Credit…Eric Lee for The New York Times

Dear Commons Community,

Trump yesterday ordered warning signs and exhibits installed outside the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History to alert the public that the museum does not, in his view, accurately reflect American history.   As reported by The New York Times.

The unusual directive, made through an executive order, was a considerable escalation of the president’s dispute with the Smithsonian and its history museum, which was the subject of a recent 162-page report. The report accused the museum’s director, Anthea M. Hartig, of “radical activist ideology” and the museum of undermining “faith in American institutions.”

The order went so far as to suggest that the signage inform potential museum visitors of locations where American history is better presented. The administration did not explain where the public would be redirected.

The Smithsonian declined to comment.

Mr. Trump’s order came just days after Ms. Hartig was grilled by Republican legislators in two congressional hearings, where she was accused of teaching “national self-loathing.”

Ms. Hartig, who was a particular target of the White House report, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. In the hearings she contested the thrust of the report and insisted her museum was simply representing history in all its complexity.

“When historians talk about reframing a traditional narrative, we don’t mean erasing it,” she said in her testimony. “We mean adding the evidence, the voices, the objects that earlier tellings left out so that more Americans can see themselves reflected in the national story.”

Friday’s executive order also ordered several government officials to “restore trust in the Smithsonian Institution” and to seek its compliance with the White House findings, which asserted that the museum had become a tool of political activism and had not done enough to celebrate the achievements of the nation’s founders on the country’s 250th anniversary year.

The government officials include the interior secretary, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, the administrator of general services, and the assistant to the president for domestic policy, the order says. The Domestic Policy Council published the White House’s report on the Smithsonian.

The inclusion of the budget office is consistent with the White House remarks in other settings that pointed to the fact that the Smithsonian is largely federally funded.

Representative Melanie Stansbury, Democrat of New Mexico, was among those who objected to Mr. Trump’s effort.

“Once again, the Trump administration is attempting to use executive authority to exercise its political will over our nation’s independent cultural institutions,” she said in a statement. “This executive order is a clear political overreach, driven by an ideological agenda to rewrite American history. Our Smithsonian institutions do not belong to the president, but the American people, and so does our national story.”

Some historians have also criticized the federal government’s attempts to overhaul the Smithsonian as ideologically motivated.

“I cannot recall a single instance where exhibits have been directly wrestled with by the upper echelons of the federal government,” said Samuel J. Redman, a history professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst who has written extensively on the Smithsonian’s history.

The order by the president said the signage “shall notify visitors that the museum exhibits should be renovated consistent with the findings in the report and direct visitors to locations and resources for accurate information regarding America’s history.”

“Because the museum has failed to appropriately honor the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence during this 250th anniversary year of the founding of our country,” the order continues, government agencies “shall install temporary exhibits or signage on N.P.S.-maintained sidewalks, walkways, and land used by the public that corrects inaccurate information presented in the museum.”

In yesterday’s order, Mr. Trump cited his March 2025 executive order, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” which accused the Smithsonian of undermining “the remarkable achievements of the United States by casting its founding principles and historical milestones in a negative light.”

This week’s hearings, which took place on Tuesday and Wednesday, increased the pressure on Ms. Hartig, who was questioned by lawmakers about exhibitions that they said indicated a liberal bias in emphasizing the country’s flaws and failing to adequately celebrate its achievements.

In particular, Ms. Hartig was repeatedly taken to task for two recent shows, one of which — “Entertainment Nation” — included explicit sexual imagery. Another, “Girlhood (It’s complicated),” discussed struggles with gender identity among young women.

Mike Gonzalez, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation who has written critically about the Smithsonian and testified at both hearings, commended the  executive order for enlisting the oversight of administration officials like Russell T. Vought, the White House budget director, and Vince Haley, the director of the White House’s Domestic Policy Council.

“Since I think the only way to correct the Smithsonian is to remove from office its entire leadership,” Mr. Gonzalez said, “I trust these two intellectual heavy hitters will work to do that.”

But Dr. Redman, the historian, said that many observers have been dismayed by the aggressiveness of the White House efforts to take control of the Smithsonian and its 21 museums.

“Historians are appalled,” Dr. Redman said. “The Smithsonian has been known for trying to present a consensus version of history.”

Trump’s actions will probably increase attendance at the Smithsonian!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

A frustrated Trump threw a curse-riddled temper tantrum inside the Oval Office over his own failure to end the war in Iran, according to an inside source.

Trump called Iranian leaders “scumbags” and lunatics” and was heard “unleashing a series of expletives,” The Wall Street Journal reported late Thursday night.

“Trump is increasingly frustrated that a conflict he once thought would be over in a matter of weeks has dragged on with no end in sight,” the Wall Street Journal reported.

