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Glasgow Times
13-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Glasgow Times
Sweet success means Easy Peeler unlikely to make quick return
John and Sean Quinn's filly has yet to finish out of the first three in her career and seems to still be improving. Having seen off Lady Of Andros to win the class two handicap, attention swiftly turned to the valuable Churchill Tyres Supporting Macmillan Sprint Handicap for which she is declared. However, Sean Quinn feels she might have done enough for the week. He said: 'My gut feeling is she's won a big race, it's a very warm day and she got warm before the race so she's expended a lot of energy. Easy Peeler flies home to win the British EBF Supporting Racing With Pride Fillies' Handicap for Rowan Scott and the Quinn stable! 🏆@rowan_49 | @johnquinnracing | @BritishEBF — York Racecourse (@yorkracecourse) June 13, 2025 'She's a filly we like, so I don't think we need to come again tomorrow because we don't really need to. She's won a good race there. 'She's progressing nicely. She's running in some nice handicaps at the moment, but she was bred by Whitsbury Manor Stud who have Havana Grey and they've leased her to Hot To Trot (owning syndicate), so she'll end up back there as a broodmare and they'd love to get black type. That's a little way from our minds at the moment.' David Egan was predicting a bright future for India Love (13-2) after the George Boughey-trained filly made a winning debut in the Juddmonte EBF Fillies' Restricted Novice Stakes. The more experienced Bleep Test made a bold bid from the front but despite racing keenly early on, India Love still had enough left to win by a neck. India Love made a winning debut under David Egan (Nick Robson/PA) 'She's been keen at home and shown plenty of enthusiasm so cover was the plan today and I'm glad we got it. I think it's just a case of she's very, very quick,' said Egan. 'She'll get faster with that run and even though she was on it early on, she was very well behaved in the prelims which is half the battle. 'In a stronger race they'll go even fast. She's a nice filly. For a Havana Grey she was very well bought for £55,000 guineas and she'd done everything right at home.' Andrea Pinna rode his first York winner when bringing Feel The Need with a sustained run down the outside in the Andy Thornton Hospitality Furniture 50th Anniversary Apprentice Handicap. Feel The Need was a first York winner for Andrea Pinna (Nick Robson/PA) Having just his second ride on the Knavesmire, Pinna, who rides primarily for Kevin Frost, had been booked by Michael Herrington for the five-year-old. The 13-2 chance just got the better of course specialist Tolstoy to win by a neck. 'I saw the favourite edging closer so I just followed him and if the ground was a bit softer he would have won easier,' said Pinna. 'I wanted to drop in and see if a couple of gaps opened up, but I couldn't see any so I just stayed on that line and he galloped on strong. 'He likes this track and soft ground suits him better.'
Elle
03-06-2025
- Health
- Elle
With ‘Hum,' Helen Phillips Embraces the ‘Vast Gray Area' of Modern Technology
Every item on this page was chosen by an ELLE editor. We may earn commission on some of the items you choose to buy. The dish rags were disconcerting. In the fall of 2019, author Helen Phillips had already accumulated a hundred-plus-page document's worth of anecdotes about AI and surveillance for a potential book she wanted to write, the book that would become last year's Hum, now out in paperback. But it wasn't until Phillips herself experienced the slow creep of data tracking that the concepts of her book started feeling routinely manifest. During one particular walk home from work, she'd realized she needed to buy new dish rags; she'd opened her computer shortly after, and there they were, advertised for her. 'Had I ever searched for them? I didn't remember,' Phillips tells me now. 'Had I said something aloud? It was just that weird feeling of being surveilled.' She went ahead and bought the dish rags, but the purchase didn't rid her of 'that little ick feeling,' that sense of being watched. 'What if you took that kind of consumer surveillance to an extreme place?' Phillips asks. That question ended up forming the central premise of Hum, a taut work of literary science-fiction that's as much about the insecurities of intimacy and parenthood as it is the expanding scope of technology. The story takes place in a climate-ravaged near-future world, in which Phillips's protagonist, May, loses her job to the proliferation of AI, a proliferation that has led to the increasing presence of robots nicknamed 'hums.' After undergoing an experimental surgery that prevents her face from being recognized by surveillance tech, May uses her earnings to take her husband and kids to the Botanical Garden, a lush and luxurious paradise protected from the climbing temperatures outside its fortress. But even a world inside an insulated bubble isn't always a legible one, and soon May has to depend on a hum to keep her family intact. Below, Phillips discusses how she tackled the big questions of technology, parenthood, and