SCROLL NEWS / DISCOVERY
Search headlines
Find the stories shaping the conversation.
Results for " yes " 1,828 found 🔀 AI-powered Shuffle
Has There Ever Been a Crazier Sports Moment for New York? Actually, Yes.
In the spring of 1994, the World Cup arrived, the Knicks were great and so were the Rangers. And in the middle of it all, an infamous White Bronco chase.
Great Day For The Jays Offense, Beat Yankees
Yankees 5 Blue Jays 8 Well, that was a baseball game. It had everything. Life doesn’t get much better. I always say that my two favourite things are a Jays’ win and a Yankees’ loss, and when I can get both in the same game, that’s even better. Trey Yesavage was not good. 5 innings, […]
Yes, there's a livestream to watch Donald Trump's name being removed from the Kennedy Center
Donald Trump's name is being removed from the John F. Kennedy Center — and there's a livestream for it.
'Heated Rivalry' tops Television Critics Awards nominations — and, yes, its leading men are going head to head
'Heated Rivalry' leads the 2026 TCA Awards nominations with dueling bids for Connor Storrie and Hudson Williams. See the full list.
Northern Highland Fishery Research Area Celebrates 80 Years Of Internationally Recognized Fisheries Science
On June 20, 2026, the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources (DNR) celebrates the 80th anniversary of the Northern Highland Fishery Research Area (NHFRA), one of the longest-running fisheries research projects in the world.
There are two Dan Sullivans in Alaska’s Senate race. Yes, really.
Two Dan Sullivans are running for Senate in Alaska. Republicans accuse one of them of being a Democratic prop.
How an activist network built pressure without political power
When Rainforest Action Network began in 1985, it had little of what usually makes an organization powerful. It had no large budget, no legal department, no reliable access to politicians, and no formal way to force global corporations or development banks to change. It had Randy Hayes, a wide activist network, a way to connect […]
These Are the Lowest Prices Ever on AirPods Pro 3 and AirPods Max 2
Yesterday we began tracking a new record low price on the AirPods Pro 3 on Amazon, and they're still available for $179.00 today, down from $249.00. This beats the previous Amazon low price by $20. Note: MacRumors is an affiliate partner with some of these vendors. When you click a link and make a purchase, we may receive a small payment, which helps us keep the site running.
When policy impedes healthcare, what are the solutions?
Yes, there’s money on the way from the federal government. But communities and healthcare systems are also taking things into their own hands.
Social Security is Facing a Political Crisis
On Tuesday the Social Security Trustees released their latest report on the system’s finances. The numbers didn’t change much: Unless something is done, the Old Age Survivors and Disability Insurance (OASDI) program, Social Security’s official name, will be unable to pay full benefits starting in either 2032 or 2034, depending on some technical issues. That’s not far away: If the Trustees are right, the prospect of a Social Security crisis will loom over the next presidential administration. It’s important to understand, however, the nature of the looming crisis. It won’t be an economic crisis. It won’t even be a serious fiscal crisis. Whatever you may have heard, Social Security isn’t in danger of going bankrupt. What we’re facing, instead, is potential political crisis. Congress and the White House could easily take action to sustain America’s retirement system. But given the current state of our politics, there’s no guarantee that they will. There is a widespread misunderstanding of how Social Security works. While Social Security was designed to look like a pension fund, it isn’t. A pension fund pays benefits out of a stock of assets it has accumulated over time. In contrast, Social Security operates as a government transfer program, like food stamps or Medicaid. Now, unlike food stamps — but like the highway trust fund — Social Security is on paper supported by a dedicated tax, the payroll tax, that is assigned to that program. But I say “on paper” because from an economic point of view assigning the payroll tax to Social Security is just an accounting convention. What matters for the U.S. economy is the overall balance between government spending and government revenue, not the difference between one type of spending and one source of revenue. So there’s no inherent economic significance to the fact that by 2034 payroll tax receipts will be insufficient to cover promised benefits. There is, however, a legislative issue. As long as the Social Security Administration can pay benefits out of payroll taxes and its cash reserve, there’s no need for Congress to vote each year to authorize benefits — they just keep going out until further notice. However, once those resources become insufficient, benefits will fall —by 17 percent according to the Trustees — unless Congress passes new legislation that “tops up” Social Security’s finances. Yet the current administration and Republican party are such extremists that there is a real risk that Social Security will be held hostage on behalf of their goals. If this should come to pass, the hostage-takers will claim that shoring up Social Security is unaffordable. Right on cue, Mike Johnson, the Trump-sycophant Speaker of the House, declared on Monday that “entitlement programs” like Social Security “have to be adjusted and fixed,” and that Republicans will introduce a plan to that effect next year. But this is a ploy, because while the cost of maintaining Social Security benefits at their promised level isn’t trivial, it is in fact affordable. According to the Trustees’ report, the actuarial balance of OASDI up through 2050 — the amount of additional funds it would need to keep paying full benefits for the next 25 years — is 1.06 percent of GDP. To put that number in perspective, the Trump administration proposes increasing military spending next year by $420 billion, equivalent to about 1.4 percent of GDP – without any discussion of whether that’s affordable Yet how did we get to the point where Social Security will need to be topped up? The main