The UNC System issued a response on Aug. 18 to the U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon’s “National Call to Action” letter. The letter detailed the system’s commitments across seven areas, including merit-based admissions, free speech, intellectual pluralism, degree affordability and artificial intelligence.McMahon’s Aug. 3 letter, sent to university presidents and governing boards nationwide, carried no explicit funding conditions but asked institutions to detail their “commitments to rigorous teaching, pathbreaking research, and national service.”
Critics have referred to the “National Call to Action” letter as “Compact 2.0,” pointing to its resemblance to the Trump administration’s Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education, which UNC Chancellor Lee Roberts refused to sign last November.For UNC students, the response raises questions about what these conversations ultimately mean for them.UNC Student Body President Devin Duncan said he is watching how the principles outlined in the response will be practiced, and identified the key question as how these conversations will change what happens in classrooms, research and the broader student experience. “We should distinguish between asking universities hard questions and then prescribing the answers that scholars are allowed to reach,” Duncan said.
“We as a university absolutely should be accountable to the public, but academic freedom requires space for faculty and students to pursue legitimate inquiry without political actors on the left or the right predetermining acceptable inclusions.” UNC Media Relations did not respond to The Daily Tar Heel’s request for comment. Speaker of the Undergraduate Senate, Liam Kiley, said he expected the System’s response to lean further to the right, saying its leadership has typically worked closely with the Republican majority in the state legislature and the Trump administration. The language used in the System’s response regarding dissent and protests on campus could have a “chilling effect,” Kiley said. Still, he’s waiting to see how UNC’s administration will implement policies.In the letter, the System said it will protect free speech, but Kiley questioned how much it will honor this commitment. He said this stood out to him because it shows limits on how much the System plans to crack down on protests, but he is watching to see what it will actually act on.
Kiley said the response reflects what students are seeing from the University’s administration and policies coming from the UNC System, but that the amount of compliance varies across levels of administration. “I do believe that we have a responsibility, sort of, to engage in dialogue with the board of trustees and the board of governors to try to limit or prevent these kinds of things,” Kiley said. “The challenge is, as you get up higher and higher in administration, they start listening to students less.”Dwayne Dixon, associate teaching professor in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, said he saw the response as the System’s way of complying in advance with the Trump administration to avoid punishment and potentially reap rewards. He said he doesn’t believe that the leadership of UNC is in full agreement with the Trump administration, but said it looks like they’re willing to be a satellite of what is coming from the White House. One thing that struck Dixon in the response was the System’s idea of teaching American values, which he said codifies a universal definition of what it means to be American.
He said that part of being American shouldn’t insist that there is a generic, static set of values that everyone is forced to read and agree upon. “I was sort of repulsed by this idea that you could teach a singular catechism of American values or ideals,” Dixon said. Diego Quintanar-Dena, a member of TransparUNCy, said he sees the System’s response as a way for the Trump administration to identify its allies and see who’s willing to engage with the federal government. He referred to some branches of UNC’s administration as political appointees, and said that their intrusion into the University’s traditions of shared governance reflects a “very clear political agenda.”“This understanding that as an institution, they are going to do their best to not bolt to political pressures, and yet here they are responding to a Trump official’s beck and call,” Quintanar-Dena said.@dailytarheel | university@dailytarheel.com
You might consider time to be such a fundamental feature of our existence that there really is nothing profound or meaningful that we can say about it. Maybe time, like space, simply is. Many have even argued time out of existence altogether. For example, if we were to split it up into three components: the past, the present and the future, then we can examine each in turn.
Those who deny the reality of time will say something like this: The past has happened and is gone; all we have left of it is the record of past events (in our memories, or in books, photographs, or on film), all of which can only ever form a part of the present moment (when we access those records). But the events themselves no longer exist.
In contrast, all there is of the future is our predictions, hopes, and beliefs about what might happen, which are again states of our minds in the present. Regardless of whether the future is predetermined or not, it has yet to exist. That leaves the present moment itself; surely “now” is real. But although we “feel” that our now is a solid, changing moment steadily sweeping through time, converting the future into the past, it is nonetheless just an instant and as such does not have any duration. The physical definition of “now” is not a minute long or a second long, the time deniers will argue; it is the edge of the shadow between light and dark, between what is to happen and what has happened. It has no thickness. The constantly changing present moment is no more than a dividing line between past and future and so does not have a tangible existence of its own. Einstein famously stated that “the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.” Thus, if none of the three components of time exist, then there is nothing left, leaving the whole of time as illusory! Many thinkers going back two and half thousand years have argued thus. If this all sounds like a clever sleight-of-hand, don’t worry: A number of philosophers of time, and physicists for that matter, subscribe to a diametrically opposite view, known as “eternalism.”
This holds that all three components—past, present and future—are equally real! This idea, which we will examine more closely later on, emerges from an idea called the block universe, which gained prominence after Einstein put forward his first theory of relativity, in which time is regarded as the fourth dimension of spacetime. In this picture all moments in time coexist in the same way that all points in space exist. Einstein famously stated that “the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.” If you don’t fancy either of these radical views: that time doesn’t exist at all or that all times exist, then there is a halfway house known as philosophical “presentism,” which holds that while the past and future do not exist (one has happened and gone, and the other is yet to happen) the present moment is nevertheless real. A related idea is the “growing block universe” view, in which the past and the present exist while the future does not, but instead gradually comes into being. So, you see all options are available on the menu. But which of them is the correct one? In fact, just to make sure you are fully aware of the scale of the problem and level of disagreement among people who have thought long and hard about the nature of time, it might even be the case that time is what is called an “emergent property” of reality, a bit like the concept of temperature, that only makes sense in our everyday world of experience, but becomes meaningless when we zoom in on the fundamental concepts that underpin reality.
The earliest arguments for the non-existence of time go back to the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher, Parmenides of Elea, in southwest Italy, who flourished in the fifth century BCE. Only fragments of his work survive, including his greatest work: a poem called On Nature, in which he describes two views of reality. The view of interest here is the first one, called The Way of Truth, in which he denies the reality of change, arguing that change is impossible and that its very notion is incoherent; rather that everything which exists is permanent and unchanging. Parmenides was no fool and presumably could clearly see change all around him, but like many of the ancient Greek thinkers he had talked himself down the rabbit hole of deductive logic from which it was hard to escape.
He was certainly persuasive enough that his more famous student, Zeno, whom we will meet shortly, also held that continuous change, or a “flow” of time, is just an illusion. Two thousand years later, Isaac Newton argued that time provides the backdrop for all change. Another Greek philosopher worth mentioning is Heraclitus, who was born around 500 BCE in the city of Ephesus, now in modern Turkey. Little is known about his life, but what we do know paints him as a complex character and, as far as we can tell, a rather miserable one to boot. His philosophical ideas were, like him, paradoxical and cryptic to the extent that he earned the epithets “The Philosopher of Riddles” and “Heraclitus the Obscure.” Of interest here, however, is that his view of time stands in stark contrast to that of Parmenides.
For Heraclitus was obsessed with change and viewed the world as being constantly in flux, always “becoming” but never “being.” The popular notion of a river of time, flowing past us, can be traced back to him. That is not the only way philosophers throughout history have thought about flowing time. For instance, rather than thinking of time flowing past us as we stand on the riverbank, we can imagine that we are in a boat carried along by this river watching the world unfold. In fact, in this poetic example we would need to be facing away from the direction of travel, with our backs to the future, watching the past recede away from us, but never seeing what is coming up. Two thousand years later, Isaac Newton argued that time provides the backdrop for all change. And because he believed that time is absolute and external, he argued that it continues to exist and flow even when there is no change. But it seems we still need time if we are to measure change. However, while time may not require change in order to exist, what about the other way round: Does change require time? Well, one can easily think of examples involving things that change, but which are not necessarily changing over time.
Atmospheric pressure changes when you climb to higher altitudes, the speed of a car changes when you press your foot on the accelerator pedal, the clarity of an image under a microscope changes when you use different lenses or alter their focus, and my mood changes when my football team wins or loses a match. However, in physics when we talk about changes over time we are generally referring to those quantities that vary dynamically, such that they are different at different moments of time. The physicist Paul Davies dismisses the notion of a flowing time thus: “Attempts to ‘graft on’ a mysterious extra quality to bestow a flowing motion upon time which is simply ‘there’ is reminiscent of attempts to explain the vital quality of living organisms by adding a ‘life force’ or ‘elan vital’ to otherwise lifeless matter.” While we have the strong sense that we are moving through time—or conversely that time flows past us—this sensation of flowing time seems to be an entirely subjective experience. After all, what could actually be flowing? If time flows then that would suggest it should be flowing at some rate, but what would we measure that rate against? Does time go by at a rate of one second per second? What does that even mean? And if it is our consciousness moving along some sort of static time axis, then how fast is it moving, and what (external) measure of time do we need to define this rate? The very notion of a rate of change is itself embedded within time.
In the trade-off between privacy and security, it helps to know the extent of your local surveillance infrastructure. There are now easy ways to find out.
I didn’t tell anyone I was meeting Michelle Dahl, executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, a watchdog group. But by the time I greet her in Brooklyn, New York, the system knows we’re together.”It’s kind of invisible if you’re not looking for it,” says Dahl, pointing up to a lamppost, where two tiny cameras labelled New York City Police Department hide in black plastic domes.They’re part of the NYPD’s massive AI surveillance platform: the Domain Awareness System (DAS). “Every police officer in the city can access it on their phones and pull up a profile of basically anyone walking around,” she says.The platform connects more than 80,000 cameras with drones, social media data, even systems that follow cars when you drive to another state. Dahl says it can unveil who I’ve seen and everywhere I’ve been in the last week. My whole life: tracked.
Every day, across the US, your life is also being recorded by a growing system of mass surveillance that reaches far deeper than many of us may realize.
Controversy around an American surveillance company called Flock Safety exploded in recent months, but it’s only one player in a giant industry. Flock and other advocates say we need to strike a compromise between privacy and safety. Is it worth the trade-off? To decide for yourself, it’s worth understanding how comprehensive the surveillance really is. So I went looking for cameras in my own neighborhood. You can too, and you don’t even need to leave the couch to find them.‘The more you start looking, the more you’ll see’ Some of those concerned about surveillance seem to think Flock is the whole issue. New York City demonstrates why that’s not true. The company doesn’t operate here, but we’re still being watched.
Dahl is taking me on a surveillance tour to the BBC’s Manhattan office, pointing out cameras and other devices along the way. I’ve covered privacy for 10 years, but even I was stunned by the infrastructure following our every move.After just a few steps, we stop and look around. I count 16 different cameras.”I would assume these are owned by businesses, buildings and renters,” she says. These are additional to cameras run by the city, she says. “But the NYPD likely has easy access. They often just ask the owner if there’s an investigation, and people hand over the footage.”Some camera vendors, like Amazon’s Ring, even have automated systems to make it easier for police to request and receive footage directly from users.Cameras in public are now so ubiquitous I barely notice them anymore. But with Dahl’s help, my eyes refocus: small pill-shaped cameras hanging in front of stores, ageing grey devices on the corners of buildings, advanced dual-camera systems run by the city that pan, tilt and zoom to laser in on people of interest.
I try to count as we walk, but there are so many it’s impossible to keep track and hold up a conversation. “The more you start looking, the more you’ll see,” Dahl says.Why the Flocklash?
These systems can capture and store your every move, and Flock has become the posterchild for surveillance. In recent months, there’s been nation-wide, bipartisan backlash against the company.
Editor’s Note: This editorial provides the updated operational companion to our foundational blueprint published earlier this year: The Heritage of Havoc: Mapping the Post-Trump Reconstruction of 2029 (May 20, 2026). The initial framework cataloged the erosion; this update establishes the specific statutory, administrative, and legal mechanisms required to rebuild the American republic in 2029. AI Support: Gemini assisted in the editorial reports.
The Evil Trump Did To America
Section 1: The Inherited Repair Job — Operationalizing Institutional Recovery
“The next president won’t get a real first term. They’ll inherit a repair job.”
When this assessment was first analyzed in May, it diagnosed an administrative assault on constitutional guardrails. The developments across the summer have removed any lingering doubt: the 48th President will not simply face policy differences, but a compromised executive architecture designed to impede future lawful governance.
The practice of “anticipatory obedience” by corporate executives and administrative leadership has transitioned into structural entrenchment. By utilizing expansive unitary executive theories, the administration has bypassed statutory directives, hollowed out career non-partisan agencies, and reallocated appropriated public funds. The mandate of 2029 requires an administrative recovery program capable of neutralizing patronage networks while rapidly restoring technical competence to core federal agencies.
Section 2: Archive of the Abnormal — Updated Chronology of Systemic Erosion
The institutional damage cataloged in the May baseline has hardened into ongoing administrative practice. The 2029 Reconstruction Mandate must systematically address these core operational areas:
Patronage Conversions & Workforce Attrition (Schedule F): Beyond reclassifying career civil servants into at-will employees, the summer experienced an exodus of senior scientists, career attorneys, and technical analysts across the EPA, FDA, and Department of Justice. The 2029 remediation plan must shift from simple defensive litigation to active civil service restoration.
Weaponization of the Justice Department: Preemptive pardons and the directed pursuit of political rivals have tested traditional norms of prosecutorial independence, underscoring the need to structurally insulate federal prosecutors and Inspectors General by statute.
Subversion of Defense and Intelligence Leadership: The appointment of hyper-partisan loyalists into permanent defense and intelligence advisory positions has compromised non-partisan threat assessment pipelines, necessitating immediate statutory qualification guardrails for key security posts.
Deregulatory Edicts & Rollbacks: Federal oversight across environmental protection, worker safety, and antitrust enforcement has been systematically reduced via emergency orders and non-enforcement directives. The restoration must mandate compliance reviews across all impacted agencies.
Multilateral Treaty Disruption: Unilateral international actions and threats of international disengagement have weakened traditional security alliances, requiring binding statutory requirements for treaty withdrawals and reaffirmed collective defense protocols.
Suppression of Official Data and Scientific Integrity: Public releases of environmental, meteorological, and economic data have faced administrative vetting and suppression, requiring independent scientific integrity boards with subpoena authority.
Immigration Enforcement Bypassing Local Authority: Mass enforcement actions and expanded detention facilities have disrupted community civil liberties and local jurisdiction frameworks, requiring modern legislative standards, transparency mandates, and strict judicial oversight.
Budgetary Impoundment and the Power of the Purse: Unilateral freezes on congressionally appropriated funds for local infrastructure, social programs, and renewable technology have challenged Article I legislative authority, demanding structural amendments to federal budget laws.
Section 3: The Reconstruction Mandate — Statutory Solutions for 2029
A return to executive status quo agreements is insufficient to protect constitutional checks and balances. The 48th President and incoming legislative majorities must enact binding statutory guardrails:
Civil Service Repatriation: Enact statutory protections that permanently bar arbitrary at-will reclassifications, provide whistleblowers with enforceable legal recourse, and establish expedited re-entry programs for career specialists forced out under patronage initiatives.
Binding Impoundment Control: Amend the Impoundment Control Act of 1974 to establish automatic 48-hour disclosure mandates, confer direct legal standing on the Comptroller General to sue for immediate fund disbursement, and trigger civil penalties for executive officers refusing to execute appropriations.
Emergency Power Sunset Provisions: Amend the National Emergencies Act to mandate that all executive emergency declarations automatically lapse within 30 days unless affirmatively reauthorized by both houses of Congress.
Independent researchers, policymakers, and civic coalitions are tracking litigation and developing structural solutions to rebuild institutional independence. Key resources include:
Civil Service Capacity & Agency Governance: The Roosevelt Institute outlines actionable strategies for recruiting, retaining, and safeguarding expert public servants in their published study: Building a More Effective, Responsive Government.
Legal Defenses Against Patronage Reclassification: Governing for Impact provides detailed analysis of the Civil Service Reform Act and statutory avenues to challenge civil service purges: Governing for Impact Legal Work and Regulatory Archives.
Statutory Frameworks for Executive Emergencies: The historical and legal compendium analyzing presidential authorities and necessary emergency power limitations is maintained in the A Guide to Emergency Powers and Their Use Archive.
Section 5: Editorial Conclusion — Hardening the Constitutional Shield
From the Desk of DrWeb: The developments of 2025 and 2026 demonstrate that informal constitutional norms cannot withstand calculated institutional dismantling. When the current governance cycle concludes, superficial restoration will leave democratic institutions vulnerable to future overreach.
The reconstruction agenda must implement an ironclad statutory framework. This begins with judicial reform: establishing regularized 18-year term limits for Supreme Court justices, codified financial and ethical reporting standards backed by independent investigative bodies, and clear statutory definitions that reject sweeping presidential immunity for official lawbreaking.
Second, Congress must pass the Protecting Our Democracy Act as a primary legislative measure. Executive discretion to impound funds, abuse emergency designations, or grant self-serving pardons must be bound by clear statutory limits. Preserving a constitutional republic requires permanent, enforceable protections that place the rule of law beyond the reach of executive fiat.
Selected Bibliography & Key Works
Bauer, Bob, and Jack Goldsmith. After Trump: Reconstructing the Presidency. Washington, D.C.: Lawfare Press, 2020.
Ben-Ghiat, Ruth. Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2020.
Levitsky, Steven, and Daniel Ziblatt. How Democracies Die. New York: Crown, 2018.
Snyder, Timothy. On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2017.
If you’ve read my book, Giving Up Is Unforgivable: A Manual For Keeping A Democracy, you’re familiar with the basic idea. Republicans have historically—they used this tactic during the civil rights era in the Deep South—used false claims of voter fraud to justify restrictive measures that make it more difficult, or entirely prevent, eligible citizens from voting. Donald Trump has mastered the art of using these kinds of fake narratives.
We explore that tonight.
Trump’s voter fraud claims have never made sense to anyone who stepped back to examine them. How could there be fraud that affected only Trump, at the top of the ticket, but not the Republican senators, House members, governors, and so forth who were elected on the same ballot? The same problem gives the lie to Trump’s claims that massive numbers of “illegal aliens” (or, as I think of them, people) voted in our elections. If that were true, how did Trump win and get GOP majorities in both houses of Congress? It doesn’t make sense. And that’s because it isn’t true.