“Some of Trump’s advisers now worry that the war—which has resulted in higher prices, falling approval ratings and the deaths of more than a dozen U.S. service members—is consuming his presidency.”

Trump’s frustration stems from his growing fear that he cannot negotiate the lasting peace he promised the American people after launching a war without Congressional permission he promised would last “four to five weeks,” the Journal reported.

The memorandum of understanding with Iran, signed in June, lasted just over a month.

“The president in recent days has grown skeptical that negotiations with Iran can produce a lasting peace, according to people familiar with the matter,” the Wall Street Journal reported.

“A senior administration official said Trump believes that the only thing Iran understands is military force, adding that he was in ‘revenge mode’ against Tehran.”

Trump has lost his leverage and credibility in bringing the war to an end! And he knows it!

Tony

Megan Rapinow ©Metro and MSNBC.

Dear Commons Community,

In an interview with “The Daily Show” host Desi Lydic, Megan Rapinoe, one of America’s all-time soccer greats, says Donald Trump threw the men’s team ‘off their game’ and gave Belgium extra motivation to knock the co-hosts out of this summer’s World Cup.

Trump inserted himself at the center of the USA’s World Cup story after Folarin Balogun was shown a red card for a foul on Tarik Muharemovic in the victory over Bosnia and Herzegovina. The sending off meant that Balogun had been due to miss the USA’s all-important round-of-16 tie with Belgium through suspension. However, Balogun’s one-match ban was subsequently suspended for a year by FIFA, a decision which left the Belgian Football Association ‘astonished’ and ‘investigating potential options’. It later emerged that  Trump had spoken privately with FIFA chief Gianni Infantino on the phone, encouraging the governing body to ‘review’ their initial call.  

Rapinoe is an American former professional soccer player celebrated for her skill as a winger. She is a two-time FIFA Women’s World Cup champion (2015, 2019), Olympic gold medalist (2012) and bronze medalist (2020), she won the 2019 Ballon d’Or Féminin and FIFA Women’s Player of the Year. Off the field, she is a prominent advocate for LGBTQ+ rights, racial justice, and gender pay equity, and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2022.

Rapionoe knows of what she speaks!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

As Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell’s weekslong absence from the Senate and the public eye stretches on, his hometown newspaper has published a “pre-obituary” of the “not yet departed” 84-year-old that paints the longtime Republican senator as “every bit the detestable figure that” President Richard Nixon was.

The scathing reflection on McConnell’s career was written by columnist Joseph Gerth, who has covered Kentucky politics at Louisville’s The Courier Journal since 1988 — three years into the Louisville native’s first of seven Senate terms.  
As reported by People.

“Unlike Nixon, McConnell never paid for his sins that have damaged our nation’s trust in government, destroyed the country’s ability to have meaningful dialogue and cemented our nation’s politics as an arena in which winning is the only thing that matters,” wrote Gerth, who spent a decade as the paper’s chief political reporter, in an op-ed on Wednesday, July 22.

McConnell was hospitalized on June 14 with a condition his office refused to disclose, offering virtually no information on his status for nearly a month.

On July 12, his office released his first photo since the hospitalization and a lengthy statement that said he “took a fall” as a result of what he and a doctor quoted in the statement credited to “mobility challenges” from surviving polio as a child.

McConnell insisted that he did not suffer a heart attack, a stroke, a concussion or any broken bones. And he said his doctors determined he had no tumors or hemorrhages.

The July 12 statement noted that during his hospitalization, he “developed pneumonia, which responded rapidly to antibiotic treatment” and that his treatment going forward will focus “on physical therapy and strategies to reduce his risk of future falls.”

It noted he has been moved from hospital care to a rehabilitation center.

But in the days since, McConnell has still not returned to work or appeared publicly or in a recorded video, contributing to further speculation within his own party and sparking criticism from Democrats like Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear and New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

“I don’t even know how this is legal,” Ocasio-Cortez, 36, said last week. “I really don’t even know how this is legal at this point, and it’s, I just find it shocking.”

“And how is everyone pretending this is normal?” she continued. “This is not normal.”

Gerth wrote in his Wednesday column that he was sparked to write his evaluation of McConnell’s life’s work after seeing pushback to criticisms of the late South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham following the 71-year-old Republican’s sudden death on July 11.

“That got me thinking about Sen. Mitch McConnell, who was rumored to be dead or on life support or in a coma or whatever and was the odds-on favorite to beat Graham to the gates of hell in the days before Graham’s death,” Gerth wrote. “And, so with McConnell allegedly on the mend, I figured I’d go ahead and tell you what I think about McConnell now — when no one can complain, ‘How dare you write that about a dead guy?’ ”

The longtime Kentucky political reporter tallied up McConnell’s achievements during his 42 years as senator: bringing billions in investment to the state, rebuilding the Kentucky Republican Party, and defending unpopular free speech.

