Image by Getty / FuturismDevelopmentsUnitedHealth, the largest healthcare insurer in the United States, reportedly went to extreme lengths to deny care to seniors and cut costs to pad out its profit margins.As The Guardian reports, nurse practitioners say that UnitedHealth pressed them to change patients' status to "do not resuscitate" — even after those same patients had "clearly expressed a desire that all available treatments be used to keep them alive.""They’re pretending to make it look like it’s in the best interest of the member," one practitioner told the British newspaper. "But it’s really not."UnitedHealth also allegedly tried to prevent patients from transferring hospitals, risking their health further.While the company has denied the allegations, the reporting paints an alarming picture of the state of healthcare in the United States, where insurance is treated much the same way as a tech company trying to maximize profits while cutting costs.UnitedHealth already has a lengthy track record of finding creative ways to deny people healthcare coverage, including deploying an AI that automatically denied and overrode claims for elderly patients.The company has attracted particular controversy after its CEO was murdered in December, in an apparent act of lethal anger at the injustices of a notoriously greedy and deficient system.The company has had a miserable year since then. Its shares have dropped almost 40 percent year to date, following a flood of damning reports.Following The Guardian's reporting today, UnitedHealth's stock price slid by more than six percent.The company has also been the subject of criminal and civil investigations into its practices, including medicare fraud, as Reuters reports.Last week, UnitedHealth CEO Andrew Witty abruptly resigned, citing "personal reasons" and drawing even more scrutiny over the company's operations.Whether the departure had anything to do with a continuous flood of bad press remains unclear. According to a whistleblower lawsuit cited by the Guardian, staffers at nursing homes were directly incentivized to leak sensitive resident records so that UnitedHealth sales teams could solicit their plans to them and their families.A patient who showed key symptoms of having suffered a stroke, for instance, was denied care by a remote and underqualified UnitedHealth employee, who suggested she was suffering from a less serious condition, according to UnitedHealth logs and records obtained by the newspaper. The delays caused by healthcare practitioners waiting to hear back from the insurer led to the patient's health deteriorating further.Per The Guardian, there have been countless other instances like it.In short, UnitedHealth seems far interested in cutting costs than ensuring people in senior homes stay healthy."How many of those people were further harmed because they never received the care that they needed?" former UnitedHealth nurse practitioner turned whistleblower Maxwell Ollivant told The Guardian. "When you just look at the percentage reductions in hospitalizations, it doesn’t say anything about patient outcomes."Share This Article

Black Panther Founder Bobby Seale running for mayor (1972), 8 x 10 inches. All images © Stephen Shames, courtesy of Amar Gallery, shared with permission Stephen Shames Highlights a Transformational Era in ‘Black Panthers & Revolution’ May 21, 2025 Kate Mothes Completed in 1940, California Highway 17—now Interstate 880—bulldozed a vast swath of Oakland’s African American community to make room for the route. Cut off from downtown, these neighborhoods were stripped of their economic connections to the commercial center, disrupting social cohesion and among other policies and attitudes at the time, setting in motion an era of increased unrest. One of these damaging policies took the form of the Federal Housing Administration’s systematic program of discriminating against people of color in a process known as redlining. During this time, Black people were prohibited from purchasing homes so that white, middle- or lower-class families could do so instead, and suburban communities were segregated by design. It’s something the people of Oakland simply wouldn’t stand for. Black Panther kids demonstrate during the Bobby Seale and Ericka Huggins trial, New Haven, Connecticut, May 1, 1970. Gelatin silver print, printed 2016, 20 x 16 inches Starting in the mid-1940s, the Bay Area city was the locus of numerous demonstrations, from general strikes to peaceful protests to all-out riots. Excessive force by the Oakland Police Department exacerbated tensions and gave rise to numerous local organizations like the Oakland Community Organizations (PICO/OCO), Unity Council, Intertribal Friendship House, and perhaps most famously, the Black Panther Party. Often simply called the Panthers or the BPP, the political organization was founded in 1966 by college students Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton. Its black berets and infamous so-called “copwatching” practices involved open-carry patrols with the mission to protect Black citizens from abuse by law enforcement. More importantly, the group also implemented a number of “survival programs” that provided essentials like food, medicine, clothing, and transportation to residents. Acclaimed photojournalist Stephen Shames had a front row seat to the party’s rise. While they were still in college, Seale invited him to be the official photographer of the BPP, and until 1973, Shames created hundreds of powerful images that highlight the Panthers’ actions and ethos around California and the