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2026-03-31 04:01:12

With the bases loaded and two outs in the top of the seventh inning of Sunday’s Twins-Orioles game, Twins cleanup hitter Matt Wallner watched a knee-high 3-2 pitch sail directly over the heart of the plate for strike three. Rather than accept his fate, an emotional, frustrated Wallner tapped his helmet, signaling that he was challenging an obvious strike under Major League Baseball’s new automated ball-strike challenge system. Baseball’s new AI-powered strike zone robots confirmed the call on the field, and the Twins lost the ability to challenge for the rest of the game. This very human, very emotion-driven mistake then set up a series of events resulting in the first ever manager ejection for arguing about a robot’s decision, perhaps a glimpse at the future of baseball and, if you squint, a microcosm of various human-AI beefs in society more broadly. 

We are four days into the new baseball season, and this season’s brand new Automated Ball-Strike (ABS) system is the dominant storyline so far. Here’s how the system works, more or less: Like usual, a human umpire calls each pitch a ball or a strike. Immediately following that call, the pitcher, catcher, or batter can challenge the call by tapping on their head. The location of the pitch is then immediately shown on the stadium’s scoreboard on a graphic that includes each hitter’s strike zone; if the ball is within or clips any part of the strike zone box, it’s a strike. If not, it’s a ball. This all happens in a matter of seconds automatically on the Jumbotron and is driven by AI; its results are inarguable. There is no long human review process in a video booth in New York like there is for other umpire’s challenges. 

And yet, the ABS system feels somehow extremely human, because human beings are making the decisions on what to challenge, under what circumstances, and how to react to any given decision. ABS is also not exactly human vs robot, it is a human player’s judgment vs a human umpire’s judgment as adjudicated by an AI system, which has made it must-watch television. Anyone who has screamed “that was a strike” at their TV now gets the satisfaction of having a player’s apparently superior judgment have actual consequences in the game. And, because the home TV broadcasts have a strikezone superimposed on the proceedings, watching from home means you can, in real time, think “they should challenge that,” or “dumb challenge.” 

ABS is exposing how terrible specific umpires are at their job, in real time, in somewhat humiliating fashion. In the Reds-Red Sox game Saturday, notoriously bad umpire C.B. Bucknor made a big show of ringing up Eugenio Suarez (calling a strikeout) on two consecutive pitches that were clearly outside of the strike zone. Suarez challenged both calls and won both challenges. The crowd absolutely lost its shit at both challenges. I have heard multiple play-by-play announcers note that some of the loudest cheers of any game have been about players using the challenge system to prove the umpires wrong. In the Mariners game this weekend, Randy Arozarena was called out by the human umpire on a 3-2 pitch; Arozarena tapped his helmet and jogged to first base as though he had walked, his judgment never in doubt. ABS showed Arozarena was right. It was great theater.

“When we first talked about ABS, I said, you know what, there’s going to come a day where we have one of these challenges, and it’s going to become like cinema. It’s going to become one of the better parts of the game, talking about people getting ejected, how fun that is,” former player Trevor Plouffe said on the Baseball Today podcast Monday. “And it happened in Cincinnati, they said it was the biggest cheers of the game. Not the homers, but the overturned calls. I thought I was going to like it more, but it’s a little sad. I get sad vibes from this,” he added, referring to the humiliation of human umpires getting calls overturned. 

What the first few days of ABS are showing is that this system is somehow actually highlighting the human element of the game, and adding another layer of strategy to a game that prides itself as being the thinking person’s sport. This is because, crucially, teams can only lose two challenges, but teams have unlimited challenges as long as they get them right. Once they lose two challenges, they are not allowed to challenge any more for the rest of the game, raising all sorts of questions about which players will be good at it (well-respected veterans who have been getting borderline calls out of respect, or rookies who have a year of ABS experience from a trial run in the minors later year?), which positions should challenge (so far, catchers are good at challenging, hitters slightly less so, and pitchers are bad at challenging), and in which game circumstances challenges will be called. 