Gerth also noted that McConnell once boasted he voted for Democratic President Lyndon Baines Johnson in 1964 over the opposition to civil rights by Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater, the Republican nominee.

Yet as a senator decades later, the columnist wrote, McConnell was the architect of the 6-3 conservative majority on the Supreme Court that has now undone much of the legal achievements of the civil rights movement that McConnell once claimed to belong to — including attending the 1963 March on Washington where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. gave his “I Have a Dream” speech.

“He had more guts as a young man than he had as an old man,” Gerth wrote. “It seems somehow fitting for the ultimate shape-shifter, who wrote about accompanying Sen. John Sherman Cooper to see Johnson sign the Voting Rights Act into law, that the court he created was the court that struck down the last remaining significant provision.”

The Kentucky Republican’s “biggest failing may be his embrace of a president who he believes is stupid and who he believes led an attempt to overthrow the United States’ government on Jan. 6, 2021,” Gerth continued.

Beyond McConnell deciding to once again support a president he accused of triggering “a violent insurrection for the purpose of trying to prevent the peaceful transfer of power after a legitimately certified election,” Gerth noted the senator has also tolerated President Donald Trump’s racist remarks towards his wife, former Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao.

“And that is the legacy of Mitch McConnell,” Gerth wrote. “He ends his career adopting the anti-civil rights positions Barry Goldwater supported, handed to him by a despised and distrusted Supreme Court that he created.”

Representatives for McConnell, who vowed to finish out his final term through January 2027, did not immediately respond to People’s request for comment about the “pre-obituary” yesterday.

Tony

Michael Kratsios

Dear Commons Community,

The White House is proposing new measures to reshape the nation’s roughly $200-billion research and development portfolio, according to a report and memo released Tuesday. A Trump administration official said Tuesday the proposed measures would divert some federal research dollars away from universities and toward “individual scientists” and AI-powered research.  As reported by The Chronicle of Higher Education.

The new report, penned by Michael Kratsios, director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, argues that scientific development has been hampered by bureaucratic universities and governments. It calls on federal agencies to “strip away unnecessary burdens” and “realign funding toward excellence and risk-taking” in research. It also states that the government must “prepare our research enterprise for the AI revolution,” claiming that “legacy scientific institutions and infrastructure are not ready to take full advantage of this transformation.”

One explicit goal, according to Kratsios, is “to change what we fund, supporting people over projects.”

• As examples of models to follow, the report cites a Howard Hughes Medical Institute program that awards dollars directly to scholars and not to institutions.
• A study found those privately supported researchers produced high-impact publications at a higher rate than those who received federal funding, the report asserts.
• Kratsios also wants to reduce indirect-cost reimbursements, which is how universities currently pay for the lab equipment, staff, and administrative overhead for research projects.

Anxieties surrounding international competition over technology and military development pervade the report, which was first covered by the The Wall Street Journal. Kratsios writes that the United States needs to “secure its position as the unrivaled world leader in critical and emerging technologies — such as artificial intelligence, quantum information science, and nuclear technology.”

The report repeats previous claims by the Trump administration that higher ed and grant making have become politicized, indicating plans to open “alternative pathways beyond standard academia, and ensure that selection rests purely on merit, not the political fashions of the day.”

But universities are held up as key partners in other parts of the report.

• It says federal leaders should “drive coordinated efforts with local universities and national laboratories to build specializations and workforce pipelines.”
• Another section states, “Universities remain essential for training scientists and pursuing fundamental questions.”
• But the document also calls for “vigilant self-improvement to ensure these institutions remain suited to the answering the most important questions.”

Holden Thorp, editor in chief of Science, said Americans’ low trust in universities has catalyzed the ideas laid out in the report. According to a recent Gallup poll, just 38 percent of Americans have a “great deal” of trust in higher education.

“They’re not talking about defunding science, they’re talking about defunding the universities,” Thorp said. “Everybody needs to get their act together and build a coalition that can rebuild trust in higher education.”

Tony

Gageskidmore / Flickr

Dear Commons Community,

Billionaire investor Mark Cuban has a new metaphor for the AI infrastructure boom, and it doubles as a plug for one of his side projects. On the latest episode of the All-In podcast, Cuban predicted that “a lot of data centers… are going to be turned into pickleball courts” if AI models and data centers keep getting more efficient. The joke lands harder because Cuban co-owns the Dallas Flash pickleball team. The underlying argument is one investors chasing the “Mark Cuban AI bubble” and “AI infrastructure overbuild” narratives should take seriously.