The Supposed Fraud
Do some people who aren’t citizens register? Do a small number of them vote? According to the data compiled by states, the answer is yes, but the numbers are minuscule. Alabama’s MAkGA Republican Secretary of State Wes Allen found 186 noncitizens registered to vote in Alabama in a January 2026 report and that 25 of them had voted in a past election. That’s 0.000675675676% of the 3.7 million registered voters in the state. In 2025, Allen claimed he identified 3,200 noncitizens who were registered to vote, before he walked it back.
Some data compiled by states that have conducted “proactive investigations since January 1, 2021 by election officials into the presence of noncitizens on voter rolls” has been collected here. It gives us a sense of the scope of the “problem.” For instance, in Florida, which has 13.4 million registered voters, the state referred 170 people who had possibly registered or voted despite being noncitizens to state and federal authorities. No word was given on the results of those investigations.
The Colorado River is a critical resource in the West. Seven U.S. states—Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming—and Mexico.
Several reservoir and water management decisional documents and agreements that govern the operation of Colorado River facilities and management of the Colorado River are scheduled to expire at the end of 2026. These include the 2007 Colorado River Interim Guidelines for Lower Basin Shortages and Coordinated Operations for Lake Powell and Lake Mead (2007 Interim Guidelines), the 2019 Drought Contingency Plans, as well as international agreements between the United States and Mexico pursuant to the United States-Mexico Treaty on Utilization of Waters of the Colorado and Tijuana Rivers and of the Rio Grande (1944 Water Treaty).
The Post-2026 process was a multi-year NEPA process that set out to develop long-term successor operating guidelines for Lake Powell and Lake Mead to replace expiring agreements. The process was formally initiated in June 2023 with the Notice of Intent to prepare an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS). Throughout the process, extensive stakeholder engagement occurred, with a particular focus on developing a range of alternatives over a two‑and‑a‑half‑year period. Six alternatives were developed and evaluated to capture a broad range of operational concepts and potential environmental impacts, though consensus on long‑term operations was not reached. After the publication of the Final EIS on July 31, 2026, the process is concluding with issuance of the Record of Decision on August 21, 2026, which adopts the Preferred Alternative[‘s] “Decision Framework.” Pursuant to the Record of Decision, the first set of guidelines—the 2027–2028 Operating Guidelines—were also issued.
Reclamation held an informational public webinar regarding the Final Environmental Impact Statement, the Record of Decision, and the 2027–2028 Operating Guidelines on Friday, August 21, 2026. The webinar was recorded and is available for playback. https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/9upizAyvlaw
Record of Decision and 2027–2028 Operating Guidelines Issued The Department of the Interior has issued the Record of Decision for the Decision Framework for Colorado River Guidelines: Coordinated Operations of Lake Powell and Lake Mead (2027–2036), along with the Colorado River Guidelines for Coordinated Operations of Lake Powell and Lake Mead for Operating Years 2027 and 2028. The Record of Decision and 2027–2028 Operating Guidelines are available on the Decision Documents page.
Final Environmental Impact Statement Reclamation has released the Final EIS for the Post-2026 Operational Guidelines and Strategies for Lake Powell and Lake Mead. A Notice of Availability of the Final EIS was published in the Federal Register on July 31, 2026. The Final EIS is available at this website.
Public Comments on the Draft EIS AvailableOn March 2, 2026, the 45-day public review and comment period for the Draft EIS concluded. Reclamation hosted two public meetings and received 18,127 submissions. There were 785 unique submissions from the public, tribes, states, federal agencies, non-governmental organizations, and other stakeholders, over 17,000 form letters, over 5,000 form letters with unique content, and 51 duplicate submissions. Videos of the public meetings and the public comments can be viewed on the Draft EIS Public Review and Comment Process page.
Scoping Summary Report, Purpose and Need, Proposed Federal Action Reclamation published a Federal Register Notice announcing the availability of the Scoping Summary Report for the Post-2026 Process. The Scoping Summary Report provides a summary of the comments received during the public scoping process and describes the Department’s current, preliminary assessment of the proposed federal action, purpose and need, and scope of the environmental analysis to be included in the Draft EIS. Read More →
Another patron seated at the Central Branch is charging their device while streaming music through earbuds as they read quietly between the stacks.
Free Wi-Fi allows Hoosiers a cozy and safe place to access the internet at all 26 library locations across Indianapolis. Potential cuts, however, by the Federal Communications Commission have put that access at risk, advocates warn, and not just in Indiana, but for millions of people in libraries and public schools across the country.
The FCC recently put into question whether a 30-year-old program that helps keep libraries online should be changed, left alone, or end.
No decisions have been reached, but librarians are concerned about what it could mean for their funding.
In late June, the FCC issued what appeared to be a benign notice addressing child safety under one of its service operations. Buried within the 86-page document were eight words that sent shockwaves among librarians and educators alike: “Should the E-Rate program be limited or sunset?”
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“This definitely caught us by surprise,” said Jamar Rahming, president-elect of the Public Library Association and CEO of Cuyahoga County Public Library in Cleveland, Ohio. “E-Rate has been just such a fixture in our public library institutions and communities.”
Posted: Sep 2, 2026 / 06:56 AM PDT, Updated: Sep 2, 2026 / 06:56 AM PDT
Officials on Wednesday morning gave the media an exclusive look at what is to come when the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art opens later this month.
First look at Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in L.A.
The museum’s website describes it as one that “celebrates the power of visual storytelling.”
It was founded by George Lucas (the man behind the “Star Wars” and “Indiana Jones” franchises) and his wife, entrepreneur and former Starbucks chair Mellody Hobson. It will include everything “from Frida Kahlo’s self-portrait to Norman Rockwell’s scenes of everyday life to Charles White’s portraits of dignity,” museum officials said in a media release.
Situated on an 13-acre site in South Los Angeles’ Exposition Park neighborhood adjacent to the University of Southern California, the Lucas Museum will house more than 1,200 works of art across 100,000 square feet of gallery space.
“I’ve been doing this for 50 years now, and then it occurred to me that, what am I going to do with it all?” George Lucas said in an interview with The Art Newspaper last year. “I refuse to sell it. I’m not one of the typical high-art collectors who buys and then comes back five years later and says, ‘What happened to that painting you bought that was so beautiful?’ ‘Well, I sold it for $10 million. I made a lot of money on it.’ I could never do that. It’s not what I think art is.”
Tickets went on sale for this month’s opening earlier in the summer; however, interest was so high when tickets first dropped that some prospective buyers reported waiting more than four hours just to get to the webpage to purchase them.
Those living in the South Los Angeles area — more specifically the ZIP code 90037 — are being offered free annual passes to the museum. More than 65,000 people live in the 90037 ZIP code, which is bordered roughly by the 110 Freeway to the west, Slauson Avenue to the south, Central Avenue to the east, and Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard to the north, according to the Los Angeles Times.
The “LM37” pass program launched in August and allows pass holders to reserve free tickets for themselves and one guest.
Additionally, children 17 and under get in free. For seniors ages 65 and older, admission is $21, while a standard adult ticket costs $25. It should be noted that the gardens and the park outside the museum, complete with a Jabba the Hutt statue, are publicly accessible, as is the library.
A general view of the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art on Jan. 05, 2026, in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Sean M. Haffey/Getty Images)
On Wednesday morning, KTLA’s Annie Rose Ramos explored the billion-dollar museum more than two weeks before it opens to the public. She described it as “so cool” on both the inside and outside.
Public libraries in the US are “at breaking point” because of an onslaught of political interference, harassment and ideological censorship, a new report published on Tuesday said.
Book bans, cancelled story hours, attacks on librarians, funding cuts and the undoing of libraries’ independent governance are examined by the free expression advocacy group PEN America in its study called Out of Circulation: Expanding Censorship in Public Libraries.
“Public libraries can be a foundational democratic institution only if they can speak to everyone and only if librarians’ curation decisions can occur free from partisan pressure or restriction,” the report, compiled by PEN America’s Freedom to Read Project, said.
“However, ongoing political and public pressures are challenging these very principles. Public libraries nationwide are reaching a breaking point.”
The 16-page document relates countless episodes and incidents across the US to support its assertion. They include verbal and physical attacks on librarians, disproportionate targeting of literature featuring LGBTQ+ people, a proliferation of bans on books dealing with gender identity and sexuality, and instances of politically appointed officials installed to override the policies of democratically elected library boards.
In one prominent example, the conservative activist and former collegiate swimmer Riley Gaines was last year appointed to a library board in Sumner county, Tennessee, which repeatedly voted down a proposal by its chair to remove material she deemed “inappropriate or sexually-explicit, including anything with transgender themes”.
Gaines, an anti-transgender voice who has taken rightwing positions on other issues, including supporting Donald Trump’s often violent immigration crackdown, immediately used social media to brand such books “filth”, and to denounce her new colleagues for “ignoring” Tennessee’s ban on state funding for “woke gender ideology”.
The report points to an Idaho law passed in March that allows city councils to hire and fire library directors, discretion previously granted to appointed library boards; and efforts in Alabama that would have allowed local governments to remove library board members at will, and without cause.
Another trend highlighted by the PEN America report is attacks on drag shows at, or promoted by public libraries. It chronicles bomb threats, protests and a physical assault on a librarian that caused the cancellation of events or story times at libraries in New York, Massachusetts and Nevada.
The group said it had also tracked almost 23,000 book bans in school libraries since 2021, and an expansion to the point where 51% of all book bans attempted nationwide, documented by the American Library Association, came in public libraries.
This post is the first in a series about the Library of Congress Artificial Intelligence (AI) Sandbox for staff. It provides an introduction to the initiative’s goals and an overview of the types of experiments conducted so far. Future posts will feature details about experiments in text recognition and searchability, metadata and bibliographic record enhancement, and more.
Great Sand Dunes National Monument and Preserve, one of America’s newest national parks to be established (in 2004), in the San Luis Valley at the base of the Sangre de Cristo Range. The dunes — the tallest in North America –were formed from sand and soil deposits of the Rio Grande River and its tributaries, flowing through the valley.
Citation: Highsmith, Carol M., 1946-, photographer Great Sand Dunes National Park & Preserve, one of America’s newest national parks to be established (in 2004), in the San Luis Valley at the base of the Sangre de Cristo Range. The dunes, the tallest in North America, were formed from sand and soil deposits of the Rio Grande River and its tributaries, flowing through the valley. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/pp.print
As the steward of over 200 petabytes of data including manuscripts, maps, books, images, artwork, audiovisual recordings, web archives, legislative data, research reports, and copyright records, the Library of Congress has spent decades building infrastructure and services to preserve and provide access to digital materials. The predictive and generative capabilities of artificial intelligence technologies offer enticing possibilities for maintaining, delivering, and analyzing some of the nation’s most influential research and treasured cultural and historical artifacts. Yet the use of these technologies requires extensive evaluation and monitoring before implementation.
In 2025, the Library introduced its AI Sandbox for staff initiative to do just that. “Sandbox” environments have been used since the early 1970s to provide protected spaces for development and experimentation without risk to systems. Playing on the term for a secure and contained play space, as technology evolved rapidly in the 20th century, the sandbox setting was adopted to mean “an environment that is controlled and supervised to test new products and services.”
While AI technologies have growing potential to augment and enrich the Library’s collections and services, experimentation and security are key. To better understand how these creative and innovative methods might work with various materials and conditions, the most recent cohort of the Library’s AI Sandbox for staff supported over a dozen small-scale experiments. Teams incorporated technical and subject matter expertise to focus their experimentation on the real-life demands and possibilities for Library workflows.
Staff expertise remains core to the Library’s approach to AI. That expertise guided the formulation of these experiments, allowing staff to determine how to deal with any hurdles that arose and assess how human insight could lead the adoption of AI technologies.
Citation: Mildred “Babe” Didrikson Zaharias, competing in the first heat of the 80-meter hurdles, winning in a record-breaking 11.8 seconds, August 3, in the Olympics at Los Angeles. Los Angeles California, 1932. [Taken , Printed 1950] Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/95503372/.
Projects focused on materials spanning the Library’s rich collections: legal records and briefs; circulars and regulations; images; talking books; audiovisual materials, classified ads from historic newspapers; web archived government PDFs; manuscript materials in Arabic, Persian, Ge’ez, Turkish, Armenian, Georgian, Japanese, Chinese, and Hebrew; children’s and young adult books, sound recordings; web archived metadata; record annotations; oral history recordings; non-Latin monographs; catalog records; training materials and resources; and even more items accessible via the Library of Congress collections API.
The scale of these experiments varied, but all exceeded the information processing capabilities of even the most energetic human: millions of bibliographic records, hundreds of thousands of lines of data, tens of thousands of pages, thousands of minutes of video, thousands of books, and the vast loc.gov API materials. Teams explored AI capabilities and developed questions about its use.
Their goals included:
Managing and speed up digitization processes, including identification, inventory, digitization, processing, and public presentation;
Identifying and extracting key pieces of metadata and full text;
Automatically generating summaries and topic lists;
Reading handwritten text making it searchable and computationally analyzable;
Transcribing materials and assigning subject terms;
Creating research tools;
Describing images to provide deeper access.
The AI Sandbox for staff initiative allows the Library to take imaginative ideas and evaluate them step-by-step, including their accuracy, scalability, costs, technical and administrative barriers, and risks. A testing ground for learning more about AI, this effort has enabled the Library to begin to see the range of ways staff envision using AI technologies to support our mission to engage, inspire, and inform Congress and the American people.
Stay tuned for future AI Sandbox posts, where we will explore efforts to evaluate AI used in text recognition and searchability, metadata and bibliographic record enhancement, transcript and document generation, and bibliographic access and research.
I suppose the title for this piece is a purely rhetorical question at this point. But the Court’s inability to tell Trump no may end up being the most concerning feature of his two terms in office. It’s as if the Justices, or five to seven of them, depending on the case, can’t summon a collective recollection of the constitutional system of checks and balances that is the foundation for the legal system they sit at the apex of. It’s another important night of opinion reading here at Civil Discourse. Tonight, we’re back to the Supreme Court.
Today, oops, they did it again. Five justices told Donald Trump all was forgiven for tearing down the historic East Wing of the White House, and he could carry on with his ballroom project while litigation about its legality proceeded. Justices Kagan, Sotomayor, and Jackson joined a dissent written by the Chief Justice.
Tonight, I planned to play legal catch-up. Since early last week, I’ve been running a list of cases and developments we must cover, but that I haven’t been able to get to with everything else going on. I had planned to write about all of them tonight and get us up to speed. Most importantly, I planned to write about Liam Ramos, the five-year-old seized by ICE as he left school with his Spider-Man backpack and blue bunny-ears hat. Liam and his dad have now been deported to Mexico. He should be at home with his mom, in Columbia Heights, Minnesota, getting ready for the start of school.
He should not have spent months in the horrible conditions at a detention facility in Dilley, Texas. But Donald Trump’s government saw fit to use the resources of the United States to cut off his future here. Don’t you feel safer knowing that? They told us they would be deporting the “worst of the worst.”
There will be a time, this week, I hope, for all of these topics. But tonight, we’re going to turn our attention to the Supreme Court’s decision this afternoon about Trump’s ballroom. Before we review the opinions, let’s remember how we got here:
On March 31, 2026, Judge Richard Leon granted the plaintiffs’ motion for a preliminary injunction, which enjoined any further construction of the ballroom above ground, but permitted work to continue on what the court was told was a “new below-ground military installation.” Any work “strictly necessary” to protect the White House or the President and his staff could take place as well. Judge Leon held that the president is the “steward” of the White House and not the “owner,” and that Trump had no statutory authority to proceed, absent authorization from Congress.
On March 31, 2026, Judge Richard Leon granted the plaintiffs’ motion for a preliminary injunction, which enjoined any further construction of the ballroom above ground, but permitted work to continue on what the court was told was a “new below-ground military installation.” Any work “strictly necessary” to protect the White House or the President and his staff could take place as well. Judge Leon held that the president is the “steward” of the White House and not the “owner,” and that Trump had no statutory authority to proceed, absent authorization from Congress.
On April 17, 2026, the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia stayed the district court’s injunction, permitting work to resume, while it considered the matter.
On August 7, 2026, the Court of Appeals ruled that the district court’s injunction would remain in place. Construction was stopped again on the above-ground part of the project.
The government ran lickety-split to the Supreme Court for a stay of the district court’s injunction, so it could get back to work on the ballroom. It’s important to understand the posture here: This is not a case that has been briefed and orally argued on the merits. It’s a shadow docket ruling on whether an injunction should be in place to keep the government from building Trump’s ballroom while the litigation moves forward.
CNN political analyst Maggie Haberman said Monday that President Trump’s approval is sinking across nearly all polls as the midterm elections near.
“There is no polling where this president is popular. Let’s put it that way,” Haberman said during an appearance on CNN’s “The Source” with Kaitlan Collins.
“And there is no polling where he is not in trouble on the issue of affordability,” she added.
Collins had pointed to new CNN polling showing Trump with a net approval rating of negative 32 percentage points, compared with negative 21 points for the Republican Party overall.
New polling shows Trump’s approval rating has dipped to its lowest point between his two terms in office as the widely unpopular Iran war stretches into its sixth month and Americans remain concerned over rising prices.
Haberman, a reporter for The New York Times, cautioned that public surveys do not always line up with private polling she has seen, but said the broader picture remains difficult for Trump, particularly on the cost of living.
She pointed to an Oval Office event on healthcare earlier Monday, where administration officials repeatedly invoked “affordability” — an issue Trump has previously dismissed as a “hoax” perpetuated by Democrats.
“That is the kind of thing that Republicans who are in these districts that are embattled do not want to be dealing with,” Haberman said.
Trump and GOP leadership have sought to make the president a central figure in the party’s midterm strategy despite his weak approval ratings, in an effort to secure votes from his base.
The president urged voters ahead of the midterms to pretend he is “on the ballot” when they cast their votes in November, as the party looks to ramp up voter turnout.
ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude quietly get worse over time. This hidden setting fixes them. Your favorite AI chatbot might be remembering a little too much.
