CULT OF JAMES

On April 23, 2026, a bulldozer scraped a fifty-foot-wide path through a 1,000-year-old fish-shaped geoglyph etched into the floor of the Sonoran Desert. The Las Playas Intaglio — 200 feet long, carved into the hardpan of what is now the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge — had survived a millennium of sun, wind, and monsoon. It did not survive a…

The phrase came from a Republican. Jim Bolin served in the South Dakota Legislature for sixteen years. When he described how redistricting worked in 2011 and 2021, he didn’t mention fairness. He mentioned the Voting Rights Act. He called it a “silent partner in the room.” There was, he said, “a strong feeling on the part of the Legislature that…

Seventy-one minutes. Beat Saber isn’t a game when you play it for seventy-one minutes. It’s not a warm-up. It’s not killing time before bed. It’s a decision to stand in a dark room and swing until the weight lifts — the other weight, the one that doesn’t show on a scale. 838 calories. That’s more than most people burn on…

In 1998, forty-six state attorneys general settled with the tobacco industry. The Master Settlement Agreement was worth $246 billion over twenty-five years — the largest civil litigation settlement in American history at that time. Tribes were not at the table. The settlement went to states. Over nineteen years, $425 billion in tobacco revenue flowed in — $148 billion from the…

The Ohlone people gathered acorns on the east shore of San Francisco Bay for at least 4,700 years. We know this because of the shellmounds — more than 425 burial sites ringing the bay, living cemeteries where ancestors were laid to rest in layers of shell and earth. Almost all of them have been paved over. The West Berkeley Shellmound,…

The Cherokee Nation was the first tribe to sue. In April 2017, before most state attorneys general had even convened task forces, the Cherokee Nation filed suit against McKesson, Cardinal Health, AmerisourceBergen, CVS, Walgreens, and Walmart. The claim was specific: these companies violated sovereign Cherokee law by failing to prevent the diversion of pain pills to the black market, flooding…

The foundation of nearly every AI agent in production is a Python web framework most people have never heard of. Starlette powers FastAPI, which powers vLLM, LiteLLM, Google’s ADK-Python, Ray Serve, BentoML, most OpenAI-compatible proxy servers, and the MCP servers that give AI agents access to tools. It has 325 million weekly downloads and more than 400,000 dependents on GitHub….

On May 22, Universal Music Group and TikTok announced a new multi-year global licensing agreement with “expanded AI protections” for UMG’s artists and songwriters. The press release uses the phrase “human artistry” twice. TikTok will remove unauthorized AI-generated music from its platform. Attribution systems will be improved. Taylor Swift’s voice is safe. Drake’s voice is safe. Kendrick Lamar’s voice is…

Amazon’s Bee is a $49.99 wristband that records your conversations, transcribes them in the cloud, and generates summaries, reminders, and to-do lists. It requires access to your location, photos, contacts, calendar, notifications, and — if you choose — your health data. Amazon promises the audio is deleted after transcription. They promise only you can access your data. They promise end-to-end…

California has 760,000 people who identify as Native American. More than any other state. Its schools count 24,822 Native American students. The actual number may be 156,000. That’s a 90 percent undercount. Not a rounding error. Not a data gap. Ninety percent of Native American students in the largest state in the country, invisible in the system that’s supposed to…