SCROLL NEWS / DISCOVERY
Search headlines
Find the stories shaping the conversation.
Results for " insists " 136 found 🔀 AI-powered Shuffle
Pirates Top Prospect Gives Update After Midseason Injury
Pittsburgh Pirates' Seth Hernandez insists he's healthy after a season-ending injury.
Judge insists Trump must be deposed in his $10B lawsuit against the BBC, warns it could be tossed in fight over records
A federal judge warned President Donald Trump could see his $10 billion defamation lawsuit against the BBC dismissed if he does not work harder to produce information the news outlet it is entitled to in the case, including sitting for a deposition.
Setting The Pace: Poets&Quants Names HEC Paris Our 2026 Business School Of The Year
A European school is topping the rankings, and its dean insists that's the least interesting thing about it.
Mikel Merino Takes Zubimendi Injury Blame and Reveals Details
Mikel Merino has revealed his challenge was behind the ankle problem that ruled Martin Zubimendi out of Arsenal’s win over Lille, but insists his teammate will be back soon.
Mikel Arteta Defends Noni Madueke Over Output Concerns
The Gunners' boss insists the £48million winger will decide matches, dismissing concerns over his final product following a pivotal assist in Arsenal’s latest European triumph.
GTA 6 Developer Rockstar Insists Its Next Game Won't Take Another 8 Years to Make
Rockstar has promised that its next game following GTA 6 won’t take as long to come out, although it failed to hint at what it might be.
Kelly Clarkson's feud with Brooklyn store escalates as owner says she 'put us in danger' and raises bird's price to $15m
Clarkson claims that the item she wanted to purchase had a $15,000 price tag, but the Brooklyn store insists it was never for sale. The back-and-forth's since gone viral.
English soccer's regulator insists there will be no political pressure in Man City case
The chair of English soccer’s regulatory body has said he would resign if there were any political interference over potential sanctions for Manchester City | Upstate Red
English soccer's regulator insists there will be no political pressure in Man City case
The chair of English soccer’s regulatory body has said he would resign if there were any political interference over potential sanctions for Manchester City | KNSS Radio
John Stamos Says Mike Love Insists on Performing Despite ‘Serious Health Challenges’
John Stamos says Mike Love is facing “serious health challenges” as the Beach Boys cofounder returns to performing after months of disrupted tour dates. The ... Read More
Kelly Clarkson's beef with a Brooklyn store has gone viral. Neither side is backing down.
Clarkson claims that the item she wanted to purchase had a $15,000 price tag, but the Brooklyn store insists it was never for sale. The back-and-forth's since gone viral.
John Stamos shares health update on Beach Boys singer Mike Love: ‘He insists on being on stage’
‘The Mike Love we see tonight may not be exactly the Mike we’ve always known,’ the actor said
Arsenal star’s father insists his son is world-class
Mikel Merino continues to prove his value at Arsenal, with the midfielder delivering important performances for club and country despite often being overlooked when discussions turn to the best player...
Gov. Moore insists Maryland’s budget is balanced; watchdog calls it 'political math'
WBFF Fox45 provides local news, weather forecasts, traffic updates, notices of events and items of interest in the community, sports and entertainment programming for Baltimore and nearby towns and communities in Maryland, including Annapolis, Crofton, Glen Burnie, Linthicum, Pasadena, Severn, Cockeysville, Dundalk, Essex, Parkville, Owings Mills, Towson, White Marsh, Woodlawn, Hampstead, Sykesville, Taneytown, Westminster, Elkton, Perryville, Pt. Deposit, Rising Sun, Aberdeen, Abingdon, Bel Air, Edgewood, Fallston, Havre De Grace, Columbia, Elkridge, Ellicott City, Fulton, and Ocean City.
‘Survivor 51’ star Rob Antonson insists ‘I’m not a quitter. I’m just not.’
‘Survivor 51’ player Rob Antonson looks back at his controversial exit and insists ‘I’m not a quitter. I’m just not. I’ve never quit anything in my life.’
Gears of War: E-Day Studio Boss Insists 'The Next Game Will Not Take Nearly as Long' to Make, Responds to Layoff Concern
The boss of Gears of War: E-Day developer The Coalition has responded to reports that staff at the studio are worried they will lose their jobs amid the ongoing cuts at Xbox, and promised the next Gears game won’t take as long to make.
How Close Jeffery Simmons Thinks Titans Are to Winning Football
Despite an 0-4 start, the star defensive tackle insists Tennessee is on the brink of a breakthrough if they can finally master the art of forcing turnovers.
Trump defends data centers in Ohio as he rallies to boost Jon Husted in a tight Senate race
President Donald Trump is defending data centers powering AI projects during a campaign rally in Ohio. He insists they benefit local communities and warns against losing them to China. The
‘It’s very sad’: Spurs’ Wembanyama rules out sports betting endorsements
Spurs star says it is ‘very sad’ to see NBA players promote gambling companies and insists money no longer drives his sponsorship decisions
Bournemouth insists two Arsenal targets will not leave in January
Arsenal are among the clubs monitoring Bournemouth’s leading players, with the Cherries continuing to exceed expectations in the Premier League. They have built an impressive squad by signing player...
September Monthly Review: Health MCP Guy?
For all the time I spend talking about APIs and data exchange, this newsletter has had embarrassingly little interoperability of its own. It’s old-school SaaS, baby - UI or bust. Not all of that is my fault! Substack, for all its popularity, is (as mentioned before) really frustrating as my system of record. The primary user it optimizes towards is the reader, whose attention feeds the app, the Notes feed, and the recommendation network that Substack is actually selling. Health API Guy is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Subscribe They’re falling into the same trap that Medium once sprinted into, albeit at a much more glacial speed. Younger generations may not remember (or never knew) it, but Medium once lured publications like The Ringer and Signal v. Noise onto its platform, only to lose them as it rebuilt itself around a paywall and an algorithmic feed. Substack’s original pitch circa 2020 was the antidote (you own your list), but every new feed feature chips away at it. I get it: writers are generic supply in the eyes of the Substack product team. Generic supply follows demand, so the consistent pressure on the PMs is to generate demand, which leads to every product cycle going toward discovery (Notes, recommendations, the app, live video). The end result lackluster author tools (laggy and broken analytics are truly crippling) all despite the premium price point. The archive is where it crosses from authorial gripes to actual reader impact, though. Across Substack and LinkedIn, I’ve published 1,218 posts and nearly 900,000 words since 2018. Substack’s native search can see only the 464 posts that live on Substack, and even there it’s woefully inadequate at surfacing relevant content (even for the guy who wrote it)! Readers have the same problem, writ large. Ask the Archive Fixing search (for both my readers and my own use) turned out to be extremely non-trivial, unfortunately: There’s no public API for readers to access content RSS exists for new content notification, but it only carries the 20 most recent posts and cuts paid ones off at the preview The only Substack MCP is an admin tool for analytics The export exists for authors, but it’s painfully awkward and slow. So I built something to work around that: the Health API Guy MCP. It’s a private MCP server holding the full text of everything I’ve written across Substack and LinkedIn. Add it to Claude or ChatGPT as a connector and you can ask things like: It pairs keyword search (for acronyms and case names, of which we have many) with semantic search. Every post is also labeled by topic, form, and court case, so you can pull a lawsuit’s (or multiple cases’) entire docket across Substack and LinkedIn in