By Andrew Grush • Aug 29, 2026 — 5:00 AM ET
I’ve been using LLM-based AI in some capacity for roughly half a decade, and in that time, the industry has changed significantly. Not only have newer competitors like Gemini and Claude arrived on the scene, but older tools like ChatGPT have also evolved dramatically. We’ve seen better third-party app integration, increased reasoning capabilities, and countless other advancements. However, I would argue that the ability to retain memories matters most.
Retaining context from previous conversations helps the AI better anticipate your needs within a single session. It also allows the tool to learn more about you, ensuring that future conversations are tailored to your preferences. However, there is a real downside to memory accumulation that not everyone considers. I’ve found that starting with a new AI usually requires significant input to generate the responses I need and fully understand my user profile. Once it reaches this data “sweet spot,” the AI becomes much more pleasant to use. Yet, slowly over time, the experience often seems to degrade again.
Let’s discuss what causes this gradual erosion, along with some simple maintenance steps to prevent old AI memories from dragging down your experience.
Do you ever clean up memories on your favorite AI chatbot?
1195 votes
How these old memories can actually erode your AI experience
Old memories can linger long after you no longer need them in a few different ways. Sometimes, random one-off questions or hypothetical tasks are the root of the problem. For example, years ago, I ran a mock simulation of how I would hypothetically invest in the stock market. At the time, I made it clear this was just for fun. Almost six months later, while planning real investments, I asked the AI a related question. It confidently referenced a fake stock I had previously “invested in” and informed me how much its value had increased.
This is why I recommend using your AI’s “incognito” mode for less important inquiries or casual experimentation. This simple step can prevent unneeded memories from forming in the first place. Of course, that is far from the only way unwanted data builds up.
Natural drift as your projects and needs change
Some of this is simply the natural drift of time. You may have given the AI instructions a year ago that were relevant at the time, but your work or personal goals have since evolved. Humans are not static, but an AI sometimes struggles to understand this evolution.
You might assume that newer instructions will naturally overwrite older, conflicting memories. For instance, your previous religious beliefs may have influenced how the AI interacted with you. If you later went through a period of deconstruction and shifted your beliefs, you might mention this in a new conversation.
The AI will then commit your new viewpoint to its memory. The problem is that it may still retain your old, opposing views. This can result in disjointed responses, or an awkward mix of both viewpoints when discussing spirituality.
Diego Pineda has been a devout storyteller his whole life. He has self-published a fantasy novel and a book of short stories, and is actively working on publishing his second novel.
A lifelong fan of watching movies and talking about them endlessly, he writes reviews and analyses on his Instagram page dedicated to cinema, and occasionally on his blog. His favorite filmmakers are Andrei Tarkovsky and Charlie Chaplin. He loves modern Mexican cinema and thinks it’s tragically underappreciated.
Other interests of Diego’s include reading, gaming, roller coasters, writing reviews on his Letterboxd account (username: DPP_reviews), and going down rabbit holes of whatever topic he’s interested in at any given point.
1 ‘Dune’ (1965)
Far more than just one of the most influential sci-fi books of all time, Frank Herbert‘s Dune is a strong contender for the title of greatest sci-fi novel ever written, a genuinely foundational masterpiece that has only continued to get better with age. After being hired to write a magazine article about sand dune stabilization in Oregon, Herbert conducted such detailed research and was so deeply fascinated by his findings that he was inspired to write Dune.
Thematically complex, beautifully written, and as hugely imaginative as any sci-fi fan could possibly hope, Dune is a classic whose fame is entirely well-deserved. Its worldbuilding is particularly strong, dropping readers into an admirably complex and believable universe without ever over-explaining any of its rules, politics, or cultures. Arrakis and the Dune universe as a whole feel remarkably lived-in; their ecology, politics, and economics are incredibly nuanced; and the story as a whole sees its themes shine through all the more thanks to their being supported by such a riveting world.
With Neuromancer, William Gibson completely revolutionized science fiction forever, and with the Apple TV television adaptation fast approaching, now seems to be about as great a time as any to check out this essential ’80s classic. One of the most prophetic sci-fi books of all time, Neuromancerredefined and popularized the cyberpunk subgenre and anticipated many elements of the modern digital age.
But whereas some prophetic sci-fi books are fun to read mostly just because they’re prophetic, Neuromancer is a classic that has aged like fine wine, one that’s still just as entertaining today as it was back when it was published. Bolstered by Gibson’s wonderfully rhythmic prose, the worldbuilding in Neuromancer makes it feel remarkably detailed and lived-in, which is precisely the kind of sensorial complexity that any sci-fi novel needs in order to be legendary.
Space Scopes Nancy Grace Roman (1925–2018) was NASA’s first chief astronomer, its first female executive, the “Mother of Hubble,” and the woman who built its space-astronomy programme from scratch — yet she remained far less famous than the telescope she made possible.
NASA’s first chief astronomer created its space-astronomy programme, helped turn Hubble into a real mission and now has a newly launched observatory carrying her name. By The Daily Orbit·Edited by Lachlan Brown Published August 30, 2026 ·How we edit Dr Nancy Grace Roman, NASA’s first chief of astronomy, poses in 1966 with a model of what would become the Hubble Space Telescope. Credit: NASA.
Dr Nancy Grace Roman, NASA’s first chief of astronomy, poses in 1966 with a model of what would become the Hubble Space Telescope. Credit: NASA.
When a Falcon Heavy left Kennedy Space Center on Sunday, it carried an observatory named for a woman who had died eight years before the launch and two years before NASA put her name on the mission. Nancy Grace Roman never saw the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. She did, however, create the NASA programme that made telescopes like it possible.
Roman was the agency’s first chief of astronomy and the first woman to hold an executive position at NASA. She developed a national space-astronomy programme when the field barely existed, helped transform the Large Space Telescope from an attractive concept into a serious project and made the case for it across NASA, the White House budget system and Congress. That telescope became Hubble. It entered orbit in 1990 and grew into a cultural symbol whose images are recognized far beyond astronomy. Roman’s role was known within NASA and the scientific community, but her name remained much less familiar than the machine she had spent years making possible.
The new observatory is an attempt to correct that imbalance. It is also a continuation of her work. An astronomer before NASA existed NASA’s biography of Roman begins with a child who organized friends into an astronomy club between fifth and sixth grade. By seventh grade, she had decided to become an astronomer, despite being told repeatedly that science was not a career for women. Roman was born in Nashville, Tennessee, on 16 May 1925. Her father, Irwin Roman, was a geophysicist and her mother, Georgia Smith Roman, was a music teacher who took her outdoors to see birds, trees, flowers and constellations.
Roman later said the astronomy was what stayed with her. She earned a bachelor’s degree in astronomy from Swarthmore College in 1946 and a doctorate from the University of Chicago in 1949. At Yerkes Observatory she studied stellar spectra and the composition and motion of stars, work that established her reputation as a research astronomer. The profession did not offer her an equal route forward. Roman saw women with years of experience denied tenure and concluded that her own prospects in academic astronomy were poor. She left for the US Naval Research Laboratory in 1955, where she entered the still-young field of radio astronomy and eventually led its microwave spectroscopy section. The move away from a conventional academic career placed her close to the emerging government space programme. It also gave her experience with new instruments, large organisations and scientists working across institutional boundaries.
Grace Coleman inside her room in the Latham unit of the California Institution for Women in Chino on Aug.13, 2026. Photo by Brian L. Frank for CalMatters/CatchLight
Gov. Gavin Newsom knows his changes to California prisons will be part of his legacy, from suspending the death penalty to refashioning San Quentin as a hub for rehabilitation.
“It was always about public safety,” Newsom told a San Quentin press conference in February. “It was about dealing with the fundamental fact that 95% of people in this system are going to go back into your neighborhood. And what kind of neighbors do you want them to be?”
Today we’re publishing a special report on what rehabilitation looks like for one young woman who committed a terrible crime and received a life sentence. The story might be difficult to read.
While driving drunk at age 22, Grace Coleman killed two parents, Gabriela Andrade and Henry Saldana-Mejia. Coleman had no memory of the accident and had to piece together details of what happened from her hospital bed.
Coleman: “In the beginning, I was like, all right — I clearly got to get therapy. I need to get my mental health in check. Clearly something is wrong with me if I just woke up and found out I killed people. This doesn’t just happen.”
Her path forward really began when she pleaded guilty and spent time with her victims’ family. As CalMatters’ Joe Garcia writes, she’s now incarcerated at a time when California is encouraging rehabilitation for people who are willing to wrestle with the why of what they did. Because of these changes, she has access to therapy, medication, support groups and activities that were not necessarily available in years past.
Although sentenced to life, Coleman likely will be paroled one day. What happens after that will answer Newsom’s question on what kind of neighbors former prisoners will become.
Jeff Roberts, an attorney who represented Coleman’s victims: “Grace needed to serve a good length of time. But I don’t think she needed to serve a life sentence, because quite frankly — that she killed two people and left three people orphaned is a life sentence. Emotionally, she won’t forget about that.”
Psychology says quiet retirees who seem to have retreated from the world often haven’t retreated at all, they’ve simply stopped going to places that required them to be a version of themselves they never truly chose Retirement’s quiet withdrawal may signal not decline but liberation—the end of a decades-long performance that finally no longer demands an audience.
There is one on every street. He ran something once. A department, a shop floor, a crew of eighteen. Now he is in the garden by seven, back indoors by nine, and the neighbours have quietly agreed he has gone downhill since the job ended. Often he has not. He has just stopped turning up to the leaving drinks. The psychology here runs against the obvious reading. What looks like a man shrinking is frequently a man cancelling a performance he signed up for thirty years ago and never got round to ending. Three decades of the work face There is a name for decades of paste-on cheer.
Arlie Hochschild coined it in 1983 as emotional labour: managing your own feelings as part of the job. Deep acting means genuinely talking yourself into the required mood. Surface acting means pasting the expression on and leaving the insides exactly as they were. Surface acting is the expensive one. Researchers call the gap between what is felt and what is shown emotional dissonance, and the evidence links it to emotional exhaustion, a sense of being fake, and knock-on effects that follow people home. Now run that forward across forty years. The cheerful one at the counter. The reasonable one in the meeting. The man who could handle a properly awful client without visibly wanting to reverse over him in the car park. A real skill, and also a bill, paid daily, for decades. Retirement cancels the contract.
A fair chunk of what reads as withdrawal is just that bill no longer being paid. The circle gets smaller on purpose Why does the invite list shrink first? Stanford psychologist Laura Carstensen has an answer in socioemotional selectivity theory: when time ahead feels wide open, you invest in breadth, banking contacts for a limitless future. When time starts to feel finite, priorities flip toward whatever is emotionally worth the hours. What gets cut is the tell.
The Illusion of Restoration: Judge Moss’s Ruling, the Dissolution of the CPB, and the Unchecked Dismantling of America’s Non-Commercial Commons
By DrWeb | DrWeb’s Domain | August 30, 2026, with AI research help via Gemini.
Category: DWD Editorial / Media Infrastructure / Constitutional Law / Information Architecture
SECTION I: The Pyrrhic Victory in Court
In the immediate wake of March 31, 2026, a dangerously complacent narrative solidified across legacy news aggregators and casual social commentary: The courts saved public broadcasting. When U.S. District Judge Randolph D. Moss handed down his comprehensive 62-page memorandum opinion in National Public Radio, Inc. et al. v. Trump et al. (Civil Action No. 1:25-cv-01674), media advocates celebrated what appeared to be an unambiguous First Amendment triumph. Judge Moss made short work of Executive Order 14290 (“Ending Taxpayer Subsidization of Biased Media”), dismantling its transparent viewpoint discrimination with razor-sharp judicial prose: “It is difficult to conceive of clearer evidence that a government action is targeted at viewpoints that the president does not like and seeks to squelch.”
The court’s logic was unassailable. Citing foundational precedents from Perry v. Sindermann to Agency for International Development v. Alliance for Open Society International, Inc., Judge Moss declared Section 3(a) of the executive order unlawful and permanently enjoined federal agencies from enforcing a blanket blacklist against National Public Radio, the Public Broadcasting Service, or their local affiliates. On paper, the executive branch was formally prohibited from utilizing discretionary federal grant mechanisms—from Department of Education early-childhood literacy allocations to National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) cultural grants and Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) emergency warning system stipends—as punitive cudgels to retaliate against disfavored journalistic coverage.
Yet, to mistake this legal victory for institutional survival is to misunderstand the brutal mechanics of federal appropriations and the structural architecture of American public broadcasting. Judge Moss’s injunction stopped an unconstitutional executive overreach, but it could not—and by design of Article I, never will—resuscitate an entity that Congress chose to financially execute eight months earlier.
The catastrophic reality that remains stubbornly obscured from public consciousness is that public broadcasting’s core federal foundation was not saved. It was extinguished.
The Rescissions Act of 2025 (Pub. L. No. 119-28), enacted on July 24, 2025, legally clawed back $1.1 billion in forward-funded appropriations allocated for Fiscal Years 2026 and 2027. Stripped of its statutory operational cash flow, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB)—the Congressionally chartered entity established under Lyndon B. Johnson to serve as a non-political buffer between state power and independent media—voted to wind down operations and dissolve. As Judge Moss explicitly and somberly noted on page 14 of his own ruling: “CPB no longer exists, and no Court order declaring the Executive Order unlawful as applied to the CPB can afford NPR, PBS, or their member stations any meaningful relief.”
What the public celebrated as a rescue was merely an autopsy report with a protective order attached. While national syndicators secured minor settlements to keep the physical satellite transponders of the Public Radio Satellite System (PRSS) alive, the foundational financial circulatory system that nourished over 1,500 local community stations was allowed to bleed out.
SECTION II: The 1967 Mandate and the Architecture of Independence
To understand the depth of the current crisis, one must revisit the information architecture designed by the 90th Congress. When the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 (47 U.S.C. § 396) was drafted, its chief architects—guided by the seminal findings of the Carnegie Commission on Educational Television—were acutely aware of a fundamental democratic vulnerability: How does a democratic government fund independent, non-commercial broadcast journalism without converting it into state-controlled propaganda?
The statutory answer was brilliant, deliberate, and structurally insulated:
The Non-Governmental Buffer: Congress created the Corporation for Public Broadcasting not as a federal agency, but as a private, non-profit D.C. corporation governed by a bipartisan board with fixed, staggered terms.
The Anti-Interference Firewall (§ 398): Section 398 of the Act explicitly forbade any federal department, agency, officer, or employee from exercising “any direction, supervision, or control over educational television or radio broadcasting.”
Two-Year Forward Funding: In 1975, recognizing that annual budget wrangling invited political hostage-taking, Congress adopted a two-year advance appropriation cycle. This ensured that lawmakers voting on CPB budgets were funding operations two fiscal years into the future, insulating day-to-day newsrooms from immediate retaliatory budget slashes over controversial reporting.
Crucially, the CPB was never designed to produce content itself. Under 47 U.S.C. § 396(k), the vast majority of CPB’s congressional appropriation was statutorily mandated to bypass Washington-based network headquarters entirely and flow directly to individual, locally licensed stations in the form of Community Service Grants (CSGs).
Judge’s ruling and public media dissolution. AI image by WP AI.
Statutory Layer (1967 Design)
Intended Democratic Function
2025–2026 Dismantling Mechanism
Two-Year Advance Funding
Insulated newsrooms from retaliatory political budget cycles.
Smashed via retroactive clawbacks in the Rescissions Act of 2025.
CPB Independent Buffer
Prevented direct executive or political control over distribution.
Dissolution triggered after total statutory defunding.
Direct CSG Station Grants
Subsidized local rural and tribal newsrooms; funded national dues.
Zeroed out overnight; eliminated baseline operational subsidies.
Non-Commercial Commons
Protected civic discourse from commercial rating algorithms.
Forced local stations into emergency paywalls, commercialization, or shutdown.
This decentralized flow created a resilient, bottom-up federation. A public radio station in rural Wyoming or an indigenous-operated television channel in northern Alaska received baseline operating capital from the federal grant pool. The local station then used a portion of those funds to purchase syndicated national programming (such as Morning Edition, PBS NewsHour, or Frontline) from NPR and PBS. The federal government did not directly fund national network news desks; local American communities chose to pool their federal resources to purchase them.
By attacking the CPB through legislative rescission while targeting the networks via executive decree, the political assault bypassed the First Amendment protections established in FCC v. League of Women Voters of California (1984). Instead of unconstitutionally censoring the speech directly, adversaries choked the economic pipes that sustained the physical infrastructure.
SECTION III: The Local News Desert & The Rural Blackout
The mainstream corporate press often covered the CPB battle through the narrow lens of Beltway personality clashes, focusing on elite national news desks in Washington and New York. This framing completely inverted the geographic and socio-economic reality of the devastation.
Flagship urban stations like WNYC in New York, KQED in San Francisco, or WGBH in Boston operate in wealthy donor markets with deep philanthropic endowments; federal CSG money represented only 5% to 12% of their annual operating budgets. For these metro giants, the loss of federal funding was an austerity crisis that demanded staff buyouts, consolidated beats, and tightened belts. But for the hundreds of rural, tribal, and small-market stations scattered across the American heartland, the dissolution of the CPB was an existential extinction event.
In rural Appalachia, the Mississippi Delta, the Great Plains, and Indian Country, CPB Community Service Grants routinely accounted for 40% to 65% of a station’s total operational budget. These stations serve communities where:
Local corporate underwriting is non-existent due to depleted local business economies.
Broadband access remains sparse, unreliable, or prohibitively expensive.
Commercial broadcast television and daily print newspapers have long since abandoned the beat, creating sprawling informational news deserts.
When the CPB dissolved, the domino effect was instantaneous. Over the past twelve months, dozens of rural repeater towers have gone dark. Tribal public radio networks—which provided life-saving health bulletins, Native language preservation broadcasts, and local weather crisis alerts across expansive reservations—were forced to lay off sole station engineers and localized news staff. In many counties across the American West, the local public radio frequency was not merely a source of national news analysis; it was the only functional, 24-hour civic broadcast link integrated into FEMA’s Emergency Alert System (EAS).
