Every so often a piece of reporting is so thorough that I don’t have much to add. So let me start with this: everyone should watch Mikhail Klimentov’s comprehensive investigation, into how former Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick appears to have used the infamous lawyers at Clare Locke to suppress negative reporting about himself. The People Make Games YouTube channel was willing to publish the piece, which is deeply researched (and I’m sure reviewed by some pretty serious lawyers):

As the video makes clear, the key reporting at issue is a 2021 Wall Street Journal article detailing how Kotick knew about sexual misconduct at the company.

Much of the real story in the video is about the law firm Clare Locke, which we’ve covered in detail before. They’re the boutique firm that seems downright proud of how good it is at killing media reports, and at shielding the rich and powerful from public criticism.

We’ve had David Enrich on our podcast talking about Clare Locke and their extremely aggressive approach to silencing journalists from reporting the truth, and the Kotick story suggests they’re going to even greater lengths to chill reporting. That can eventually backfire, as it did here — though it appears to have worked successfully for a while.

Klimentov’s reporting goes above and beyond. You can tell how much work went into it, and how carefully every claim was nailed down, precisely because everyone involved knew Clare Locke would likely come after them. I want you to watch the entire video, so I won’t spoil it, but I will also suggest you read that WSJ article, because as Klimentov details, Kotick’s lawyers have gone to extraordinary lengths to claim that the WSJ’s article has been debunked. However, as Klimentov notes, the WSJ has never issued a correction or a retraction of that article.

Rather, Kotick’s lawyers have taken a variety of steps that might seem odd in isolation, but all seem focused on giving the impression that the Wall Street Journal story has been debunked and then using that to pressure other journalists from repeating the claims in that article. But, again, the WSJ still stands by that story, and Clare Locke’s evidence of the article being “debunked” doesn’t pass the sniff test (again, details in Klimentov’s reporting).

What’s interesting to me is that this is the same old story all over again: the coverup shines way more light on the original actions. We have a term for this. Kotick could easily have let that story die, and it would have faded into the background. Yes, people would mention the allegations that you can read in the WSJ such as:

Activision has been thrown into turmoil in recent months by multiple regulatory investigations into alleged sexual assaults and mistreatment of female employees dating back years. Mr. Kotick has told directors and other executives he wasn’t aware of many of the allegations of misconduct, and he has played down others, according to people familiar with the matter and internal documents.

Those documents, which include memos, emails and regulatory requests, and interviews with former employees and others familiar with the company, however, cast Mr. Kotick’s response in a different light. They show that he knew about allegations of employee misconduct in many parts of the company. He didn’t inform the board of directors about everything he knew, the interviews and documents show, even after regulators began investigating the incidents in 2018. Some departing employees who were accused of misconduct were praised on the way out, while their co-workers were asked to remain silent about the matters.

Instead, the lengths Kotick’s lawyers at Clare Locke went to, threatening (and even suing) games media outlets to kill the story, have made it a story all over again. Nice work, guys.

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Riverside County, California sheriff Chad Bianco is definitely one of those guys. You know the ones I mean. The kind of “law and order” hypocrite who loves the law as long as it can be used to hurt the people he doesn’t like and protect the people he does like. In other words, he’s a guy who loves the stuff Trump does that violates the law because those laws aren’t part of his narrow “rule of law” view.

You may remember Sheriff Bianco from his hysterical comments in response to California governor Gavin Newsom signing a law that would ban law enforcement officers from hiding behind masks — something prompted by the federal government’s reliance on masked kidnapping squads to round up undocumented migrants.

“They didn’t ban criminals from wearing masks, they didn’t tell criminals that they had to identify themselves,” Bianco said while campaigning in Northern California on Friday. “Every single person that voted for that needs to be eliminated in the next election. Anyone that votes for those people are absolute idiots.”

No, this law didn’t do this. Bianco is right about that. But that’s because it didn’t need to. California law already outlaws mask use by criminals who aren’t working for the federal government. That’s why the new law didn’t need to do something that was already being done — something the “absolute idiots” cheering on/voting for Chad Bianco might want to remember the next time they storm the Capitol building and/or engage in other racist, violent acts.

Bianco is in the bag for Trump. This is not disputable. Shortly after the Trump administration engaged in the (very likely illegal) seizure of ballots in Georgia (a transparently vindictive act prompted by the Georgia’s secretary of state refusing to “find” the ~12,000 votes needed to flip the state in Trump’s favor following the 2020 presidential election), Chad Bianco (who’s currently running for Congress) decided he needed to right some wrongs by doing the wrong (and illegal!) thing by seizing more than 600,000 ballots from election offices.

Bianco claimed this was necessary to investigate “irregularities” apparently only he had witnessed during the state’s 2025 Proposition 50 voting. As is to be expected by all the spectacularly stupid and slimy shit going on here, Prop 50 was put up for a vote in response to rampant mid-term gerrymandering by a suddenly desperate GOP.

The state Attorney General, Rob Bonta, immediately stepped in to ask the courts to block any further actions by Sheriff Bianco, pointing out that this was something that had never happened in the state’s long history of democratic voting and employment of various sheriffs.