Cuban brings dot-com-era operator credibility to the debate. He is a founder who sold Broadcast.com to Yahoo for $5.7 billion in April 1999, right before the market imploded. That timing gives his overbuild warning some weight, even if his “data centers to pickleball courts” punchline is doing most of the work on social media.  As reported by 24/7 Wall Street.

The Efficiency Argument

Cuban’s core view is that hyperscalers like Meta and Alphabet are correctly betting that AI usage will keep rising, but that “technological breakthroughs” will make AI dramatically cheaper and more power-efficient. If that happens, much of the computing capacity being poured into the ground today will not be needed at the scale currently planned.

His analogy is the late-1990s fiber-optic rush. Telecoms overbuilt long-haul networks, then connection speeds improved and, in Cuban’s telling, “there wasn’t a bandwidth problem anymore.” He expects a similar price-performance curve in AI compute. On Big Tech’s habit of pouring cash into AI infrastructure, borrowing heavily, and pledging to keep spending for years, Cuban called it “planning for perfection, and that’s going to be hard,” adding, “nobody can predict that well.”

A Different Kind of Bubble, in Cuban’s View

Cuban is careful to separate overbuild risk from mania. He argues the AI boom is “not the traditional dot-com bubble” because there are fewer companies going public at “crazy valuations” with “no revenue, no traffic, no nothing,” and none of the retail-mania tells (like cab drivers pitching internet stocks) that defined 2000. “It’s not the traditional dot-com bubble, right?” he said.

Where the pain would show up, in his framing, is narrower. Cuban said the damage would be concentrated: it “could just destroy a lot of VCs and a lot of funds and a lot of PE” that have gone all-in on AI infrastructure bets, while sparing “most people across the US.”

He Is Not Alone

Other well-known skeptics have arrived at similar conclusions through different doors. Michael Burry has warned that Big Tech is overinvesting in chips and data centers that could quickly become obsolete. GMO co-founder Jeremy Grantham has called AI “obviously a bubble,” comparing it to the railroad and internet bubbles as transformational technologies that still sparked overinvestment. All three still see AI as transformative. Their argument is that the capex math assumes a demand curve history rarely delivers.

What the Market Is Saying Right Now

The current market is running the other way. Super Micro Computer just disclosed over $60 billion in new orders and a record backlog in its latest SEC filing, guiding gross margin to 15-17%, doubled from a previous 8% outlook, and the stock rose 24%. Bank of America is telling clients that wafer fab equipment spending will surge from $144 billion in 2026 to $250 billion by 2028. OpenAI plans to dramatically increase compute spending through 2030, and Microsoft just signed a multi-billion-dollar agreement to rent computing capacity from Mistral’s European data centers.

That is exactly the “planning for perfection” Cuban is warning about. Whether it ends in more revenue or more pickleball courts is the question every AI-infrastructure investor should be underwriting right now.

Interesting perspective!

Tony

Image courtesy of The Chronicle of Higher Education

Dear Commons Community,

This posting is derived from an article and interview conducted by Beckie Supiano for The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Since the 2024 election, there’s been a lot of discussion about the attitudes and experiences of young men. Public Agenda, a nonprofit research organization, wanted to ground that conversation in what young men themselves have to say. It recently released findings from a survey and focus groups that capture the opinions of men age 18 to 34 on many issues, including higher ed.

Public Agenda found that young men believe it’s socially acceptable to not attend college and that they see trade school and bachelor’s degrees as having similar market value. Like young women, they believe that the value of a degree is declining.

And many don’t think college is for them. Thirty-eight percent of young men said that colleges are designed to benefit women more than men.

Beyond the hard data, the research presented a striking portrait of disaffection: Many young men in the focus groups expressed sentiments of loneliness, social pressure, and deep doubt about the motives of others.

The Chronicle spoke with Andrew J. Seligsohn, president of Public Agenda, to learn more. The conversation has been edited and condensed.

You found a lot of skepticism toward higher ed. What’s driving that?

Young men and young women have skepticism about not whether there’s any payoff to college, but whether that payoff has enough certainty to balance the costs and the likelihood of carrying debt. What’s different is that young men don’t perceive that they belong in college to the same extent that young women do. There’s greater concern about whether, from a political standpoint, the views that they hold are as welcome on campuses.

There is a big political split by gender in this age group, right?

Yes, exactly. Probably any young person who’s conservative is likely to have heard a lot of communication suggesting that college may not be a welcoming place for them. Young men are more likely to be conservative than young women.

Young men and young women feel lonely. They feel disconnected — that’s true for everybody. But young men were more likely to say they really didn’t have anybody to talk to. When we looked at questions about “did you have people to help you make decisions about whether to go to college,” young men — and young men who hadn’t gone to college — were particularly likely to say they had no one to help them with that.