Furthermore, because these rural stations could no longer pay their annual affiliate dues to NPR or PBS, the national syndicators experienced an immediate secondary liquidity shock. The erasure of the small-station subsidy starved the national newsrooms of subscription revenue, forcing the very centralization and reduction of regional bureaus that critics disingenuously claimed to oppose.
SECTION IV: Anticipatory Obedience and Media Autonomy
The structural dismantling of the CPB cannot be evaluated in a vacuum. It represents a crowning case study in the dynamics of anticipatory obedience—a psychological and institutional surrender wherein legacy organizations preemptively dilute their coverage, soften their adversarial edge, and sacrifice institutional norms in a desperate, futile attempt to placate authoritarian power.
Long before Executive Order 14290 was penned, the seeds of structural vulnerability were sown by media executives who attempted to navigate bad-faith attacks with defensive retreat. For years, non-commercial media leadership responded to orchestrated allegations of “systemic bias” not by doubling down on rigorous, fearless investigative journalism, but by indulging in false equivalencies, bureaucratizing newsrooms, and apologizing for basic factual reporting.
This dynamic accelerated across the commercial and non-commercial press alike throughout 2024 and 2025:
Major corporate newspaper publishers spiked long-planned presidential endorsements to protect billionaire owners’ secondary aerospace and logistics government contracts.
Broadcast network news divisions settled dubious defamation threats out of court to avoid regulatory retribution during FCC license renewals.
Public media boards implemented suffocating, multi-tiered editorial review protocols that delayed urgent investigative exposés on corporate grift and executive branch abuses until the news cycle had passed.
The tragic lesson of 2026 is that anticipatory obedience never purchases safety; it merely signals weakness. When the administration issued EO 14290, it did not target public broadcasting because the networks were radically combative; it targeted them because public media had been politically isolated, structurally starved, and institutionally defenseless. The subsequent First Amendment victory in Judge Moss’s courtroom proved that the law was on the side of press freedom, but the prior years of institutional timidity ensured that when the blow landed, public media had already lost the broad, militant public mobilization necessary to halt Congress’s rescission knife.
SECTION V: Beyond Federal Subsidies: The Bridge Fund and Grassroots Information Architecture
If the American public media experiment is to survive the collapse of the 1967 statutory model, it must completely abandon the nostalgic fantasy that a future Congress will magically re-fund the CPB on historic terms. The old paradigm—reliant on federal appropriations filtered through centralized gatekeepers—is dead. The future requires constructing a robust, decentralized, and adversarial Information Architecture built on radical transparency, civic ownership, and direct public utility.
We are already witnessing the embryonic stages of this transformation. Across the country, surviving journalists and local communities are constructing alternative pathways to sustain the Fourth Estate:
1. The Emergence of Civic Endowment Consortia
Independent philanthropic coalitions, municipal media trusts, and grassroots “Bridge Funds” are stepping into the void left by CPB grants. Rather than funding Washington bureaucracy, these consortia are directing capital directly into local reporting trusts, guaranteeing multi-year operational underwriting for regional reporters who cover school boards, statehouses, water rights, and municipal courts.
2. Open Protocols & Decentralized Syndication
The proprietary distribution bottlenecks of the 20th century are giving way to federated open-source media networks. By bypassing closed corporate platforms and leveraging open standards, local newsrooms are sharing raw audio feeds, investigative databases, and verified reporting across independent digital nodes, ensuring that a single corporate takedown or federal injunction cannot sever the public’s access to reliable reporting.
3. The Reader-Supported Sovereign Commons
The survival of deep-dive investigative journalism depends entirely on a direct, unmediated pact between the citizen-journalist and the reader. The collapse of the CPB proves that when an information system relies on the grace of state power or the algorithmic whims of advertising monopolies, its demise is merely a matter of time. Non-commercial media must be funded as a vital public utility—not by state coercion, but by an engaged public that recognizes high-integrity information as the primary prerequisite for democratic self-governance.
The judicial victory of March 31 was a constitutional baseline, not a triumph. It demonstrated that executive censorship remains illegal under the supreme law of the land. But the work of rebuilding the public information commons—brick by brick, server by server, newsroom by newsroom—remains in our hands.
MULTIMEDIA EVIDENCE & PRIMARY DOCUMENTATION
Memorandum Opinion & Order:National Public Radio, Inc. et al. v. Donald J. Trump et al., No. 1:25-cv-01674 (D.D.C. Mar. 31, 2026), ECF No. 81 (Judge Randolph D. Moss presiding). Available via Justia Law D.D.C. Docket Archive.
Executive Order 14290: “Ending Taxpayer Subsidization of Biased Media,” 90 Fed. Reg. 19415 (Issued May 1, 2025). Full primary text and litigation pleadings archived via the Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse.
FCC v. League of Women Voters of California, 468 U.S. 364 (1984). Full Supreme Court opinion and syllabus on public broadcasting editorial freedom available via Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center and Oyez.
Perry v. Sindermann, 408 U.S. 593 (1972). Landmark precedent establishing the unconstitutional conditions doctrine regarding government benefits and free speech, accessible at Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center.
Agency for International Development v. Alliance for Open Society International, Inc., 570 U.S. 205 (2013). Supreme Court decision barring the leverage of federal funding conditions to suppress speech, available via Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center.
Accuracy in Media, Inc. v. FCC, 521 F.2d 288 (D.C. Cir. 1975). Landmark D.C. Circuit ruling restricting agency interference in CPB programming decisions, available via OpenJurist.
Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press (RCFP). (2025). Amicus Curiae Brief in Support of Plaintiffs-Appellees in National Public Radio, Inc. v. Trump. Complete brief and analysis available at RCFP Legal Filings Archive and direct PDF Repository.
Congressional Research Service (CRS).Federal Funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) (Report No. R43983 / R47120). Official legislative analysis hosted via EveryCRSReport and CRS Reports (Congress.gov).
Starr, Paul. (2004). The Creation of the Media: Political Origins of Modern Communications. Basic Books. Overview and publishing details available via Basic Books / Hachette.
McChesney, Robert W., & Nichols, John. (2011). The Death and Life of American Journalism: The Media Revolution that Will Begin the World Again. Nation Books. Profile and indexing at Nation Books / Hachette.
Pickard, Victor. (2019). Democracy Without Journalism? Confronting the Misinformation Society. Oxford University Press. Academic catalog link available via Oxford Academic.
Snyder, Timothy. (2017). On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (Chapter 1: “Do Not Obey in Advance”). Information and excerpts via Penguin Random House.
Witherspoon, John, & Kovitz, Roselle. (1987). The History of Public Broadcasting. Current Publishing. Full digital text archived via the Internet Archive.
The views expressed by contributors are their own and not the view of The Hill
‘Medicare for All’ means Medicare for none
by Merrill Matthews, opinion contributor – 08/25/26 8:00 AM ET
Article video…
It may be one of the most deceptive public policy marketing schemes in modern history. First, pick the most popular health insurance program in the country, which is Medicare. Then call your health insurance reform proposal “Medicare for All,” even though the intent is to eliminate the Medicare program as we know it, so that no one would have that coverage anymore.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has long pushed to end the nation’s current mix of private health insurance (that is, employer-based and individually purchased) and government-provided health insurance (Medicare and Medicaid) and replace it with a new government-run program. Taxpayers would pay higher taxes — though no one would pay premiums — and the government would pay all medical bills.
Under most government-run health care systems, as in the United Kingdom, the government determines what services and medicines are available, who can have them and when. Bureaucrats rather than doctors decide whether patients are allowed to have access to those services and medicines.
That is what Sanders and 71 percent of Democrats mean by Medicare for All. But that’s not Medicare.
Sanders knows he’s being deceptive. His Senate website says, “Medicare is the most popular health care program in America.” Then he claims that under Medicare for All, “every resident of the U.S. will receive health insurance through an expanded Medicare program.” That is a blatantly false statement.
Medicare has multiple parts. Part A covers hospital bills, Part B covers doctors’ bills, Part C is now Medicare Advantage and Part D covers prescription drugs. Medicare for All has none of that.
Importantly, Medicare Advantage relies on private sector health insurance similar to employer plans. Seniors have a choice between traditional Medicare and Medicare Advantage. Currently, 55 percent of eligible seniors choose Medicare Advantage. Medicare for All excludes private sector coverage, including Medicare Advantage.
Remember President Obama’s promise for the Affordable Care Act? “If you like your health plan, you can keep it,” is what he said. That won him [the] Politifact2013 “Lie of the Year.” But Sanders won’t make that claim, because he intends to ensure no one has their current health plan, including people currently on Medicare.
There are the big donors to American elections, and then there are the biggest donors — the ones that can turn around candidates’ fortunes and sometimes even write history.
These are the billionaires who tower over Senate and House races. The corporations digging deep to increase their profits. The dark-money groups that want to keep their sources of cash secret forever.
The 20 biggest donors so far in the midterm elections — some of whom are grouped together because of close familial or business relationships — have combined to shovel a staggering $1.2 billion into federal races this cycle, according to a New York Times analysis of the latest contribution data available.
The lineup shows the rising power of the tech industry and is dominated by Republican-leaning donors, reflecting how the party has steadily built an advantage in midterm money. That edge could keep the party competitive despite a political environment that favors Democrats.
Dr. Adam Kalkstein is suing over his removal from the military academy.
Students at West Point. Drew Angerer/Getty Images
A science professor says he was fired from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, New York, for refusing to ignore the human causes of climate change, and is now suing the institution in federal court.
Dr. Adam Kalkstein, a professor of geography, told The New York Times that the dean of the West Point academic board, Brigadier General Shane Reeves, in a meeting last year ordered him to remove everything about human contributions to climate change, as President Trump sets the agenda as commander in chief. Kalkstein told Reeves that such a change would be immoral, and possibly illegal. When Reeves suggested Kalkstein resign, Kalkstein declined, after which the dean stormed out of the room.
“We’re only telling cadets part of the story. We’re lying to them, deceiving them. It would be like trying to teach the law without being able to even mention the Constitution,” Kalkstein reportedly said during the meeting, according to Stars and Stripes.
Six months later, Kalkstein, a tenured professor, was told his contract wouldn’t be renewed, and on Monday, he sued the institution in the Southern District of New York, alleging that his First Amendment rights were violated. The lawsuit states that the institution’s order would require Kalkstein “to omit a massive, fundamental, essential component of the court and to defy science.”
According to the Times, Kalkstein is a conservative Republican who believes military cadets need to know the truth about climate change for national security reasons rather than social justice. He wrote a letter to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth arguing that knowing the causes of climate change was important for competing over resources in the Arctic and understanding why sea ice was melting.
Hegseth, along with the rest of the Trump administration, is trying to purge “wokeness” from government and military institutions, including any acknowledgment of climate change. Early in his tenure last year, Hegseth boasted on X that “The @DeptofDefense does not do climate change crap. We do training and warfighting.”
That’s a major departure from previous administrations. In 2021, the Pentagon concluded in a report that “increasing temperatures; changing precipitation patterns; and more frequent, intense, and unpredictable extreme weather conditions caused by climate change are exacerbating existing risks.”
Those risks still exist, but the Trump administration is flat-out ignoring the science for financial and culture-war reasons. Professors like Kalkstein, and the knowledge of America’s future military officers, are among the casualties.
UCSB Researchers Unveil 10 Rules for Generative AI in Science
New ‘ten simple rules’ framework from UC Santa Barbara’s NCEAS helps environmental scientists use generative AI without sacrificing rigor — or leaving anyone behind
Researchers at UC Santa Barbara’s NCEAS published a 10-rule guide in PLOS Computational Biology to help environmental scientists navigate generative AI coding responsibly.
Researchers at UC Santa Barbara’s National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS) are blazing a trail through the Wild West of AI-assisted science, with a field guide aimed at environmental data scientists.
“It started as something we needed for ourselves,” said ecologist and data scientist Rachel King. “We kept repeating the same conversation, project after project: whether to trust a suggestion, how much access to give an AI agent, what to do when a long chat session forgets a decision it made an hour earlier. At some point it made more sense to work it out together, once, than have every team rediscover it independently.” The researchers’ work is published in PLOS Computational Biology.
From internal guidance to community standards When a six-person team set out to build the Wildfire Resilience Index, an open-access tool for measuring how prepared communities and landscapes are for wildfire, they knew the science would be hard: stitching together satellite imagery, land-cover data, and socioeconomic variables with R and Python pipelines across two countries and 13 unique jurisdictions. What they didn’t expect was how fast the ground would move beneath them.
The project began in 2023, when AI was just emerging as a transformative tool, and by the time the project was released, an entirely new generation of AI coding tools had arrived — and lessons the team had learned six months earlier no longer applied.
That whiplash wasn’t unique to the WRI team. At NCEAS, a kind of think tank for environmental science, dozens of research teams work side by side on everything from wildfire to biodiversity to climate change.
Up and down the building, the same conversations kept surfacing: junior researchers leaning on AI they didn’t fully understand, veteran scientists doubting it could be trusted at all, and everyone in between quietly inventing their own rules for what counted as responsible use.
WRI wasn’t an isolated case — it was a case study of a reckoning already underway across the center. Rather than let every project work it out alone, NCEAS brought its community together, spanning researchers, software developers, data analysts, and professors, to hash it out directly.
What began as internal guidance didn’t stay internal for long. The result, refined through literature review and months of co-writing among 22 researchers, developers, and data analysts, is “Ten simple rules for effective use of generative AI for code development in environmental science” — offered not just throughout NCEAS, but to the entire field.
“What started as guidance for our own community ended up filling a gap nobody else had addressed,” said senior author Cat Fong, a researcher at NCEAS. “Existing advice was written for software engineers, or for science in the abstract. Almost none of it accounted for what our field actually looks like — messy, multi-source data, small teams, wildly different levels of coding experience in the same room.
And because some of us were openly skeptical of GenAI going into this, what came out of it is honest about the tradeoffs, not just enthusiastic about the tool.”
“What started as guidance for our own community ended up filling a gap nobody else had addressed.”
The 10 rules that came out of those conversations are organized around three phases of working with AI: before, during, and after coding. The guidelines cover the preparation for the project, with AI selection; promote best practices during coding with AI; and verification of the AI-generated code and documentation of the process after coding.
The Partnership for Academic Library Collaboration and Innovation (PALCI) has published the PALCI Guide to Interoperability and System Selection, a resource to help academic and research libraries evaluate whether new systems will support open standards and effective collaboration before contracts are signed.
The guide walks readers through what interoperability means in practice, why it matters for cost, flexibility, and long-term access, and what open standards, as opposed to closed proprietary interfaces, allow libraries to do that closed systems don’t.
It is written primarily for library staff in PALCI member organizations, but also for the broader library community, including the vendors and publishers who serve them, with the goal of raising awareness and the baseline expectation for openness across the field. “System choices made in isolation can quietly limit what a library is able to do collectively down the road,” said Jill Morris, Executive Director of PALCI.
“This guide gives libraries a shared vocabulary and a set of questions to ask during procurement processes, so interoperability is part of the decision up front rather than an expensive or surprising problem to solve later.” Carl Piraneo, PALCI’s Director of Resource Sharing and Member Services noted, “Interoperability determines how much friction there is in collaboration. PALCI’s EZBorrow service works so well because open standards let libraries with very different local systems participate on equal footing, and the services we are planning next will depend on that same groundwork.”
The guide is available now at palci.org. A companion resource with additional technical detail relevant to PALCI member organizations is available to individuals employed by PALCI member libraries through PALCI’s Basecamp member portal (login required).
About Gary Price Gary Price (gprice@gmail.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area. He earned his MLIS degree from Wayne State University in Detroit. Price has won several awards including the SLA Innovations in Technology Award and Alumnus of the Year from the Wayne St. University Library and Information Science Program. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com.
Route 66 is forever rooted in American culture, even though it was decommissioned in 1985 and removed from modern maps as a continuous U.S. Highway.
The legendary road still stretches from Illinois to California, but sees fewer travelers than it did in its heyday.
By the 1950s, Route 66 had become so iconic that Bobby Troup wrote the classic song “(Get Your Kicks on) Route 66,” celebrating America’s Main Street and its must-see stops. Travelers from all over would fill their tanks and set off down the Mother Road, excited to explore the unique landscapes, diners, and motels that lined the way.
But everything changed in 1956.
How did the beloved road go from one of the nation’s most popular attractions to disappearing from the map? Let’s adjust our mirrors on Route 66 to discover exactly what happened to this road-tripper’s paradise.
THE BIRTH OF THE MOTHER ROAD
US-LIFESTYLE-CALIFORNIA | PATRICK T. FALLON/GettyImages
Route 66 was established in 1926, when the U.S. Bureau of Public Roads first introduced the federal highway system. In its early days, the road, running alongside major railway lines, was “rough and rugged,” according to David Dunaway, author of A Route 66 Companion.
Dunaway and his coauthor, Stephen Mandragoc, noted that the route’s placement was weather strategic. Starting in Chicago, it avoided snow for much of the year, then continued through states where summer heat would be tolerable.
In the 1930s, travelers flocked to Route 66 in search of work out west, especially in booming California. By 1938, the once rough road running through Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California was operational, standing out as the first U.S. highway to be fully paved. Used as a vital transportation route during World War II, Route 66 was officially equipped for mass tourism by the mid-1940s.
Americans packed up their cars and headed west for their family vacations, lured by neon signs, diners boasting the best burgers, and motels promising the coziest stays in town (much like Radiator Springs in Pixar’s Cars).
For Americans traveling Route 66 in the ’40s and ’50s, the journey was the destination, until one bill changed the road’s fate in ways no one could have imagined.
THE FEDERAL-AID HIGHWAY ACT OF 1956
M. McNeill/GettyImages
In 1956, President Eisenhower signed the Federal-Aid Highway Act, launching a new era of efficient interstate highways designed to help Americans get to their destinations as quickly as possible.
With new, efficient highways crisscrossing the country, there was less need to take the old, winding Route 66 and stop in every small town along the way. As more Americans opted for the interstates, Route 66 was left in the dust.
Travelers still relied on Route 66 for services like motels and fuel stations until those amenities began to appear along the new interstates, pushing the Mother Road toward near obsolescence.
