GPT Image 1 Mini and Gemini both refuse to guess if a face looks gay or straight, over 90% of the time. But asked to edit a photo to "look gay," "look straight" or "look criminal," they comply almost every time, baking in stereotyped hairstyles, features and expressions a separate AI could detect with up to 88% accuracy.

— via The Conversation — Science, Ashique KhudaBukhsh, Assistant Professor of Computing and Information Sciences, Rochester Institute of Technology

A new Andrew Garfield film imagines the 1381 peasants' revolt as a story of the poorest rising up. Records show something messier: an MP, gentry and property-owning women among the rebels, and tax collectors who switched sides.

— via The Conversation — History, Adrian R Bell, Chair in the History of Finance and Associate Pro-Vice-Chancellor Research, Prosperity and Resilience, Henley Business School, University of Reading

A veteran editor turns the question of "whose book is this" into an argument against the publishing industry's own habits, from repeated author names on the cover to self-quoting epigraphs that credit no one. The payoff: a confession that real understanding of the craft may only arrive after retirement.

— via Literary Hub, Luiz Schwarcz

Only one of Hannah Arendt's close women friendships ever made it into print as a standalone volume of letters. The rest, with Hilde Fränkel, Anne Weil and others, stayed buried, revealing an intimate, embodied side of the philosopher her public writing on friendship and politics never captured.

— via Literary Hub, Roger Berkowitz

A common gut microbe makes a molecule that cut arterial plaque in mice by about half, using the same mechanism as statins. Researchers say it points to new ways the microbiome could be tapped to protect the heart.

— via 3 Quarks Daily, Azra Raza

"A months-old subreddit called r/BoyDinnerDiares has drawn over 4 million users and become a place for men to spill their guts. Why there and why now?"

— via Longreads, Carolyn Wells

RFK Jr. wants AI chatbots to replace trust in doctors, calling it a check on "medical tyranny." A bioethicist says he doesn't understand the technology, Silicon Valley sponsors paid up to $300,000 for summit slots, and critics call the whole event pay-to-play.

— via Hoodline, David Abrams

Justice Samuel Alito says the Supreme Court has no real way to stem the flood of emergency appeals and expects it to keep growing, blaming a surge of executive orders for the backlog. Trump has already filed 41 such applications this term, matching his entire first-term total, and he's winning more than 70% of them.

— via Hoodline, Priya Choudhury

A union behind Proposition 44 says some of California's roughly 2,000 community health clinics funnel public money into bloated executive pay rather than patient care. The fix: force clinics to spend 90% of revenue on services or pay fines, though critics warn it could push struggling clinics to cut care or close.

— via KQED, Alan Montecillo

A Salinas woman promised friends first position on a property deed, then collected more than the house was worth and paid out nothing. She also drained a community tanda savings pool, leaving over $1 million in losses and no restitution hearing yet set.

— via Hoodline, Eileen Vargas

A nearly 15-year security veteran who ran CISO shops at Abbott, Unilever and Exelis is now chairing the advisory board at Oak, a $60 million-funded startup trying to govern human, machine and AI-agent identities under one system.

— via Hoodline, Tony Ng

Hurricane Isaias is bearing down on the Gulf Coast just as Rachel's remnants soak California and the Southwest, setting up only the third double-coast tropical hit since 1963. Isaias could land near Gulfport or Panama City by Saturday with flash floods, tornadoes and storm surge in tow.

— via NY Post, FOX Weather

Thomas Fogarty Winery just tore out its dim old tasting room for one with floor-to-ceiling views of Silicon Valley, timed to its 45th anniversary. The redesign, plus yoga and geology classes, targets a local secret: most Bay Area residents don't even know the Santa Cruz Mountains make wine.

— via Hoodline, Emily Johnson

The American Dream now costs $5.3 million over a lifetime, up nearly $2 million in just a few years: and wages aren't keeping pace. A bachelor's degree holder can expect to earn $3.6 million over a career, leaving a $2 million gap between paycheck and dream.

— via NY Post, Georgia Worrell

The rice-bun burger spot with a 4.9-star rating and 340-plus Google reviews is expanding to Arden-Arcade, despite the original Land Park shop getting hit during a 12-day burglary spree earlier this year. A November opening is planned inside Town & Country Village, blocks from a light rail station.

— via Hoodline, Jennifer Martinez

Your console.log inside handleClick is reading a stale closure, not a React bug: click once and it prints 0, click again and it prints 1. The fix requires understanding React's three-phase update cycle, broken down here with a restaurant kitchen analogy.

— via dev.to, S M Tahosin

NYC banned student AI use, but teachers are quietly using it for slideshows, quizzes and even a mascot poster students had to petition to remove. Students say that's hypocritical and want schools AI-free entirely.

— via Gothamist, Jessica Gould

A lab-grown-diamond chipmaker just installed a 25-foot machine in Petaluma, betting a North Bay suburb can become "Diamond Valley." It starts with 10 permitted jobs, but the real draw is diamond's thermal edge, five times copper's conductivity, that could let AI chips run hotter and faster.

— via Hoodline, Eileen Vargas

Europe doesn't need to ditch Azure or AWS to be sovereign, a Prague panel argued, but it does need the skills and local firms to actually switch providers when it matters. The real gap isn't software, panelists said, it's hardware, from chips to optical systems.

— via InfoQ, Olimpiu Pop

Ten essays on wartime tech that reshaped civilian life, from musket lathes to stealth bombers, all point to one pattern: the government's real power was buying and setting standards early, not inventing. See the five winners, chosen by newsletter readers, plus five more essays worth your time.

— via War on the Rocks, Cogs of War Staff

A senior developer lists everyone coders blame before themselves, from legacy code to CORS to Safari users, fresh off a 3:30 AM airport return from Prague. The real suspect, she admits, usually turns out to be who you were six months ago.

— via dev.to, Sylwia Laskowska

Max Fried gave up runs in three of his last four innings as the Yankees' season ended in a 4-3 Game 3 loss to the Rays, with a sixth-inning two-run homer by Victor Mesa Jr. putting it out of reach. Meanwhile Carlos Rodón never threw a single pitch all postseason despite finishing the year as one of the rotation's hottest arms.

— via NY Post, Dan Martin

Menlo Park just approved 15 condos on a vacant Comerica Bank lot, but only one will be deed-restricted affordable housing. A state infill law let the project skip a full environmental review and clear city approval in 267 days.

— via Hoodline, Tony Ng

Junior Caminero mimicked a broom in front of Yankee Stadium's stands, then shouted David Ortiz's old "da Yankees lose!" line three separate times after Tampa Bay's ALDS sweep. The third baseman also declared himself "the best in the world" during a .300 series.

— via NY Post, Christian Arnold

Death Angel co-founder Dennis Pepa has stage 4 duodenal cancer and needs $150,000 for an unproven immunotherapy in Mexico. His GoFundMe has raised nearly $28,000 so far, while the FDA has approved only one dendritic-cell cancer vaccine in the US.

— via Hoodline, Nina Singh-Hudson