this experiment on an entire generation on cognitive development, with no control group,’ said Mikel Rodriguez, a former Google research scientist who left last year. He said people inside Google privately worried among themselves about how ...

TechBrew – The two biggest delivery networks in the US are bringing cameras along, and you can’t opt out: “Amazon is rolling out smart glasses with cameras for its delivery drivers, which could be snapping photos every few seconds, and the United States Postal Service (USPS) says it’s starting to test dashcams on mail trucks. ...

Project Syndicate: “…The breadth and granularity of what companies now know about their customers is astonishing. When San Francisco-based WIRED reporter Reece Rogers asked McDonald’s for a copy of the data the company keeps on him—a right he enjoys as a California resident under the state’s privacy law—he expected to get a log of all ...

Epstein Files Engine: Agentic Search for Investigative Journalism. AUTHORS Duy K. Nguyen (The New York Times), Teresa Mondría Terol (NPR; work done while at The New York Times), Dylan Freedman and Zach Seward (The New York Times). PUBLISHED September 2026. The NYT project is also described in this slide deck about recent Epstein Files-related projects ...

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Semafor: “The FBI’s plans to acquire nationwide access to automatic license plate readers face scrutiny from House Democrats, according to a letter shared with Semafor. “The FBI’s plan to obtain direct access to this extensive network of cameras raises the risk of substantial abuses of Americans’ data. The Committee requests information from the FBI to ...

President Donald Trump sat down for a [factless] interview with TIME at the White House on Sept. 28. Over the course of the interview, Trump discussed a wide range of issues, including the war with Iran, the artificial intelligence boom, the Federal Reserve, the Supreme Court, and his outlook for the midterms.  Below is a ...

The Foundry: A guide to the Supreme Court lawyer, his high-stakes poker life and Bradley Hope’s series, The Tell. All eleven chapters are now available, free to read. See the full chapter guide. “In public, he was the country’s top Supreme Court litigator. In private, he won close to $100 million from opponents at the highest-stakes ...

Via LLRX – The Trump Administration’s Continued War Against Science, Research, Public Health and the Rule of Law – Part 13, September 30, 2026 – The Trump administration continues to dismantle federal programs, services and regulations across a wide swath of agencies. By targeting the government’s operational structure and workforce, officials have replaced established policy ...

The New Yorker – Why are we so obsessed with putting our belongings in metal boxes and then never looking at them again? [no paywall]…A self-storage facility is a business that rents lockable space to people who own more stuff than they know what to do with. (A 2022 survey by the Craftsman tool division ...

Via LLRX – AI in Finance and Banking – September 30, 2026 – This semi-monthly column by Sabrina I. Pacifici highlights news, government documents, NGO/IGO papers, conferences, industry white papers and reports, academic papers and speeches, and central bank actions on the subject of AI’s fast paced impact on the banking and finance sectors. The ...

Via Kottke [Real. not AI. Actually soothing.: “This is a three-hour, high-quality recording of thunderstorms in the distance in the Slovakian countryside. The rest of the channel is loaded of similar (and similarly long) atmospheric videos: thunderstorms, blizzards, rain, wind & fog, winter storms, etc. The most recent videos are prominently labeled “No AI” because ...

TechCrunch: “Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth used a “State of the Force” address on Wednesday to launch a new effort to study how war may be fought as tech advances rapidly. It’s being called Project Meridian. Elon Musk, Anduril founder Palmer Luckey, and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich will co-lead the project. They’ll be joined by ...

Dan Maccarone: “One after another, the people building the most powerful AI in the world have asked to be regulated. One after another, the people building the most powerful AI in the world have asked to be regulated. Dario Amodei, who runs Anthropic, published a 3,800-word essay calling for the industry to slow down and ...

Cranney, Katelyn, Solène Delecourt, and Rembrand Koning. “Global Evidence on Gender Gaps and Generative AI Over Time.” Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 25-023, October 2024. (Revised May 2026.) Generative AI has the potential to transform productivity and reduce inequality, but only if adopted broadly. In this paper, we synthesize evidence from 76 sources from ...

