The "talent is everywhere" approach that U.S. employers adopted during the white-hot pandemic job market is quietly giving way to something much older and more familiar: recruiting almost exclusively from a small set of elite and nearby universities. A 2025 survey of more than 150 companies by Veris Insights found that 26% were exclusively recruiting from a shortlist of schools, up from 17% in 2022.

Diversity as a priority for school recruiting selection dropped to 31% of employers surveyed in 2025, down from nearly 60% in 2022. GE Appliances once sent recruiters on one or two passes through 45 to 50 schools each year; now the company attends four or five events per semester at just 15 universities, including Purdue and Auburn. McKinsey, the consulting firm that expanded recruitment well beyond the Ivy League after George Floyd's murder, recently removed language from its career page that said "We hire people, not degrees." The firm now hosts in-person events at a shortlist of about 20 core schools, including Vanderbilt and Notre Dame.

Most companies now recruit at up to 30 American colleges out of about 4,000, said William Chichester III, who has directed entry-level recruiting at Target and Peloton. For students outside elite schools or those located near company headquarters? "God help you," he said.

Book publisher HarperCollins said it will start translating romance novels under its famous Harlequin label in France using AI, reducing or eliminating the pay for the team of human contract translators who previously did this work. 404Media: Publisher's Weekly broke the news in English after French outlets reported on the story in December. According to a joint statement from French Association of Literary Translators (ATFL) and En Chair et en Os (In Flesh and Bone) -- an anti-AI activist group of French translators -- HarperCollins France has been contacting its translators to tell them they're being replaced with machines in 2026.

The ATFL/ En Chair et en Os statement explained that HarperCollins France would use a third party company called Fluent Planet to run Harlequin romance novels through a machine translation system. The books would then be checked for errors and finalized by a team of freelancers. The ATFL and En Chair et en Os called on writers, book workers, and readers to refuse this machine translated future. They begged people to "reaffirm our unconditional commitment to human texts, created by human beings, in dignified working conditions."

A survey of 2,000 teachers, students and parents conducted by the New York Times found that many high schools have stopped assigning full novels to students, opting instead for excerpts that are often read on school-issued laptops rather than in print. The shift stems from multiple factors: a belief that students have shorter attention spans, pressure to prepare students for standardized tests, and the influence of Common Core standards adopted by many U.S. states more than a decade ago.

Schools increasingly rely on curriculum products like StudySync, which takes an anthology approach to literature rather than requiring complete books. Teachers acknowledge that teens now read far fewer full novels than previous generations, though some educators push back against the trend. "Many teachers are secret revolutionaries and still assign whole books," said Heather McGuire, a New Mexico English teacher who responded to the survey.

An anonymous reader shares a report: The Open Rights Group is warning politicians that the UK is leaning far too heavily on US tech companies to run critical systems, and wants the Cybersecurity and Resilience Bill to force a rethink.

The digital rights outfit says the bill, which is due to receive its second reading in the House of Commons today, represents a rare opportunity to force the government to confront what it sees as a strategic blind spot: the UK's reliance on companies such as Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and data analytics biz Palantir for everything from cloud hosting to sensitive public sector systems.

"Just as relying on one country for the UK's energy needs would be risky and irresponsible, so is overreliance on US companies to supply the bulk of our digital infrastructure," said James Baker, platform power programme manager at Open Rights Group. He argued that digital infrastructure has become an extension of geopolitical power, and the UK is increasingly vulnerable to decisions taken far beyond Westminster's control.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Californians are getting a new, supercharged way to stop data brokers from hoarding and selling their personal information, as a recently enacted law that's among the strictest in the nation took effect at the beginning of the year. [...] Two years ago, California's Delete Act took effect. It required data brokers to provide residents with a means to obtain a copy of all data pertaining to them and to demand that such information be deleted. Unfortunately, Consumer Watchdog found that only 1 percent of Californians exercised these rights in the first 12 months after the law went into effect. A chief reason: Residents were required to file a separate demand with each broker. With hundreds of companies selling data, the burden was too onerous for most residents to take on.

On January 1, a new law known as DROP (Delete Request and Opt-out Platform) took effect. DROP allows California residents to register a single demand for their data to be deleted and no longer collected in the future. CalPrivacy then forwards it to all brokers. Starting in August, brokers will have 45 days after receiving the notice to report the status of each deletion request. If any of the brokers' records match the information in the demand, all associated data -- including inferences -- must be deleted unless legal exemptions such as information provided during one-to-one interactions between the individual and the broker apply. To use DROP, individuals must first prove they're a California resident.

