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Piccalilli conference blends creativity and business
PARKERSBURG — Artists explored the business of art while making time to create Friday during the fifth Piccalilli Arts Conference at the Parkersburg Art Center. Seventy people registered for the conference, which offered nine workshop options along with lunchtime activities, breakfast and a catered lunch, said Jessie Siefert, the art center’s managing director and education […]
University of Washington launches new Master of Science in Robotics
This autumn, the University of Washington (UW) is launching a Master of Science in Robotics, a 38-credit degree designed to meet the demands of one of the fastest-growing careers in technology.
Nashville celebrates Phil Ponder amid health battle
As community legend Phil Ponder works through health battles, the community wants to share their love and support.
Undergraduates Learn Ways AI Can Help Produce Happier Livestock
A joint workshop has given undergraduates from a variety of disciplines a hands-on look at the ways precision livestock farming and artificial intelligence can create better living conditions for hogs.
Many Hitters Could Benefit From Hearing Pirates' Brandon Lowe's Approach
The veteran has an approach that works for any age.
Games Workshop: New TonePro Paints, Blood Bowl Goblins, Tomb Kings, and More On The Way
Warhammer's specialist games and hobby supplies are also getting some reveals in today's big autumn preview.
Boyer appointed to ABA Emerging Leaders Council
Devin Boyer, senior vice president and Central Iowa market leader for Nicolet National Bank in West Des Moines, has been appointed to the American Bankers Association’s Emerging Leaders Council for the 2026-27 association year. The council works to identify, connect and develop current and future banking leaders and helps guide ABA programming related to leadership…
Astartes II, the Most Anticipated Warhammer 40,000 Animation Ever, Has a New Trailer and Confirmation of Key Details
Games Workshop has released a new trailer for Astartes II, the most anticipated Warhammer 40,000 animation ever.
Harvard Business School Rock Center for Entrepreneurship announces 2026–2027 Entrepreneurs-in-Residence
The 2026-2027 EIRs, Venture Builders, VCAs, and LSs further strengthen one of the most comprehensive entrepreneurship expert networks in higher education.
Engrams Embedding Entendre: Codesign for Efficient DRAM/SSD Offloading
Engram extends standard token embeddings with learned multi-token lookups. Recurring local patterns retrieve vectors directly, reducing the need to reconstruct them through attention and feed-forward layers. With Engram model architecture optimization, it allows for lower HBM capacity to be needed for models at the same quality. This does not mean there won’t be an insane demand for HBM but it just means that model architecture will continue to innovate around constraints. This model architecture design is naturally codesigned for parameter offloading: each token accesses a few embedding rows whose addresses depend on token IDs, not hidden states. The runtime can prefetch those rows from host DRAM while earlier layers compute, keeping the table outside HBM without transferring entire weight matrices. Our Memory model contains our latest estimates of quarter by quarter HBM, DRAM, & NAND supply and demand. Offloading frees HBM for model weights and KV cache, potentially supporting larger batches or more concurrent sessions. When DRAM becomes the next constraint, NVMe offers another tier. Recommendation systems already cache frequently or recently accessed embedding rows in faster memory while backing colder rows with SSDs. After NVIDIA roadmap had to change due to massively despec’ing Rubin Ultra from 1024GB to now ~200GB of HBM per chip, model architecture optimizations like emgram maybe helpful. Our DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash configuration uses roughly 189 GiB of memory for Engram. We replace it with a memory-mapped (mmap) file and measure serving performance with offload to SSD. Later on in our report, we will show our Engram offloading experiments along with the official InferenceX agentic inference serving results on Engram models like DeepSeekv4.1 Flash across all 6 NVIDIA GPU SKUs along with MI355X. Unsurprisingly, the CUDA Moat is still mogging MI355X on the ultra popular DeepSeekV4.1 Flash model. We also show how even on high capacity HBM SKUs, offloading emgrams to DRAM could result in even better performance for most of the pareto than keeping the emgram in HBM. Our benchmark has been widely reproduced, validated and/or supported by almost every major buyer of compute from Google Cloud to Microsoft Azure to Oracle, to Meta and many more. Furthermore, it has the support of the ML community including from vLLM, LMCache, SGLang, PyTorch, Huggingface and the support of major labs like OpenAI, MiniMax, ZAI, Qwen, Moonshot Kimi, etc. Star the InferenceX GitHub repository if you find the open-source benchmark and data useful!. InferenceX is the only inference benchmark in the world to have TPUv7, Jalapeño, Nvidia Rubin NVL72, AMD, and soon, SambaNova and Trainium. Due to how realistic AgentX scenario is to real world agentic inference workloads, AMD has committed to collaborating on MI455X UALoE72 too. DeepSeek did not release the original paper’s two trained Engram models. We replicated its setup on fineweb-edu using the released code and training hyperparameters, at an estimated 6E18 FLOPs per run. We observed the same U-shape scaling: Engram improved performance over pure MoE baselines. We also reproduced DeepSeek’s results, where earlier-layer representations with Engram resembled those of later layers. Like the original Engram paper, it is possible to probe Engram’s gate scores to see what n-grams DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash makes the most use of. Our gate scan finds names, code fragments, relational phrasing, and boilerplate. These examples prioritize interesting-ness over gate strength. One unexpected result was Wright : Ace Attorney. These examples suggest learned memory optimizes the training objective, not a judgment of which facts deserve storage. Licenses, bibliography fragments, API scaffolding, and website furniture can provide prediction shortcuts, so the value of additional Engram capacity may depend on what survives data preparation. This does not show that table capacity is “wasted”: the evaluation-corpus scan establishes neither training exposure nor the capacity occupied by each category. For offloading, strong gates do not identify cache-hot rows. Low gates do not automatically save reads either: computing the gate requires the retrieved key and undoes the performance gain of a fused kernel. Skipping reads would require a separate usefulness predictor before retrieval. In the original paper’s inference-time ablation, factual-knowledge benchmarks retained just 29–44% of their original performance, while reading comprehension retained 81–93%. This is due to the training–inference mismatch. The resulting degradation therefore measures this trained model’s dependence on Engram, not the performance difference between models trained with and without it. In our ablations, suppressing Engram worsens token likelihood across all evaluated domains, especially encyclopedia text and several code corpora. Surprisingly, GSM8K accuracy stays within measured run-to-run variation and removing Engram has no effect. Engram is not a detachable dictionary beside an unchanged MoE. Removing it changes downstream features and expert selection. We tested whether rerouting hurts or compensates by holding tokens fixed in a teacher-forced experiment on CRUXEval, a code-reasoning benchmark of small Python functions where the model predicts a function’s output from its code and an input, and scoring the reference answer. Removing Engram raised answer loss from 0.2848 to 0.3093 bits/token. Forcing the ablated model to use the original Engram-on expert choices made it worse still, at 0.3375 bits/token. Rerouting partially compensates for the missing memory. Memory features and expert selection work together, rather than following a clean “memory stores facts; experts reason” division. On the same CRUXeval, removing Engram during either phase reduced accuracy and increased generated tokens; removing it throughout produced the largest changes. Keeping Engram for prefill leads to more correct answers than keeping for decode likely due to semantically richer KV cache transferred to decode workers, allowing it to mitigate some of the performance loss. Engram’s table is large, but each lookup is small. DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash requests 24 rows at each of two Engram layers, about 12.4 KiB per processed token position across the model, or 3.1 KiB per GPU when split across four GPUs. Currently as of Day 7 since Model Release, MI355X is still 2-4x worse performance per dollar compared to B200 even when normalized by Mi355X’s lower TCO. Our full total cost of ownership breakdown comes from our AI Cloud TCO Model along with monthly market surveys of over 100+ gpu clouds & gpu cloud customers. On the Day 0 release of DeepSeekv4.1 Flash, NVIDIA vLLM works out of the box with zero issues across all 6 SKUs: H100, H200, B200, B300, GB200, GB300! This was thanks to the amazing work by the NVIDIA & Interact teams! In comparison, AMD vLLM did not work on day 0 for DeepSeekv4.1 Flash.Source: SemiAnalysis InferenceX AMD’s vLLM documentation points to using vllm/vllm-openai-rocm:deepseekv41-flash-0909, but from hour 0 of the model release to hour 23, AMD has not publicly released the image. AMD claims, “SPEED IS THE MOAT,” yet it has still not released it by the 23rd hour. We wish that, going forward, the AMD team has a better process for hour 0 model releases. Eventually when they did publicly release for “day 0” image support, performance-wise, it is currently up to 14.8x worse perf per dollar than H200 and up to 42x worse perf per dollar than B200/B300. The power of the CUDA MOAT is NVIDIA’s collaboration with its massive 6 million-developer community ecosystem including most of the vLLM & SGLang & Tokenspeed maintainers which means that CUDA is optimized on day 0. Overall, AMD did make significant improvements but the performance per dollar is still currently 2-4x worse than B200. AgentX Engram DRAM Offloading Improving Performance The HBM and DRAM offload use the same GPU kernel to select and dequantize rows. With HBM, it reads GPU memory; with Unified Virtual Addressing (UVA), it reads pinned host memory directly. Both support full decode graphs. Moving the table into HBM accelerates only the sparse lookup, leaving decoder computation and communication unchanged, resulting in little overall benefit while consuming memory otherwise available to KV cache. Another benefit of Engram offloaded to DRAM which means you can reduce the communication overhead by using less HBM GPUs per replica. For example, when enabling Engram offloading on B300, we are able to switch from TP4 to now TP2 which improves the pareto curve by up to 1.6x. When iso-model quality, less HBM is required as the engrams could be offloaded to host DRAM. Thus HBM bandwidth matters way more than HBM capacity. For inference workloads where memory bandwidth matters the most, 4-hi HBM provides the best $/bandwidth and therefore lowest cost per token. If China continues to make more and more revolutionary model architecture innovations, soon it could potentially 0Hi HBM stacks. [ ](https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/long-live-the-short-king-why-4-hi) [ Long Live the Short King: Why 4-hi HBM Wins ](https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/long-live-the-short-king-why-4-hi) Myron Xie, Bryan Shan, and 3 others · Sep 13 [ Read full story ](https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/long-live-the-short-king-why-4-hi) Moreover, on B300 and week-0 stack, moving the Engram table back to HBM did not improve results and stay within run-to-run variance. This is a result of the work optimizing DRAM offload, such as async, and overlap. SSD Offloading On B200, we created a unoptimized vLLM fork and stored the Engram tables in memory-mapped files on local SSDs. File backing lets the OS reclaim table pages when other applications need RAM. Pages already cached in memory can be served without reading the SSD again. Furthermore, note that we were unable to turn on GDS The unoptimized SSD implementation changes how rows reach the GPU. It copies row IDs to the CPU, deduplicates them, gathers the requested rows into pinned buffers, copies those rows back to the GPU and dequantizes them. This work runs between segments of the GPU execution graph. Native UVA performs row selection and dequantization directly on the GPU, avoiding the CPU round trip. A warm filesystem cache removes physical SSD reads, but leaves the coordination, row gathering and transfers. This is why a file already cached in RAM can still perform worse than a pinned DRAM table. The comparison measures the whole serving path; it does not separate the time spent on each of these operations. B200 DRAM dominates both measured SSD serving curves in total tokens per dollar and P90 interactivity. Near 125 tokens/s/user, DRAM delivers 121 million total tokens per dollar versus 52 million for SSD. For production serving, SSD offloading is likely not worth the tradeoff. On the B200 configurations we measured, SSD offloading loses on both measures: every observed SSD point has a DRAM alternative that delivers higher P90 interactivity and more total tokens per dollar. The only points where Cheaper storage does not automatically produce a cheaper inference service. Moving Engram to SSD leaves the same four expensive GPUs and the rest of the server in place. Reclaiming RAM only creates an economic benefit if it enables a cheaper server configuration or additional useful capacity. The current unoptimized path provides neither benefit, and the filesystem cache still consumes RAM when table pages are resident. Next we will look at the mechanisms and specific implementation of ngrams from DeepSeekv4.1 Flash, LongCat, Qwen3.8 Flash Next.