First came Interstate 40, then 55, and by 1984, only a single stretch of the original Route 66 remained in Arizona. Locals fought to preserve it, but the road was officially decommissioned in 1985.
ROUTE 66: 100 YEARS LATER
Seligman on Route 66 | M. Kaercher/GettyImages
After its removal from the highway system, America’s Main Street experienced a comeback, of sorts. The Road Ahead Partnership, a research and education group, made it their mission to bring life back to the road, attracting visitors from around the world who wanted to experience America in its most authentic form by traveling Route 66.
While Route 66 no longer appears as a continuous U.S. highway on modern maps, many still pack up their cars to travel its storied path, becoming part of history as they stop at remaining attractions, historic sites, and ghost towns.
Though this famous route’s busiest days are likely in the rear view, it remains a vivid symbol of American culture, even a century after its creation.
A new program in Charlotte, North Carolina, is using the arts to tackle loneliness and social isolation. Paul Solman reports on prescriptions for art instead of medicine for our series at the intersection of art and health, part of our CANVAS coverage.
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Notice: Transcripts are machine and human generated and lightly edited for accuracy. They may contain errors.
Amna Nawaz:
Now for a look at a program using the arts to tackle loneliness and social isolation. Located in Charlotte, North Carolina, it requires a prescription for art instead of medicine.
Paul Solman has the story for our series at the intersection of art and health, part of our Canvas coverage.
Alisha Bigby, Charlotte Art on Prescription Participant: I wouldn’t go anywhere. I stayed at home.
Paul Solman:
Alisha Bigby was traumatized by family tragedy.
Alisha Bigby:
I would get invited to things, and I would say I would go, and then I would kind of get a panic attack and wouldn’t go. And I would just sit in the dark at home or sit on the front porch.
Paul Solman:
But now she’s giving interviews to strangers, visiting museums.
Alisha Bigby:
Growing up, my mom collected these little African American figurines.
Paul Solman:
One of her favorite paintings at the moment, David McGee’s Drum Call.
Alisha Bigby:
When I came here and I saw this, I was like, oh, my goodness, this reminds me so much of my mom and the little figurines that she kept in her armoire. And I just immediately gravitated towards this.
Paul Solman:
In fact, this museum was key to her turnaround, The Bechtler in downtown Charlotte, North Carolina, and its program Art on Prescription.
Todd Smith, Executive Director, The Bechtler Museum of Modern Art: So individuals who are under the care of a doctor are prescribed art as medicine, and instead of going to the pharmacy to have their prescription filled, they come to the museum, where they get a year’s worth of arts programming for free.
Paul Solman:
Todd Smith runs this contemporary museum.
Todd Smith:
It’s a way to combat loneliness here in Charlotte. They attend performances, they create art, they talk about art, they share experiences, and in the end they become friends.
Paul Solman:
Eighty participants have gone to the ballet, the theater, taken art making classes, and visited The Bechtler to see most recently David McGee’s riffs on art classics from the past, like The End of Summer, playing off Caravaggio’s famous Bacchus.
Todd Smith:
We would ask participants to just start talking about what they see. What do the colors make you feel? How does it express an emotion to you? It’s just about getting people to talk.
Paul Solman:
Bigby didn’t talk at all after an unimaginably painful series of events that began with the death of her brother.
Alisha Bigby:
His truck went down and the embankment and it exploded. And then just a few days later, my mom passed away.
So-called third spaces have slowly dwindled over the past two decades.MIGUEL RIOPA/AFP via Getty Images
Before I was a reporter covering the death of American fun, I tried to run on saving it. In 2021, I ran for New York City Council in my home district of Astoria, Queens, on the slogan “Public Space for the Public Good”—a promise to wrestle back sidewalks, plazas, and streets from car storage and give them back to actual human beings. I wanted more open streets, more benches, more places where a neighbor could just sit down. I didn’t win, but I’ve never stopped noticing when a city takes away somewhere people used to gather, and lately, it feels like that’s happening everywhere at once.
Numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics back that feeling up. According to its Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages—which counts business establishments by industry down to the county level going back to 1990—the U.S. has lost a fifth of its movie theaters and nearly a third of its bowling alleys since 2001.
A 2025 study titled Uneven Access to Essential Services and Amenities: Geographic Disparities in “Third Place” Availability Across the United States From 2010 to 2021, found the same pattern holds well beyond bars and bowling alleys. Using Census data, researchers tracked 12 categories of what sociologists call “third places”—among them coffee shops, libraries, museums, recreation centers, and restaurants—and found widespread closures across every single category from 2019 to 2021, with the losses hitting hardest in rural areas and communities with larger Black, Hispanic, and less-educated populations.
Not only are these places disappearing, the ones still standing cost more to walk into than they used to. Jessica Finlay, an assistant professor of geography at the University of Colorado Boulder and one of the study’s researchers, immediately agreed when asked how much of this is an affordability story. “Absolutely. I mean, everything costs more,” she said. “Cost of living is so much more, and gentrification is absolutely happening.” It’s a dynamic she’s watched shrink the pool of people who can still afford to be regulars anywhere.
Some of this is simply the economics of running a physical space getting harder. Finlay traces the wave of closures to forces that predate the pandemic: delayed effects of the Great Recession, an oversupply of malls, the rise of online retail, and consolidation among major chains.
“COVID certainly accelerated it,” she said. “I think something of a silver lining to all this is that people started to notice. These are often quite mundane, overlooked places—that local diner where people hang out, or that hole-in-the-wall bar that has regulars who’ve been going there for a long time.”
The math has only gotten less forgiving since. Restaurants have seen food costs rise 38% and labor costs 35% since 2019, and 45% of operators say they weren’t profitable in 2025, just as restaurant menu prices are up 31% since 2020. Bars are getting squeezed from the insurance side: Liquor liability premiums have jumped 25% to 40% in some regions. Movie theaters face a similar squeeze from the real estate side: AMC alone carries more than $400 million in annual interest expense and $850 million in rent, a capital structure S&P Global Ratings has called “unsustainable” even as attendance recovers. When Cineworld filed for bankruptcy, it cited a nearly 30% rent increase per theater in that same 2019-to-2022 window.
Julianne Holt-Lunstad, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Brigham Young University, agrees the price of showing up has become its own barrier. She described her son’s experience trying to make friends after moving to San Francisco for an internship: a group dinner, a family-style bill split evenly, and he still left hungry. “It cost me $90 and I was just stressed about the money the whole time that I couldn’t even enjoy myself,” he told her. What she’s hearing instead from students on her own college campus is a retreat toward cheaper, more physical alternatives—roller skating, line dancing, outdoor meetups. “Affordability is one,” she told Fortune, referring to reasons pushing people toward those substitutes.
A changing urban landscape
The city itself has changed shape around this too, and not always by accident. Finlay spent recent years studying what happens when a place that should function as a gathering spot doesn’t—or actively works against the people it’s supposed to serve, something researchers call a “disamenity.” “A disamenity for me is when a potentially therapeutic site either doesn’t support health and well-being or directly harms you,” she told Fortune.
“Maybe that’s because it’s unaffordable. Maybe that’s because there’s no seats—it’s just a small check-in counter or drive-thru. Maybe it’s because there’s a giant parking lot outside that’s too hot, or the environment’s just off. People say the place is still isolating.” Sometimes the design is intentional: benches removed so people can’t loiter, tunnels sealed so no one can sleep in them, bike lanes routed around convenience rather than need.
I’ve seen this firsthand. Years ago, a business improvement district in New York was given a public bathroom by the city—free, on paper. But maintaining it fell entirely on the BID’s own budget. And unable to absorb the cost of maintenance, the “gift” was given back. An amenity became a disamenity the moment we couldn’t afford to maintain it, to keep the lights on and the door unlocked.
Chronic isolation is the equivalent of smoking 15 cigarettes a day
The health stakes of all this are not abstract. Holt-Lunstad led a meta-analysis of 148 studies tracking millions of people over years and often decades, finding that chronic loneliness and isolation carry a mortality risk comparable to smoking 15 cigarettes a day. A later paper she coauthored formalized that comparison, benchmarking social isolation directly against smoking as a public health risk. The U.S. Surgeon General’s 2023 advisory on loneliness, which Holt-Lunstad helped author, put a number on the danger: People who are socially disconnected face up to a 29% higher risk of premature death.
“This isn’t just some interesting correlation,” she said. “We know the biological mechanisms, the behavioral mechanisms that account for these effects.” Her own national survey, Social Connection in America, found nearly three-quarters of Americans get together in person with people they care about, other than those they live with, just twice a month or less, and 67% report never participating in a club or organization at all.
“We have designed our world, our society, for efficiency and economic benefit, and not necessarily for the thriving and well-being of humans,” she said.
Home > Performances > Exploring AI and the Future of Artistic Practice
Performance Overview
Save the date for the UNCSA Emerging Technology in the Arts Residency, a thought-provoking afternoon exploring how emerging technologies such as AI are reshaping artistic practice.
Hosted by the University of North Carolina School of the Arts and the Thomas S. Kenan Institute for the Arts, the residency will bring together artists, technologists, legal scholars and industry leaders to examine the ethical, legal, technical and creative implications of AI for the arts. The event centers on the work of acclaimed choreographer and Martha Graham Dance Company member Xin Ying, which was created in collaboration with Mimi Yin and NUUM Collective.
The afternoon will feature a deep dive into their AI-inflected work, “Letter to Nobody,” alongside discussions with leading experts on AI’s role in artistic practice, a presentation of the work and an audience talkback.
The residency also includes a free public screening of “The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist,” an acclaimed film exploring AI and society that premiered at SXSW 2026, presented in partnership with a/perture cinema in Winston-Salem, on Friday evening.
Whether you are an artist, educator, student, researcher or arts leader, this event offers an opportunity to engage with one of the most important conversations shaping the future of creative work.
Additional program details will be announced soon.
NPR journalist Manoush Zomorodi and her latest book, Body Electric: The Hidden Health Costs of the Digital Age and New Science to Reclaim Your Well-Being. Flatiron Books/Tory Williams/NPR
The internet at my apartment went out last Saturday. For three full days!
I’m used to having several spigots of information turned on — and drinking from them all at once. The TV, the laptop, the phone and even my tablet, if I was feeling extra thirsty.
It felt terrible.
Life Kit
Free yourself from ‘information overload’
So you know what I did? I pulled one of my Shakespeare books off the shelf and started re-reading Othello. Because I wasn’t trying to use all my devices at once, I was able to relax and focus.
I’m used to “media multitasking,” a term I learned from TED Radio Hour host Manoush Zomorodi, that describes double- or triple-screening devices. But when you’re consuming too much information, it can be hard to take anything in. And you end up feeling tired and overwhelmed.
Zomorodi, who also hosted the NPR podcast Body Electric, talks to Life Kit about the science of information overload. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What happens in our bodies when we multitask?
Every time you switch a task, you use glucose. And every time you use glucose in your brain, you’re burning through a finite amount of it, as well as the oxygen it takes to burn it.
Your brain has the ability to clear out the CO2 that’s the remnants from burning all that glucose and oxygen. But at a certain point, it starts to build up if you overload yourself. So that is when you start to feel tired and foggy, mentally fatigued, maybe even feel it in your body.
If you’re multitasking, do the opposite — single-task. One thing at a time, all the way through. Then take a break. Then tackle the next task.
What is the best way to regain focus?
Take a break, move. Not take a break on your phone, because that’s burning glucose again. Literally get up and walk around the room. That stimulates your muscles. Your muscles can then pump in more blood, which has oxygen and glucose, back up to your brain.
That moment in the afternoon where you’re like, “Oh, I just need chocolate so bad,” well, of course you do. Literally you are light on glucose in your brain. That makes total sense. But if you take a walk, you will refresh your cognitive capacity and protect your physical health as well.
There’s a chapter of the book where you talk about information overload. That feels important to me in my personal life, because I feel like I’m almost getting sick on information. How would you define it?
It is infomania, a compulsion to take in more information. Sure, I could read all these things, but then do I remember what I’ve read? Am I processing [the information] in a way that’s getting stored in my memory?
No, because I’m not a computer. My brain is not infinite with RAM. We need to be smarter about how we take in [information], how we synthesize it and what our expectations are in terms of using all of it.
What are the symptoms of information overload?
There was a podcast I did where we asked people what their symptoms were, and some of the things they mentioned were the eye twitch and the inability to sleep because you’ve been looking at screens for so long that you can’t settle down. Also, feeling like you can’t concentrate.
I’ve spoken to researchers, like Gloria Mark at University of California, Irvine, who have studied how we switch our attention. One of the things she has seen is that if you’ve spent an hour switching from screen to screen, checking X, then Instagram and going over to email, even if in the next hour everything calms down and you want to sit down with a single article, you will start switching tasks yourself.
So even if nobody else is interrupting you, you will start interrupting yourself. You will start trying to get information in different ways. It takes time to get into the rhythm that is required for reading something carefully and cautiously.
How do we try to not interrupt ourselves?
If you catch yourself self-interrupting, have a plan ready. Decide ahead of time how you’ll respond, so your brain reaches for that instead of the phone. I try to have my calendar filled with things that need to be done, not because I like to be busy, but because, that way, I don’t have to think throughout the day.
How do you prevent information overload?
Think of [yourself] as an information athlete with information goals.
Switching context is an emotional roller coaster and it’s exhausting. It’s burning through your cognitive resources fast.
So think about it this way: What is it that you want to get out of the time with your phone? If you are looking for something for dinner, great. That’s your goal. Then once you’ve achieved [that goal], stop.
Your turn: Did you try any tips from this interview?
Zomorodi would like to hear from you. Did you try setting an information goal to cope with information overload? Make a plan to help reduce self-interruption? Regain focus by taking a break? Email us at lifekit@npr.org with the subject line “To Manoush.” We’ll send her your responses.
The story was edited by Meghan Keane. The visual editor is CJ Riculan. We’d love to hear from you. Leave us a voicemail at 202-216-9823, or email us at LifeKit@npr.org.
Editor’s Note: This post is a fair use of an archived Internet Archive item, an important interview with Ernest Hemingway. I hope to make it easier to find and study from the Archive with the direct links. –DrWeb
Ernest Hemingway, ca. 1939. Photograph by Lloyd Arnold
HEMINGWAY
You go to the races?
INTERVIEWER
Yes, occasionally.
HEMINGWAY
Then you read the Racing Form … There you have the true art of fiction.
—Conversation in a Madrid cafe, May, 1954
Ernest Hemingway writes in the bedroom of his house in the Havana suburb of San Francisco de Paula. He has a special workroom prepared for him in a square tower at the southwest corner of the house, but prefers to work in his bedroom, climbing to the tower room only when “characters” drive him up there.
The bedroom is on the ground floor and connects with the main room of the house. The door between the two is kept ajar by a heavy volume listing and describing “The World’s Aircraft Engines.” The bedroom is large, sunny, the windows facing east and south letting in the day’s light on white walls and a yellow-tinged tile floor.
The room is divided into two alcoves by a pair of chest-high bookcases that stand out into the room at right angles from opposite walls. A large and low double-bed dominates one section, over-sized slippers and loafers neatly arranged at the foot, the two bedside tables at the head piled seven-high with books. In the other alcove stands a massive flat-top desk with two chairs at either side, its surface an ordered clutter of papers and mementos. Beyond it, at the far end of the room, is an armoire with a leopard skin draped across the top. The other walls are lined with white-painted bookcases from which books overflow to the floor, and are piled on top amongst old newspapers, bullfight journals, and stacks of letters bound together by rubber bands.
It is on the top of one of these cluttered bookcases—the one against the wall by the east window and three feet or so from his bed—that Hemingway has his “work-desk”—a square foot of cramped area hemmed in by books on one side and on the other by a newspaper-covered heap of papers, manuscripts, and pamphlets. There is just enough space left on top of the bookcase for a typewriter, surmounted by a wooden reading-board, five or six pencils, and a chunk of copper ore to weight down papers when the wind blows in from the east window.
A working habit he has had from the beginning, Hemingway stands when he writes. He stands in a pair of his oversized loafers on the worn skin of a lesser kudu—the typewriter and the reading-board chest-high opposite him.
When Hemingway starts on a project he always begins with a pencil, using the reading-board to write on onionskin typewriter paper. He keeps a sheaf of the blank paper on a clipboard to the left of the typewriter, extracting the paper a sheet at a time from under a metal clip that reads “These Must Be Paid”. He places the paper slantwise on the reading-board, leans against the board with his left arm, steadying the paper with his hand, and fills the paper with handwriting which through the years has become larger, more boyish, with a paucity of punctuation, very few capitals, and often the period marked with an x. The page completed, he clips it facedown on another clipboard which he places off to the right of the typewriter.
Hemingway shifts to the typewriter, lifting off the reading-board, only when the writing is going fast and well, or when the writing is, for him at least, simple: dialogue, for instance.
He keeps track of his daily progress—“so as not to kid myself”—on a large chart made out of the side of a cardboard packing case and set up against the wall under the nose of a mounted gazelle head. The numbers on the chart showing the daily output of words differ from 450, 575, 462, 1250, to 512, the higher figures on days Hemingway puts in extra work so he won’t feel guilty spending the following day fishing on the Gulf Stream.
A man of habit, Hemingway does not use the perfectly suitable desk in the other alcove. Though it allows more space for writing, it too has its miscellany: stacks of letters, a stuffed toy lion of the type sold in Broadway nighteries, a small burlap bag full of carnivore teeth, shotgun shells, a shoehorn; wood carvings of lion, rhino, two zebras, and a wart-hog—these last set in a neat row across the surface of the desk—and, of course, books. You remember books of the room, piled on the desk, beside tables, jamming the shelves in indiscriminate order—novels, histories, collections of poetry, drama, essays. A look at their titles shows their variety. On the shelf opposite Hemingway’s knee as he stands up to his “work-desk” are Virginia Woolf’s The Common Reader, Ben Ames Williams’ House Divided, The Partisan Reader, Charles A. Beard’s The Republic, Tarle’s Napoleon’s Invasion of Russia, How Young You Look by one Peggy Wood, Alden Brooks’s Shakespeare and the Dyer’s Hand, Baldwin’s African Hunting, T. S. Eliot’s Collected Poems, and two books on General Custer’s fall at the battle of the Little Big Horn.