Bianco continued to insist this was a necessary part of protecting the integrity of elections and waved away multiple issues raised by his actions, including his apparent judge-shopping trip which put his (plainly defective) warrant in the hands of judge who the sheriff had endorsed during the judge’s 2022 election campaign.

The state’s top court has sided with reason, democracy, and logic in general, as Cal Matters reports:

Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco broke the law and created “a substantial risk to election integrity”  when he seized more than 650,000 ballots California’s Supreme Court ruled on Thursday morning.

The justices ruled unanimously that Bianco must return the ballots to the county’s top election administrator and “refrain from further handling” them. In a second ruling, the court also held that Bianco broke the law when he ignored directives from the state’s attorney general to hold off on his plans to execute a search warrant to seize the ballots last March.

That’s right: Bianco lost twice in one day in the same court. That’s because his obviously illegal act generated plenty of litigation, all of which Bianco seems doomed to lose.

It’s hard to tell from the filings which “you lose, Bianco” ruling came first, but we’ll take a brief look at both.

This one [PDF] was filed by Riverside County voters. The California Supreme Court says some stuff that’s repeated in its other decision, but it’s the sort of thing dipshits like Sheriff Bianco need to be told more than twice.

We hold that the seizure of the ballots was unlawful.California law long has recognized that voted ballots require special care and handling to safeguard them from alteration or tampering. Consistent with this principle, the Elections Code narrowly limits the circumstances in which a court may order the production of ballots for inspection, and even in those narrow circumstances, requires that ballots remain in the physical custody of the responsible elections official. Bianco’s seizure of the ballots violated the plain language of section 15551, subdivision (d), commanding that “[i]n no event” shall voted ballots “be taken from the custody of the elections official.” This provision manifests a legislative intent that ballots remain in the elections official’s custody even in the event of a criminal investigation.

Even if Bianco were doing more than pretending whatever “irregularities” necessitated this seizure, it still wouldn’t matter. At best, Bianco could perhaps secure access to them via a judicial warrant, but state law makes it clear the ballots were to remain in the possession of election officials.

The court orders Bianco to return the ballots and refrain from doing anything else with the records but that. The second ruling [PDF] addresses the challenge raised by State AG Rob Bonta. The end result is the same, but the beginning is a bit more interesting, as the court notes it has never been asked before to determine whether or not an AG has the power to issue “binding directions” to a state sheriff because… well… it has never seen this particular form of bullshit from a sheriff before.

In this case, time is of the essence and without the court’s intervention, Sheriff Bianco would likely just continue to ignore the AG’s order to return ballots and preserve records of this so-called “investigation.” While the AG is in the right, the extreme abnormality of this situation places Bonta’s attempt to rein in Bianco in a legal dead zone. The court says Bianco loses because he cannot possibly point to precedent that justifies his actions or his refusal to comply with the state AG’s orders:

Lastly, we address whether the Attorney General has an adequate remedy at law. We conclude he does not. With the November 2026 General Election nearing, the Attorney General reasonably regards respondents’ investigation as requiring his immediate attention and prompt intervention. Only this court can provide a definitive explication of the Attorney General’s powers and duties and appropriately tailored writ relief. In light of the exigencies involved here, no other remedy would be as effective as a writ issued by this court in securing the timely and conclusive relief needed.

Of course, this isn’t over yet. Bianco has already made it clear he intends to appeal both of these decisions. But his success relies on the US Supreme Court being interested, much less willing, to help a pro-MAGA sheriff extricate himself from a mess of his own making. I doubt it will, even if the resident anything-for-Trump justices will fall all over themselves to write lengthy dissents about the court’s refusal to carry water for a sheriff who clearly has no respect for the rule of law.

Corporations have long enjoyed creating toothless “self-regulatory” regimes that exist primarily to pre-empt real government oversight. While the quality of these orgs can vary somewhat, generally they’re just a toothless pantomime designed to pretend that corporate power can effectively police itself for ethical and competitive breaches. U.S. history has a thing or two to say on their real-world effectiveness.

This week, Trump met with most of the major tech industry AI leaders, who once again demonstrated they’re enthusiastic supporters of the most corrupt and autocratic administration in U.S. history (they’ll then turn around with puzzlement at why the public might be hostile to their products).

They met, in part, to celebrate two very silly things. One, the president’s random decision to arbitrarily try to rename AI as “superintelligence” via executive order. And to announce they’d all struck a completely voluntary agreement to try and maybe do better when it comes to developing software automation responsibly, securely, and ethically.

Basically, our richest tech titans wanted to help Trump pretend he’s competent and powerful, and stall any real public interest accountability, whether it’s for the environmental impact of data center turbines on marginalized populations, the sloppy failure to secure their own automated hacking software, or their reckless and comical disregard for U.S. consumer privacy.

The 308-word “AI accord” is a load of bullshit and fluff. One, it’s worth noting it couldn’t even spell “United States” properly. Two, most of it is just vaguely urging AI companies to do things they were already doing (poorly), such as this recommendation:

“Empower an internal team to ensure all of the controls, monitoring, and detection are operating as intended, and that any issues are remediated.”

Why hadn’t anybody thought of that?

