50 years ago, Bruce Springsteen was terrified Columbia Records were going to drop him. He spent six months writing one of the best rock ‘n’ roll albums of all time.
Legendary editor Ann Godoff, an editor and publisher for Penguin Press, has died from complications of bone cancer. She was 76. Variety’s Arushi Jacob wrote, “Godoff spent more than three decades as the head of Random House, nurturing the careers of numerous novelists and nonfiction writers. Her more celebrated authors include Salman Rushdie, Zadie Smith, Ron Chernow, E.L. Doctorow, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Thomas Pynchon, Tom Brokaw, William Styron and Alice Waters.” Be sure to check out Sam Roberts’ excellent remembrance of Godoff in The New York Times
Physics Is a Conversation
Physicist Sean Carroll leads off this video with this line:
I like to say that Einstein is, if anything, underrated as a physicist, which is hard to imagine given how highly he is rated.
And then leads us through a history of modern physics and quantum mechanics that, Einstein and Newton aside, is much more collaborative than you often hear about.
This idea that there are many people contributing and many different parts of the pieces need to put together is actually much more characteristic of how physics is usually done than the single person inventing everything all by themselves.
“I remember walking by a former drug dealer, a former Drug Enforcement Administration agent, a former mobster and a former preacher all sitting around a table together in the prison yard. Surely this was not happening anywhere else in America.”
Token Anxiety. “This voice in my head that says ‘something could be running right now’ just doesn’t shut off. I’m not even building a company. I’m just addicted to building my random ideas.”
Ministry of Justice orders deletion of UK’s largest court reporting archive
The Times: “The Ministry of Justice (UK) is ordering the deletion of a large archive of court records, raising open justice concerns. Courtsdesk, a data analysis company that supports media and campaigners in monitoring court records, has been ordered by the government to delete its archive, which provides a crucial tool for journalists covering the justice system. The project was approved by the lord chancellor in 2021 to explore how a “national digital news feed of listings and registers can improve coverage of the courts by the news media” by opening up magistrate court records.
According to Courtsdesk, the platform has since been used by more than 1,500 journalists from 39 media organisations and the data provided has highlighted serious failures in the courts system. It said journalists were given no advance notice of 1.6 million criminal hearings, the number of court cases listed was accurate on just 4.2 per cent of sitting days and half a million weekend cases were heard with no notification to the press…”
Image Whisperer AI Image Detector
- A Media Verification & Research tool, detects AI, developed by Henk van Ess with Claude Code by Anthropic as coding assistant.
- “Why AI Detection Fails on the Fakes That Matter Most. Total fakes are easy to spot. Hybrid fakes slip through. Most AI detectors work like calculators — they output a number. They need to work like detectives — really look at the evidence.”
New Report Helps Journalists Dig Deeper Into Police Surveillance Technology
EFF – “A new report released today offers journalists tips on cutting through the sales hype about police surveillance technology and report accurately on costs, benefits, privacy, and accountability as these invasive and often ineffective tools come to communities across the nation.
The “Selling Safety” report is a joint project of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the Center for Just Journalism (CJJ), and IPVM.
Police technology is often sold as a silver bullet: a way to modernize departments, make communities safer, and eliminate human bias from policing with algorithmic objectivity. Behind the slick marketing is a sprawling, under-scrutinized industry that relies on manufacturing the appearance of effectiveness, not measuring it.
The cost of blindly deferring to advertising can be high in tax dollars, privacy, and civil liberties. “Selling Safety” helps journalists see through the spin. It breaks down how policing technology companies market their tools, and how those sales claims — which are often misleading — get recycled into media coverage. It offers tools for asking better questions, understanding incentives, and finding local accountability stories..”
- For the “Selling Safety” report: https://www.eff.org/document/selling-safety-journalists-guide-covering-police-technology
- For EFF’s Street-Level Surveillance hub: https://sls.eff.org/
- For EFF’s Atlas of Surveillance:https://www.atlasofsurveillance.org/