Powderhorn

A patent granted to Google on January 27, 2026 titled “AI-generated content page tailored to a specific user” describes a system that evaluates your company’s landing page in real time and, if it decides the page won’t perform well enough for a specific user, replaces it with an AI-generated version assembled on the fly. The user never sees what your team built, they see what Google's machine learning model thinks they should see instead.

This isn’t a feature announcement, it’s a patent, meaning Google has legally protected the ability to do this. Whether and when they deploy it is a separate question, but the direction is unmistakable – your website may soon be optional.

The system described in the patent is more sophisticated than a simple redirect. When a user submits a query, Google generates a standard search result page. But simultaneously, the system scores the most relevant landing page using signals like conversion rate, bounce rate, click-through rate, and design quality. If that score falls below a threshold – or if the page simply lacks the desired content – search results maybe be updated to include a navigation link to an AI-generated alternative.

That alternative page isn’t a cached copy of your site. It’s a dynamically assembled page built from the user’s current query, their search history, their account context, and whatever Google can extract from your original page. The patent describes possible elements including personalized headlines, suggested product filters, a product feed, sitelinks to product detail pages, and even an embedded AI chatbot. In other words, a complete brand experience built by Google. Not you.

On the plus side, this kills the SEO market.

War in the Middle East is once again exposing the downsides of our addiction to oil and gas. Transportation and electricity costs are soaring for ordinary families, while multinational oil giants and Vladimir Putin reap windfalls. Then add in the usual planet-heating greenhouse gas emissions.

Understandably, $5-a-gallon gasoline and other fallouts from the energy crisis are inspiring calls for America to reduce its dependence on fossil fuels. And though it’s become unfashionable to say so, individual Americans can also change our expensive and destructive gas-guzzling ways. Yes, President Trump’s attacks on electric vehicles, renewable power and fuel-efficiency rules are awful. But nobody’s really stopping you from buying electric vehicles, installing solar panels or using less fuel.

It’s not a bad idea. You can save real money while doing a small part to help stabilize the climate, defund Big Oil and even reduce the risk of future conflicts in fossil-fueled nations like Iran and Venezuela. It’s true that your contribution to a better world will only be a drop in the bucket, but lots of individual drops, after all, are what fill buckets.

My phone beeped, alerting me to a ride. I clicked to accept, and a few minutes later I pulled up beside an older lady in a parking lot in Fairfax, Virginia, about half an hour outside Washington, DC. She exchanged a few words in Spanish with the man who was waiting with her in the early-morning darkness and then slid into the back seat of my Subaru Outback. The fare was going to earn me less than $7.

“Buenos días,” I said. She said the same to me and was chatty, unlike the people I had picked up earlier. She was born in Peru, she said, and her husband had died two years ago. He used to take her everywhere and now he was gone, so she used Uber to get to work. I dropped her at the front door of a hotel.

It was my first morning as an Uber driver, and everyone I picked up was Latino or South Asian and heading to work. My first three customers were schoolteachers. Then I dropped a young woman at a hospital and her mother at a grocery store that had yet to open. I brought a young man to a large auto mechanic’s garage, another to a Panera Bread chain restaurant, and a woman to the open back door of a strip-mall diner.

I made $130 in a little less than five hours. Since I’m 55 and have the bladder of a 3-year-old, I had to find a place to pee three times. “Welcome to Donald Trump’s America,” I muttered to myself as I whipped into a city park to take a leak behind a tree.

I didn’t know the immigration status of any of my clients. But I wondered: How is the misguided and aggressive targeting of the very people who serve us breakfast, teach our children, fix our cars, clean our hotel rooms, and comfort our sick “making America great”?

I have had a lot of questions since I returned to the United States to live and work on July 4, after having been away for 28 years. After serving as Reuters’s Ottawa bureau chief for five years, my job was eliminated in a cost-cutting drive. I wanted to stay in Canada, where I owned a home and my kids attended the local schools, but I was unable to find a new job that would allow me to. Crossing the border didn’t feel like a homecoming. America is as foreign to me today as Italy had been in 1998, when I started working there as a foreign correspondent.

One of the things people tend not to get is there was, in fact, a time when journalism was fun and exciting. When people tell me to "just get a fucking job" that I'll no doubt despise, they seriously cannot register the idea that there are jobs that don't suck. I'm considered stuck up for continuing to want what I've already experienced.

The global energy crisis caused by the war in Iran is equivalent to the combined force of the twin oil shocks of the 1970s and the fallout of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the head of the International Energy Agency has warned.

Fatih Birol, the IEA’s executive director, said the growing fallout could be seriously compounded through [interruptions] to the “vital arteries of the global economy”, including petrochemicals, fertilisers, sulphur and helium.