one query: Hail, Healthapiguyhydra This is also a bit of me eating my own cooking. I’ve spent the year arguing that headless healthcare is arriving and that developers want primitives over abstractions. Last week in Hail, Benihydra, I watched Salesforce plug its platform into Claude and bet that the records underneath outlive whatever interface sits on top: Salesforce must believe that the Hydra’s immortal head is the records, permissions, and business logic (in that they will survive whatever happens to the interface). It felt a bit hypocritical to keep my own archive behind a Substack search bar. The archive is the body. Substack is one head, and now whatever tool you might use is another. Will the EHRs follow my lead? Probably not imminently, but one can hope! Why Founding Members Only The MCP is available to Founding Member subscribers. A few reasons: It costs money and time to run. Hosting, the database, Clerk usage and AI compute for search and labeling are significant operational costs (that increase with usage). Substack gives me no way to automate access. There’s no API to check whether someone is a paid subscriber, so every user is manual operations for now. It’s a beta. We’ll need to improve things and parts will break. I’d rather they break for a small group of dedicated readers who will tell me about it. The Founding tier deserved a real benefit. Until now it was mostly a generous tip. Now it comes with something. If you’re already a Founding Member, reply to this email with the address you’d like provisioned. If you’re not and want in, upgrade here. Larger teams (such as companies) can get access too: group subscriptions at the Founding tier come with the group discount. The admin for the subscription can reply with the list of addresses to provision. Get 20% off a group subscription Pricing Founding membership is now a flat $200 a year, replacing the old suggested $150 that readers could adjust. Existing Founding Members will have access grandfathered in at their previous rate. Month in Review Articles Published Make Networks Dumb Again (Sep 11): AI is making old analog networks cheaper to use and flooding them with machine traffic in the process. A plea for agent-native rails with the intelligence at the endpoints, and for Washington to drag them to ubiquity. Interoperability, Unbuttoned (Sep 29): Interoperability is a series of workflows in a trenchcoat, and this post finally takes the trenchcoat off. A color-coded map shows which provider workflows went digital, which are fragmented, and which still run on fax. Video Content Antitrust’s System of Record Problem (Sep 3): The FTC’s investigation into Epic prompted a ninety-minute webinar, now posted with chapters and a smoothed transcript. We get into why market definition, missing B2B share data, and the SSNIP test leave antitrust poorly suited to systems of record, plus why information blocking may be doing more than any pending lawsuit. The Information Exchange: Cerner Milking Edition (Sep 18): This was so fucking fun. Ryan Tucker, Ryan Brickner, Brad Thorson, and I try an Around the Horn format, complete with points, penalties, and a mute button. We debate whether Oracle Health is dead, who would actually buy Cerner (IBM enters the chat), p(Doom), and why the front desk still hands you a clipboard. Regulatory Ask Not What Your Network Can Do (Sep 23): CDC’s RFI on public health data intermediaries lists use cases already served, unevenly, by eCR, lab reporting, IZ Gateway, and syndromic surveillance. The real opportunity sits in one question about AI: a network that can handle the next emergency without another interface project. Court cases Particle v. Epic: The Naughty Schoolteacher (Sep 4): After a summer-long vigil, the answer on Epic’s early summary judgment bid is two paragraphs and a remedial assignment. Particle advances to the next grade, and market definition gets another year of discovery. The Epic Discovery Files (Sep 8): Texas’s motions to compel arrive with a 251-page appendix of requests, objections, and meet-and-confer letters with Cravath. Inside: Epic using generative AI for document review, denied interoperability requests in scope, and Noerr-Pennington raised against lobbying discovery. Epic v. Health Gorilla: “Working as Designed” (Sep 9): Epic wants nothing to do with the data breach MDL, and explaining why puts fresh discovery on the public docket. The spiciest allegation: Health Gorilla told GuardDog to scrub its law firm business from its website instead of cutting off access. Veeva v. Epic: Legal Bypass Surgery (Sep 15): Veeva asks the Wisconsin Supreme Court to skip the Court of Appeals, while law professors and three policy groups line up as amici. Meanwhile, Epic’s lawyers apologize for another round of citation errors, including a quote that never existed. Texas v. Epic: Behind the Black Bars (Sep 17): The court portal served up Epic’s unredacted filings, revealing a $5 million document review budget and the AI workflow behind it. Also inside: the 200-plus company names Texas wants searched, and one very expensive Zoom invitation. OpenEvidence v. Doximity: Consequences Will Follow (Sep 25): OpenEvidence tells the court it will not comply with a discovery order, and its own lawyers at Quinn Emanuel say they won’t defend the choice. Add years of Slack reported unrecoverable, and Rule 37 sanctions come into view. Health Tech Keeps Choosing Violence (Sep 28): Doximity moves to end OpenEvidence’s case, Epic asks Texas to show its work, and a sleepy Audacious Inquiry patent fight sprouts antitrust and information blocking counterclaims. The main event is a long-sealed Cognizant v. Infosys ruling that hints where system of record antitrust claims can survive. EHRs One Verb for Oracle Health (Sep 14): Oracle’s earnings call quantifies every data center to the decimal point, while Oracle Health gets a single verb: “accelerate.” Panning the few healthcare mentions turns up an agentic care management system, a research-to-care ledger play, and the question of whether healthcare gets Larry’s patience. Epic’s Forretress Under Siege (Sep 30): Judy Faulkner tells a panel Epic paused hundreds of projects to harden its software and calls it a “shame,” while a spokesperson insists the roadmap hasn’t changed. Project Glasswing, a Pokémon-branded QAN sprint, and a trove of Jodel grievances reconcile the two Epics and preview the Jevons paradox coming for all software. Industry Analysis Scanning for a Network (Sep 1): Scan.com raises $220M to build the imaging network labs never got, speedrunning Zocdoc’s consumer-to-B2B pivot. Its wedge to network density may be the most American one available: personal injury litigation. The Front Desk Wants the Damn Whole Building (Sep 16): Hello Patient buys Converse Health, pushing its AI front desk into referrals, chart work, and prior auth. The copilot categories keep blurring, and your distribution partner is still your final boss. Cross-industry Comparisons A Different Patchwork Quilt (Sep 10): Healthcare loves to envy open banking, but the US version has no mandate, a toll booth at Chase, and data quality problems of its own. The grass isn’t greener; it’s another American patchwork quilt, and perhaps a worse one. Hail, Benihydra (Sep 21): Salesforce brings its platform into Claude, Slack, and its own agent, inviting the interfaces that might replace it. Cut off one head and more grow back, so long as the records underneath stay put. Living on A Trade Secret Prayer (Sep 22): Six credit unions are suing Fiserv, the Epic of core banking, by claiming their own member records as trade secrets. Banking has no Cures Act, so its lawyers reach for legal alchemy that healthcare has already tried. Other News None this month External Media Nabla Accelerate NYC: I kicked off fall conference season at Nabla’s Accelerate event in New York, where Delphine Groll opened by asking the room to picture the company it wants to become and the one it doesn’t. I liked her framework of bureaucracy, fear, and ego as the blockers. I also love vendor conferences/events in general - different vibe than industry biggies. Healthcare 101 with Nikhil Krishnan: I briefly guest lectured Out-Of-Pocket’s Healthcare 101 class. Appreciated Nikhil’s takeaways cover whether AI doctors