answer is that we have an aging population, with a growing ratio of retirees collecting benefits to workers paying into the system: Trump’s anti-immigration policies are making this problem worse. According to the Trustees’ report, lower immigration will deepen Social Security’s financial hole because many immigrants are working-age adults who will pay into the system for decades before they collect benefits. In fact, this problem may be much bigger than the report acknowledges: The report’s baseline assumption is that we’ll have net immigration of almost 1.2 million people a year, and even the pessimistic case assumes 750,000 a year. Meanwhile actual net immigration has already been cut far below that — and may now be negative. Moreover, Social Security is being financially damaged by growing income inequality in America. Payroll taxes are levied only on wages up to $184,500, and they don’t touch capital income. With the distribution of income increasingly shifting from labor to capital, as well as becoming more unequal among wage-earners, revenue from the Social Security payroll tax has been falling as a share of national income. From 1990 to 2024, it fell from 5.02 percent of gross domestic income to 4.46 percent. Which brings me to the question that, these days, we ask about everything: How might Social Security be affected by the advent of AI? A short answer: If, as many of us fear, AI accelerates rising income inequality, it will further reduce the payroll tax receipts that currently pay for Social Security and further endanger its finances. On the other hand, if AI, as its advocates promise, leads to faster economic growth, it will increase the potential tax base that could and should be used to support Social Security and other social insurance programs. But to take advantage of that larger base, we’ll have to get serious about taxing wealth and capital income. Is Social Security in trouble? Yes, but only because of the way its financing is currently structured — a structure that no longer works well because our society and economy have become so unequal. Moreover, Trump’s immigration policies are further endangering its already deteriorating financial condition. So don’t believe Republicans’ gaslighting that it will be necessary to cut Social Security benefits. All that is necessary to preserve Social Security is political will to raise taxes on the wealthy and a sensible immigration policy. MUSICAL CODA Actually 67 under current law.
Scarlet, gray and something more: The science of sports fandom at Ohio State
The November air in Columbus was bitter and cold as more than 100,000 fans packed into Ohio Stadium for the 2024 edition of The Game. At the time, The No. 2 ranked Ohio State Buckeyes were 19.5-point favorites against unranked Michigan. A Buckeye win over the Wolverines was something that many Ohio State students had […]
Final Fantasy 14 receives first Nintendo Switch 2 gameplay trailer
We now have a good look at Final Fantasy 14 on Nintendo Switch 2 with a proper gameplay trailer. Square Enix announced a port of the game at the end of April during the Fan Festival. However, we didn’t really get a look at the Nintendo Switch 2 version at all. A few seconds of footage did appear during yesterday’...
Google TV Streamer’s new update turns it into a better smart home device
The first big Google TV Streamer of 2026 is here – yes, six months into the year. Timing aside, though,...
Arlington council renames entertainment district in bid to add the area to statewide network
The change is effective immediately at the local level, but state approval will be needed before the reclassification is official in the eyes of Texas law.
Volvo Eyes $3 Billion Autonomous Truck Business in Five Years
Volvo AB expects revenue from autonomous transportation to approach $3 billion within five years after starting driverless operations on US highways in a few months.
Yankees news: Good news on Austin Wells
Austin Wells receives promising MRI results; an All-Star prediction; Yesavage starting Friday for Jays
Google makes its AI Plus plan cheaper, doubles the cloud storage that comes with it
Previously, the Google AI Plus plan cost $8 a month and came with 200GB storage. Google scored a big victory yesterday as its Gemini model became the...
GM eyes new battery chemistry to grow AI data center, energy storage business
GM is expanding efforts to capitalize on the expected growth of energy storage and data centers and the development of next-generation sodium-ion batteries.
Kingdom Hearts IV Gameplay Trailer Revealed, Will Launch Simultaneously On Consoles And PC
Yes, Kingdom Hearts IV will launch on Nintendo Switch 2.
SBA visits Pennsylvania’s 2026 Small Business Person of the Year
Gale Ferranto, of Buona Foods in Chester County, received the award.
Philadelphia Sports Columnist Tabs A.J. Brown 'Obvious Traitor,' Rips Patriots WR Over Eagles Exit
Marcus Hayes of The Philadelphia Inquirer wrote Sunday that 'A.J. Brown now is a Patriot, an ironic misnomer since he’s such an obvious traitor.'
Commentary: Yes, we can end corporate influence in politics
There’s more money in politics than ever. But some state governments, like California, are finding ways to fight back.
'It's very aesthetically pleasing.' Prada and Axiom just revealed the stylish cooling suit Artemis astronuats will wear under their spacesuit on the moon
Prada (yes, that Prada) and Axiom Space are taking spacesuits up a notch with this liquid cooling ventilation garment.
Major Kansas country festival eyes new 35,000-fan home near Wichita
Country Stampede Kansas moves to Gilley’s Park City in June 2027, via a Kustom Entertainment deal expected to add 20+ show days and lift capacity to 35,000.
Attorney general race: Johnson and Middleton offer competing visions
Democratic Sen. Nathan Johnson of Dallas says he wants to depoliticize the attorney general’s office. Republican Sen. Mayes Middleton of Galveston says he wants to use it to fight the left.
HCA, VCU Health seek dismissal of Bon Secours legal challenges to Chesterfield hospital projects
"Bon Secours, alone amongst the three health systems, has refused to take yes for an answer,” HCA argued in its response to Bon Secours' calls for its competitors' projects to be denied by the state.