Speaking at the National Press Club of Australia in Canberra on Monday, Birol said the depth of the problems in energy markets caused by American and Israeli bombings in Iran, and the closure of the [strategic] strait of Hormuz, had not [initially] been properly understood by world leaders.

That situation prompted his intervention last week, when the IEA pushed for demand-side measures such as increases in the number of employees working from home, a temporary lowering of speed limits on highways and reduced air travel.

Edits mine.

The war on Iran, even as it spreads and destabilises the Middle East and the global economy, is not real. This is how it is being portrayed by the Trump administration. The war is a video game, a spectator sport, a social media festival of dunking. The architects of this war have made a virtue out of stupidity, and have been supported in that by a stupefying information ecosystem. The conflict waged by the US feels like the first of its kind in the modern age: distinctly remote and profoundly ignorant.

A week into the war, the White House uploaded a clip on its social media channels featuring montages of Top Gun, Braveheart and Breaking Bad, with the caption “Justice the American way” – itself a repurposing of a Superman motto. In another, entitled Touchdown, NFL players tackle each other and upon contact, boom, footage of a strike explosion tagged “unclassified”. SpongeBob SquarePants also makes an appearance, asking, “Wanna see me do it again?”, and then, an explosion. In another, Operation Epic Fury is rendered as a Nintendo Wii game.

“We’re over here just grinding away on banger memes, dude,” a senior White House official told Politico. “There’s an entertainment factor to what we do.” It is pure Donald Trump and his Maga base, to whom everything is not just a game, but a competition. Politics at home and abroad is about scoring, winning and humiliating the other side. For that competition to be fun, it has to be portrayed in the most low-stakes way possible. And so the war is not about death, destruction, calamitous fallout economically and geopolitically, but about the boom, the score, the fist pump. “Wake up, Daddy’s home,” starts one clip. The Trump administration is like a gamer in a dark basement, downing beers, nursing deep insecurities, hectically self-soothing through flashes of colour and noise on a large screen. Maximum hit, minimum effort.

Cool.

Elanor Boekholt-O’Sullivan is on a mission. The new housing minister of the Netherlands is charged with building 100,000 homes a year and breaking through a planning deadlock to combat one of Europe’s worst housing crises.

The Irish-born 50-year-old is new to politics. Until a fortnight ago she was the country’s top female military officer, famous for getting flak jackets redesigned for women’s bodies and holding her own in a male-dominated sphere.

Now she is clear. With a shortage of 400,000 homes, average house prices of almost €500,000 and a growing population, the country must build like it did after the second world war – and be prepared to make some compromises along the way.

“What I take from working in defence is that you keep your eye on the ball,” Boekholt-O’Sullivan, from the liberal-progressive D66 party that now leads the coalition government, said.

“The homes have to be built: that is the primary need right now. Luxury takes time, and we do not have time.”

It's so weird to have a politician sound competent.

Ever sat in a meeting where someone declares that your company is “growth-hacking” and “working at the intersection of cross-collateralization and blue-sky thinking” and called bullshit? Turns out you were right.

A new study out of Cornell University published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences found workers most excited and impressed by corporate speak may be the least equipped to make effective, practical business decisions, and it can leave companies with dysfunctional leaders.

Academically, “bullshit” is broadly defined as “a type of semantically, logically or epistemically dubious information that is misleadingly impressive, important, informative or otherwise engaging”, according to the study.

“Corporate bullshit” is a specific type of bullshit that uses puzzling corporate buzzwords and jargon and is ultimately “semantically empty and often confusing”, according to the research. It is often used by management to persuade and impress, sometimes to inflate perceptions of the company to workers and investors.

Coincidentally, five days from today is No Kings. Anything to keep Epstein out of the news.

Donald Trump has extended by five days his deadline to “hit and obliterate” Iran’s power stations and energy infrastructure if Tehran does not allow shipping to move freely through the strait of Hormuz, claiming that the US and Iran have held “very good and productive conversations” on an end to the three-week-old war.

There was no immediate official reaction from Tehran to Trump’s announcement, which was made in a post on Truth Social and appeared to avert a potentially massive escalation of the conflict, at least for now.

The Fars news agency, which is linked to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, denied any talks, saying there were neither direct nor indirect communications with the US, and the state-owned IRNA newspaper reported that Iran’s foreign ministry said no negotiations had taken place with the US.

Heads up for anyone planning on attending this weekend and would like preparatory knowledge.

"You're going to write about it, aren't you?" Ra asked as I got back into the car. It was a resigned tone rather than excited.