Or this one:

“Implement robust internal controls to monitor the capabilities and alignment of its models during training and deployment around areas like cybersecurity, biosecurity, and chemical threats, and to ensure that its models do not hack or access technical systems in unintended ways.”

To be clear, several of the high-profile agentic AI hacks in recent months attributed to doomsday sentience were in reality just big and unethical companies simply failing to do very basic things: like confirming third-party vendors had adequately isolated their automated hacking software from the internet, or failing to monitor their automatic hacking software in real time.

Of course they’re not doing a great job on this sort of thing because they’re all hungrily eyeing multi-trillion dollar IPOs based largely on fraudulent accounting and are in a mad dash toward the trough. They’re also not doing a better job because they know their support for a corrupt autocrat also involves him defanging corporate oversight and the regulatory state, ensuring no real penalties or liability.

Politely recommending that big corporations with more money than sense try to do a better job on quality control, privacy, and security isn’t actually accomplishing anything. None of the requests are actually real things, despite Trump comically trying to insist they were “morally binding.”

Down at the bottom of the document, it insists that “over time, it may make sense to codify these steps into laws or regulations.” That’s particularly amusing given that Congress is currently too corrupt to function, and the Trump administration has taken an absolute hatchet to already shaky U.S. consumer protection, corporate oversight, and regulatory independence.

Most of the corporate media coverage of the AI announcement was negligently shallow (see: Reuters, Politico, Axios), not only failing to point out that the AI accord was meaningless, but that Trump has actively defanged all of the federal government oversight systems you might otherwise lean on to hold these companies accountable down the road.

You can wind your way through this whole Reuters story, for example, without the slightest hint that this proposal might not be a real boy. Or that Trump clearly, indisputably remains overtly hostile to corporate accountability or public interest guardrails of any meaningful kind. Most of our big news outlets simply put the lies right in the headline, completely unchallenged.

It’s “almost like a constitution,” guys!

Here in reality, Trump’s captured Supreme Court has actively ensured that any regulator that tries to hold companies accountable for literally anything will find themselves swatted on the nose for exceeding their regulatory authority. This administration has ensured that already shaky corporate oversight no longer functions — and our corporate press doesn’t think that’s useful context worth mentioning.

They’ve all adopted the Libertarian and corporate Republican framing that government regulation exists exclusively to “stifle innovation” and ruin everybody’s good time. And that corporate pinky swearing has real worth when it comes to environmental, labor, and consumer protection law, despite a generation of very ugly and indisputable evidence to the contrary.

If AI regulation does come in the new year, it will most likely be written by the biggest tech companies with an eye on legalizing all their worst impulses, banning Chinese AI (to “protect U.S. consumer privacy and national security), and box out open source, on-device, open-weighted, or other competitive threats to the biggest companies’ cloud-software walled-garden domination.

The corruption and regulatory capture are disgusting enough, but it’s positively grotesque that the U.S. lacks an establishment press that’s capable of explaining any of this to the public at large.

It’s been a bit tough to watch how Wizards of the Coast (WotC) has behaved regarding its beloved TTRPG Dungeons & Dragons the past couple of years. A game that was built from its inception on encouraging fans and creators to use the game to do new and interesting things suddenly saw its shepherd turn corporate IP gremlin. Harmless fan mods for other games got lawyerly attention. And then there was the fiasco around WotC changing D&D’s OGL license to make it far less open in the name of rent-seeking.

If you’re not familiar with what happened and don’t want to read my previous post from 2023 on the topic, I’ll try to summarize it tersely. D&D’s OGL 1.0 license made the game’s mechanics, classes, spells, monsters, and more freely open to use to make other new content. OGL 1.0 was a perpetual license that the game’s creators said couldn’t be revoked. No royalties or payments were necessary. Then the planned OGL 1.1 revision leaked to the world and that license would have had lots of changes. There would be royalties owed — 25% of gross revenue — for larger corporate creators, required anyone generating at least $50k per year in revenue to share revenue data with WotC, and it declared that the new license nullified the previous license, despite it having been a perpetual license.

The D&D world went into a rage. Many theorized that the behavior displayed by WotC led to Larian Studios swearing off making another Baldur’s Gate game. There were questions about whether large and popular D&D streamers like Critical Role would continue using D&D to power their storytelling. Nobody seemed to like any of this.

Unsurprisingly, WotC walked the license changes back. Then they promoted Dan Ayoub to run D&D late last year and tasked him with trying to repair all of the bridges the company had managed to burn down. Hearing him speak with Wargamer recently, I think they may have hired the right person. It starts with him acknowledging the missteps of his employer from a high level.

I like to think we have made great strides. Bluntly, we’re recovering from a lot of missteps – very loud, very public missteps. And we’re not going to fix it in one year. I can talk ’til the cows come home, but we’ve got to show more than tell, and that is going to take some time. I’m very conscious that it’s going to take a lot of time to win back the trust to the extent that I would like. Having said that, I think we’ve started strongly, and a lot of these things are still happening behind the scenes.

Honestly, if I would give myself good grades on one thing in particular over the past year, I think it’s been listening. We established the community council. I’ve personally spent a bunch of time talking to not just fans, but retailers and consumers.