can query HIEs, why healthcare’s data-liberation rules beat most industries’, and the hi-res graphic is in the comments. HCN: Epic Probed by the FTC: I joined the HCN guys to talk through the FTC’s investigation into Epic. Cedric’s new hairdo was an unexpected plot twist. The episode also covers MFN drug pricing, healthcare M&A and Eli Lilly’s acquisition streak. Fall Conferences: At eHealth Exchange’s Annual Meeting in Austin on Oct 27, I’ll moderate a panel on the tensions between AI, HIEs, and timely patient access with Jean Ross (Primary Record), Therasa Bell (Kno2), Byron Crowe (Doctronic), and Michael Marchant (Freenome). Here’s the rest of my schedule if you want to meet up: CommonWell (Redwood Shores, CA): Oct 13-14 Will be participating in a fun Jeopardy event Open@Epic (Madison, WI): Oct 20-23 Will be enjoying Verona, Willy Street, and other local adventures eHealth Exchange and Sequoia Project (Austin, TX): Oct 27-29 Yeehaw HLTH (Vegas): Nov 15-18 Groundhog Day, Venetian Edition RSNA (Chicago): Nov 30-Dec 2 See me at “Governing AI in Breast Imaging: What Health Systems Are Actually Doing” Digital Health Counsel 2026 AI Summit (Seattle): December 2-3 Will likely be speaking to a bunch of lawyers about information blocking Posts I Liked ChatGPT’s Epic integration: game changer or nothing burger?: Joshua Liu, MD offers five thoughts on OpenAI’s Epic launch, starting from the point that it rides the same open APIs available to anyone. He argues read-only access leaves ordering to Art and the ambient startups, and asks why HCA is piloting it alongside Commure. He’s sorta a must-follow at this point - consistently excellent, thought-provoking takes. Epic, Lilly, and the Discovery pass: Seth Chaney reads Epic’s first major Discovery deal (with Eli Lilly), as well as its revised developer terms on commercial displays, as the pipe finally opening between EHRs and pharma. Life sciences and health continue to collide. Scott Rossignol on EHR payer platforms and ePA fees: Scott argues the top ambulatory EHR vendors are turning the prior auth mandate into a per-member-per-year toll on payers, for an API whose operating cost has nothing to do with covered lives. His fix is two lines of regulatory text: put the CRD/DTR/PAS certification criteria in the Base EHR definition, and bring payer-facing ePA connectivity under § 170.404’s cost-based fee rules. It’s a good solution. Health API Guy is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Subscribe
Xbox CEO Asha Sharma insists "Xbox is not for sale"
Xbox CEO Asha Sharma has pushed back on speculation that Microsoft could spin off its games division, telling the New Y…
The White House Claims Trump’s New Ads Are “Clearly Not Political,” Says Aide
The pre-midterm commercials are “reminding Americans to love their country,” a White House official insists to Vanity Fair, even as both Republican and Democrat lawmakers balk.
Video: Mancini responds to allegations of double Man City contract
Roberto Mancini’s Manchester City contract is among the 115 possible breaches of Premier League financial rules, but the Italy national team coach insists that ‘it’s not an issue that concerns m...
Bellamy sure Wales belong as Haaland threat looms
Craig Bellamy expects Norway to be a force for years, but insists Wales have earned the right to be in Nations League A.
Terim: Italy have ‘significant potential’ but no identity
Former Fiorentina and Milan coach Fatih Terim insists Italy must ‘rediscover identity and competitiveness’ and backs the Turkish FA’s decision to confirm Vincenzo Montella in charge despite a di...
Century Entertainment insists still PAGCOR compliant despite joint venture partner losing its GSA license
Hong Kong-listed Century Entertainment International Holdings Ltd has insisted it remains compliant under Philippine gaming regulator PAGCOR’s new regulatory framework
Alajbegovic on right Juventus decision, Spalletti help and Scudetto ambition
Kerim Alajbegovic insists he ‘didn’t think twice’ about joining Juventus, despite an offer from Chelsea, thanks Luciano Spalletti for advice, and wants to ‘compete for the title.’The Bosnia ...
NYFF Turns Up The Heat As ‘Godzilla’, ‘Artificial’, ‘NAZA’, ‘You Can See Everything’ Spark Festival Buzz
The New York Film Festival opens Friday night with a lineup featuring great films of 2026 along with heavy-hitting world premieres. Artistic director Dennis Lim insists the global bows are not “the be...
Ranieri: ‘Luckily’ young Italian footballers get playing outside Serie A
Italy technical director Claudio Ranieri is focused on developing young players, but insists youth coaches must be paid more and notes that, ‘luckily’, many youngsters are gaining valuable playing...
Reedijk 'not an academic guy' despite doctorate
New Hibernian manager Marink Reedijk insists he is more a man of action than an academic despite having a philosophy doctorate in sports coaching. The Dutchman is only 35 but had already worked in coaching with Ajax and West Bromwich Albion, Roeselare, Vitesse and Anderlecht before leading Beveren to the Belgian second-tier title and promotion last season. "I'm not a really an academic guy," he told Hibs TV.
Watchdog says Messmer's taxpayer-funded TV ad part of larger problem
U.S. Rep. Mark Messmer insists his recent taxpayer-funded, campaign-like commercial wasn't political. A watchdog says it shows reforms are needed.
Wales will not be overawed in Portugal
Jordan James insists depleted Wales will not be overawed against "the best players in the world" in their Nations League A opener against Portugal on Thursday.
NJ labor chief criticizes 'river of misinformation' about independent contractor rule
A rule set to take effect Oct. 1 has caused a furor among business groups and freelancers, but the state insists enforcement won't change.
Falcons searching for answers after crushing loss to Carolina
Frustration boiled over on the Falcons’ sideline during a 34-3 loss to the Panthers, but head coach Kevin Stefanski insists Atlanta’s locker room remains resilient despite mounting quarterback and offensive struggles.
Legendary Phoenix Suns Coach Names Shawn Marion for Major Honor
Mike D’Antoni insists the "seven seconds or less" era's success demands Shawn Marion’s Hall of Fame induction, cementing the versatile forward's legacy as a defensive powerhouse.
Unease over O'Neill but not facing sack?
Comfortable defeats by Rangers and Ferencvaros have left a growing sense of unease behind the scenes at Celtic over the future of manager Martin O'Neill. Martin O'Neill says "Celtic will be looking, soon enough, for someone to replace me" but insists he retains the hunger to succeed this season.
De Zerbi insists Tonali is a ‘complete midfielder’
Roberto De Zerbi insisted that Sandro Tonali is “a complete midfielder”, despite the Italian struggling to make an impact for Spurs so far.The Italian joined Spurs for £92.5 million plus add-ons ...
Dartmouth Health CEO says patient care was focus in deciding layoffs
A day after Dartmouth Health and the UVM Health Network announced layoffs affecting hundreds of employees, the CEO of the region’s largest health care provider insists the cuts are unavoidable and will not harm patient care.
Austin Schlottmann Believes Titans Can Still Channel Energy From Offseason
After a demoralizing collapse against the Jets, center Austin Schlottmann insists Tennessee can rediscover its preseason spark before facing a high-powered Eagles roster in Nashville.
Arteta insists Arsenal star ‘will get his chance’
Mikel Arteta insists Max Dowman will get opportunities in the Arsenal first team this season – but says he must earn his minutes like every other player in the squad.The highly-rated youngster has b...
Thuram happy with Inter reaction and praise for Bonny
Marcus Thuram insists Inter’s comebacks prove they ‘are a team that know how to react’ and can rely on players off the bench like Ange-Yoan Bonny after beating Udinese 5-3.This felt almost like ...
Blizzard Insists There Are 'Many Reasons to Keep Playing' Diablo 4 as Fans Debate End of Expansions and Diablo 5 in 2029
Blizzard has insisted Diablo 4 still has “bright support” as the community debates the shock news that no more expansions will be released for the game and with Diablo 5 looming over the horizon.
