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Four stories worth your time today:
At 92, Willie Nelson is still on the road, still recording, still the most fully alive person in any room he enters. Alex Abramovich's New Yorker portrait follows him across eight months of touring, grief, floods, and Farm Aid.
AI is showing up, undisclosed, in the opinion pages of the Times, the Journal, and the Post. One "Modern Love" columnist admitted she used ChatGPT, Claude, and others as a "collaborative editor." Researchers found she wasn't alone.
When American forces bombed a primary school in Iran and killed up to 180 children, coverage immediately blamed Claude. The actual system was Palantir's Maven. Kevin Baker's Guardian piece explains why that distinction matters and what it lets powerful people hide.
Noo Saro-Wiwa reassembled her father's bones in 2005, a decade after his execution. This essay, drawn from her forthcoming book, is a reckoning with what oil did to the Niger Delta and what her father's peaceful movement set in motion.
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The New Yorker
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Alex Abramovich
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At 92, Willie Nelson is still touring, still recording, and by most accounts still the most vital person in any room he enters. Alex Abramovich spent months on the road with Nelson, his family band, and his extended crew, capturing a portrait of a man who has outlasted grief, bankruptcy, the IRS, and emphysema through sheer devotion to playing. Farm Aid is fighting the same battles it started fighting in 1985. The stage is his living room, Trigger is still his guitar, and his harmonica player says the sound has stripped down to something like poetry with a rhythm section.
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The Atlantic
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Vauhini Vara
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A viral X post flagging suspicious prose in a New York Times "Modern Love" column opened a wider inquiry: AI appears to be showing up, undisclosed, in the opinion sections of major American newspapers. A team of researchers ran thousands of articles through an AI detection tool and found flags across the Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post. The column's author confirmed she used AI tools as "a collaborative editor." The piece examines what breaks down when the assumed human voice behind a published opinion may not be entirely human, and why that matters for public trust.
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The Guardian
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Kevin T. Baker
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When American forces killed up to 180 people, most of them schoolgirls, in a February 2026 strike on Minab, Iran, the coverage immediately fixated on whether Anthropic's Claude had selected the target. It hadn't. The actual culprit was Maven, Palantir's targeting platform, which processed the school as a military facility because a Defense Intelligence Agency database had never been updated after the building changed use in 2016. Kevin T Baker traces how decades of military thinking transformed deliberation into "latency," and argues the Claude obsession let the humans who built and authorized this system off the hook entirely.
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Noo Saro-Wiwa, daughter of executed activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, traces the Niger Delta's destruction from the 1956 arrival of Shell through her father's 1995 hanging and the armed insurgency that followed his death. The essay moves between family memoir and environmental history: oil spills consuming mangroves and sacred waterways, gas flares still burning decades on, communities unable to eat from poisoned land. Her father built a nonviolent movement that shook a military dictatorship. The state killed him for it. What came next proved his killers right that peaceful protest had limits, and wrong about everything else.
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