By now, many of you have probably read or heard about the recent exposé revealing a secretive society in which the wealthy and the famous hunt poor people for sport. I more than understand fans being concerned about my reported involvement when they’re seeing bizarre headlines and posts about panels where we allow the poor person to plead for their life and the dinners in which an unhoused man is mockingly honored as “the king of the hunt” when we put a construction paper crown on his head and feed him empty banana peels and crusts of bread.

In other words, my critics are missing the nuance of my membership in the wealthy people hunting poor people for sport club.

To be clear, I have only been to three or four hunting poor people for sport conferences. Three. Or four. That’s not quite a dedicated membership to a secret society, is it? Nor have I ever met the billionaire known as the Founder of the Hunt. I have never spoken with him on the phone or with his representatives, other than to ask where the hunt will be held this year, what weapons will be considered fair game, and who needs to survive seventy-two hours in the forest to have all their debts cleared.

I’m not saying this out of ego, but it’s important to remember that many high-profile people need to ask these questions before attending an event like this.

Also, I want to reaffirm that the billionaire Founder of the Hunt has politics that are the complete opposite of mine. You can paint me as some right-wing lunatic if you want, but I know in my heart the good I’ve done for those who haven’t been as lucky as me. Okay? I support LGBTQ+ rights. I support a woman’s right to choose. I even do a land acknowledgment before they open the man’s thirty-four-by-twenty-three-inch cage to let him loose with a head start of ten seconds. Whatever you think being a member of this club entails, I strongly believe I wouldn’t be disguising bear traps with leaves and setting up a speaker that plays the sound of a distressed woman begging for help if we had politicians in office who uplifted those less fortunate. So, please don’t paint me with a broad brush when I’m out there doing the work.

At the hunts I’ve been to, there were a wide variety of hunters, with a wide variety of hunting opinions—some I agreed with, some I didn’t. I can’t speak for every person on the list, especially when I was only with a small subset of them when we crawled through dense grass in order to slice an unsuspecting hobo’s Achilles tendon. My experience was not of a single ideological gathering. Rather, we were able to have important conversations about our beliefs. If the victim dies fast, was it a test of speed and accuracy? Or was it more the sign of a skilled hunter if the hopeless target suffers as long as possible, no matter how many fingers remain and how much blood is lost?

I’ve had long, detailed debates with members of different political persuasions on whether we should eat the man we caught in a net and allowed to get so dehydrated that he hallucinated us as demons when we came to put him down. Those aren’t the types of discussions you’re likely to have in public, especially when so much of the media is ready to pounce on celebrities for stepping out of line. But how can we come together as a country, or even as a world, when we’re afraid to share our thoughts on the easy kill of a shotgun versus the clean kill of a sniper rifle? What does it say about the current cultural climate that two sides can’t find common ground on how long to starve the dogs before letting them loose on a man who’s hoping his wife and children won’t be visited by the loan sharks he owed money to?

Over the last couple of years, I’ve been focused on making a positive impact on how the future unfolds, especially in tech, AI, and which areas of the body outside the neck can cause you to bleed out with the right shot. Part of that work means forming relationships with all kinds of hunters and trying to understand their strategies for making the man lose all hope when he realizes his stash of nuts and berries in the forest has been poisoned. Sometimes I try to get them to understand mine, which is pretending I’m there to help the victim escape and then, once his guard is down, claiming that sweet trophy for myself.

So, yes, I do respect that many of you have misgivings about me being in the wealthy people hunting poor people for sport club. But I also know that it’s productive to sometimes engage with those we oppose and to remind ourselves that we all want the same thing at the end of the day: To see the light leave the eyes of a living, breathing, feeling person who isn’t famous or wealthy enough to help my career.

Fiction written by artificial intelligence is easy to detect because it struggles with complex story structure and tends to moralize in clunky ways, according to a preprint study from researchers at University of Maryland, College Park and Google DeepMind. They found that AI fiction has tells that go beyond stereotypical overuse of em-dashes and other obvious AI tropes and have more to do with the formulaic nature of the text itself.