country. “The Black Panther party burst upon our consciousness when Bobby Seale and other Panthers marched upon the California State Capitol in Sacramento—armed with guns,” Shames says in a statement. “This approach electrified a generation of Black youth.” More than 65 percent of the group’s membership comprised women. Black Panthers food program (c.1970s), 8 x 10 inches The BPP image was carefully choreographed, from militaristic uniforms to its distinctive logo to a deliberate and carefully designed weekly newspaper, with art director Emory Douglas, the party’s visual identity “master craftsman” at the helm. In 2016, Shames and Seale co-authored the book Power to the People: The World of the Black Panthers, which showcases Black pride, resilience, and empowerment during this revolutionary era. He says: The Panthers did not encourage hatred…The Black Panther Party sought to build a community through service to the people, providing free food and clothing. They gave purpose to the aimless, angry youth who loitered on street corners. The Panthers molded these young people into disciplined, hard workers who served their community and showed respect for mothers, fathers, and elders. This month, a remarkable selection of Shames’ photos opens in Black Panthers & Revolution: The Art of Stephen Shames at Amar Gallery. Panthers Line Up At A Free Huey Rally in DeFremery Park, Oakland, July 28, 1968. Gelatin silver, 16 x 20 inches Striking black-and-white imagery portrays Seale, Newton, and other renowned activists like Angela Davis and James Baldwin among daily scenes of local youth and families, the Panthers’ food distribution program, and demonstrations. Shames’ photographs invoke a range of emotions, from the intensity of BPP rallies to the energy of local programs to the fundamental joy of togetherness and community. Shames is known for his bold and emphathetic photo essays that shine light on social issues around the world. His work resides in the permanent collections of MoMA, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Art, the National Museum of American History, and dozens more. Black Panthers & Revolution opens May 28 and continues through July 7 in London. If you’re in Los Angeles, keep an eye out for Shames’ solo exhibition, Comrade Sisters: Women of the Black Panther Party, which opens on August 7 at the Museum of Social Justice. Find more on the artist’s website. Black Panther medical program (c.1970s), 8 x 10 inches Angela Davis (c.1970s), 16 x 20 inches Black Panther rally (c.1970s), 8 x 10 inches Kids of the Black Panthers (c.1970s), 8 x 10 inches Black Panther kid wearing a “Free Angela” T-shirt (c.1970s), 16 x 20 inches James Baldwin visiting Black Panther founder Bobby Seale in prison (1969), 16 x 20 inches “Free Our Sisters” (c.1970s), 8 x 10 inches Black Panther kids (c.1970s), 8 x 10 inches Next article

Isabel Lane is this year’s William “Bill” Menking Travel Award winner. Lane is a graduate student at Pratt Institute in the Urban and Community Planning program, a department in the Graduate Center for Planning and the Environment. Lane will travel to Quebec, Canada, where she’ll engage with farmers, planners, and policymakers to explore Montreal’s urban agricultural production. Lane will examine the extensive, province-wide food system that supports the region, which is 50 percent self-sustaining, Pratt said in a statement. The goal is to export this knowledge back to New York State, and potentially replicate this strategy in local urban and rural communities, bolstering low-cost, healthy produce access. “As a young person, one of Bill Menking’s many roles included organizing for farmworker unions; later, as an architect, he was not simply concerned with the final form, but with the labor conditions in its construction,” Lane said. Lane continued: “Tributes to Bill Menking portray him as a teacher who challenged his students to engage with big, cross-disciplinary questions and never distract from their work’s social implications. This is reflective of Pratt’s School of Architecture’s purpose—to prepare its students to meet moments “of consequence” with firm principles and technical proficiency towards progressive ideals. In this moment of excitement and traction for urban agriculture at scale, I hope that my travels allow me to share with the Pratt community a critical analysis of the opportunities and risks of planning for urban agriculture through the frameworks of social, racial, and environmental justice.” Before entering Pratt, Lane worked on a homestead farm in Maine. She continues this work today as an intern at the Urban Farm on Randall’s Island. All of these lived experiences inform her current research project at the intersection of food equity, resiliency, labor, and social justice. The selection committee that awarded Lane was led by Pratt professor Meredith TenHoor, assistant professor Yuliya Dzyuban, and assistant professor Mark Heller. The travel award was inaugurated in 2023 to honor The Architect’s Newspaper cofounder Bill Menking, who spent three decades teaching at Pratt in addition to organizing in the Architecture Lobby, steering the Storefront for Art and Architecture, researching radical Italian design, and a long list of many other feats. There is also a reading room indebted to Menking at Pratt. The 2024 recipient of William “Bill” Menking Travel Award was Quinn Gregory. He traveled to Amsterdam to research how messengers, planners, academics, and architects have impacted progressive street designs in big cities. Menking passed in 2020, the travel award helps honor his legacy.

