investigating healthcare + pharma @hntrbrkmedia | former @Capitol_Forum @jhunewsletter | Minnesotan in DC

Washington, DC
Joined August 2015
Beyond excited and grateful to finally share this with the world! I am honored and humbled to be part of telling this story. THANK U Leo, members of the Cass Lake community, and @SammyKoppelman @nbhorwitz + co for taking a chance on a whole new medium!
New documentary out now: Killing Cass Lake pairs never-before-seen archival footage with new reporting on a Minnesota tribal community's decades-long fight with International Paper over a toxic Superfund site.
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New powerful reporting in Minnesota ⬇️ by the intrepid @LWadsten
👀 Sneak peek of the never-before-seen footage in Hunterbrook's first ever documentary film investigation!
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Our documentary Killing Cass Lake drops Tomorrow, Oct. 26th. Watch on HNTRBRK.com, YouTube, and X. This is the latest investigation in the Hunterbrook Media series Poisoned USA.
KILLING CASS LAKE | OFFICIAL TRAILER Leo Anderson bought a camera to document what a contaminated site was doing to his hometown. His tapes sat in storage for 20 years. Our first investigative documentary, with Leo's never-before-seen footage, drops Monday.
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!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! A stunning, devastating film
KILLING CASS LAKE | OFFICIAL TRAILER Leo Anderson bought a camera to document what a contaminated site was doing to his hometown. His tapes sat in storage for 20 years. Our first investigative documentary, with Leo's never-before-seen footage, drops Monday.
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Huntebrook documentary!
Decades of contamination. Families displaced. A neighborhood erased. Tribal lifeways disrupted. Alarming public health data led us to a 20-year-old documentary film project that was never finished — until now. Killing Cass Lake drops Monday.
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KILLING CASS LAKE The first documentary from @hntrbrkmedia — & latest investigation in our Poisoned USA series spanning from Texas to Hawaii Stay tuned for the drop 4pm Mon! 👀
KILLING CASS LAKE | OFFICIAL TRAILER Leo Anderson bought a camera to document what a contaminated site was doing to his hometown. His tapes sat in storage for 20 years. Our first investigative documentary, with Leo's never-before-seen footage, drops Monday.
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👀 Sneak peek of the never-before-seen footage in Hunterbrook's first ever documentary film investigation!
KILLING CASS LAKE | OFFICIAL TRAILER Leo Anderson bought a camera to document what a contaminated site was doing to his hometown. His tapes sat in storage for 20 years. Our first investigative documentary, with Leo's never-before-seen footage, drops Monday.
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So excited to share this with the world! Hunterbrook’s first documentary out Monday.
Decades of contamination. Families displaced. A neighborhood erased. Tribal lifeways disrupted. Alarming public health data led us to a 20-year-old documentary film project that was never finished — until now. Killing Cass Lake drops Monday.
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Scorpions kill thousands of people every year, mostly kids in regions pharma doesn’t prioritize. Claude designed novel toxin-binding molecules within days. Then we waited two months on actual lab work.
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Can Claude actually help create new medicines? Hunterbrook joined @Citrini at Anthropic, where we hunted for a new antivenom using an unreleased model without all its usual biosecurity guardrails. We then tested its designs in two labs.
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Outsourcing AI regulation to a voluntary "pledge" conceived by Mark Zuckerberg and endorsed by tech CEOs over a private White House lunch is a recipe for disaster. "Self-regulation" by tech giants is a proven failure. The last time Meta promised to police itself, turned out it was hiding evidence that its platforms actively harm kids. Repeating this mistake with AI leaves the public dangerously exposed. AI companies are already bound by existing laws, but the White House has generally stopped enforcing laws against the wealthy and powerful. State AGs should step up, halt lawbreaking, and promote real deterrence, including through holding individual executives accountable. Congress also needs to legislate. We have a long history of regulating risky, transformative industries like banking, pharmaceuticals, and nuclear power. These tools include mandatory testing, truly independent supervision, and break-ups that end conflicts of interest. Ultimately, reckoning with AI will also require reckoning with our broader crisis of governance. All three branches have become severely deformed. Against this backdrop it might be tempting to outsource regulation to these private actors, but it would be a serious mistake. Our public institutions must decide the trajectory of these powerful technologies, not the firms whose breakneck pace and financial conflicts brought us here. My piece in @nytopinion: nytimes.com/2026/09/30/opini… xitter.cf/semaforben/status/2105…
Big @ashleyrgold scoop: Zuckerberg shaped the Trump AI pledge semafor.com/article/09/30/20…
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The First Amendment Right to Fix Prices:
In a win for pricing software firm RealPage, a New York federal judge has preliminarily blocked enforcement of an NY law intended to ban algorithmic rent-fixing, saying the legislation might violate the First Amendment. The judge was hesitant to do so. Here's the key passage:
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BREAKING: Muse AI can leverage Facebook data to build lists of people in vulnerable groups on request for ordinary users, a Hunterbrook investigation has found.
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At a Politico event, Reid Hoffman was asked if he would object if a future Democratic presidential nominee wanted to reinstall Lina Khan at the FTC. “Certainly not,” he said. Big shift from the 2024 election, when he said Kamala Harris should fire her.
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MIT published a brutally honest report on what AI is doing to students. A committee of professors and students spent five months studying how AI changed learning on campus, and the findings read like a warning to every university on the planet. Study groups are disappearing. Office hours are emptying out. Problem sets and take-home exams no longer prove anything, because AI can produce credible solutions to almost any written assignment in the undergraduate curriculum. Students who lean on chatbots lose mastery and confidence, and some slip into what the report calls cognitive surrender, reaching for AI at the first hint of struggle. The numbers are rough. 46 percent of surveyed MIT undergrads use LLMs daily. 90 percent worry about their own overreliance. Undergrads who feel AI makes them replaceable now outnumber those who feel it makes them capable. The committee's answer surprised me. They refused to fight AI with surveillance. The report calls AI detectors unreliable, says lockdown browsers feel like spying, and warns that policing students builds a classroom atmosphere of mutual distrust. Instead, MIT wants to rebuild education around the things AI can't replace. That means oral exams, semester portfolios, in-person project work, and a required social component in every subject. The report even floats the idea of rethinking grades entirely, since without a GPA to optimize, much of the incentive to cheat with AI evaporates. The committee warns professors against replacing undergrad research assistants with AI agents just because they're cheaper, because a university exists to grow people, not output. The most famous tech school on earth admitted the machines broke its way of teaching. Its answer is more humans, not more software.
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BREAKING: You should read Hunterbrook.
🚨 BREAKING: The SEC has opened an investigation into Daktronics concerning Kawhi Leonard, according to the scoreboard-maker's CFO on their earnings call today. This is in addition to requests for information, related to the Clippers, from the NBA. "The Securities and Exchange Commission is seeking information from us concerning the company and [Kawhi] Leonard. We take these requests seriously and are cooperating."
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A contractor on America's priciest rail line stockpiles lead-laced soil in Honolulu's poorest, densest neighborhoods. Wipe sampling conducted by Hunterbrook shows contaminated dust from these soil piles may have drifted to nearby residential areas.
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This tells you everything you need to know about the Trump administration's drug price agreements with pharma companies. sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/…
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NEW: We have the next big scoop in the Lakers/Mark Walter drama. It’s about a hundred billion dollars in “unaffiliated” life insurance money.  And a… rodeo team funded by ordinary Americans?
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