Source: Reason
by Elizabeth Nolan Brown

“As more places around the world — including U.S. states — pass laws requiring age checks around the internet, we’re continuing to see a slew of unintended (but entirely predictable) consequences. The latest round includes some U.S. residents being blocked from a blogging platform, French folks in dangers of their porn viewing habits being leaked, and porn websites that violate the law in the U.K. being rewarded with big boosts in web traffic. Let’s start closest to home.” (09/03/25)

https://reason.com/2025/09/03/more-age-verification-fallout-artist-blogs-blocked-porn-data-leaked-traffic-boosts-for-noncompliant-sites/

Source: Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression
by Ross Marchand

“What’s in a name? To Gallaudet University, quite a lot. When the Gallaudet chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine protested the war in Gaza, Gallaudet moved swiftly to silence the group, neutering the SJP chapter’s social media presence and sending a campus-wide email condemning the group’s rhetoric. While they initially succeeded, swift action by FIRE and the social media company Meta ensured that free speech — and proper application of trademark law — won the day.” (09/03/25)

https://www.thefire.org/news/new-campus-censorship-hack-turns-trademark-law-muzzle

Source: The American Prospect
by Bryan McMahon

“Last month, the tech world turned with rapt attention to one man, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, for the launch of the company’s new AI model, GPT-5. The atmosphere resembled the scientists waiting to see the first atomic bomb test at Los Alamos. GPT-5 was supposed to be another great leap forward toward the promised godlike telos of artificial general intelligence (AGI), a machine smarter than any human and possibly smarter than the sum of human civilization itself. But the release of GPT-5 was a dud. Despite being relentlessly hyped for years, the most significant part of the announcement was the release of a model router that dynamically selects the correct ‘level’ of computation power spent toward answering questions.” (09/04/25)

https://prospect.org/economy/2025-09-04-what-if-theres-no-agi/

Source: Brownstone Institute
by Cooper Davis

“During a recent family vacation over lobster, I watched my ‘vote blue no matter who’ aunt-in-law, herself a paragon of New England liberal sensibilities from a leafy suburb outside Boston, argue with her Fox News-watching, burn-it-all-down brother about recent goings-on at HHS. ‘Just because Fauci lied about Covid,’ she said, ‘doesn’t mean all science is fake; there’s something worth saving here.’ Meet J.Crew-Anon: affluent, educated, professional, skeptical but not nihilistic. They still read the Times and the Journal, but also subscribe to multiple Substacks and are daily imbibers of less ‘safe’ publishers, like Brownstone.org. They triangulate. They parse information with friends and peers, seeing fact-checkers as either dangerous or useless or both. They are more interested in steelmanning the opposition than shouting it down.” (09/03/25)

https://brownstone.org/articles/dissent-goes-mainstream/

Source: Bet On It
by Bryan Caplan

“Value is not cost. Value is what you get; cost is what you pay; and they are not the same. Not even close. In this world of ours, some things have immense value and immense cost, like a cure for aging. Some things have trivial value and trivial cost, like a speck of dust floating through the air in front of you. Some things have trivial value and immense cost, like a mud pie a hundred miles wide. And finally, some things have immense value and trivial cost, like food, water, and air. Value is not cost. It is thanks to this simple principle that life is worth living.” (09/03/25)

https://www.betonit.ai/p/the-everyday-miracle-value-is-not