Ann Larson

At our five-borough municipal grocery stores, New Yorkers will get a 30% discount on eggs, milk, chicken, fresh produce and other everyday essentials. In the wealthiest city in the richest country in the world, no one should have to wonder how they’ll afford the food they need to feed themselves or their families.

🦔AI companies are bulk-buying rare books, scanning them through high-speed machines that cut the spines off, and shredding the originals. A service called ISBNdb facilitates orders of up to a million books and keeps buyers anonymous. Pre-2022 books are premium because they're free of AI-generated text. A federal judge ruled the practice is fair use because eliminating the original means only one copy exists at a time. Anthropic hired the former head of Google Books partnerships to obtain "all the books in the world." My Take This got to me. A bookseller told 404 Media that rare books with almost no surviving copies are being fed into this pipeline. Books that survived wars, fires, and centuries of handling are being shredded so an AI can learn to write a better marketing email. ISBNdb's website literally says "'AI company destroys two million books' is not a headline that generates sympathy," and they still built an entire business around making it happen quietly. They offer NDAs as a feature. They coach clients to call it "digital preservation." I've covered AI companies scraping the internet, torrenting libraries, and stealing music. This is worse because it's irreversible. You can re-upload a website. You can reprint a bestseller. You can't replace the last three copies of an 18th-century botanical text once someone shreds them for training data. And the judge said it's legal. So it's going to accelerate. "We shred rare books and offer NDAs so nobody finds out" is a legitimate business model in 2026. What a timeline. Hedgie🤗

Big news — Paramount Skydance has agreed to delay its merger with Warner Bros. Discovery until June 2027 or after the conclusion of a trial brought by 12 state attorneys general in federal court. Today’s agreement comes days after a California federal district judge issued a temporary restraining order to halt the $111 billion deal. On Friday, Paramount and the state attorneys general agreed to the freeze to allow the antitrust case against the merger to proceed to a trial

Trump says communities "can’t fight" data centers, should embrace them

Since 2020, Dollar General spent $7.76 billion on stock buybacks - enough money to give their workers a $40,000 bonus. Instead, it pays wages so low that 5,000 of their workers in 11 states need food stamps paid for by taxpayers. You are subsidizing Dollar General's low wages.

🇺🇸 Nearly 10 U.S. service members seriously wounded in recent Iranian attacks have been transferred to a U.S. military hospital in Germany, the New York Times reported, citing a U.S. military official. The troops are among roughly 100 American service members injured since the beginning of July. The transfers indicate some injuries were more serious than earlier Pentagon descriptions, which said most involved minor traumatic brain injuries and that the vast majority had returned to duty.

Seattle City Council votes 6-3 to delay the Mayor’s universal meal program a year and pay instead for a voucher program to help the students in most need get food over weekends and breaks. CMs Rinck, Lin, and Saka opposed the manufactured, false choice