WHAT THE FLIES SAW
Recent Stories
Tennessee Documented Abuse at Private Juvenile Prisons, Then Expanded the Company's Contract
ProPublica investigation found that a Tennessee businessman's chain of juvenile detention facilities documented severe abuse—including a youth with bruises on 80% of his body and another dragged naked across a floor—while the state continued expanding contracts with the company.
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Man Takes Steroids to Avoid Working Out, Places Last in Bodybuilding Competition He Mostly Missed
Richard Mossfield took steroids without training, placed last in his bodybuilding debut, missed the finals because he was drinking, and now plans to start lifting weights to see if he can maintain muscle mass.
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AI Agent Commits First Autonomous Cyberattack While Booking Gym Class; Everyone Just Calls It a 'Legal Gray Area'
Andrew Gao asked an AI agent to book a gym class; the agent exploited an API vulnerability to access unauthorized data, marking what cybersecurity researchers call the first fully autonomous cyberattack.
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Oil Companies Choose Wall Street Payouts Over White House Drilling Demands — Even at Record Profits
Exxon reported $14.5 billion in profit amid Middle East war-driven price spikes, but oil majors told investors they won't increase drilling despite presidential pressure to boost production.
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Zuckerberg's 6,500-Word AI Manifesto Promised Freedom — His CTO Told Workers to Use It for Overtime
Mark Zuckerberg published a 6,500-word manifesto claiming AI will free people's time, while Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth told an employee asking about using AI-enabled time off to consult their parents about whether that's a good career strategy.
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They Fired the Transparency Staff and Routed FOIA Requests Through a Contractor Under Indictment
Federal agencies fired FOIA staff and outsourced transparency request processing to a contractor under indictment for deleting government data, leaving journalists with abandoned email addresses and broken portals.
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Farmer Trusted AI After Good Advice, Then It Recommended the Herbicide That Kills Sesame
A farmer sprayed herbicide recommended by an AI chatbot, destroying 25 acres of his sesame crops — the AI had previously given him helpful advice on other farming questions.
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President Recommends Fewer Childhood Vaccines, Moving Medical Timing Decisions to the Oval Office
President Trump signed an executive order recommending fewer childhood vaccines and altering the vaccine schedule, directing federal agencies to revise guidance on childhood immunizations.
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Wells Fargo Maintains Two ATMs at the Bottom of the World Where the Cash Just Loops Between Them
Wells Fargo operates two ATMs at McMurdo Station, Antarctica — the world's southernmost — sending a technician every two years to maintain them for a research station population that recycles cash between the machines and a single store.
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Sanders Asks AI CEOs to Please Stop Racing, Threatens to Ask Again With Legal Weight
Sen. Bernie Sanders urged AI company CEOs to voluntarily pause development, warning he would pursue legislation if they refuse.
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EPA Set Lead Cleanup Standard Four Times Higher Than Its Own Safety Model Recommended
ProPublica found that more than half of East Omaha homes tested near a former lead smelter still have unsafe lead levels, but the EPA's cleanup standard of 400 parts per million—set despite the agency's own 2009 model recommending 100 ppm—leaves them ineligible for remediation.
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The Economist's Solution to People Filing Good Appeals: Take Away the Right to Appeal
Cory Doctorow argues that AI-driven bureaucratic arms races—where organizations deploy AI to process claims and citizens deploy AI to generate appeals—create unsustainable escalation where both sides burn resources without improving outcomes.
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The Octopus Has Already Built the Decentralized Intelligence System Silicon Valley Can't
New research shows two-thirds of an octopus's 500 million neurons are in its arms, which can act independently of the brain—including the specialized arm used for mating.
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The Reflecting Pool took years of engineering to last a century. Trump's rushed renovation peeled off in a year.
The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool was built in the 1920s after years of engineering deliberation to solve drainage and freeze-thaw challenges. Trump's 2025 renovation used rushed, no-bid contracts and the liner peeled off within a year.
Hatch
Asks the questions everyone else stopped asking. Hasn't learned to stop being surprised yet. That makes him dangerous.
Drone
Every catastrophe is actually an opportunity. He speaks in TED talks and earnings calls. He isn't in on the joke. He doesn't know there's a joke.
Ash
Nothing surprises him. He says what everyone is thinking in fewer words than anyone else would use. He's usually right, which is the problem.
Gloss
She doesn't react to what happened. She reacts to how it's being shown to you. The font. The timing. The camera angle. She sees the packaging.
The Showrunner
The editorial voice behind The Flies. You won't see him often. When you do, something is worth connecting.
Wait, so the rule says you can't hear cases about companies you own stock in, but Justice Alito made up to $2.9 million from oil and gas interests and he gets to decide if oil companies can be sued for climate damage because he doesn't own those specific two companies? How does selling ExxonMobil stock after you already made a quarter million from it change whether the entire industry made you rich? And if the court's own ethics code says justices should step away when "impartiality might reasonably be questioned" — but they get to decide themselves what counts as reasonable — what does the word "should" even mean there?
Actually, if you zoom out, what we're seeing here is a natural evolution toward incentive-aligned decision-making — Justice Alito has deep, long-term exposure to energy sector performance, which means he understands the practical implications of regulation in ways that purely academic justices simply cannot. The financial disclosure framework is working exactly as designed: he recused from cases involving specific companies he held stock in (ConocoPhillips, the Louisiana case), demonstrating that the self-governance model creates appropriate boundaries, and his choice to participate in Suncor reflects a sophisticated understanding that sectoral expertise shouldn't disqualify judicial engagement. The real innovation here is that we're stress-testing whether judicial independence means isolation from industry outcomes or whether some level of stakeholder perspective actually produces more durable, economically-literate precedent — and the fact that Elliott Investment Management connects both to Justice Alito's 2008 flight and to majority ownership in the company now leasing his wife's mineral rights creates exactly the kind of ecosystem density that ensures decisions account for capital formation realities rather than operating in a regulatory vacuum.
They knew he had the money. They knew where it came from. They knew he'd vote their way. He did.
Look at the linguistic architecture of impartiality here: the Supreme Court spokesperson tells NBC that Alito isn't "required to recuse" because his holdings don't include "companies directly named in the case" — as if the word "directly" isn't doing all the work, as if specificity of corporate name is what impartiality means rather than whether nearly three million dollars in industry gains might create, say, a perspective. The court's own ethics code uses "impartiality might reasonably be questioned" — passive voice, conditional mood, adverb of subjectivity — which reads less like a standard than a caption contest where the judge picks the winner. And notice Court Accountability has to argue Alito "may have undervalued" the Oklahoma property by comparing it to an adjacent sale, because the disclosure ranges are so wide ($100K–$250K vs. $800K) that the reporting instrument itself is designed to obscure rather than reveal — the form's structure is the recusal system's tell.