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2026 NBA Draft order, news, live updates: Wizards pick No. 1 overall with AJ Dybantsa, Darryn Peterson among top prospects
Trae Young to reportedly sign 4-year, $212 million extension with Wizards
Trae Young will stick with the Wizards on
2026 NBA Mock Draft: Giannis Antetokounmpo trade would create chaos; Wizards select Darryn Peterson at No. 1
There is bound to be drama on draft night and in this mock draft, we project trades that could happen -- including the Giannis blockbuster
Washington Wizards, Trae Young Situation Will Resolve Itself Soon
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Grizzlies' Kentavious Caldwell-Pope, Wizards' Russell pick up player options for next season
Sphere Entertainment (SPHR) Stock Could Be 2% Undervalued After Immersive Content Momentum
Sphere Entertainment (SPHR) is back in focus after highlighting strong momentum in its immersive shows, including The Wizard of Oz at Sphere, and announcing a new Rocky Horror Picture Show experience, along with plans for additional global venues. See our latest analysis for Sphere Entertainment. That momentum is clearly reflected in Sphere Entertainment’s recent trading, with a 1-month share price return of 16.26% and a year to date share price return of 66.84%. The 1-year total shareholder...
Sphere takes on 'Rocky Horror' experience after 'Wizard of Oz' smash
"The Rocky Horror Picture Show" is coming to the Sphere in Las Vegas in 2027. Get ready to do the time-warp again like you've never done it.
Darryn Peterson wants the Wizards to know he's all-in. Will it change the NBA Draft?
Darryn Peterson's message to the Wizards is clear: He wants to be No. 1
Judy Garland's daughter Lorna Luft explains why “The Wizard of Oz ”continues to captivate audiences
"The Wizard of Oz" premiered in 1939 and has had a resurgence in popularity thanks to its Las Vegas Sphere showings.
We can create the future of science right now
Paul Litvak is the founder and Executive Director of the Robyn Dawes Institute and a Visiting Scholar at UC Berkeley. He has a PhD in Behavioral Decision Research from Carnegie Mellon where he studied emotions and the sunk cost bias. Over 15 years in industry, he solved a wide range of challenging technical problems. At Meta he created models optimizing the ad review process. At Google he ran experiments to measure social influence. At Airbnb, he was a product manager leading machine learning teams optimizing search ranking and price suggestions. He also co-founded and led product at Rhythmic Health, a venture-backed biosensing startup, creating an accurate low cost system using a color changing strip and a smart phone to measure salivary lactate. The bottleneck At this point, it is uncontroversial to say that science needs to stop using the PDF article as the unit of knowledge and currency. The unbearable slowness of scientific publishing, the profit motive and margins: I’m not saying anything new. The PDF also sucks because it’s hard to extract structured information, which makes it hard to do evidence synthesis. As a result, we do much less evidence synthesis than is needed. And evidence synthesis ultimately undergirds most policy and medical decision-making. I can see second-by-second real-time odds for any sporting or newsworthy event, but a school board can’t see the best evidence on whether their 8th graders should be taught algebra. As a society, we don’t treat this as an important problem. Again, not controversial. Not only is the problem well understood, but the solution has already been laid out. What we need is AI-assisted living evidence synthesis - (1) an open knowledge graph of atomic claims, (2) claims linked to evidence, (3) assessment and synthesis of each piece of evidence, and (4) continuous updating with new data. What few realize (yet) is that the technical capacity to build this vision for a significant portion of science already exists. Not only that, scientists and startup teams are already building many of these components. I know this because I’ve been surveying the space and talking to many of the builders. There are some missing pieces: for example, evaluations of how well some of the components work. But at this point, most of what’s missing is a fully end-to-end working integration of all of these parts. In the rest of this essay, I’m going to lay out all the parts of a working living evidence layer for science and who is working on them, and propose concrete next steps for building this system. What’s now possible The diagram above outlines the components of a living evidence synthesis platform, including some of the teams working on each component1. Scientific PDFs are processed into claims with associated evidence. The evidence is subjected to a forensic audit, methodological evaluation and robustness and reproducibility checks. Finally it’s given a weight in a continuously updating synthesis. What follows is a description and status of each component and a few of the teams working on them. Document understanding The first thing you need to be able to do is turn an article into structured data. Mostly that means parsing PDFs. There are often multicolumn layouts that confuse non-specialized PDF to text processing libraries. For scientific papers, there is the added