Trump to join Biden in 80-year-old presidents' club: Is his health an issue?
Trump is set to become the second president after Joe Biden to reach 80, and, like Biden, he is facing questions about his health and fitness.
Trump to join Biden in 80-year-old presidents' club: Is his health an issue?
Trump is set to become the second president after Joe Biden to reach 80, and, like Biden, he is facing questions about his health and fitness.
Southwest eyes deeper revamp; MAX 7 service seen in 2027
Southwest Airlines expects Boeing's long-delayed 737 MAX 7 to enter revenue service in 2027, about six months after the aircraft is certified by the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration, Chief Operating Officer Andrew Watterson told Reuters on Saturday.
The Obama Center opens as a time warp to an old political order
One end of the regulation-size basketball court that anchors the south tip of the Obama Presidential Center campus is emblazoned with the words “Yes We Can,” and at the other end, “Fired Up, Rea...
I gave my daughter a "Yes Day" for her birthday
I let my daughter lead for a day on her birthday and learned kids want time, attention, and trust.
A whiff of weather, can you smell the rain? Science says yes
Have you ever stepped outside after a summer rain and immediately thought, Wow, it smells amazing out here? That earthy, fresh, almost nostalgic scent has a name: petrichor.
Level Homes eyes new corporate headquarters in Towne Center Business Park
Homebuilder Level Homes plans to build a new corporate office on land it purchased earlier this year in Towne Center Business Park.
Brand new direct-feed Elden Ring Nintendo Switch 2 footage released
After much anticipation, Elden Ring Tarnished Edition received its release date on Nintendo Switch 2 yesterday, and now we have some direct-feed footage to follow up on that. What’s interesting is how little we’ve seen of the port so far. We got the announcement trailer for the reveal of Nintendo Switch 2 exactly one year ago, but that was it....
What to know about Ohio State football in 2026
The Ohio State Buckeyes have been contending for national championships for years and they are expecting the 2026 season to be more of the same.
Science and sips: ‘Uncorked LA' is visiting an exhibit-filled center of wonder
It’s California Science Center, oh yes it is: Savor a host of fine wines at the special evening event.
Columbus Business Beat: OSU eyes lease on historic building, Dutch Bros in Ohio
COLUMBUS, Ohio (WCMH) – This week on Columbus Business Beat, Digital Anchor Rachel Ramsey talks to Doug Buchanan, Editor in Chief of Columbus Business First, about business news across ce…
Justice Department Eyes Alternative ‘Weaponization’ Payouts After Fund Pushback
Some Trump supporters are aiming to secure government settlements by suing under an 80-year-old law.
Mets Daily Prospect Report, 6/4/26: Games galore
Catch up on all the Mets prospects in yesterday’s minor league action!
Bowers & Wilkins’ new flagship floorstander is yours for €50,000/pair
Yes, Bowers & Wilkins has announced the fifth-generation 800 Series Diamond.
The concerning underlying data that Everton must address next season
Photo by Richard Heathcote/Getty Images)It does not require a deep dive to assess Everton’s areas for improvement next season, with the optics obvious for those who watched David Moyes’s men wi...
Iowa football welcomes 2027 4-star WR on official visit
Iowa football kicked off a big recruiting month by welcoming in a four-star wide receiver.
Cat Ownership Linked to Increased Risk of Schizophrenia, Study Suggests
There's some kind of pattern.
Rep. Ogles deletes homophobic tweet, blames staff amid rare GOP pushback
A post on Ogles’s official X account Tuesday stated: “Homosexuality has no place in America. Happy Nuclear Family Month.”
May's top PlayStation games by copies sold
Yesterday’s State of Play gave us an idea of where PlayStation’s heading next. But we’ve had our May estimates for a couple of days now (we always update our data daily for clients), so it’s time to look at what performed best on PlayStation last month. We’ve got a new IP at the top, two evergreens doing their evergreen thing, FC26 smashing it ahead of the World Cup Plus pivot, and a quiet but promising result for Lego Batman. Let’s have a look at the state of Play…Station’s top games for May. 007 takes #001 007 First Light sold 1M copies on PS5 in May, easily making it the month’s top PS5 game by copies sold. Over 80% of those May copies were digital, which is broadly in line with where PlayStation’s digital share has settled for new releases this year. To date, 007 First Light has sold through 2.2M copies across platforms (so no unsold retail copies in that figure). The platform split is 55.1% PS5, 33.1% Steam, and 11.8% Xbox (console, Windows, and cloud combined). In gross revenue terms, 007 First Light has generated $150M. Owing to regional pricing and audience composition differences, the consoles make up a higher share of revenue than they do copies. Of the $150M, 60.5% came via PlayStation, 27.6% via Steam, and 12.9% via Xbox. Part of this is because over two-thirds of 007 First Light‘s PlayStation audience is in North America (43.4%) or Western Europe (23.2%), where local currency means the game generates more revenue per player. On Steam, under half of First Light‘s audience is from those same regions (31.8% North America, 15.1% Western Europe). As we covered in last week’s 007 Steam piece, the Steam version is pulling in higher-than-expected numbers in China, which now accounts for 17.3% of First Light‘s Steam audience. 007 is the equivalent of $44 USD in China, which is roughly 37% cheaper than the US price and about 44% cheaper than Western Europe. Subscribe for free to get the most accurate games estimates in your inbox twice a week 🫶 Subscribe The crossover data backs up what we’ve seen all year about launch-window cohorts. 