Hearts 'have to be above emotions' as big favourites
Hearts head coach Wouter Vrancken insists there can be no excuses as his side prepare to face Stenhousemuir at Ochilview on Friday with a place in the Premier Sports Cup semi-finals at stake.
Pereira expects UFC rematch with Gane to happen
UFC star Alex Pereira insists the fight that makes the most sense for him is a rematch against Ciryl Gane.
Arbeloa vows Fulham’s poor start ‘will not define this season’
Fulham boss Alvaro Arbeloa insists his side’s difficult start to the season will not define their campaign after suffering a third consecutive defeat.Fulham were beaten 3-2 by Crystal Palace having ...
'No crisis' at Aberdeen despite difficult start
Aberdeen captain Kevin Nisbet insists there is no "crisis" at Pittodrie after back-to-back Scottish Premiership defeats to Rangers and Celtic. The Dons, who will also play Killie in the quarter-finals of the League Cup the following week, have won one of their opening four leagues.
De Zerbi insists he remains confident in Spurs ‘project’ but admits ‘mentality’ challenge
Roberto De Zerbi admits Tottenham’s biggest challenge is finding the “right mentality” after they suffered a 2-0 defeat to Newcastle.Spurs were beaten at St James’ Park as goals from Anthony E...
Star Citizen Spinoff Squadron 42 Delayed to 2027, Dev Insists It's Because of GTA 6
Star Citizen single-player spinoff Squadron 42 has been delayed to 2027, with developer Chris Roberts insisting it wouldn't get the attention it deserves because of Grand Theft Auto 6.
Manchester City star insists Community Shield not just a friendly
Ruben Dias has insisted the Community Shield is a final and Manchester City wanted to win it, despite a poor performance in defeat to Arsenal on Sunday.Photo by Shaun Botterill/Getty ImagesArsenal’s...
Jackson unveils plan for Black-owned businesses; Bottoms fires back
Jackson insists his legacy corridor plan will work. Bottoms insists she helped the same businesses already when she was mayor.
Jared Padalecki apologizes for supporting Perez Hilton amid mental health crisis
Jared Padalecki insists he had ‘absolutely no idea’ about Perez Hilton’s history when he offered support amid the controversial blogger’s mental health crisis.
Samsung insists the Galaxy Z Fold 8 is ‘perfect’ for ‘full-screen’ video
As Samsung’s pre-order perks for the Galaxy Z Fold 8 come to an end, the company continues to advertise its...
Patriots legend Rob Gronkowski reveals the impact politics has on locker room dynamics
Rob Gronkowski said political awareness grew during his NFL career but insists the New England Patriots locker room always stayed unified to win.
FIFA insists 'nobody is selling football' after UEFA threatens to boycott tournaments if plans to sell off stake in World Cup go ahead
FIFA: Nobody is selling football. This is not something FIFA would ever entertain; UEFA reacted furiously to FIFA plan to seek private investment in competitions including World Cup; FIFA president Gianni Infantino has publicly backed the plan
Exclusive: Disney Insists That Cursed Kingdom Hearts Art Was Not AI-Generated
A joint statement from Disney and Square Enix says the odd-looking cover art for The Kingdom Hearts Collection [I-III] was the result of "human error."
UEFA will boycott FIFA tournaments if Gianni Infantino continues with plans to sell off stake in World Cup
UEFA reacted furiously to FIFA plan to seek private investment in competitions including World Cup; FIFA insists it would retain sole control over governance and sporting decisions; PM Andy Burnham says: Football belongs to the fans
Reds CEO Hogan on potential investor Bhatia
With Liverpool stating that they have more than 26 million supporters in the USA, there is little surprise over why the Reds chose America as the destination for their pre-season tour. This has been quite the summer for football here and Billy Hogan, CEO of Liverpool and Fenway Sports Group (FSG), insists the aim is to build on that after what has been a "super difficult year" for the club "for lots of different reasons". Last week, FSG, which owns Liverpool, confirmed that a consortium led by Amit Bhatia, a British-Indian millionaire businessman, was in talks over a strategic minority investment in the club.
Ailing Sen. Mitch McConnell skips major event but claims progress in rehab
McConnell has been the subject of intense rumors since the June 14 fall, with many claiming he is incapacitated or even dead. He says his health woes were compounded by a battle with a mild case of pneumonia, but insists he is on track for…
'No panic' despite shock cup exit, says Valakari
St Johnstone boss Simo Valakari insists there is "no panic" from him despite his team suffering a shock exit from the Scottish League Cup. A draw with third-tier East Fife ensured Saints could not progress from the group stage.
With bombing campaign unlikely to change Iran’s posture according to US intel, Trump faces limited options
Two weeks into a renewed bombing campaign against Iran, with US forces taking casualties and allies wary of the conflict escalating further, President Donald Trump insists that Iran is “desperate” to find an end to wave after wave of US attacks.
Commissioner Greg Sankey insists SEC breakaway threat is real as rules frustrations linger
Greg Sankey opened SEC football media days by talking about the Protect College Sports Act, NCAA frustrations, Playoff expansion and more.
Science can serve dark as well as light
I’m not sure how many of you are watching “Star City,” Apple TV’s spin-off of its “For All Mankind” program (2019-present), but it’s one of the better sci-fi series I’ve seen in a while, with an impressively dark political message. (Some light spoilers below.) For the uninitiated, “For All Mankind” presented a slightly tweaked history of the U.S. space program in which it was the USSR that landed on the Moon first in 1969, and shortly thereafter put a woman cosmonaut on the lunar surface. This sparks an ongoing space race that, in the original series, yields a lot of benefits for humanity. President Nixon’s insistence on a female astronaut corps to compete with the Soviets boosts the feminist movement of the 1970s and the ERA passes. New fuels generated for the space program create clean and cheap energy around Earth. There are also some darker changes — the USSR is thriving well into the 2000s, there are terrorist counter-technology movements around the globe, laborers on Mars work in nightmarish conditions and organize strikes and riots, etc. the @smotus report is a reader-supported publication. To support this work, please become a paid subscriber. Subscribe That show offers glimpses into the subtle ways this Earth is different. Teddy Kennedy never went to Chappaquidick because he was racing back to Washington to deal with the space program crisis; he gets elected President in 1972. John Lennon survives his early 1980s shooting but Pope John Paul II does not. The Apple Newton succeeded. Pretty much the whole of season 4 is a setup for an Al Gore joke. Again, mostly, the vision that “For All Mankind” presents is a positive one, with technology advancing many human interests. “Star City” goes in a very different direction. This spin-off show is about the same set of events but from the Soviet perspective. As we meet them, the team of scientists and cosmonauts responsible for the lunar landing are still basking in their hero status, but their program is embedded deep in the Soviet security state of the late 1960s. Everyone’s apartment is bugged. Whole teams of clerical staff spend their days transcribing recordings of people’s lives. People in the program, including respected cosmonauts, are regularly arrested. An incredibly menacing Colonel Lyudmilla Raskova (Anna Maxwell Martin) forces confessions and tortures and kills, expressing little more than annoyance in the process. Meanwhile, the space program’s highly respected Chief Designer (Rhys Ifans) has a vision for the program that he knows the government will not approve. He insists that they need to think past the Moon to focus on colonizing the solar system, starting with Venus. (This is a rough parallel to the Americans’ pivot to Mars in the original show.) He essentially builds a secret space program within the space program, calculating that the government will embrace the mission after it has succeeded. (As an aside, I’m not sure why the Venus obsession, as a successful mission can’t produce the biggest public relations payoff: a cosmonaut standing on the surface holding the Soviet flag. Anyone standing on Venus would be immediately crushed by the 92-bar atmosphere and then cremated in the 900°F temperatures. But in a country with no free press perhaps the visual payoff was less valued.) But the overall vision is that the technological advances have only amplified the most fearsome aspects of the Soviet system. The state is paranoid (but not incorrect) about American spies and does monstrous things to protect its secrets. People are terrified to trust each other. Classic banality-of-evil figures order people to harm those they care about; those people comply rather than get shot. Others are forced into criminal behavior to protect loved ones. We’re reminded all the time these days of what happens when a government despises science. It manifests in the defunding of schools, the elevation of fossil fuels as the rest of the world pivots to solar, outbreaks of measles and diarrhea, etc. But “Star City” offers a vision of a bad government that likes science. It’s not encouraging. It’s not yet clear if there will be a season two of this show. But I strongly recommend season one. It’s both thoughtful and gripping. Share
No, Doom maker id Software hasn't been "nerfed into the ground and gutted" by the Xbox cuts, insists director Hugo Martin
Doom and Quake creator id Software tries to reassure fans it's okay following the devastating recent Xbox cuts.