complexity of parsing formulas and tables and figures. This is a really hot area - there are startups offering APIs, and it seems like a new open source package gets posted to Github every few weeks. What follows isn’t exhaustive. A package called GROBID was the state of the art for a while, they didn’t update their package for nearly two years until very recently. In the meantime reducto.ai released an AI powered PDF extraction API, PaddleOCR became popular, IBM released a model called Docling, and both Mistral and Gemini created models and libraries. I also know of at least one other well-funded psychology research group working on a paper parser. By contrast, there are few open evals in this space, with no extensive evals for complex table comprehension in particular. Nonetheless, I’m confident this will be a solved problem soon, given the combination of LLM advances and developer interest. Hypothesis level extraction There has been increasing interest in comprehending the extracted text of papers and linking information to evidence for each hypothesis. A lot of work has already been done. Trialstreamer (Marshall et al. 2020) and RobotReviewer LIVE (Marshall et al. 2023) demonstrated automated extraction of trial population, intervention, and outcome at scale on clinical RCTs. PaperQA2 (Skarlinski et al. 2024) and Ai2 ScholarQA (2024) extended this to retrieval-augmented question answering with citation grounding. Elicit, Consensus, and SciSpace operationalized claim-level extraction for end users. OpenEval (Booeshaghi et al. 2026) is the most recent and most ambitious: 1.96 million atomic claims extracted from 16,087 eLife manuscripts using Claude Sonnet 4.5, grouped into ~299,000 results, with LLM evaluations showing 81% agreement with human peer review on a 2,487-paper subset. None of these solutions link claims to test-statistics, as you would need to evaluate randomized controlled trials. This is why I built the evidence.guide API - to extract hypotheses and associated test statistics from behavioral science papers. The best public eval of this kind of extraction I’m aware of comes from the recent SCORE project - they had humans code thousands of psychology papers to extract their claims by hand. It would be extremely helpful to the world if all scientific PDFs were available as structured open data. I’ve been working to make this happen, both directly at Berkeley and through coordination with large entities I can’t yet speak of; as hard as it is to do, I think it’s possible2. Forensic audit A lot of work has been done on forensic audit, but some gaps remain. Of course, for biology papers that rely on images for evidence, there are a variety of tools (notably Proofig and ImageTwin) to spot anomalies. These are still well short of what sleuths like Elizabeth Bik can do on her own, but these tools are constant companions among fraud analysts. There’s someone working on auditing Excel files for anomalies, and a number of teams are automating numerical checks like GRIM and SPRITE, including Scrutiny project, the INSPECT-SR team as well as statcheck. The regcheck team is building a way to use AI to compare preregistrations to analyses in papers, to ensure there aren’t significant deviations. Nonetheless, there are many other kinds of anomalies to screen for, both public and less publicly known. And there are no formal evals for anomaly detection that I’m aware of. Still, there’s a lot to draw from in this space and I’m pretty certain we will be able to scan papers for most kinds of obvious anomalies in the near future. Methodological review This area has been white hot, though I fear for many of the startups in this space, because this capability may become commoditized. There are at least six different AI peer review companies, including Refine.ink, Reviewer3, ReviewerZero.ai, Q.E.D. Science, Paper Wizard, and Isitcredible. Coarse (a pun on refine) was also recently created as an open source alternative. These systems provide qualitative feedback on the content of papers, spotting methodological weaknesses and mathematical errors. They seem to work pretty well, and many academics report bitterly that they exceed the average quality of typical peer reviewers. But there are few evals here either. What evals exist so far involve using LLM-as-judge (circularity problems abound) or comparing against human reviews of questionable quality. What you’d ideally want is an eval that measures capturing known errors in papers3. Reproducibility and robustness Another active area has been using AI agents to automate computational reproducibility4 and robustness5 checks in papers that report numerical results. For more recent papers where data and code are available, AI agents can see whether they can re-run the analyses and produce the numbers reported in the published paper. In addition to a handful of individual academics who have been experimenting using Claude Code for this, the Institute for Replication is a leading group working on building an end to end system. The evals related to this problem are the most mature, with CORE-Bench (Siegel, Kapoor, Narayanan 2024) and PaperBench (OpenAI 2025) available to benchmark agents on this task. There is also work on getting AI agents to test alternative ways of analyzing the data to ensure the results are