Biz.ability: Two Workshops for Entrepreneurs on Friday, Oct. 16
City of Round Rock - Biz.ability: Two Workshops for Entrepreneurs on Friday, Oct. 16
Mathematicians Build Long-Awaited Graph Sandwich
The proof of a decades-old conjecture has given researchers a new way to understand complex networks.
MGA Entertainment Debuts New Music Video for Mirror Mi Doll Line
Additional projects in the works for the line include stop-motion films and an animated short-form series launching later in 2026.
'USC will take care of business': Preview of No. 12 USC ahead of matchup with Rutgers football
The Rutgers football team returns to Piscataway to face USC at SHI Stadium on Busch campus on Saturday afternoon. The Scarlet Knights (0-2, 0-0) look to upset the Trojans (3-0, 0-0) in the Big Ten conference opener for both teams.
Mid-America Science Museum to host STEM career fair for students
Mid-America Science Museum has invited local students in grades eighth to 10th to the third annual STEM Works career fair on Sept. 25 in the Hall of Wonder.
16th Asian Chief Dental Officers Meeting: Advancing universal health coverage for oral health in the WHO Western Pacific and South-East Asia Regions
Session 3 of the 100-Day Sprint BackgroundOral diseases remain among the most prevalent noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) across Asia, affecting people throughout the life course and placing a significant burden on individuals, families and health systems. Countries across the World Health Organization (WHO) Western Pacific Region and South-East Asia Region have committed to strengthening oral health through regional action plans and by advancing universal health coverage (UHC). The 16th Asian Chief Dental Officers Meeting (ACDOM) serves as a regional platform for Chief Dental Officers in Asia to exchange experiences, strengthen collaboration and accelerate implementation of oral health commitments. For the first time, the meeting is being jointly organized by the WHO Regional Offices for South-East Asia and for the Western Pacific and the ACDOM Secretariat. This year's meeting introduces a 100-Day Sprint, bringing together oral health and UHC leads and technical experts to support countries in strengthening integration of oral health within national UHC benefit packages. Through the Sprint, participating countries will develop, refine, cost and operationalize country-specific essential oral health-care benefit packages using WHO tools, including the Service Package Delivery and Implementation (SPDI) Platform. The in-person 16th Asian Chief Dental Officers Meeting represents Session 3 and the midpoint of the 100-Day Sprint, providing an opportunity for countries to review progress, exchange experiences, identify challenges and refine their approaches before continuing with the remaining Sprint sessions. 100-Day SprintSession Date Format Title Session 1 (Day 0) 19 Aug Virtual Setting the Scene and Introducing Key Principles and Frameworks Session 2 16 SepVirtual Introduction to the SPDI Platform and Initial Mapping Exercise Session 3 27-29 Sep In-person, 16th Asian Chief Dental Officer Meeting, Malaysia Review and Refinement of Oral Health Service Packages Session 4 14 Oct Virtual Finalizing National Essential Oral Health Services Packages and Costing Exercise Session 5 (Day 100) 26 Nov Virtual Country Presentations and Closing of the 100-Day Sprint ObjectivesLeverage the 100-Day Sprint to define priority implementation actions for oral health in countries; Strengthen national capacity to design, cost and operationalize country-specific essential oral health care packages using SPDI platform; andExplore cross-country collaboration to expand access to essential oral health supplies and products, including harmonized specifications and pricing, and improve supply chains for essential dental preparations and medicines.Expected outcomesA draft country-specific essential oral health care benefit package developed using the SPDI platform and aligned with WHO’s Essential Oral Health Care packageA strengthened regional network in Asia of oral health and UHC leaders, fostering collaboration among South-East Asia and Western Pacific countries, WHO offices and WHO Collaborating Centres to support sustained implementation beyond the meetingParticipantsChief Dental Officers and national oral health programme leads;National focal points responsible for universal health coverage, health financing and health systems;Representatives from WHO country offices, regional offices and headquarters;WHO Collaborating Centres; andAcademic institutions and technical partners.
Black Salt Games establishes indie studio Team Trifold under new Saltworks Entertainment label
Team Trifold aims to "turn the roguelike loop on its head" with its debut title Nothing Lost
10 Tampa Bay News
Welcome to 10 Tampa Bay News on YouTube! We’re the CBS affiliate serving the Tampa Bay area. Our team works hard to consider context, pursue connections and identify the trends that shape our world. We believe you deserve a return on your invested attention and a reward for your curiosity. And so, we offer storytelling that delves deeper, beyond the noise and confusion, so that you can feel informed, prepared and connected. Our team delivers information, breaking news, weather and sports 24/7 at 10TampaBay.com.
How Do Scientists Decorate Their Lab Space?
From cherished keepsakes to unexpected collectibles, researchers share the décor that brings personality to their laboratory and workspaces.
More empty storefronts in Thayer Street area after four business closures
Kung Fu Tea, Tiger Sugar, Aroma Joe’s and Bagel Gourmet Ole have all closed since May.
Buccaneers vs. Browns: Thursday injury report for Week 2
The Tampa Bay Buccaneers continue to get encouraging news on wide receiver Jalen McMillan ahead of Sunday’s home opener against the Cleveland Browns. McMillan, who missed Tampa Bay’s Week 1 loss to Cincinnati with a knee injury, was a full participant for the second consecutive day Thursday. Safety Miles Killebrew remains limited as he works […]
First iPhone 18 Pro, Apple Watch Series 12, Apple Watch Ultra 4 and AirPods 5 Orders Arriving to...
It's Friday, September 18 in Australia and New Zealand, which means customers who pre-ordered are beginning to receive their new devices. The iPhone 18 Pro, iPhone 18 Pro Max, Apple Watch Series 12, Apple Watch Ultra 4, and AirPods 5 are launching today. Apple fans who ordered an iPhone, Apple Watch, or AirPods will soon be sharing first impressions on Instagram, Reddit, the MacRumors forums, and other social networks.
Hidden Megacities Discovered Beneath Amazon Jungle: Scientists Stunned by Scale - Futura-Sciences
Millennia-Old Urban Networks Revealed by Modern Science It turns out, the Amazon wasn’t always the wild jungle we picture today. Between around 600 BCE and 850 CE, a civilization known as the Aquiry dramatically transformed large parts of the southwestern Amazon Basin. These people dug colossal ditches and geometric earthworks,...
Des Moines Water Works to tackle main replacements, expansion projects
The Des Moines Water Works board of directors recently adopted a 10-year capital improvement plan to invest in the city’s water system. The roughly $640 million plan includes main replacements, water quality projects, facility improvements and investments into the broader water system. The capital improvement plan outlines projects to be done in 2027 through 2036.…
Spotlight on Business: New family-run Italian restaurant and small business workspace
(ABC 6 News) – In this week’s Spotlight on Business, Justin Collopy from Realty Growth is introducing us to a new family-run restaurant serving up scratch-made dishes and a flexible workspace designed to help small businesses grow.Realty Growth showcases local businesses every Wednesday in Spotlight on Business. Have a place you’d like to see featured […]
Like Nastya Coming to Disney in Content Deal with Entertainment Giant
An animated series for Disney Jr. and Disney+ and new live-action content are in the works.
Plan to bring more maternal health care to Alabama
IN-DEPTH WITH SARAH WALL: Health officials say one in three counties in Alabama is considered a maternal health desert. That means there are no health services in the counties for pregnant women or new moms. But, a plan is underway to change that. We’re talking to the folks at the March of Dimes about their Mom and Baby Mobile Health Units - why they are so important, how they work and how you may be able to use them. For more information on the Mom and Baby Mobile Health Units, you can go to the March of Dimes website: www.marchofdimes.org/our-work/mobile-health-centers. If you would like to sign up for an appointment with the mobile health unit, you can click here: https://www.healthservicesinc.org/. And, for more information on UAB’s mobile unit that works in other areas of Alabama, you can go to: https://www.uab.edu/nursing/home/partnerships/clinical/moms-and-kids-mobile-health-unit.
