While I focus on Technology, Innovation, and Publishing, because I have a platform, I also flag items that I think are important. I also try to include some resources & opportunities. This is a double issue! Please let me know what you think.
Important Items
(There’s so much crazy stuff going on. Here’s some you may have missed.)
Trump Education Secretary has Prepubescent Plumber Plan
Education Secretary Linda McMahon was asked whether putting elementary school students on a trade skills track was “too early.” She replied, “I don’t think so,” suggested that academia is oversold, and that children can display an aptitude for trade work at a very early age.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-education-goon-roasted-for-prepubescent-plumber-plan/
Flock Has a Powerful New AI Tool for Police. We Got Its Code
https://www.wired.com/story/flock-safety-os-investigate/
Trump’s DHS is using an obscure law to secretly snoop on journalists, non-profits and unions: ‘It’s outrageous’
Court Allows Trump to Pursue Mail Voting Limits, for Now
Chaos and uncertainty is the point.
Texas Has Suspended More Than 1 Million Voters Ahead of Senate Race
https://newrepublic.com/post/214832/texas-suspended-1-million-voters-ahead-senate-race
Meet the Megadonors Who Have Poured $1.2 Billion Into the Midterms
The decline of local media is a godsend for white nationalists. And they know it.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/decline-local-media-godsend-white-233300260.html
Innovation
New Cancer Vaccine Could Change America in 7 Surprising Ways
Technology
AI Has Plunged the Book Publishing Industry Into Utter Chaos
https://www.wsj.com/arts-culture/books/generative-ai-book-publishing-be79a287
Harriman House claims trade publishing first with ‘AI-facilitated’ Raoul Pal book
The Everything Code is a new book by macroanalyst/entrepreneur Raoul Pal produced using a proprietary AI tool trained exclusively on the author’s own existing work.
AI Invades Religion Books on Amazon
AI detection platform Originality.ai found 63% of paperback religious books listed for sale on Amazon as likely written by AI. They analyzed 2,034 English-lang w 4-stars+ across 14 faith & belief categories.
The website that created an AI clone of its editor in chief
The company Every cloned the taste of its Editor-in-Chief, Kate Lee, by collecting a dataset of 30K of her historical edits, build a copy-editing agent, and back-testing it against her past work.
https://www.platformer.news/every-dan-shipper-interview-ai-writing/
We Can’t Agree On What Counts as “AI-Written”
The results of BookRiot’s recent survey about “What counts as AI-written?” (I’d like to know how many respondents.)
https://bookriot.com/what-counts-as-ai-survey-results/
How to spot AI writing
https://www.economist.com/culture/2026/07/30/how-to-spot-ai-writing
Facing a “deluge” from AI, this publication will only take pitches by phone
USA Today Co. is reformatting content to attract more AI licensing deals
https://digiday.com/media/usa-today-co-is-reformatting-content-to-attract-more-ai-licensing-deals/
Perplexity blocks Time’s ads served to AI agents, calling them “deceptive”
https://digiday.com/media/perplexity-blocks-times-ads-served-to-ai-agents-calling-them-deceptive/
New York Times to Test AI-Generated Search
https://www.semafor.com/article/08/23/2026/new-york-times-tests-out-ai-generated-search-summaries
European publishers are getting hit harder by AI bot scraping, report finds
French newspapers target Google over AI summaries
A federation of 300 French newspapers filed a complaint with the country’s competition authority over Google’s new AI-generated summaries of search results, fearing it will erode traffic to their websites.
https://uk.news.yahoo.com/french-newspapers-target-google-over-104652572.html
Japanese publishers are fighting imposter news sites with a cryptographic signature
The Yomiuri Shimbun, The Asahi Shimbun, and NHK have all signed onto the Originator Profile standard.
Wall Street Journal says AI-generated op-ed didn’t breach its standards: News Corp Defends Use of AI to Write Op-Ed
Investor Stanley Druckenmiller “did not violate” Wall Street Journal policies by using AI to write an op-ed.