climate change in such a tight story; what working on Hum taught her about the future; and the common denominator amongst her books, including the 2019 National Book Award-longlisted The Need and 2015's The Beautiful Bureaucrat. The first line of the book came to me early on: 'The needle inched closer to her eye, and she tried not to flinch.' There's a bit of the anxiety of the future that we are facing right there in that line. May is interested in the possibility of not being recognizable in a city where surveillance is so common. She's also doing it for money because she has lost her job to artificial intelligence. That's what she has to sell at this point in her life: herself as a test subject. There's also a different answer to that question that's a little more personal. When I was 11 years old, I lost all of my hair due to alopecia. So I've been a bald woman for the vast majority of my life. And when I was about 13, my mom and I had the idea to get eyebrows and eyeliner tattooed on my face so that I wouldn't have to apply that in the morning. The process of having facial tattoos at that age—my sense memory of that is very present in [the book's] initial scene. So that was where the physical grounding of it came from. When I am setting out to write a novel, it is, in a large part, a way of processing my own anxieties—a way of understanding them better. I was assembling the things that I'm concerned about as I look to the future; there's a long laundry list of those. And as I was reading and thinking about this plot, they all coalesced. The original draft of the book was twice as long and had a lot more research in it. I cut the book basically in half, because what I want is [the research] to be the iceberg that you feel under the book, but not the focus point of the book. I certainly wanted to explore the vast gray area that I feel in my own life about technology. It is actually encouraging or reassuring that you can know where your children are at all times. But, is it also troubling that we surveil our children by way of their devices? And always know where they are? Is there some loss of essential human exploration and adventure that they lose when they know that we're tracking them? I'm concerned about that. The hums are an embodiment of that [dissonance]. My hope is that the reader experiences the hums in a lot of different ways and have a range of different feelings toward them: from finding them sinister to finding them comforting and cute. I think that's how technology is for us: It's nice that when I'm lost, I can find my way on my phone. I don't even know how I'd get around the world without it. But do I find it eerie that, in order for my phone to help me navigate a map, someone somewhere basically knows where I am at all times? It's such a double-edged sword; I wanted to get at that in the book. Since I began writing Hum, climate change has accelerated and artificial intelligence—when I was writing, it was GPT-3, not ChatGPT, which is a whole leap. So these problems have only become thornier since I began researching the book. But in the interviews I did as I was researching the book, I would ask people, 'What can we do?' And a refrain I heard was that we have to have community; we have to have meaningful communities. It's only from that sense of interconnectedness and collective action that we can hope to have change. The book doesn't really get to that collective action place, but I do intend that, at the end—at least in the unit of the family—there's some sense of an interconnected body of care and wellbeing. I do feel like The Beautiful Bureaucrat, The Need, and Hum are kind of in a series together. They all have female protagonists, and they're told in the close-third [point of view] with a real intimacy to that protagonist's anxiety and desire. They all have some element of speculation or science fiction that, for me, is reflecting back on the world we do live in. They also all have a very different element of scientific research. With The Beautiful Bureaucrat, I did a lot of mathematical research. With The Need, I did a lot of research about paleobotany because that was the profession of the protagonist. For this book, I did a lot of research about artificial intelligence and climate change. But they're speaking to each other in a deeper way, too. A reviewer recently said, 'Helen makes anxiety a genre,' which is maybe a dubious distinction. But I do think that—to some extent—these are books about confronting your anxieties. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Yahoo
05-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Fact Check: Rep. Keith Self quoted Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels at congressional hearing. Here's the context
