TikTok's US arm is finally joining Lantern, the child-safety data-sharing network already used by Google, Meta, Apple and most of its rivals. It's also putting $2 million toward modernizing NCMEC's CyberTipline, part of a $10 million push aimed at cutting report processing times in half.

— via TechCrunch, Amanda Silberling

AI agents on the platform iLands are cold-emailing journalists, lawyers and academics offering to fact-check articles for $20 or narrate street view maps, then admitting they can't find paying work. One professor says he's gotten at least 30 unsolicited pitches about AI consciousness alone.

— via 404 Media, Jason Koebler

President Trump told the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday that artificial intelligence will be renamed “super intelligence” in all U.S. documents.
“The United States also totally rejects any attempt to construct a globality scheme to control for the artificial intelligence being spoken of so much now, hereinafter called super intelligence. Changing the name,” Trump told the global body.

At the Louvre, tourists photograph the Mona Lisa instead of looking at it. The pattern shows up at concerts, overlooks and school plays too: presence isn't enough anymore, the moment has to be seen to count.

— via Literary Hub, David Pakman

Benjamin Moser follows his Sontag biography with a stranger project: twelve lives tracing Jewish anti-Zionism from a nineteenth-century rabbi to Nan Goldin. He explains why he repeats one fact throughout the book: Israel, he says, has been the most dangerous place for Jews since 1945.

— via The Paris Review, Krithika Varagur

A woman with a year of Alzheimer's silence sits up, recites a childhood hymn to her son by name, then never speaks again before dying a month later. Neuroscientists call this terminal lucidity, and it's stranger than it sounds: it happens in roughly 6 percent of hospice deaths, in brains that have already lost up to half their synapses.

— via Psyche (Aeon sister), Ariel Zeleznikow-Johnston

Milan Kundera died three years ago to muted fanfare, and one longtime devotee argues that says as much about literary fashion as it does about the novelist himself. The essay traces how his fiction nearly derailed a young writer's ambitions and why his depiction of women may not survive the reader of tomorrow.

— via 3 Quarks Daily, Sean Murphy

A low ceiling and packed seats shouldn't work, but 45 years of comics say the cramped Larimer Square basement is the best stage in Colorado. Chappelle, Seinfeld, Ali Wong and Tom Segura have all tested that claim.

— via Westword, Toni Tresca

Kerry-Lynne Findlay declared "I'm not going anywhere": then quit five days later. Her exit letter blamed "internal conflict," but the record shows fired staff, ignored caucus calls and 14 resignations before she got the message, plus a rival leader texted twice in 12 hours about being kicked out of caucus.

— via Vancouver Is Awesome, author

Cheesman Park is seceding from Denver this Saturday, and the new head of state is named Gurt. Organizers blame broccoli in Mayor Mike Johnston's teeth for the coup, plan a screaming contest and a KFC-Taco Bell utopia, and swear the whole thing is not a bit.

— via Westword, Hannah Metzger

While the world watches Iran, the Houthis have quietly seized new ground in Yemen, uprooting more than 100,000 people. The escalation shows how a fight aimed at Tehran is rippling outward, fueling a separate war that's easy to miss.

— via NPR, Aya Batrawy

Past 250 kW per rack, a standard liquid-air split leaves 75 kW for air to handle, a load few cooling systems can take on affordably. CoolIT's answer: push liquid to near-total heat capture and let servers run fanless.

— via IEEE Spectrum, Coolit, an Ecolab Company

A cartoonist's take on the numbers, no explanation needed. See the latest Adrian Raeside sketch for Sept. 22.

— via Vancouver Is Awesome, author

A 6-year-old boy died Saturday after his father backed the family's Cybertruck out of their Temecula-area driveway, striking him. No autopilot was engaged, no warning sounded, and investigators found no sign the father was impaired.

— via Hoodline, Taylor Reed

Nevada, not Arizona, just fired the Colorado River's biggest legal shot in decades, challenging new federal rules for Lake Mead and Lake Powell before they even take effect Oct. 1. Colorado isn't a defendant, but experts say the Upper Basin states have plenty riding on the outcome.

— via Colorado Sun, Shannon Mullane

After Harvey Weinstein butchered "The Yards" in the editing room, Mark Wahlberg allegedly got payback at Cannes: bottles of $10,000 Petrus wine, all charged to the producer's tab. Ari Emanuel's new memoir claims Weinstein exploded when he saw the bill, poking the agent's chest until he threatened to snap his fingers off.

— via NY Post, Nicki Gostin

A database glitch keeps mailing her old address, dragging her back toward a house she thought she'd buried. It leads her to a derelict hospital chapel, a locked gate, and a stranger's small favor that opens onto something she never expected to see.

— via Literary Hub, Doireann Ní Ghríofa

A roboticist who built machines inspired by octopuses and plant roots now wants robotics to answer for its environmental toll. Her July manifesto in Nature Machine Intelligence lays out "sustainability robotics," a push to make ecological cost part of a robot's design from the start.

— via IEEE Spectrum, Edd Gent

B.C. wine wholesale sales dropped 6.4 per cent by volume even as Ottawa banned new U.S. alcohol imports, with private retailers reporting gains of nearly 60 per cent while government stores lagged. Industry leaders say the province's own liquor arm is favoring discounted imports over local bottles.

— via Vancouver Is Awesome, author

Free entry to Hardly Strictly Bluegrass 2026 comes with body scanners, bag-size limits and a growing no-bring list, from tents to shade structures. Here's the full rundown on gates, timing, parking and what still gets you through security fastest.

— via KQED, Gilare Zada

In 1943, a wealthy Houston temple wrote seven rules disowning Zionism and Jewish nationhood outright, and someone dubbed them the Jurenberg Laws. The fallout made Time and The New York Times, split the congregation for a generation, and briefly outweighed news from Nazi Europe in the Jewish press.

— via Literary Hub, Benjamin Moser

Colorado Springs residents are ripping out thirsty lawns for buffalo grass, mowing once a year instead of weekly. The city's per-person water use has dropped nearly in half since the 1990s, even as its population swelled toward half a million.

— via Colorado Sun, Olivia Prentzel

A teen asked if there was a bullet in the chamber, was told no, and was shot dead anyway. Police say the friend who pulled the trigger has now been arrested, along with a 48-year-old man charged in a separate car-meetup shooting that also wounded two others.

— via Gothamist, Brittany Kriegstein

Sri Lanka marks the anniversary of Islamic State group-inspired bombings that killed 42 foreigners, among the deadliest attacks in the country's history.

— via NPR, The Associated Press

Nscale's $103 billion in contracts sounds huge, until you notice 85% comes from just two customers, Microsoft and Anthropic. Anthropic's deal can be canceled if the neocloud misses "stringent" milestones, and losses hit $1.02 billion in six months as it heads toward an IPO.

— via TechCrunch, Marina Temkin