This is today's edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. By putting AI into everything, Google wants to make it invisible If you want to know where AI is headed, this year’s Google I/O has you covered. The company’s annual showcase of next-gen products, which kicked off yesterday, has all of the pomp and pizzazz, the sizzle reels and celebrity walk-ons, that you’d expect from a multimillion dollar marketing event. But it also shows us just how fast this still-experimental technology is being subsumed into a line-up designed to sell phones and subscription tiers. Never before have I seen this thing we call artificial intelligence appear so normal. Read the full story.—Will Douglas Heaven AI could keep us dependent on natural gas for decades to come Last December, Meta announced plans to build a massive $10 billion data center for training its artificial intelligence models in rural northeast Louisiana. Stretching for more than a mile, it will be Meta’s largest in the world, and it will have an enormous appetite for electricity. To power the data center, a Meta contractor called Entergy will build three large natural-gas power plants with a total capacity of 2.3 gigawatts. It’ll also upgrade the grid to accommodate the huge jump in anticipated demand.The choice of natural gas as the go-to solution to meet the growing demand for power from AI is not unique to Louisiana. The fossil fuel is already the country’s chief source of electricity generation, and large natural-gas plants are being built around the country to feed electricity to new and planned AI data centers. That’s all but wiping out any prospect that the US will wean itself off natural gas anytime soon. Read the full story.—David Rotman This story is part of Power Hungry: AI and our energy future—our new series shining a light on AI’s energy usage. Check out the rest of the package here. Take a new look at AI’s energy use Big Tech's appetite for energy is growing rapidly as adoption of AI accelerates. But just how much energy does a single AI query use? And what does it mean for the climate?  Join editor in chief Mat Honan, senior climate reporter Casey Crownhart, and AI reporter James O'Donnell at 1.30pm ET today for a subscriber-only Roundtables conversation digging into our new package of stories about AI's energy demands now and in the future. Register here.The must-reads I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology. 1 Democrats are on the hunt for a digital thought leader They’re (finally) realizing how far they’re lagging behind their opponents’ online efforts these days. (NYT $) + AI’s impact on elections is being overblown. (MIT Technology Review)2 At least two newspapers printed an AI-generated summer reading list 📰 The only problem is, some of the books don’t actually exist. (404 Media)+ It’s a useful reminder to never take anything chatbots produce as fact. (Axios)+ Even regional newspapers aren’t safe from AI slop. (The Atlantic $)+ Why AI hallucinates, and why we can’t stop it. (MIT Technology Review)3 The Earth may already be too hot to maintain polar ice sheetsEven if it stays at current temperature levels. (WP $)+ Why climate researchers are taking the temperature of mountain snow. (MIT Technology Review)4 How New York City’s child abuse algorithm flags families for investigation Critics believe it’s open to racial bias. (The Markup) 5 Here’s what it’s like to interview for a job at DOGE   The hiring process is remarkably fast, for a government entity. (Wired $)+ The department reportedly tried to enter the US government’s publishing operation. (Politico)+ DOGE’s tech takeover threatens the safety and stability of our critical data. (MIT Technology Review)6 Fortnite has finally returned to Apple’s App StoreAfter five years and a lengthy legal battle. (NYT $) + The recent ruling has major implications for the iOS economy. (Reuters)7 Most chatbots can be tricked into dispensing dangerous informationFrom hacking advice, to describing how to make drugs. (The Guardian) + Anthropic has a new way to protect large language models against jailbreaks. (MIT Technology Review)8 Young Indonesians are being trafficked to scam farmsFraudulent job ads on Telegram and Facebook lure them into a life of crime. (Rest of World) + Inside a romance scam compound—and how people get tricked into being there. (MIT Technology Review) 9  Inside the building in China where stolen western iPhones are stripped and sold You’ll find a buyer for every single component inside the Feiyang Times. (FT $)10 Amazon has started randomly refunding customers for old purchasesSome orders were placed as far back as 2018. (Bloomberg $) Quote of the day “Anybody who’s a computer scientist should not be retired right now. They should be working on AI.” —Google cofounder Sergey Brin says people with the right technical skills should copy him and quit being retired, TechCrunch reports. One more thing This fuel plant will use agricultural waste to combat climate change A startup called Mote plans to build a new type of fuel-producing plant in California’s fertile Central Valley that would, if it works as hoped, continually capture and bury carbon dioxide.It’s among a growing number of efforts to commercialize a concept first proposed two decades ago as a means of combating climate change, known as bioenergy with carbon capture and sequestration, or BECCS.It’s an ambitious plan. However, there are serious challenges to doing BECCS affordably and in ways that reliably suck down significant levels of carbon dioxide. Read the full story.—James Temple We can still have nice things A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or skeet 'em at me.) + These creepy little Labubu toys are everywhere. But why?+ Happy 25th birthday to one of London’s finest institutions, the Tate Modern gallery.+ Why the Mission Impossible film franchise just won’t die.+ Hummingbirds can fly backwards!? Wow.