We ended up in the parking lot for some 20 minutes, as the first problem on her end was that she was ordering too many calories via the app.

She was going to cover my lunch, but as she had one of the boys in the car, that caloric limit needed to apply to them. I reluctantly download the app, and after navigating the labyrinthine process to order a fucking burger, when it comes time to check out, my only active card is not accepted by the app.

We're already there, so I go in. I try ordering exactly what I just had at the counter. Fuck the kiosk; if your app doesn't work, that about all I need to know about your tech stack. The cashier seemed surprised that McDonald's sells McDoubles and repeated my order back to me as a Quarter Pounder. An Abbot and Costello routine ensues, but at least the order was correct.

Meanwhile, back in the car, Ra has placed a second order to obviate the caloric limit, which, let's be reasonable, is absurd coming from the establishment it does. What if, just hypothetically, you're buying hamburders for an entire football team?

Needless to say, I deleted the app.

That's roughly four hours ago as I type this sentence (I have no idea how long this is going to turn out, but I have a week to cover, and it took this long to explain 20 minutes).

We're in Temple, Texas, where I've just spent two nights after five with my ex-wife in Killeen, but the destination is Austin this time ... thankfully, I park surprisingly close to the Atheist Community of Austin, which is her destination, so dropping me off was far less of a delay than it could have been (the McDonald's fiasco made her late to the lecture).

I will say, indoor plumbing and real meals for a full week was rather nice.

So as not to be redundant, the basic setup is this: We had a wild temperature swing forecast for last Saturday that I was trying to figure out how to mitigate when I got a text from my ex, to whom I'm now been doing monthly sojourns since December, saying she's unexpectedly free for the weekend.

The unusual thing on this trip was ... there wasn't really an end date. We eventually settled on Tuesday, but then Amazon double-charged her for an order that left her unable to cover my ride home until her check clears Thursday.

This opens up an unusual opportunity. Temple and Killeen are far closer together than Austin is to either, and Ra wanted me to come back and do another round of interviews with Mike, a former journalist in desperate need of donations for medical bills.

Ra saved half the cost, and my ex paid nothing, so, really, win-win.

So I settle in at her place and hang out in the garage with her husband so I can vape while he smokes. There may have been weed involved; I definitely cracked a beer.

Ra's husband, whom I'd met once before, is genuinely one of the more interesting people I've crossed paths with in years. Another one was who I was waiting on a ride to go see.

My first round with Mike was fascinating on the conversation front, but left me with no clear narrative on how to convince strangers to donate money to the cause. He got some heavy-hitters in journalism to donate for his last campaign and that well is dry.

I thought we had an angle with "longtime queer activist" (this is how he was sold to me at the start of the project), but he wants to leave that out. I fully respect that, but as I told Ra, who is high up in Temple Pride, that would have been an angle I can work with far easier than "grizzled veteran journalist suffers two brain hemorrhages and a stroke, ends up severely immunodeficient."

This time, I switch tacks. I bring a six-pack and just try to shoot the shit. It works.

We talk about his childhood (it wasn't pleasant) and his career (it was) more fully, and about my life -- to establish rapport. I've finally broken down the wall, and we're talking as equals.

But two hours in, he's due his pain meds and muscle relaxer, and I feel I've sort of expended his energy (he'd had physical therapy just before we arrived). And he's been meandering and incoherent frequently without those.

I text Ra for a pickup, and we all agree that I'll come back Friday so we can continue.

Putting me back in the garage with Ra's husband, with occasional cameos from Ra. The conversation flows for hours, as though we've been doing this for years. As the atheist seminar was his idea to attend, in addition to being a leftist anarchist, I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised.

The funny thing is, he isn't a burner. I'm sitting in that garage solely because Ra and I are. He always has reasons behind surprises, and in this case, it's that the animist in him wants to commune with nature when camping, not be subjected to amped electronica and flashing lights.

I can't argue that point.

Speaking of communes, that quickly becomes a topic of discussion, as he's looking for acreage to start one -- right then, on his phone. I mention that I've had vegetable gardens and raised rabbits, and I sure as fuck know how to set up and maintain offgrid solar (though Ra's electrician goddaughter is still insisting she'd be much happier if she could fully go through my system).

I'm immediately invited to join.

The timeline is murky, as they have to sell their house in addition to finding the right patch of land. And he's doing due diligence, much preferring an unimproved site that already has a well and septic tank (these are oddly surprisingly frequent ... I guess people get that done and then run out of money?) and a decent forest canopy.

"Chickens," he says. "Rabbits are great, but that's going to get old for every meal."

Thus begins the tale of how I got my rabbit from a farm where they cohabitated with chickens, so this is clearly not going to be an issue.

