Delightful:

(from the NYT's Metropolitan Diary) (h/t Eric Roston)

A charming correction from the New York Times:

Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article misstated which day the New York Mets suffered their 11th straight loss. It was on Sunday, not Monday. Even the Mets cannot lose on an off day.

Baseball always brings out the best in American newspapers, especially when the subject is crushing and unrelenting defeat. Here's a tremendous passage from a New York Times report on the Chicago White Sox's 2024 season:

Over the course of the 2024 season, the White Sox have explored the full spectrum of losing the way a great actor uses every corner of the stage, the way a jazz saxophonist probes every note in a scale. They have lost nobly, tragically, cleverly, inspiringly and deflatingly. They have lost late at night and early in the afternoon, in soggy rain and on crisp sunny days. I have seen perfectly professional losses that could have gone either way — but of course didn’t — and games that should have been stopped, for cruelty, in the fourth inning. I have seen the White Sox lose in front of huge roaring crowds at Fenway Park and also, back home, in their own nearly empty stadium. (On a sunny Tuesday, just before game time, I once counted 199 people sitting in the vast sea of outfield seats — and when the announcer finally said “Play ball!” the applause sounded like someone had just done a magic trick at a church picnic.) I have seen the White Sox hit their catcher in the groin with the baseball three separate times in a single inning. I have seen the White Sox lose because three fielders ran into each other like clowns. I have watched a bloop single flutter and fall, like the first leaf of autumn, delicately onto the outfield grass, at the most devastating possible moment. I have seen games in which Chicago’s hitters looked like All-Stars but their pitchers looked like impostors, and games where it was vice versa, and games in which they all played great but the ball just bounced the wrong way.

For more great writing on baseball and the meaning of defeat, check out Can't Anyone Here Play This Game?, by the incomparable Jimmy Breslin.

Reuters reports on Ace, a ping pong-playing robot created by AI researechers at Sony, was able to beat some of the world's best human players.

Will Dunham writes:

In matches detailed in the study, Ace in April 2025 won three out of five versus elite players and lost two matches against professional players, the top skill level in the sport. Sony AI said that since then Ace beat professional players in December 2025 and last month.

Of course, Sony's ambition here isn't to make a champion table tennis player, fun as that is. Broader applications can follow:

The project's goal was not only to ⁠compete at table tennis but to develop insights into how robots can perceive, plan and act with human-like speed and precision in dynamic environments, Dürr said.

"The success of Ace, with its perception system ​and learning-based control algorithm, suggests that similar techniques could be applied to other areas requiring fast, real-time control and human interaction - such as manufacturing and service robotics, as well as applications across sports, entertainment and ​safety-critical physical domains," said Dürr, lead author of a study describing Ace's achievements published on Wednesday in the journal Nature.

At some point I'm sure someone will come up with some kind of Humans v Robots Olympic Games. Though how long that will last is questionable. At a certain point the robots will just never lose.

Interesting data from Nicholas Thompson of the Atlantic:

"Because we are asking it about our relationships" offers a woman in Thompson's comments, though we're just as likely to hear about men turning to AI for relationship advice as women. Another comment speculates that this shift was inevitable as AI matured into a mainstream tool, which is about where we are now.

Casey Newton:

Being polite to a large language model can feel strange or even silly — roughly equivalent to thanking a toaster. And yet a recent paper from Anthropic lends scientific weight to the theory that chatbots work better when you’re nice to them.

The researchers found that language models have fairly reliable internal representations of feelings like “happiness” and “distress,” and that these representations affect their behavior — sometimes for the worse. For example, when Claude Sonnet 4.5 begins to represent “desperation,” the model is more likely to cheat at coding tasks.

Read more: The scientific case for being nice to your chatbot

"Blessed are the peacemakers! But woe to those who manipulate religion and the very name of God for their own military, economic and political gain, dragging that which is sacred into darkness and filth."

-- Pope Leo XIV, speaking in Cameroon on Thursday.

Some great news from the ailing world of local journalism. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette is going to be saved by the parent company of the terrific Baltimore Banner:

The Venetoulis Institute for Local Journalism, which runs The Baltimore Banner and is financed by the hotel magnate Stewart W. Bainum Jr., said on Tuesday that it had reached an agreement with the newspaper’s current owner, Block Communications, to buy the assets of The Post-Gazette and run it as a nonprofit. The transaction is expected to take effect on May 4, ensuring there is no gap in publishing.

The deal is a rare spot of good news for the media industry, which has endured waves of metropolitan and local newspaper closures and widening local news deserts around the country for the past two decades. A 2025 report by Northwestern University found that more than 130 papers had shut in the preceding year alone.

Lately, it's seemed as if there's two kinds of sustainable media company. Huge -- the NYT, Bloomberg -- or extremely small, like the Substackers.

The Baltimore Banner is hope for a different way -- local news done well without all the overheads of the previous era: expensive executives and clueless publishers that drove those vital businesses into the ground.