This is today's edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology. By putting AI into everything, Google wants to make it invisible If you want to know where AI is headed, this year’s Google I/O has you covered. The company’s annual showcase of next-gen products, which kicked off yesterday, has all of the pomp and pizzazz, the sizzle reels and celebrity walk-ons, that you’d expect from a multimillion dollar marketing event. But it also shows us just how fast this still-experimental technology is being subsumed into a line-up designed to sell phones and subscription tiers. Never before have I seen this thing we call artificial intelligence appear so normal. Read the full story.—Will Douglas Heaven AI could keep us dependent on natural gas for decades to come Last December, Meta announced plans to build a massive $10 billion data center for training its artificial intelligence models in rural northeast Louisiana. Stretching for more than a mile, it will be Meta’s largest in the world, and it will have an enormous appetite for electricity. To power the data center, a Meta contractor called Entergy will build three large natural-gas power plants with a total capacity of 2.3 gigawatts. It’ll also upgrade the grid to accommodate the huge jump in anticipated demand.The choice of natural gas as the go-to solution to meet the growing demand for power from AI is not unique to Louisiana. The fossil fuel is already the country’s chief source of electricity generation, and large natural-gas plants are being built around the country to feed electricity to new and planned AI data centers. That’s all but wiping out any prospect that the US will wean itself off natural gas anytime soon. Read the full story.—David Rotman This story is part of Power Hungry: AI and our energy future—our new series shining a light on AI’s energy usage. Check out the rest of the package here. Take a new look at AI’s energy use Big Tech's appetite for energy is growing rapidly as adoption of AI accelerates. But just how much energy does a single AI query use? And what does it mean for the climate?  Join editor in chief Mat Honan, senior climate reporter Casey Crownhart, and AI reporter James O'Donnell at 1.30pm ET today for a subscriber-only Roundtables conversation digging into our new package of stories about AI's energy demands now and in the future. Register here.The must-reads I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology. 1 Democrats are on the hunt for a digital thought leader They’re (finally) realizing how far they’re lagging behind their opponents’ online efforts these days. (NYT $) + AI’s impact on elections is being overblown. (MIT Technology Review)2 At least two newspapers printed an AI-generated summer reading list 📰 The only problem is, some of the books don’t actually exist. (404 Media)+ It’s a useful reminder to never take anything chatbots produce as fact. (Axios)+ Even regional newspapers aren’t safe from AI slop. (The Atlantic $)+ Why AI hallucinates, and why we can’t stop it. (MIT Technology Review)3 The Earth may already be too hot to maintain polar ice sheetsEven if it stays at current temperature levels. (WP $)+ Why climate researchers are taking the temperature of mountain snow. (MIT Technology Review)4 How New York City’s child abuse algorithm flags families for investigation Critics believe it’s open to racial bias. (The Markup) 5 Here’s what it’s like to interview for a job at DOGE   The hiring process is remarkably fast, for a government entity. (Wired $)+ The department reportedly tried to enter the US government’s publishing operation. (Politico)+ DOGE’s tech takeover threatens the safety and stability of our critical data. (MIT Technology Review)6 Fortnite has finally returned to Apple’s App StoreAfter five years and a lengthy legal battle. (NYT $) + The recent ruling has major implications for the iOS economy. (Reuters)7 Most chatbots can be tricked into dispensing dangerous informationFrom hacking advice, to describing how to make drugs. (The Guardian) + Anthropic has a new way to protect large language models against jailbreaks. (MIT Technology Review)8 Young Indonesians are being trafficked to scam farmsFraudulent job ads on Telegram and Facebook lure them into a life of crime. (Rest of World) + Inside a romance scam compound—and how people get tricked into being there. (MIT Technology Review) 9  Inside the building in China where stolen western iPhones are stripped and sold You’ll find a buyer for every single component inside the Feiyang Times. (FT $)10 Amazon has started randomly refunding customers for old purchasesSome orders were placed as far back as 2018. (Bloomberg $) Quote of the day “Anybody who’s a computer scientist should not be retired right now. They should be working on AI.” —Google cofounder Sergey Brin says people with the right technical skills should copy him and quit being retired, TechCrunch reports. One more thing This fuel plant will use agricultural waste to combat climate change A startup called Mote plans to build a new type of fuel-producing plant in California’s fertile Central Valley that would, if it works as hoped, continually capture and bury carbon dioxide.It’s among a growing number of efforts to commercialize a concept first proposed two decades ago as a means of combating climate change, known as bioenergy with carbon capture and sequestration, or BECCS.It’s an ambitious plan. However, there are serious challenges to doing BECCS affordably and in ways that reliably suck down significant levels of carbon dioxide. Read the full story.—James Temple We can still have nice things A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or skeet 'em at me.) + These creepy little Labubu toys are everywhere. But why?+ Happy 25th birthday to one of London’s finest institutions, the Tate Modern gallery.+ Why the Mission Impossible film franchise just won’t die.+ Hummingbirds can fly backwards!? Wow.