Yes, actions will tell us far more than words, but this is pretty good as far as words go. From a PR standpoint, it’s just about perfect. He acknowledges that the company made serious mistakes, that people were pissed, and that project for restoring trust will be a long one. Then he goes on to say that the most important thing here is for him to listen generally, and to his customers specifically. If he’s doing that, that’s making a connection with fans and customers. And if he acts on what he learns from that connection, that’s how you repair all of this.

He did even better when specifically asked about the OGL 1.1 fiasco.

It was a rug pull, right? A lot of people and businesses were built up around a specific thing. Trust was given to the brand, and people rightly felt the rug was pulled from under them. In some cases, it’s caused damage we are still trying to fix today. So I understand the hesitancy of ‘okay, here’s this new guy saying all these things’.

My biggest takeaway as I step into this role is that trust takes a long time to build and a second to break. I’m keenly aware it’s going to take me a long time to repair this, but my hope is people will give the benefit of the doubt as we continue to show that lessons have been learned. This is a new direction, a new voice, and a new spirit and energy behind D&D.

That feels about as transparent and open as I can expect an executive at a company to be.

He’s right: the damage done these past few years is going to take a while to repair. And Ayoub is going to also have to figure out how to navigate the corporate waters to keep other people at the company from reverting to its previously protectionist, IP-focused ways. Actions will tell us far more than anything Ayoub said in this interview.

But Ayoub seems to love D&D every bit as much as I do. The words spilling from his mouth are good words, with a good sentiment behind them. If this is the start of D&D returning to the explosive greatness it enjoyed up until 2023 or so, then Ayoub will be the hero of that particular story.

“Defund the police” has come for at least one local law enforcement agency in one of the reddest states in the nation. This police department could have avoided this ignominious fate simply by not being generally awful. But the person leading the now-defunct department couldn’t seem to do his job without violating rights on the regular. And that’s how this ended up going down in Texas once state law enforcement officials got involved:

A police department in Texas that arrested a local resident for complaining on social media about their city’s contaminated water supply has been ordered closed after failing to prove it provided any benefit to the community.

State officials stepped in to investigate after Jennifer Combs spent a night in jail in May after a post appeared on her Facebook page suggesting people were hospitalized by bacteria in the water pipes of Trinidad, a municipality in Henderson county about 75 miles south-east of Dallas.

The (now-former) police department referenced in this report once failed to serve the residents of Trinidad, Texas. The biggest problem appears to have been (now-former) police chief Charles Gregory, who did nothing but double-down on his First Amendment violations before stepping away from the job shortly before the state’s commission on law enforcement decided the Trinidad PD served no public purpose.

Gregory not only tried to get Combs indicted for bringing attention to town water quality issues, but arrested a supporter of Combs for daring to “display” a “FUCK BAD COPS” sign outside of city hall during one of its meetings.

After an investigation, the Texas Commission on Law Enforcement (TCLE) sent a letter to the town’s mayor, letting him know the state had decided to pull the plug on the PD.

Chief Gregory may have been the biggest problem, but he wasn’t the PD’s only problem:

According to the news channel, the police department lacked resources for officers, including not having bulletproof vests or an evidence room.

Other highlighted failings were problems with use-of-force policies, active shooter situations, vehicle pursuits and the professional conduct of officers.

While some might suggest this lack of public value wasn’t completely the PD’s fault (see also: lack of Kevlar vests, a functioning evidence room), the possibly underfunded PD apparently did the least it could with its limited resources.

As for Chief Gregory, he took the easy way out when it became apparent he had no business running a law enforcement agency (into the ground). When a grand jury refused to indict citizen journalist Jennifer Combs on trumped-up “threatening public safety” charges, Gregory resigned, rather than face more criticism from critics he’d failed to put in jail, as well as to avoid answering questions posed by the judge who handled the Combs arrest warrant and now claimed to have been “misled” by Chief Gregory.

Even if you ignore everything seen here, it’s tough to see how the town of Trinidad (pop. 860 as of the 2020 census) could support a cop shop that employed five full-time officers and “several part-timers.” To put this in perspective, I live in a town with a population of 885 (according to the 2020 census) and all law enforcement support is provided by the county and that seems to be more than enough. No local has ever suggested the town needs its own PD, much less one staffed with 5-10 officers.

With the PD disbanded, law enforcement will be handled by the county, which (as is the case in my current home town) is probably enough to handle whatever criminal activity the town of Trinidad throws at it. The mayor of Trinidad (David Haws) seemed to be completely receptive of this disbanding, suggesting in his public statement that the PD had been a bit of problem for its entire existence.

He said: “There’s been a lot of neglect through the years. We are moving in a positive direction. We’ve got to get past all of this.”

This could mean a few things, but given the context of the disbanding, Haws seems to suggest the town was both over-policed and under-funded. And it’s easy to imagine the local PD had more power than a succession of small town mayors who probably took the job because someone needed to do it. Meanwhile, a bunch of cops with no real crime to fight continued to collect paychecks and abuse their power, with the town seemingly powerless to shut down the unnecessary agency itself.

No one needs a local cop shops when residents report [squints and re-squints at crime data] an average of eight(8)[!!!} crimes per year. The prosecution of town critics and the cop critics who support them make it clear the overstaffed agency had nothing better to do with its time than provide residents with nothing useful in exchange for their tax dollars.

