Ariel Hart

Honored to tell the story of folks in recovery. Famed former UGA assistant coach Scott Cochran almost died from his addiction to opioids, in both GA and Alabama. He tried keeping his addiction a secret and held player recruiting meetings by video from his rehab room. More here:

No Georgia official is more directly tied to affordability than the state’s commissioner of insurance. And that job is on the ballot this year, starting with Tuesday’s primary. Story by @ArielWriter #gapol georgiarecorder.com/2026/05/16/dem…

Let us not forget the WaPo essay: wapo.st/3RJ0o9u

Dayum.

Breaking: Gov. Kemp has called state lawmakers for a special session on June 17 to reshape both how Georgians vote and to redraw the state’s political maps after last month’s U.S. Supreme Court decision for the 2028 election. #gapol ajc.com/politics/2026/…

The clerk of court whose violations just helped get this conviction overturned only got 3 yrs probation for her crimes. The local SC judge who sentenced her noted “A lot of folks probably made a lot of money" off the trial "but you didn’t.” @AP cite in below.

A healthcare cost-centered ad in the Georgia US Senate campaign. In the "You aren't the problem" - echoes of Gallego's winning AZ campaign of "It's not your fault." #gapol

Lautaro Grinspan, the @ajc's immigration reporter, is extraordinary. So many scoops of national importance. The AJC's reinvented video team does it justice with ace presentation, editing and original footage. A true public service. This is well deserved. ajc.com/about-us/2026/…

@CollinRugg Hero.

Man who went viral for remaining in his seat as he ate food during the WH Correspondents' Dinner shooting says he didn't want his new tux on the dirty Hilton floor. He also said he is from New York, so he hears sirens and activity all the time. "I’m a New Yorker. We live with sirens and activity happening all the time," Michael Glantz, an agent at Creative Artists Agency, said. "I wasn’t scared. There are hundreds of Secret Service agents hurtling themselves over tables and chairs, and I wanted to watch." "First of all, I have a bad back. I couldn’t get on the floor, and if I did get on the floor, they’d have to bring in people to get me off the floor. And No. 2, I’m a hygiene freak. There was no freaking way I was getting in my new tux on the dirty Hilton floor. It was not happening."

EXCLUSIVE: Georgia’s ACA health insurance enrollment plunges more than 500K, raising concerns for rural hospitals My latest for The Current GA in partnership with the Georgia Recorder/States Newsroom #gapol thecurrentga.org/2026/04/20/geo… via @thecurrentga

Hungarians singing “We Are The Champions” after Orban’s landslide defeat

This is Sadie. She was finally reunited with her human, astronaut Christina Koch, after her mom’s voyage around the moon took her the furthest any human has ever been from their dog. She can't wait to hear all about the universe. 14/10

Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has just called to congratulate us on our victory.

Hungary’s Viktor Orban, ally of Trump and Putin, concedes election defeat wapo.st/48JPiH1

Splashdown!!!

🦔A researcher invented a fake eye condition called bixonimania, uploaded two obviously fraudulent papers about it to an academic server, and watched major AI systems present it as real medicine within weeks. The fake papers thanked Starfleet Academy, cited funding from the Professor Sideshow Bob Foundation and the University of Fellowship of the Ring, and stated mid-paper that the entire thing was made up. Google's Gemini told users it was caused by blue light. Perplexity cited its prevalence at one in 90,000 people. ChatGPT advised users whether their symptoms matched. The fake research was then cited in a peer-reviewed journal that only retracted it after Nature contacted the publisher. My Take The researcher made the papers as obviously fake as possible on purpose. The AI systems didn't catch it. Neither did the human researchers who cited it in real journals, which means people are feeding AI-generated references into their work without reading what they're actually citing. I've covered the FDA using AI for drug review, the NYC hospital CEO ready to replace radiologists, and ChatGPT Health launching this year. All of that is happening in the same environment where a condition funded by a Simpsons character and endorsed by the crew of the Enterprise was being presented as emerging medical consensus. The people making these deployment decisions seem to believe the pipeline from research to AI to patient is more supervised than it actually is. This experiment suggests it isn't supervised much at all. Hedgie🤗 nature.com/articles/d4158…

New from @ReporterRossW: Here’s what Cobb County voters had to say about the race to pick Marjorie Taylor Greene’s successor #gapol georgiarecorder.com/briefs/heres-w…

I mostly avoid commenting on what President Trump says from day to day, while pulling no punches in my assessments, whether positive or negative, of his policy. His Iran ultimatums feel different. Making such threats is a policy. If he were to follow through on them, the consequences would be immediate, irreversible, and catastrophic on a world-historical scale. So while some will inevitably insist he should be “taken seriously rather than literally,” or that he is executing a sophisticated “madman” strategy in a complex game of 5-D chess, or that he needs everyone’s steadfast support to maximize his leverage, now rather than later seems the time to say that the actions that he is proposing would be a disaster for our country, both strategically and morally, which makes the remarks themselves a terrible mistake. Simply put, what’s the point of all this? If these are empty threats that we all know he will not carry out, then they are ineffective threats (the Iranians are on X too!), merely making the president and our nation look foolish. If they are not empty threats, then the president is asserting the American position that such actions are acceptable in this situation and ones we are willing to take. We are not living in some quantum thought experiment where he simultaneously is and is not serious. We cannot expect the Iranians, but only the Iranians, will believe him. Whether the threats are empty or not, we should be willing to say: This is wrong. We should not establish a pattern of threatening escalation from a blockaded strait to elimination of a civilization. We should not launch strikes intended to devastate the lives of millions of people and take our nation to total war without indisputable justification, or before the American people have deliberated upon and assented to the path with full understanding of what total war might mean for them. Those principles are vital to our Republic, independent of whether the strategy could “work.” But it’s also worth emphasizing that the strategy is a dead end. This war is actively weakening American power, increasing the danger to American citizens, and frustrating the president’s important efforts at addressing our many domestic challenges. It has closed a strait that was previously open, strengthened the incentive for other nations to pursue nuclear weapons, and in this most recent rhetoric made more plausible their use. Our choices for continuing the war appear to be catastrophic escalation of the air war or extensive deployment of ground troops, neither of which were planned or had support at the outset. Stepping back from these threats and admitting such actions do not offer a path to resolving the conflict may be unpalatable, but it is by far the least unpalatable option available. Let us all hope cooler heads prevail.

nobody's been this far from a Waffle House before