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. By putting AI into everything, Google wants to make it invisible If you want to know where AI is headed, this year’s Google I/O has you covered. The company’s annual showcase of next-gen products, which kicked off yesterday, has all of the pomp and pizzazz, the sizzle reels and celebrity walk-ons, that you’d expect from a multimillion dollar marketing event.But it also shows us just how fast this still-experimental technology is being subsumed into a line-up designed to sell phones and subscription tiers. Never before have I seen this thing we call artificial intelligence appear so normal. Read the full story. —Will Douglas Heaven AI could keep us dependent on natural gas for decades to come Last December, Meta announced plans to build a massive $10 billion data center for training its artificial intelligence models in rural northeast Louisiana. Stretching for more than a mile, it will be Meta’s largest in the world, and it will have an enormous appetite for electricity.To power the data center, a Meta contractor called Entergy will build three large natural-gas power plants with a total capacity of 2.3 gigawatts. It’ll also upgrade the grid to accommodate the huge jump in anticipated demand.The choice of natural gas as the go-to solution to meet the growing demand for power from AI is not unique to Louisiana. The fossil fuel is already the country’s chief source of electricity generation, and large natural-gas plants are being built around the country to feed electricity to new and planned AI data centers. That’s all but wiping out any prospect that the US will wean itself off natural gas anytime soon. Read the full story. —David Rotman This story is part of Power Hungry: AI and our energy future—our new series shining a light on AI’s energy usage. Check out the rest of the package here. Take a new look at AI’s energy use Big Tech’s appetite for energy is growing rapidly as adoption of AI accelerates. But just how much energy does a single AI query use? And what does it mean for the climate? Join editor in chief Mat Honan, senior climate reporter Casey Crownhart, and AI reporter James O’Donnell at 1.30pm ET today for a subscriber-only Roundtables conversation digging into our new package of stories about AI’s energy demands now and in the future. Register here. The must-reads I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology. 1 Democrats are on the hunt for a digital thought leaderThey’re (finally) realizing how far they’re lagging behind their opponents’ online efforts these days. (NYT $) + AI’s impact on elections is being overblown. (MIT Technology Review) 2 At least two newspapers printed an AI-generated summer reading list The only problem is, some of the books don’t actually exist. (404 Media)+ It’s a useful reminder to never take anything chatbots produce as fact. (Axios)+ Even regional newspapers aren’t safe from AI slop. (The Atlantic $)+ Why AI hallucinates, and why we can’t stop it. (MIT Technology Review)3 The Earth may already be too hot to maintain polar ice sheetsEven if it stays at current temperature levels. (WP $)+ Why climate researchers are taking the temperature of mountain snow. (MIT Technology Review) 4 How New York City’s child abuse algorithm flags families for investigationCritics believe it’s open to racial bias. (The Markup) 5 Here’s what it’s like to interview for a job at DOGE  The hiring process is remarkably fast, for a government entity. (Wired $)+ The department reportedly tried to enter the US government’s publishing operation. (Politico)+ DOGE’s tech takeover threatens the safety and stability of our critical data. (MIT Technology Review) 6 Fortnite has finally returned to Apple’s App StoreAfter five years and a lengthy legal battle. (NYT $)+ The recent ruling has major implications for the iOS economy. (Reuters) 7 Most chatbots can be tricked into dispensing dangerous informationFrom hacking advice, to describing how to make drugs. (The Guardian)+ Anthropic has a new way to protect large language models against jailbreaks. (MIT Technology Review) 8 Young Indonesians are being trafficked to scam farmsFraudulent job ads on Telegram and Facebook lure them into a life of crime. (Rest of World)+ Inside a romance scam compound—and how people get tricked into being there. (MIT Technology Review) 9  Inside the building in China where stolen western iPhones are stripped and soldYou’ll find a buyer for every single component inside the Feiyang Times. (FT $) 10 Amazon has started randomly refunding customers for old purchasesSome orders were placed as far back as 2018. (Bloomberg $) Quote of the day “Anybody who’s a computer scientist should not be retired right now. They should be working on AI.” —Google cofounder Sergey Brin says people with the right technical skills should copy him and quit being retired, TechCrunch reports. One more thing This fuel plant will use agricultural waste to combat climate changeA startup called Mote plans to build a new type of fuel-producing plant in California’s fertile Central Valley that would, if it works as hoped, continually capture and bury carbon dioxide.It’s among a growing number of efforts to commercialize a concept first proposed two decades ago as a means of combating climate change, known as bioenergy with carbon capture and sequestration, or BECCS.It’s an ambitious plan. However, there are serious challenges to doing BECCS affordably and in ways that reliably suck down significant levels of carbon dioxide. Read the full story. —James Temple We can still have nice things A place for comfort, fun and distraction to brighten up your day. (Got any ideas? Drop me a line or skeet ’em at me.) + These creepy little Labubu toys are everywhere. But why?+ Happy 25th birthday to one of London’s finest institutions, the Tate Modern gallery.+ Why the Mission Impossible film franchise just won’t die.+ Hummingbirds can fly backwards!? Wow.

