The scene sits about ten minutes into The French Connection. Buddy Russo has been stabbed, and on the way out of the station Popeye Doyle tells him what the wound means. The exchange is short. Doyle calls Russo a dumb guinea. Russo asks how he was supposed to know the man had a knife. Doyle answers with the word that settles what Doyle is. Russo says the man could have been white. Doyle says, never trust anyone.
Hugo Duminil-Copin cried on a Tuesday night. His daughter woke up. The Fields Medalist was responding to OpenAI’s October release of mathematical manuscripts, at least sixteen of which addressed questions directly related to his research. Le Monde reported his account of that night and his judgment that the company had annihilated his field. I keep returning to the child who woke up. Her presence changes the scale of the story. A research release entered a house after dark, and a father who had spent years learning how to attack difficult questions saw part of his life’s work absorbed into a catalogue. His grief deserves a hearing before anyone turns it into a joke about experts fearing unemployment. His chance to finish some of that work himself may be gone, even if the mathematics proves sound and benefits other people later.
A customer can now hand an AI agent the keys to a bank account. Their instruction can be as casual as “help me pay my bills.” The agent enters with valid credentials, and the bank sees an ordinary login. Their immediate concern may be the electric bill. The agent may encounter a new payee or a low balance and make a choice the customer never discussed. Once the money moves, the bank has a password and a session log. The customer has a memory of what they meant. Those records do not necessarily agree.
The most famous memo in American industrial history says a company counted the dead. In the fall of 1977, Mother Jones published “Pinto Madness,” and the country learned the shape of the story it would keep: a car with a dangerous fuel tank, a fix that cost eleven dollars a vehicle, and a memo that priced the burn deaths against the repair and found the deaths cheaper. The memo became the Pinto’s death warrant in the public mind, the smoking gun with a signature, the proof that a corporation had done the arithmetic of murder and filed it.
The jury box in a Florida criminal courtroom holds six chairs. In one of those courtrooms, in West Palm Beach, six people heard the state’s case against a chiropractor named Hamed Kian, and they convicted him on every count. Kian is forty-five years old, with an office up the road in Jupiter. Florida had suspended his license after three women he had treated complained that he kissed or touched them inappropriately, and prosecutors said he went right on seeing patients. The charge was practicing chiropractic medicine with a suspended license, a third-degree felony, five counts of it. He drew a year and a day in prison and five years of probation. The Fourth District Court of Appeal affirmed in October 2025 and did not write an opinion, because none of this is unusual in Florida. Florida seats twelve jurors only in capital cases. Everything else, from this chiropractor’s case to armed robbery, has gone to six jurors since 1877.
The World Cup final fell on a Sunday this year. The largest crowd of the summer poured out of MetLife Stadium, and the stores at American Dream were open and selling. Ten miles north, the biggest mall in New Jersey was dark. Westfield Garden State Plaza closes every Sunday. Paramus Park closes. The Bergen Town Center closes. Nearly every other retailer in Bergen County closes, because a statute older than any of the malls says clothing, furniture, appliances, lumber, and home furnishings may not change hands on the first day of the week. Bergen County likes it that way. The voters have said so twice, both times by landslide. The voters never got a say over the ground under American Dream. That is where the case lives.
New York University made an announcement this week. The school pledged $6 million over four years to the Washington Square Park Conservancy, the nonprofit steward of the nine-and-three-quarter-acre square at the foot of Fifth Avenue. The university’s own headline chose a gambler’s verb: “Doubles Down.” The money is real. The park needs care, and the Conservancy has paid for horticulture crews and free programming there for years. NYU students treat the park as their quad because it is one. A school without a campus was handed a campus by geography, and the students love the ground they borrow. Grant all of that. The gift is generous, and the park will be cleaner for it.
Continue reading → The Dead Already Paid for Washington Square Park
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