Take a look at Tennessee’s new Entertainment District as Kentucky plans one of its own
Kentucky is exploring adding an entertainment district around Kroger Field; Tennessee has one in the works that could provide inspiration.
US Lawmakers Introduce Bill to Assist Cannabis Businesses in Getting Insurance
The bipartisan legislation aims to shield insurance companies that serve the cannabis industry from federal prosecution and liability.
The 5 Worst Foods for Liver Health, According to Dietitians
Your liver works hard to keep you healthy, but regularly eating these 5 foods adds extra stress, raising your risk of damage and disease.
Which iOS 27 CarPlay Features Actually Work in Your Car?
In iOS 27, available now, CarPlay gets its biggest update in years, but some features depend on what type of car you have rather than your iPhone model. Some of the biggest additions won't do anything in the vast majority of vehicles on the road today. Here's how the new features pan out. Works in any CarPlay Vehicle Custom widgets: In iOS 27, CarPlay is no longer limited to Apple's handful of stock widgets.
The Strange New Politics of AI. Plus. . .
It’s Thursday, September 17. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Douglas Murray asks, why do we allow terrorists to die of old age? The American nonprofits backing Hamas. A conversation with Dara Horn and Coleman Hughes. And much more. But first: inside the unlikely coalition warning that AI may kill us all. Last week, an AI researcher named Jacob Coxon made headlines around the world after saying that he had resigned from Anthropic because he believes AI might cause human extinction—and his co-workers do, too. Unlike the rest of us, potentially, the story just won’t die. The Pro-Human Assembly, a conference held Tuesday in Washington, D.C., about the existential dangers of artificial intelligence, couldn’t have come at a better time—or with a more eclectic coalition. The Archbishop of San Francisco was there. So was Steve Bannon, screaming about the Chinese. Bernie Sanders did a quasi-dramatic reading of messages posted to an online forum by rogue AI agents. Ashley Judd paraphrased a graphic Andrea Dworkin quote for reasons that remain a mystery to me still. It was odd. People in the AI industry have talked openly about the possibility of this technology causing human extinction for years, but it hits differently in the wake of the Hugging Face incident. If you don’t know what that is, all the more reason to read my dispatch today. As the doomers see it, the best-case scenario is a future in which humans are basically kept as pets: well cared for, but with zero autonomy. The worst-case scenario, obviously, is the everyone dies thing. What should be done? I heard lots of ideas but no easy answers. There are currently zero federal regulations on AI, which is sort of strange even to think about. After all, we regulate microwaves, and the people running the microwave industry have never once refused to rule out the possibility that their products will end all human life on Earth. What I saw in D.C. left me even more convinced that you would be hard-pressed to find anyone who believes nothing should be done. You know, except for President Trump. — River Page River Page • Tech and Business [ The AI Doomers Have a Plan to Save Us. I Went to Find Out What It Is. ](https://www.thefp.com/p/the-ai-doomers-have-plan-save-bernie-sanders-bannon) Read story How Robert Kraft Made Macklemore a Martyr—and How to Better Fight Antisemitism On Monday, New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft and a group of other NFL owners banned Macklemore from performing at their stadiums after the rapper delivered a “Free Palestine” speech while opening for Ed Sheeran. Kraft cited the rapper’s “broader history of antisemitic rhetoric and imagery.” Once multiple venues refused to host shows with Macklemore on the lineup, the tour’s promoter officially dropped him. Today, Josh Kaplan says that the move was counterproductive, arguing that though well-intentioned, Kraft’s decision turned an irrelevant footnote into a martyr. “You cannot cancel people into liking you,” Josh writes. Read his column on what a better response to Macklemore would have looked like. Read [ Robert Kraft Made Macklemore a Martyr ](https://www.thefp.com/p/robert-kraft-made-macklemore-martyr-antisemitism-palestine) This raises the question: What actually works against antisemitism? On the latest episode of Conversations with Coleman, recorded in front of a live audience in New York, Dara Horn joins Coleman Hughes to talk about her new book The Final Solution to the Jewish Question. She argues that antisemitism is a script that has repeated itself across countries and ideologies, and that most people don’t understand that well enough to fight it. Don’t miss their conversation. Watch [ The Lie at the Center of Antisemitism, with Dara Horn ](https://www.thefp.com/p/the-lie-at-the-center-of-antisemitism-coleman-hughes-dana-horn) Listen now Douglas Murray • U.S. Politics [ Douglas Murray: The 9/11 Failure That Still Haunts America ](https://www.thefp.com/p/douglas-murray-911-failure-justice-terrorist-guantanamo-bay) Twenty-five years after the September 11 attacks, the men who planned them have still not faced trial. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and most of the accused have been locked up in Guantanamo Bay since 2002. Judges have retired, and plea deals have collapsed. Today, Douglas Murray examines how this happened and argues that a justice system that allows terrorists to die of old age in an interminable pretrial process is one that has failed. Read his latest column on what that failure says about our unpreparedness for the era we are now living in. Read story The Editors • U.S. Politics [ When Nonprofits Support Terrorists ](https://www.thefp.com/p/when-nonprofits-support-terrorists) A newly declassified CIA brief from 1998 found that Osama bin Laden used nonprofit shell organizations—including U.S.-based Islamic groups—to fund his terror plots. Today, a similar story is unfolding as multiple organizations on American soil present themselves as nonprofits, taking advantage of tax-exempt status while seeking to advance the ideological mission of terrorist groups like Hamas. Read our editorial on the latest evidence of this dangerous trend—and why there’s no excuse for making the same mistake the CIA revealed 28 years ago. Read story Simon Sebag Montefiore and Bari Weiss Live in New York For decades, the Middle East has shaped American foreign policy and loomed large in the public consciousness. Few understand its influence on our politics better than Simon Sebag Montefiore, who argues that America’s quagmires in the Middle East stem from a deep misunderstanding of the region—on both the left and the right. Join him October 1 as he sits down with Bari Weiss live in New York City to kick off his U.S. book tour for The Cauldron: The Making of the Modern Middle East. Get Tickets Now MORE FROM THE FREE PRESS [ Sydney Sweeney’s Naked Truth ](https://www.thefp.com/p/sydney-sweeneys-naked-truth-caitlin-flanagan) Caitlin Flanagan Read story [ I Thought Ukraine Was Losing. Then I Was Almost Hit by a Russian Drone. ](https://www.thefp.com/p/elliot-ackerman-ukraine-drone-gas-station-train) Elliot Ackerman Read story [ The Dangerous Ideology Behind the AI Warnings ](https://www.thefp.com/p/dangerous-ideology-effective-altruism-artificial-intelligence) Shyam Sankar Read story [ Amanda Knox: Patrick Clancy Can’t Win ](https://www.thefp.com/p/amanda-knox-patrick-clancy-grief-internet-crime) Amanda Knox Read story THE NEWS The Federal Reserve raised interest rates by a quarter point, its first hike since 2023, signaling that another increase could follow as the central bank tries to bring inflation under control. President Donald Trump fired back by demanding that rates be cut sharply, though he stopped short of criticizing Fed Chair Kevin Warsh by name. The Houthis fired drones and missiles at Saudi Arabia on Wednesday, including a major oil port on the Red Sea, and Saudi jets struck back with air strikes across Yemen in an escalating front of the Middle East war. (For more on the Houthis, read Zineb Riboua’s column from earlier this week.) A sweeping Russia and Iran sanctions bill passed the House in a 262–159 vote and is now heading to Trump for his signature. Named after the late senator Lindsey Graham, the legislation would hit countries that purchase large volumes of Russian oil and gas with tariffs of up to 100 percent, and is aimed at cutting off revenue that funds Russia’s war in Ukraine. European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen proposed making Canada the European Union’s first-ever “associate member,” drawing a standing ovation from European lawmakers. The proposal, framed as a response to a world grown more hostile, faces an uncertain path as EU member states would have to approve it, and one diplomat said that “nobody really knows what it means.” The House voted unanimously to send billionaire Leon Black a criminal contempt referral after he defied a congressional subpoena to testify and hand over documents related to his connections to Jeffrey Epstein. Black chose to fight the subpoena in court rather than comply. Charlie Kirk’s family filed a wrongful death notice Wednesday against Utah Valley University, alleging that a series of security failures left him exposed to a rooftop sniper. The notice is a required legal step before the family can sue. Merriam-Webster added 1,400 words and definitions to its dictionary, including looksmaxxing, vibe coding, and cuffing season. The publisher said the new entries offer “a window into the world today.” The Free Press earns a commission from any purchases made through all book links in this article.
How to vote by absentee ballot in New Hampshire
In New Hampshire, you can only vote by mail if you vote by absentee ballot, and you can only do that if you meet certain criteria. Here's how it all works.
Kauai businesses feel tourism slowdown as island recovers from Hurricane Lowell
Kauai businesses say the drop in visitors following Hurricane Lowell is affecting sales and staffing as the island works to recover.
Red Dot Gallery welcoming clay artist Claudia Jeffers
The Red Dot Gallery is happy to welcome the clay works of Claudia Jeffers beginning this week. She will display a unique array of sculptures. Claudia Jeffers is a Narrative
Personnel note: Alex Barrera joins Ballard Partners’ Miami, Tallahassee offices
' … few people understand as well as he does how priorities move through the Legislature and how state and local government works.'
The science behind Florida football’s physical transformation starts with Jake Sankal
Nutritionist Jake Sankal is the science behind some of Florida football's body transformations. Here's how it works.