This Amateur Art Detective Thinks Paul Gauguin’s Last Self-Portrait Is a Fake The new allegations come from Fabrice Fourmanoir, who previously identified a fraudulent Gauguin sculpture that the Getty Museum had purchased for $5 million The authenticity of Paul Gauguin's 1903 self-portrait has long been the subject of debate. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons According to naval records, Paul Gauguin’s eyes were brown. In early self-portraits, the French artist painted himself with a crooked nose, and he scrawled a signature and date in the corners. Why, then, does Gauguin’s last self-portrait have blue eyes, a squat nose and no signature or date? According to Fabrice Fourmanoir, an art dealer and amateur art sleuth, these aesthetic oddities are just the most obvious evidence that the 1903 self-portrait housed at the Kunstmuseum Basel in Switzerland was not the work of Gauguin. Fourmanoir alleges that the work was instead painted by Gauguin’s friend Ky-Dong Nguyen Van Cam in the 1910s, years after the artist’s death in 1903. After that, he says it was passed off as a real Gauguin and eventually bequeathed to the Kunstmuseum Basel in 1945. So far, the Kunstmuseum has been willing to check Fourmanoir’s claims. It announced that it will conduct X-ray, infrared and ultraviolet scans to help determine the provenance of the painting. “We take this matter very seriously, but these analyses will take some time,” a spokesperson for the Kunstmuseum tells Artnet’s Jo Lawson-Tancred. Results are not expected until June or July. A Gauguin self-portrait from 1888 Public domain via Wikimedia Commons The painting’s official origin story begins on the island of Hiva Oa in French Polynesia in 1903. Gauguin’s health was declining. Although in February of that year, he wrote to a friend explaining that he had “hardly touched a brush for three months,” he somehow found the motivation to make one last self-portrait, per the Art Newspaper’s Martin Bailey. On the morning of May 8, he died, likely of a heart attack. His poor health is evident in the self-portrait. His face is grim, lacking the exuberance and devil-may-care attitude visible in earlier paintings. Henri Loyrette, a former director of the Musée d’Orsay and the Louvre in Paris, once described it as “a portrait of eternity,” akin to the Fayum funerary portraits of ancient Egypt, according to the Art Newspaper. But Fourmanoir doesn’t believe this story. He claims that after Gauguin befriended Ky-Dong, who was exiled from his native Vietnam for anti-colonial activities, he taught him to paint. After Gauguin’s death, Ky-Dong painted the portrait of his deceased friend and teacher based on a black-and-white photograph, which goes some way in explaining the discrepancy in eye color and nose shape. Fourmanoir’s principal source is Ky-Dong’s son, whom he met in Papeete, the capital of Tahiti, in the 1980s. “We had long conversations about Gauguin and his father, Ky-Dong. He told me his father had said that he had painted the portrait of Gauguin,” says Fourmanoir, per the Art Newspaper. The portrait surfaced in 1923 in the possession of Louis Grélet, a Swiss liquor merchant and photographer who knew Gauguin. Fourmanoir alleges that Grélet knew the painting was not a real Gauguin but passed it off as authentic with the help of Jean-Louis Ormond, the nephew of painter John Singer Sargent. They put the work up for auction at Sotheby’s in London and split the earnings. Paul Gauguin around 1891 Public domain via Wikimedia Commons Fourmanoir’s allegations aren’t without precedent. In the late 1920s, the portrait hung at the Kunsthalle Basel, an art gallery in Switzerland, where records described it as a “presumed self-portrait,” according to Le Quotidien de l’Art’s Jade Pillaudin. “The hypothesis that the work is not a Gauguin was already expressed in the first documents that we attained on the subject,” Eva Reifert, a curator at the Kunstmuseum, tells Le Quotidien de l’Art. “Admittedly, we also see documented expert opinion that the work is undoubtedly authentic, but with the new information shared by Fabrice Fourmanoir, there is a chance to study this question again.” Fourmanoir, after all, has a knack for spotting fakes. In 2020, he claimed that a rare sandalwood sculpture attributed to Gauguin was a forgery. The Getty Museum in Los Angeles, which had purchased it for a reported $5 million, later reattributed the piece. While the results of the analyses will help determine the truth of Fourmanoir’s claims, one other possibility remains: The portrait could be a collaborative work by both Gauguin and Ky-Dong. In the 1960s, Bengt Danielsson, a Swedish anthropologist and the author of Gauguin in the South Seas, recalled a story that Grélet once told him, per the Art Newspaper: One day, Ky-Dong was in Gauguin’s studio and began painting the artist’s portrait, Danielsson wrote. “Without a word, Gauguin picked up a mirror and, thrusting his friend aside, took the brush and finished the portrait himself.” Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: On Sunday, the Chicago Sun-Times published an advertorial summer reading list containing at least 10 fake books attributed to real authors, according to multiple reports on social media. The newspaper's uncredited "Summer reading list for 2025" supplement recommended titles including "Tidewater Dreams" by Isabel Allende and "The Last Algorithm" by Andy Weir -- books that don't exist and were created out of thin air by an AI system. The creator of the list, Marco Buscaglia, confirmed to 404 Media (paywalled) that he used AI to generate the content. "I do use AI for background at times but always check out the material first. This time, I did not and I can't believe I missed it because it's so obvious. No excuses," Buscaglia said. "On me 100 percent and I'm completely embarrassed." A check by Ars Technica shows that only five of the fifteen recommended books in the list actually exist, with the remainder being fabricated titles falsely attributed to well-known authors. [...] On Tuesday morning, the Chicago Sun-Times addressed the controversy on Bluesky. "We are looking into how this made it into print as we speak," the official publication account wrote. "It is not editorial content and was not created by, or approved by, the Sun-Times newsroom. We value your trust in our reporting and take this very seriously. More info will be provided soon." In the supplement, the books listed by authors Isabel Allende, Andy Weir, Brit Bennett, Taylor Jenkins Reid, Min Jin Lee, Percival Everett, Delia Owens, Rumaan Alam, Rebecca Makkai, and Maggie O'Farrell are confabulated, while books listed by authors Francoise Sagan, Ray Bradbury, Jess Walter, Andre Aciman, and Ian McEwan are real. All of the authors are real people. "The Chicago Sun-Times obviously gets ChatGPT to write a 'summer reads' feature almost entirely made up of real authors but completely fake books. What are we coming to?" wrote novelist Rachael King. A Reddit user also expressed disapproval of the incident. "As a subscriber, I am livid! What is the point of subscribing to a hard copy paper if they are just going to include AI slop too!? The Sun Times needs to answer for this, and there should be a reporter fired." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Chicago Slop Chicago Sun-Times prints summer reading list full of fake books Reading list in advertorial supplement contains 66% made up books by real authors. Benj Edwards – May 20, 2025 10:52 am | 42 Credit: Jorg Greuel via Getty Images Credit: Jorg Greuel via Getty Images Story text Size Small Standard Large Width * Standard Wide Links Standard Orange * Subscribers only   Learn more On Sunday, the Chicago Sun-Times published an advertorial summer reading list containing at least 10 fake books attributed to real authors, according to multiple reports on social media. The newspaper's uncredited "Summer reading list for 2025" supplement recommended titles including "Tidewater Dreams" by Isabel Allende and "The Last Algorithm" by Andy Weir—books that don't exist and were created out of thin air by an AI system. The creator of the list, Marco Buscaglia, confirmed to 404 Media that he used AI to generate the content. "I do use AI for background at times but always check out the material first. This time, I did not and I can't believe I missed it because it's so obvious. No excuses," Buscaglia said. "On me 100 percent and I'm completely embarrassed." A check by Ars Technica shows that only five of the fifteen recommended books in the list actually exist, with the remainder being fabricated titles falsely attributed to well-known authors. AI assistants such as ChatGPT are well-known for creating plausible-sounding errors known as confabulations, especially when lacking detailed information on a particular topic. The problem affects everything from AI search results to lawyers citing fake cases. On Tuesday morning, the Chicago Sun-Times addressed the controversy on Bluesky. "We are looking into how this made it into print as we speak," the official publication account wrote. "It is not editorial content and was not created by, or approved by, the Sun-Times newsroom. We value your trust in our reporting and take this very seriously. More info will be provided soon." In the supplement, the books listed by authors Isabel Allende, Andy Weir, Brit Bennett, Taylor Jenkins Reid, Min Jin Lee, Percival Everett, Delia Owens, Rumaan Alam, Rebecca Makkai, and Maggie O’Farrell are confabulated, while books listed by authors Françoise Sagan, Ray Bradbury, Jess Walter, André Aciman, and Ian McEwan are real. All of the authors are real people. Photo of the Chicago Sun-Times "Summer reading list for 2025" supplement. Credit: Rachel King / Bluesky Novelist Rachael King initially called attention to the error on Bluesky Tuesday morning. "The Chicago Sun-Times obviously gets ChatGPT to write a 'summer reads' feature almost entirely made up of real authors but completely fake books. What are we coming to?" King wrote. So far, community reaction to the list has been largely negative online, but others have expressed sympathy for the publication. Freelance journalist Joshua J. Friedman noted on Bluesky that the reading list was "part of a ~60-page summer supplement" published on May 18, suggesting it might be "transparent filler" possibly created by "the lone freelancer apparently saddled with producing it." The staffing connection The reading list appeared in a 64-page supplement called "Heat Index," which was a promotional section not specific to Chicago. Buscaglia told 404 Media the content was meant to be "generic and national" and would be inserted into newspapers around the country. "We never get a list of where things ran," he said. The publication error comes two months after the Chicago Sun-Times lost 20 percent of its staff through a buyout program. In March, the newspaper's nonprofit owner, Chicago Public Media, announced that 30 Sun-Times employees—including 23 from the newsroom—had accepted buyout offers amid financial struggles. A March report on the buyout in the Sun-Times described the staff reduction as "the most drastic the oft-imperiled Sun-Times has faced in several years." The departures included columnists, editorial writers, and editors with decades of experience. Melissa Bell, CEO of Chicago Public Media, stated at the time that the exits would save the company $4.2 million annually. The company offered buyouts as it prepared for an expected expiration of grant support