Another part of it is that young men feel very cross-pressured. When we ask them about their personal values versus what they think is expected of men, there’s a big disconnect. A big part of that is anxiety about the economy. We still found young men believe that they are expected to be breadwinners, and they’re not really sure they can do it.

In the focus groups, the idea kept coming up that college is a scam. What did the participants mean by that?

Young people — and this is true of men and women, but it’s even stronger within certain segments of the male online universe — they don’t believe that anyone is ever acting on something other than a market-based value.

We had somebody in one of the focus groups say, and it was said as if everybody must know this: You know, high-school guidance counselors obviously must get somehow compensated when their students go to college, because why else would they constantly tell us to go to college?

When you have encountered the world they have, where you do have scams flying at you constantly, where everybody who seeks your attention is seeking to monetize that attention — and when the institutions themselves have come to speak market language very unself-consciously — how can they distinguish the college president who talks about return on investment from the online influencer who’s offering you a way to get rich quick?

We cover what some of those college presidents are getting paid. Young men might not see those headlines. But — not to be stereotypical here — they probably are aware of what’s happening with money in athletics.

This was not something we dug into in the research; this is my impression. I suspect the role of college athletics in all of this is enormous. I think the cynicism that is implicit in Division I college athletics is evident to everyone in America. It is especially well known to young men. It completely undermines the notion that colleges and universities are out for the public good or for the good of their students, and it completely reinforces the sense that they are money-making institutions who put values to one side when money is at stake.

Why did you ask specifically about nursing and teaching in the focus groups?

So much of the job growth in the United States is in health care. So when you think about economic opportunity and the possibilities of finding jobs that are decently compensated, that are likely to be available in the future, that sector looms so large.

On the education side, it’s more about the social value of having male educators.

About having no one to talk to.

It’s a big part of that story. Many young men will never have had a male teacher along the way. What really stood out to me: We heard participants’ concerns about how they will be perceived, whether people will make false charges about them. That’s a very pernicious part of our society. The idea that any man who, like, cares about children must have terrible motives.

That is worse than “everyone is out to make money off me.” It’s ascribing the worst motivations to everyone.

Exploitation must be behind everything. Yes, exactly. It’s the worst manifestation of that.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

I have just finished reading, The American School of Spies by Stephan Talty. It recounts the stories of a team of archaeologists and academics who are deployed to Greece and other parts of the Mediterranean to preserve ancient artifacts from the Germans during World War II.  Rodney Young, an affluent Princeton alumnus who had done important archaeology in Greece in the 1930s, was asked to recruit and develop a team or “Green Desk” of several dozen individuals like himself to help the preservation.  They get involved with saving artifacts, assassinating Germans known to take and/or destroy them, blowing up railroad lines, and other clandestine activities.  Many Germans including Hitler were obsessed with the Greek cultural history even claiming it derived from Aryan roots.  The first half of the book is a tad slow, but the second half is riveting.  The last few chapters cover the post-World War II Greek Civil War among the British, the Greek conservative royal government, and Communist factions.

Below is a New York Times book review of The American School of Spies.

Tony

————————————————————————————–

The New York Times Review of Books

Mission Accomplished: Kill the Nazis, Save the Statues

By Edward Dolnick

Edward Dolnick is the author of several books, including “The Writing of the Gods,” about the deciphering of the Rosetta Stone.

In “The American School of Spies,” Stephan Talty tells the story of the desperate struggle to preserve antiquities during World War II.

On April 27, 1941, German troops marched into Athens. “The capital is falling into the hands of the conquerors,” a radio announcer declared. “Very shortly the Radio Station of Athens will no longer be Greek. It will be German, and it will broadcast lies.”

Greece would suffer grievously during the occupation — a staggering 5 percent of the population would die — and seeing the birthplace of democracy in Nazi hands was painful. Shortly after marching on the city, Nazi troops removed the Greek flag from the Parthenon and raised an enormous swastika in its place.

Stephan Talty’s compact, lively “The American School of Spies” tells the story of two sets of agents sent to Greece by the Allies, with distinct missions. One was to harass and kill Nazis by blowing up trains, calling down airstrikes and ferreting out military secrets. The second was to safeguard Greece’s trove of archaeological treasures.

Two missions required two sets of spies, and Talty moves between their stories. The commandos were Greek American volunteers who could pass themselves off as locals. They boasted a variety of skills — among them were not only soldiers and saboteurs but “radio operators, safecrackers, pigeon trainers (for delivering messages)” and medics.

The archaeologists were a more eccentric group. Their leader was a wealthy classicist named Rodney Young, a third-generation Princeton man who bore some resemblance to Cary Grant. Young recruited a team of friends and colleagues, all of them amateurs familiar with statues and vases but unacquainted with ciphers and disappearing ink.

