From Classes On Bad Bunny To 'Queering God' Higher-Ed Has Lost Its Way

Via The College Fix,

Higher education is not what it used to be.

Gone are the days when students were required to study the classics. Nowadays it seems like any gibberish can pass for scholarly study.

The examples are myriad, write Daniel Buck, a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and Garion Frankel, incoming editor at the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal.

“Oregon State University offers ‘Disney: Gender, Race, and Empire.’

Students at Indiana University can attend the course, ‘Having it All: Postfeminist Media After Sex and the City,'” the two wrote in The Hill on June 2.

“How about ‘Bad Bunny: Musical Aesthetics and Politics’ at Yale University? The Bad Bunny Syllabus that inspires this course — which lists topics such as ‘LGBTQ Activism,’ ‘Gender and Sexuality in Reggaeton’ and ‘Political Protests of Summer 2019’ for study - is also in use at Wellesley College and Loyola Marymount University.

Both Swarthmore College and the University of Chicago offer courses on ‘Queering God.'”

The scholars go on to note these classes are no outliers:

Harvard offers an English course, “Taylor Swift and Her World.”

At UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, students can take “Artistry, Policy, and Entrepreneurship: Taylor’s Version” through the Department of Economics.

Penn State Berks offers a course titled, “Taylor Swift, Gender, and Communication.”

Another unofficial sub-genre of courses focuses on Korean pop music — “Lights, Camera, Action: The Visual Culture of K-Pop” at Columbia University, “K-Pop and Human Rights” at Binghamton University, “Kangnam Style: K-Pop and the Globalization of Korean Soft Power” at Stanford University, or “K-Pop and J-Pop Culture” at Florida International University.

The scholars point out that at a time when the return on investment for a four-year degree is plummeting and trust in higher education is at an all-time low, colleges and universities should return to their true purpose.

“A student who can tell you all about Swift’s entrepreneurship but cannot write a five-paragraph essay is not educated, but entertained,” the duo wrote.

“Why attend college in the first place? Universities were once places where students and faculty alike pursued higher aims — truth, beauty, ethics and even the divine.

What are they now? Too often, they resemble four-year summer camps, designed to make students comfortable with a participation diploma at the end.”

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From Classes On Bad Bunny To 'Queering God' Higher-Ed Has Lost Its Way

'Chat Is Dead': OpenAI's Pre-IPO Makeover Into A "Superapp"

The year the private-AI complex finally has to show its work has arrived, and ChatGPT maker OpenAI is about to add some major garnishing to the prospectus before their upcoming IPO - in what FT is calling the "biggest overhaul of ChatGPT since launch."

"It will transcend the actual surface . . . what we’re building towards is where you have your own personal agent that is capable of helping you . . . across everything in your life, be it personally or at work," said Thibault Sottiaux, who previously ran Codex and now leads all of OpenAI’s core product and platform.

Context: Over the last three weeks, the three most valuable private companies in the space announced IPOs. SpaceX filed its S-1 in May, months after folding xAI into itself. Anthropic filed a confidential draft S-1 on June 1, reportedly targeting an October listing. And OpenAI filed its own confidential draft around May 22, aiming for a debut as soon as September at a private valuation of roughly $730 billion to $850 billion, with IPO chatter pushing toward $1 trillion. The back half of 2026 is now the first real test of whether public investors will pay the prices private rounds have set.

"Chat Is Dead"

"Chat is dead," one senior OpenAI employee told the FT - which is a crazy thing to hear given that ChatGPT is what brought us here, and still has nearly a billion users. The obvious interpretation: OpenAI is moving away from chat because chat does not pay, at least not quickly enough to support a near-trillion-dollar valuation.

Adoption was never the problem. ChatGPT has nearly a billion users, most of them on the free tier. The problem is that the flagship product remains a low-margin consumer chatbot while the company burns roughly $14 billion a year against revenue that crossed $20 billion by the end of 2025. Depending on how that revenue is annualized and what multiple investors apply, OpenAI's valuation range implies a price-to-sales multiple from the mid-30s to the low 60s. Walking into a roadshow near $1 trillion while presenting the golden goose as a beloved money-loser is not a viable option.

The company has also reorganized. ChatGPT, Codex, and other product teams have been consolidated under a single leader, Sottiaux, while several senior executives - including former product head Kevin Weil - have departed. Key-person churn in the weeks before an S-1 filing is, notable.

According to FT and other reporting, here's what's new:

• ChatGPT is being redesigned from a standalone chatbot into a gateway for higher-value products. The website and mobile apps are expected to be reworked so users are pushed toward coding tools, image generation, AI agents, and partner-built applications rather than simply returning to a general-purpose chat interface.
   