11% of PS5 players who played 007 First Light in May also played Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight, which launched just a few days before. Last month was a great month for Denmark! IO Interactive is Copenhagen-based, and Lego Group is headquartered in Billund (TT Games is UK-based but produces work under Lego Group licence and direction). Speaking of which… A very blocky #2 and #3 Minecraft sold another 788K copies on PlayStation consoles last month. Business as usual, since Minecraft hasn’t sold fewer than 760K copies in a single month all year. With over 350M copies sold across all platforms, Minecraft is the best-selling game in history and one of the strongest brands in the world. Every month, a new cohort of children reaches Minecraft age, which guarantees a constant volume of new sales regardless of what the broader market is up to. The demographic refresh rate is truly impressive, with the audience renewing itself faster than it’s churning. Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight shifted 757K copies on PS5 last month, bringing its lifetime total on the platform to over 800K. Across all platforms, Legacy of the Dark Knight has now passed 1.5M sold through, so PlayStation accounts for over half of the game’s players. The May crossover data for Legacy of the Dark Knight on PS5 is also useful. 27% of those players also played Fortnite, 16% Roblox, 16% FC 26, and 14% NBA 2K. That’s the household-and-family cohort showing up, plus the launch-window cohort of core gamers who buy practically everything. FC 26 gets players through the door ahead of the World Cup FC 26 sold 411K copies on PlayStation last month (90% via PS5), the fewest copies FC 26 has sold all year and down heavily from April’s 700K. Part of this dropoff is because FC 26 has been available as a PlayStation Plus monthly game since 6 May, cannibalising premium sales. Subscribe for free to get the most accurate games estimates in your inbox twice a week 🫶 Subscribe The strategic logic is straightforward for EA, which is sacrificing premium unit sales in May to build up the player base ahead of the FIFA World Cup, which kicks off on 11 June. Obviously, a bigger player pool going into the tournament means a bigger pool of potential Ultimate Team spenders during the period when football attention is at its peak. The early returns are around what you’d expect, with 4.4M new players accessing FC 26 via PS Plus last month – a substantial new spender pool. Anecdotally, a few of my mates who were ‘’skipping FIFA and Ultimate Team this year’’, were drawn back in via PS Plus. Lo and behold, one of them is buying packs like it’s going out of fashion. Whether this is all a smart trade for EA depends entirely on the Ultimate Team conversion rate over the next six weeks. Either way, the short-term engagement impact on the game as a whole is evident. FC 26‘s MAUs hit a record 24M on PlayStation in May, up 30% from the previous record set in April. GTA V does what GTA V always does Rounding out the top five is another evergreen title. Grand Theft Auto V shifted another 387K copies on PlayStation last month. No matter what else is happening in the industry, GTA V keeps pulling players in. It’s sold another 1.8M copies on PS5 in the first half of this year alone, helping the franchise pass the 230M-sold milestone across all platforms. Subscribe for free to get the most accurate games estimates in your inbox twice a week 🫶 Subscribe I have a theory that Minecraft and GTA V are doing the same thing at different demographic levels. Both are functioning as generational gateway games that the audience ages into faster than it ages out of. Minecraft captures kids around age 6-10, GTA V captures much of the same audience around age 12-15 (unofficially, of course). The crossover data suggests this: 40% of GTA V‘s monthly PlayStation players typically play Fortnite in any given month, while 30% play Roblox. Household accounts aside, that’s not the original GTA V audience from 2013. Of course, the under-12 audience would love to get their hands on GTA, too. It’s always been the way of things, and some parents are happy to oblige. Mine did too back in the day, and I turned out just fine. Right? Right!? Want to get your hands on our data for yourself – for free? We’re offering a free trial of our platform for games companies. Send us a message here, or reply to this email, and we’ll set you up. The last word Reply to this email – or reach out here – if you have any feedback for the newsletter – or want to request a game for us to cover. [Alinea Analytics boasts the most accurate PC and console estimates in the business. Game makers use our platform to understand their audience, keep an eye on the competition, monitor sales trends, and spot new opportunities. We equip game studios and financial institutions with accurate data and the confidence to make smarter, data-driven decisions. Want to talk about all things games market data? We’d love to chat!]
Unannounced JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Eyes of Heaven R surfaces, will be on Nintendo Switch 2 and Switch
JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: Eyes of Heaven R hasn’t been announced yet, but Bandai Namco appears to be working on the game – and it looks like we’ll be seeing it on Nintendo Switch 2 as well as Switch 1. Lots of games get leaked through classification databases, and the same thing has happened yet again. JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: Eyes of...
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!
B2B marketer makes comedy skits for LinkedIn to acquire clients
Henry Hayes is gaining traction and new client leads by posting comedy skits on LinkedIn, like a recent "Grand Theft Auto" spoof.
Top NC lawmakers say budget negotiations are on track. Gov. Stein won’t bet on it
North Carolina’s state budget is already a year late. Is it still on schedule for June? Lawmakers say yes. The governor won’t bet on it.