Artemis was a triumph, writes Bloomberg Opinion's Timothy Lavin, but it might not have been. Sobering reading:

For all the well-earned acclaim, this mission was uncomfortably close to tragedy. In fact, its risks were more pronounced than the public was generally aware, and out of all proportion to the limited goals it was pursuing.

Dolly Parton is the most popular person in America, an (actually quite rigorous) poll finds:

Parton has a net favorability of +65, 50 points higher than Barack Obama (+14) or Volodymyr Zelensky (+13), and more than 60 points above the just-barely-positive Taylor Swift (+3). Of course this doesn’t directly translate to popularity; a T-Swift tour will outsell Parton 100 times out of 100. The poll suggests that though Swift may be a juggernaut, nearly as many people loathe her as like her. With Dolly, there’s love everywhere you look.

While it’s just one poll, UMass Lowell is a reputable pollster; Silver Bulletin gives them an A-. Dolly is included in the questions in part because she’s an example of a genuinely beloved figure, which is rare in these often less-than United States. She’s used as a bar that no politicians seem able to reach. Even Swift at +3 far outpaces most national figures in office.

We should never be drawn too much on this, obviously, but I do think it's notable how Dolly is, at the core of it, an unashamed and unequivocating liberal (or what American's consider "liberal," in our absurd times).

She was so pro-Covid vaccine she funded its development. On LGBT rights, she said "We are all god's children, we are who we are. We should be allowed to be who we are."

Has she spoken on all issues? No. But you couldn't accuse of her of not doing her bit to promote some sanity among the madness.

Former ProPublica president Richard Tofel declares the days of the "anecdotal lede" to be numbered. Among the reasons why, he says, is how AI might change our habits:

AI is another important factor pushing in the same direction. How much AI is going to take over news delivery is, I think, more of an open question than some techno-enthusiasts believe. But there is no real question that the degree to which content will come to us filtered through AI will grow substantially. And AI is simply going to strip away the grace (and, I am afraid, the power) of anecdotal ledes from those who insist on continuing to employ them. If you are summarizing a story, Kilgore’s nut graf survives—it even floats to the top. But the slow slide into the pool of the anecdotal lede is deemed surplusage.

"And not before time!" says a room of grumpy editors. (I'm not in that room.)

Tofel talks about the bulleted AI-generated summaries many news orgs (including the one I work for) are placing on top of stories these days. Why have this and then drop into an anecdotal lede? It's a good point. But I'm not giving up the right to an anecdotal lede that easily. I have two simple rules. First, the anecdote needs to be extremely relevant to the story at hand. Second, the anecdote needs to actually be good.

Christopher Hale in his 'Letters from Leo' newsletter:

In January, behind closed doors at the Pentagon, Under Secretary of War for Policy Elbridge Colby summoned Cardinal Christophe Pierre — Pope Leo XIV’s then-ambassador to the United States — and delivered a lecture.

“America,” Colby and his colleagues told the cardinal, “has the military power to do whatever it wants in the world. The Catholic Church had better take its side.”

Read it all: The Pentagon Threatened Pope Leo XIV’s Ambassador With the Avignon Papacy

This 2,800-word essay took me 45 hours to write. I wrote it from scratch five times, and only 10% of my words made the final cut. That comes out to an average pace of one word per minute; imagine typing a single word, taking a brief walk, and then coming back to type the next. Writing happens at an unbearably slow pace for a culture that’s glued to vertical feeds with split-second reward loops, but thinking takes time. Good thinking takes a lot of time and even more toil. Essay writing is a process I’ve grown to love, a process I believe is deeply human, and yet it’s a process that’s becoming endangered.

-- Michael Dean: Essay Writing as Personal Sovereignty

Facing a problem of North Koreans posing as different nationalities for remote jobs, one tech start-up implements a simple test: Will they insult Kim Jong-Un?

Here is a video of a North Korean IT worker being stopped dead in their tracks upon being required to insult Kim Jong Un.

It won't work forever, but right now it's genuinely an effective filter. I'm yet to come across one who can say it. https://t.co/8FFVPxNm8X pic.twitter.com/KXI5efMo5L

— tanuki42 (@tanuki42_) April 6, 2026

TechCrunch has more on the practice here.

James Ball on Bluesky's (lack of) growing pains:

This is the better question about this stuff: most of us aren’t technology investors. We just want a social network we can use, and which ideally isn’t full of fascists, trolls, and bots. Bluesky’s small size can feel like a bonus against that backdrop: for many of its current users, the network feels fine as it is. Why worry about it growing? I’m getting what I need from it now.

The problem is monetisation: Bluesky costs a lot of money to run, and at present the bills are being paid by investors. They don’t do this out of the goodness of their hearts. They do so in the hope of making vastly more money later. Generally, investors will be happy to subsidise the losses of a company if it is growing, especially if it is growing fast.

Hamilton Nolan:

No, I will not be joining in the chorus of condemnation. On the contrary. If you are a professional writer, I want you to use AI. Because this industry is competitive. I’ll take any advantage I can get. And if you want to make your writing suck, that’s all the better for me. One less person outshining me.

Read the rest: Go Ahead and Use AI. It Will Only Help Me Dominate You.