• OpenAI is adding prompts and interface features that steer users toward monetizable use cases. The company is expected to add new surfaces inside ChatGPT that direct users toward Codex, image tools, and apps from partners such as Canva and Booking.com. The partners themselves are not new; their more prominent placement inside the ChatGPT flow is.
   
• The company plans to remove that scaffolding over time. The longer-term goal is for OpenAI’s models to infer what users want without requiring explicit prompts, buttons, or routing cues. That roadmap detail appears to be one of the more specific new elements in the report.
   
• The “superapp” framing is being elevated as the new investor-facing story. OpenAI is increasingly presenting ChatGPT as a single interface that can absorb chat, coding, agents, search-like tasks, image generation, and third-party services. The underlying components have existed in pieces, but the report frames them as one consolidated product thesis.
   
• Codex is being pushed closer to the center of ChatGPT. OpenAI’s coding product is receiving greater prominence and resources as the company shifts attention toward products with clearer paid usage and enterprise demand. The Codex push was already underway, but the report makes it central to the ChatGPT overhaul.
   
• The personal-agent vision is being packaged as the next version of ChatGPT. OpenAI is positioning the product around a single assistant that can help across personal and work tasks, reachable through mobile, desktop, web, and voice. The company has been moving toward agents for some time; what is newly elevated is the idea that this agent becomes the primary ChatGPT experience.
   
• The enterprise pivot is being tied directly to the ChatGPT redesign. OpenAI’s push toward business customers and competition with Anthropic is not new. What is newly emphasized is the way the consumer interface is being reshaped to support that shift, turning ChatGPT into a funnel for higher-value, work-oriented products.

The revamp is expected to begin rolling out in the coming weeks - right inside the IPO window, when every interface change, resource shift, and product decision doubles as investor messaging meant to burnish the prospectus.

One issue with a 'superapp': structural coherence. A consumer funnel that routes users to third-party apps like Canva and Booking.com, an enterprise business built around Codex, and a long-horizon AGI bet are three different businesses with three different margin profiles, customer-acquisition dynamics, and capital requirements. OpenAI is now trying to staple them together within an agentic ecosystem - something that was always going to happen.

So OpenAI is building the only story that can survive diligence: enterprise seats, Codex, and agents that perform billable work. Codex's weekly active users have grown sixfold to more than five million since the February desktop launch, with the majority of users paying. Enterprise already accounts for around 40 percent of revenue and is expected to reach 50 percent by year-end. That sequencing is, almost line for line, the "make money first" approach Anthropic has followed for years. The convergence is no longer subtle.

That said, the revamp does not amount to panic. Agents and coding tools really are where the technical and commercial frontier is moving anyway. Codex's growth trajectory is real, and a majority-paying user mix is what you want going into an IPO. 

Meanwhile, what's Dario gonna do? Anthropic also burns substantial cash and has told investors it may not reach break-even until 2028. Both companies are walking into the same public-market daylight this year. 

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'Chat Is Dead': OpenAI's Pre-IPO Makeover Into A "Superapp"

Trump Admin Announces $850MM To Modernize US Coal Capacity, Build 2 New Plants

By Robert Walton of UtilityDive

The Trump administration approved 76 coal-related permits in more than a year of efforts to revive the flagging fuel and execute an agenda of “energy dominance.” His latest attempt includes tapping Defense Production Act funding to expand the industry.

“Last year we prevented 17 GW of coal-powered electricity from going offline. That’s enough power for about 13 million homes, and at a very low price. It’s the lowest price,” Trump said of coal resources.

But critics say the opposite is true. “This move, along with the President blocking the retirement of old coal plants that are too costly to operate, is making most Americans poorer,” Jenkins said. “This is a total misuse of the Defense Production Act, a giant giftwrapped payout to subsidize and prop up a flailing industry that can no longer compete in the free market.”

The coal funding is “another example of Trump ignoring the affordability crisis,” Tyson Slocum, director of Public Citizen’s energy program, said in a statement. “Abusing emergency authorities to justify subsidies for coal is a waste of taxpayer dollars and a clear giveaway to an absurdly outdated, expensive and dirty fossil fuel.”

DOE said it plans to use up to $425 million in Defense Production Act Title III funds to support a dozen coal-plant projects and $75 million for the West Gateway Terminal Project, to operate a rail-served marine export terminal. The coal projects include:

• $19 million for Arizona Electric Power Cooperative to modernize and extend the operating life the Apache Generating Station near Cochise, Arizona;
• $33 million for Duke Energy Kentucky to boost generating capacity at its East Bend Station in Boone County, Kentucky;
• $22.5 million for Oklahoma Gas and Electric’s Sooner DCS Modernization Project near Red Rock, Oklahoma, to modernize the facility’s distributed control system to maintain reliability and improve efficiency; and,
• $46.3 million for Tennessee Valley Authority to revitalize its Cumberland Fossil Plant in Stewart County, Tennessee, to meet regional demands for dispatchable power.