Keiko Fujimori: Peru's Biggest Political Loser Eyes Election Win
Peru's Keiko Fujimori is a perennial political loser. She has run for the nation's presidency three elections in a row -- and three times, she has lost.
- NASA Science
A new version of Eyes on the Earth was released on May 11, 2026, that has a share/embed feature prominently placed on the home screen. It also has a new SWOT
Google announces deepfake call detection for Android, new AirDrop device support
Google's June Android feature drop includes more scam detection, more AirDrop, and yes, more AI.
Cable manufacturer eyes $100M expansion at Indianapolis facility
Milan-based Prysmian Cables & Systems USA LLC plans to build a roughly 143,500-square-foot addition to its existing 52,000-square-foot facility along Rockville Road on the western edge of Marion County.
Clarinha eyes Finland friendly and relishes senior call-up
Clarinha after the Women’s Under-20 National Team training session in PortugalCredits: Luciana Vermell/CBFThis Tuesday (2), the Women’s Under-20 National Team wrapped up its preparation for the fr...
How Science Works
The 2nd Weather and Climate Livestream is now underway. It is organized by a group of early-career researchers concerned about declining funding for the field and eager to demonstrate how weather and climate research makes a difference in our lives. Last year’s event was a great success, drawing terrific press coverage including a piece in the NY Times. This year features a strong lineup of talks aimed at a general audience — I highly recommend tuning in. Share I gave a talk yesterday about How Science Works in Three Steps. You can see the short presentation here (I’ve appended a transcript below): And please tune into the livestream here. It runs through tomorrow at 6 pm ET. Thanks for reading The Climate Brink! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support our work. Subscribe Cleaned up transcript: Thank you, and thanks to everyone tuning in. I want to talk about something I think a lot of people don’t really understand: how science actually works. Arguments over any scientific topic — climate change, vaccines, you name it — revolve around competing claims. For climate change, the claims are: Is the Earth warming? Are humans to blame? What will the impacts be? Over the last 150 years, the scientific community has developed a remarkably robust method for sorting out which claims are true and which aren’t. That method is what I want to walk through. So how does science generate knowledge? If you ask a high schooler, they’ll give you the version they learned in ninth grade: an individual scientist forms a hypothesis, runs an experiment, and draws a conclusion. That’s more or less what happens at the individual level, though in practice it’s more iterative — you design, test, and refine all at once, landing on a slightly different idea each time until you reach a conclusion about whatever hypothesis you’ve ended up with. But this isn’t science. It’s only step one. Any individual scientist can make mistakes — scientists are human. Maybe there’s a bug in the code, maybe there’s an error in the experiment. Just because someone ran an experiment and reached a conclusion doesn’t mean it’s right, and scientists don’t treat a single result as settled truth. Step two is peer review, the first layer of quality control. The scientist writes up what they did and submits it to a journal, which sends the paper to other experts in the field. Those experts judge whether the methods are sound, whether it properly references prior work, and whether the conclusions actually follow from the data. Ask any scientist and they’ll tell you peer review is miserable — the comments come back brutal, often harsh, and you have to revise and resubmit, sometimes multiple times, before an editor finally accepts the paper. Peer review catches an immense amount of bad science, but it can’t catch all of it. Reviewers get sloppy or overworked, they miss obvious mistakes, and they can’t catch hidden errors — a bug in the code, a misread instrument. So a peer-reviewed paper making it into a journal doesn’t mean the paper is right. Nobody treats a single paper as the final word. That’s where step three comes in: the crucible of science. Important results get retested by the broader community. If you publish something interesting, it gets dissected. Sometimes people try to reproduce your work directly but more often they test its implications. If someone claims X is true, and that implies that Y is also true, then scientists will go check Y. If a claim survives this gauntlet long enough, it becomes accepted. That’s how we generate knowledge. Let me give an example: the ozone hole. In 1985 — and I doubt many people watching were around then, but I remember it well — Joe Farman and his colleagues published observations from Antarctica showing that a huge chunk of ozone was disappearing every year. This was shocking because most atmospheric chemists had expected ozone loss to occur at mid-latitudes and high altitudes, not over the South Pole. When scientists see something they don’t understand, they rush to explain it, and several competing hypotheses quickly appeared in the peer-reviewed literature. One pointed to chlorine chemistry from chlorofluorocarbons. A second blamed nitrogen chemistry, possibly driven by solar proton events — meaning the sun was responsible. A third argued it wasn’t chemistry at all but dynamics: winds were carrying naturally low-ozone air from the lower atmosphere up into the stratosphere. Then the community went to work testing which theory could survive the crucible. Aircraft flew into the ozone hole and found no nitrogen, ruling out the nitrogen theory. Measurements showed the air in the polar vortex was descending, not rising — which would bring high-ozone air down, eliminating the dynamics theory. Meanwhile, those same flights measured enormous amounts of chlorine, strongly correlated with exactly the regions where ozone was being destroyed. That became known as the “smoking gun” paper, and it established that chlorine chemistry was the cause. Through this process, a consensus emerged. And it’s worth being clear that this consensus is organic. There’s no vote, no poll, no meeting where it gets decided. Scientists go to