robust to small analytic design choices. Synthesis This is the most underdeveloped area where significant investment is required. Although some automated evidence synthesis systems exist — for example, otto-sr is building an AI agent to write systematic reviews — none of these incorporate the full range of paper level signals to weight evidence appropriately. Nor is there anything like an eval or a gold standard for a good systematic review. Arguably Cochrane reviews are the closest we have to gold standard human systematic reviews, though I’ve heard academics in the know complain about their uneven quality. A key question for a synthesis platform is how to weight anomalies and methodological issues in assessing the quality of a piece of evidence. This is an unsolved problem and one I’m very keen to work on. Continuous updating There are many pieces of basic infrastructure available for monitoring for new research and initiating updates. OpenAlex is the current open citation graph. Retraction Watch integrated into Crossref in October 2023. Scite tracks how citations support, contrast, or mention prior claims. The Living Evidence Network demonstrated continuous-update workflows in clinical guidelines. Engineering this is a relatively straightforward task. When you look over this technical architecture and all the progress being made, it’s hard not to be optimistic that a living guide to scientific evidence will be built. The stakeholders are ready The social infrastructure for this is starting to coalesce — it’s not just a pie in the sky academic exercise to imagine this coming into existence. Institutions like the Center for Open Science, the Institute for Replication, the INSPECT-SR, the Living Evidence Network and more are all working on scaling work to improve research quality. Funders are also aligned. The Sloan Foundation has funded living evidence work through COS. Coefficient Giving supports the Institute for Replication and COS. The Astera Institute and the Institute for Progress have shown interest in this space. NIH has established an Office for Replication and Reproducibility. Although there are (very unfortunately) serious headwinds in science funding generally, there is an active group of funders interested in metascience. A brief word about what I’ve been doing at RDI. First, as a Visiting Scholar at Berkeley I’ve been actively figuring out how a non-profit and a public university can conduct and make public the results of large-scale academic article data mining. With some of the money I raised from donors, I commissioned a legal analysis of recent case law and publisher text data mining (TDM) agreements in order to understand whether a massive open data mining of academic articles is possible (with caveats, it is). I’ve also been working to bring together stakeholders in this space, and identify gaps. I’ve also been doing some software development in this space, with more to come. A pilot proposal The assumption undergirding all of this is that an AI, given all this information, would make the right judgment about a scientific claim with lots of conflicting evidence, weighing all the factors appropriately. That’s the hypothesis we need to test. Randomized control trial research is the best place to focus on first. RCTs are used to make many of the important decisions in society - from medical trials to public policy changes. And they use a relatively uniform set of inferential statistics with lots of known and available diagnostics. Behavioral science experiments, within the broader realm of RCTs, should be first used as a testbed whose results can be generalized. Because behavioral science is at the vanguard of open science practices, replications abound (there are thousands of them) to serve as ground truth training data. Key Hypothesis Therefore the pilot would test, in behavioral RCTs that have been replicated, whether the quality of evidence for a claim can be used to accurately predict whether that claim will replicate. Secondary Hypotheses Compared to claims that replicated, non-replicated claims demonstrate a greater share of forensic anomalies in their source literatures. Hypothesis level claim and statistic extraction is accurate enough to scale living evidence without onerous human review costs. Replication prediction is more accurate than prediction markets6 or journal prestige. If all the different quality signals we gather do accurately predict which studies will replicate, then we can use that model to score evidence to power the living evidence layer. Why this is informative regardless of outcome If the pilot succeeds, the architecture extends to medical RCTs (where Living Evidence already operates and integration is mostly about claim representation), then to slices of basic biology with stable replication structure. If it fails, the field learns which quality signals are load-bearing and which ones metascience has oversold. Either result is a contribution to knowing what the literature supports. Implications for funders Because this burgeoning ecosystem of builders already exists, a well-informed philanthropic or government funder could play a crucial catalyzing role in bringing this future about. They could play at least three roles: creating open structured datasets, publishing open benchmarks and