Edition

Monday, September 7, 2026

Monday edition

Courts

The Postal Service asks the Court to free its ballot-mail rule.

Confirmed

David Steiner runs the mail. A Massachusetts court froze the mandatory pieces of his rule before the Nov. 3 midterms. Saturday he and the Justice Department asked the Supreme Court to lift the freeze. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson gave the other side until 4 p.m. Eastern Wednesday, Sept. 9. The Solicitor General withdrew an earlier stay bid the same day.

Full story and sources · 4 primary sources

Labs

OpenAI’s chief scientist writes about minds we don’t fully understand.

Confirmed

Jakub Pachocki is OpenAI’s chief scientist. On Sept. 6 he published “An Alien Mind.” He writes about reasoning models, alignment, and new danger in computer security. He says this speed of progress could hold into recursive self-improvement. The same day the lab said coding agents now do the work of an “automated research intern,” a goal it had set for September. No new frontier model launched in this window.

Sources · 2 listed

NFL

Goodell is locked in through the 2030 season.

Confirmed

Roger Goodell has run the league since 2006. Sunday the owners told him to keep running it. The deal now goes through the 2030 season and ends March 31, 2031. It is his fifth extension. Robert Kraft, who chairs the owners’ compensation committee, wrote the others a memo and called the pay heavily performance-based. No odds. No picks.

Sources · 1 listed

Earth

A Landsat pass caught Mount Michael’s lava lake awake.

Confirmed

Mount Michael sits on Saunders Island, far down in the South Atlantic. A Landsat 8 pass on Aug. 24 caught heat from a persistent lava lake in the summit crater. NASA Earth Observatory made it the Image of the Day for Sept. 7. Lindsey Doermann wrote the story. Michala Garrison made the pictures from U.S. Geological Survey Landsat data. Scientists watch this place mainly from orbit.

Sources · 1 listed