The remainder of the evening is sociology, geopolitics, political theory, linguistics, the adventures of being homeless ... every time the topic veers somewhere new, both of us are ready to engage.

It was fantastic! I was able to go into my preferred register for vocabulary and still be understood without a single question as to what I was talking about. As much as I love my ex, she cannot provide such mental stimulation.

Things wind down, and the next morning, I'm up way too early, as I'm sleeping in the living room and they have two boys.

Turns out, Ra has to work today, so now I'm going to be in the garage until at least 5 p.m. The conversation proceeds apace, and we just chat when he's available (he's a stay-at-home dad to two special-needs kids).

Finally, it's time to head to Mike's. Thankfully, his prognostication is correct, and he's of sounder mind than yesterday. With yesterday's chat, I was just trying to establish rapport.

This time, it's an interview.

Much of what we talked about is in confidence, so I can't really spill the tea ahead of whatever we settle on for fundraising copy. Thankfully, Ra is handling the back end; I just need to write.

Suffice to say, I think I have enough to craft something decent. And, oh, this is actually a paid gig: $100 on delivery for maybe three or four grafs. That's the immediate one. There will be another that's much larger so he can go to one of the clinics that specializes in brain stuff (think Mayo).

Two prominent (I'm taking his word for it) local neurologists have said he still has a chance of full recovery with the right treatment, and he's been working on a book documenting the hell he's been through in the U.S. medical system. Oh, he also could use an editor.

At this point, I point him to Beehaw on his phone and pull up a random recent post, putting it to him: This is my writing style; does this work for you? Anything past "yes" would sound like narcissism, but he assented.

So I promised him, then Ra, that I'd have something ready by Monday at the latest. Her goddaughter is going to try to come by tomorrow.

Of course, I'd set myself a Monday deadline in that moment. When we talked last night about heading down to Austin, she said she wanted to be out of the house by 1 p.m. Then one of the boys started acting up, so her husband didn't end up coming along.

"Just for the record," I said at 1:03, "I had everything packed and ready to go at 12:59."

"By 1!" Ra said.

"And you said it to someone who works off deadline."

I don't want to get my hopes up too much, but there are significant opportunities here with people who, you know, actually follow through on plans, so my hopes aren't exactly at baseline.

This month I will conclude my tenure as the commissioner-general of Unrwa – the United Nations agency that has provided essential, public-like services to Palestinian refugees across the Middle East for more than 75 years. As the world struggles to emerge from the quagmire of Gaza and the US-Israeli war against Iran threatens to engulf the entire region, I am profoundly concerned about the future of Palestinian refugees and the multilateral system at large.

Having endured more than two years of relentless physical, political and legal attacks, most fiercely in Palestine, Unrwa has reached breaking point. The risks to Palestinians’ rights and the stability of the region are immense.

In December 2023, amid the escalating brutality of the war in Gaza, I wrote to the president of the UN general assembly that in my 35 years of working in complex emergencies, I had never had cause to report the killing of 130 personnel, nor to predict the killing of many more. I did not imagine then that the number of colleagues killed would triple – the death toll is now more than 390 – or that so many others would sustain life-changing injuries, or be arbitrarily detained and tortured.

Hundreds of Unrwa premises in Gaza have been damaged or destroyed. The parliament of Israel adopted legislation to end the agency’s presence in occupied East Jerusalem, including by forcibly shutting schools and health clinics, and cutting off the supply of water and electricity to our premises. The Unrwa headquarters in East Jerusalem was seized, looted and set on fire, with senior Israeli officials celebrating the destruction on site and online. A deputy mayor of Jerusalem even threatened to “annihilate and kill all members of Unrwa”.

I'll just leave this here.

Donald Trump threatened on Saturday to deploy federal immigration agents to US airports on Monday if Democrats do not agree to measures aimed at strengthening security and immigration enforcement.

“If the Radical Left Democrats don’t immediately sign an agreement to let our Country, in particular, our Airports, be FREE and SAFE again, I will move our brilliant and patriotic ICE Agents to the Airports,” Trump said in a Truth Social post.

Airport security is currently handled by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), while ICE handles immigration enforcement. Both are under the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). ICE has been a pillar of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, drawing criticism from Democrats, civil liberties advocates and immigration advocacy groups.

Trump added that ICE “will do Security like no one has ever seen before, including the immediate arrest of all Illegal Immigrants who have come into our country” and pointed to a “heavy emphasis on those from Somalia, who have totally destroyed, with the approval of a corrupt Governor, Attorney General, and Congresswoman, Ilhan Omar, the once Great State of Minnesota”.

I hate even platforming his verbal diarrhea, but this is what we've ended up with.