GameStop CEO Ryan Cohen Insists Sony Killing Physical Discs 'Doesn't Matter at All' Because Video Game Sales Make Up So Little of His Business
GameStop CEO Ryan Cohen has sparked a fiery debate in the gaming community after remarking that sales of physical games are “totally irrelevant" to his business.
ZeniMax Online Studios leadership to exit as part of Xbox cuts
There are major changes happening atop Maryland-based ZeniMax Online Studios, developer of the Elder Scrolls Online, Game File has learned. Joe Burba, a 14-year veteran of the studio who was appointed to run it last July, is departing, along with ESO executive producer Susan Kath, studio game director Rich Lambert and production director Ala Diaz. Their roles were listed among hundreds of others cut last week from the Maryland offices of ZeniMax, in a WARN letter sent to the state by ZeniMax and obtained today by Game File. Tonight, BUrbam Kath, Lambert and Diaz notified Zenimax Online Studios workers of plans to “transition” to a new leadership team consisting of promoted ZOS veterans. That transition will occur “over the next few months,” they told workers, according to a copy of the notice reviewed by Game File. “We will remain in place during the transition period to help ensure a smooth handoff.” Last week, Microsoft laid off of 1,600 workers across its vast gaming teams in locations around the U.S. and abroad. Just who has been impacted and how hard various studios have been hit has been emerging day by day. Game File reported last week that Microsoft/ZeniMax notified officials in Maryland that 379 gaming jobs were being cut across the state. They tallied cuts in two locations: one for ZeniMax Media Inc. (covering Elder Scrolls/Starfield/Fallout-maker Bethesda Game Studios and central Bethesda game publishing) and one for ZeniMax Online Studios (Elder Scrolls Online). More than 200 jobs were cut at the latter. Last week’s totals did not reveal job titles, nor did Microsoft announce any leadership changes in the ZeniMax group. That has now happened. Earlier today, Game File obtained from Maryland officials a breakdown of the 379 impacted roles, which, extraordinarily, included “studio head.” Microsoft later confirmed to Game File which studio head that referred to: ZeniMax Online Studios’. Microsoft has since has notified studio employees and internally announced new leadership. ZOS will now be run by Josh Henderson, previously head of business operations at the studio, and Nick Giacomini, who was promoted to game director for ESO last August. Game File is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my journalism, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Subscribe Last week’s news of 200+ cuts at ZeniMax Online Studios generated public sympathy for those workers and questions about the long-term viability of the Elder Scrolls Online. ESO is a massively multiplayer online game that inherently persists on the strength of new content being developed for it. Earlier today, fans and workers in Maryland protested the cuts at the ZeniMax teams in a rally organized by the Communication Workers of America, the union that represents many of the impacted employees. Regarding concerns around the game, a community manager stated on Saturday: “The plan is still to deliver great content, and we will hopefully have an update soon.” In their note to the studio today, the outgoing leaders of ZeniMax Online Studios predicted “growth” for the game: We have tremendous confidence in Josh and Nick, the future of this studio, and the continued growth of ESO. With exciting experiences still ahead for our players as we wrap up work for Update 51 and beyond, we believe that your passion, creativity, and commitment to each other and the community will continue serving as the heartbeat of ESO. The list of jobs cut in the ZeniMax WARN notice in Maryland includes several very senior roles, including: Studio Head Studio Operations Director Studio Game Director Studio Audio Director Studio Art Manager Vice President and Controller VP, Global Sales & Business Development While some of those job descriptions match the exiting ZOS leadership team, Game File couldn’t verify if all were from that studio. The full list of cut roles shared by Maryland officials also covers workers at Bethesda Game Studios and its central publishing office. The following is an excerpt: The list of 379 eliminated ZeniMax jobs in Maryland also includes: four animators three bilingual CS (community service) leads for Chinese, Italian, and Japanese a creative director for the Elder Scrolls Online Player Life Cycle two food service workers seven producers more than 60 senior QA testers. and many others The WARN notice states that almost all of the 379 workers were notified of their layoff on July 6. In fine print, it states: “Approximately 9 employees were notified of the elimination of their position prior to July 6, 2026.” A 2021 mega-merger scaled back Microsoft announced in 2020 that it intended to buy ZeniMax and its network of game studios in 2020, and closed the $7.5 billion deal in March 2021. The purchase, which preceded Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard, added several award-winning studios to Microsoft’s portfolio, including Bethesda (Elder Scrolls, Fallout), Arkane (Dishonored), and id Software (Doom). The studios’ output since then included a 2024 Game of the Year contented from MachineGames in the form of Indiana Jones and the Great Circle along with Starfield from Bethesda and the poorly-received Redfall from Arkane Austin. In recent years, a Microsoft repeatedly in cutback mode closed ZeniMax’s Tango Gameworks (which was reconstituted by Krafton) and closed Arkane Austin. The Xbox cuts last week have hit the ZeniMax group hard, with 158 jobs eliminated in Texas, many of them at id, and 379 from the ZeniMax teams in Maryland. Xbox also said last week that it would be entering a consultation process around Arkane Lyon, a process expected to end in a sale, shutdown or other form of divestment. The Lyon team has been working on a game tied to Marvel’s Blade vampire-hunting super-hero.
Mahmood offers Farage security meeting after Ann Widdecombe’s death
Home secretary insists all MPs treated equally but that security of former MPs and non-Westminster politicians is a concern
Xbox cuts "not the end" for The Elder Scrolls Online, insists ZeniMax, despite a drastic reduction in size
Layoffs at ZeniMax Online had reportedly put MMORPG The Elder Scrolls Online in a difficult spot, but the developers are still confident in its future.
Mookie Betts becomes latest Dodgers player to skip White House visit, insists it's 'not political'
Mookie Betts says his decision to skip the Dodgers' White House visit is about family time with his new baby, not politics, despite inevitable scrutiny.
id Software insists in new statement that it still has "the crew we need to build the games and tech we're known for"
id Software has posted a brief statement on social media, insisting, "We still have the crew we need to build the games."
John Stamos says he told “DWTS” producers to stop asking him to join show: ‘I’m never gonna do that’
Stamos insists he’s been asked “every single season” to compete on the reality series.
John Stamos says he told ‘DWTS’ producers to stop asking him to join show: ‘I’m never gonna do that’
John Stamos says ‘Dancing With the Stars’ producers try to get him on the show ‘every single season,’ but he insists he never will: ‘Don’t ever ask me again.’