The Greek Desk, as the archaeologists called themselves, was part of the Office of Strategic Services, the spy network created by Gen. William “Wild Bill” Donovan that would become the C.I.A. — a group so gregarious and patrician that some joked their initials stood for “Oh So Social.”

One member of the Greek Desk was among the last Harvard graduates to write his dissertation in Latin. Another was an authority on the ceramic vessels called amphora. “It was hardly an ecumenical group,” Talty writes. “Overwhelmingly male, all WASPs, most from moneyed families, not a Greek American in the bunch.”

The commando team had scarcely any interest in antiquities, but they helped preserve Greece’s artistic heritage even so. “With thousands of stolen artifacts leaving Greece in the rucksacks of ordinary soldiers or in the vehicles or trunks of officers,” Talty writes, the commandos played a role that “most of them were unaware of: stopping the theft of relics by killing the Nazis stealing them.”

In every country they occupied, the Nazis looted art on a colossal scale. In Greece the danger was even greater because of a harebrained doctrine, espoused by Heinrich Himmler, that ancient Greece had in fact been shaped by Aryans. The relics of classical Greece, therefore, rightly belonged to Germany.

First alone, and then with the help of the O.S.S., Greek officials labored mightily to guard their treasures. Much of Talty’s story turns on these curators and their quiet efforts to thwart German theft. Shortly before the Germans moved in, the Greek government had created a group called the Committee of Hide and Secure, which stashed away countless statues and artifacts. At the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, staffers had cracked open the floors and dug deep pits.

The customary task of archaeologists is to unearth relics; here the process operated in reverse, with statues and vases carefully wrapped, cast in molds and buried underground. Then concrete slabs were poured on top, to seal the artifacts away.

Next ensued a bizarre cat-and-mouse game, in which the Germans demanded that the Greeks hand over their antiquities and the Greeks professed to have lost their records, or to have misplaced the necessary tools, or to have run into any of a dozen other “insurmountable difficulties.”

But if it was farce, it was desperately serious farce, and Talty tells the story well.

There was a war on. Greek farmers were being barricaded in their homes and burned to death, along with their sons and daughters; Athenians woke each morning to fresh bodies on the street, handkerchiefs placed over their faces by early risers. The bureaucrats passed those bodies on their way to work, where they drafted polite letters about which second-century B.C. statues were available for viewing on guided tours.

On June 4, 1946, a year after the Allied victory, curators at the National Archaeological Museum prepared to break open the floor they had sealed shut five years before. Workmen began wielding pickaxes and shovels.

Onlookers gazed into the pit, astonished. “Statues, still sunken in the earth, appeared naked from the waist up, planted at random,” wrote one observer. “It was a chorus of the resurrected, a second coming of bodies that gave you a crazy joy.”

Credit…Timo Lenzen

Dear Commons Community,

When Google prepared to go public in 2004, Larry Page, a co-founder of the company, wrote a letter to shareholders describing the internet firm’s responsibility to the world.

“We believe a well-functioning society should have abundant, free and unbiased access to high-quality information,” Mr. Page said.

Google fulfilled that responsibility by acting as a gateway to the internet. It answered people’s search queries with lists of hyperlinks, pushing users out to what is known as the “open web” — the millions of websites run by merchants, publishers, universities and others — for more information. In the ensuing decades, Google became one of the planet’s richest and most powerful companies by directing people to the vastness of the open web.

Now in the age of artificial intelligence, Google appears to be shrinking back from the open web — and may be imperiling it.  As reported by The New York Times.

Since last year, the Silicon Valley giant has revamped its search with A.I. It introduced AI Mode, which replaces search results of hyperlinks with conversational responses written by Gemini, its A.I. chatbot. Most recently, Google changed its iconic search box for the first time in 25 years so that people could add photos and videos to their queries and assign A.I. “agents” to run searches for them.

The effect of these moves is becoming clear: People are spending more time with Google than ever.

Users are writing queries three times as long as the keyword-heavy questions they asked of traditional searches, Google said at its developer conference in May. People are spending one to nine more minutes in AI Mode than on traditional Google searches, according to three studies from researchers tallied by The New York Times. One October study from Growth Memo, a newsletter focused on search and marketing, found that in about 75 percent of sessions, users never left AI Mode for the web.

For publishers, businesses, banks and others that relied on Google to funnel its billions of users to their websites, the impact has been unmistakable as the company has increasingly incorporated A.I. into search. Google’s users are no longer leaving Google after a search and are just reading its A.I.-generated answers, they said, which means fewer people are coming to their websites and search traffic has dropped.

Nilay Patel, the editor in chief of the technology website The Verge, has warned publishers for years that they would face “Google Zero,” a moment when traffic from Google would plummet to nothing.