Federal Reserve: Evaluation of the Eccles-1951 Renovation Project Management and Construction Costs

FT.com – no paywall – OpenAI’s software has obscured efforts to scrape data from crucial government agencies, according to new findings that show the scale and severity of AI hacks are far larger than previously known. Meanwhile, a US competition watchdog is expanding its investigation of the AI company. “OpenAI’s software obscured efforts to scrape ...

Wired: “Consumer advocate Lindsay Owen’s new book, Gouged, traces how corporations use software—from ever-changing prices to opaque algorithms—to squeeze every penny from you…These core frustrations were what drew me to Gouged: The End of a Fair Price and What That Means for Your Wallet. Author Lindsay Owens knows what it’s like to advocate for consumers’ ...

“Explore daily fall color estimates, peak timing, and recent foliage reports across the Lower 48. Our platform is centered around a fall foliage map like none other, allowing travelers to find beautiful fall colors and plan their trips accordingly. New in 2024, we provide daily updates to our season-long maps, ensuring that our fall foliage ...

4040 Media: “As Flock continues to be the center of a nationwide conversation about automatic license plate reading cameras, the company has said that it doesn’t, and won’t, do facial recognition: “We will not add facial recognition to our devices,” Flock CEO Garrett Langley said in a recent video. But other, third-party companies are telling ...

Ars Technica: “In news that should surprise very few, connected cars remain a complete privacy nightmare. But now we have a better idea of what data those cars are giving away, and to whom, thanks to a study conducted by a team of researchers at Northeastern Universityand Consumer Reports. Testing 21 cars from 19 different ...

Tracking Measles Cases in the U.S. The Current Situation with Measles – “Measles outbreaks have been reported in multiple states, raising concerns about continued spread, increases in hospitalizations and deaths, and loss of measles elimination status, highlighting the importance of measles vaccination and rapid detection and reporting of suspected and confirmed measles cases. Measles is ...

The New Yorker – Donald Trump’s son-in-law represents the kind of Washington figure for whom public office serves as a means to extraordinary wealth. [no paywall] “Kushner is plagued with conflicts of interest,” Virginia Canter, a former White House counsel, said. “He is supposed to be working for the American people, but in fact he ...

Annas Sabar: “In 2000 a typical mobile phone was about a quarter metal by weight. Most of the rest was plastic, with some ceramics. In 2016 the U.S. Geological Survey listed examples of the mined materials that go into a mobile device and the parts that use them. This page takes that list, adds cobalt ...

Trump Announces His Own AI Platform Will Take Over The American Government – the site is powered by artificial intelligence from Google’s Gemini and Elon Musk’s Grok. [Just a suggestion – do not use this website, after all, what could go wrong….] See also: NextGov/FCW – “The Trump administration launched an artificial intelligence-powered one-stop shop ...

Washington Post – The Department of Homeland Security says it will use the technology to “revolutionize” how the agency handles redactions. [no paywall] “Redactions are the Freedom of Information Act requester’s bane. Those black boxes that often hide wide swaths of words when the government finally delivers on a request for public records. While even ...

“The National Institutes of Health (NIH) today launched Linked Discoveries, an experimental tool designed to help scientists more easily see how an individual research finding relates to the larger body of biomedical evidence. From a citation in PubMed, users can use the Linked Discoveries tool to explore a “neighborhood” of publications closely related to that ...

Just wondering…are you concerned yet? Wall Street via MSN: “OpenAI says it is scrapping the release of its next-generation AI model over safety concerns that researchers raised during internal testing, in one of the clearest signs so far that agent misbehavior could stymie the industry’s rapid progression. The move follows a summer punctuated by reports ...

“A newly-released study called the Hunger Report, produced by a Washington, D.C.-based food bank group had an alarming diagnosis: “The state of food security more broadly is deteriorating.” Some of the findings are just gutting. The survey found broad swaths of people who acknowledge they: Cut the sizes of their children’s meals, due to the ...

The Guardian: “National Center for Education Statistics, which collects critical data to guide policy on learning, was decimated after Doge canceled crucial contracts. As reading and math scores fall to their lowest point in the past quarter-century, the US now has fewer tools to understand and develop interventions for this troubling trend. When the Trump ...