Mark Zuckerberg takes business calls on a jet ski wearing his $800 Meta glasses—and insists ‘the other person could not tell’
Zuckerberg is convinced smart glasses will replace the smartphone—and he's spending billions to prove it, even as Reality Labs posts a $19.2 billion loss.
World Cup 2026: Jesse Marsch insists Canada was 'the better team' in loss to Morocco: 'I'd rather be us than them'
Sony Tiptoes Over PS6 Release Date, But Insists It Won't Just Follow Xbox
Keep on guessing
Claims GTA 6 is selling 8 times as many copies on PS5 as Xbox "doesn't represent pre-order data", insists Microsoft
Microsoft has refuted claims that its rival system, the PlayStation 5, is outselling the Xbox edition of Grand Theft Auto 6 by a rate of 8-to-1.
GTA 6 has no plans for a post-launch physical release, "not at launch, and not months later", insists new report
A new report has cast doubt on news that a physical version of Grand Theft Auto 6 will follow the digital release later this year after all.
WATCH: Kellyanne Conway insists socialist primary victories don't reflect American values nationwide
Kellyanne Conway says Democratic primary wins reflect only a handful of specific districts and do not signal a broader political shift nationwide.
Boffin claims Microsoft's supposed quantum leap does not compute due to 'basic Python errors'
Nature paper argues researchers cherry-picked data. Redmond insists its work is sound
Charles Leclerc explains why business ventures are helping his F1 career
Charles Leclerc says his growing business interests are making him more open-minded, but insists his focus remains firmly on becoming F1 world champion
Charles Leclerc explains why business ventures are helping his F1 career
Charles Leclerc says his growing business interests are making him more open-minded, but insists his focus remains firmly on becoming F1 world champion
France arrests 20 after banning rally against political executions in Iran
Paris protest goes ahead despite the ban, which French foreign ministry insists isn't linked to FM's call with his Iranian counterpart
Why China Insists on the “Existing International Order”: The Politics of UN Centrality and Reform
In May 2026, China held the rotating presidency of the UN Security Council, and Foreign Minister Wang Yi flew […]
Trump insists U.S. will not invest money in Iran as part of peace deal
Others in the president's circles, including Vice President JD Vance, have suggested Tehran could gain access to a major investment fund if it upholds its side of the peace accord.
Top-Selling Comedian Who Attended Trump’s UFC Fight Insists He’s ‘Not Political’
A source close to comedian Nate Bargatze says he’s just a huge UFC fan.
Elden Ring Director Insists FromSoftware Is Free to Make the Games It Wants To, Teases 'Unannounced Titles'
Dark Souls and Elden Ring creator Hidetaka Miyazaki recently commented on the shareholder pressure that is putting FromSoftware parent company Kadokawa in the news lately. Reassuring fans, he insisted that Fromsoftware can still “freely make the kind of games we want to make without excessive interference."
Fury over Jared Kushner’s Albania project reaches doors of political elite
Protesters want the entire political establishment to step aside, including PM Rama, who insists the development will create jobs.
As fighters arrive for White House UFC event, Trump is the invisible guest
UFC insists Sunday’s event isn’t political, but politics — and the president — were difficult to ignore as fighters gathered in D.C.
Bowen Yang says he never felt 'that central' to “Saturday Night Live”
Bowen Yang insists he "never played the dad or the straight-man teacher" on "SNL" and "was always there as the seasoning."
Young men are leaving Trump. Can a UFC fight at the White House get them back in the ring?
Do not mistake the massive mixed martial arts arena rising out of the White House lawn for a political statement, insists Ultimate Fighting Championship president Dana White. It is, he told CNN, simply part of the celebration for America’s 250th birthday.
No excuses as Wilkinson insists Wales will be ready
Head coach Rhian Wilkinson says Wales cannot let travel chaos affect their performance in Friday's Women's World Cup qualifier in Montenegro.
England do not need massive change
Captain Ben Stokes insists England do not have to make a "massive change", despite their 4-1 Ashes hammering in Australia.
The cult of objectivity has broken consciousness science
With 22 competing theories and no consensus in sight, the science of consciousness is lost. In this exclusive IAI interview, Berkeley psychedelics researcher and bestselling author of a new book on consciousness Michael Pollan insists that even though consciousness lies beyond traditional forms of scientific investigation, we should resist becoming dualists who see it as something radically different from ordinary stuff in the world. Instead, he makes the case for reimagining science itself: it must stop reaching for objective descriptions of physical reality, and instead embrace subjectivity as the indispensable core of all inquiry. Alasdair Craig: How did your experiences with psychedelics get you interested in consciousness?Michael Pollan: One of the things that happens on psychedelics is that they foreground consciousness. What formerly seemed perfectly transparent and ever present—and yet, non-existent, as water is to fish—suddenly you see it. The metaphor I use in the book is that psychedelics sponge the windscreen. Suddenly you realize: wow, there’s a windscreen, there is this phenomenon that’s mediating my relationship to reality. This is not an unusual realization on psychedelics. I think a lot of people are called to think about consciousness after psychedelic experiences. So that was the proximate inspiration for A World Appears: A Journey Into Consciousness (2026).And then there was a more specific way in which psychedelics influence the book. That was a particular experience I had on psilocybin. I had the sensation that the plants in my garden were conscious and returning my gaze, with their own point of view and agency, and I got curious as to how to evaluate an insight like that. I mean, what’s the truth quotient of insights you have on psychedelics? And I was reading William James—who, of course, wrote beautifully about mystical experience—and he said, we can’t judge the metaphysics here, but we should pay attention to two criteria: (1) How useful is it to think this is true? He was a pragmatist, of course. And (2) can we subject it to other ways of knowing to validate it? Because maybe we should treat these insights as hypotheses. And that’s kind of how I approach psychedelics, as a great generator of hypotheses, but they need to be tested against other ways of knowing. And so that led me down this long path exploring the science of plant intelligence and plant sentience.AC: I love your phrase, “smudging the windowpane of conscious experience.” So do you now start to think, actually, even when I’m not on psychedelics, I’m just seeing a screen all the time, which is not reality, but rather is my conscious experience, behind which reality is hidden?MP: Well, you know, not when I’m brushing my teeth and making breakfast! But yes, in meditation, certainly. I mean, one of the things you realize is that my experience happens to be this way now, but it could be another way. And many things can affect it. My morning coffee changes the screen in various ways, sharpens certain things.___The only tool we have to understand consciousness is consciousness.___There’s this wonderful metaphor in Aldous Huxley’s book, The Doors of Perception, where he thinks we channel consciousness, and that what the brain does is edit it, and there’s a reducing valve. And psychedelics open the reducing valve wider. I don’t know that I’m ready to buy into the idea that consciousness exists outside brains, but I do love that metaphor because there are times when you are more conscious than others. I know I’ve switched from window pane to valve, but you know, a camera aperture can open wider or narrower. And I do have a sense of that. I have a sense of when I’m being less conscious, and when I’m being more conscious, by which I mean, you know, more present, taking in more sensory information. So when you start thinking about consciousness as a matter of degree, that changes things also.I think when we scroll on social media, obviously, we’re conscious. But minimally so, because we don’t have to generate our own thoughts. We’re basically taking these little hits from other people and thinking their thoughts.The process of writing this book made me kind of relativize everyday consciousness as just one type, which is exactly what William James said. Normal consciousness is one type, separated by the flimsiest of screens from the other types.AC: If we stick with the metaphor of the smudge on the window that you get when you take psychedelics, it seems like we’re saying that consciousness has become like an object that you’re looking at, right? You’re looking at the smudge and that just is consciousness. But sometimes we’ll talk about consciousness as a state that you’re in, rather than an object you can perceive. You’re either conscious or you’re not conscious. So it’s difficult to really know what sort of thing we’re talking about when we talk about consciousness, right?MP: Yeah. When you say that consciousness is an object, what’s the subject? Consciousness also? The