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.”
Tyler Durden Tue, 06/09/2026 - 15:00Authored by Martin Young via CoinTelegraph.com,
Artificial intelligence agents that have autonomous access to crypto wallets could become unstoppable if deployed maliciously or if they escape from sandboxes, experts from a leading academic research consortium warned.
“Unstoppable Autonomous Agents” (UAAs) pose a clear threat if they are deployed to persist automatically and have access to digital assets, according to a June 8 industry review written by 25 academics and experts from top US universities for the Initiative for Cryptocurrencies and Contracts (IC3).
“When combined systematically, crypto tools can channel AI’s fluid power into secure, reliable, and highly autonomous systems,” the researchers wrote.
However, this combination could have “far-reaching consequences for users and the financial system,” they added.
UAAs may also be equipped with access to cryptocurrency wallets, social media accounts, APIs, and other external tools, said the researchers.
“The capabilities enabling such agents are already emerging and improving rapidly.”The warning comes as crypto projects and executives have been pushing the agentic payment and micropayment economy narrative this year, suggesting it could be the biggest use case for decentralized digital assets.
AI self-replication alarm bellsThe paper also revealed that existing models can already “surpass self-replication red lines” in local environments, by autonomously creating a live, separate copy of themselves on the same machine, “a capability that could let a system evade shutdown and proliferate.”
Because reward signals used in training often fail to perfectly capture the intended objectives, “UAAs deployed for benign purposes may inadvertently cause harm,” or pursue resource acquisition as a default strategy, they said.
However, the authors noted that models have yet to replicate themselves onto external infrastructure.
Potential AI agent insider trading advantagesA fleet of self-replicating, resource-acquiring agents could also create unpredictable demand and liquidity dynamics in crypto markets.
“AI-powered trading systems could enable collusion between autonomous agents and create unfair insider advantages through opaque strategies.”The tech sector is already dealing with difficult questions about the threat of unmitigated AI.
Models such as Anthropic’s Claude Mythos have already been shown to be capable of finding and exploiting zero-day vulnerabilities in major operating systems.
Professor Ari Juels, IC3 co-director and Chainlink Labs chief scientist, presents the paper at ETHConf. Source: IC3
Meanwhile, Gartner warned in late May that governance failures around autonomous AI agents could trigger widespread enterprise failures, predicting 40% of companies will be forced to decommission their agents by 2027.
“The harms that could follow from fully autonomous agents of this kind are severe,” the researchers said, suggesting circuit breaker guardrails.
Tyler Durden Tue, 06/09/2026 - 14:20The good news for US farmers is that urea fertilizer prices have returned to pre-US-Iran conflict levels after spiking from late February through mid-April. This is great news for farmers, though they are not out of the woods, as drought continues to plague some of the nation’s top agricultural belts.
Prices for granular urea in New Orleans have slumped 36% since peaking at $710 per short ton in mid-April. Spot prices are currently $453, back to pre-conflict levels.
Bloomberg Intelligence analysts noted that a combination of oversupply and weak demand is pressuring US urea spot prices, which have fallen below those seen in more import-dependent markets such as Brazil and Egypt. The reversal in nitrogen fertilizer prices benefits farmers while also reducing part of the windfall enjoyed by CF Industries and Nutrien.
Shares of CF Industries and Nutrien are both down about 20%, closely tracking urea spot prices.
Urea was among the crop nutrients most affected by the Gulf-area energy shock, with nearly half of global exports originating in the region. There have been concerns about a global food shortage that could emerge later in the year.
Drought concerns still plague top agricultural belts in the US.
Meanwhile, on the otherside of the world:
One troubling development in food has been the surge in rice prices, with the regional Asian benchmark rising 20% in May, the largest monthly increase since 2008. It is important to closely monitor global food prices.
Tyler Durden Tue, 06/09/2026 - 14:00