The room, however, for all the disorder sensed at first sight, indicates on inspection an owner who is basically neat but cannot bear to throw anything away—especially if sentimental value is attached. One bookcase top has an odd assortment of mementos: a giraffe made of wood beads, a little cast-iron turtle, tiny models of a locomotive, two jeeps and a Venetian gondola, a toy bear with a key in its back, a monkey carrying a pair of cymbals, a miniature guitar, and a little tin model of a U.S. Navy biplane (one wheel missing) resting awry on a circular straw placemat—the quality of the collection that of the odds-and-ends which turn up in a shoebox at the back of a small boy’s closet. It is evident, though, that these tokens have their value, just as three buffalo horns Hemingway keeps in his bedroom have a value dependent not on size but because during the acquiring of them things went badly in the bush which ultimately turned out well. “It cheers me up to look at them,” Hemingway says.
Hemingway may admit superstitions of this sort, but he prefers not to talk about them, feeling that whatever value they may have can be talked away. He has much the same attitude about writing. Many times during the making of this interview he stressed that the craft of writing should not be tampered with by an excess of scrutiny—“that though there is one part of writing that is solid and you do it no harm by talking about it, the other is fragile, and if you talk about it, the structure cracks and you have nothing.”
As a result, though a wonderful raconteur, a man of rich humor, and possessed of an amazing fund of knowledge on subjects which interest him, Hemingway finds it difficult to talk about writing—not because he has few ideas on the subject, but rather because he feels so strongly that such ideas should remain unexpressed, that to be asked questions on them “spooks” him (to use one of his favorite expressions) to the point where he is almost inarticulate. Many of the replies in this interview he preferred to work out on his reading-board. The occasional waspish tone of the answers is also part of this strong feeling that writing is a private, lonely occupation with no need for witnesses until the final work is done.
This dedication to his art may suggest a personality at odds with the rambunctious, carefree, world-wheeling Hemingway-at-play of popular conception. The point is, though, that Hemingway, while obviously enjoying life, brings an equivalent dedication to everything he does—an outlook that is essentially serious, with a horror of the inaccurate, the fraudulent, the deceptive, the half-baked.
Nowhere is the dedication he gives his art more evident than in the yellow-tiled bedroom—where early in the morning Hemingway gets up to stand in absolute concentration in front of his reading-board, moving only to shift weight from one foot to another, perspiring heavily when the work is going well, excited as a boy, fretful, miserable when the artistic touch momentarily vanishes—slave of a self-imposed discipline which lasts until about noon when he takes a knotted walking stick and leaves the house for the swimming pool where he takes his daily half-mile swim.
INTERVIEWER
Are these hours during the actual process of writing pleasurable?
ERNEST HEMINGWAY
Very.
INTERVIEWER
Could you say something of this process? When do you work? Do you keep to a strict schedule?
HEMINGWAY
When I am working on a book or a story I write every morning as soon after first light as possible. There is no one to disturb you and it is cool or cold and you come to your work and warm as you write. You read what you have written and, as you always stop when you know what is going to happen next, you go on from there. You write until you come to a place where you still have your juice and know what will happen next and you stop and try to live through until the next day when you hit it again. You have started at six in the morning, say, and may go on until noon or be through before that. When you stop you are as empty, and at the same time never empty but filling, as when you have made love to someone you love. Nothing can hurt you, nothing can happen, nothing means anything until the next day when you do it again. It is the wait until the next day that is hard to get through.
INTERVIEWER
Can you dismiss from your mind whatever project you’re on when you’re away from the typewriter?
HEMINGWAY
Of course. But it takes discipline to do it and this discipline is acquired. It has to be.
INTERVIEWER
Do you do any rewriting as you read up to the place you left off the day before? Or does that come later, when the whole is finished?
HEMINGWAY
I always rewrite each day up to the point where I stopped. When it is all finished, naturally you go over it. You get another chance to correct and rewrite when someone else types it, and you see it clean in type. The last chance is in the proofs. You’re grateful for these different chances.
INTERVIEWER
How much rewriting do you do?
HEMINGWAY
It depends. I rewrote the ending to Farewell to Arms, the last page of it, thirty-nine times before I was satisfied.
INTERVIEWER
Was there some technical problem there? What was it that had stumped you?
HEMINGWAY
Getting the words right.
INTERVIEWER
Is it the rereading that gets the “juice” up?
HEMINGWAY
Re-reading places you at the point where it has to go on, knowing it is as good as you can get it up to there. There is always juice somewhere.
INTERVIEWER
But are there times when the inspiration isn’t there at all?
HEMINGWAY
Naturally. But if you stopped when you knew what would happen next, you can go on. As long as you can start, you are all right. The juice will come.
INTERVIEWER
Thornton Wilder speaks of mnemonic devices that get the writer going on his day’s work. He says you once told him you sharpened twenty pencils.
HEMINGWAY
I don’t think I ever owned twenty pencils at one time. Wearing down seven number-two pencils is a good day’s work.
INTERVIEWER
Where are some of the places you have found most advantageous to work? The Ambos Mundos hotel must have been one, judging from the number of books you did there. Or do surroundings have little effect on the work?
HEMINGWAY
The Ambos Mundos in Havana was a very good place to work in. This Finca is a splendid place, or was. But I have worked well everywhere. I mean I have been able to work as well as I can under varied circumstances. The telephone and visitors are the work destroyers.
INTERVIEWER
Is emotional stability necessary to write well? You told me once that you could only write well when you were in love. Could you expound on that a bit more?
HEMINGWAY
What a question. But full marks for trying. You can write any time people will leave you alone and not interrupt you. Or rather you can if you will be ruthless enough about it. But the best writing is certainly when you are in love. If it is all the same to you I would rather not expound on that.
INTERVIEWER
How about financial security? Can that be a detriment to good writing?
HEMINGWAY
If it came early enough and you loved life as much as you loved your work it would take much character to resist the temptations. Once writing has become your major vice and greatest pleasure only death can stop it. Financial security then is a great help as it keeps you from worrying. Worry destroys the ability to write. Ill health is bad in the ratio that it produces worry which attacks your subconscious and destroys your reserves.
INTERVIEWER
Can you recall an exact moment when you decided to become a writer?
HEMINGWAY
No, I always wanted to be a writer.
INTERVIEWER
Philip Young in his book on you suggests that the traumatic shock of your severe 1918 mortar wound had a great influence on you as a writer. I remember in Madrid you talked briefly about his thesis, finding little in it, and going on to say that you thought the artist’s equipment was not an acquired characteristic, but inherited, in the Mendelian sense.
HEMINGWAY
Evidently in Madrid that year my mind could not be called very sound. The only thing to recommend it would be that I spoke only briefly about Mr. Young’s book and his trauma theory of literature. Perhaps the two concussions and a skull fracture of that year had made me irresponsible in my statements. I do remember telling you that I believed imagination could be the result of inherited racial experience. It sounds all right in good jolly post-concussion talk, but I think that is more or less where it belongs. So until the next liberation trauma, let’s leave it there. Do you agree? But thanks for leaving out the names of any relatives I might have implicated. The fun of talk is to explore, but much of it and all that is irresponsible should not be written. Once written you have to stand by it. You may have said it to see whether you believed it or not. On the question you raised, the effects of wounds vary greatly. Simple wounds which do not break bone are of little account. They sometimes give confidence. Wounds which do extensive bone and nerve damage are not good for writers, nor anybody else.
INTERVIEWER
What would you consider the best intellectual training for the would-be writer?
HEMINGWAY
Let’s say that he should go out and hang himself because he finds that writing well is impossibly difficult. Then he should be cut down without mercy and forced by his own self to write as well as he can for the rest of his life. At least he will have the story of the hanging to commence with.
INTERVIEWER
How about people who’ve gone into the academic career? Do you think the large numbers of writers who hold teaching positions have compromised their literary careers?
HEMINGWAY
It depends on what you call compromise. Is the usage that of a woman who has been compromised? Or is it the compromise of the statesman? Or the compromise made with your grocer or your tailor that you will pay a little more but will pay it later? A writer who can both write and teach should be able to do both. Many competent writers have proved it could be done. I could not do it, I know, and I admire those who have been able to. I would think though that the academic life could put a period to outside experience which might possibly limit growth of knowledge of the world. Knowledge, however, demands more responsibility of a writer and makes writing more difficult. Trying to write something of permanent value is a full-time job even though only a few hours a day are spent on the actual writing. A writer can be compared to a well. There are as many kinds of wells as there are writers. The important thing is to have good water in the well and it is better to take a regular amount out than to pump the well dry and wait for it to refill. I see I am getting away from the question, but the question was not very interesting.
INTERVIEWER
Would you suggest newspaper work for the young writer? How helpful was the training you had with the Kansas City Star?
HEMINGWAY
On the Star you were forced to learn to write a simple declarative sentence. This is useful to anyone. Newspaper work will not harm a young writer and could help him if he gets out of it in time. This is one of the dustiest cliches there is and I apologize for it. But when you ask someone old tired questions you are apt to receive old tired answers.
INTERVIEWER
You once wrote in the Transatlantic Review that the only reason for writing journalism was to be well paid. You said: “And when you destroy the valuable things you have by writing about them, you want to get big money for it.” Do you think of writing as a type of self-destruction?
HEMINGWAY
I do not remember ever writing that. But it sounds silly and violent enough for me to have said it to avoid having to bite on the nail and make a sensible statement. I certainly do not think of writing as a type of self-destruction though journalism, after a point has been reached, can be a daily self-destruction for a serious creative writer.
INTERVIEWER
Do you think the intellectual stimulus of the company of other writers is of any value to an author?
HEMINGWAY
Certainly.
INTERVIEWER
In the Paris of the twenties did you have any sense of “group feeling” with other writers and artists?
HEMINGWAY
No. There was no group feeling. We had respect for each other. I respected a lot of painters, some of my own age, others older—Gris, Picasso, Braque, Monet, who was still alive then—and a few writers: Joyce, Ezra, the good of Stein…
INTERVIEWER
When you are writing, do you ever find yourself influenced by what you’re reading at the time?
HEMINGWAY
Not since Joyce was writing Ulysses. His was not a direct influence. But in those days when words we knew were barred to us, and we had to fight for a single word, the influence of his work was what changed everything, and made it possible for us to break away from the restrictions.
INTERVIEWER
Could you learn anything about writing from the writers? You were telling me yesterday that Joyce, for example, couldn’t bear to talk about writing.
HEMINGWAY
In company with people of your own trade you ordinarily speak of other writers’ books. The better the writers the less they will speak about what they have written themselves. Joyce was a very great writer and he would only explain what he was doing to jerks. Other writers that he respected were supposed to be able to know what he was doing by reading it.
INTERVIEWER
You seem to have avoided the company of writers in late years. Why?
HEMINGWAY
That is more complicated. The further you go in writing the more alone you are. Most of your best and oldest friends die. Others move away. You do not see them except rarely, but you write and have much the same contact with them as though you were together at the cafe in the old days. You exchange comic, sometimes cheerfully obscene and irresponsible letters, and it is almost as good as talking. But you are more alone because that is how you must work and the time to work is shorter all the time and if you waste it you feel you have committed a sin for which there is no forgiveness.
INTERVIEWER
What about the influence of some of these people—your contemporaries—on your work? What was Gertrude Stein’s contribution, if any? Or Ezra Pound’s? Or Max Perkins’?
HEMINGWAY
I’m sorry but I am no good at these post-mortems. There are coroners literary and non-literary provided to deal with such matters. Miss Stein wrote at some length and with considerable inaccuracy about her influence on my work. It was necessary for her to do this after she had learned to write dialogue from a book called The Sun Also Rises. I was very fond of her and thought it was splendid she had learned to write conversation. It was no new thing to me to learn from everyone I could, living or dead, and I had no idea it would affect Gertrude so violently. She already wrote very well in other ways. Ezra was extremely intelligent on the subjects he really knew. Doesn’t this sort of talk bore you? This backyard literary gossip while washing out the dirty clothes of thirty-five years ago is disgusting to me. It would be different if one had tried to tell the whole truth. That would have some value. Here it is simpler and better to thank Gertrude for everything I learned from her about the abstract relationship of words, say how fond I was of her, re-affirm my loyalty to Ezra as a great poet and a loyal friend, and say that I cared so much for Max Perkins that I have never been able to accept that he is dead. He never asked me to change anything I wrote except to remove certain words which were not then publishable. Blanks were left, and anyone who knew the words would know what they were. For me he was not an editor. He was a wise friend and a wonderful companion. I liked the way he wore his hat and the strange way his lips moved.
INTERVIEWER
Who would you say are your literary forebears—those you have learned the most from?
HEMINGWAY
Mark Twain, Flaubert, Stendhal, Bach, Turgeniev, Tolstoi, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Andrew Marvell, John Donne, Maupassant, the good Kipling, Thoreau, Captain Marryat, Shakespeare, Mozart, Quevedo, Dante, Virgil, Tintoretto, Hieronymus Bosch, Brueghel, Patinier, Goya, Giotto, Cézanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin, San Juan de la Cruz, Gongora—it would take a day to remember everyone. Then it would sound as though I were claiming an erudition I did not possess instead of trying to remember all the people who have been an influence on my life and work. This isn’t an old dull question. It is a very good but a solemn question and requires an examination of conscience. I put in painters, or started to, because I learn as much from painters about how to write as from writers. You ask how this is done? It would take another day of explaining. I should think what one learns from composers and from the study of harmony and counterpoint would be obvious.
INTERVIEWER
Did you ever play a musical instrument?
HEMINGWAY
I used to play cello. My mother kept me out of school a whole year to study music and counterpoint. She thought I had ability, but I was absolutely without talent. We played chamber music—someone came in to play the violin; my sister played the viola, and mother the piano. That cello—I played it worse than anyone on earth. Of course, that year I was out doing other things too.
INTERVIEWER
Do you re-read the authors of your list? Twain, for instance?
HEMINGWAY
You have to wait two or three years with Twain. You remember too well. I read some Shakespeare every year, Lear always. Cheers you up if you read that.
INTERVIEWER
Reading, then, is a constant occupation and pleasure.
HEMINGWAY
I’m always reading books—as many as there are. I ration myself on them so that I’ll always be in supply.
INTERVIEWER
Do you ever read manuscripts?
HEMINGWAY
You can get into trouble doing that unless you know the author personally. Some years ago I was sued for plagiarism by a man who claimed that I’d lifted For Whom the Bell Tolls from an unpublished screen scenario he’d written. He’d read this scenario at some Hollywood party. I was there, he said, at least there was a fellow called “Ernie” there listening to the reading, and that was enough for him to sue for a million dollars. At the same time he sued the producers of the motion-pictures North-West Mounted Police and the Cisco Kid, claiming that these, as well, had been stolen from that same unpublished scenario. We went to court and, of course, won the case. The man turned out to be insolvent.
INTERVIEWER
Well, could we go back to that list and take one of the painters—Hieronymus Bosch, for instance? The nightmare symbolic quality of his work seems so far removed from your own.
HEMINGWAY
I have the nightmares and know about the ones other people have. But you do not have to write them down. Anything you can omit that you know you still have in the writing and its quality will show. When a writer omits things he does not know, they show like holes in his writing.
INTERVIEWER
Does that mean that a close knowledge of the works of the people on your list helps fill the “well” you were speaking of a while back? Or were they consciously a help in developing the techniques of writing?
HEMINGWAY
They were a part of learning to see, to hear, to think, to feel and not feel, and to write. The well is where your “juice” is. Nobody knows what it is made of, least of all yourself. What you know is if you have it, or you have to wait for it to come back.
INTERVIEWER
Would you admit to there being symbolism in your novels?
HEMINGWAY
I suppose there are symbols since critics keep finding them. If you do not mind I dislike talking about them and being questioned about them. It is hard enough to write books and stories without being asked to explain them as well. Also it deprives the explainers of work. If five or six or more good explainers can keep going why should I interfere with them? Read anything I write for the pleasure of reading it. Whatever else you find will be the measure of what you brought to the reading.
INTERVIEWER
Continuing with just one question on this line: One of the advisory staff editors wonders about a parallel he feels he’s found in The Sun Also Rises between the dramatis personae of the bull ring and the characters of the novel itself. He points out that the first sentence of the book tells us Robert Cohn is a boxer; later, during the desencajonada, the bull is described as using his horns like a boxer, hooking and jabbing. And just as the bull is attracted and pacified by the presence of a steer, Robert Cohn defers to Jake who is emasculated precisely as is a steer. He sees Mike as the picador, baiting Cohn repeatedly. The editor’s thesis goes on, but he wondered if it was your conscious intention to inform the novel with the tragic structure of the bullfight ritual.
HEMINGWAY
It sounds as though the advisory staff editor was a little bit screwy. Who ever said Jake was “emasculated precisely as is a steer?” Actually he had been wounded in quite a different way and his testicles were intact and not damaged. Thus he was capable of all normal feelings as a man but incapable of consummating them. The important distinction is that his wound was physical and not psychological and that he was not emasculated.
INTERVIEWER
These questions which inquire into craftsmanship really are an annoyance.
HEMINGWAY
A sensible question is neither a delight nor an annoyance. I still believe, though, that it is very bad for a writer to talk about how he writes. He writes to be read by the eye and no explanations or dissertations should be necessary. You can be sure that there is much more there than will be read at any first reading and having made this it is not the writer’s province to explain it or to run guided tours through the more difficult country of his work.
INTERVIEWER
In connection with this, I remember you have also warned that it is dangerous for a writer to talk about a work-in-progress, that he can “talk it out” so to speak. Why should this be so? I only ask because there are so many writers—Twain, Wilde, Thurber, Steffens come to mind—who would seem to have polished their material by testing it on listeners.