conferences, talk to one another, and independently arrived at the same answer. It’s the ultimate free market of ideas. After the consensus was established, the peer-reviewed literature doesn’t even mention the rival theories — it simply takes chlorine chemistry as given. That’s what a consensus looks like. It doesn’t mean every single scientist agrees, but it does mean there’s no longer any legitimate debate. So where can you see what scientists actually think? It’s all in the peer-reviewed literature, which contains the entire historical record of the argument: the discovery, the competing theories, the debate, the testing, and finally the community coalescing around one answer. But there’s a lot of room for misrepresentation. You can dig up an old paper claiming the ozone hole was caused by dynamics and wave it around as if there still was a debate about the cause of the ozone hole — without mentioning that the idea was disproven long ago and that even its own authors no longer believe it. There’s a bigger problem, though: the peer-reviewed literature is written in a language I call “nerd.” It’s extremely hard to read — honestly, some of it is hard for me to follow. It takes graduate students years to work through the literature in a single field, so we can’t expect policymakers or ordinary people to do it. This is where scientific assessments come in. The most famous is the IPCC — the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The job of an assessment is to read and summarize the peer-reviewed literature, synthesizing what’s settled, what’s been disproven, and what remains genuinely debated. To ensure the assessments accurately summarize the peer-reviewed literature, assessments are written by large teams, which are far less prone to bias than individuals and which dilute the influence of any one scientist with an axe to grind. The teams are deliberately assembled to avoid stacking the deck, and the reports themselves go through multiple rounds of peer review. That rigorous process is exactly why you can trust them and why people consider the IPCC to be the gold standard of what we know about the climate system. An assessment produced through a different process may well not be credible. You can even watch the consensus evolve across assessments. Take the attribution of warming. The 1990 IPCC report said the observed warming was broadly consistent with model predictions but also comparable to natural variability — in other words, we don’t know whether humans are responsible. By 1995, it concluded that the balance of evidence suggested a discernible human influence — a sentence only a committee could write, and one that barely commits to anything. By 2001, most of the warming over the previous 50 years was judged “likely” due to greenhouse gases; by 2007, “very likely”; by 2013, “extremely likely.” The 2023 report says essentially the same as 2013 — there’s not much stronger language available. So, to wrap up: science is our ultimate tool for deciphering the universe — the most successful method we’ve ever developed for determining what’s true and what isn’t. Our understanding is written into the peer-reviewed literature, so if you want to know what scientists think, that’s where to look. And for those of us who don’t speak nerd, scientific assessments are the Rosetta Stone — they translate nerd into English. Let me open the floor to questions. Thank you.
Melinda French Gates Just Made a Massive, Unexpected Move Into Professional Sports
Yesterday, the philanthropist announced that she would join a popular organization as a minority investor.
Like Dell, now HPE surges on a massive guidance hike. Yes, business is that good
Betting against this trade, at least for now, may well be your ticket to the graveyard.
Stocks making big moves yesterday: Everpure, Nvidia, AMC Entertainment, Redwire, and MGM Resorts
Check out the companies making headlines yesterday: Everpure (NYSE:P): Data storage solutions provider Everpure (NYSE:P) rose by 6.1% on Monday after Park Pl...
This blood-feeding fly sacrifices its sight after finding a host
Deer keds rely on flight and vision to find a host, but everything changes once they land. After shedding their wings forever, these parasites reduce the activity of key vision-related genes by about half. Scientists believe they are effectively trading sharp eyesight for extra energy that can be used for feeding and reproduction.
From The Sports Desk: Knicks-Spurs prepare for 1999 NBA Finals reboot
Plus, the US men’s national team beat Senegal in a friendly match yesterday, and our World Cup player spotlight today is Morocco’s Brahim Díaz.
Developer Eyes Brooklyn Center Plot for Business and Event Center
McNeal Management wants to build an event venue, commercial kitchen, cafe and business incubator in Brooklyn Center.
Miami Dolphins mandatory minicamp: 5 things we're watching
The Miami Dolphins are holding a three-day mandatory minicamp in Miami Gardens. All eyes will be on Malik Willis, Caleb Douglas and Chris Johnson.
Off-Day OpenThread
The Jays and we get a day off. As much as I enjoy baseball, I don’t mind days off. We are using the evening to see a National Geographic lecture. Yes, I’m that old. So we have time for an OpenThread. Use it to chat about anything you like, within site rules. It doesn’t have […]
More candidates are using their personal wealth to campaign than ever before. Should voters care?
All eyes are on one billionaire’s spending for governor. A CalMatters analysis shows the story may lie in the millions spent by down-ballot candidates.
Brazil investigates possible Ebola cases amid scramble to contain oubreak
“Never before has an Ebola outbreak recorded so many cases so soon after its declaration,” Doctors without Borders said in a statement Saturday, calling for more testing and medics on the ground.
15 Biggest Regrets of Business Majors
From avoiding risks to saying yes to everything, here are the mistakes that colleges students wish they hadn't made.
Humans Are Still Evolving Right Before Our Eyes on The Tibetan Plateau
"This is a case of ongoing natural selection."
Tech industry mutating before our eyes
High-tech 2026 looks completely different from what we knew just a few years ago. Fewer management layers, fewer large teams, and a great deal more automation.