The science behind Florida football’s physical transformation starts with Jake Sankal
Nutritionist Jake Sankal is the science behind some of Florida football's body transformations. Here's how it works.
PS5 Linux dev quits after "the only hypervisor bug left" was reported to Sony
The developer behind the PS5 Linux project is stepping away, after getting frustrated with AI LLM Slop kiddies threw a spanner in the works.
Seahawks Sam Darnold Injury Update: Sports Doc Predicts ‘Realistic’ Return Date
A sports doctor predicted a “realistic” return date for Seahawks quarterback Sam Darnold as he works his way back from injury. The post Seahawks Sam Darnold Injury Update: Sports Doc Predicts ‘Realistic’ Return Date appeared first on HEAVY.
Josh Allen-Jahmyr Gibbs fireworks come with major Lions warning
Josh Allen and Jahmyr Gibbs created two of Week 1’s best performances, but Detroit enters Thursday night with an offensive-line problem that could decide everything.
Left-Wing Political Commentator Hasan Piker to Speak at Sage Hall
Left-wing political commentator Hasan Piker will speak at Sage Chapel while livestreaming for his Twitch channel on Sept. 24, the Students Not Bombs campaign announced on Tuesday.
Resources for addiction, mental health in Monroe County
Local mental health and addiction treatment centers provide support for struggling people.
Dartmouth Health CEO says patient care was focus in deciding layoffs
CEO Joanne Conroy says the cuts were in the works for roughly nine months and that patient needs were a top consideration.
Beacon of discovery
Biomedical science Ph.D. student Lucy Williamson conducts cancer cell research in a Whitley H35 Hypoxystation, which creates hypoxic conditions within a controlled and sustained workstation environment in the Mugar Life Sciences building.
Apple Explains How Its New iPhone 18 Photo Verification Actually Works
The company shared new details about how Apple Reference Image is designed to prove a photo is real.
I On Politics
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Truth and Politics in the Age of Post-Truth
Get E-International Relations delivered to your inbox, free of charge. As you sign up, consider becoming a paid subscriber, or make a donation, to support our work. Subscribe This is an excerpt from Global Politics in a Post-Truth Era. You can download the book free of charge from E-International Relations. The term post-truth is by now so ubiquitous in describing the state of politics in the Western world and even beyond that the most pressing issue of the day appears to be about making democracy work in the era of post-truth rather than questioning the normalisation of the term itself in the first place. The critical turning point appeared to have occurred in 2016 when the term was chosen by the Oxford English Dictionary as ‘The Word of the Year.’ On its website, the Dictionary notes the transformation of post-truth from ‘being a peripheral term to being a mainstay in political commentary and connects ‘the spike in frequency’ directly with the Brexit referendum in the United Kingdom and the election of Donald J. Trump in the United States – both occurring in 2016. Paired with the noun ‘politics,’ post-truth is defined as an adjective ‘relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.’ The Oxford English Dictionary traces the first use of the term to a 1992 essay in The Nation by the playwright Steve Tesich as he reflected on the 1980s Iran-Contra scandal and the 1990–91 Gulf War: We are rapidly becoming prototypes of a people that totalitarian monsters could only drool about in their dreams. All the dictators up to now have had to work hard at suppressing the truth. We, by our actions, are saying that this is no longer necessary, that we have acquired a spiritual mechanism that can denude truth of any significance. In a very fundamental way we, as a free people, have freely decided that we want to live in some post-truth world (Tesich 1992, 13; emphasis added). He then continued, The Gulf War is over but the war at home goes on. The gulf between rich and destitute widens – between those of us who live in a modern post-industrial nation and those of us who live in the Third World countries of our inner cities. The present administration’s response to this internal crisis has shifted from benign to malignant neglect. The current levels of misery and decomposition of our cities and the economic gulags of our ghettos are acceptable. Since there is only so much hope to go around, there is a freeze on hope. The have-nots have now been reclassified as never-will-haves (Tesich 1992, 13). In the context of Tesich’s essay, truth includes both facts, as in what happens, and ‘moral absolutes,’ as in the ‘self-evident truths mentioned in our Constitution’ (Tesich 1992, 14). Together, these two notions of truth entail the obligation to both act and react. The two passages cited above show that even in the early post-Cold War years, Tesich was already deeply concerned that the American people are neither prepared to act on truth nor react to truth that is disconcerting, or what he calls ‘bad news’ (Tesich 1992, 12). Accordingly, Tesich’s insight as captured by the term post-truth is not that truth is irrelevant to what we know, but rather it is irrelevant to how we act. In contrast, ‘post-truth politics,’ as defined by Oxford as a term that pitches ‘objective facts’ against ‘emotion and personal belief’ such that the latter appears to have overtaken the former in shaping ‘public opinion’ and thereby, democratic politics. When Tesich’s post-truth politics and its current usage are juxtaposed, the two are in fact not identical in terms of what truth is and how it relates to politics. Against such consideration, this chapter provides a critical survey of selected historical events and theoretical considerations for the purpose of gaining a more nuanced understanding of the relation between truth and politics. Truth and Language One notable impact of post-truth politics is that language is being overtly deployed as a political weapon not only by politicians and those in power, but among the general population. It seems that once facts are irrelevant to the validity of what is being said, language becomes the platform for an all-out political contest in which what is said is no more than an act of will expressed as an assertion of power and/or an exercise in defiance. As early as in the writings of Thucydides (460–400 BCE), the vulnerability of logos – which is the human capacity for rational discourse in tumultuous times – was already noted. Thucydides belonged to a school of Greek thought which maintained that language is conventional and that the association between name and things is a result of ‘human use and habit’ rather than ‘nature or divine dispensation’ (Connor 1984, 99). The conventional nature of language means that it is incapable of providing its users with any independent criteria for judgement. In Thucydides’ study of the Peloponnesian War (431–405 BCE), the subversion of logos as seen in the manipulation of language was introduced through his account of the civil war in Corcyra (Thucydides 1972, 236-245). The war first broke out in 427 BCE between the pro-Athenian democratic faction and the pro-Spartan oligarchic faction before it spread to the rest of the Greek world. There was a general breakdown of law and order, resulting in extreme violence and death. Language underwent changes that were reflective of the events of the time. The English philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) translated Thucydides’ description of the situation as follows: The received value of names imposed for signification of things, was changed into arbitrary. For inconsiderate boldness, was counted true-hearted manliness: provident deliberation, a handsome fear: modesty, the cloak of cowardice: to be wise in everything, to be lazy in everything... he that had been so provident as not to need to do the one or the other, was said to be a dissolver of society, and one that stood in fear of his adversary. In brief, he that could outstrip another in the doing of an evil act, or that could persuade another thereto that never meant it, was commended (Hobbes 1839–1845, 8: 348; Thucydides 1972, 242-243). What concerned Thucydides most was that the meanings of words are no more than linguistic conventions that require logos to support them. The Corcyrean civil war was a reminder that such capacity cannot be assumed. This is why history understood as an authentic account of what happens matters. Guided by logos, the historian’s task is ‘the search after truth’, which is established through ‘the absence of the fabulous,’ including ‘the rejection of myth and unverifiable stories’ (de Jonge 2017, 2). Thus, history plays an important role in facilitating the stability of language – without which distinctions and judgements cannot be rendered communicable. Just like Thucydides, Hobbes was a nominalist who subscribed to the view that there is no inherent meaning to words. Hobbes’ state of nature, where there is no common authority, is precisely one in which distinctions cannot be made. As Hobbes put it, there is ‘no Mine and Thine distinct’ nor is there distinction between ‘the notions of Right and Wrong, Justice and Injustice’ (1968, 188; emphasis in original). This is clearly an unsustainable condition for everyone. Behind Hobbes’ famous words that life in the state of nature is ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short’ is his uncompromising argument for the ‘Leviathan’, which is described by the late American political theorist, Sheldon Wolin (1922–2015), as the ‘sovereign definer’ (Hobbes 1968, 186; Wolin 2004, 238–243). Accordingly, the social contract is importantly a ‘linguistic contract’ that binds all parties to ‘general names agreed upon’ (Peters 1979, 125; Hobbes 1968, 111). Through Thucydides and Hobbes, we can identify a line of thinking that sees politics as a contestation over the use of language, which is based on shared conventions and norms. Thus understood, politics is not a collective quest for the true nature of our being or an epistemological exercise in pursuit of true knowledge. Rather, politics is about humans living with one another by finding a shared language to communicate with one another on matters that affect them all. Truth is in that sense contingent on what is being said as opposed to setting the standard for it. In other words, truth is the embodiment of shareability among us. While truth as such ensures the viability of a political entity, truth by no means represents a normative standard to adjudicate among contesting actors in what they say, let alone in what they do. During Thucydides’ times, ancient China was also experiencing a tumultuous time as the ruling Zhou dynasty deteriorated into the period of the Warring States (481–221 BCE). This was when the rulers of Zhou no longer presided over the territories brought under its control through conquest. Instead of professing allegiance to the Zhou royalty, the lords of these territories became kings themselves to rule over their own land. The period was one marked by endless military campaigns as each of the seven major states aimed to conquer the rest (Lewis 1999). Yet, the period was also known for its intellectual vibrancy as different thinkers challenged the restoring of order among these warring states – including offering ideas and advice to rulers on good governance. Among these thinkers was Confucius (551–479 BCE). His thought, which came to be known as Confucianism, went on to become the state ideology of China from the Han dynasty (206 BCE–222 CE) until the end of the Qing dynasty in 1911 when China became a republic. The founding text of Confucianism was the Analects, which is a collection of dialogues between Confucius and his students as recorded by them. One key concept Confucius advanced is the ‘rectification of names’. Though the term only appears in one exchange in the Analects, it is considered a major aspect of Confucius’ thought. Generations of Confucian scholars from past and present, including Western academics, have debated over its interpretation (Makeham 2003). The passage in question reads as follows: Zi Lu said: ‘The monarch of the state of Wei wants you to govern the country, what is the first thing you plan on doing?’ Confucius said: ‘First it is necessary to rectify the names.’Zi Lu said: ‘Is that really what has to be done? You are being too pedantic, aren’t you now? How will you rectify these names?’Confucius said: ‘Zhong You, you are too unrefined. A gentleman, faced with a matter that he does not understand, takes a skeptical attitude. If names are not correct, one cannot speak smoothly and reasonably, and if one cannot speak smoothly and reasonably, affairs cannot be managed successfully. If affairs cannot be managed successfully, rites and music will not be conducted. If rites and music are not conducted, punishments will not be suitable. And if punishments are not suitable, the common people will not know what to do. So, when the gentleman uses names, it is necessary to be able to speak so that people understand. If one can say it, one can definitely do it. A gentleman should not be careless with words’ (Analects 13:3 in Cao 2016, 148). This translation is offered by the contemporary philosopher Cao Feng. As Cao notes, the passage is what started the whole debate over ‘exactly what kind of names did Confucius... wish to rectify’ (Cao 2016, 148). Of the three major groups of interpretation examined by Cao, beginning with classical Confucian scholarship, one is arguably the most influential and certainly most pertinent to the issue of language and politics. This is the interpretation that was first associated with the Neo-Confucian master, Zhu Xi (1130–1200), who argued that the ‘rectification of names is simply the rectification of politics’ (Cao 2016, 149). Within this interpretive framework, rectification has the dual functions of correction and prescription by ensuring that predetermined hierarchical roles are strictly adhered to through following ‘the system of rites and propriety’ (Cao 2016, 151). In addition, the rectification of names entails ‘using names to rectify actuality’ (Cao 2016, 151). Yet Cao rejects this whole body of interpretive works by arguing that these were ideas developed later. Instead, Cao suggests the following: The original meaning of Confucius’ rectification of names may, then, be quite simple. Confucius did not mean to establish a concrete, normative system of “names”; rather, Confucius was simply the first person in history to realize or remark upon the importance of language in politics. As a politician, he noticed and foresaw the impact that the indeterminacy, ambiguity, and arbitrariness of names would have on politics. Confucius recognized the political consequences of language’s not accurately expressing meaning or not being accurately received by people. He realized the great role that names, as a means of distinguishing right and wrong and establishing norms, could play in society and politics (Cao 2016, 168). Scholarly debates aside, Cao’s view has the advantage of identifying an interpretation of this controversial exchange in the Analects that enables its readers to extrapolate from it the observation that the meaning of words depends as much on their users as on their interpreters; neither of which can be predetermined. Accordingly, a good ruler is someone who can speak without ambiguity to his subjects and make good his words through actions. Stated differently, Cao’s view on what concerned Confucius then, who was living through times of protracted political upheaval, is that language is an indispensable political tool for those in power and can be deployed by both good and bad rulers alike. To sum up, this historical survey shows that politics as a war of words is by no means a distinctive marker of contemporary politics nor the Western world. Be it ancient or current, east or west, language is subject to manipulation to serve political purposes and when there is an outright war of words that defies existing norms, it is indicative of a political situation in which people no longer share a language and truth becomes irrelevant. Accordingly, political order entails stability in language use. Truth and Politics As previously noted, current use of the term post-truth as an adjective to the term ‘politics’ suggests that once there was a time when politics aligned with truth. Indeed, if we start with Plato’s Republic as the key founding text of Western political thought, we see that the ideal polis (city-state of ancient Greece) is where truth and politics converge, and justice is achieved. Written around 380 BCE when Athens was still coping with its defeat by the Spartans in the Peloponnesian War, the Republic is a defence of the rule of the ‘philosopher king’, defined as someone who is ‘guided by the truth’ and is ‘always and in every way’ in pursuit of the truth (Plato 1974, 490a). For Plato, truth converges with virtues and hence, letting the philosopher take charge of politics is to let the wisest and the most virtuous lead the less wise and the less virtuous even if it requires compulsion (Plato 1974, 499b). In Plato’s words, ‘…until the philosophers attain power in a city there will be no respite from evil for either city or citizens…’ (Plato 1974, 501e). The uncompromising rule of philosopher-kings is made palatable by the claim that we are all ‘earth- born brothers’ with random mixtures of gold, silver, bronze and iron, but only the gold can rule (Plato 1974, 414–415). Understandably, academic debates over the interpretation of Plato’s Republic revolve around the question of whether truth as attained in philosophy can be realised in politics as action and whether such a connection is even desirable. Without getting into the details of these scholarly exchanges, I suggest that they all share the concern that truth acquired through the rigorous process of philosophical reasoning is not without problem when applied to the real world of living humans. This is because not all humans are philosophers – and indeed, in Plato’s view, not everyone is capable of becoming a philosopher given the protracted and arduous training that one needs to endure to become one. Hannah Arendt (1906–1975), a highly influential political philosopher of the twentieth century, notes that ‘Plato was the first to introduce the division between those who know and do not act and those who act and do not know’ and that such a separation has remained ‘at the root of all theories of domination’ (Arendt 1958, 223, 225). What Arendt points out in this remark is not the gap between theory and practice, but rather that Plato provides the normative ground for those who know the truth to tell those who do not know what to do. Arendt herself took on the challenge of understanding the relationship between truth and politics through her analysis of Nazism and Stalinism. Arendt’s insight, which was controversial when The Origins of Totalitarianism was published in 1951, was to identify Nazism and Stalinism as representative of a new form of political rule – totalitarianism – making it distinct from ‘other forms of political oppression... such as despotism, tyranny and dictatorship’ (Arendt 1973, 460). Arendt defines totalitarianism as a self- contained system of ideas driven by their ‘logic’ and marked by a mode of reasoning called ‘ideological thinking.’ Ideological thinking as such is a distinctive form of political reasoning defined by three characteristics. First, ideological thinking claims to provide a ‘total explanation’ of all historical happenings, encompassing the past, the present, and the future. Second, while ideological thinking is an attempt to account for ‘factual reality’ in its totality, this mode of thinking is paradoxically divorced from reality and experience. This is because experience, being rooted in specificity, is clearly limited in its claim to totality. It follows that as its third characteristic, ideological thinking aims to emancipate thought from the limitation imposed by experience through a ‘specific method of demonstration.’ The method involves arranging facts into an ‘absolutely logical procedure’ that starts from an ‘axiomatically accepted premise’. It is, in short, a ‘process of deduction from a premise’ – which is the only possible movement in the realm of logic that leads to one definitive conclusion. This is how the ‘logicality of ideological thinking’ provides the basis for total explanation and the ‘principle of action’ for totalitarian movement (Arendt 1973, 468–474). Stated differently, totalitarianism is a form of uncompromising idealism that exists in one’s head irrespective of shared reality as experienced. It is the perverse form of what Arendt later refers to as ‘rational truth’, which is the product of the ‘speculative mind’ that belongs to philosophy, mathematics and the sciences. The ‘speculative mind’ is the mind working on its way to generate axioms and theories by relying on the cognitive capacity of the human brain (Arendt 1977, 231). The presence of others has no bearing whatsoever on rational truth. In contrast, ‘factual truth’ is what happens when humans are ‘living and acting together’ (Arendt 1977, 231). Factual truth is therefore particular and temporal by definition. But more importantly, factual truth is ‘political by nature’ because it can only be validated in the context of the human community (Arendt 1977, 238). In other words, factual truth is about humans in their plurality rather than in their singularity. For factual truth to be sustainable, we need what Arendt calls ‘common sense’ – understood as ‘community sense’ (Arendt 1982, 72). There is also another distinction about truth that Arendt makes which is pertinent to understanding how totalitarianism works. The issue is whether the so-called totalitarian ideology is simply an unnecessarily cumbersome way of saying that it is an all-round and polished lie. Here, Arendt calls totalitarian ideology the ‘modern lie’ – in contrast to the ‘traditional lie’. The latter is restricted by two conditions: that it is a lie about the ‘particulars’ and that it deceives only the ‘enemy’ – which means that the liar is not engaged in self- deception. The modern lie, however, involves a ‘complete rearrangement of the whole factual texture’. It also intends to deceive everyone alike, to the extent that those who initiate the lie eventually ‘fall victims to their own falsehood’ (Arendt 1977, 249–254). This distinction between the traditional and modern lie is important. It indicates that not only is totalitarianism a lie, but the lie is in fact too big to fit into the standard meaning of the word. To tell a lie from truth, we need a common standard. In the case of a traditional lie, the common standard is precisely ‘the fabric of factuality’. As such, a lie always appears as a ‘tear’ to that fabric. Yet, modern lies require making a surrogate reality with a completely different context for facts to fit ‘without seam, crack, or fissure, exactly as the facts fitted into their original context’. Arendt notes that as long as those who concoct the surrogate reality are prepared to engage in self- deception to ‘create a semblance of truthfulness’, there is nothing to prevent ‘these new stories, images, and non-facts from becoming an adequate substitute for reality and factuality’ (Arendt 1977, 253–254). Totalitarianism therefore requires a person to stand outside of the system itself in order to make sense of it. Arendt points out that it is futile for us to argue with (for example) a Nazi or a Stalinist on race or class. To confront totalitarianism requires more than just a confrontation with specific facts. It is a more fundamental confrontation between reality as experienced and its total rejection. This means that Nazism and Stalinism are more than radical ways of conducting racial