HEMINGWAY
I cannot believe Twain ever “tested out” Huckleberry Finn on listeners. If he did they probably had him cut out good things and put in the bad parts. Wilde was said by people who knew him to have been a better talker than a writer. Steffens talked better than he wrote. Both his writing and his talking were sometimes hard to believe, and I heard many stories change as he grew older. If Thurber can talk as well as he writes he must be one of the greatest and least boring talkers. The man I know who talks best about his own trade and has the pleasantest and most wicked tongue is Juan Belmonte, the matador.
INTERVIEWER
Could you say how much thought-out effort went into the evolvement of your distinctive style?
HEMINGWAY
That is a long-term tiring question and if you spent a couple of days answering it you would be so self-conscious that you could not write. I might say that what amateurs call a style is usually only the unavoidable awkwardnesses in first trying to make something that has not heretofore been made. Almost no new classics resemble other previous classics. At first people can see only the awkwardness. Then they are not so perceptible. When they show so very awkwardly people think these awkwardnesses are the style and many copy them. This is regrettable.
INTERVIEWER
You once wrote me that the simple circumstances under which various pieces of fiction were written could be instructive. Could you apply this to “The Killers”—you said that you had written it, “Ten Indians,” and “Today Is Friday” in one day—and perhaps to your first novel The Sun Also Rises?
HEMINGWAY
Let’s see. The Sun Also Rises I started in Valencia on my birthday, July 21. Hadley, my wife, and I had gone to Valencia early to get good tickets for the feria there which started the twenty-fourth of July. Everybody my age had written a novel and I was still having a difficult time writing a paragraph. So I started the book on my birthday, wrote all through the feria, in bed in the morning, went on to Madrid and wrote there. There was no feria there, so we had a room with a table and I wrote in great luxury on the table and around the corner from the hotel in a beer place in the Pasaje Alvarez where it was cool. It finally got too hot to write and we went to Hendaye. There was a small cheap hotel there on the big long lovely beach and I worked very well there and then went up to Paris and finished the first draft in the apartment over the sawmill at 113 rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs six weeks from the day I started it. I showed the first draft to Nathan Asch, the novelist, who then had quite a strong accent, and he said, “Hem, vaht do you mean saying you wrote a novel? A novel huh. Hem you are riding a travhel büch.” I was not too discouraged by Nathan and rewrote the book, keeping in the travel (that was the part about the fishing trip and Pamplona) at Schruns in the Vorarlberg at the Hotel Taube.
The stories you mention I wrote in one day in Madrid on May 16 when it snowed out the San Isidro bullfights. First I wrote The Killers, which I’d tried to write before and failed. Then after lunch I got in bed to keep warm and wrote Today Is Friday. I had so much juice I thought maybe I was going crazy and I had about six other stories to write. So I got dressed and walked to Fornos, the old bullfighters’ café, and drank coffee and then came back and wrote Ten Indians. This made me very sad and I drank some brandy and went to sleep. I’d forgotten to eat and one of the waiters brought me up some Bacalao and a small steak and fried potatoes and a bottle of Valdepeñas.
The woman who ran the Pension was always worried that I did not eat enough and she had sent the waiter. I remember sitting up in bed and eating, and drinking the Valdepeñas. The waiter said he would bring up another bottle. He said the Señora wanted to know if I was going to write all night. I said no, I thought I would lay off for a while. Why don’t you try to write just one more, the waiter asked. I’m only supposed to write one, I said. Nonsense, he said. You could write six. I’ll try tomorrow, I said. Try it tonight, he said. What do you think the old woman sent the food up for?
I’m tired, I told him. Nonsense, he said (the word was not nonsense). You tired after three miserable little stories. Translate me one.
Leave me alone, I said. How am I going to write it if you don’t leave me alone? So I sat up in bed and drank the Valdepeñas and thought what a hell of a writer I was if the first story was as good as I’d hoped.
INTERVIEWER
How complete in your own mind is the conception of a short story? Does the theme, or the plot, or a character change as you go along?
HEMINGWAY
Sometimes you know the story. Sometimes you make it up as you go along and have no idea how it will come out. Everything changes as it moves. That is what makes the movement which makes the story. Sometimes the movement is so slow it does not seem to be moving. But there is always change and always movement.
INTERVIEWER
Is it the same with the novel, or do you work out the whole plan before you start and adhere to it rigorously?
HEMINGWAY
For Whom the Bell Tolls was a problem which I carried on each day. I knew what was going to happen in principle. But I invented what happened each day I wrote.
INTERVIEWER
Were The Green Hills of Africa, To Have and Have Not, and Across the River and Into the Trees all started as short stories and developed into novels? If so, are the two forms so similar that the writer can pass from one to the other without completely revamping his approach?
HEMINGWAY
No, that is not true. The Green Hills of Africa is not a novel but was written in an attempt to write an absolutely true book to see whether the shape of a country and the pattern of a month’s action could, if truly presented, compete with a work of the imagination. After I had written it I wrote two short stories, The Snows of Kilimanjaro and The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber. These were stories which I invented from the knowledge and experience acquired on the same long hunting trip one month of which I had tried to write a truthful account of in The Green Hills. To Have and Have Not and Across the River and Into the Trees were both started as short stories.
INTERVIEWER
Do you find it easy to shift from one literary project to another or do you continue through to finish what you start?
HEMINGWAY
The fact that I am interrupting serious work to answer these questions proves that I am so stupid that I should be penalized severely. I will be. Don’t worry.
INTERVIEWER
Do you think of yourself in competition with other writers?
HEMINGWAY
Never. I used to try to write better than certain dead writers of whose value I was certain. For a long time now I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.
INTERVIEWER
Do you think a writer’s power diminishes as he grows older? In The Green Hills of Africa you mention that American writers at a certain age change into Old Mother Hubbards.
HEMINGWAY
I don’t know about that. People who know what they are doing should last as long as their heads last. In that book you mention, if you look it up, you’ll see I was sounding off about American literature with a humorless Austrian character who was forcing me to talk when I wanted to do something else. I wrote an accurate account of the conversation. Not to make deathless pronouncements. A fair percent of the pronouncements are good enough.
INTERVIEWER
We’ve not discussed character. Are the characters of your work taken without exception from real life?
HEMINGWAY
Of course they are not. Some come from real life. Mostly you invent people from a knowledge and understanding and experience of people.
INTERVIEWER
Could you say something about the process of turning a real-life character into a fictional one?
HEMINGWAY
If I explained how that is sometimes done, it would be a handbook for libel lawyers.
INTERVIEWER
Do you make a distinction—as E. M. Forster does—between “flat” and “round” characters?
HEMINGWAY
If you describe someone, it is flat, as a photograph is, and from my standpoint a failure. If you make him up from what you know, there should be all the dimensions.
INTERVIEWER
Which of your characters do you look back on with particular affection?
HEMINGWAY
That would make too long a list.
INTERVIEWER
Then you enjoy reading over your own books—without feeling there are changes you would like to make?
HEMINGWAY
I read them sometimes to cheer me up when it is hard to write and then I remember that it was always difficult and how nearly impossible it was sometimes.
INTERVIEWER
How do you name your characters?
HEMINGWAY
The best I can.
INTERVIEWER
Do the titles come to you while you’re in the process of doing the story?
HEMINGWAY
No. I make a list of titles after I’ve finished the story or the book—sometimes as many as a hundred. Then I start eliminating them, sometimes all of them.
INTERVIEWER
And you do this even with a story whose title is supplied from the text—Hills Like White Elephants, for example?
HEMINGWAY
Yes. The title comes afterwards. I met a girl in Prunier where I’d gone to eat oysters before lunch. I knew she’d had an abortion. I went over and we talked, not about that, but on the way home I thought of the story, skipped lunch, and spent that afternoon writing it.
INTERVIEWER
So when you’re not writing, you remain constantly the observer, looking for something which can be of use.
HEMINGWAY
Surely. If a writer stops observing he is finished. But he does not have to observe consciously nor think how it will be useful. Perhaps that would be true at the beginning. But later everything he sees goes into the great reserve of things he knows or has seen. If it is any use to know it, I always try to write on the principle of the iceberg. There is seven-eighths of it underwater for every part that shows. Anything you know you can eliminate and it only strengthens your iceberg. It is the part that doesn’t show. If a writer omits something because he does not know it then there is a hole in the story.
The Old Man and the Sea could have been over a thousand pages long and had every character in the village in it and all the processes of how they made their living, were born, educated, bore children, et cetera. That is done excellently and well by other writers. In writing you are limited by what has already been done satisfactorily. So I have tried to learn to do something else. First I have tried to eliminate everything unnecessary to conveying experience to the reader so that after he or she has read something it will become a part of his or her experience and seem actually to have happened. This is very hard to do and I’ve worked at it very hard.
Anyway, to skip how it is done, I had unbelievable luck this time and could convey the experience completely and have it be one that no one had ever conveyed. The luck was that I had a good man and a good boy and lately writers have forgotten there still are such things. Then the ocean is worth writing about just as man is. So I was lucky there. I’ve seen the marlin mate and know about that. So I leave that out. I’ve seen a school (or pod) of more than fifty sperm whales in that same stretch of water and once harpooned one nearly sixty feet in length and lost him. So I left that out. All the stories I know from the fishing village I leave out. But the knowledge is what makes the underwater part of the iceberg.
INTERVIEWER
Archibald MacLeish has spoken of a method of conveying experience to a reader which he said you developed while covering baseball games back in those Kansas City Star days. It was simply that experience is communicated by small details, intimately preserved, which have the effect of indicating the whole by making the reader conscious of what he had been aware of only subconsciously…
HEMINGWAY
The anecdote is apocryphal. I never wrote baseball for the Star. What Archie was trying to remember was how I was trying to learn in Chicago in around 1920 and was searching for the unnoticed things that made emotions such as the way an outfielder tossed his glove without looking back to where it fell, the squeak of resin on canvas under a fighter’s flat-soled gym-shoes, the gray color of Jack Blackburn’s skin when he had just come out of stir and other things I noted as a painter sketches. You saw Blackburn’s strange color and the old razor cuts and the way he spun a man before you knew his history. These were the things which moved you before you knew the story.
INTERVIEWER
Have you ever described any type of situation of which you had no personal knowledge?
HEMINGWAY
That is a strange question. By personal knowledge do you mean carnal knowledge? In that case the answer is positive. A writer, if he is any good, does not describe. He invents or makes out of knowledge personal and impersonal and sometimes he seems to have unexplained knowledge which could come from forgotten racial or family experience. Who teaches the homing pigeon to fly as he does; where does a fighting bull get his bravery, or a hunting dog his nose? This is an elaboration or a condensation on that stuff we were talking about in Madrid that time when my head was not to be trusted.
INTERVIEWER
How detached must you be from an experience before you can write about it in fictional terms? The African air-crashes, for instance?
HEMINGWAY
It depends on the experience. One part of you sees it with complete detachment from the start. Another part is very involved. I think there is no rule about how soon one should write about it. It would depend on how well adjusted the individual was and on his or her recuperative powers. Certainly it is valuable to a trained writer to crash in an aircraft which burns. He learns several important things very quickly. Whether they will be of use to him is conditioned by survival. Survival, with honor, that outmoded and all-important word, is as difficult as ever and as all important to a writer. Those who do not last are always more beloved since no one has to see them in their long, dull, unrelenting, no quarter given and no quarter received, fights that they make to do something as they believe it should be done before they die. Those who die or quit early and easy and with every good reason are preferred because they are understandable and human. Failure and well-disguised cowardice are more human and more beloved.
INTERVIEWER
Could I ask you to what extent you think the writer should concern himself with the sociopolitical problems of his times?
HEMINGWAY
Everyone has his own conscience, and there should be no rules about how a conscience should function. All you can be sure about in a political-minded writer is that if his work should last you will have to skip the politics when you read it. Many of the so-called politically enlisted writers change their politics frequently. This is very exciting to them and to their political-literary reviews. Sometimes they even have to rewrite their viewpoints… and in a hurry. Perhaps it can be respected as a form of the pursuit of happiness.
INTERVIEWER
Has the political influence of Ezra Pound on the segregationalist Kasper had any effect on your belief that the poet ought to be released from St. Elizabeth’s Hospital?
HEMINGWAY
No. None at all. I believe Ezra should be released and allowed to write poetry in Italy on an undertaking by him to abstain from any politics.* I would be happy to see Kasper jailed as soon as possible. Great poets are not necessarily girl guides nor scoutmasters nor splendid influences on youth. To name a few: Verlaine, Rimbaud, Shelley, Byron, Baudelaire, Proust, Gide should not have been confined to prevent them from being aped in their thinking, their manners or their morals by local Kaspers. I am sure that it will take a footnote to this paragraph in ten years to explain who Kasper was.
INTERVIEWER
Would you say, ever, that there is any didactic intention in your work?
HEMINGWAY
Didactic is a word that has been misused and has spoiled. Death in the Afternoon is an instructive book.
INTERVIEWER
It has been said that a writer only deals with one or two ideas throughout his work. Would you say your work reflects one or two ideas?
HEMINGWAY
Who said that? It sounds much too simple. The man who said it possibly had only one or two ideas.
INTERVIEWER
Well, perhaps it would be better put this way: Graham Greene said that a ruling passion gives to a shelf of novels the unity of a system. You yourself have said, I believe, that great writing comes out of a sense of injustice. Do you consider it important that a novelist be dominated in this way—by some such compelling sense?
HEMINGWAY
Mr. Greene has a facility for making statements that I do not possess. It would be impossible for me to make generalizations about a shelf of novels or a wisp of snipe or a gaggle of geese. I’ll try a generalization though. A writer without a sense of justice and of injustice would be better off editing the Year Book of a school for exceptional children than writing novels. Another generalization. You see; they are not so difficult when they are sufficiently obvious. The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof, shit detector. This is the writer’s radar and all great writers have had it.
INTERVIEWER
Finally, a fundamental question: as a creative writer what do you think is the function of your art? Why a representation of fact, rather than fact itself?
HEMINGWAY
Why be puzzled by that? From things that have happened and from things as they exist and from all things that you know and all those you cannot know, you make something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new thing truer than anything true and alive, and you make it alive, and if you make it well enough, you give it immortality. That is why you write and for no other reason that you know of. But what about all the reasons that no one knows?
* In 1958 a Federal court in Washington, D.C., dismissed all charges against Pound, clearing the way for his release from St. Elizabeth’s.
When Forbidden Planet arrived in cinemas in 1956, it was a daring investment in a small genre. At a time when science fiction meant low-budget monster movies and tales of alien invasion, MGM spent big on something far more ambitious: a movie that imagined a world of interplanetary travel, robotics and alien civilizations with real seriousness and scale.
The premise is a familiar sci-fi trope now, but wasn’t then. United Planet Cruiser C-57D crosses the stars using a faster-than-light “hyperdrive” and lands on distant Altair-4. Its mission: find out what happened to the colony there.
The crew, led by Commander Adams (a young Leslie Nielsen), finds Dr Edward Morbius (Walter Pidgeon) living in isolation with his daughter Altaira (Anne Francis) and their mechanical servant, Robby – the screen robot who would go on to be one of sci-fi’s most enduring icons in his own right.
Morbius claims to have unlocked the secrets of the vanished Krell, an ancient civilisation whose technological achievements far outstripped humanity’s. The rest of the colony, he says, were murdered in mysterious circumstances.
The film is interesting to revisit for many reasons, including its interpretation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, and its legacy in shaping sci-fi cinema. But watching it 70 years after its release, perhaps it is most striking for what it has to say about the rise of artificial intelligence in our own age.
Technology may give us extraordinary new power. But it may also give our deepest, least understood desires a power of their own.
The Tempest, transposed
Loosely based on The Tempest, the script replaced Prospero’s magic with advanced science, the enchanted island with a distant planet, and supernatural forces with the power of an alien civilisation.
Morbius stands in for Prospero, Altaira for Miranda, Robby for Ariel – exiled figures ruling over a world shaped by forces just beyond their understanding.
It’s easy to see this device echoed in later epics like Star Wars (1977), Alien (1979) and Dune (1984). Each takes a familiar human story and inflates it to cosmic scale, trading a single kingdom or family for the fate of entire worlds.
But not everything in Forbidden Planet’s plot is borrowed.
Behind the flying saucers, ray guns and at times unsubtle exposition, is an original idea that now shines through as contemporary and cautionary: the Krell vanished because, at the height of their power, they built a machine that could translate thought directly into physical reality.
In doing so they gave their subconscious minds free rein, and were annihilated by monsters born from their own repressed impulses.
Echoes of the Krell in Silicon Valley
Some of the film’s most striking scenes show Morbius leading Commander Adams through the vast machinery that once powered Krell civilisation – thermonuclear reactors stretching for miles, with enough power to rival an “exploding planetary system”.
Early in the film, Morbius demonstrates how he interfaces with the Krell machine via a headset and 3D viewer. Doing so, he boasts, has enhanced his intelligence to superhuman levels.
He has been “plugging in” as often as he can, each time supposedly just chasing a little more of the Krell’s knowledge – but really, we come to realize, for the feeling of intellectual superiority it gives him.
At the film’s climax, Morbius finally understands why the Krell disappeared. What he admired so much as the ultimate evolutionary step – a machine that melded thought and reality – unleashed a “monster from the id”.
Invisible and unstoppable, it tore through the Krell one by one as their own minds turned against them.
The term “id” Morbius reaches for was coined by Freud to describe the primal, irrational part of the subconscious — distinct from the more rational ego and superego.
In 1956, the world had fought two catastrophic world wars in under 40 years, and nuclear weapons had given the id a tool of unprecedented power.
Morbius, reflecting on the Krell’s fate, eulogizes:
“After a million years of shining sanity they could hardly have understood what power was destroying them.”
By the film’s end, Morbius admits the monster on the loose is from his own id, drawing power from the very machine he so admired.
He dies protecting his daughter from the monster, and with his last breath destroys the machine and the Krell planet.
Is AI what we think it is?
Elon Musk recently said AI can lead to “an age of amazing abundance where anybody can have anything they can think of” – the same dream that drove and destroyed both the Krell and Morbius.
Current discussion underwrites that dream, treating AI as our manifest destiny – an inevitable, transformative force we simply need to regulate.
We’re missing a much older, more uncomfortable question: what if AI isn’t new at all? What if it’s just another expression of our most ancient desire for a “brave new world” of better weapons, greater resource exploitation and a more God-like place in the universe?