“For publishers, Google Zero is already here,” he said. “It wasn’t until AI Mode arrived that people could see that the slow creep was about to hit a tipping point.”

The changes threaten the open web and show how rapidly A.I. has upended the technology landscape. Tim Berners-Lee, the computer scientist credited with inventing the World Wide Web in 1989, had envisioned the web as a tool for global collaboration without borders, where people could launch their own websites and flit freely among sites created by others.

Much of that vision has been chipped away over the years, as tech behemoths like Apple and Meta created “walled gardens,” or tech ecosystems where users could get almost everything they needed under one roof. Now A.I. has indisputably accelerated that trajectory, Mr. Berners-Lee said in a 2024 essay.

Tech companies have built empires that locked users in and were focused on maximizing profit instead of enhancing public utility, Mr. Berners-Lee wrote. “The rapid advancement of A.I. has exacerbated these concerns,” he added, “proving that issues on the web are not isolated but rather deeply intertwined with emerging technologies.”

Google has denied that it is endangering the open web. In a blog post last August, Liz Reid, a vice president of search, said that the company’s ethos had not changed and that it was sending out a “relatively stable” number of clicks numbering in the billions. Reports of a decline in search traffic were “inaccurate” and relied on “flawed methodologies,” she said.

“We care passionately — perhaps more than any other company — about the health of the web ecosystem,” Ms. Reid said.

Since publishing that blog post, Google has added more A.I. to search. It also created some features intended to push users out of AI Mode and into the broader web, including previews of websites to some responses and a tool that lets people set “preferred sources” so that A.I. refers to their favorite news outlets more frequently. The company also created a profile that helps publishers and creators promote their work in search.

“Google’s AI Search features send billions of clicks to the web every week, meeting people’s evolving preferences for how they want to find information while driving significant traffic to websites,” a Google spokesman said in a statement, adding that the company’s A.I. features highlight links to the web.

He said the study that found that users stayed in AI Mode 75 percent of the time was flawed because it relied on a small sample size and gave users specific tasks that did not reflect normal user behavior.

Even so, searches are increasingly being performed by A.I. chatbots while the number of people visiting websites is falling, according to Cloudflare, a content delivery network company. While someone might once have Googled a soccer player’s World Cup performance and clicked to a sports site or a social media thread for commentary, a bot now crawls the web for that information and returns the player’s statistics to the user, who stays on Google.

In total, more than 50 percent of web traffic is now nonhuman, Cloudflare said. Between June 2025 and April 2026, human traffic to websites of businesses in industries like finance, publishing and retail dropped nearly 40 percent, it added.

The web’s fundamental economic model has changed, Cloudflare said, and chatbot-style search tools like Google’s could put the open web in peril if left unchecked.

Google’s A.I., along with other popular chatbots, have hit Wikipedia. The Wikimedia Foundation, which manages the online encyclopedia, said it had experienced an 8 percent decline in human visitors to its site over the past year. At the same time, it has seen an increase in bots scraping its site for data to train A.I. models.

“My work is to ensure that people don’t forget about us because Google’s user interface changed,” said Selena Deckelmann, the Wikimedia Foundation’s chief product and technology officer.

Wikipedia has started promoting its own app and social media channels to establish connections with readers outside Google’s ecosystem, she said. It also began charging Google and other A.I. firms for access to its data for training.

Last month, Britain’s Competition and Markets Authority mandated that Google change its A.I. search tools in the United Kingdom to address publishers’ concerns. The regulator said Google must include clear links to attribute content in chatbot responses, a move intended to help send traffic to websites. The company is also required to allow website operators to opt out of having their content appear in A.I. summaries, and is making the changes across search globally.

For some open web proponents, the fact that people can leave Google’s ecosystem remains enough.

“Whether it uses a traditional search method or A.I., I think Google is still facilitating access to the open internet,” said Tori Noble, a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit focused on defending civil liberties online. “It’s not a closed universe” compared with walled gardens like Facebook, which requires a login for access, she added.

That’s little comfort to some website operators.

In May, Vox Media, which owns The Verge and other publications, began selling some of its sites. Jim Bankoff, Vox Media’s chief executive, said the “decimation of search traffic” had influenced his decision to explore other ways of reaching readers, like a podcast network, and ultimately to sell about half of the company to James Murdoch. In June, The Verge and several other Vox Media websites were sold to Penske Media.

Google has often said it was “sending out more traffic and the web is bigger than ever,” Mr. Patel said. “And then right next to that is a bunch of publishers whose businesses are getting destroyed.”

Google’s move should not be a surprise to anyone!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

New York State Governor Kathy Hochul signed an executive order barring the construction of new large-scale data centers using 50 megawatts or more of power for up to one year, making the Empire State the first state in the nation to impose such a ban.  As reported by CNBC News.