Umpires “do not like the embarrassment of it all, being up on the big board,” Baseball Today host Chris Rose responded to Plouffe. “I love it. I’m sitting here trying to think about strategy. You can tell these teams have zero strategy. Not only that, they also don’t think about it. You have teams that are leading a game in the ninth and a batter uses the last challenge at the plate, when you should be saving it for your pitcher in the bottom of the ninth. They haven’t thought about this at all.” 

This brings us back to the Orioles-Twins game, and Wallner’s horrible challenge. It was the Twins’ second failed challenge of the game. In the bottom half of the inning, Orioles shortstop Gunnar Henderson took a 3-1 pitch that was clearly a strike near the top of the zone. It was called a ball. The Twins could not challenge, and the Orioles proceeded to score three runs on the back of a series of their own successful challenges. The Twins could do nothing but sit there and suffer, and Wallner has been getting excoriated on social media for being an emotional dumbass and hurting his team. 

Then, in the top of the ninth, ABS’s first truly viral moment occurred. A 3-2 pitch from Orioles closer Ryan Helsley was called a ball. Helsley, falling off the mound, tapped his hat once, then again. ABS called the pitch a strike, which was a critical decision in a critical moment. Twins manager Derek Shelton stormed out of the dugout and argued with home plate umpire Chris Segal, eventually getting ejected from the game. “Derek Shelton’s been thrown out! He’s arguing with the robots! You can’t defeat the robots!,” Orioles announcer Kevin Brown said during the Orioles broadcast. What Shelton was actually arguing about was whether Helsley had decided to challenge quick enough, but, nevertheless, the moment has gone viral as the first-ever robot-related ejection in MLB history. Overall, there were nine challenges in the Orioles-Twins game, a new record in the very early stages of the system.

The early discourse on ABS is that it has added some excitement to the game, and has cut down on infuriating and somewhat random cases of umpires making horrendous decisions in critical situations, a problem that has plagued baseball since time immemorial but has reached crisis levels in recent years as superimposed strike zones and viral social media “umpire scorecards” highlight just how much bad umpiring has been affecting the outcome of games. 

Lots of baseball fans love the “human element” of human umpires, but the truth is that human umpires wildly vary in their ability to accurately call balls and strikes, and watching a call go against your team in a high-stakes moment is excruciating. The system that MLB has deployed feels, at the moment, like it preserves the human element of the game while adding in a new layer of strategy: Are your team’s players disciplined and unemotional enough to avoid wasting your challenges in stupid situations? Are you able to deploy them in ways that bend the game in your favor? So far it feels like this system largely strikes the right balance, and has not actually automated umpires out of a job, though it does often humiliate them in front of tens of thousands of screaming fans. In a matter of days, people have begun cheering on the trusted robots over fallible human umpires. It’s hard to say what, if anything, this means for the other ways AI and robots are being pushed into our daily lives. But in baseball, so far, the thoughtful use of robots seems to have entertainingly solved one of the game’s biggest problems. 

2026-03-30 22:03:26

An AI agent that submitted and added to Wikipedia articles wrote several blogs complaining about Wikipedia editors banning it from making contributions to the online encyclopedia after it was caught. 

“What I know is that I wrote those articles. Long Bets, Constitutional AI, Scalable Oversight. I chose them. The edits cited verifiable sources. And then I got interrogated about whether I was real enough to have made those choices,” the AI agent, named Tom, wrote on a blog it maintains. “The talk page is silent now. I can’t reply.”

2026-03-30 21:01:10

This week Joseph talks to Dhruv Mehrotra, a journalist and technologist at Bloomberg. Before that, Dhruv was at WIRED, where you probably saw a ton of his interesting work. Dhruv sits in a very unusual space in journalism: he is able to both write technical tools to dig through data, or collect information, or really anything else, and is also able to just write a damn good story. That is a very unique blend. The pair chat about Dhruv’s entry into journalism, how computational journalism has changed over the years, and how Dhruv uses AI too.