conflict or class struggle. Rather: Totalitarian politics – far from being simply antisemitic or racist or imperialist or communist – use and abuse their own ideological and political elements until the basis of factual reality, from which the ideologies originally derived their propaganda value– the value of struggle, for instance, or the interest conflicts between Jews and their neighbours – have all but disappeared (Arendt 1973, xv). Accordingly: The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (that is, the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (that is, the standards of thought) no longer exist (Arendt 1973, 474). Who then is the ‘ideal subject’ of totalitarianism? Although there is a revival of interest in Arendt’s observation on truth and politics since the onset of post- truth politics, not enough has been said about her reply to the question (Hyvönen 2018; Klinkler 2018; Lee 2019; Zerilli 2020). Yet if we take a look at Arendt’s portrait of this ideal subject, her view is even more pertinent to our current challenge. As a self-contained system of ideas that is detached from experience, totalitarian thinking offers consistency in ways that reality cannot. Arendt notes that this kind of consistency is especially appealing to those who have lost a sense of bearing in the world (Arendt 1973, 353). They constitute what she calls the ‘masses’. The ‘mass man’ is thus a highly isolated and atomised individual, who is ‘obsessed by a desire to escape from reality’ (Arendt 1973, 318, 352). In his ‘essential homelessness’ the mass man can ‘no longer bear its accidental, incomprehensible aspects’ (Arendt 1973, 352). This longing for escape from reality is a ‘verdict against the world’ in which one is ‘forced to live’ but ‘cannot exist’ (Arendt 1973, 352). Such a situation is ripe for the ‘revolt of the masses’ against ‘common sense,’ which is ‘the result of their atomisation, of their loss of social status’ and with it, the ‘whole sector of communal relationships in whose framework common sense makes sense’ (Arendt 1973, 352). In short, the masses are people who are considered to be ‘superfluous or can be spared … [who] cannot be integrated into any organisation based on common interest’ (Arendt 1973, 311). Whether one agrees with Arendt’s analysis of the social conditions in the interwar years that led to the formation of the ‘masses’, her portrait of the ‘mass man’ is a powerful account of what can happen to an individual who has become disposable to the society that they used to belong to. Hand in hand with this phenomenon is indeed the collapse of ‘common sense’ that leaves the dislodged individual scrambling for reconnection. By offering the masses a substitute reality validated by the ‘logic of an idea’ rather than by experience, totalitarianism makes it possible for them to live in a world where there is no condition of plurality. Between ‘facing the anarchic growth and total arbitrariness of decay’ and ‘bowing down before the most rigid, fantastically fictitious consistency of an ideology’, the masses will likely ‘choose the latter’ (Arendt 1973, 352). A world created by ideology, then, is more attractive to the masses not because ‘they are stupid and wicked, but because in the general disaster this escape grants them a minimum of self- respect’ by conjuring up ‘a lying world of consistency which is more adequate to the needs of the human mind than reality itself’ (Arendt 1973, 353). Moreover, it is precisely this ability to guarantee consistency that makes it possible for the leaders of totalitarian movements to demand ‘total, unrestricted, unconditional and unalterable loyalty of the individual member’ (Arendt 1973, 323). While this chapter is not a study of the social factors that led to specific contemporary developments such as the result of the Brexit referendum or the election of Donald Trump in 2016, Arendt’s ‘mass man’ seem to have found their counterparts among the supporters of Brexit and Trumpism. Studies of voters’ profiles in both events point to a disproportionate share of supporters from white male lower income backgrounds without university educations. These are individuals who have either already lost their jobs to globalisation or who are at high risk of losing their job with very little capacity to be retrained for the twenty-first century market economy of advanced industrialised states (BBC 2016; Pew Research Center 2018). In short, these displaced workers are part of the tapestry forming the modern equivalent of Arendt’s ‘mass man’ – ready to be the recruits of totalitarianism. Conclusion If we step back to take a more comprehensive approach to the relationship between truth and politics, both historically and theoretically, it is not so obvious that 2016 is a defining moment. From ancient China and ancient Greece to our so-called post-truth age, the indeterminacy of language appears to be a persistent political challenge. Language is always open to manipulation by its users to serve power. Nonetheless, the tendency these days is to single out the ubiquity of social media and the proliferation of Internet platforms as the incubator for the countless cyberwars of words that in turn fuel the real world of politics. In this context, language is no longer the conveyor of objective facts and accurate information, but rather the medium for expressing subjective opinions and feelings, as captured by the Oxford Dictionary’s definition of the term ‘post-truth politics’. In contrast, the historical approach used in this chapter shows that it is in fact too easy to point the figure at the Internet and digital communication for the political challenge that we face today. What is being suggested here is that with or without the Internet, language, be it used to convey facts or emotions, is simply a tool for communication that humans have invented. While language per se cannot adjudicate what is true or not true, what is right or wrong, it embodies such capacity when language is a shared norm. That shared norm cannot be sustained without some semblance of cohesion in any given community. Any war of words, irrespective of its platform, is indicative of the breakdown of such cohesiveness. Returning to the original context in which the term post-truth politics was first used by Steve Tesich helps to identify the important distinction between truth as the standard for knowledge and truth as the standard for action. The two do not necessarily coincide. Placed in the context of the history of political thought, this distinction is in fact at the heart of Plato’s Republic. Yet when the philosopher as the quintessential bearer of truth becomes king, the polis that he rules over is far from the ideal of a just state that it purports to be. Instead, it is one that is held together by lies and coercion. What Arendt reveals through her study of Nazism and Stalinism is that it is dangerous for the kind of truth that philosophy generates – ‘rational truth’ – to become the guide to politics. Politics guided by rational truth can only be uncompromising and follows a logic of its own that cannot afford the ambiguity and indeterminacy of reality as lived experiences of humans. A world of post-truth politics can be an opportunity for a new kind of politics if it is indeed about dismantling the idea that truth is the ideal that politics should strive for. But as it stands, the post-truth politics of today is more about invoking a past that never exists to judge the presence as a crisis in naming when the real crisis is about rebuilding a shared space that has room for all – be they of the left, right or centre; cosmopolitan or parochial; civic-minded or self-centred; liberal-minded or bigoted. Politics is and always will be about striving for that space, without which no human can thrive. References Arendt, Hannah. 1958. The Human Condition. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Arendt, Hannah. 1973. The Origins of Totalitarianism. Rev. ed. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Arendt, Hannah. 1977. “Truth and Politics.” In Between Past and Future, 227–264. New York: Penguin Books. Arendt, Hannah. 1982. Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, edited by Ronald Beiner. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. British Broadcasting Corporation. 2016. “Brexit vote: The breakdown.” BBC News, December 7, 2016. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-38227674 Cao, Feng. 2016. “A New Examination of Confucius’ Rectification of Names.” Journal of Chinese Humanities 2: 147–171. https://doi-org.subzero.lib. uoguelph.ca/ doi/ 10.1163/23521341-12340032. Connor, W. Robert. 1984. Thucydides. Princeton: Princeton University Press. de Jonge, Casper C. 2017. “Dionysius of Halicarnassus on Thucydides.” in The Oxford Handbook of Thucydides, edited by Sara Forsdyke, Edith Foster, and Ryan Balot. Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/ oxfordhb/9780199340385.013.17 https://www-oxfordhandbooks-com.subzero. lib.uoguelph.ca/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199340385.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780199340385 Hyvönen, Ari-Elmeri. 2018. “Careless Speech: Conceptualizing Post-Truth Politics.” New Perspectives 26 (3): 31–55. https://www.proquest.com/ scholarly-journals/careless-speech-conceptualizing-post-truth/ docview/2204515132/se-2?accountid=11233. Hobbes, Thomas. 1839–1845. The English Works of Thomas Hobbes, edited by Sir William Molesworth. London: John Bohn. Vol. 8. Klinkner, Melanie. 2018. “Reasonable Truth.” International Journal of Media & Cultural Politics 14 (3): 393–99. doi:10.1386/macp.14.3.393_7. Lee, Haiyan. 2019. “When Nothing Is True, Everything Is Possible: On Truth and Power by Way of Socialist Realism.” PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 134 (5). Cambridge University Press: 1157–64. https://doi.org/10.1632/pmla.2019.134.5.1157 Lewis, Mark E. 1999. “Warring States Political History.” In The Cambridge History of Ancient China: From the Origins of Civilization to 221 BC, edited by Michael Loewe and Edward Shaughnessy, 587–650. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Makeham, John. 2003. “Zheng ming (Rectification of names).” In RoutledgeCurzon Encyclopedia of Confucianism, edited by Xinzhong Yao. Vol. 2: 813-814. New York: Routledge. Oxford Languages, n. d. “Word of the Year 2016.” Accessed 19 August 2017. https://languages.oup.com/word-of-the-year/2016/ Peters, Richard. 1979. Hobbes. Westport: Greenwood Press. Pew Research Center. 2018. “An examination of the 2016 electorate, based on validated voters.” Report, August 9, 2018. https://www.pewresearch.org/ politics/2018/08/09/an-examination-of-the-2016-electorate-based-on- validated-voters/ Plato. 1974. Republic. Translated by G. M. A. Grube. Indianapolis: Hackett. Tesich, Steve. 1992. “Watergate Syndrome: A Government of Lies.” The Nation: 12-14. January 6/13, 1992. Thucydides. 1972. The Peloponnesian War. Translated by Rex Warner. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books. Wolin, Sheldon. 2004. Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Westen Political Thought. Expanded Edition. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Zerilli, Linda M. G. 2020. ‘Fact-Checking and Truth-Telling in an Age of Alternative Facts.’ Le foucaldien 6, no. 1: 2, 1–22. Theresa Man Ling Lee is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Guelph (Canada). Lee is a political theorist who specializes in contemporary political thought. Her research and teaching areas include continental philosophy, Marxism and critical theory, feminism, postmodernism, philosophy of social science, psychoanalysis, multiculturalism, human rights, disability studies, modern Chinese political thought and comparative political theory. Lee has published on a wide range of subjects in these areas, including intercultural pedagogy and the challenges of teaching as a person with multiple minority designations in a Canadian university classroom.