at the end of 2026. Even with those pressures in the media, one Reddit user expressed disapproval of the apparent use of AI in the newspaper, even in a supplement that might not have been produced by staff. "As a subscriber, I am livid! What is the point of subscribing to a hard copy paper if they are just going to include AI slop too!?" wrote Reddit user xxxlovelit, who shared the reading list. "The Sun Times needs to answer for this, and there should be a reporter fired." This article was updated on May 20, 2025 at 11:02 AM to include information on Marco Buscaglia from 404 Media. Benj Edwards Senior AI Reporter Benj Edwards Senior AI Reporter Benj Edwards is Ars Technica's Senior AI Reporter and founder of the site's dedicated AI beat in 2022. He's also a tech historian with almost two decades of experience. In his free time, he writes and records music, collects vintage computers, and enjoys nature. He lives in Raleigh, NC. 42 Comments

I’ve been thinking about art deco. The style recently turned 100, and after it arrived via the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes in Paris, its influence quickly proliferated around the world: One can see its streamline sensibility in New York’s skyline; hotels that line Miami Beach; bus stations across the U.S.; the UNESCO-designated World Heritage city of Asmara, Eritrea; in Mumbai, India; and the Kavanagh Building in Buenos Aires, among other venues. It has a syncretic, catholic vibe in that its geometric directives were combined with vernacular material cultures to create distinct local varieties. Art deco’s optimistic eclecticism absorbed the aesthetic flourishes of art nouveau and cubism alongside rapid transformations in building technology. It arrived in a moment of societal change: Just four years after its eponymous fair, squarely in the middle of the Roaring Twenties, the great crash struck in 1929. (The resulting depression contributed in part to the rise of the Nazi Party in Germany.) In my view, art deco embodies the aspirations of a society that was rapidly concentrating capital, which makes sense that it is experiencing a comeback today. Our current moment bears a striking resemblance to that time: We too have emerged from a global pandemic, are dealing with the rise of fascism, and are grappling with extreme wealth inequality. Architects of that era were responding to rapid changes in technology, just as contemporary practitioners are now. But we have the added anxiety of the climate crisis. While art deco’s formal exuberance was revelatory, these days the same showy flourishes often land as wasteful, overwrought, even lame. Which is to say: Architecture’s long capital-P Project of exploring ever-more-complicated forms has finally come to an end. The heroic pursuit of formal complexity for its own sake feels like a bygone thing. The urgent question is not “Can we build it?” but “Should we build it?” Our technology is sufficiently advanced that all manner of shapes and assemblies are within our reach to imagine, though having the money or construction ability to realize them is another story entirely. This provocation is in part the premise of “Crisis Formalism,” a smart issue of Flash Art Volumes guest edited by Michael Abel and Nile Greenberg of the New York–based ANY, a partnership in architecture, scenography, theory, and design. Their introduction begins: “If we recognize that architecture is at a tipping point—in which form, once immediate and vital, risks dissolving into a haze of proliferating crises—then the moment calls for a fundamental rethinking of form itself, not as an outcome of crisis but as its very cause.” ANY’s contents help us exit the tailspin of architecture’s sublime uselessness, in Manfredo Tafuri’s description. We can move beyond the caveman logic: If form bad and architect make form, then… architecture bad? Uh, not really. Architects should still make things, but perhaps they should be making maintenance plans or organization charts or business plans or adaptive reuse scenarios or affordable housing. Making form is necessary but easy; it’s the rest of the stuff that is hard. What’s needed is a deeper, more thoughtful accounting of form’s impacts, material flows, and complicities. We ought to train ourselves to see form’s shadow. Robert Wilson’s Parzival: A Chair with a Shadow (Martien Mulder) Theater artist Robert Wilson does exactly this with Parzival: A Chair with a Shadow, the chair pictured above as photographed by Martien Mulder. The seat includes a built version of its shadow. “A chair and its shadow—and its shadow’s shadow” and, correspondingly, “the shadow’s shadow—and its chair,” Dung Ngo writes at the end of Robert Wilson: Chairs, a new book published by Ngo’s August Editions and Raisonné. Wilson’s chairs become characters in his plays, so this new publication documents his cast of furniture. This resonates. Wilson, who earned a degree in architecture at Pratt after landing in Brooklyn from his hometown of Waco, Texas, writes in the introduction: “I never thought of theater design as decoration, but as something architectural.” Across this issue, we are on a search for the rationales beneath form, from our news to features on material uses to a Focus section on facade expertise to a Q&A about the future of museums to an excerpt from Sérgio Ferro’s forthcoming book. Much like a century ago, with everything going on in the world, it feels like the right time to press ahead—not to discard architecture’s value but to reexamine what anchors it in our wider culture. It’s like the opening of the poem “Tear It Down” by Jack Gilbert: “We find out the heart only by dismantling what / the heart knows.” Later, a line of welcome direction: “We must unlearn the constellations to see the stars.”