Lorri Hopping ✍🏼 🕹️ 🔜 NarraScope & NYC

I'm going to NARRASCOPE! June 12-14 in Albany, and then training into New York City for a five-week work-play stint (based in Greenpoint again). See you in Albany? Or, you can stream the talks online: narrascope.org

Google is making $62 billion a quarter destroying the websites it NEEDS to survive. This is literally a death spiral that ends with Google killing itself. Let me explain what's going on... Google added AI summaries to the top of every search result in 2024. When you Google something now, the answer sits right there on Google's page. You never have to click anywhere. Google took the information from someone else's website, summarized it, and kept you inside Google's ecosystem. The result: 60% of all Google searches now end without a single click to any website. Small publishers lost 60% of their traffic in one year. Medium publishers lost 47%. Even the biggest names in media, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Business Insider, all saw traffic fall between 22% and 55%. The Axios CEO called it "a referral extinction event for the ad-supported web." Google's response to all of this was to tell publishers they can "opt out" of having their content summarized. But opting out also REMOVES your description from normal search results. So the choice Google gives you is let us steal your content for free, or become invisible on the internet. That's extortion. The Washington Post laid off another round of journalists this year because of it. Stereogum, one of the most respected music publications on the internet, had to BEG readers for donations. Business Insider cut 21% of its staff. Dozens of smaller publishers have shut down entirely. The people who actually CREATE the information Google summarizes are going bankrupt while Google posts record revenue. But here's where this gets interesting and where everyone stops thinking: Google's AI summaries are only as good as the content they summarize. If the publishers who write the original articles, run the original investigations, and create the original data go out of business, there is nothing left for Google to summarize. The AI starts recycling old information, the answers get stale, the quality drops, and users start noticing that Google's summaries are increasingly wrong, outdated, or useless. Google is essentially strip-mining the internet for short-term revenue. They are extracting all the value from content creators without paying for it, driving those creators out of business, and then wondering why the quality of their own product is declining. This is exactly what Napster did to the music industry in the early 2000s: Made content free, creators went broke, and quality collapsed. It took a decade to rebuild. Google is doing the same thing to the entire internet at 100x the scale. Rolling Stone, Variety, Deadline, The Hollywood Reporter, and Billboard are now suing Google for antitrust violations. Chegg, the education platform, lost 49% of its traffic and is suing too. The UK's competition authority just ordered Google to let publishers opt out without being punished. The DOJ already ruled Google is an illegal monopoly. And Google's defense in court is genuinely unbelievable. They argue that publishers CHOOSE to let Google index their content and can leave anytime they want. That's like saying you choose to pay protection money to the mob because technically you could close your business and move to another city. Google controls 90% of search. Leaving Google means leaving the internet. Meanwhile Google is investing billions in custom AI chips to make these summaries cheaper at scale. Every quarter the problem gets worse. The internet as we've known it for 25 years ran on a simple deal: Publishers make content. Google sends traffic. Advertisers pay for the traffic. Everyone wins. But Google just BROKE that deal and kept all the money.

Let me get this straight. Trump sued his own IRS for $10 billion. His own Justice Department is now considering settling that case. And one of the terms on the table is that the IRS drops all audits of Trump, his family, and his businesses PERMANENTLY. He’s using the full weight of the federal government to protect himself and his family from accountability and potentially pay himself BILLIONS of your tax dollars. nytimes.com/2026/05/12/bus…

Nous n'avons tous qu'un nombre limité de doigts et d'orteils.

One of my nightmare challenges while tutoring English language to adult learners. "But why?" they would ask.

LOL, the first programming language I mastered. I made a 2-player "name race" game. Enter your names and watch them race across the screen! [NAME] wins! Over and over, kids played it, soon dawning on them they could enter any text. DOG v CAT! COKE v PEPSI! Issue solved! LOL

Wow. This NYC pop up is 🔥 The Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein Memorial Reading Room is open as a public installation displaying all 3.5 million pages of the released and partially redacted Epstein files, printed and bound into 3,437 volumes. This shouldn’t just stay in NYC. Take it on the road.

The best advice I've ever encountered on how to deal with self-doubt and creative block themarginalian.org/2016/09/09/do-…

@HoppingReads Good luck, Gaels!

Our St. Michael's quiz bowl team is competing at the NAQT National Middle School Championship tournament in Chicago! Supporters can follow this brainy team here, match by match, SAT May 9: naqt.com/tournament/tea… We need 5 WINS to advance. #naqt #quizbowl #msnaqt #gogaels

@JoyceCarolOates Let's just imagine a "risk pool" of 350 million people? The leverage! No one goes bankrupt, loses everything, because of a tragedy.

@JoyceCarolOates YEP, DECADES. Started paying into it at 13-14, working at a cider mill for minimum wage, with a "seasonal work" child labor law exception. I think I made 75 cents an hour? It's an INSURANCE program, designed to spread the risk among all workers so that we all benefit.

some Americans have literally been paying into Social Security for 50, 60 years; & this multi-billionaire from South Africa dismisses Social Security as a mere "entitlement"--not workers' actual pay, deferred. cutting Social Security would be literally--not metaphorically: literally--stealing earned money from American citizens. please let us hope that MAGA gets this news from some source other than Fox; otherwise, MAGA might agree to it without comprehending.

hello! i've been working on a thing (behind the scenes this time) that I'm very excited for you all to hear. Paper Trail - a new podcast showcasing @propublica's badass investigations. it's going to be really good. come along with us? propub.li/4d59Lcd

Attenborough at 100 — A Sting Cut We know what humans think of David Attenborough: the greatest broadcaster in TV history. But what do the animals think?

New York game friends, May 13 is this month's NYC Indie Game Dev social at the usual venue. Spots fill up FAST, so jump in now if you're planning on going. luma.com/2vwvat9l #NYMakesGames

A Gorilla Story is Attenborough's latest, greatest nature adventure, among the mountain gorillas of Rwanda 50 years after his first life-changing close encounter with the great apes. Highly recommend. (Neflix)

I was scrolling TikTok this morning and found this video of my face and likeness giving medical advice. It’s completely AI generated but several people thought it was real. This is terrifying. If there is any member of Congress who wants to help crack down on this, please!!

“Investigative journalism is an act of optimism.” Thrilled to announce the new @propublica Podcast “Paper Trail.” It’s going to be amazing! We will share our secrets and hopefully inspire you. Change is possible. Here’s the trailer: propublica.org/series/paper-t…

A Library Dedicated Solely to the Epstein Files Is Opening in New York | WIRED wired.com/story/a-librar…

Trump’s judicial nominees were asked point blank if he can run for a third term. Every single one refused to answer. One said he’d have to “review the actual wording” of the 22nd Amendment. These are lifetime appointments to the federal bench. Trump already said “eight or nine years” when asked when he’d leave office. His term ends in 2029. Full breakdown on YouTube. 👇 Never stop connecting the dots.

These are essential suits.