Elite law firm Sullivan & Cromwell admits to AI ‘hallucinations’ Firm whose partners bill more than $2,000 per hour apologises to judge for software-driven errors in bankruptcy case

The future is embarrassing www.ft.com/content/657d...

Sen. Jack Reed to Warsh as he dodges questions about divesting his assets: "Excuse me. I must commend you on the way you can circularly go around questions and not answer them. It's a skill. Unfortunately it's not a good skill for the chairman of the Fed."

Elizabeth Warren nails Warsh right between the eyes: if you're tough and independent, did Donald Trump lose the election in 2020?
Warsh refused to answer, dances around the question. Won't matter to Republicans, but could raise questions in the markets about subservience.

Online abuse of politicians is a profitable business Senator Eileen Flynn's comments on far-right use of the tricolour have made her a lightning rod for online abuse — because viral hatred is highly profitable

Grifters --> "Much of the abuse directed at Ms Flynn came from Irish accounts run by people who benefit from algorithmically amplification ...and content monetisation. Monetisation is now a commonplace feature on social media platforms..." www.irishexaminer.com/opinion/comm...

Say hello to the LSI.

Which will be “shedding the traditional model of academics standing at the front of lecture theatres” in favor of bots leading students through “a personalised, hands-on learning experience”. Now accredited by the OfS 👍

A thing that I think a lot of people don't appreciate is that the reason we urgently need court reform isn't that the Court is doing too MUCH, it's that it's doing too LITTLE

It is incapable of performing its essential function. That function is going undone, and this is destroying us as a nation

“He vomited a green substance and fainted,” the man said. “His body was white. He was shaking and sweating and officials paid no attention to him.” According to the man, who asked not to be named to avoid retaliation, this was the third person to be hospitalized after facing similar symptoms.”🚨🏥🚑

This is a snapshot of the failure of MSM and the concomitant ignorance within the American electorate about what is happening in and to their country.

"What we are trying to look at is, how do we use one problem which is water hyacinth to solve the other problem which is plastic waste pollution,” says Joseph Nguthiru.

“We work with fishermen who are affected [by it] and we contract them to harvest the water hyacinth for us.”

#GoodNews #Africa 🌱

Zumthor

👇🎯

Tl;dr: Support the liberal arts & fund the damn public universities like we used to

So much for the theory. Iran should allow fertiliser to pass through the Strait of Hormuz; America should not blockade urea shipments from Iran. Tragically, neither shows any inclination to do so. High petrol prices make biofuel more attractive to farmers, not less. And rich countries are in a selfish mood. Failure to act thus looks baked in. In the face of an avoidable disaster, that is shameful.

Fair but depressing conclusion from @economist.com - we could avoid some of the worst of the hunger, but we won’t
economist.com/leaders/2026...

A rum situation where it is the legal profession which has held firm, whilst the political and justice systems have simply given way.

But you can't pardon a disbarment.

A moment in the history of viewpoint diversity in US universities

A diagram showing the VDA framework and the Arc of Democracy. At the top, three icons label the essential elements of democracy: Verification (tick), Deliberation (speech bubble), and Accountability (magnifying glass). Arrows descend from each through three horizontal bands representing the arc: Substantial (truth tested, voices included, power constrained), Performative (forms remain but substance is weak, rituals without consequence), and Simulated (appearance maintained but functions inverted: propaganda as verification, polarisation as deliberation, scapegoating as accountability). A vertical arrow on the left marks the arc's direction: improvements, decline, collapse. A column on the right maps counterpublics onto the same three states: functional counterpublics act in a substantial way, hollow counterpublics in a performative way, disordered counterpublics in a simulated way. The bands shift from grey through pink to red as democracy moves toward simulation.

A society that runs on this stack doesn't stop holding elections, or debating, or running investigations. The forms stay, but what goes is their capacity to constrain power. The arc bends toward simulation, carried out in the language of defending democracy.

2/So earlier this week, Trump’s U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, Jeanine Pirro, moved to vacate the convictions of prominent insurrectionists. She wrote that doing so was “in the interests of justice.”

“The children are always ours, every single one of them, all over the globe; and I am beginning to suspect that whoever is incapable of recognizing this may be incapable of morality.” -James Baldwin

The Baldwin line about children gets so much mileage on social media that it risks becoming trite but I refuse to give into the cynicism because at the end of the day he’s 100% right

The Court's judgment will declare as follows: Defendants lack the authority to unilaterally establish standards of care that supersede professionally recognized standards of care for provision of gender-affirming care recognized in the Plaintiff States. Defendants also lack the authority to exclude providers from federal healthcare programs based on their provision of gender-affirming care in a manner and quality consistent with the professionally recognized standards of care in the Plaintiff States.

“Defendants lack the authority to unilaterally establish standards of care that supersede professionally recognized standards of care for provision of gender-affirming care recognized in the Plaintiff States.”

anyone who knew someone with pancreatic cancer knows how big of a deal this is

This is what leadership looks like.

Read the Supreme Court’s Shadow Papers (Gift Article) Read 16 pages of internal deliberations from the Supreme Court that the New York Times has obtained, bringing the origins of the court’s “shadow docket” into the light.

The most striking bits of the Shadow Docket docs:

Lots of hand wringing over costs to power plants, not even a mention of the benefits of cutting CO₂ pollution.

Yes, the 5:4 SCOTUS majority doing the fossil industry's bidding, and not even trying to hide it

www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

Notable Sanchez is unapologetically pro-immigration and also the only major European leader with positive approval ratings.

Someone really ought to write a book about the significance of #SCOTUS doing so many major things through unsigned and unexplained rulings, and how so much of it really is a recent phenomenon.

The Inside Story of Five Days That Remade the Supreme Court

If you are as infuriated as you read this as I am, know that Congress not only has the power to fix the abuse of the Shadow Docket but also that the legislation is already drafted. We just need to get it to the floor. www.nytimes.com/2026/04/18/u...

In regulating the SCOTUS appellate jurisdiction, it's not just that Congress can cut them out altogether (jurisdiction stripping), though they can. They can also impose procedural rules and limits. Radically restrain interlocutory appeals and "emergency" stays, for example.

The Inside Story of Five Days That Remade the Supreme Court

This is both

(1) some of the most important SCOTUS reporting ever, and

(2) far too generous to the Republican justices in framing of many pieces and omissions of Trump-era developments

I keep wondering if I should even bother continuing to cover this stuff because I’m so broke, and then this shit keeps happening. So my reporting definitely has value! Just not for me.

“Researchers that have attempted to make the university’s connections –and potential obligations– to the Caribbean explicit say their efforts have been stymied. …“The conversation is not happening,” said Carla Martin, a Harvard professor of African and African American Studies. “We all have tried.””

This excellent analysis of the origins of the shadow docket based on new leaked memos should be positioned within the extraordinary political maneuvering by which the Republican-controlled senate prevented then President Obama from filling Justice Scalia’s seat on the Supreme Court.

The Inside Story of Five Days That Remade the Supreme Court

There’s so much to say about the remarkable reporting from Jodi Kantor & Adam Liptak—and I’ll say a lot of it in Monday’s newsletter.

But the most striking thing about all of it is the role & behavior of Chief Justice Roberts. “Calling balls and strikes” this ain’t:

www.nytimes.com/2026/04/18/u...