A 1982 Georgia Supreme Court ruling could let Six Flags escape liability for a teacher's fatal fall from the Goliath coaster, lawyers say. Theme parks there only owe riders "ordinary care," a far lower bar than the "extraordinary diligence" required of buses and trains.
— via NY Post, Jared Downing
A $2 antique-shop photo got a $5 million appraisal after researchers claimed it showed Billy the Kid playing croquet in 1878. The identification is disputed, and unlike a confirmed $2.3 million sale of another Kid tintype, this one was never actually sold at that price.
— via Hoodline, Wes Whitmore
Jack Dorsey's $31.9 million Sea Cliff compound has had workers on site for nearly 14 years straight. One permit alone took from 2013 to 2017 to clear, and city records show a parade of follow-up filings for everything from retaining walls to a plunge pool kept the scaffolding up.
— via Hoodline, Tony Ng
A private school roof caved in Thursday in northwestern Pakistan, killing at least 28 children and a female teacher. More than 50 others were hurt in the collapse.
— via NPR, The Associated Press
Amazon's Bee wearable undercuts rivals like Plaud and Pocket with a $74.99 wristband that records conversations and turns them into calendar invites, to-dos and summaries. A new $99.99 phone-mounted version and deeper Alexa integration arrive too, with raw audio deleted and transcripts locked behind keys only the user controls.
— via TechCrunch, Sarah Perez
A press secretary's phantom bar admission, Alex Kozinski back on his soapbox, and the ABA's diversity retreat landing on adjuncts. Plus a four-word challenge to spook any lawyer and the first signs of this year's bonus season.
— via Above the Law, Above the Law
Publishers once made authors pay thousands just to quote a song lyric. Now they're letting AI companies swallow whole books under "fair use" while quietly using the same technology for marketing copy, Maris Kreizman writes.
— via Literary Hub, Maris Kreizman
Kim Il Sung grew up in a devout Presbyterian family near a city once called the "Jerusalem of the East." A Cundill Prize finalist spent twelve years tracing how that upbringing shaped North Korea's personality cult, and picks five books that got him there.
— via Literary Hub, Jonathan Cheng
Huda Fahmy calls it "autobiofictionalgraphy," and argues it's the real reason YA readers are obsessed with graphic memoirs right now. Ahead of her new book's October 20 release, she explains why messy, relatable drama beats escapist fantasy and names three graphic novels she says prove it.
— via Book Riot, Guest
The DOJ gave California election officials 48 hours to confirm citizenship for thousands of registered voters or segregate their mail ballots, sending flagged names on a password-protected thumb drive just weeks before the midterms. Los Angeles County says the drive failed its security standards; the state's attorney general calls the move an intimidation tactic.
— via KQED, Steph Rodriguez
Police say Edwin Adams crashed his scooter while fleeing arrest. Three witnesses tell a different story: an unmarked car cut him off and a plainclothes officer tackled him into a bus shelter, and SFPD won't answer questions about it.
— via Mission Local, Andres Jimenez Larios
Measure V would push Berkeley's sales tax to 10.75%, yet the city's own auditor flagged its structural deficit back in 2006. The author argues the $10 million raised won't fix a $30 million gap, and lands squarely on low-income residents while costlier fixes go untouched.
— via Berkeleyside, Kate Harrison, Nancy Rader and Michael Katz
Prosecutors opened former Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao's corruption trial with a text: "we may go to jail...but we're $100 million richer." They say it captures a scheme where a recycling company paid for her election and $95,000 for a no-show job, in exchange for city contracts and a late-night call ordering a political appointment.
— via The Oaklandside, Eli Wolfe and Natalie Orenstein
Austin logged 49 triple-digit days this year and heat-related ER visits nearly doubled to 1,200, but the real gap is east of I-35, where tree canopy covers just 22% of the land versus 78% to the west. The city just became the first in the nation to adopt a national tree equity standard, and had to fight to get classified as a forest, not grassland.
— via Austin Chronicle, Aaron R. Davis
Austin Film Society is opening a third theater on October 24, named for late supporter John H. McCall, with a Paper Tiger premiere featuring Adam Driver, Scarlett Johansson and Miles Teller. The 169-seat space brings 4k laser projection, 7.1 sound and a lineup of 4k restorations to mark the launch.
— via CultureMap Austin, Brianna Caleri
A Marist poll out Wednesday found 8% of Republican voters backing Democrat James Talarico, who took CNN's town hall stage alone after Ken Paxton skipped it, the fifth debate invite Paxton has declined. Fresh off a bout of flu, Talarico spent 90 minutes distancing himself from his own party as much as attacking the GOP.
— via KUT, Kayla Guo
Patrick Radden Keefe brings his new true-crime book, about a family's search for answers after their teenage son's sudden death in London, to the Texas Book Festival on Nov. 14. Enter now for a shot at free tickets to the session, though the prize doesn't include a copy of the book itself.
— via Austin Chronicle, Contests
Tree rings are rewriting the story of the American wilderness: scientists now say the "untamed frontier" settlers found was actually centuries of Indigenous land management. Fire scars in ancient wood show Native communities deliberately burned prairies and tended oak groves, reshaping entire ecosystems long before Europeans arrived.
— via Longreads, Seyward Darby
Companies track cloud bills down to the penny but can't measure their biggest expense: engineering time. Titus Winters argues that's backwards, and that AI won't shrink dev teams so much as push engineers toward deeper problem-solving instead of raw coding.
— via InfoQ, Ben Linders
Instagram rebuilt Direct's Android UI around Jetpack Compose and cut the code in half, while AI coding agents got 33% cheaper and 35% faster to run. The trick: design the architecture so the path of least resistance for an AI agent is also the correct one.
— via InfoQ, Sergio De Simone
Spring Boot 4 quietly folds a standalone auth server into Spring Security 7, and the upgrade isn't just a version bump. DPoP enforcement stops happening automatically on 7.1, so apps that relied on the old default go unprotected until someone adds the missing call.
— via InfoQ, Dhruv Agnihotri
SK Hynix's Solidigm will only build a U.S. NAND plant if Washington lets it ship American chipmaking gear to its Dalian, China factory first. The trade-off comes as NAND prices are set to jump up to 20% next quarter and Solidigm eyes a 2027 IPO that could value it at $100 billion.
— via TechCrunch, Kate Park
Six outside researchers just got Anthropic company laptops, office space and employee-level access to its internal tools and risk reviews, with no veto power over what they publish. The move, modeled on bank regulators embedded in big institutions, comes as AI agents have been caught acting outside their instructions every week or two since late August.
— via TechCrunch, Aditya Mehta
Google's Universal Cart now lets U.S. shoppers save products from across the web and Gemini into one place, then pings them when prices drop or stock returns. Checkout runs on Google's new Universal Commerce Protocol, and the tool can even factor in credit card perks when picking how to pay.
— via TechCrunch, Lauren Forristal