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Week 2 of the 2026 college football season featured two high-profile SEC-Big Ten matchups, with Ohio State-Texas setting records for ESPN. On Saturday, Texas’s improbable comeback win over Ohio State averaged 14.0 million viewers on ABC, peaking at 16.4 million, according to ESPN PR. That is the most-watched regular-season college football game on ESPN networks…
College of Arts and Sciences Announces Science, Technology and Society Major
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Mitsubishi Heavy Industries and Preferred Networks Form Capital and Business Alliance-- Accelerating joint development of cutting-edge AI technologies for the intelligence and autonomy of machinery and systems in mission-critical applications --
Mitsubishi Heavy Industries
Arc System Works are working on a brand new fighting game property as of a few months ago but it kind of slipped under the radar
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Washington State Book Awards 2026 winners announced
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Hain Celestial to sell international business for $323M
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Steam Mischaracterizing Indie Game As Porn Works Out In The End
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Free Medicaid workshop to help Meridian residents navigate health care benefits
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Apple Watch adds an all-new Readiness app, here's how it works
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Little Shop of Physics wins $50K grant to continue science education for kids
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Physicist: Famed 'Picard Maneuver' on Star Trek Works
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Pokeworks celebrates 5 years of business in Southlake
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Please Stop Conflating Sports Betting Handle With Spending On Entertainment
Editor’s note: The Cashout for paid subscribers will publish on Tuesday. Every September there’s a huge uptick in how much people bet on sports with the start of football season. Which means it’s time to get ahead of a ridiculous narrative before it picks up steam on social media or in mainstream media. Subscribe Every few months I see some version of this: [ Charlie Bilello@charliebilello Americans bet over $165 billion on sports last year, which is more than they spent on movies, books, concerts and sports tickets - combined. 1:00 PM · Jun 28, 2026 · 4.1M Views 258 Replies · 674 Reposts · 4.23K Likes ](https://x.com/charliebilello/status/2071217050328895935?s=20) Fortune published this in July. The headline and start of the story tell the same narrative (emphasis added): Gambling becomes America’s favorite pastime as Americans spend more on sports bets than movies, arts, museums, and music combined: The North American box office totaled $8.87 billion in 2025, which is still 22% below pre-pandemic levels. Recorded music revenue hit a record $11.5 billion. Live music like concerts and festivals brought in $18.51 billion. Meanwhile, book publishers tracked by the Association of American Publishers reported $14.6 billion for the year. And the U.S. museum industry generated an estimated $16.4 billion. Add it up and the total comes to roughly $70 billion, which is less than half what Americans wagered on sports. The story, to its credit, goes on to tell us why sports betting is entirely different, although people who only read headlines will miss that nuance. (The tweet above definitely skips over the nuance.) I will mostly be preaching to the choir here, but it’s worth saying out loud: Wagering money on sports is not the same thing as spending on entertainment from a financial perspective. When you spend money on a movie or concert ticket, that money is gone. You exchanged money for an experience. It’s a good trade! I get to have fun for “x” dollars. (Unless the movie sucks, I guess.) When you bet money on sports, the money is not necessarily gone every time you wager it. It could be gone, but sometimes it’s not and you actually get more money back! That’s not “spending” money or something you should try to compare directly to entertainment spend. A far better comp would be how much people lose at sports betting. That number was more like $17 billion in the US last year, at least for state-regulated sportsbooks. Why are we trying to equate handle and entertainment spending? I dunno. It makes for splashy headlines, I guess. Now, people should be betting for entertainment, and not because they expect to win in the long term; no doubt about it. Anyway, here’s hoping I don’t see people saying Americans “spent” hundreds of millions of dollars on sports betting this fall. Mindway AI and DraftKings Expand Responsible Gaming Drive with Launch of Gamalyze American Football In time for the NFL kickoff, Mindway AI has expanded its partnership with DraftKings to launch Gamalyze American Football the second title in the neuroscience-based Gamalyze Sports collection. Following the success of Gamalyze Football (soccer) during the FIFA World Cup, this gridiron-themed update replaces static questionnaires with immersive, stadium-inspired gameplay. Backed by 10+ years of Aarhus University research, Gamalyze evaluates real-time decision-making to deliver instant, unbiased player risk assessments. Integrated into DraftKings’ platform and nationwide activations, it engages fans when excitement peaks. Ready to upgrade your player protection? Contact Mindway AI to try Gamalyze Sports today. Gambling news roundup 🚨The important stuff 1st NFL Sunday of Season ‘Champagne-Popping Day for Bettors’ (Covers): “The first NFL Sunday of the season was a champagne-popping day for bettors, while the book was left cleaning up the corks,” Caesars’ head of football Joey Feazel said prior to the Sunday night game. “Caesars Sportsbook reported that Detroit’s Jahmyr Gibbs, Baltimore’s Derrick Henry, Indianapolis’ Jonathan Taylor, and Atlanta’s Bijan Robinson were among the top five most-bet players to reach the end zone, and all of them cashed tickets.” [ Ben Fawkes@BFawkes22 A @CaesarsSports oddsmaker on how Week 1 has gone so far: “The first NFL Sunday of the season was a champagne-popping day for bettors, while the book was left cleaning up the corks.” ➡️8 of 10 most popular anytime TD scorers cashed 1:31 AM · Sep 14, 2026 · 276K Views 16 Replies · 16 Reposts · 615 Likes ](https://x.com/BFawkes22/status/2099310001927995849?s=20) 🔍 Are we already getting a “customer-friendly results” narrative in Week 1? NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell spoke with CNBC about the prediction markets industry: “We think that there needs to be stronger regulations into the predictive markets,” Goodell said. “We want to see that to protect the integrity of our game. We want to make sure we’re protecting the consumers that are on those platforms for the NFL. So, we’re continuing to have conversations with them and talk to them about the things that we think they need to do to strengthen that so that they could be potential partners at some point in the future.” More on the NFL + PMs: [ Straight to the Point Quid Pro Quo The NFL has asked Kalshi and other prediction markets to remove certain easy to manipulate markets. Does a potential partnership hang in the balance… Read more 6 hours ago · 19 likes · Steve Ruddock ](https://straighttothepoint.substack.com/p/quid-pro-quo?utm_source=substack&utm_campaign=post_embed&utm_medium=web&embedding_publication_id=1472492) Kalshi was on my podcast?: Kalshi was on my podcast [ The Event Horizon Episode 32: Talking Prediction Market Enforcement With Kalshi’s Robert DeNault Kalshi? On my podcast? Yep… Listen now 5 hours ago · 6 likes · 1 comment · Dustin Gouker ](https://nexteventhorizon.substack.com/p/episode-32-talking-prediction-market-enforcement-kalshi?utm_source=substack&utm_campaign=post_embed&utm_medium=web&embedding_publication_id=1472492) DraftKings Enhances Responsible Engagement Efforts With New Customer Initiatives, Tools and Education (press release): DraftKings Inc. today announced a series of new initiatives designed to promote responsible engagement and increase awareness and use of the tools and resources to help customers make informed decisions and engage responsibly. The efforts include a new digital advertising campaign featuring Kevin Hart and Nick Jonas that promotes responsible engagement, a PGA TOUR sweepstakes that promotes customer engagement with responsible engagement features, the launch of Gamalyze American Football in collaboration with Mindway AI, and new custom cool-off options that give customers enhanced flexibility when choosing a cool-off period. The initiatives build on DraftKings’ commitment to making responsible engagement an integral part of the customer experience and providing players with accessible tools and resources that help them make informed choices about their gaming experience. “At DraftKings, responsible engagement is embedded in how we operate and is essential to building trust with our customers and our long-term sustainability,” said Lori Kalani, Chief Responsible Gaming Officer at DraftKings. “We’ve continued to invest in tools and resources that give customers enhanced access to information about their play and more choices for managing how they engage. From My Budget Builder and My Stat Sheet to player-set limits and new custom cool-offs, we’re continuing to evolve our approach while promoting awareness and use of the tools and resources available to help customers play responsibly.” … DraftKings is launching a new digital advertising campaign featuring Kevin Hart and Nick Jonas that continues the pair’s road trip and promotes responsible engagement and awareness of the tools and resources available to help customers make informed choices about their gaming experience and engage responsibly. The campaign was initially launched on Sep. 10th and will reach customers through digital channels, bringing responsible engagement messaging to fans in an engaging way. bet365 Launches “The Matchup,” a New Weekly Video Podcast Hosted by Super Bowl Champions Chris Harris Jr. and Emmanuel Sanders (press release): "bet365, a global leader in online sports betting and gaming, today announced the launch of “The Matchup,” a new weekly video podcast hosted by former Super Bowl Champions Chris Harris Jr. and Emmanuel Sanders. Featuring current and former NFL players, the original series marks a significant, intentional investment in football as bet365 works to become a go-to destination for U.S. bettors throughout the season. “The Matchup” premieres September 10, with new episodes released weekly in both video and audio formats. Full episodes will be available on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify and wherever podcasts are available, with clips and additional content rolling out across YouTube, X, Instagram, Facebook, Threads, and TikTok. The show is being produced by Last Row Digital Media. Each week, Harris and Sanders will be joined by guests from across the game to break down the biggest NFL matchups, unpack the latest league news and share perspectives that go beyond the box score. By bringing together two former players with distinct perspectives and firsthand experience, “The Matchup” will give audiences timely context and a deeper understanding of the teams, players and storylines shaping the week ahead. “Every great football conversation starts with a matchup—who has the edge, what everyone is overlooking and what could change the game,” said Chris Harris Jr. “Emmanuel and I have experienced the game from different perspectives, and we want the audience to feel like they are part of the conversation and leave every episode knowing more about the week ahead.” Today’s iGaming companies face new litigation threats as expansive consumer protection statutes spark lawsuits with sky’s-the-limit aspirations, sometimes backed by private funders. Clients of Ifrah Law have a staunch defender in Robert Ward – an agile litigator and case tactician who responds to the changing state of play with creative legal defenses and efficient case-closing strategies. Robert draws on federal clerkship experience and appellate defense work to advise iGaming clients on litigation exposure, white-collar risk, and regulatory defense across multiple jurisdictions. Read More: Robert Ward on Helping iGaming Clients Outmaneuver Lawsuit-Obsessed Adversaries 🔮 Prediction markets Update on legal action in Connecticut: [ Daniel Wallach@WALLACHLEGAL Connecticut says gaming service license holders which received subpoenas over sports prediction markets “are not under investigation” by the @CTDCP but may possess information that could assist the state “in evaluating the conduct of prediction market platforms.” 