After Congress approved President Donald Trump's rescission package eliminating federal funding, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting voted to dissolve after 58 years, rather than continue to exist and potentially be "vulnerable to future political manipulation or misuse." The shutdown leaves hundreds of local public TV and radio stations facing an uncertain future. Variety reports: The CPB was created by Congress by the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 to support the federal government's investment in public broadcasting. The org noted that the rescission of all of CPB's federal funding came after years of political attacks. "For more than half a century, CPB existed to ensure that all Americans -- regardless of geography, income, or background -- had access to trusted news, educational programming, and local storytelling," said CPB president/CEO Patricia Harrison. "When the Administration and Congress rescinded federal funding, our Board faced a profound responsibility: CPB's final act would be to protect the integrity of the public media system and the democratic values by dissolving, rather than allowing the organization to remain defunded and vulnerable to additional attacks.

[...] "CPB's support extends to every corner of the country -- urban, rural, tribal, and everywhere in between," the org noted. "In many communities, public media stations are the only free source of trusted news, educational children's programming, and local and national cultural content." The CPB said that without funding, its board determined that "maintaining the corporation as a nonfunctional entity would not serve the public interest or advance the goals of public media. A dormant and defunded CPB could have become vulnerable to future political manipulation or misuse, threatening the independence of public media and the trust audiences place in it, and potentially subjecting staff and board members to legal exposure from bad-faith actors."

As it closes, CPB is distributing its remaining funds, and also supporting the American Archive of Public Broadcasting in digitizing and preserving historic content. The CPB's own archives will be preserved at the University of Maryland, which will make it accessible to the public. "Public media remains essential to a healthy democracy," Harrison added. "Our hope is that future leaders and generations will recognize its value, defend its independence, and continue the work of ensuring that trustworthy, educational, and community-centered media remains accessible to all Americans."

Both GNOME and Firefox are considering disabling middle-click paste by default, arguing it's a confusing, accident-prone X11 relic that dumps clipboard contents without warning. Phoronix reports: A merge request for GNOME's gsettings-desktop-schemas was opened this weekend to disable the primary-paste functionality by default that allows using the middle mouse button for pasting. Jordan Petridis argued in that GNOME pull request that middle-click paste is an "X11'ism" and that the setting could remain for those wanting to opt-in to enabling the functionality [...].

The gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface gtk-enable-primary-paste true command would be a way of restoring the primary paste (middle click paste) for those desiring the functionality. The decision over the default has been tasked to GNOME's design team for consideration.

Separately, Mozilla is also considering disabling middle mouse button paste by default too. [...] Another option being considered is having the option to enable/disable it at either the GTK toolkit level or Wayland compositor level.

Capita, the UK outsourcer that won a $323 million contract to administer the nation's Civil Service Pension Scheme for 1.7 million members, has responded to a disastrous portal launch by asking users to hold off on complaints until its new AI chatbots go live.

The service launched on December 1 and immediately ran into problems including unrecognized passwords, broken links and placeholder text scattered across unfinished pages. In a December 17 email to members, The Register reports today, managing director Chris Clements said Capita was "working tirelessly" and promised "one of the biggest services in the United Kingdom with AI at its core" by March.

He asked users whose enquiries were not urgent to wait until the new year before contacting support again.

Public opinion surveys paint a picture of Americans souring dramatically on higher education, as Pew found that the share of adults calling college "very important" dropped from 70% in 2013 to just 35% today, and NBC polling shows that 63% now believe a degree is "not worth the cost," up from 40% over the same period. Yet enrollment data tells a different story.

Four-year institutions awarded 2 million bachelor's degrees in 2023, up from 1.6 million in 2010, and the fraction of 25-year-olds holding a bachelor's degree has steadily increased for the past 15 years. The economic case remains strong. The average bachelor's degree holder earns about 70% more than a high-school graduate of similar work experience, and after factoring in financial aid, the cost of attending a public four-year college has fallen by more than 20% since 2015.

Even after accounting for student-debt payments, college graduates net about $8,000 more annually than those without degrees. Part of the disconnect may stem from misunderstanding how college pricing works. Nearly half of U.S. adults believe everyone pays the same tuition, though fewer than 20% of families actually pay the published sticker price.

America's tech companies and data center developers "are increasingly losing fights in communities where people don't want to live next to them, or even near them," reports the Associated Press: Communities across the United States are reading about — and learning from — each other's battles against data center proposals that are fast multiplying in number and size to meet steep demand as developers branch out in search of faster connections to power sources... [A]s more people hear about a data center coming to their community, once-sleepy municipal board meetings in farming towns and growing suburbs now feature crowded rooms of angry residents pressuring local officials to reject the requests...

