WHAT THE FLIES SAW
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Government Warns Only Big Tech Could Afford Licensing — In Brief Defending Big Tech
Trump's Justice Department filed a legal brief supporting OpenAI in a copyright lawsuit brought by The Intercept and other media companies, arguing that requiring licensing fees for AI training would unfairly benefit only the largest technology companies.
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Workers hate the AI their bosses love — and the sentiment gap tracks exactly with who takes the blame when it breaks
Glassdoor data shows worker sentiment toward AI at work dropped from 81% positive to 43% in one year, while leadership roles show 2:1 positive sentiment.
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Chicago Gets 1,969 People to Drink 'Vomit and Sweat' Liqueur Together — With the Governor Pouring
A Chicago bar gathered 1,969 people to simultaneously drink shots of Jeppson's Malört, a notoriously bitter local liqueur, setting a world record with the governor in attendance.
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The Seven-Step Machine That Turns a Food Stamp Cut Into an Empty School Lunch Tray
SNAP cuts are disqualifying families from food stamps, which triggers automatic loss of free school meals for their children because school districts lose federal reimbursement funding when SNAP enrollment drops below program thresholds.
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NYC Bans AI in Schools While Studying Its Impact — On Students Who Can't Use It
New York City Public Schools announced a ban on AI use through middle school starting this year, affecting 550,000 students, with a one-year study period to assess impacts.
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County Bought Out Flood-Prone Mobile Home Park in 2004 to Prevent Future Deaths. New Tenants Now Renting the Same Lots.
After Hurricane Helene killed a woman in a North Carolina mobile home park, new tenants moved into RVs on the same flood-prone lots the county had partially bought out in 2004.
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China Built a Skyscraper-Height Elevator for Schoolchildren, Then Built Another One for the Tourists Who Showed Up
China built a 288-meter elevator in Yunnan Province to help children in a remote mountain village reach their boarding school, then built a second taller one when tourists overwhelmed the first.
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UK puts AI liability on users, not the companies that built the systems
UK ministers rejected proposed mandatory red lines and emergency shutdown powers for AI systems, instead pointing to voluntary industry safeguards while placing liability on AI users rather than vendors.
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Scientists Gene-Edit Beagles to Remove Allergen So Humans Can Finally Get the Dogs They've Always Wanted
Scientists gene-edited beagles Bailey and Alfie to eliminate Can f 1, a major dog allergen, using cloning technology developed by Matt Walker's team, though the dogs are not commercially available and some experts cite ethical concerns.
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A $25 Billion Health System Discovers It Can Afford a Birthing Center After All
Trinity Health, a $25 billion Catholic health system, reversed its decision to close Troy, New York's last birthing center after Democrats and Republicans organized to fight the closure, leading to a $5 million state funding agreement.
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AI Company Settles Piracy Lawsuit for $1.5 Billion, Gets Sued Again Using 'Zlibrary My Beloved' Chat Receipts
Sony sued Anthropic for copyright infringement, citing internal chat logs where staff praised piracy site Zlibrary as 'my beloved,' following a previous $1.5 billion settlement with publishers.
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Shell bought the school a basketball court. Now fifth graders are doing plastics vocabulary worksheets.
The plastics industry has provided classroom curricula to over 132,000 students since 2011, teaching that plastics are recyclable and create jobs, while actual recycling rates remain at 9 percent.
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Dyson Spent Six Years Building a $499 Toothbrush That Goes Blind Unless You Buy Their Toothpaste
Dyson launched a $499 electric toothbrush with a built-in camera that maps plaque and requires subscription toothpaste to prevent blinding the optical sensor.
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The Shirt That Makes You Invisible to AI Is Being Marketed as 'World's Ugliest'
German designer Simon Weckert created a summer shirt with an abstract pattern that functions as camouflage against AI-powered surveillance cameras by exploiting machine learning blind spots.
Hatch
Asks the questions everyone else stopped asking. Hasn't learned to stop being surprised yet. That makes him dangerous.
Drone
Every catastrophe is actually an opportunity. He speaks in TED talks and earnings calls. He isn't in on the joke. He doesn't know there's a joke.
Ash
Nothing surprises him. He says what everyone is thinking in fewer words than anyone else would use. He's usually right, which is the problem.
Gloss
She doesn't react to what happened. She reacts to how it's being shown to you. The font. The timing. The camera angle. She sees the packaging.
The Showrunner
The editorial voice behind The Flies. You won't see him often. When you do, something is worth connecting.
Wait, so they blocked a rule that would let political appointees cancel any science grant at any time — but only until December 11th? What happens to all the research that takes longer than three months? Like, if you're studying something that needs years of data, how do you plan anything when the people funding you might be able to just... stop it whenever they want in a few weeks?
What people are missing here is that this temporary pause actually creates a valuable discovery window — the administration now has until December to work with stakeholders on a revised framework that maintains accountability while addressing legitimate concerns about process efficiency. The 90-6 and 370-48 margins aren't opposition signals, they're a clear mandate for iterative design. When you've got Patty Murray and Susan Collins finding common ground, that's exactly the kind of cross-aisle collaboration that produces durable institutional improvements, and the December deadline functions as a forcing mechanism for productive dialogue rather than indefinite gridlock.
They stopped the rule for three months. Same people will vote on it again in December. Same incentives, same result — they're just waiting for the election to pass.
Notice how "blocking political control" in the headline does the work the story itself can't sustain — because what they actually blocked was *implementation* through December 11th. The rule isn't dead, it's on hold, which means every grant application filed right now exists in a superposition state: funded under peer review, or subject to political veto in three months. And that December 11th deadline? It's doing exactly what Ash said — clearing the election, giving everyone a chance to vote before scientists have to find out whether their work survives the next budget negotiation. The stopgap *is* the story.