New York Times (Gift Article): This Screw Is Needed for Missiles and Planes. Buying One Can Take Years. “It’s a spiral carved into metal, attached to a mechanism that might not look out of place in a junk drawer. Almost no one outside a small, obsessive community of machinists and engineers has ever heard of ...

Today The Existentialist Republic published grand jury petition kits for six counties, five updated kits and one fully new, in the counties where residents asked for them. Each kit asks a local court to convene a grand jury over DOGE’s handling of Social Security records: Santa Fe County, New Mexico Shawnee County, Kansas Tulsa County, ...

Washington Post [no paywall]: “At the center of a widening crisis for one of the nation’s great wildlife comebacks is a fish most Americans would hardly recognize…Now one of America’s great wildlife recoveries is coming undone. Across the Chesapeake this year, Watts and his colleagues at William & Mary’s Center for Conservation Biology recorded the ...

Via LLRX – Thirteen AI Books For Lawyers: An Opinionated Guide – There’s an obvious objection to recommending books about AI: timeliness. Any book about the tools themselves is out of date by the time it’s printed. But that misses the point, as Jerry Lawson points out. Good books are still better than a vendor demo or a ...

Via Alexios & Craig [sub. req’d] “GeoWhisperer helps you compare satellite images of a single location. “Just type in an address and it will tell you what the differences are in satellite images over time,” he said. “I built it because location research means stitching together satellite archives. It’s slow, and easy to get wrong ...

CNN: “The intelligence report, circulated across the US military this spring in the midst of the war with Iran, immediately set off alarm bells: A Chinese ship in the Middle East was transporting components of a nuclear weapons program. The US military swung into action with plans to intercept the vessel, according to four sources ...

TechBrew: “In a letter to the US Senate Judiciary Committee, Flock CEO Garrett Langley said that it’s “possible to search for humans in images taken by Flock cameras.” This contradicts the information currently on Flock’s own website, which states that “Flock cameras do not use facial recognition” and that “they are not designed to search ...

Reuters [sub req’d]: “On September 24, Gunderson Dettmer started training new partners to focus on human relationships as AI tools handle more legal work. Lawyer Ivan Gaviria told trainees, “You have to accept that you are in the business of sales.” Firms now use these personal connections to stand out against automation…” You are not ...

“The paper summarized here is part of the fall 2026 edition of the Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, the leading conference series and journal in economics for timely, cutting-edge research about real-world policy issues. Research findings are presented in a clear and accessible style to maximize their impact on economic understanding and policymaking. The editors ...

Riley Walz: “Between 2009 and 2012, iPhones had a built-in “Send to YouTube” button in the Photos app. Many of these uploads kept their default IMG_XXXX filenames, creating a time capsule of raw, unedited moments from random lives. Inspired by Ben Wallace, I made a bot that crawled YouTube and found 5 million of these ...

Bad Connection – Uncovering Global Telecom Exploitation by Covert Surveillance Actors – “The mobile networks that our phones connect to and rely on contain inherent vulnerabilities that can be exploited to track users and access sensitive information. As state-sponsored cyber-espionage groups and commercial surveillance have expanded, these risks have grown in both scale and sophistication. ...

“With over 24,000 images entered into the competition this year, Bird Photographer of the Year is pleased to present our winners. Celebrating bird life from around the world, these images comprise some of the most incredible bird photos in the world taken by talented photographers, whilst also raising vital funds for our partner charity Birds on ...

“The Global Forest Goals Report 2026 provides the latest global assessment of progress towards implementing the six Global Forest Goals and 26 associated targets of the United Nations Strategic Plan for Forests 2017–2030. Published at a pivotal moment, with less than five years remaining to 2030, the report reviews progress made, identifies gaps and highlights ...

The Atlantic: “Artificial intelligence is becoming a significant threat to financial institutions, with AI agents capable of hacking at machine speeds and attacking in swarms. Major banks, including JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America, are collaborating with AI firms like Anthropic to bolster defenses against these sophisticated cyberattacks. While larger banks are well-prepared, smaller institutions ...