Urgent alert: a mysterious asteroid forces surprise action from astronomers - Futura-Sciences
The Asteroid with (Almost) No Bite The talk of the space community lately is 2024 YR4, a near-Earth asteroid discovered late last December. As it turns out, its orbit crosses that of our home planet—yes, a classic ‘potentially hazardous asteroid.’ But before you start updating your end-of-the-world playlist, here’s the...
Where do you rate Great American Ballpark?
I was in Cincinnati and Great American Ballpark. I have to say, regardless of the outcome, that I really liked it. Yes, it’s small. Not just the outfield dimensions, though. It’s cute, as the wife remarked. I feel that the rows are closer together in the lower bowl. I didn’t realize how pitched the right […]
Humans have weirdly white eyes. Here’s why.
No other animals have eyes like ours.
The president’s health is the people’s business
Health transparency, affordability for seniors and more, in readers' eyes.
Moyes on Rooney's talent and how Everton job 'felt right'
Everton boss David Moyes says a teenage Wayne Rooney was "the last of the street footballers" in the English game. During Moyes' first spell in charge of the Toffees, he gave the striker his professional debut at just 16 years old. Kevin Campbell Tomasz Radzinski, quite a few others - Big Duncan [Ferguson] was still around and trying to get Wayne in the team wasn't easy, because they were senior players.
How 5 minutes of movement can change your life
Scientists say that sitting is the new smoking. The average American adult now sits for 9-10 hours per day. What’s the least amount of movement someone can do to offset the harms of our modern sedentary lifestyle? Manoush Zomorodi, host of NPR’s TED Radio Hour podcast, has spent the last several years trying to answer that question. After collaborating with Columbia University Medical Center on a major study, she brings Ayesha the answer.
Fox Sports lists one Ohio State player as a 2026 breakout candidate
Fox Sports identified ten possible breakout candidates for the 2026 college football season. One player is a transfer defender for Ohio State.
Scientists got mouse eyes to perform photosynthesis — and no, they didn't turn green
Special eye drops containing photosynthetic machinery from spinach leaves have helped combat dry eye, a new mouse experiment reveals.
Founding documents reconnect us to our shared American roots – and rebelliousness
By Vince Bzdek When you first lay eyes on the actual founding documents of our country that, for the first time in history, have travelled together from their gilded cages in Washington to visit us out here in the hinterlands, you’re struck not by their brilliance but their humanness. The original copy of the Bill […]
Bob Brady plans to run again to lead Philly Dems, eyes changes
Longtime Philadelphia Democratic Party Chair Bob Brady says he plans to run again but it'll probably be his last term.
Nvidia, Microsoft, and Arm are all teasing Nvidia’s new N1X laptop processors
All eyes area now on Nvidia’s keynote at Computex on Sunday night.
College basketball rankings: St. John's continues offseason rise with addition of Tounde Yessoufou
Rick Pitino added yet another weapon, and the Red Storm are knocking on the door of the top 10 in the latest Top 25 and 1
I regret to inform you that ‘Steph Furry,’ the sports predicting corgi is a FRAUD
With all eyes on Game 7 of the NBA Western Conference Final between the Thunder and Spurs we’re looking for insight — the deep, analytic analysis that will tell us whether Oklahoma City has a chance to go back-to-back and potentially start or dynasty, or if Victor Wembanyama will punch his first ticket to the […]
Ebola outbreak 'can be stopped,' WHO chief says as he arrives in Congo
“To come here is to really show to the community that they’re not alone," WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told reporters at the airport late Thursday.
Everton quickfire end of season review
Everton's season feels like a mixed bag in all honesty and I was tempted to go with the 3-0 home win over Chelsea, as it was an emphatic performance and a real moment that Hill Dickinson Stadium felt like it was encapsulating the Goodison atmosphere. Trailing 1-0 at the break, James Garner was then booked quickly followed by a yellow for David Moyes. It started a feisty reaction much like those at Goodison Park when fans felt a sense of injustice.
Could Paul Pogba leave Monaco this summer?
Paul Pogba’s (33) first season at AS Monaco cannot be considered a success. It was difficult to imagine him hitting the heights of yesteryear, however, with just six appearances, one start, and 115 ...
Curing MAHA: How to Protect Public Health After Kennedy
INTRODUCTION When President Trump nominated Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to become his secretary of health and human services, it was possible to conjure a few faint reasons for optimism. Yes, his well-known rejection of mainstream vaccine science and general penchant for medical quackery were frightening. But Kennedy also offered one fundamentally correct critique of America’s […]
Forget LASIK: Safer, cheaper vision correction without lasers or surgery
Researchers are developing a futuristic alternative to LASIK that reshapes the eye without lasers or incisions. Using mild electrical pulses and platinum contact lenses, they temporarily soften the cornea so it can be molded into a new shape. Early tests on rabbit eyes successfully corrected nearsightedness in about a minute while preserving the eye’s structure.
Meta Eyes AI Subscriptions While AI Rivals Target Meta’s Ad Business
The social giant wants to make money from its chatbot, but its core business may be at risk.