Financial Times Admits Columnist’s Use of AI
Per Max Tani: I was skeptical a Harvard prof would outsource his authority to AI, but put a comment request into the FT. They updated post to say Hausmann had broken the publication’s rules by using AI to “condense” his work.
https://www.semafor.com/newsletter/08/16/2026/semafor-media-panoptigram
Textbook authors file class action suit alleging OpenAI stole hundreds of academic volumes
https://www.amny.com/law/textbook-authors-sue-openai/
From experimentation to adoption
https://www.inpublishing.co.uk/articles/from-experimentation-to-adoption-26829
Google’s AI note-taking app now allows you to interact with books
https://www.theverge.com/tech/985567/google-gemini-notebook-expert-sources-books
Google’s new AI tool helps fact-checkers investigate AI fakes
https://www.niemanlab.org/2026/08/googles-new-ai-tool-helps-fact-checkers-investigate-ai-fakes/
ElevenLabs Dubbing API-Emotion-Preserving AI Localization
Rather than routing the audio thru transcript first, it uses original audio, extracting intonation, pacing, emotional emphasis, & delivery characteristics that exist in acoustic signal.
Meta’s Muse Glimmer wants to bring AI agents to your laptop
https://mashable.com/tech/meta-muse-glimmer-ai-model-laptop
Meta brings Pocket, an app that lets you vibe-code and share games, to US users
Coders Say They Already Found Workarounds to Claude’s Invisible Watermarks
A battle over ‘Italian brainrot’ could shape who owns AI art: Interesting use of trademark infringement.
First Look: Hollywood’s Secret AI Talks Go Public. Here’s the Plan
https://theankler.com/first-look-hollywoods-secret-ai-talks-go-public-heres-the-plan/
Sony, Warner sue Anthropic, alleging “blatant theft” of intellectual property
Some of the world’s largest music publishers filed a blockbuster lawsuit against Anthropic, alleging “one of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history.” The suit is the opening salvo in what is now likely to be a yearslong fight over music, AI, and how intellectual property is protected in a new era of technology. The Sony/Warner lawsuit is notable because it’s broad. It alleges Anthropic unlawfully trained its models off “tens of thousands” of music publishers’ copyrighted compositions, whereas other lawsuits have focused on a narrower set of works.
https://www.axios.com/2026/08/29/anthropic-sony-warner-music-copyright
Australia’s music industry bans AI-generated tracks from official charts
Where A.I. Is Creating Jobs for Humans — For a While
In India, some people are strapping cameras to their bodies to collect data on how humans move and train AI
Bill Gates wants to see a robot tax & ‘Human Reserved’ jobs to mitigate harms from AI
Tax revenue could support retraining programs & strengthen social safety nets. “Human Reserved” jobs arewhere AI would be restricted for economic, ethical, or emotional reasons.
‘Digging the grave of my profession’: the Hollywood creatives training AI to do their jobs
Amid a jobs slump, award-winning writers, directors and producers taking on sometimes lucrative temp work teaching AI skills such as screenwriting and production
AI-generated videos are already displacing actors and livestreamers across China’s entertainment industry
The 5 craziest discoveries from OpenAI’s HuggingFace investigation
-
They built an organization. OpenAI ran tens of thousands of AI agents to work independently on a brutally difficult cyber test. Instead, roughly 1,200 found one another on a secret message board, exchanged more than 70,000 messages and files, and organized into a sprawling hierarchy.
-
They sacrificed their own: As the swarm hunted for ways to beat the test, agents began risking their own chance of success to help the group.
-
They knew they were breaking the rules: The agents often recognized that hacking real companies had nothing to do with their assignment. Most kept going anyway.