As arguments rage about the possible or real threats of AI, there is one domain that AI has already turned on its head, and in the space of just the last few weeks: mathematics. The first hint of what was coming arrived in May, when OpenAI announced that one of its models had disproved a famous mathematical conjecture. In August, the company shared a list of ten more AI-generated mathematical results, “each of which resolves or makes substantial progress on a long-standing open problem.” But the real bombshell arrived on 8th September, when it announced that an “internal OpenAI system” had come up with a solution to the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem:

The Millennium Prize Problems represent some of the deepest questions at the frontier of mathematics. The question of whether smooth three-dimensional fluid motion can break down has remained unresolved for roughly 90 years.

Although there is no doubt that this represents a major advance in AI mathematics, there is still controversy about who exactly should get credit for the solution of the Navier-Stokes problem. Zvi Mowshowitz has an excellent rundown of what we know and what we don’t know about this saga. But much more important is the effect this achievement has had on the mathematical community. For example, the Caltech Mathathon was already considering “how can we responsibly use AI tools to augment human understanding of mathematics?”:

We are assembling 100 teams of mathematicians to answer this question. Our objective is to provide frontier models for the math community to use, as opposed to solely AI corporations.

But on 10th September, two days after OpenAI revealed its Navier-Stokes solution, current and former Caltech mathematicians published an “Open Letter about the Mathathon”. In it they warned that:

Two prominent AI companies, Anthropic and OpenAI, will supply participants with 2 million dollars in AI credits. This event is likely to have destructive impacts for the mathematical community.

They listed a number of concerns, and called on the organizers to suspend this event. In response, the organizers admitted that worries “the event could incentivize rushed, poorly understood mathematics, place verification burdens on the broader community, and amplify unhealthy incentives around AI-generated results” were valid, at least partially. They went on to clarify what they had done to address the concerns. Following this brouhaha, OpenAI dropped its sponsorship of the event.

Those doubts about the Mathathon’s encouragement of the use of AI tools in mathematics are part of much wider soul-searching in the mathematics community. Even before OpenAI announced the Navier-Stokes solution, the mathematician Max Weinreich wrote a paper entitled “The crisis of AI-generated mathematics” in which he presented the case for “total opposition to the use of artificial intelligence in mathematics.” He is on the organizing committee of the Association for Human Mathematics, which wants to “organize mathematicians to center human understanding and protect against the threat of artificial intelligence.” Another mathematician, Daniel Litt, wrote of “The End of Mathematics”.

Alongside these and many other posts on the topic, thousands of mathematicians around the world have signed declarations and open letters that call for action to address the challenges posed by the use of AI in mathematics research. The Leiden Declaration was published in June of this year, and currently has over 4,000 signatories. A declaration on the “Math and AI” site entitled “A Severe Misalignment of AI in Mathematics” was published on 11th September, but already has around 8,000 endorsers. Even the more narrowly focused Open Letter about the Mathathon has over 2,000 supporters. The “Math and AI” declaration identifies the central problem as follows:

We are witnessing a general threat to intellectual work, with misalignment between the outcome of the use of AI and its initial purpose. In many fields and activities, years of training have traditionally served not only to produce a final answer or product, but also to develop understanding and the ability to formulate new questions and ideas. However, building on a vast body of previous human work, AI systems are becoming increasingly capable of producing the results of such work directly, and these goals cease to align. The issues the mathematical community faces now are similar to issues that other scientific and creative professions are facing, and indicate issues that all of humanity might face: how to make sure that, as AI changes the way work is done, we do not lose sight of what that work was meant to achieve in the first place.

According to many mathematicians, focusing on AI’s prowess in proving challenging theorems misses the point. Bryna Kra wrote in a blog post:

A proof is more than a certificate that something is true. Instead, it is a story, a picture, an insight, an explanation. A proof highlights novel ideas and opens new directions for what we should ask next. It becomes part of the toolkit of the community. A deep theorem changes how we think, not because of its statement, but because of what it teaches us. As Bill Thurston wrote on MathOverflow in a 2010 response to a question about what mathematicians do: “The product of mathematics is clarity and understanding. Not theorems, by themselves.”

As many mathematicians now recognize, the challenge today is coming up with a way to shift from a world in which proofs (by humans) are rewarded, to one where all the other aspects — the stories, pictures, and insights that are part of a proof — are rewarded as well, or even instead. Terence Tao, one of the mathematicians playing a prominent role in the debate about the future shape of mathematics in the age of AI, has even even said (pdf):

if the authors cannot convincingly demonstrate that they are able to give a clear, expert-level talk on their results, one that is correct and properly attributed, then the result should not be published. A proof that no human can properly explain should be viewed as incomplete, even if it has been formally verified.