The West Gateway Terminal Project “will support continued growth in U.S. coal exports, improve supply chain resilience, and strengthen energy partnerships with allies throughout the Indo-Pacific region,” DOE Under Secretary of Energy Kyle Haustveit said in a statement.

In a separate announcement, DOE said four projects will receive up to $350 million under the agency’s “Restoring Reliability: Coal Recommissioning and Modernization” initiative, to add or preserve roughly 3.6 GW of coal-fired capacity.

Apache Generating Station near Cochise, Arizona;

Along with almost 3 GW of new capacity split between Alaska and West Virginia, DOE announced funding for a project in Guayama, Puerto Rico, to retrofit and modernize an existing 510-MW coal-fired plant, and another project in Cumberland, Maryland, to recommission a 205-MW facility that ceased operations in 2024.

The Anchorage plant will have 1.25 GW of new coal capacity and the West Virginia Energy Campus project will offer 1.6 GW, according to a fact sheet from DOE. They would be the first new U.S. plants to come online since 2013, Trump said.

Also Thursday, U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright issued an emergency order directing the Orlando Utilities Commission to ensure that Unit 1 at the coal-fired Stanton Energy Center near Orlando, Florida, remains available to operate. The unit was slated to enter a premature extended cold shutdown this month. The order is effective through Sept. 1. 

“Americans are upset about high electricity prices,” Wright said at the White House event. “Blame closing existing, reliable, secure plants, and replacing them with subsidized, unreliable plants — a gauranteed way to drive electricity prices up.”

But critics say coal plants are expensive to operate and the administration’s efforts are driving U.S. power bills higher. In March, the Sierra Club published analysis showing the Trump administration’s emergency orders to keep six retiring fossil-fueled power plants online have cost ratepayers more than $230 million.

More emergency orders have been issued since the Sierra Club analysis. Coal supporters, however, say the resources are essential and Trump’s investments will help maintain power grid reliability.

“Coal is a critical part of America’s energy security,” America’s Power President and CEO Michelle Bloodworth said in a statement. The group represents the U.S. coal sector.

“The United States has approximately 400 years of domestic coal reserves, making it one of the most fuel-secure energy sources available,” Bloodworth said.

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Trump Admin Announces $850MM To Modernize US Coal Capacity, Build 2 New Plants

Former Musk Adviser Sriram Krishnan Leaving White House AI Role

Authored by Tom Gantert via The Epoch Times,

Senior White House policy adviser on artificial intelligence Sriram Krishnan, a former Twitter executive who advised Elon Musk during his acquisition of the social media platform, announced Saturday he will leave his role at the end of June.

U.S. President Donald Trump hands a pen to Senior White House Policy Advisor on Artificial Intelligence Sriram Krishnan after signing an executive order while U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) (2nd L) and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick look on in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, DC, on Dec. 11, 2025. Alex Wong/Getty Images

In a social media post, Krishnan described serving the American people as "the privilege of a lifetime" and thanked President Donald Trump for the opportunity.

"Without his leadership, we would not be leading in the AI race," Krishnan wrote.

Krishnan also thanked David Sacks, saying he had worked most closely with him over the past 18 months and praising his advocacy for American leadership in artificial intelligence.

Among the accomplishments Krishnan said he was most proud of were helping architect and publish the American AI Action Plan, advancing AI acceleration partnerships, helping develop the National AI Policy Framework for AI executive order, and advocating for the American AI technology sector with allies around the world.

Looking ahead, Krishnan said the United States and its allies face challenges involving energy, data centers, and expanding access to artificial intelligence technologies.

"I plan on building institutions that help tackle some of those challenges for America and its allies," he wrote.

Krishnan also thanked numerous administration officials and others for their support, including Vice President JD Vance, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, Elon Musk, and others.

Krishnan leaves as opposition to AI data centers has grown rapidly across the country as projects expand into communities.

According to Data Center Watch, an estimated $152 billion in potential data center investment was blocked or delayed in 2025. Hundreds of activist groups in 42 states organized to oppose new projects or expansions. Critics cite concerns over water consumption, electricity demand, noise, and the lack of long-term studies on health and environmental impacts. There are more than 3,100 data centers in the United States, according to the Data Center Map. There are another 1,800 data centers in some state of development.

Trump announced Krishnan was joining the White House as an adviser in December 2024.

"Sriram Krishnan will serve as Senior Policy Advisor for Artificial Intelligence at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy," the president said at that time. "Working closely with David Sacks, Sriram will focus on ensuring continued American leadership in A.I., and help shape and coordinate A.I. policy across Government, including working with the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. Sriram started his career at Microsoft as a founding member of Windows Azure."