Claim: During a March 2025 congressional hearing, U.S. Rep. Keith Self, a Republican from Texas, quoted Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels as saying, "It is the absolute right of the state to supervise the formation of public opinion." Rating: Context: Prior to quoting Goebbels, Self was questioning Nina Jankowicz, a disinformation expert who wrote the 2020 book "How to Lose the Information War" and led the Disinformation Governance Board (DGB) during its brief existence in Joe Biden's administration. He asked Jankowicz about her personal beliefs regarding "the role of government in [forming] public opinion" in an attempt to compare her answers to Goebbels' statement. On April 1, 2025, the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Foreign Affairs held a congressional hearing titled, "Censorship-Industrial Complex: The Need for First Amendment Safeguards at the State Department." During the hearing, Rep. Keith Self, a Republican from Texas, allegedly quoted Joseph Goebbels, the propaganda minister of Nazi Germany, as saying, "It is the absolute right of the state to supervise the formation of public opinion." The claim was shared in a video on X by the account of Rep. Julie Johnson, a Democrat from Texas, and quickly went viral on multiple platforms because, well, it purported to show an American politician quoting a Nazi propagandist. Based on a video of the full hearing uploaded to the House Foreign Affairs Committee Republicans YouTube channel, the claim is true — Self did quote Goebbels at the hearing. However, Johnson's post was misleading in that it omitted the context of Self's remark and the reason he quoted Goebbels in the first place. Self replied to Johnson's post the next day: Self's Goebbels quote came at the end of his questioning, which focused on Nina Jankowicz, the CEO of the American Sunlight Project, a nonprofit that describes its mission as "increasing the cost of lies that undermine democracy." Jankowicz is a disinformation researcher who wrote the 2020 book "How to Lose the Information War," and according to The New York Times, once served as an adviser to Ukraine's Ministry of Foreign Affairs. She founded the American Sunlight Project in 2024 in response to a large, ongoing campaign by conservative Republicans "to silence think tanks and universities that expose the sources of disinformation" by arguing that measures to fight disinformation unfairly target conservative speech. However, Self didn't want to discuss Jankowicz's personal record as a disinformation researcher — he wanted to discuss her 11 weeks leading the Disinformation Governance Board (DGB) during former President Joe Biden's administration. In early 2022, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) established the advisory-only DGB, led by Jankowicz, with a goal of combating "disinformation coming from Russia and rebutting misleading information aimed at migrants hoping to travel to the U.S.-Mexico border," according to Politico. It did not go particularly well for the board. Republicans immediately began making comparisons to George Orwell's "1984," and the Biden administration floundered in response. Even then-DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said on CNN that officials "probably could have done a better job of communicating what [the DGB] does and does not do." According to CNN, DHS paused the board's activities in May 2022 in response to the backlash and Jankowicz resigned after the pause was announced. The board was fully shut down that August. A video of the hearing is available on YouTube, uploaded by the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Self's questioning begins at 1:01:33. Self opened his questioning by asking Jankowicz her personal opinion, having worked in the government ("for 11 weeks," Jankowicz noted), on the government's role in "enforcing free speech." Jankowicz responded that the First Amendment, which grants the right to free speech, is "sacrosanct," and that she thought the government should not be "arresting people for exercising their speech." Self then read a supposed quote from Jankowicz during her time leading DGB saying that "law enforcement and our legislatures [needed] to do more," implying that she was advocating that the government using law enforcement to restrict free speech. Jankowicz said the quote omitted necessary context, namely that she was "talking about online harms and threats against people online for exercising their speech," not free speech itself. Self's final question, which he asked in four different ways (Jankowicz gave a similar answer the first three times and did not engage with that part of the question on the fourth), was the following: "What is the mission of the state, the right of the state, to form public opinion?" Self's choice of wording clearly alluded to the Goebbels quote. Here is the transcript of the exchange from Self's final question through to the Goebbels quote [the annotations are ours, to add as much context to the exchange as possible]. The transcription begins at the 1:04:07 mark of the video: Self: What is the mission of the state, the right of the state, to form public opinion? Because we're talking about — our government has been involved in doing that for the last few years. Jankowicz: In my opinion, the government has a First Amendment right to free speech as well, and SCOTUS [Supreme Court of the United States] has just affirmed with a case last June, we just heard a case that came in federal court in New York, that, actually showed that NewsGuard was not acting as an envoy of the state. Self: So what is the role of the government? Jankowicz: The role of the government can express its free speech, right? And citizens have a right to their free speech as well. I don't really understand your question, sir, I'm not sure the point. Self: I'm asking you what is the role of government in public opinion? Because we're talking about actions here that have tried to form public opinion. On the Hunter [Biden] laptop, on the Russia disinformation, all of that. I'm asking you what is the role of government in that matter? Jankowicz: Absolutely, congressman. So the government is allowed to express its own opinions, its viewpoints, as we're seeing this administration do, as we saw the previous administration do— Self: Well, what is their role when it is absolutely wrong? The Hunter laptop is probably the best example we could roll out here. [This is a reference to social media companies trying to slow the spread of the original New York Post article about Hunter Biden's laptop published just before the 2020 presidential election. Jankowicz was not an employee of the government at the time.] Jankowicz: I actually disagree with that, because when Twitter decided to add friction [slow the spread] to the Hunter Biden laptop case, it actually got more views. You've also heard Mr. Taibbi talk about 22 million tweets, millions of things censored through the GEC [Global Engagement Center] to the Election Integrity Partnership [EIP]? [Journalist Matt Taibbi, another witness at the hearing, was the lead author of the "Twitter Files," a report comprising internal Twitter documents Elon Musk gave journalists shortly after buying and taking over the social media platform. The Global Engagement Center was an agency in the State Department founded in 2016 to combat "foreign state and non-state propaganda and disinformation efforts aimed at undermining or influencing the policies, security, or stability of the United States." It folded in 2024 after the Republican-controlled Congress refused to fund it. The EIP was a partnership of misinformation researchers between Stanford University and the University of Washington that helped track false and misleading information during the 2020 and 2022 elections. According to NPR, it faced massive conservative backlash and was the focus of claims that it was a front used by the Biden administration to suppress speech. It also folded in 2024.] Jankowicz: You know how many emails went between the GEC and the EIP? 15. You can look it up in Chairman Jordan's documents that he released at the end of last year. Fifteen emails. I've sent more text messages to my husband about our toddler's potty training in the last week than emails went from the GEC to the EIP, and those were all about overt Russian propaganda — RT and Sputnik — except for one, when the GEC analyst said to the folks there, "I can't comment on this one because I'm a government employee, but I think you should check it out." That's all that happened, sir. Self: So I'm gonna leave you, and I'll yield back a little bit of my time, a direct quote from Joseph Goebbels. "It is the absolute right of the state to supervise the formation of public opinion," and I think that may be what we're discussing here. So it's true that Self quoted Goebbels, but as the context clearly shows, he was attempting to liken Jankowicz's views to the Nazi propaganda minister's. About Us - Global Engagement Center - United States Department of State. 5 Oct. 2023, AFP. "US Agency Focused on Foreign Disinformation Shuts Down." France24, 24 Dec. 2024, Bertrand, Sean Lyngaas, Priscilla Alvarez,Natasha. "Expert Hired to Run DHS' Newly Created Disinformation Board Resigns | CNN Politics." CNN, 18 May 2022, Bond, Shannon. "A Major Disinformation Research Team's Future Is Uncertain after Political Attacks." NPR, 14 June 2024. NPR, "Censorship-Industrial Complex: The Need for First Amendment Safeguards at the State Department." House Foreign Affairs Committee, 1 Apr. 2025, "GOP Rep Quotes Infamous Nazi During Censorship Hearing." The Daily Beast, 2 Apr. 2025, Hooper, Kelly. "Mayorkas Cites Misinformation about Homeland Security's Disinformation Board." Politico, 1 May 2022, Lorenz, Taylor. "How the Biden Administration Let Right-Wing Attacks Derail Its Disinformation Efforts." The Washington Post, 18 May 2022, Myers, Steven Lee, and Sheera Frenkel. "G.O.P. Targets Researchers Who Study Disinformation Ahead of 2024 Election." The New York Times, 19 June 2023, Myers, Steven Lee, and Jim Rutenberg. "New Group Joins the Political Fight Over Disinformation Online." The New York Times, 22 Apr. 2024, "North Texas Congress Members Clash over Use of Nazi Propagandist Joseph Goebbels Quote at Hearing." 3 Apr. 2025, "Programs." The American Sunlight Project, Accessed 4 Apr. 2025. Rutenberg , Jim, and Steven Lee Myers. "How Trump's Allies Are Winning the War Over Disinformation." The New York Times, 17 Mar. 2024, Sands, Geneva. "DHS Shuts down Disinformation Board Months after Its Efforts Were Paused | CNN Politics." CNN, 25 Aug. 2022, Tait, Robert. "Capitol Hill Hearing on 'Censorship Industrial Complex' under Biden Based on 'Fiction', Says Expert." The Guardian, 1 Apr. 2025. The Guardian, "Team." The American Sunlight Project, Accessed 4 Apr. 2025.
