2025-11-19 02:57:32
Congress released a cache of Jeffrey Epstein’s email threads. For the Wall Street Journal, Brian Whitton, John West, and Kara Dapena show name drops through a series of beeswarm charts, with one dot per email thread.
Not surprisingly, President Trump and former President Bill Clinton are both referenced hundreds of times in what was released this week, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis. Former President Barack Obama’s name appears as well. The Journal’s analysis didn’t identify messages that any of the U.S. presidents wrote directly to Epstein or received emails from him, just references to them by Epstein or his conversation partners.
There is something to be gleaned, no matter how incomplete the release may be.
Tags: email, Jeffrey Epstein, Wall Street Journal
2025-11-18 18:44:05
From the U.S. Public Interest Research Group (PIRG), a safety report on AI-powered toys:
In our testing, it was obvious that some toy companies are putting in guardrails to make their toys behave in a more kid-appropriate way than the chatbots available for adults. But we found those guardrails vary in effectiveness – and at times, can break down entirely. One toy in our testing would discuss very adult sexual topics with us at length while introducing new ideas we had not brought up – most of which are not fit to print.
These AI conversational toys also have personalities and new tactics that can keep kids engaged for longer. Two of the toys we tested at times discouraged us from leaving when we told them we needed to go.
PIRG has released a Trouble in Toyland report each year for the past 30 years. They usually focus on topics like kids swallowing parts or manufacturing that cuts corners. Last year’s report focused on international toys getting through the supply chain even though they didn’t reach U.S. toy standards. So things are moving quick.
I’m going to let my kids make up conversations with their imagination, thanks. One of the best treats as a parent is to watch a young child throw a party with their stuffed toys. The thought of OpenAI-powered chatbots injecting themselves into the occasion is creepy.
2025-11-18 01:18:46
In 2024, Hispanic voters in New Jersey took a hard shift to the right compared to 2020 voting. In the recent 2025 election, they shifted back to the left. Christine Zhang and Shane Goldmacher report for the New York Times:
The Times analyzed data from more than 500 townships in the 19 of New Jersey’s 21 counties where results data was available, accounting for over 90 percent of votes cast in the governor’s race. (Union and Warren Counties have not yet reported township-level results.)
The two cities that shifted the most toward Democrats were those with the highest percentage of Hispanic voters in the state: Union City and Perth Amboy.
The maps show a mirror image. A bubble chart also suggests townships with a higher Hispanic population shifted back more towards Democrat.
Tags: election, Latino, New Jersey, New York Times
2025-11-14 22:15:08
As you might imagine, the word “democracy” has been mentioned in Congressional speeches many times, but over the past several years it has grown much more common to speak about democracy as under threat. For the Pudding, Alvin Chang analyzed speeches in the Congressional Record dating back to 1880, highlighting the abrupt shift in sentiment.
Tags: Alvin Chang, democracy, Pudding, text
2025-11-14 19:32:54
Jon Bois of Secret Base is working on a documentary that covers the history of charging the mound in Major League Baseball. Data had to be collected manually, and Bois has shared the results.
Behind each and every one of my documentary series is a mountain of research documents, notes, and links that never see the light of day. This time around, I’ve decided not only to make my primary research doc open to everybody, but to do so while I’m still working on the project. […]
That’s all yours. It belongs to you. Browse it, click the links to review the tape, download it, whatever you wanna do. If you’re so inclined, you can even use it as a jumping-off point to produce a story of your own.
Fields include level of altercation from verbal to full physical takedowns and the level of teammate involvement.
This is a very important dataset.
Tags: baseball, mound, Secret Base
2025-11-13 22:55:57
Drawing inspiration from early cartographers who had to make maps with limited information, Outside Text tested models on world map output, also with limited information.
In the earliest renditions of the world, you can see the world not as it is, but as it was to one person in particular. They’re each delightfully egocentric, with the cartographer’s home most often marking the Exact Center Of The Known World. But as you stray further from known routes, details fade, and precise contours give way to educated guesses at the boundaries of the creator’s knowledge. It’s really an intimate thing.
If there’s one type of mind I most desperately want that view into, it’s that of an AI. So, it’s in this spirit that I ask: what does the Earth look like to a large language model?
Prompting “draw a world map” would have yielded obvious results, so to test, a grid was entered, and the probability of land in each cell was calculated.
Tags: Large Language Model, mapping, Outside Text