“We’re in the midst of one of the most significant economic upheavals in generations … perhaps ever,” the governor said, announcing the executive order in New York City. “These hyperscale AI data centers consume enormous amounts of power, truly threatening to outpace our grid’s capacity,” she added. “They drive up costs for local ratepayers, and I refuse to let those costs get passed down to New Yorkers.” 

Hochul’s sentiment echoes that of many state residents and environmental leaders, who have heavily scrutinized hyperscaler data centers on the basis of their excessive consumption of power and natural resources, particularly fresh water. 

The announcement noted that New Yorkers have seen their electric bills surge, with the state’s average residential electricity price climbing nearly 68 percent since 2019. This fact has skewed public opinion starkly against new data center construction, with major public backlash against proposed facilities in townships such as Lansing and East Fishkill. 

Leaders of the data center opposition celebrated the governor’s decision. 

“This one-year moratorium is a huge step forward for New York communities fighting against an onslaught of massive data center proposals,” stated Laura Shindell, director of New York State’s Food & Water Watch, a high-profile environmental nonprofit. “It comes as the direct result of immense public pressure from people across the state demanding their elected leaders protect them from Big Tech’s assault, which threatens the state’s clean air and water and New Yorkers’ financial security.” 

Praise was not limited to environmental and community leaders, however, as it also came from the governor’s allies, both in Congress and in the state legislature. 

“This one-year moratorium is fundamentally about trust,” said Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, in a statement provided to WRGB Albany. “Right now, New Yorkers aren’t convinced these massive facilities benefit them. Before we move forward, our communities need ironclad guarantees that their energy bills won’t spike, their water will be protected, and their air will remain clean.”

“Technology should make our lives better, not pollute our water, strain our energy grid, or drive up our utility bills,” State Senator Kristen Gonzalez, a Democrat, stated in the New York State announcement. “By giving our State time to plan, we can ensure that development and innovation do not come at the expense of all of us.”

Many, however, voiced their dissatisfaction, claiming that the moratorium would hinder New York’s — and the United States’ – ability to compete in a rapidly expanding technological field. 

“A statewide moratorium is the wrong answer to the right questions,” New York State Assemblyman Scott Gray, a Republican, and three of his colleagues wrote in a letter to the governor in June opposing data center moratoriums. “It freezes investment, takes decisions away from the communities that should be making them and duplicates or ignores work the governor’s own administration already has underway.”

“Siting belongs to local communities. Albany’s job is to set the regulatory framework, facilitate interconnection and protect ratepayers and grid reliability,” Gray and his colleagues wrote.  “It is not Albany’s job to decide for a town or village whether it wants one of these projects. That is a local decision, and it should remain one.”

“China wins,” said Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman in an X post on Tuesday morning. 

There have been claims made by those building data centers that foreign rivals of the U.S. are supporting the anti-AI movement, and evidence of foreign-created anti-AI content being published for a U.S. audience.

A data center moratorium remains popular in the state. A Siena Research Institute poll conducted in June revealed that 46% of respondents believed that a “one-year moratorium on new permits for large data centers in New York” would be good for the state, whereas only 21% said it would be bad. The issue appeared to be fairly bipartisan as well, with Democrats backing the idea by a margin of 37 percentage points and Republicans supporting it by a margin of 13. This same poll showed Hochul, a Democrat, leading her Republican challenger, Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman, by a margin of 20 percentage points – a promising sign for her reelection campaign. 

The first-in-the-nation statewide moratorium marks a significant show of authority by Hochul, who has now carried out a landmark policy that her Democratic colleagues, such as Maine’s Janet Mills and Virginia’s Abigail Spanberger, have cautioned against. Fourteen state legislatures across the country have introduced bills restricting new data center construction, none of which, to this point, have been signed into law.

Tuesday’s moratorium might not be the last action taken by the governor’s office, either. The Responsible Data Center Development Act, passed by the state legislature earlier this year, contains a one-year moratorium on the construction of new data centers with a peak energy demand of 20 megawatts or more. Hochul has yet to take action on the bill but has indicated that she will work with the legislature to “further review” its nature. Furthermore, a statement released by Hochul’s office stated that the governor is actively “pursuing legislation to repeal sales tax exemptions for massive data centers across the state.”

In addition to the pause on new data center construction, Hochul directed the NYS Department of Public Service to “consider approaches to require data centers to fund new clean electric generation dedicated to their operations, including but not limited to customer-sited distributed energy resources and battery storage.”

Once the state develops a comprehensive framework to support municipalities and strong standards for construction, Hochul says, the moratorium will be lifted. New York was ranked by CNBC as being among the best-positioned states to win AI data centers in its recent annual rankings of Top States for Business.

Good move on the part of Gov. Hochul!

Tony