A growing number of proposals are going down in defeat, sounding alarms across the data center constellation of Big Tech firms, real estate developers, electric utilities, labor unions and more. Andy Cvengros, who helps lead the data center practice at commercial real estate giant JLL, counted seven or eight deals he'd worked on in recent months that saw opponents going door-to-door, handing out shirts or putting signs in people's yards. "It's becoming a huge problem," Cvengros said. Data Center Watch, a project of 10a Labs, an AI security consultancy, said it is seeing a sharp escalation in community, political and regulatory disruptions to data center development. Between April and June alone, its latest reporting period, it counted 20 proposals valued at $98 billion in 11 states that were blocked or delayed amid local opposition and state-level pushback. That amounts to two-thirds of the projects it was tracking...

For some people angry over steep increases in electric bills, their patience is thin for data centers that could bring still-higher increases. Losing open space, farmland, forest or rural character is a big concern. So is the damage to quality of life, property values or health by on-site diesel generators kicking on or the constant hum of servers. Others worry that wells and aquifers could run dry...

2025'S final months finally saw the publication of J.R.R. Tolkein's The Bovadium Fragments, writes the Los Angeles Review of Books: Anyone who has read Tolkien's letters will know that he is at his funniest when filled with rage, and The Bovadium Fragments is a work brimming with Tolkien's fury — specifically, ire over mankind's obsession with motor vehicles. Tolkien's anger is expressed through a playful satire told from the perspective of a group of future archaeologists who are studying the titular fragments, which tell of a civilization that asphyxiated itself on its own exhaust fumes. Tolkien's fictional fragments use the language of ancient myth, reframing modern issues like traffic congestion and parking with a grandeur that highlights their total absurdity. It is Tolkien at his angriest and funniest, making The Bovadium Fragments a minor treasure in his ever-growing catalog...

As Tolkien put it in one of his private letters, "the spirit of 'Isengard,' if not of Mordor, is of course always cropping up. The present design of destroying Oxford in order to accommodate motor-cars is a case." Readers of The Lord of the Rings (1954-55) will recognize the allusion. In the author's magnum opus, Isengard is a kind of industrial hell, endlessly feeding its furnaces with felled trees... The Bovadium Fragments brings Tolkien's visceral hatred of such machines to the fore for the first time — on the same level as Isengard or the scoured Shire. In Tolkien's story, the words "Motores" and "monsters" are interchangeable. And with his grand, mythic register, Tolkien defamiliarizes the car enough for modern readers to see it as he does — as truly monstrous. "[T]he Motores continued to bring forth an ever larger progeny," Tolkien writes. "[M]any of the citizens harboured the monsters, feeding them with the costly oils and essences which they required, and building houses for them in their gardens...."

One suspects that Tolkien would have preferred to see Oxford return to the era of the donkey cart. That kind of nostalgia is familiar in Tolkien's work — the idea that we developed just a little too far, skipping past an Eden we failed to recognize a generation or two ago. (For Tolkien, the paragon of paradise seems to have been a rural village around the time of Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee.) But he also knows that mankind's impulse to develop is something we cannot help. And the inevitable blowback we get from our hubris is something we cannot avoid. That defeatist attitude is suggested in the frame narrative to The Bovadium Fragments, in which the archaeologists smugly declare their superiority to the extinct citizens of old Oxford. "We at any rate are not likely to fall into such folly," one of them says.

In their more enlightened future, we are told, they only pursue the more benign science of longevity. Their wish is that one day they shall "at last conquer mortality, and not 'die like animals.'" But humans are animals, Tolkien argues. And in stretching beyond that, we may find progress and modern conveniences like motorcars. But perhaps we also pave a road to Isengard. And we may not recognize that destination until it is too late — until we are trapped within its walls, suffocating on our own exhaust fumes.

North Dakota passed a law last May to promote development of rare earth minerals in the state. But the law's language apparently also includes two fake mineral names, according to the Bismarck Tribune, "that appear to be inspired by coal company lawyers who worked on the bill." The inclusion of fictional substances is being called an embarrassment by one state official, a possible practical joke by coal industry leaders and mystifying by the lawmakers who worked on the bill, the North Dakota Monitor reported.

The fake minerals are friezium and stralium, apparent references to Christopher Friez and David Straley, attorneys for North American Coal who were closely involved in drafting the bill and its amendments. Straley said they were not responsible for adding the fake names. "I assume it was put in to embarrass us, or to make light of it, or have a practical joke," Straley said, adding it could have been a clerical error.