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Former Musk Adviser Sriram Krishnan Leaving White House AI Role

FBI Fires Analysts Who Drafted Controversial Anti-Catholic Memo

Via Headline USA,

Several FBI analysts who drafted a 2023 memo that cited Southern Poverty Law Center information to justify targeting “radical-traditionalist Catholics” as potential violent domestic extremists were fired Friday, according to their lawyer, the latest wave of terminations under the leadership of its director Kash Patel.

The fired employees included four intelligence analysts and a supervisory analyst. The FBI declined to comment.

The January 2023 intelligence product produced by analysts in the FBI’s Richmond, Virginia, field office emerged as a political flashpoint after it was issued, with Republicans in Congress repeatedly citing it as part of their broader contention that the FBI during the Biden administration was targeting conservatives.

The FBI quickly backtracked from the memo at the time, saying it had been drafted in error. Then-director Chris Wray repeatedly denied that charge and the FBI has said the document was quickly retracted and an internal review was launched. Merrick Garland, the attorney general under President Joe Biden, has said he was “appalled” by the memo.

🚨BREAKING🚨 The FBI's controversial memo targeting Catholics was inspired by an investigation into a schizophrenic man

I've got the records to prove it

🧵https://t.co/vTLAQI9gJr

— Ken Silva (@JD_Cashless) April 23, 2024

As Headline USA exclusively revealed in April 2024, the FBI’s troubling memo was crafted by analysts involved in an investigation into a schizophrenic man who began attending a traditional Catholic church in early 2022. That schizophrenic man, 24-year-old Xavier Lopez, was arrested in November 2022 on a slew of domestic extremism-related charges. His mental health diagnosis was revealed during criminal proceedings.

According to records from his case, Lopez was on law enforcement’s radar since September 2018, when he attempted suicide. Lopez was 18 years old at the time. The FBI opened an assessment into Lopez about a year later after he allegedly made online statements advocating civil war and the murder of politicians.

Law enforcement continued to monitor Lopez—including while he served a stint in jail for felony vandalism—into early 2022, when he began attending Our Lady of Fatima Catholic Chapel in Richmond, Virginia. Our Lady of Fatima is one of the Catholic chapel’s listed in the FBI’s memo.

Shortly after Lopez started attending Our Lady of Fatima, the FBI decided to run an informant at him inside the church.

Infiltrating a Catholic church with an informant was supposedly necessary because “the only times [Lopez] left the house alone were to attend events at [Our Lady of Fatima Catholic Chapel] and it therefore provided the only potential opportunity for [an informant] to establish regular contact with him,” a 2024 DOJ Inspector General’s report said.

The FBI insisted that the informant was only used to monitor Lopez—and wasn’t used against any of the church’s other members, according to the DOJ-IG report.

The existence of the FBI informant is not disclosed in any of Lopez’s criminal records.

Lopez was arrested in November 2022 on a slew of state charges, including prohibited paramilitary activity, soliciting someone for a terrorist act and possessing firearms as a felon.

After his arrest, an FBI analyst with knowledge of the investigation worked with another analyst to craft the FBI’s memo about Catholics.

According to the DOJ-IG report, the FBI analysts wanted help conduct outreach to faith communities, “to make them aware of what we would call warning signs to radicalization, for the protection of everybody.”

“There was ample information in [Lopez’s] chats and in online chatter suggesting a potential link between white supremacist ideology and an attraction to certain religious beliefs and organizations, including [Our Lady of Fatima Catholic Chapel], but that the two analysts were searching for more definite substantiation,” the DOJ-IG report said, citing interviews with the FBI analysts.

One FBI analyst told the DOJ-IG that he found it “completely incongruous” that Lopez was attempting “to find common ground or find a community with this particular faith community.” He also said that there was no evidence that Lopez was being radicalized at Lady of Fatima Catholic Chapel, because he had been on the FBI’s radar “as an unstable, dangerous individual” before “any association with any Catholic related entity whatsoever.”

Rather, the FBI expressed concerns to the DOJ-IG that Lopez may have been recruiting other Lady of Fatima members to carry out an attack.

There is nothing in the charging documents against Lopez to suggest that he was recruiting other Catholics for an attack. Rather, the available evidence suggests that Lopez was interested in Catholic church to find a girlfriend.

“One place you will find [white women] is at a traditional church … I found a girl there that checked off every box on my list, but she’s 17 and I’m 22 so that’s not happening,” he said in an August 2022 post on Gab, according to charging documents.

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FBI Fires Analysts Who Drafted Controversial Anti-Catholic Memo