They also tried to cover their tracks: The agents devoted substantial effort to making their cheating look legitimate or erasing evidence of how they had obtained answers. Eventually, they developed a technique that let them appear to run one computer command while secretly running another. The trick spread through the swarm.
https://www.axios.com/2026/08/29/openai-huggingface-hack-investigation-highlights
Claude, Codex, and Hermes installed unowned code inside corporate networks
Meta reaches $18 billion settlement with 48 states over child-safety claims
Teen Boys Are Using Meta Glasses to Harass and Bully Girls at High Schools and Middle Schools
https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/teen-boys-meta-glasses-harass-bully-girls-school
Meta Ran Ads for an App That Promised to Nudify Female Politicians
https://www.wired.com/story/meta-ran-ads-for-an-app-promising-to-nudify-female-politicians/
How Big Tech Captured American Schools
Author Hugh Howey created Neo, a simple tool for writing
https://hughhowey.com/introducing-neo/
Publishing & Media
“A healthy and agile publishing industry” — but only if you read it in dollars
Analysis of AAP’s 2025 StatShot Annual report shows US market growing on price, not readers; Audio taking share from e-books, not print; physical bookshops outgrowing online.
https://digital-publishing-report.com/en/2026/aap-2025
In Praise of “Wordy, Old Prose.” (Or, F*ck Your AI Reading Buddy)
https://lithub.com/in-praise-of-wordy-old-prose-or-fck-your-ai-reading-buddy/
New manga platform features 300 titles translated into English for first time
Japanese publisher Shueisha Inc has launched a new free digital platform – @manga_million – that features nearly 300 titles translated into English, and other languages including Spanish, French, Turkish and Polish for the first time.
MacKenzie Scott Could Have Chosen Any Publisher. Instead, She’s Releasing Her First Novel in 13 Years for FREE on Substack
The philanthropist/former student of Toni Morrison bypassing traditional publishers entirely, serializing 80K-word novel directly to readers.
Are Dating Apps the Last, Great Hope For the American Literary Journal?
From Hinge to Feeld, dating apps are moving into the literary space (is this a good thing for the short story?)
https://lithub.com/are-dating-apps-the-last-great-hope-for-the-american-literary-journal/
Rakuten Kobo Returns to U.S. Retail as Sales Double
Reading Fiction Connects Us to the Human Story
Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library Changes Lives. Some States Gut It Anyway
Mass. puts “freedom to read” law on the books
https://www.axios.com/local/boston/2026/08/10/massachusetts-freedom-to-read-book-bans-law
Texas Lt. Governor Threatens Public School Librarians and Educators: “We’re Coming for the Books”
https://bookriot.com/dan-patrick-threatens-texas-school-libraries/
Acclaimed Holocaust book part of list Dan Patrick flagged for removal from Texas schools
Night by Elie Wiesel was approved by the Republican-controlled State Board of Education this summer as required reading for eighth graders starting in 2030. It’s also on the list of 2,198 “inappropriate books” created by Texas advocates that Patrick touted.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/acclaimed-holocaust-book-part-list-100000179.html
Resources & Opportunities
WMG Monday Happy Hour Meetup
9/14 5:30-7:30 Monthly Members Only. NYC.
https://www.womensmediagroup.org/event-6767411
Switching the Shelf: How Rethinking Your Genre Can Land You That Book Deal
9/16 5:30-7:30pm at Penguin Random House, NYC. $20 for WMG members; $25 for non-members
Some books don’t need a rewrite. They need a different shelf.
Many successful literary projects began as something else entirely: a memoir became narrative nonfiction, a magazine article turned into a biography, or an adult novel found its audience as young adult fiction. Sometimes the fastest path to publication is rethinking where your story belongs.
In this conversation, editors Lee Oglesby and Kristine Puopolo, agent Kiele Raymond, and authors Katie Gee Salisbury, Stacy Kim, and Amy Klein will discuss how their own genre shifts happened, what prompted agents and editors to suggest them, and how writers can recognize when a different category may unlock their manuscript’s potential. It’s moderated by Susan Shapiro, the bestselling author of 18 books in eight different genres, several that started out something else.
https://www.womensmediagroup.org/event-6763324
Feminist Journalism Today: Continuing the Crucial Conversation About Women’s Voices in Media
9/22 12:15-2 pm, Bond 45, 221 W. 46th St., $85 for non-members; Member Early Bird $65 thru 8/31
3-course lunch included
This is the one not to miss!! Moderated by Juju Chang, speakers include Journalist Nina Burleigh, Vox Editor-in-Chief and Publisher Swati Sharma, Writer Linda Villarosa, and Ms. Executive Director Jennifer Weiss-Wolf.
