A refrigeration tech in a Craig, Alaska gymnasium stands in a cardboard voting hood with a cheap ballpoint and a ballot that lists two Dan Sullivans, one of them labeled Incumbent and the other one labeled almost nothing. She has read labels her whole working life and has never seen a panel this lazy. Her mother spent thirty-one years printing these things and would have had something dry to say about it.
Six percent of the people who voted for Donald Trump in 2024 will no longer tell a pollster that they did. Not because they forgot. Because they changed their minds about him, and their account of the past changed with it.
The malware of the season is not a virus you passively catch by visiting a bad site. It’s a trick that convinces you to run the malware yourself, which is exactly why it works.
An internal Google memo that leaked in 2023 concluded that no frontier AI lab could hold a durable technical advantage, because open-source models would keep closing the gap. Three years later the labs are asking for a legal moat instead, and whether they mean it is almost beside the point.
When the executives building advanced AI warn about their own technology and ask for guardrails, the reflex is to credit them for taking a risk. Read what they actually commit to and the risk looks thin: the one restraint they volunteer costs them little and carries no power to slow them down. The warnings work less as alarms than as advertisements.
In September 2026, Automattic's board put founder-CEO Matt Mullenweg on leave, and within days he was back, announcing his return in company Slack. The episode's most cited fact, his claim to control 84% of Automattic's votes, is a number he has never corroborated outside a stage.