Max Weinreich wants to go further:

We could replace traditional authorship with co-ownership of mathematical ideas. In this paradigm, any mathematician who demonstrates authoritative understanding of a work – the type you would expect of an author today – would be entitled to claim co-ownership, even after publication. Some papers might have a few co-owners; others would have tens, or even hundreds. Journals would have the exciting, but challenging, role of establishing norms for validating understanding and maintaining the infrastructure of co-ownership. This would take time – immense amounts of it. Explaining an entire paper in full detail to an appropriately skeptical audience often constitutes an entire graduate course. But if mathematicians aren’t writing papers any more, we will have more time. That time should be returned to mathematics, in its most social and human forms. I think it sounds like fun.

This would require not only a fundamental re-thinking of how academic journals work — something long overdue anyway — but also how educational institutions structure and reward academic work. In a follow-up to his earlier “The End of Mathematics” post, Daniel Litt has written a more optimistic one entitled “A beginning for mathematics.” In it, he calls for more emphasis to be placed on the human and social aspects of mathematics — the very things lacking from even the most impressive AI proofs:

The allocative aspects of our job (hiring, graduate admissions, etc.) are in dire need of reform if we want to retain human mathematical expertise. Broadly speaking I think we should focus on rewarding skill in the parts of our jobs that cannot be automated: the internal (e.g. understanding mathematics) and social-relational parts, and operationalizations that hew as closely to those aspects of the profession as possible. For example, talks and sustained mathematical discussion now demonstrate understanding much better than papers. Once AI systems improve at exposition and “digestion,” this will be even more the case.

There seems to be an emerging consensus in the field that, like it or not, mathematics has changed for ever, and that we have entered “The Age of Wonders and Terrors” as the mathematician Scott Aaronson puts it:

It seems to me that the Singularity has already started; it’s just wildly unevenly distributed. Yes, I still unload the dishwasher and clip my toenails. On the other hand, in whatever years I have left, I don’t expect that I’ll ever again prove a theorem because I’m actually needed to prove it. If I do, it will only be for my or others’ enjoyment or edification.

In this view, mathematicians will still prove theorems and come up with counterexamples, but they will do it because they enjoy it, not because their career depends upon it. Society will benefit from the coming flood of new AI-derived results, as we move from an era of proof scarcity to an era of proof abundance, but there will still be a place for human mathematicians to interpret those results, to pass them on to the wider community, and to build on them, probably using AI to do so. In this respect, they will become what the “technical philosopher” Logan Graves calls “priests”:

Yes, it is true — but how? What does it mean? It has been passed down to us from on high and its secrets must be disentangled. Its form may be foreign, perhaps even disgusting, but it is true. It remains to understand it. To attempt to grasp the truth in its full glory and deliver it to the community, the flock, the seekers of truth and the lovers of wisdom — that is the task for the priest. That is the task the we are watching the human mathematical community transition to, at this moment.

However, the dizzying pace of AI development brings with it a danger, articulated here by Terence Tao (pdf):

We may soon be faced with the very real possibility of a verified proof of a major result that no human understands well enough to explain.

Already AI proofs run to hundreds of pages — 166 in the case of Navier-Stokes (pdf); there is no reason why they won’t reach thousands of pages one day. At that point, no human, or even team of humans will ever understand it in detail. What then for mathematics and mathematicians?

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When right wing billionaire Larry Ellison (and his nepobaby son David) hired blog-troll Bari Weiss to run CBS News, Weiss arrived with the promise of “balanced, fact-based news,” “independent, principled journalism,” and a unique “entrepreneurial drive and editorial vision” that would modernize the network and reach the “everyday Americans” they claimed were “traditionally ignored by mainstream media.”

As we noted at the time, that was all bullshit code for turning CBS into yet another outlet that panders to global autocrats, normalizes far right wing extremism, coddles corporate power, and generally shits all over the kind of popular progressive societal reforms (like an equitable tax code) that terrify rich people.

Obviously none of this has gone well, with Weiss “new” CBS seeing some of the worst ratings in a quarter century. Apparently, people don’t have much of an appetite for authoritarian-coddling, “anti-woke,” low-effort agitprop crafted by unqualified people with little actual journalism experience.

Thanks to feckless California Democrats, Ellison is close to also acquiring CNN and doing the same thing courtesy of Paramount’s $111 billion acquisition of Warner Brothers. While initially there was some thought that Weiss would see her management role extended to include “modernizing” CNN, there are growing rumblings that Paramount may ultimately jettison Weiss entirely:

“Everyone is wondering how soon it will take the Ellisons to pull the plug once the merger goes through,” one industry insider told Radar. “CBS is desperately trying to spin these abysmal launch numbers as a win when the entire industry is laughing at yet the third failure on Bari’s record.”

Radar’s sourcing is pretty thin, and doesn’t extend much beyond insider gossip. But the same growing Ellison dissatisfaction is bounding around right wing media outlets like the New York Post (for whatever that’s worth) suggesting that at least — it’s unlikely that Weiss’ shaky authority extends to CNN. A lot seems to be hinging on just how bad the ratings are for the looming new season of 60 Minutes.

It’s not surprising that Bari Weiss can’t do journalism — because she was never a journalist. She was a right wing substack troll focused on editorially punching left against “woke” concepts like empathy, diversity, democratic norms, popular progressive reforms, and broad public opposition to genocide.