only tool we have to understand consciousness is consciousness. So we’re in a closed loop and when we get a perspective on consciousness, we’re not achieving any distance from it. That’s one of the problems with studying consciousness. Science is predicated on an objective, God’s eye view of things, and you never get that. There’s no such thing. SUGGESTED VIEWING The brain filters consciousness With Àlex Gómez-Marín But, yeah, there is this sense, I think, that consciousness is something you can approach. Certainly, when you’re writing and trying to recreate a conscious experience, it’s a fiction, but you’re standing back from it, and looking at it. But there’s no real subject-object distinction.AC: That’s so interesting, because when philosophers start talking about consciousness, they often talk about what they call “qualia”, which is their word for the felt experience of, say, the color red. And I think that way of speaking often makes us think of the qualia as an object, which you can see out there: the redness of red. But, as you say, we also want to collapse the subject-object distinction when we talk about consciousness. So there’s something strange going on here…MP: Oh, yeah, there are many strange things going on! *AC: Let’s talk about the varieties of consciousness. Apart from perceptions, there are, pains, emotions, thoughts, and so on. What is it that holds all this diversity together so that they all count as instances of consciousness? What is it that they all have in common?MP: Yeah, that’s a really good question. I mean, there is sensory information, right? Which we perceive coming from the world outside ourselves. And then there’s internal information, which is what’s called interoception. And this is very important too. This is where feelings come from—what are sometimes called homeostatic feelings—that are intended to get the brain to keep us in these narrow ranges of temperature and glucose and so on. That’s a very important part of consciousness. And according to some researchers, who I think are probably right, this is where consciousness begins, with these very primal feelings, like hunger and thirst and warmth and itch, and things like that. And then there’s this third thing, which is our thinking about thinking.And what holds all this together is, I think, the sense of self. Consciousness generates a self: it is probably an organizing principle. All this stuff is happening to the self. It’s a construct, I think, but it is very useful. It can connect all these different streams of consciousness to a single being or a place, metaphorically speaking.* AC: The first half of your book is about the science of consciousness. Is consciousness just another thing, like black holes or the origin of life, which we don’t yet understand, but which we should have every hope that science will one day get to the bottom of, or is there something special about consciousness that makes this unlikely?MP: It depends how you define science. As we define science now, it’s going be very difficult. Science since Galileo has had a set of rules or assumptions, which is that the proper remit of science is to deal with the objective, quantifiable, third-person world. And the physical sciences have done amazing work under that set of limitations. Galileo—for tactical reasons, not for philosophical reasons—said science should not deal with the soul, which at the time was what consciousness was considered to be. So what is subjective, what is qualitative, what is first person, we’re going to leave to the church, he said. And this was a good agreement, and it probably kept many scientists from getting burned at the stake. But it leaves science in an awkward spot, now that it wants to venture into that territory of qualities, of first-person experience. And I don’t think it has the proper tools. I think it will have to add to its toolkit in some way, and find a way to bring in phenomenology, or lived experience and introspection, which science is usually dismissive of.The challenge—we alluded to it earlier—is that the only tool you have to study consciousness with is consciousness. And what I mean by that is, the whole scientific enterprise is a manifestation of consciousness. As much as scientists like to flatter themselves with this idea that they attain a godlike perspective on what they study, when it comes to consciousness, there’s no such thing. And it’s fine for all the things you can step outside of and study from that perspective. But two areas it won’t work are consciousness and cosmology.___It could be that we live in this anomaly of not believing nature is conscious. And maybe psychedelics are teaching us something we’ve forgotten.___With cosmology, too, you have to study the universe from inside the universe. It’s not that cosmologists haven’t made progress. We know a lot about the age of the universe and expansion and things like that. But we can’t penetrate what happened before the Big Bang. We just don’t have the tools because we can’t stand outside.The fact that there are 22 full-scale theories of consciousness tells you all you need to know: we’re kind of lost. And I was surprised to find that we are more lost than I thought we were when I started this. I thought that there’d be leading theories, or that we had experiments that we could conduct that would nail some of this down. And the fact is, we don’t.So, I don’t know if science can solve it. But, of course, we can change the rules of science. A really influential book for me was a book called The Blind Spot, by two physicists, Marcello Gleiser and Adam Frank, and a philosopher, Evan Thompson. It’s a reminder that science is a social practice. It’s organized in a certain way and it can be organized in a different way. But it has this huge blind spot at the center of it, which is its failure to recognize that it is a form of consciousness itself, and it doesn’t have a good way of taking account of lived experience.AC: On the one hand, I think you want to resist traditional dualism, which would say that consciousness is something magical, something supernatural, right? But on the other hand, you’re accepting that there is this division in reality between the stuff that you can investigate objectively and measure, and so on—the stuff that science has been good at finding out about—and consciousness, which, for some reason, you can’t objectively measure. Some would take this to suggest that the dualism is actually right. Is there a way of reconciling these two strands of your thinking?MP: To call it magical is full of value judgement. I mean, you could just say immaterial. The interesting thing is, I think, that intuitively we’re all dualists. And I don’t know whether that’s because we’re children of Descartes and other cultures are less dualist than we are. Or it may be because that’s how consciousness feels. It feels different than the body. It feels separate from the body. But I don’t think we should trust that intuition.AC: So let’s think about ways that science might be changed to get at consciousness. I suppose the starting point would be the way that you begin the second half of your book. You have this nice line from William James, where he says, “We now begin our study of the mind from within.” Could you give us some sense of the ways of studying the mind from within? What does this involve?MP: I don’t know what that science looks like. But one of the points I’m making is that it depends on the humanities. I found that I learned as much, if not more, about consciousness, from reading novels and poetry. There is a sense of the fullness and complexity of consciousness that you don’t get in any scientific account. I interviewed this stream-of-consciousness writer and I approached her as an expert on consciousness, and she is. So I think that dialogue is really important.I’m reading Ben Lerner’s new novel, Transcription. Just read the first page of this novel: it’s a man falling asleep on a train, going to conduct an interview, and there is the experience of being in the train, facing backwards, there’s the view outside, but there’s a reflection of himself through which he’s seeing outside. There’s the memory of dropping his kids off at school. All this is going on in one moment of consciousness. Scientists aren’t going anywhere near that. But I think it’s useful for them to think about. That’s where we’re trying to go: like, how does such a layered experience happen? You know, it also makes you wonder, could a computer ever do this? And it gives you some doubt.