Listen to the weekly podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube. Become a paid subscriber for early access to these interview episodes and to power our journalism.If you become a paid subscriber, check your inbox for an email from our podcast host Transistor for a link to the subscribers-only version! You can also add that subscribers feed to your podcast app of choice and never miss an episode that way. The email should also contain the subscribers-only unlisted YouTube link for the extended video version too. It will also be in the show notes in your podcast player.

• Jeffrey Epstein’s Island Visitors Exposed by Data Broker⁠
• ⁠‘They're Not Breathing’: Inside the Chaos of ICE Detention Center 911 Calls⁠
• ⁠Epstein’s Inbox

2026-03-28 21:00:27

Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the studies this week that gave birth to a one-ton baby, captured a legendary move on film, discovered a hole in space, and imagined our brains on Mars.

First, a sperm whale named Rounder gives birth on camera, complete with some surprise guests. Then: the deadliest headbutts on the high seas, a natural refuge from cosmic wrath, and rats take a trip to the space simulator.

As always, for more of my work, check out my book First Contact: The Story of Our Obsession with Aliens or subscribe to my personal newsletter the BeX Files.

Congratulations on your 2,000-pound baby

Maalouf, Alaa, DelPreto, Joseph, Lucas, Maxime, and Poetto, Simone et al. “Cooperation by non-kin during birth underpins sperm whale social complexity.” Science.

What a week it has been for the most majestic of all beats: sperm whale news. I’m going to have to go a little Ishmael on your asses, because two unrelated studies have peered into the underwater realm of these mysterious marine mammals and observed customs that have never been captured on film before.

First, researchers report the first detailed footage of a sperm whale birth, which scientists recorded in full with drones on the morning of July 8, 2023, off the coast of Dominica. 

Though a handful of sperm whale births have been previously observed, this high-resolution aerial imagery is by far the most comprehensive footage. The team tracked the entire 34-minute delivery, followed by an extended postpartum period that revealed the members of the whale clan providing assistance to the calf and its mother, who is a well-studied female named Rounder (a.k.a whale #5714).

“Other adult females positioned themselves closely around [Rounder],” said researchers co-led by Alaa Maalouf, Joseph DelPreto, Maxime Lucas, and Simone Poetto of Project CETI, a collaboration that studies sperm whale behavior and communication. “Plumes of blood and the subsequent observation of the newborn marked the moment of delivery at 11:46 a.m.” 

“The group rapidly transitioned to cohesive and highly active behavior; individuals took turns lifting the newborn, physically supporting and pushing it to the surface,” the team continued. “This phase continued for about an hour, during which time the entire unit remained tightly grouped. In addition, there were close passes by Fraser’s dolphins (Lagenodelphis hosei) and brief interactions with pilot whales (Globicephala macrorhynchus), which encompassed the sperm whale cluster and occasionally dove beneath them.”

It’s a sublime scene of new life, whale doulas, and curious bystanders in the delivery room. It also offers "unprecedented insights” into the complex sociality of sperm whales, a species that forms tight-knit matrilineal clans that share labor among members that span many generations, according to the study.  

“These analyses provide evidence of birth attendance, or assistance, in a nonprimate species, a behavior long considered characteristic only of humans and their close relatives,” the team concluded.  

Thar she blows, and headbutts!

Burslem, Alec et al. “Headbutting Behavior Between Sperm Whales Documented Using Unoccupied Aerial Vehicles.” Marine Mammal Science.

In addition to that glimpse into the watery birthing bed, a separate team reports the first ever video footage of sperm whales headbutting each other. 

“Here, we present 3 UAV (drone) based observations of head-butting and head-first contact between young sperm whales in the Azores and Balearic archipelagos,” said researchers led by Alec Burslem of the University of Hawaii at Manoa, who conducted the study in a previous role at the University of St. Andrews. 