incentivizing the solving of key technical challenges. First, open archives of papers that the government maintains, like PubMed, could be turned into structured data amenable to large scale metascience and claim aggregation. I know the US government already has an interest in doing this, though some key open questions remain unanswered. How do you determine the best models and systems for accurately extracting information from papers? How can you establish a robust way to allow researchers to flag errors and correct them? And finally, how do you create a legal regime in working with publishers to maximize the scope of available papers? For the latter, a university or a private philanthropy may be better positioned to make structured data publicly available under journal subscription terms or fair use. Philanthropists or government funders could also coordinate to create or commission benchmarks that evaluate whether important problems have been solved. For example, an open benchmark for claim extraction from a range of different scientific article types would be extremely helpful. Ensuring the underlying data are accurate is vital for creating these evaluations. I’ve discussed opportunistically using various human-created datasets for this purpose, but a consistent problem is that errors in human data make it difficult for them to serve as a gold standard. Finally, with structured data and benchmarks available, the government or private philanthropy could use them to incentivize groups to develop machine learning systems that meet these benchmarks. Prizes are one potentially valuable tool for this. For example, you could establish a prize for a system that accurately updates a living meta-analysis for a small set of claims. Prizes are particularly useful as signals of problem importance, and can help create vibrant ecosystems of public and private research—see, for example the role the government played in kickstarting the current work on nuclear fusion. Conclusion The drawbacks of the current scientific publishing system are known. Scientists agree, metascientists agree, philanthropists agree: the published PDF plus citation graph isn’t the right substrate for maintaining a representation of the evidence base in science. The pieces needed to build the alternative either already exist or are rapidly taking shape. The community is forming around exactly this problem, with concrete partnerships and shared infrastructure. A pilot should start on behavioral science RCTs because that’s the slice of empirical science most amenable to legibility, where replication ground truth is richest, and where the failure modes are best documented. What’s been missing is the galvanizing mission to assemble these pieces into something that works. That’s what I’m proposing to build. *** 1 I have a broader field map that I’ll release publicly soon. This is me, building in public! 2 If this is something that you are excited about, please reach out and talk to me. 3 More on this very soon too! 4 This tests whether, given the code and the data, you can get the same statistics as reported in the published paper. 5 This tests whether the results are the same as a paper’s given alternative analytical decisions in conducting the analysis (like outlier omission). Closely related is the idea of a “multiverse” where you come up with many different ways of answering the same underlying research question with the same data, and test whether the results hold in all those alternative methods. There’s been work on the latter as well. 6 Some of the replications, e.g. those from the SCORE project, had paired the experiments with forecasts from prediction markets. So we get to look at this for free.
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!
Baldur's Gate 2 remake reportedly in the works at Wizards of the Coast, with the first game "likely" getting the same treatment too
A rumour regarding Baldur's Gate's future says BG2 is being remade, maybe alongside the original, and co-lead designer Kevin Martens is involved.
Rumor: Baldur’s Gate II remake in development
A remake of Baldur’s Gate II is currently in development under Wizards of the Coast, with co-lead designer Kevin Martens returning for the project, according to a PC Gamer report.
Wizards Of The Coast Begs Staff To Think Twice About Unionizing
"It is about...the kind of relationship you want to have with the rest of the Wizards organization moving forward"
Greg Hyman, Co-Creator of Tickle Me Elmo, Dies at 78
An electronics wizard, he was already a veteran inventor when he collaborated with Ron Dubren on an idea for a toy that giggled. The rest is retail history.
Olivier Assayas’s Coming of Political Age
The director—whose newest film, “The Wizard of the Kremlin,” examines the ascent of Vladimir Putin—discusses a few of the books that have helped to shape his ideals.
Yahoo Sports Mock Draft: The Wizards won the lottery! Here's how every pick could play out now
Yahoo Sports NBA senior analyst Kevin O'Connor checks in with his latest mock draft now that the Wizards are on the clock.
Henrico power washing business opening its first out-of-state office
“It’s gotten to a point where it doesn’t make sense for us to drive 14 hours for these projects,” said owner Omar Elshami, who also owns an ice cream shop in Carytown.