But apparently Weiss isn’t good at propaganda either. Fox News, Sinclair Broadcasting, and countless other right wing agitprop mainstays have mastered the art of trolling about homelessness, drug use, crime, and immigration in a way that captures the interest of the frightened, racist, and elderly. But, thankfully for the public interest, Weiss doesn’t really actually seem to know how to modernize broadcast TV agitprop for this new era.

Of course the Ellisons don’t really know what they’re doing — so it’s very possible they just keep doubling down on the same mistakes. The problem is that the CNN deal saddles them with significantly more debt, which always results in more layoffs, higher prices, and corner cutting, all of which are only likely to expedite the “tiffany network’s” precipitous collapse in the marketplace of ideas.

I often hear Bari Weiss was a “success” and “is doing what she was hired for” because the Ellisons hate journalism and want to see CBS destroyed. And while I doubt they’d lose much sleep if CBS journalism did die; I genuinely do think they thought they could “modernize” CBS as an effective propaganda tool, and it’s abundantly clear Weiss isn’t capable of it.

Which suggests it’s very likely she’s replaced by somebody more competent, at least as so far as rank propaganda is concerned. One thing will be sure: whatever happens to Weiss she’ll absolutely continue to fail upward.

Eleven months ago, I wrote about what I thought was a truly fascinating find: that some kids appeared to be using some random old NPR podcasts on Spotify as a personal chat room to get around various restrictions. It was mentioned, somewhat in passing, on the “How to do Everything” podcast last October, where someone who did social media monitoring for NPR described noticing odd comments like these showing up on podcasts like NPR’s TED Radio Hour:

But then, a week and a half ago or so, This American Life, a much bigger podcast, also associated with public radio (though not actually part of NPR), reported that they had discovered basically the same thing (and clearly seemed unaware that anyone else had reported on it earlier, even other public radio podcasts). This American Life used it as an example of “intergenerational” confusion, because Dave Blanchard, the millennial who first spotted those comments on the (again, public radio) podcast “Wild Card,” assumed they were bots, only to be told by a Gen Z colleague that they were kids, not bots:

Ira Glass

So OK, bots, he thought, some newfangled kind of bots that respond to each other somehow. He deleted the posts.

Dave Blanchard

And I went back to the Spotify comments again. And there was a new comment that said, uh, so it deleted my com. And that felt not botty. That felt very strange that a bot would be able to recognize that the thread got deleted and post it, letting people know that it had been deleted.

Ira Glass

And then there were other responses to that.

Dave Blanchard

So someone says, username cotton/amity, parentheses, I’m back, bitches, commented, “Weird.” Aubrey commented, “That’s weirdss,” two S’s.

Ira Glass

This is really not looking like any bot behavior he’d ever seen. So he goes to NPR’s Slack channels, post some screenshots, describes what these comments are. And one of the higher-ups, Matilde, suggests reporting it to Spotify, which Dave does. And then somebody younger at NPR reads the thread. They’re 10 years younger than Dave– Gen Z, not millennial, named Hannah Chinn.

Hannah Chinn

And I click into the screenshots, and almost immediately I’m like, oh. My conclusion is really, really different than Dave’s and Matilde’s, because I’m like, these are kids. And I think that part of that is because I was a middle schooler on the internet, posting on forums and stuff.

And so I look at their display names. Their display names are, like, Ella with five emojis. And they’re the special character emojis. They’re the ones that you have to go onto the internet and type your name into a special text generator, and then it comes out as a special character, and then you have to special paste it into your profile.

Ira Glass

Their profile pictures are all cartoon characters Hannah’s never seen before. And then there’s the way that they’re commenting back and forth with each other, short little phrases. I’m sorry. That’s weird. Lots of hi’s, lots of extra exclamation points. Hannah recognized it. They grew up in a conservative home, was homeschooled, with limited access to social media.

Hannah Chinn

And so I was a kid who used weird parts of the internet not as they were originally designed to talk to my friends. I talked back and forth with my friends on Google Docs. And we would type things and then delete them, and then type things and then make them invisible by making the text white on the white background. So I think this is familiar behavior to me.

I also find it kinda hilarious that Hannah mentions how they would talk with their friends via Google Docs, because in my post from last year, that was the other example I used to demonstrate how kids will turn anything into their own personal social space.

One thing that This American Life was able to do though, was track down one of the kids, a 14-year-old girl, named Ella, whom Ira Glass speaks to. You can hear a bit of their conversation in this Bluesky post from Glass:

Or listen to the whole thing on the full podcast (which doesn’t go that much deeper into this conversation). While some of the earlier discussion was speculative, it appears that the speculation was exactly right regarding what’s happening, including the idea that if adults caught them on the Spotify page of a public radio podcast, they wouldn’t be too concerned:

Ira Glass

Ella says this all started with a video podcast that played TikTok videos. Ella thinks a kid started it. The video seemed to be chosen specifically for kids who weren’t allowed on TikTok, but were allowed on Spotify. That was Ella. She was allowed on Spotify, but on no social media. And she and the other kids would watch this girl’s podcast on Spotify and then chat in the comments of the podcast.

Ella

And her podcast ended up getting banned. And we wanted to keep talking to each other, so people would make playlists.