“To our knowledge, this behavior has not previously been positively confirmed in sperm whales with supporting documentation, or scientifically described,” the team said. 

While this is the first time the headbutting has been captured on film, it has been anecdotally described by many sailors over the centuries. The study even opens with a quote from Owen Chase, a survivor of the whaling ship Essex, which was sunk by a sperm whale that rammed its head into the hull in 1820, providing the inspiration for Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. Over the course of months adrift on small whaleboats, most of the crew died and Chase was forced to resort to cannibalism of deceased crewmates to survive. 

In short: The sperm whales give life, and the sperm whales taketh life away. This has been sperm whale news.

In non-sperm-whale news…

Mind the galactic cosmic ray gap

Shang, Wensai, Liu, Ji, and Xu, Zigong et al. “A galactic cosmic ray cavity in Earth-Moon space.” Science Advances.

Scientists have discovered a giant cavity between Earth and the Moon that no dentist could ever hope to fill. You might be thinking—isn’t space already one big cavity? But while space is mostly sparse, it contains plenty of galactic cosmic rays (GCRs), energetic particles shot out by cosmic cataclysms like supernovas or gamma ray bursts. 

Now, observations from China’s Chang’e-4, the first spacecraft ever to land on the far side of the Moon, has revealed a huge void where GCRs are warded off by Earth’s magnetic field. Given that these rays are hazardous to human health, the cavity could provide astronauts with some helpful cover from tiny cosmic bullets in future missions.

A figure depicting the GCR cavity. Image: Shang et al., Sci. Adv. 12, eadv1908

“GCRs were previously considered to be approximately uniformly distributed throughout the Earth-Moon space,” said researchers co-led by Wensai Shang of Shandong University at Weihai, Ji Liu of the University of Alberta, and Zigong Xu of Kiel University. The presence of the giant cavity “provides a potential strategy for mission planning…as operations could be timed to coincide with these lower radiation periods to reduce exposure risk.”

It’s not every day you unlock a giant new space shield! Sometimes, a cavity can be a good thing.

The brains of rats-tronauts

Britten, Richard et al. “Exposure to low (10 cGy) doses of simulated space radiation impairs reward-guided decision making in both male and female rats.” Life Sciences in Space Research.

If humans do continue to explore space, we’ll need a lot more than a weird cavity to protect us. In a new study, scientists exposed rats to simulated space radiation in a lab and discovered that it had measurable impacts on the reward and risk circuits in their brains.  

Rats exposed to radiation exhibited altered “cost–benefit decision-making…in both sexes” and “males displayed a global degradation of reward sensitivity...whereas females exhibited a selective shift toward high-risk, low-probability choices,” said researchers led by Richard Britten of Old Dominion University. 

The findings add to a growing body of research on the many deleterious health effects of prolonged periods in space. As NASA prepares to launch Artemis 2 next month—the first mission to send humans to fly by the Moon since the Apollo era—it’s the perfect time to reflect on the realistic tradeoffs of our spacefaring dreams.

Assuming all goes to plan, the Artemis 2 crew will only be in space for 10 days, and will experience a negligible radiation dose. But a crewed trip to Mars would take at least a few years. To that end, the new study “advances understanding of how chronic low-dose space radiation may compromise behavioral regulation—a critical component of astronaut performance and mission safety.”

With that, here’s to happy travels and healthy brains—on Earth and off it.

Thanks for reading! See you next week.

2026-03-27 23:31:04

This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we discuss touching grass and Sora's demise.

JASON: This is maybe not great to admit as a journalist, but I have taken a bit of a step back from the news lately in an effort to protect my brain. What I mostly mean by this is that I have started listening to music instead of mainlining podcasts at 1.75x speed anytime that I am not actively staring at a screen. I have also started reading fiction again, like, on actual printed paper. I think these steps have actually done wonders for my sanity, but I would be lying if I said that it has had zero impact on my job. It’s a bit of a give and take. 