Forbidden Planet suggests an uncomfortable reading of “AI”: amplified id. Not human intelligence sharpened, but human appetite unleashed.
The Krell did not destroy themselves because their machines failed. They destroyed themselves because their machines succeeded.
As America celebrates its Semiquincentennial (250th anniversary) this year, explore a curated list of materials preserved at the Internet Archive documenting the nation’s founding, the Declaration of Independence, past ephemera created for the nation’s anniversaries, and new efforts to capture and preserve the materials published by democracies.
Democracy’s Library
The Internet Archive’s Democracy’s Library project helps preserve critical information and publications produced by federal, state, provincial, and municipal governments, and makes them available for users to access and to anyone wanting to build new services on these public documents. Learn more about Democracy’s Library.
Declaration of Independence
The National Archives of the United States lists three documents as the “Founding Documents”: the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights.
Preamble to the Declaration of Independence
From article…
The Declaration of Independence was ratified on July 4, 1776, creating a historical date that Americans observe every year as “Independence Day.” Internet Archive preserves many materials related to the Declaration including a souvenir copy, a full reading of the text from LibriVox, and more educational and informative items.
The Declaration of Independence on the Wayback Machine
Internet Archive has been archiving the National Archives and Records Administration website since 1997. Compare the earliest capture (June 6, 1997) of the page displaying the Declaration of Independence via the Wayback Machine to a more recent capture (June 16, 2026). These preserved web pages allow Americans and other observers to trace the ways that presentation of the document has changed online over nearly 30 years.
From article…
How has America celebrated past ‘-Ennial’ anniversaries
Since its founding America has always told stories about itself. These stories see hotspots every 50 years during the various ‘-ennial’ anniversaries dating back to 1826. Below is a selection of materials highlighting each past anniversary. To explore more, check out the broader collections linked within the relevant sections.
Semi-centennial (1826)
On its first 50-year anniversary, America still was in living memory of the American Revolution and the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Almost symbolically, two titans of that moment would pass on that very day: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson.
Jefferson was instrumental in drafting the original Declaration while Adams was one of the 56 signatories. Each man served as President during the earliest years of the United States’ history.
The Semi-Centennial was commonly referred to as the American Jubilee at the time. The document below is a printed version of a speech given by Reverend William B. Johnson in 1826:
Primary Source: Read the full 1826 pamphlet print scan online at the Internet Archive.
“An Oration on the First Jubilee of American Independence (1826)”
The speech traces a providential history of America from European settlement through the Revolution and into the nation’s first fifty years, reflecting the patriotic and deeply religious tone common to many Jubilee observances. It offers a snapshot of how Americans in 1826 understood their country’s past and envisioned its future.
Centennial (1876)
Following the American Civil War, the late 1860s and 1870s saw the passage of the Civil War Amendments (XIII, XIV, XV) that altered the civic order of the nation. As the 100th anniversary came about, the United States hosted the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. Explore more from this moment in our collections.
1872 Map from Caldwell’s Illustrated Combination Centennial Atlas Of Beaver County, Pennsylvania. by J.A. Caldwell (1876).
This map of the United States, published by cartographer J.A. Caldwell around the time of the nation’s Centennial celebrations in 1876, reflects how Americans visualized their country at its 100th anniversary. As a Centennial-era artifact, it captures both the geographic reach of the United States and the national growth, infrastructure, and westward development in the decades following the Civil War.
American democrats need a Hungarian-style landslide to overwhelm Trump’s attempts to rig November’s midterm elections, Sat 1 Aug 2026 05.00 EDT
In these days of extreme weather events, it seems odd to say that the US needs a big landslide. But a landslide defeat for President Donald Trump in November’s midterm elections is exactly what is required if the country is to start reversing his deliberate and rapid erosion of its democracy.
The respected Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Institute at Gothenburg University argues that in 2025 the US saw one of the most rapid declines in liberal democracy on record. “Democracy in the USA,” says its Democracy Report 2026, “is now at its worst in 60 years.” As the imperial republic marks the 250th anniversary of its founding, the danger seen at the very beginning of its constitutional order by anti-federalists such as Patrick Henry – that of an overmighty president abusing his executive power in an attempt to become a new king – has come closer than ever before.
V-Dem analysts note that in 2025 Trump issued no fewer than 225 executive orders whereas the Republican-controlled Congress passed just 49 laws, most of them on minor issues such as “To amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to modify the rules for postponing certain deadlines by reason of disasters”. The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, crafted to advance the so-called unitary executive theory, is, according to the project’s own tracker, more than halfway to completion – helped by rulings from the Supreme Court.
An important chapter in any would-be autocrat’s playbook is fixing the next election. It seems Trump is hard at work on this one too. Beside outrageous levels of partisan gerrymandering (responded to in kind by the Democrats in some places) there are multiple attempts to deny the vote to groups more likely to vote Democrat, whether by restricting mail-in ballots, demanding on-the-spot documentary proof of US citizenship or other legal and procedural devices. If the 3 November election result were to be close in a number of congressional districts that might swing control of the House of Representatives, Trump and the Republicans would pull out every stop to disqualify or exclude Democrat victors.
Hence the imperative of a landslide. As Hungary showed this spring, if the popular revulsion towards an incumbent is sufficiently widespread, and channelled into turning out to vote, it sweeps away all the obstacles that the would-be autocrat puts in place – and those obstacles were, taking all in all, larger in the Hungarian case than they are here. The election may not be fair; it may not even be entirely free; but the result is still irrefutably plain for all to see.
Now, if you ask who is doing most to bring about an anti-Trump landslide, the answer is clear: Donald Trump. After he campaigned on bread-and-butter issues for ordinary Americans, the combination of his tariffs and his war of choice in the Middle East has actually increased the cost of living – most visibly, in petrol prices for motorists. There is, to put it mildly, no obvious path to a victorious peace in a war against Iran which, according to official figures, has cost $37.5bn, with the new administration already requesting another $67.1bn for this purpose. Popular opposition to the war is approaching 60% in opinion polls, as is the president’s disapproval rating. The blatant corruption of his regime adds to his unpopularity. According to one estimate, he has so far enriched himself and his family to the tune of roughly $2bn. The latest revelation is the plan of the Fifa president and Trump crony, Gianni Infantino, to sell stakes in running the World Cup to an investment fund led by Joshua Kushner, the brother-in-law of Trump’s daughter Ivanka. Satire wilts at the pairing of Fifa and Trump.
Gianni Infantino, left, and Donald Trump with the World Cup trophy after the final between Spain and Argentina, 19 July 2026. Photograph: Allstar Picture Library Ltd/Richard Sellers/Apl/Sportsphoto
All this adds up to the electoral equivalent of an open goal for the Democrats. But where’s the Lionel Messi or Harry Kane to put the ball in the net? Nowhere to be seen. As a European in the US, one keeps looking around and asking: “Where’s the leader of the opposition?” Where, to recall the Hungarian example, is an opposition figure like Péter Magyar, leading a disciplined, effective nationwide campaign, answering the widespread feeling that it’s time for a change with “and this is the change you need”?
Friends who study these things here at Stanford University tell me I’m looking for something that usually doesn’t exist at this stage. The 1994 midterm election, when House minority leader Newt Gingrich’s “Contract with America” shaped a nationwide campaign and helped deliver a big Republican victory, is the exception that proves the rule. Usually, the midterms are essentially a referendum on the incumbent president and his party – and usually the incumbents lose some seats, especially in the House of Representatives. But looking back over the results since the second world war, one sees that the level of House seats lost at midterm varies widely, from 54 in 1994 and 63 in 2010 to just five in 1986 and nine in 2022. This time round, a single-digit result would be vehemently and perhaps even violently contested afterwards.
Even if a unifying opposition leader such as Magyar is not to be expected in the US system – not until we get a presidential candidate in 2028 – the Democrats are making a pretty poor job of kicking balls into that open goal. The 75-year-old Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer, hardly resembles a prize striker. In opinion polls, they vie with Trump for unpopularity. Much of the energy is with democratic socialists like New York mayor Zohran Mamdani, but can they win in places like Michigan or Wisconsin? The New York Times columnist and podcaster Ezra Klein has toyed with the notion that this very diversity might be a strength: you need one kind of candidate in Kansas and another kind in Seattle. Horses for courses. But getting the wrong candidate in just a couple of the 35 Senate seats up for grabs this time seems likely to cost the Democrats their already slim chance of flipping the Senate as well.
What’s at stake here is not the future of the Democrats; it’s the future of democracy. A normal midterm change in control of the House is the absolute minimum needed to start checking, if not actually reversing, the unprecedented erosion of liberal democracy under Trump. That check will come partly through Congress’s constitutional powers to control government funding, to investigate and to impeach. If there’s an electoral landslide, however, it will come even more through the psychological shift, as Trump begins to look like his own worst nightmare – being a “loser”. For that very reason, the man who would be king will try first to prevent, then to circumvent and delegitimate a Democrat-controlled House with all the means at his disposal. Nonetheless, this would be the end of the beginning.
Last summer, I wrote a column arguing that Americans had 400 days to save their democracy. It’s now little more than 90.
Timothy Garton Ash is a historian, political writer and Guardian columnist
“Timing lines up remarkably well with gas prices and the resumption of hostilities in Iran,” Silver said on the social platform X.
The prolonged military engagement between the U.S. and Iran has driven up oil and gas prices because of disruptions in the Strait of Hormuz — a critical shipping corridor through which approximately 20 percent of global oil supplies pass.
As the war nears its six-month mark, the average price of a gallon of gas in the U.S. on Friday morning was roughly $4.11, according to AAA, up from about $3.15 a year ago.
Two additional polls released earlier this week also show Trump’s dwindling approval rating, reflecting public dissatisfaction over his handling of the Middle East conflict.
A Quinnipiac University poll released Tuesday showed that 58 percent of surveyed voters disapproved of the president’s job performance, compared with 32 percent who approved. That number marks Trump’s lowest approval rating recorded by the pollster across both of his terms in office.
On Wednesday, an AP-NORC poll similarly found Trump’s approval at 33 percent, down 4 points from the previous AP-NORC survey and also the lowest rating in their polling since his return to the White House.
Trump’s overall average approval rating was 40.6 percent as of Friday morning, according to a polling average from Decision Desk HQ, while his average disapproval rating was 57.5 percent.
Renewed fighting this week has taken its toll on the U.S. economy, elevating affordability concerns ahead of the midterms as prices at the pump and inflation increase.
The Quinnipiac survey found 60 percent of U.S. voters oppose the war — the highest level of opposition recorded since the conflict began on Feb. 28. Nearly three-quarters of Americans said they do not support deploying U.S. troops to Iran.
Similarly, the AP-NORC poll found that 64 percent of Americans believe the war has not been worthwhile — a view shared by 87 percent of Democrats, 37 percent of Republicans and 68 percent of independents.
Public Library Quarterly
DOI: 10.1080/01616846.2026.2725502
Abstract
As artificial intelligence reshapes both library work and the information environment, public libraries must determine whether or how to engage with AI while maintaining library values. To our knowledge, there exists no published analysis of how American and Canadian public library AI policies might link library values and technology adoption. To address this gap, we conducted an environmental scan of public library websites to identify and analyze AI policy statements. Our scan of over 200 library websites identified 32 AI polcies. All reference at least two values, with privacy, security, and responsibility the most frequently cited.
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Judge again blocks Trump’s effort to restrict mail voting as ballots start going out.. The move comes as the Trump administration appeals a related order to the Supreme Court.
0 seconds of 5 minutes, 19 seconds, Live 00:0000:0005: The rushed time frame being pushed by the administration will make voter disenfranchisement “practically inevitable” if the rule is allowed to stay in place, the judge found. Matt Slocum / AP file
A federal judge on Friday temporarily blocked a bid by President Donald Trump for the U.S. Postal Service to exert control over mail-in voting ahead of the midterm elections as one state begins mailing out ballots.
Boston-based U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani, who previously blocked a related effort on mail voting, found the new Postal Service rule dictating how mail-in ballots can be sent is likely unlawful and unconstitutional, prompting her to issue a preliminary injunction.The rushed time frame being pushed by the administration will make voter disenfranchisement “practically inevitable” if the rule is allowed to stay in place, the judge found.
The “court finds, on one side, that immediate implementation of the Final Rule issued less than seventy days before the November 2026 election threatens disenfranchisement of millions of United States citizens who seek to vote by mail,” while “on the other side, that the record includes no evidence relating to fraudulent mail voting to support the rushed implementation of the Final Rule,” Talwani wrote.
She rejected the Justice Department’s request that she pause her order while the administration appeals, and noted that her ruling does not bar states that want to follow the new rules from doing do. Talwani also said the ruling applies only to the midterms, since “the Final Rule imposes no irreparable harm as to later elections and judicial challenges may be addressed in the normal course.”The DOJ did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the judge’s order, but said in a court filing Friday night that it would appeal to the First Circuit Court of Appeals.
The action comes a day after the Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to override a temporary order issued by Talwani last week halting the rule. In that ruling, the judge sided with states and voting rights groups that argued the Postal Service rule unlawfully usurped states’ power to regulate their own elections — and left them facing an “impossible” timeline to comply.“Through the Final Rule, the USPS is refusing to send mail ballots to eligible voters unless States or local election officials submit their mail ballot envelopes and return envelopes and receive advance approval from the USPS without regard to impending deadlines for the November 3, 2026 election,” the judge wrote.
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On Sept. 6, 1947, a rocket launched from an aircraft carrier for the first time. The V-2 rocket was captured from a German manufacturing site by the Allied forces at the end of World War II.
V-2s were the world’s first long-range guided ballistic missile. They were designed by German rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, a famous aerospace engineer, invented them for Nazi Germany before he was secretly moved to the U.S. and started working for NASA. Von Braun and the seized V-2 missile parts were brought to the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, where the scientists assembled the parts and began experimenting with launches.
The first V-2 to launch at sea blasted off from a U.S. Navy ship called the USS Midway in a mission titled “Operation Sandy.” The aircraft carrier sailed a few hundred miles south of Bermuda for the launch. After liftoff, the V-2 started tilting midair and only made it to an altitude of 15,000 feet (4,600 meters) before falling back to Earth.
A V-2 rocket ignites its engine on the deck of the USS Midway during the U.S. Navy’s first ballistic missile test on Sept. 6, 1947. (Image credit: USS Midway Museum)
Why it mattered
Rockets may be great for space exploration, but the technology’s roots are firmly embedded in military applications, with the V-2 rocket standing out as a clear example.
The rocket was designed as a military weapon first and foremost, and it was U.S. military’s push to secure such tech that led to Operation: Paperclip, which secreted Von Braun and many other German aerospace scientists out of Germany at the end of World War II.
Operation: Sandy marked the first ballistic missile launch by the U.S. Navy, but today the such missiles are a standard part of the arsenal of some ships. That all started with the 1947 test flight. It also marked a step forward in U.S. missile technology, which would later evolve into orbital rockets just over a decade later.
While the V-2 rocket that launched from the USS Midway veered off course and began to break apart at an alttude of about 12,000 feet, according to MidwayCurrents.org, it did prove the concept of a missile launch at sea.
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SpaceX launched 27 more of its Starlink internet satellites to orbit today (Sept. 6).
The spacecraft rode to low Earth orbit (LEO) atop a Falcon 9 rocket, which lifted off from California’s Vandenberg Space Force Base at 10:26 a.m. EDT (1426 GMT; 7:26 a.m. local California time). The Falcon 9 rose into blue morning skies, which was something of a rarity; Vandenberg, and other areas of California’s central coast, are often cloaked in fog.
The Falcon 9’s first stage came back to Earth as planned 8.5 minutes later, landing in the Pacific Ocean on the SpaceX drone ship “Of Course I Still Love You.”
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launches 27 Starlink satellites into orbit from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California on Sept. 6, 2026. (Image credit: SpaceX)
It was the 19th flight for this particular booster, which is designated B1088. This marks about the halfway point to the SpaceX record of 37 flights, which was set by B1067 during a Starlink launch on Aug. 25.
The Falcon 9’s upper stage, meanwhile, carried the 27 Starlink satellites to LEO, deploying them on schedule 62 minutes after launch.
SpaceX’s sooty Falcon 9 rocket first stage on the drone ship Of Course I Still Love You in the Pacific Ocean after a successful launch and landing on Sept. 6, 2026. (Image credit: SpaceX)
Today’s launch was the 103rd Falcon 9 mission of 2026. Eighty of those flights have been dedicated to building out the Starlink megaconstellation, by far the largest satellite network ever assembled. It currently consists of more than 11,000 active spacecraft, according to astronomer and satellite tracker Jonathan McDowell.
Starlink missions fly exclusively out of Vandenberg these days. SpaceX used to launch them from Florida as well, but the company recently put those missions on hold until it gets its Starship megarocket up and running on the Space Coast.
SpaceX will rely on Starship to launch its next-gen Starlink V3 satellites, which are bigger and more capable than the current V2. The company wants to assemble a network of about 100,000 Starlink V3s in LEO, Elon Musk has said.
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Star Wars’ starships are almost as memorable the saga’s character and thanks to Lego’s Star Wars range, you can build your own replicas of these iconic craft. We’ve rounded up the very best, from a palm-sized version of Darth Vader’s Tie Fighter to a massive, table-hogging Star Wars Clone Wars-era Venator Star Destroyer.
While several of these sets are display pieces, we’ve included some play-friendly models, such as this mid-sized Lego Star Wars Millennium Falcon that can be swooshed around your living room and this Lego Star Wars Imperial Star Destroyer which, with seven mini-figures and removable roof, will delight younger Star Wars fans.
Read on and build the largest fleet the galaxy has ever known.
Lego
Star Wars UCS Millennium Falcon
Lego
Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith Arc-170 Starfighter
Lego
Star Wars Venator-Class Republic Attack Cruiser
Lego
Star Wars Imperial Star Destroyer
Lego
Star Wars Ultimate Collector Series X-Wing Starfighter
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by 
Ernest Hemingway, ca. 1939. Photograph by Lloyd Arnold