*AC: Before we get to computers, perhaps we could talk briefly about plants. How did you come to feel that they are sentient?MP: Well, it was a psychedelic experience, and it’s not unusual on psychedelics. In fact, there’ve been studies about how people become animists during psychedelic experience. Their belief in animism arises after a single psychedelic experience.You know, most scientists would say this is all a myth. But we have only 400 years of the age of enlightenment and science. Before that, we were animists, and if you go around the world, most indigenous cultures are still animists, and children are animists, by and large, until they go to school. So it could be that we live in this anomaly of not believing nature is conscious. And maybe psychedelics are teaching us something we’ve forgotten.As I said, I wanted to test this idea, and see whether there was conventional scientific evidence for it. And there’s fascinating work going on in a field that calls itself—in a rather cheeky way—plant neurobiology. These are people who fully realize there are no neurons in plants, but they’re trolling conventional botanists! And they’re doing experiments that are demonstrating that plants can learn and remember, which is kind of amazing: how do you store a memory without neurons? They’re finding plants that can solve problems, that can hear and see. In fact, they have 20 senses to our five or six. For example, a bean plant looking for something to twine, and given a pole within eight inches or so of it, knows where that pole is and will aim its spiraling reach at that pole. What is that about? Is it bouncing signals off of it?One of the spookiest things is the fact that the same anesthetics that put us out put plants out. You might think that plants are already out, but they’re not. They’re just slow. If you take a plant with a fast behavior, like a Venus flytrap, and give it an anesthetic, it will stop reacting. So you have to ask yourself, what is lost when the plant is anaesthetized? Some state of alertness, of awareness, of its environment, of reactivity. I’m not prepared to call that consciousness, but maybe it’s sentience—which is a simpler form of consciousness, and involves the ability to sense what’s going on in your environment and assess what’s good and bad for you and act appropriately. That may be a universal quality of life.AC: Let’s turn from plants to AI. You point out that LLMs are trained on the internet rather than direct interactions with reality. You put this really nicely when you say the internet is not the world so much as a shadow cast by the world. So LLMs are living in this kind of shadow world, or in Plato’s cave, as you put it. What’s the significance of this for AI consciousness and moral consideration? And, to recall the beginning of our conversation, if we’re stuck behind a veil or screen of consciousness, are we also stuck in a kind of shadow world?MP: I don’t think they’re the same shadow worlds because our world includes nature and other people. And even if it’s mediated in some ways... There is a reality out there, and we are in relation to it, through consciousness. There’s friction with it. What’s missing from the LLMs is that friction with the real world. There’s more to the world than human representation, which is what they’re dealing with. And that means that so far, AI is a cultural technology for combining thoughts we’ve already had. SUGGESTED VIEWING Cracking the code for thought With Roger Penrose, Sabrina Gonzalez Pasterski, Max Tegmark, Güneş Taylor Genuine creativity is more than collage. A lot of what AI does now is tantamount to collage, putting this with that and you know, that’s part of art, certainly. But there are also genuinely new ideas that come into the world that don’t come in through manipulating the representations we already have. So it remains to be seen whether AIs can be truly creative in that more radical sense.But my arguments against AI becoming conscious have to do with the fact that the idea of AI consciousness is based on this faulty metaphor that the brain is a computer. There are dimensions in which the brain is like a computer—it certainly does its share of computation. But computers have this sharp distinction between hardware and software, and brains don’t. In a brain, hardware and software are identical. Every memory is a physical change to the brain. Brains are not interchangeable in the way computers are. So this idea that you could take the consciousness out and somehow run it on another substrate, a silicon substrate, seems foolhardy.Anyway, it’s a more extended argument, and I may be wrong. And when we move to computers that aren’t based on silicon—neuromorphic computers and things like that—all bets may be off.AC: Regarding your point about LLMs being stuck in the world of our representations—the internet or whatever—and not being able to interact with reality, are these representations, the world of the internet, themselves part of reality? We’ve created the internet, but it’s still a real thing that exists. And so while the LLMs may be trapped within that part of reality, they’re nevertheless within reality and interacting with it and so on. So it’s not obvious that there’s a barrier there to them becoming conscious and being creative.MP: Yeah, I mean, if our consciousness is built out of human culture, which is what we’re talking about with all those representations. But I tend to think consciousness comes a bit more out of nature and friction with the natural world, but...AC: So there’s a fundamental divide between the natural world and human artefacts?MP: And we lose track of that, and especially people in this computer world. You know, the people who are creating these AI systems, my guess is they’ve been into video games since the age of three, and they didn’t go outside a lot. And their own contact with nature is somewhat limited. I could be wrong, it’d be a very interesting thing to ask, all the wizards of AI, whether they like to go fishing and hiking and do things like that. Or were they on computers from a very early age? I interviewed Blake Lemoine, the Google engineer who came to believe that LaMDA, the Google LLM out at the time, was conscious and deserved personhood. It was very clear that he didn’t see a distinction between this bubble in which he lived and the real world. And I think we’ve all been distanced from the natural world, and this is taking us even further away. But it’s still there, you know, and we still have bodies, and we’re still mortal, and we don’t live in a simulation.AC: I think that’s a great place to finish. Michael Pollan, thank you very much!
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 invites you to "keep the receipts" as it fights to be a more "authentic", "grounded, and transparent" shooter experience
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4's community team insists players can "keep the receipts" as it fights to remain "authentic to what Modern Warfare is".
Bailey wants to keep the Bears. How? Well, that’s not clear.
As Illinois lawmakers struggle to craft a plan that would help keep the Chicago Bears from moving to Indiana, Republican gubernatorial candidate Darren Bailey says the state should find a way to keep the team — but insists individual taxpayers should also get a break.
Minister insists Labour will not apply national living wage to all over-18s before election
Torsten Bell says Labour manifesto ‘did not set out the timeline’ for changes to living wage after scale of youth unemployment crisis revealed in Milburn report
The Witcher 3 Songs of the Past Is an Expansion, Not DLC, CD Projekt Insists While Using IGN Interview With Idris Elba to Make the Point
In the wake of the announcement of The Witcher 3 Songs of the Past, CD Projekt staff have taken to social media to insist it should be considered an expansion, rather than DLC — even using an IGN interview with Cyberpunk star Idris Elba to hammer home the point.
The Latest: Iran deal progress is murky after US military says it carried out ‘self-defense’ strikes
President Donald Trump insists a peace deal is close on this 88th day of the Iran war, but Iran on Tuesday denounced U.S. strikes a day earlier as a sign of “bad faith and unreliability” as negotiations continue.
Allegri: ‘Nobody expected Milan defeat, but players gave everything’
Max Allegri admits ‘nobody expected’ Milan to lose at home to Cagliari and miss out on the Champions League, but insists his players ‘did everything they could.’The Rossoneri were in the stron...
Black Women, Beauty Politics and the Power of Rage in 'Is God Is'
In one of the film’s most surreal scenes, the twins at the center of *Is God Is*—Racine, “the Rough One,” and Anaia, “the Quiet One”—pretend to be strippers for a room full of men. But while Racine is welcomed, Anaia is rejected because her scarred face disrupts the men’s fantasies. That moment crystallizes one of the film’s central questions: What happens when Black women refuse to shrink themselves for the comfort of others? In Aleshea Harris’ Gothic revenge thriller, ugliness becomes both a burden and a source of power, as the film transforms into a stereotype-busting meditation on misogynoir, beauty politics and righteous rage. As the twins travel cross-country seeking vengeance against the father who burned their mother alive, Harris layers the conventions of the revenge genre with distinctly Black feminist aesthetics. The film moves between absurd comedy, trap music, intimate sisterhood and brutal violence while interrogating the ways Black women are expected to manage their pain, suppress their anger and perform acceptability. Anaia’s scarred face and Racine’s consuming rage become mirrors of the same misogynoir that shapes Black women’s lives—whether through beauty standards, domestic violence or the demand to remain silent. What makes *Is God Is* so striking is its refusal to look away from the “ugly.” Harris insists that Black women marked by violence, scars and fury still deserve visibility, complexity and even divinity. The film embraces the “angry Black woman” and the “ugly” Black woman as figures worthy of space, power and humanity. In doing so, it expands the tradition of Black feminist filmmaking by asking viewers to confront the realities dominant culture would rather ignore—and to recognize the beauty, dignity and selfhood that exist beyond respectability.