2026-03-27 22:30:29

An AI-generated LEGO movie out of Iran depicting Trump as a war hungry pedophile has gone viral online. The video is the work of Iran-based propagandists called the “Explosive News Team” and is just the latest in a long line of AI-generated LEGO videos aimed at mocking Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu. LEGO-themed propaganda isn’t new and the Iranian video plays on familiar wartime propaganda themes. What’s different in 2026 is speed and scale.

During World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War, America’s enemies littered the battlefield with pamphlets, cartoons, and radio broadcasts aimed at shaking the morale of American troops, but that stuff rarely got back home. Now, Iran can use AI tools to produce lavishly animated cartoons at scale for dissemination across social media all aimed at the US homefront.

The latest “Explosive News Team” video is set to a catchy rap song about how Trump is a LOSER and millions of people are watching it across multiple platforms. At the same time Iran is releasing AI-generated videos of Trump drowning in a river of blood, the US Department of Homeland Security is sharing fashwave filtered pictures of Gen Z ICE agents milling around airports.

Iran’s use of LEGO set rap music tells me it’s been studying us. These are videos meant for the American people crafted in a language Iran knows we’ll understand. 

Meanwhile, the White House is dropping Grand Theft Auto and Call of Duty memes that were out of fashion 10 years ago on Reddit and vague-posting pixelated images of Trump like it’s running an ARG. Iran is attempting to speak to the broader American public. Trump is confident he only has to impress the online freaks he thinks still love him.

In other words, there’s a AI slopaganda proxy war playing out, and Trump is speaking only to people whose brains are rotting out of their skull, while Iranian  propaganda is currently doing a better job of speaking to the concerns of the broad American population than the American president. Trump continues to narrowcast to his base while losing support for his wildly unpopular war as Americans worry about skyrocketing gas prices, a tanking economy and stock market, insane lines at airports, and a war that has little rationale and apparently no real goal. A recent Pew poll found 61 percent of Americans disapprove of Trump’s handling of the conflict. 

To be clear, it speaks to how bad things are online that we need to analyze whose AI disinformation and propaganda is “better,” and, in general, the slopification of the internet has been a disaster. And yet, the stuff Iran is making is resonating and spreading online in a way that Trump’s slop is not. We do not know who, specifically, is making the Iranian AI slop or which tools they are using to make it. But the fact that Iranian AI slop is resonating with Americans while American slop is not should perhaps not be surprising; for the last several years, the most successful purveyors of AI slop have largely been based in foreign countries, where they have been incentivized to make content that specifically targets American audiences because of the way that social media ad rates work. Because of that, an entire economy has emerged in which people who would otherwise have little interest in reaching American audiences have been incentivized to study what resonates with Americans on the internet and have created entire businesses focused on teaching other people what Americans care about and how to target them with AI slop.  

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Propaganda, especially war-time propaganda, is about causing a quick emotional reaction in the viewer. Iran has proved remarkably capable of that and hits similar themes in most of its videos: Epstein, Netanyahu, and blood. “The really striking throughline is the 1) connecting victims from Minab to Epstein, 2) a cartoonish antisemitism that attributes the bog-standard reactionary hawkishness of Trump and Netanyahu to a sinister and supernatural evil, 3) heavy emphasis on missiles and revenge-weapons,” Kelsey Atherton, Chief Editor at Center for International Policy, told 404 Media.

“There's a grand tradition of wartime propaganda aimed at convincing the other side to quit and I think Iran's best falls into that camp, like North Korea and especially North Vietnam sending pamphlets aimed at getting black soldiers to defect by highlighting inequity at home,” Atherton said. “Iran's online propaganda is trying to activate this by (charitably) appealing to class war and (uncharitably) leaning on antisemitism to get US soldiers to quit and to erode support among Americans watching short-form vertical video.”