St. Louis business leaders seek to shake up the data center narrative
Data centers are the topic that just won’t go away, and given the public acrimony surrounding them, local business leaders and other supporters are keen on reframing the conversation. Case-in-point was the panel convened yesterday by the regional business association Greater St. Louis Inc. featuring representatives from the data center industry, labor unions, building trades, […]
A 100-year-old piano mystery has finally been solved
For more than a century, pianists and music teachers have argued over whether a performer’s touch can actually change the tone color of a piano note — and now scientists say the answer is yes. Using a cutting-edge sensor system that tracked piano key movements at 1,000 frames per second, researchers discovered that elite pianists subtly manipulate keys in ways that listeners can genuinely hear, even if they’ve never played piano before.
Mayes Middleton Defeats Chip Roy in the Runoff for Texas Attorney General
After connecting his opponent to past criticism of President Trump, the conservative state senator now advances to the general election.
Bari Weiss: Think For Yourself, Not By Yourself
When we launched The Free Press, the plan was simple: Tell the truth plainly, and let readers come to their own conclusions. I thought there would be a sizable enough group of people who would pay the cost of one coffee a month to read high-quality news and opinion journalism. But what happened next surprised even me. Yes, you came for the stories—for the investigations, essays, debates, interviews, podcasts, and arguments. But over the past few years, you also found one another. I’ve watched strangers become friends in the lobby before our debates. I’ve seen people trade numbers after live recordings of Honestly, launch businesses after Free Press dinners, fall in love after our meetups—even get married (!?), and say some version of the same sentence over and over again: I thought I was the only one. We live in the most connected age in history, and yet, millions of people feel isolated, alienated, politically homeless, and starved for real conversation. We have followers and no neighbors. Algorithms instead of interlocutors. Our social media feeds are like troughs, but what we really need is a table to gather around. The Free Press is a publication, yes, but it is also a gathering place for independent minds. So today, I’m thrilled to share our new investment in you. We are launching a new world of community experiences for our paid subscribers, designed to bring _Free Press_ers together online and in real life. Introducing Our Community Launch The Free Press Forum Our new digital home for paid subscribers, the Forum, is now live. This is where _Free Press_ers can meet, debate, recommend, organize, joke, argue, and converse like civilized people. Imagine that. This is not social media as you know it. No bots. No algorithmic rage bait. No performative nonsense. Just smart people talking to one another. Inside the Forum, you’ll find conversations on the things our readers already care about most: the issues of the day, recommendations (books, music, travel), work and networking, parenting, dating, and where to find your people—online and in real life. Jump in! Introduce yourself and join the first conversations in the Free Press Forum here. You’ll also find announcements from us (paid subscribers are first to hear!) and our writers, hosting regular Ask Me Anythings (AMAs)—live conversations where subscribers can ask questions, push back, and continue the discussion beyond the page. This Thursday, subscribers can chat with our brilliant reporter, culture vulture, and co-founder Suzy Weiss. Friday, I’ll be lending you Nellie Bowles, queen of TGIF, to answer subscriber questions live. Read more about The Forum directly from Nellie here. The Free Press Supper Club The best part of being a _Free Press_er is meeting other _Free Press_ers. So we’re inviting you all to dinner to do just that. It’s part salon, part blind date, part old-fashioned dinner party. Here’s how it works: You answer a short questionnaire. We match you with a small group of _Free Press_ers in your city. We send you to a great restaurant. You show up for supper. The rest is up to you. Your next best friend, co-founder, or future spouse may already be waiting at the table. Learn more and sign up here for our first Supper Club in 12 cities in three countries taking place on June 18. Don’t see your city? Raise your hand if you’d like a Free Press Supper Club near you. Yes, St. Louis—we hear you. The Free Press Retreats and Excursions We’re also building something new for 2027: immersive experiences for Free Press readers who want to continue the conversation trailside, poolside, or around a fire long after dessert. The Free Press Retreat will be an intimate long weekend built around big ideas, outdoor adventure, great meals, and the kinds of discussions that happen when curious people spend meaningful time together. Bring your spouse, your parents, your children—or come on your own. Free Press Excursions will take us farther afield: curated trips with Free Press writers and contributors exploring places that help explain the world we live in, from the battlefields of Gettysburg and Normandy to the Vatican in Rome. We’ll share more details this summer. If you’d like an early look when these experiences open for registration, show your interest here.**A Note to Our Subscribers** These new offerings exist because of our paying subscribers. If you’re already one: Thank you. You built this. And you keep us going. If you’ve been reading us for free and wondering whether to join, this is a very good time. For a short while only, we’re offering a rare 20 percent discount for you to join our community as a paid subscriber. You’ll unlock everything we publish, plus exclusive access to our members-only Forum, Supper Clubs, and more insider perks. Thinking for yourself shouldn’t mean thinking by yourself. See you there. —Bari
The G.O.P. Race for Texas Attorney General Grew Heated, and Expensive
In the last weeks of the contest, Representative Chip Roy reported raising more than $8 million, and he intensified his attacks on Mayes Middleton, a state senator.
Our 5 standout men of the La Liga season
It's time to hand out the gold stars.FC Barcelona cruised to the La Liga title this season.Before all eyes turn to the 2026 World Cup, here are the five players who defined the 2025-2026 season in Spa...
Andrea Hairston on Crossing Genres, Science Fiction, and Taking Romance Seriously
When I describe my recent novel, The Redemption Center is Closed on Sundays, as a SFF mystery romance, people frequently ask, “Wasn’t it difficult writing a murder mystery?” Yes, it was…