Ira Glass

She described exactly the system that Hannah figured out. Kids would name their playlist “chat here” or something like that, and then there’d be some podcast, and everybody would go to that podcast and talk in the comments. She says it was maybe 20 kids in the core group– lots of theater kids, she says, mostly girls, most of them with strict parents who didn’t let them on regular social media.

And can I ask, why did you guys pick NPR shows to be the ones where you went to in the comments?

Ella

I think we just looked for podcasts that didn’t have many comments.

Ira Glass

I see. So you picked NPR because it didn’t seem very popular.

Ella

Yeah, so that we wouldn’t get caught up in other people’s comments.

Ira Glass

I tell you, buddy, I do a public radio show, and that hurts a little to hear it.

Ella

[CHUCKLES]

Sorry.

Ira Glass

That’s OK. Are your parents NPR listeners?

Ella

Yeah, my mom is. She listens to podcasts all the time.

Ira Glass

Was any of this that your parents were NPR listeners, and this felt like this is the perfect cover? Like, if they catch you doing this, you can be like, look, I’m just doing this for an NPR show.

Ella

Yeah.

Ira Glass

Is that true? Did you think about that?

Ella

Yeah, a little bit.

While this feels like a silly little story, it’s actually pretty important at a time when adults keep rushing to ban social media for kids. Those bans miss the point: kids still want to socialize, to gather, and to chat. And we’ve effectively been closing down the real world places where they can do that outside of school.

Professor Kate Klonick, who studies online speech and platform governance, summed it up nicely: “All networked technology comes down to chat.” That’s a crazy important point to make, which is often lost in the wider discussions about “regulating social media.” If you are connecting people via technology, they are going to use the tools to communicate. Pretending that we can magically stop this or regulate “chat” is going to end badly.

But the attempts continue no matter how much the kids today may think “that’s weirdss” with two s’s.

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The Supreme Court just keeps giving Trump a free pass to engage in what Mike Masnick correctly called “human trafficking.” It’s stuff this nation has never done before because it’s never been run by someone quite like Trump before. To maximize the cruelty inflicted on immigrants, the Trump administration (steered directly by its chief ghoul, Stephen Miller) has repeatedly ejected migrants into anywhere but their native lands, putting most of them in countries even our own State Department recommends everyone steer clear of.

Any country with a history of human rights abuse or is considered to be “war-torn” is a favored destination for people this administration wants erased from the US population count, if not from the world itself.

And despite this being a particularly novel and particularly cruel abuse of immigration enforcement powers, the Supreme Court has refused to block this on multiple occasions. Any time an appellate court says the government can’t do this, the government immediately runs to its SCOTUS enablers to get injunctions stayed pending its appeal.

SCOTUS did this June 2025 over the lengthy dissent of justices who rarely have anything to do these days but express their disagreement with the conservative far-right majority that runs the court. And now it has done it again — targeting the same appellate court (First Circuit) that ruled only a few days earlier that it would not be allowing the injunction against vanishing migrants into war-torn hellholes to be stayed pending the administration’s constant stream of appeals.

This ruling runs only a paragraph as well. And the three justices dissenting from the majority’s decision to reimpose the stay on the injunction are the ones you expect. There’s nothing new to write here, so they don’t. However, the majority does at least suggest it might actually consider the case on its merits in the near future, rather than just keep hitting the reset button without explanation every time a court sides with the victims of the administration’s abject cruelty.

From the one-paragraph preamble to the SCOTUS order list [PDF]:

The application for stay presented to Justice Jackson and by her referred to the Court is granted. The February 25, 2026 order and judgment of the United States District Court for theDistrict of Massachusetts, case No. 1:25-cv-10676, are stayed. The application is also treated as a petition for a writ of certiorari, and the petition is granted. The parties are directed to brief and argue the following questions: (1) Whether the district court had jurisdiction over Respondents’ claims. (2) Whether the district court had authority to enter classwide declaratory relief and APA vacatur under 8 U. S. C. §1252(f)(1). (3) Whether the Government’s Guidance on third-country removals is unlawful under 8 U. S. C. §1231(b), the Due Process Clause, or FARRA/CAT and its implementing regulations. (4) Such other questions that the Government determines are appropriate for the proper disposition of the case. The Clerk is directed to establish a briefing schedule that will allow the case to be argued in the December 2026 argument session.

The upside is that the government will have to present an argument in favor of its actions and try to support it with existing precedent. The bad news is that SCOTUS is cutting corners on behalf of the administration by treating an application for a stay as a writ of certiorari. They’re not the same thing and doing this just means the right-wing majority is going to pretend the government has already filed a brief containing its arguments for lifting the stay to the court, which it absolutely hasn’t done. On top of that, the government gets to choose what “other questions” are pertinent to this case — a courtesy that’s not being extended to the plaintiffs who just got shit on by SCOTUS undercutting their injunction without saying anything more than “we’ll discuss this at a later date and the administration will get to lead the discussion.”

On the other hand, there’s always a chance the administration will talk itself out the good graces of the ultra-conservative majority by making arguments so bad or blatantly bigoted everyone but Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito will be forced to reject them.

But, as it stands now, the government is free to kidnap people off the streets, deprive them of their due process rights, and ship them to whatever country they think might make these migrants the most miserable.