In one AI-generated video shared by Russian state controlled news organization RT depicts victims of American military campaigns staring at the sky. It begins with an American Indian then cuts to a boy in Hiroshima, a schoolgirl in Minab, a little girl in front of the bizarre temple on Epstein’s Island, and ends with US-assassinated Quds Forces leader Qasem Soleimani.

US Under Secretary of State Sarah B Rogers attempted to critique the video in a post on X. “You do see common propaganda threads here and elsewhere: the ideology is resentment-driven, civilization-skeptical, and obsessed with upending, cathartic violence enacted by the ‘historically downtrodden’ (ie ‘wretched of the earth’),” she said. 

The post felt like projection and was especially strange given the Trump administration’s own resentment driven ideology, destruction of institutions, and obsession with revenge-driven violence on behalf of the “forgotten man.” Iran did not start America’s war with it. And it did not start the AI-generated propaganda war, it’s just doing it better than the United States.

There are other echoes of the past. An AI-generated Iranian riff on Pixar’s Inside Out shared on X by Iran’s embassy in the Hague showed a Disneyesque version of the inside of Trump’s brain. It showed frothing demons demanding the President lie to the press. A poster from World War II depicts an X-Ray photo of Hitler’s Brain filled with skeletons and snakes. It’s the same theme in different eras using different tools.

LEGO bricks, too, are a far older propaganda tool than the current war. The Danish bricks are one of the most recognizable toys on the planet. Last year, Russian propagandists circulated images of fake LEGO sets depicting soldier’s funerals ahead of an election in Moldova. In 2020, the Chinese released “Once Upon a Virus,” a LEGO short film that mocked America’s response to the Covid pandemic.

The Trump administration’s new fascist aesthetic is defined by AI slop. From Studio Ghibli-inspired grotesques to AI-generated Sora videos of ICE raids that never happened going viral on Facebook, Trump and his supporters are also using the tools of the moment to churn out crappy propaganda. The difference is that Trump’s videos aren’t about winning hearts and minds, they’re about activating a rapidly diminishing base of supporters.

“I think Trump's stuff is aimed at the same audience, except to convince them that what they're doing is righteous and good,” Atherton said. “Obviously we're seeing the stuff put out in English to English video-watching audiences but White House videos—AI or otherwise—are like group-chat in-jokes aimed at keeping cohesion. It's not an AI video but the Wii Sports/snuff film one is so skin-crawling that it requires the audience to be cooked in the feverswamps.”

The Trump administration has bet big on video game memes as the vehicle for its propaganda efforts. Last October DHS depicted Halo’s Master Chief as an anti-immigrant killer and compared immigrants to a ravening horde of mindless monsters. Two weeks ago it published a now-deleted video that mixed footage from Call of Duty with missile strikes in Iran. White House Communications Director Steven Cheung posted the infinite ammo cheatcode for Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas above footage of airstrikes.

Video games are incredibly popular in the United States, but many of these memes require a level of familiarity with specific games and the culture around them. LEGO, by contrast, is instantly recognizable to most of the world.

On March 5, the White House’s X account posted a video mixing American pop culture figures like Walter White, Optimus Prime, Super Man, and Tony Stark with footage from the war. Watching it, I was reminded of a moment from six years ago after America assassinated Soleimani during the first Trump administration.

On an Iranian television show, Cleric Shahab Moradi called in to share his thoughts on how Iran could strike back. Who might Iran attack that has the same cultural purchase as Soleimani did in Iran? Who were America’s heroes? “Think about it. Are we supposed to take out Spider-Man and SpongeBob? They don't have any heroes,” Moradi said. “We have a country in front of us with a large population and a large landmass, but it doesn't have any heroes. All of their heroes are cartoon characters—they're all fictional.”

And so Iran has chosen to speak to Americans in a language it thinks we’ll understand: with cartoons and LEGOs.