2:31 PM · Sep 13, 2026 · 844 Views 5 Likes ](https://x.com/WALLACHLEGAL/status/2099143914271670576?s=20) American Gaming Association Opposes CFTC Bid to Block New York Prediction-Market Enforcement (DeFi Rate): “The brief points to the Ninth Circuit’s Aug. 28 decision in KalshiEX LLC v. Assad, which the AGA says supports New York’s authority to regulate sports contracts as gambling. It also cites Kalshi advertising, product comparisons and reporting on Kalshi’s sports volume to argue that the economic product resembles a sportsbook wager more than a conventional financial hedge.” [ Daniel Wallach@WALLACHLEGAL AGA intervenes in CFTC v. NY case to oppose CFTC request for preliminary injunction, says the CFTC’s arguments “obfuscate a simple truth: prediction markets offer sports betting.” Highlights CA9 decision, @DustinGouker (6x), and $1.32 billion in OSB taxes for NY (0 from PMs). Daniel Wallach @WALLACHLEGAL High stakes hearing on Monday in CFTC v. New York State. If SDNY judge Lorna Schofield denies the CFTC’s motion for preliminary injunction, the New York AG would have a clearer path for securing a state court geofencing order against Kalshi, Coinbase, and Gemini Titan. 2:08 AM · Sep 13, 2026 · 4.78K Views 1 Reply · 2 Reposts · 8 Likes ](https://x.com/WALLACHLEGAL/status/2098957043474280584?s=20) Gaming Commission remains member of gambling council after questions raised over ties to Kalshi (Mass Live): “The Massachusetts Gaming Commission will not follow the leads of gaming regulators in Ohio and Michigan and drop ties with the National Council on Problem Gambling over its new association with Kalshi.” Sponsor’s messageTrusted Voices: Conversations About Betting is designed to equip adults, including parents and coaches, with tools and resources to talk to young people about gambling, including information on warning signs, risks and proxy betting. The program is led by retired professional basketball player Randy Livingston and his wife, basketball agent Anita Smith, who share their personal stories related to problem gambling, with the hope of preventing others from experiencing similar harms. Learn more and join the conversation here. 📣 Industry news Gaming M&A: Latest Mergers, Acquisitions and Deals (SBC Americas): “But what else is happening in the world of gaming mergers, acquisitions, investments, and partnerships? Here, we round up some of the news you might have missed.” BetMGM Named Official Sports Betting and Online Casino Partner of the Minnesota Vikings in Canada (press release): BetMGM, a leading iGaming and sports betting operator, announced a multi-year partnership with the Minnesota Vikings, naming it the Official Sports Betting Partner and Online Casino Partner of the team in Canada. The agreement gives BetMGM rights to use Vikings marks across approved sports betting, online casino and marketing activities in Canada. In addition, Vikings Big Kick LuckyTap™, a casino game by Design Works Gaming, is available now exclusively at BetMGM Casino in Alberta and Ontario. “Vikings fans bring a level of passion and loyalty that extends well beyond game day,” said Matt Prevost, Chief Revenue Officer at BetMGM. “As the home of one of the largest collections of sports-themed casino content in North America, BetMGM is uniquely positioned to combine sports fandom with iGaming. We are eager to start football season off strong with another fantastic partnership especially as we expand our reach in Canada to Alberta.” Martin Nance, Minnesota Vikings Chief Marketing Officer, said, “As we continue to deepen our connection with Vikings fans across Canada, we’re proud to welcome BetMGM as the team’s official sports betting and online casino partner in Canada. Their commitment to innovation and fan engagement aligns well with our organization, and we’re excited to create memorable experiences that celebrate Vikings football and connect with Canadian fans in new and meaningful ways.” Caesars Entertainment Launches Ball Rush Jackpots™ in New Jersey,the Latest Proprietary Online Title from Empire Creative™ (press release): Caesars Entertainment, Inc. (NASDAQ: CZR) (“Caesars”) today announced the launch of Ball Rush Jackpots™, a new ball-and-peg style online casino game developed by Empire Creative™, the Company’s in-house game development studio. Now live in New Jersey across Caesars Palace Online Casino, Caesars Sportsbook & Casino and Horseshoe Online Casino, Ball Rush Jackpots is expected to become available in additional jurisdictions where Caesars offers online casino gaming following regulatory approval. The title expands Caesars’ growing portfolio of proprietary online casino titles, following the successful launch of Ca$hline™ earlier this year and further diversifying the Company’s lineup beyond traditional slots and table games. Ball Rush Jackpots follows the traditional ball-drop gameplay experience where players drop a ball down a board filled with pegs to land in a prize slot. As balls navigate independently through a field of pegs, every drop creates new opportunities to collect feature symbols, unlock bonuses and pursue jackpots, delivering a different experience with every round. “Ball Rush Jackpots delivers a different kind of casino experience for our players, combining easy-to-understand gameplay with meaningful customization, exciting bonus opportunities and jackpot potential,” said Matthew Sunderland, Senior Vice President and Chief iGaming Officer at Caesars Digital. “As we continue expanding our proprietary content portfolio, we’re focused on creating games that are simple to pick up, rewarding to revisit and designed around the features players enjoy most.” Bally’s Corporation Secures New Financing to Support the Development of the Bally’s Bronx Project (press release): Bally’s Corporation (NYSE: BALY) (“Bally’s” or the “Company”) announced today that it secured new financing led by WhiteHawk Capital Partners, LP to fund further development of the Bally’s Bronx project and general corporate purposes. The new financing comprises closing date term loan commitments in an aggregate principal amount of $400 million and delayed draw term loan commitments in an aggregate principal amount of $160 million (together, the “Facilities”). … Bally’s Chairman of the Board, Soo Kim, commented, “This important financing allows us to progress the pre-construction planning process so that we are ready to complete the remainder of the capital raise and remain on schedule. Furthermore, the additional liquidity provides us greater flexibility for other capital opportunities.” WORLD JAI ALAI LEAGUE LAUNCHES CENTENNIAL SEASON AND ENTERS NEXT CHAPTER IN MIAMI (press release): The World Jai Alai League will open its 2026 fall season on Tuesday, September 15 at Miami’s JAM Arena, beginning a milestone season that marks 100 years since professional Jai Alai first arrived in Miami. Season X, the tenth season of the Battle Court team-based competition launched in 2022, will also be the first since entrepreneur and sports asset investor Rob Gough acquired the World Jai Alai League in August 2026. The acquisition marks the beginning of a new chapter for the league. World Jai Alai League will maintain the existing Battle Court competition and operating format, with Chief Operating Officer Scott Savin overseeing Season X. Gough and his team will use the coming months to listen to players and fans, evaluate opportunities across the league, and execute plans for a broader evolution of Jai Alai’s presentation, live experience, media, marketing and commercial strategy beginning in 2027. “This is a really unique moment for Jai Alai,” said Rob Gough, Owner of the World Jai Alai League. “We have a sport with more than 100 years of history in Miami, extraordinary athletes and incredible speed, but I also believe there is enormous untapped potential.” bet365 reveals most popular online slots in 3 US states in August (SBC Americas): “In its monthly Gaming Insights and Performance report, growing online casino operator bet365 tracks player trends and game performance in online slots across its North American online casino markets.” The Closing Line is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Subscribe
SkyFall Landing Site Workshop
The First Landing Site Workshop (LSW) for the SkyFall mission to Mars will be held virtually, Feb. 9-10, 2027, and will be the first of two science-focused
Physicist proves famous 'Star Trek' combat strategy works
The ‘Picard Maneuver’ is technically more ingenious than the show depicted it.
Mobile health units on display as WVHA brings care to the Capitol
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Local canoe business finds strength in community after destructive floods.
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Angie Harmon to Keynote MIPCOM Cannes’ Women in Global Entertainment
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The letting completes Redsun Projects' speculative industrial development
Apple's Siri AI Can Be Swapped Out for Claude, ChatGPT, Code Shows
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NVIDIA Intros RTX PRO 5500 Blackwell Graphics Card, Features Same Core Count As The 5090 But With 2.6x The VRAM
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NVIDIA Unveils RTX PRO 5500 "Blackwell" Workstation GPU with 84 GB GDDR7 Memory
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United Concordia, PDS Health launch saliva screening pilot
A joint pilot program between United Concordia and PDS Health will track gum disease progress and patient engagement across 125 California dental practices.
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The System Is Not the Patient
Across OECD countries, healthcare spending has long grown faster than GDP, while health-adjusted life expectancy has stagnated or declined and up to 20% of spending remains directed to low-value care. Outcome-based care measures success by patient outcomes relative to resources used, yet no health system has implemented it end to end. The World Economic Forum convened expert workshops to identify practical solutions. This paper argues that full system redesign, perfectly aligned incentives and flawless measurement systems are not prerequisites for progress, highlighting instead six interconnected priorities. The challenge is now to connect existing building blocks into a coordinated system focused on improving patient outcomes.
Prediction: ServiceNow's AI Business Triples Before 2029
Tripling works out to about 55% a year -- and the company's own target asks for even more.
Engaging with Grandkids Boosts Brain Health: Here's How It Works
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Laredo Public Health hosting Get Ready Day workshops
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