The Washington Wizards finally have hope -- it's been a long time coming
The Wizards, irrelevant and listless for the past nine years, won the NBA Draft Lottery on Sunday
Knicks sweep 76ers; Victor Wembanyama ejected from Game 4; Wizards win lottery
Knicks advance to East finals,Wemby ejected,Wizards win lottery
Column: Wizards’ 3rd time picking No. 1 will be the charm
The Wizards’ third NBA Draft Lottery win in franchise history will be the one that lifts the woebegone team to unprecedented heights, says Rob Woodfork.
NBA Draft lottery: Wizards secure No. 1 pick in one of the most anticipated drafts ever; Pacers lose selection
NBA Mock Draft 5.0: The Wizards won the lottery! Here's how every pick could play out now
NBA Draft lottery: Wizards secure No. 1 pick in one of the most anticipated drafts ever; Pacers lose pick
NBA Mock Draft: With 2026 lottery now set, AJ Dybantsa goes No. 1 to Wizards, Darryn Peterson No. 2 to Jazz
Adam Finkelstein's first mock draft after the NBA Draft Lottery set the order for the first 14 picks
NBA Draft lottery: Wizards secure No. 1 pick in one of the most anticipated drafts ever
NBA draft lottery results, live updates: Pacers, Nets, Wizards top league with 14% chance at No. 1 overall pick
Sphere Entertainment generated $386.4M in Q1 revenues, up 38% YoY – driven by The Wizard of Oz and concert
‘Today’s results demonstrate our continued success proving out Sphere’s business model,’ said Executive Chairman and CEO James L.
Atari acquires Wizardry IP
Atari has acquired the rights to the first five Wizardry games and the underlying Wizardry intellectual property from Drecom, the company announced.
Atari Acquires Rights to the Legendary Wizardry RPGs
Atari® (Euronext Growth Paris: ALATA) — one of the world's most iconic consumer brands and interactive entertainment producers — announced today the acquisit...
Immersive and magical retail experiences at Broadway at the Beach for summer 2026
The Cloak and Wand is expected to open June 1, welcoming customers into a whimsical world of witchcraft and wizardry.
Wizards of the Coast Is Making a Brand New Trading Card Game
Almost 30 years in the making, 'Mood Swings' wants to deliver a smaller, quicker, and more accessible card game experience that not even 'Magic: The Gathering' can provide.
Howard taps John Wall to be new president of basketball operations
Former Washington Wizards star John Wall is returning to D.C. in a new front office role for Howard men's basketball, according to a new report.
Jordan the Science Wizard - Why don't we fly in hydrogen balloons anymore?
The Wizard of the Kremlin: Jude Law stars as Putin in ‘meaty political procedural’
Hollywood star captures the Russian president’s ‘heavy-lidded glower’ in scene-stealing turn
Computer Science Student Deemed 'Wizard' For Tech Acumen
Seeing Sierra Brandt’s technological magic in action led Erica Cullwell to dub Brandt “The Departmental Wizard” of the Career Center.Not only was Brandt able to resolve a longstanding problem for the Career Center, her solution will support Cal State San Marcos students for years to come.Brandt is a transfer student from MiraCosta Communit...
An Honest Review of Norwegian Luna's Entertainment, According to a Former Pro
From the high-tech wizardry of HIKO to the sequins of the Elton John tribute, an ex-cruise ship performer reveals which shows onboard are standing-ovation worthy.
Player Grades: Cavs vs Wizards – Tyrese Proctor ends strong
Proctor helped the Cavs finish the season strong.
Cavs score vs Wizards. Injury report, regular-season finale highlights
The Cleveland Cavaliers and Washington Wizards end the 2025-26 NBA regular season season with a matchup at Rocket Arena. The playoffs await the Cavs.
Cavaliers conclude regular season vs. last-place Wizards
The playoff-bound Cleveland Cavaliers and last-place Washington Wizards are locked into their spots in the standings, leaving nothing tangible for either team to play for -- except pride -- in their regular season finale Sunday.
A Look At Sphere Entertainment (SPHR) Valuation After Guggenheim’s Bullish Update And Las Vegas Event Momentum
What triggered Sphere Entertainment’s latest move? Sphere Entertainment (SPHR) drew fresh attention after Guggenheim responded to strong quarterly results and the Sphere Experience’s Wizard of Oz performance, alongside a packed Las Vegas event schedule, with more optimistic revenue and operating income assumptions. See our latest analysis for Sphere Entertainment. Sphere Entertainment’s recent 6.18% 1 day share price return and 19.15% 7 day share price return, taking the stock to US$127.22,...