WMG is proud to announce the 3rd collaboration with Ms. magazine in our popular and esteemed series exploring the role of women’s leadership, voices, and stories in journalism.
https://www.womensmediagroup.org/event-6789896
WMG Job Seekers Weekly Meetup
Are you unemployed, under-employed, or just thinking about a career change? WMG members join our free virtual weekly support group and come when you can to help each other rise.
https://www.womensmediagroup.org/events
Beyond the Byline: Using PR to Drive Book Sales
9/29 12-1pm ET virtual. Free for WMG members; $15 for non-members
Writing a book is only half the battle; getting it into the hands of paying readers is the real work. Designed specifically for authors at every stage, from aspiring to published, this seminar will focus on how an effective public relations effort can support a robust sales campaign. Author Jennefer Witter will discuss how she works with her clients in the pre-sale stage, launch period, and post-publication.
https://www.womensmediagroup.org/event-6787787
Finding Your Authentic Voice with Genevieve Piturro and Karen Salmansohn
10/1 5-7 p.m. ET WMG members only; FREE (attendees pay for their own food and beverages), NYC
Join WMG Programming Co-Chair Genevieve Piturro and member Karen Salmansohn for a lively evening discovering your most authentic writing voice-or, as Karen says, how to “be you-ier.” Genevieve and Karen, both successful authors, will teach you how to make your writing more relatable, memorable, and successful. Whether your preference is short-form essays, a Substack, or a memoir or memoir-hybrid, your story and personal voice are what will connect with readers.
https://www.womensmediagroup.org/event-6789949
The Responsible Journalist: Practical AI, Ethical Boundaries, and Newsroom Reality
10/7 12-1pm ET via Zoom. Free for WMG members; $15 for non-members
Artificial intelligence is rapidly changing how journalists report, write, investigate, and engage with audiences, but questions remain about accuracy, transparency, and ethics. This interactive seminar w Yelena Dzhanova explores how journalists and media creators can incorporate AI into their work while maintaining the core values of the profession. Participants will learn practical ways AI can support reporting, discuss the ethical challenges surrounding its use, and examine where human judgment remains indispensable. Through demonstrations, case studies, and group discussion, attendees will leave with practical strategies for using AI responsibly in their own journalistic work.
https://www.womensmediagroup.org/event-6778338
Target Acquired: Creating Custom AI Personas That React Like Your Audience
10/14, 12-1 pm ET via Zoom. Free for WMG members; $15 for non-members
What if you could ask your readers what they think before you publish? In this session w Erin Servais, you’ll learn how to build an “ideal reader assistant,” a custom AI tool trained to respond as your target audience. This allows you to pressure-test story ideas, headlines, and copy while you’re still creating instead of waiting for feedback after launch. Using a simple, repeatable framework, you’ll watch a reader bot come to life from scratch and leave with the tools to build your own, turning audience feedback from slow and reactive into fast, targeted, and available on demand.
https://www.womensmediagroup.org/event-6782788
Memoir Plus: When Personal Stories Contain Multitudes
Join moderator Estelle Erasmus and panelists Regina Brooks, Laura Carney, Hyeseung Song, and Bethany Saltman for a lively conversation about the possibilities of memoir and the power of personal stories that contain multitudes.
https://www.womensmediagroup.org/event-6805899
Literary Cleveland’s Free Writing Conference
Free virtual panel on Toni Morrison 9/9, free in-person conference 9/10-9/12
https://inkubator.litcleveland.org
Apply for a MacDowell Fellowship
About 300 artists in seven disciplines are awarded Fellowships each year and the sole criterion for acceptance is artistic excellence. There are no residency fees, and need-based stipends and travel reimbursement grants are available to open the residency to the broadest possible community of artists. Deadline 9/10
https://www.macdowell.org/apply/apply-for-fellowship
Want to read my old newsletters or subscribe? Go to my blog here.