This is the most delightful nerd news I've heard in awhile. Look forward to getting the literal magazine in my mailbox.

Today could be Congress's last chance to stop the KIDS Act. Tell your lawmaker to vote NO on this rushed, messy package of internet bills that threatens privacy, free expression, and private messaging online. www.eff.org/deeplinks/2...

Sadly ironic that today's the 55th anniversary of an overreaching White House going to the Supreme Court to try to block the Pentagon Papers' publication, and now with Anthropic's Fable we're seeing another historic prior restraint by an equally lawless administration. #FreeFable

NEW: The Trump admin clamped down on Anthropic following a spat over the company granting South Korean telecom giant SK Telecom access to Claude Mythos. Why? US officials were concerned the company may have ties to China.

Great thread from @cdt.org's First Amendment maven, @kateruane.bsky.social

My brother's a Hollywood creative exec. I dragged him to the 'AI on the Lot' conference to see the future. Then I interviewed him: “They keep talking about saving time and money. I live in Burbank, man—that ‘time and money’ are all my neighbors.” converger.kevinbankston.com/i/201583118/...

There's been not enough attention to the fact that this event on public property can be seen only through--who else's?--Paramount's paywalled streamer. I'm among many praying for thunderstorms to wash it out. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

Uh, I think cyberattacks happen on the internet.

To be clear, this is an order to depublish speech based on vague and unsupported “national security” concerns. We have seen this before. It wasn’t justified then and it’s not justified now. The fact that it’s a new technology does not change the analysis. www.anthropic.com/news/fable-m...

Confession time: I helped murder Punky Duck. Accidentally. Which I guess makes it duckslaughter? A couple weeks ago I went to the AI on the Lot conference in LA, and unexpectedly found myself at the center of Hollywood’s AI controversy of the week... converger.kevinbankston.com/p/converger-...

We didn't get the data portability we wanted for social networks in time to matter. Now the same fight's shaping up around AI. In my 1st guest post for @mbogen.bsky.social's AI policy newsletter Elicitation, I lay out what real AI portability would look like. elicitation.substack.com/p/dont-let-p...

Autonomous robot clown roundhouse kicks a small child

Why do this? Do we need even more national guards standing around doing nothing?

I would be immensely grateful if the house office of legislative counsel could drag themselves into oh I don't know 1995 so that the bills they produce could be a) in a machine readable format and b) have actual internal links from the table of contents.

There were signs: Scorcese spoke positively of the next generation using these tools in a recent BFI interview. I covered that, and other directors' comments indicating the ongoing AI vibe shift (most recently visible at Cannes) in my newsletter Converger converger.kevinbankston.com/p/converger-...

🧵1/3 🎮 What if cultural history disappears because no one is allowed to preserve it? Jordan Mechner, creator of Prince of Persia, reflects on the fragility of games, media, and cultural memory in his essay in VANISHING CULTURE, from the #InternetArchive. Read it here: archive.org/details/vani...

"My opposition to cancel culture is such that I will fire you for what you said."

A little surveillance break, as a treat.

AI is changing how products behave and how they are built. Product lawyering has to change too. Here's my attempt to describe how. I'd love to hear if this rings true to folks who are still product counseling. www.bricoleur.org/2026/06/prod...

We are all in horrible danger when our nation’s intelligence apparatus is run by a corrupt regime loyalist with no relevant experience

🧵 Some publishers & news organizations are blocking the Wayback Machine from archiving journalism, stifling access to the public record. 📣 If you rely on the Wayback Machine to preserve news & history, tell them not to block web archiving. ✏️ Sign the open letter👇 www.savethearchive.com/NewsLeaders

... and we're LIVE! You can pledge for the fourth issue of the coolest newspaper format journal of comics criticism around now! www.kickstarter.com/projects/tif...

Backrooms and Obsession have set off a small-budget big-box office revolution, but Parsons and Barker are just two of the many creators making the YouTube-to-cinema leap. Check out my roundup of the next gen of viral video-to-horror feature directors: converger.kevinbankston.com/i/196771089/...

The AI vibe shift at Cannes that I just wrote about in Converger was in full effect at AI on the Lot this past week in LA as studios & networks like Fox, Paramount, MGM, & AMC were all there talking about integrating AI--though not without pushback. converger.kevinbankston.com/p/converger-...

Honestly, this is good because it removes any plausible deniability about the type of people Trump put in charge of his domestic paramilitary operations

Wrote about how Bluesky users do not click links and read articles (yes, this is behind the scenes stuff so paywalled). Bluesky isn’t unique among social networks. Many people do not click through. Instead they scroll, maybe reply, and move on. Not good for journalism www.404media.co/behind-the-b...

That Texas Blood is an exceptional book. Very excited for the creators; FX should be a great home for this.