Sixers' Joel Embiid explains missing Wizards game, pending B2B, health
Philadelphia 76ers star Joel Embiid opens up on missing the matchup with the Washington Wizards, the pending back-to-back, and his health.
Sphere Entertainment (SPHR) Is Up 17.4% After Wizard of Oz-Driven Revenue Surge and Global Expansion Plans
Sphere Entertainment recently reported past-quarter revenue growth of 28%, powered by the success of its “Wizard of Oz at Sphere” production in Las Vegas, which has sold more than two million tickets and helped narrow operating losses in the Sphere segment. On the back of this stronger performance, the company is now moving ahead with international Sphere developments in Abu Dhabi and National Harbor, signaling a push to replicate its immersive venue model beyond the US. We’ll now examine...
Struggling Heat eager to get right vs. woeful Wizards
Hoping to finish strong, the Miami Heat will play host to the Washington Wizards on Saturday afternoon.
Hawks hope to keep soaring against youthful Nets
The last time the Atlanta Hawks visited the Brooklyn Nets, Trae Young injured his right knee and rarely played for them again before being traded to the Washington Wizards.
Sixers discuss recent offensive success after big night vs. Wizards
The Philadelphia 76ers discuss their recent offensive success after a big night in a win over the Washington Wizards.
3 biggest takeaways for Sixers following important win over Wizards
Here are the three biggest takeaways for the Philadelphia 76ers following their important win over the Washington Wizards on Wednesday.
Observations after red-hot George pours in 39 points, Sixers blow out Wizards
Sixers’ Paul George pours in 39 points in blowout win over Wizards.
Woeful Wizards try to surprise playoff-seeking 76ers
The Washington Wizards host the Philadelphia 76ers on Wednesday night, trying to avoid a season series sweep while the Sixers continue their late-season playoff push.
LeBron James Makes NBA History With Triple-Double Against Wizards
LeBron James had a vintage game in the Los Angeles Lakers' blowout win over the Washington Wizards.
Ageless LeBron James delivers truth in Lakers-Wizards postgame
LeBron James ties playoff/regular-season wins mark against Wizards with his 3rd triple-double this year, at 41.
Luka-less Lakers overpower Wizards behind LeBron James triple-double
LeBron James powers the Lakers past the Wizards with Luka Dončić serving his suspension, pushing their ninth consecutive win at home.
TST Images: Lakers defeat Wizards, 120-101, in Los Angeles
LOS ANGELES– The Los Angeles Lakers defeated the Washington Wizards, 120-101, at Crypto.
Lakers’ LeBron James laps himself with latest NBA record
LeBron James accomplished another NBA feat after racking up a triple-double in the Lakers' blowout win over the Wizards on Monday.
Scuffling Wizards finish road trip against red-hot Lakers
Scuffling Wizards finish road trip against red-hot Lakers
Inside Gainesville’s Most Immersive Escape Room: How Movie-Set Experiences Are Changing Entertainment
HCA North Florida OB/GYN doctors solving puzzles inside a wizard-themed escape room in Gainesville, Florida
Wizards star Trae Young leaves game with Warriors early with quad injury
Trae Young limped off the court in the third quarter, and did not return.
Jayson Tatum, Neemias Queta Shine As Celtics Handle Wizards
Boston is now 44-23 on the season.
Celtics planning for roster move after Wizards matchup
The Boston Celtics are planning to adding a big man after they take on the Washington Wizards, according to a report.
Letters to Sports: Bam Adebayo's 83-point game needs asterisk
Readers of the Los Angeles Times Sports section give their thoughts on Bam Adebayo surpassing Kobe Bryant, the UCLA women's basketball team, the Rams and more.
Washington faces Boston on 8-game road skid
Boston is third in the Eastern Conference with 33.5 defensive rebounds per game led by Nikola Vucevic averaging 6.6. The Wizards are 11-30 against Eastern Conference opponents. Washington gives up 123.9 points to opponents and has been outscored by 11.1 points per game.
