CULT OF JAMES

SpaceX filed its S-1 today. The document is hundreds of pages of legal disclosure filed under penalty of perjury, and it contains things Elon Musk has never said at Davos. xAI lost $6.4 billion in 2025. Revenue was $3.2 billion. The gap between those numbers is the size of a small country’s GDP. In Q1 2026 alone, the AI segment…

CISA — the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency — exists for one reason: to tell everyone else how to secure their systems. They publish the guidelines. They run the advisories. They are the federal government’s answer to the question who watches the network? On November 13, 2025, a contractor working for Nightwing — a government services firm based in Dulles,…

Today Google announced it’s bringing deepfake detection to Chrome and Search. OpenAI announced it’s joining the C2PA provenance standard and integrating Google’s SynthID watermarking into its products. Both companies framed this as making AI-generated content easier to identify. The announcements sound responsible. The math doesn’t. Here’s what the detection tools do: they check whether an image was made by Google…

At Glendale Community College in Phoenix, Arizona, on May 15, 2026, dozens of graduates walked across the stage and heard nothing. The college had deployed a new AI-powered name-reading system for commencement. The system mispronounced some names. It skipped others entirely. The names on-screen stopped matching the people walking. The ceremony paused twice. College President Tiffany Hernandez apologized and called…

In April, I wrote about the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians and the Spirit Lake Tribe. They sued North Dakota over a redistricting map that diluted Native voting strength. They won at trial. A federal court ordered new maps. Three tribal members got elected under those maps. Then the Eighth Circuit said they couldn’t sue. Not that they were…

In 1978, you could sit in economy class with 35 inches between your knees and the seat in front of you. The seat was 19 inches wide. A meal came with the ticket. Your bags flew free. You didn’t choose this. It was just what the seat was. In 2026, economy class offers 28 to 31 inches of pitch. The…

In Marietta, Georgia, there is a garden with more than four hundred Cherokee plants. Bloodroot for red dye and skin medicine. Wild ginger — present in seventy percent of Cherokee medicinal formulations. Black walnut for food and crafts. Tulip poplar for canoes and shelter. Heirloom vegetables grown from seeds shipped from the Cherokee Nation seed bank. In Oklahoma. That’s the…

Sixty-six minutes in the headset. No miles logged because the feet never left the room, but the body was somewhere else entirely — swinging through neon corridors, slicing blocks on the beat, heart rate climbing past 120 and staying there. Beat Saber doesn’t look like a workout from the outside. It looks like someone flailing in a living room. From…

Apple’s revamped Siri will offer auto-deleting chats. Users can set conversations to vanish after 30 days, one year, or keep them indefinitely. Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reports the options mirror what iMessage already offers. The feature ships with iOS 27 this fall. Privacy as product. Apple’s signature move. Here’s the timeline. In July 2019, a Guardian whistleblower revealed that Apple contractors…

Kalshi is not a sportsbook. Kalshi is a “designated contract market” regulated by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. It offers “event contracts” — financial derivatives that happen to resolve based on the outcomes of NFL games, NBA games, college football games, and boxing matches. Ninety percent of its $178 billion in annualized trading volume comes from these contracts. It raised…