In LA today for the AI on the Lot conference, looking forward to meeting new people & learning new things about the intersection of AI and film, which I'm covering in my tech & media newsletter Converger (latest issue at converger.kevinbankston.com/p/converger-...). Drop a line if you'll be around!

Absolutely nothing is stopping John Cornyn, Tillis, Murkowski, & Paul from caucusing immediately with Democrats & giving them control of the Senate. The same is true of Thomas Massie & any 2 retiring GOP Reps in the House. It is a choice to continue caucusing with the authoritarian personality cult.

From pro-AI comments by filmmakers like Peter Jackson & Steven Soderbergh to screenings by new AI film creators & toolmakers, the Cannes Film Festival made it clear: a vibe shift is happening in the film community around AI. Read more in Converger: converger.kevinbankston.com/p/converger-...

I was delighted to be interviewed for Sophie Raseman's fabulous American Childhood newsletter, offering advice for her 9 yr-old who wants to start making comics. The pictured graphic novel—The Cartoonists Club—is THE first book any parent should hand to their kid who wants to explore comics-making.

If it’s collected, they will come.

Got a notification from a medieval copyright lawyer

I calculated the Pentagon's "black budget".... Using Claude, the LLM banned from the Pentagon by Hegseth, I went through the military’s initial budget submissions. I found $126 billion in programs either explicitly marked as classified, or described only through a code word. (1/2)

Nice to see more evidence that the comics to streaming pipeline is heating up again. These are the deals that keep a lot of independent publishers in business and help draw meaningful investment into the perennially precarious comics direct market.

One good thing that entertainment journalists covering The Odyssey can do is never to ask Nyong'o, Page, or Nolan about this. When a prominent racist and transphobe says something racist and transphobic, go make his life miserable and leave his targets alone. They have nothing to defend or explain.

ICE agents are walking around with a list of 20 million people to detain in their pockets because of this Palantir database: www.404media.co/ice-agents-h...

I'm excited to be speaking Thursday in B'more at the 2nd AI x Journalism Summit, a "hacks" & hackers convening on the future of tech-enabled journalism. I'll be talking legal angles with @revealnews.org's @monikab.bsky.social & @publicknowledge.bsky.social's @mrose.ink. luma.com/hh-aijournal...

Republicans are hurriedly redrawing voting maps to remove every Southern Black representative from Congress. Liberals say that's a bad thing.

Truly excellent book

The most notable revelation is that according to these files, now finally available after years of delay, we see that Donald Trump was close friends with a notorious sex trafficker and seems likely to have routinely engaged in sex with trafficked women and girls while here on planet Earth.

I don’t understand who this is for. A feed of repurposed legacy media clips doesn’t seem like a good competitor for native vertical short-form content feeds, and it also seems like a uniquely inefficient and tim—consuming way to do discovery. But I guess we’ll see.

I've seen nothing in the mainstream press about the massive wave of automated demonetization hitting AI creators on YouTube so I wrote 1500 words about it. Google pushes video generation with one hand while punishing it with the other. kevinbankston.substack.com/i/196771089/...

For the media nerds: 1500 words on Noah Hawley’s genius at expanding franchises in an additive rather than extractive way, comparing the different directions he took with Fargo, Legion, & Alien: Earth: "Noah Hawley, the Multidimensional Franchise Expander" kevinbankston.substack.com/p/converger-...

Issue 2 of my Substack CONVERGER is out now! With features on YouTube's chilling crackdown on AI creators, the internet-to-theaters horror movie pipeline, Noah Hawley's franchise-expanding genius, and AI labs' hypocrisy about everyone else's data scraping. kevinbankston.substack.com/p/converger-...

This proposes a licensing scheme, also known as a prior restraint on speech. Those don't usually do well in court because they give the government too much power over what can be said and are presumptively unconstitutional. Thank you for your time. www.nytimes.com/2026/05/04/t...

I disagreed with Stewart on pretty much everything but he was my kind of whipsmart cantankerous sunuvabitch and I kind of can’t imagine the surveillance policy landscape without him. Thinking of his family tonight.

Ah, once again Musk's version of "free speech absolutism" seems to be quite different than any actual definition of free speech absolutism.

DC friends: Please join the AI Collective at @wilsonsonsini.bsky.social's office on Tuesday 5/5 at 5 PM for a wide-ranging panel conversation about AI and the law, where I'll be speaking. Register here: luma.com/aic-dc-4-27

Tomorrow, Tuesday 13 ET / 10 PT / 17 UTC: "Preserving the Web in the Age of AI" with Mike Masnick, Kendra Albert, Mark Graham... this will be epic af: www.authorsalliance.org/2026/04/09/p..., support Authors' Alliance!!)