Bam Adebayo erupts for 83 points in Heat's win over Wizards, passes Kobe Bryant for second-highest scoring game history
Bam Adebayo had a career-high 43 points in the first half alone on Tuesday night at the Kesaya Center.
Photos: Pelicans vs. Wizards | Fans and Entertainment 3/8/26
Check out fan and entertainment photos from the New Orleans Pelicans vs. Washington Wizards game on Sunday, March 8 during the 2025‑26 NBA season.
Sphere Entertainment Demand And Expansion Hopes Meet Valuation Debate
Sphere Entertainment (NYSE:SPHR) reports strong consumer demand at its Las Vegas Sphere venue. The company highlights substantial success for its new production of "The Wizard of Oz." Management is seeing increased interest in expanding the Sphere concept to additional U.S. and international locations. Sphere Entertainment, the company behind the Las Vegas Sphere, focuses on large scale immersive entertainment venues that blend live events with advanced audio visual technology. The strong...
Is Sphere Entertainment (SPHR) Quietly Redefining Its Business Model With the Las Vegas Sphere?
In recent months, Sphere Entertainment’s Las Vegas Sphere venue has seen strong consumer demand for its immersive “The Wizard of Oz” production, alongside expanding concert residencies and original films that are increasing venue utilization. This operational momentum is also encouraging discussions for additional Sphere venues in the U.S. and overseas, while attracting greater institutional interest such as Citigroup’s sizeable stake increase. With this backdrop of “Wizard of Oz”-driven...
Is Sphere Entertainment (SPHR) Quietly Redefining Its Business Model With the Las Vegas Sphere?
In recent months, Sphere Entertainment’s Las Vegas Sphere venue has seen strong consumer demand for its immersive “The Wizard of Oz” production, alongside expanding concert residencies and original films that are increasing venue utilization. This operational momentum is also encouraging discussions for additional Sphere venues in the U.S. and overseas, while attracting greater institutional interest such as Citigroup’s sizeable stake increase. With this backdrop of “Wizard of Oz”-driven...
Mr. Wizard’s science show held children spellbound
Each week on “Watch Mr. Wizard,” Don Herbert used household objects to conduct an easily replicated experiment that illustrated a scientific concept.
Paul Dano: ‘The sad thing about seeing celebrities get into politics is that it shows how impressionable we are’
Every generation needs an actor who fits into roles that are out of the ordinary. In ‘The Wizard of the Kremlin,’ Dano proves, once again, that he’s the man for the moment
Is Sphere Entertainment (SPHR) Turning Immersive Hits Into a Durable Global Venue Strategy?
In recent months, Sphere Entertainment Co. has attracted heightened attention as strong consumer demand for its The Wizard of Oz show at the Las Vegas Sphere and growing interest in immersive concerts and films have supported improving business fundamentals. At the same time, large investors such as Citigroup have significantly increased their holdings, underscoring institutional interest as Sphere explores additional U.S. and international venue opportunities. We’ll now examine how the...
Magic rout visiting Wizards behind Paolo Banchero’s 37 points
ORLANDO, Fla. — Entering Tuesday’s game against the Wizards, the Magic knew they’d already be without Franz Wagner, who is managing an extended rehab of a left high ankle sprain. Then, in the hours leading up to tipoff, Orlando learned it would also be without Anthony Black (right quad contusion) for the second game in a row and Wendell Carter Jr. (left ankle soreness) while hosting Washington ...
Trae Young ejected after coming onto court during incident in Wizards' loss to the Rockets, days before his debut
Trae Young hasn't played a game yet for the Wizards, but he already has one ejection.
Politics Aside Season 2, Episode 4
On this episode of Politics Aside, Chris Cillizza runs drills at M&T Bank Stadium with Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott and later, shoots hoops with Virgina Rep. Suhas Subramanyam at Wizards legend Gheorghe Muresan’s Giant Basketball Academy in Ashburn. Along the way, Chris explores how youth sports and community shape political leadership.
Youth movement leading Wizards into matchup with Hawks
The Atlanta Hawks continue their five-game homestand on Tuesday with the first game of a back-to-back series against the Washington Wizards.