Agriculture Commissioner Doug Goehring questioned the two substances listed in state law during a recent meeting of the North Dakota Industrial Commission, which is poised to adopt rules based on the legislation... Friezium and stralium first appeared in the bill on the last afternoon of the legislative session as lawmakers hurried to pass several final bills... The amended bill is labeled as prepared by Legislative Council for Rep. Dick Anderson, R-Willow City, the prime sponsor and chair of the conference committee. Anderson said the amendments were prepared by a group of attorneys and legislators, including representatives from the coal industry...

Jonathan Fortner, president of the Lignite Energy Council that represents the coal industry, said it's unfortunate this happened in such an important bill. "From the president on down, everyone's interested in developing domestic critical minerals for national security reasons," Fortner said. "While this may have been a legislative joke between some people that somehow got through, the bigger picture is one that is important and is a very serious matter."

"The ancient evolution of fish mouths could help solve a modern source of plastic pollution," writes ScienceAlert.

"Inspired by these natural filtration systems, scientists in Germany have invented a way to remove 99 percent of plastic particles from water. It's based on how some fish filter-feed to eat microscopic prey." The research team has already filed a patent in Germany, and in the future, they hope their creation will help curb a ubiquitous form of plastic pollution that many are unaware of. Every time a load of laundry is done, millions of microplastics are washed from the fibers of our clothes into local waterways. By some estimates, up to 90 percent of plastic in 'sewage sludge' comes from washing machines. This material is then often used in agriculture as soil or fertilizer, possibly exposing those who eat the resulting crops to these pollutants...

Unlike other plastic filtration systems on the market, this one reduces clogging by 85 percent.

Reddit "has overtaken TikTok as Britain's fourth most-visited social media service," reports the Guardian: The platform has undergone huge growth over the last two years, with an 88% increase in the proportion of UK internet users it reaches. Three in five Brits online now encounter the site, up from a third in 2023, according to Ofcom. Its popularity is rising fastest with younger internet users. It is now the sixth most visited organisation of any kind by UK users aged between 18 and 24, up from 10th a year earlier. More than three-quarters of that cohort now visit it....

The UK is a boom market for the platform, with the second largest user base behind the US, according to company records. A series of factors are behind its rise. However, a change in Google's search algorithms last year to prioritise helpful content from discussion forums appears to have been a significant driver. A recent deal with Google that allows the company to train its AI model on Reddit's content also appears to have provided a boost. Reddit is the most-cited source for Google AI overviews, which is likely to see more people directed to its forums. It has a similar deal with OpenAI, which owns the most popular AI chatbot, ChatGPT.
According to the article, Reddit "believes it is also benefiting from shifting internet habits, as younger users seek out human-generated reviews and opinions."

Remember how California's government negotiated a 2024 deal where Google contributed millions to California's local newsrooms to offset advertisers moving to the search engine?

"A year after it was cemented — and billed as a model that could succeed where entire countries and continents had fallen short — the agreement is tangled in budget cuts, bureaucratic infighting and unresolved questions about who controls the money," reports Politico, "leaving journalists empty-handed and casting doubt on whether the lofty experiment will ever live up to its promise." The program, initially framed as a nearly $250 million commitment over five years, has secured just $20 million in new money for journalists in its first year, with no guarantee the funding will continue. It's changed hands twice since the University of California, Berkeley withdrew its support [with school officials "worried they wouldn't have enough of a say in how the money was distributed"]. Suggestions that other big tech players like ChatGPT-maker OpenAI could front more resources haven't materialized. A $62.5 million "AI accelerator" tied to the deal hasn't been set up yet.

Not a single newsroom has seen a dollar of funding, and there's no definitive timeline spelling out when they will... [The article adds later that state officials "have yet to draft precise rules for how California will decide which newsrooms get cash..."] Conversations with at least 20 people involved in the deal's rollout reveal how California's budget shortfalls and intraparty spats among Democrats scrambled it... California's struggle to launch its program has dampened hopes of replicating its model in other states such as Oregon, Illinois and New York, where lawmakers have tried but failed to make Big Tech pay for news...

When [California governor] Newsom unveiled his final state budget plan in May 2025 after a $12 billion deficit suddenly scrambled the state's finances, California's first-year commitment was reduced from $30 million to $10 million. Google followed suit within days and cut its first-year contribution from $15 million to $10 million... Whether the program even continues past 2026 is also unclear. Newsom's office declined to confirm whether the state will provide its $10 million commitment to the fund in the coming 2026-27 state budget. Newsom will also be termed out in 2027, and there's no requirement for his successor to honor the state's agreement with Google.