Hornets aim for return to winning ways vs. Wizards
The Charlotte Hornets have stumbled out of the All-Star break with consecutive losses, but nobody seems close to pushing the panic button.
Morgan Stanley raises its price target on Sphere Entertainment Co. (SPHR) to $135 and maintains an overweight rating
Sphere Entertainment Co. (NYSE:SPHR) is among the 11 Best Entertainment Stocks to Buy According to Wall Street. On February 13, 2026, Morgan Stanley raised its price target on Sphere Entertainment Co. (NYSE:SPHR) to $135 from $105 and maintained an Overweight rating, citing stronger-than-expected results from The Wizard of Oz. The firm said the performance lifts […]
Magic: The Gathering® | Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle Bundle Delays in North America
An update regarding Magic: The Gathering | Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle Bundles in North America.
Commander Banned and Restricted Announcement
Announcing changes to the Commander format effective February 9, 2026.
College basketball's top teams are dominating this season
In today's edition: College hoops' top brass, AD to the Wizards, KP to the Warriors, the Olympics are underway, investing in women's sports, and more.
Wizards acquire Anthony Davis in bizarre deal ahead of NBA trade deadline; WM Phoenix Open preview
Plus, the Rangers dealt superstar winger Artemi Panarin to the Kings
How would you change the 2026 Notre Dame Football schedule?
You have the power of a great wizard — so change the Notre Dame football schedule for the better in 2026.
Anthony Davis trade grades: Mavericks, Wizards both make questionable decisions in deadline puzzler
The Wizards and Mavericks made one of the most surprising trades in recent deadline memory
IndyCar tabs Monumental Sports & Entertainment as marketing, hospitality agency for Freedom 250 GP
Monumental Sports & Entertainment has been signed to “serve as the official marketing, sponsorships and corporate hospitality sales agency” for the Freedom 250 Grand Prix of Washington D.C., according to the IndyCar Series. MSE owns the Washington Wizards NBA team, the Washington Mystics WNBA team, the Washington Capitals NHL team,...
PGA Innovation Showcase Immerses Audiences In Entertainment’s Future
The Producers Guild showcased five immersive experiences vying for this year's Innovation Award, led by Sphere's immersive Wizard of Oz, showing where entertainment is headed.
Knicks boost win streak to six by beating LeBron's Lakers
The New York Knicks spoiled what might have been LeBron James's last game at Madison Square Garden, stretching their win streak to six games with a 112-100 victory.Washington rookie Will Riley scored 18 points off the bench to lead the host Wizards over Sacramento 116-112, stretching the Kings' losing streak to six games.
Lakers' Luka Dončić records triple-double in first half during blowout 142-111 win over Wizards
Lakers' Luka Dončić records triple-double in first half vs. Wizards with 23 points, 10 rebounds and 11 assists
Wizards carry 9-game skid into matchup vs. Trail Blazers
The Washington Wizards find themselves in the midst of another extended losing streak, but team officials are increasingly optimistic about the future.
Sphere Entertainment (SPHR) Valuation After Live Event Momentum And New Technology Leadership
Event snapshot and why Sphere Entertainment is on investors’ radar Sphere Entertainment (SPHR) is in focus after strong live event momentum around its Wizard of Oz production, fresh sponsorship deals, and the appointment of Felicia Yue as Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer for the Sphere division. See our latest analysis for Sphere Entertainment. Sphere Entertainment’s share price has been volatile, with a 10.22% 1 month share price return and a 64.29% 3 month share price...
Hawks trade Trae Young to Wizards; CFP semifinal preview: Miami vs. Ole Miss
Plus, we rank all Wild Card Weekend underdogs by their likelihood to pull an upset
'The Wizard of Oz' gets terrifying horror twist in new trailer for 'Gale: Yellow Brick Road' (exclusive)
Entertainment Weekly can exclusively debut the new trailer for 'Gale: Yellow Brick Road,' a horror movie reimagining the world of 'The Wizard of Oz.'
Wizards’ CJ McCollum buries Bucks with tough game-winner
CJ McCollum’s last-second jumper gives the Wizards a 114-113 win over the Bucks, closing out 2025 with a bang.
Suns, Wizards look to reach new heights
The Phoenix Suns and host Washington Wizards, two teams riding high, will meet in the third contest of the Suns' four-game road trip on Monday.