“AI stories over-explain themes and favor tidy, single-track plots while human stories frame protagonists’ choices as more morally ambiguous and have increased temporal complexity,” the study, which looked at more than 50,000 AI-generated short stories, found. “Claude produces notably flat event escalation, GPT over-indexes on dream sequences, and Gemini defaults to external character description. We find that AI-generated stories cluster in a shared region of narrative space, while human-authored stories exhibit greater diversity. More broadly, these results suggest that differences in underlying narrative construction, not just writing style, can be used to separate human-written original works from AI-generated fiction.”

Basically, AI-generated fiction sucks and at the moment is easy to detect. The typical method of detection involves looking for stylistic markers such as an abundance of em-dashes, the overuse of the word “delve,” or an obsession with goblins, but this project tried something different. “The idea for this project came because we are hoping to eventually move past plain text detection, into some sort of space where we can separate human ideas from AI-generated ideas,” Jenna Russell, a University of Maryland researcher and one of the study’s authors, told 404 Media. Russell is also an intern at the AI-detection company Pangram.

Russell and her team decided to attempt to detect what she called “narrative features” in AI- generated fiction. The detector is called StoryScope and it builds on NarraBench, a 2025 benchmark that suggested a taxonomy of narrative features in fiction. StoryScope looked at how fiction handled plot development, character descriptions, setting, and temporal structure to determine if something was written by a human or an AI.

“It was my first attempt at getting 'under the surface' and focusing more on ideas,” Russell said. “We wanted to see how close to typical AI-detection we could get by only relying on the narrative features, to understand if this sort of structural difference really even exists. This method also adds some interpretability to detection, which is an open question in the field. Using narrative features, we can point to certain tangible features (such as the number of subplots included in a story). I think this is why it's struck a chord recently, people can really say ‘ah these are some of the underlying traits of how AI writes fiction.’”

To test StoryScope, the researchers selected 10,272 human-written stories then reverse engineered them into writing prompts using Gemini 2.5. Then it took those thousands of prompts and fed them into Gemini 3 Flash, DeepSeek V3.2, Claude Sonnet 4.6, Kimi K2.5, and GPT 5.4. All of the data — including the prompts and the resulting AI stories — are available on Hugging Face.

To source the stories, the researchers used the Books3 dataset — a database of 183,000 books collected from pirated ebooks. The dataset is the subject of several lawsuits and has been used to train an unknown number of LLMs. The StoryScope study included more than 10,000 of some of the most famous short stories ever written, many of them pulled from popular anthologies. There’s Joyce Carol Oates, Stephen King, Louis L'Amour, Charlotte Perkins, and Harlan Ellison. All have been rendered down to their base elements by AI and then regurgitated into a different LLM to see if it can replicate them.

Russell told me the dataset was controversial. “Hence why we do not release it to the public,” she said.

The study itself contained a disclosure. “We acknowledge the copyright issues related to the Books3 dataset and do not endorse its use for model training or commercial text generation,” it said. “The use of the dataset in our paper is restricted to academic purposes only and is meant to understand the narrative differences in human-written and AI-generated text to help inform discussions on AI-detection, authorship, and copyright policy.”

The various AIs, of course, can’t possibly replicate the prose of O. Henry. So what, according to StoryScope, are the narrative quirks of LLM-written simulacra of English’s grand works of fiction? 

AI tools tend to over explain themes, for one. 

“Narrators explicitly explain the story’s theme 77% of the time, versus 52% for humans: a grieving character’s arc will typically end with the narrator stating the lesson learned. AI dialogue serves philosophical debate more often (59% vs. 34%), and references to other works tend to be vague allusions (72% vs. 50%) rather than specific, named references. The pattern is one of over-determination: AI spells out meaning rather than trusting the reader to infer,” the study said.

AI also more often avoids subplots and fails to play with time jumps and flashbacks. The systems overwrite passages about the body and senses. “Where a human author might write that a character ‘felt afraid,’ AI renders fear as a tightening chest, cold sweat, and dimming lamplight,” the study said. Humans also spin more complicated narratives involving more characters and locations than AI can handle. Humans also reference other works of fiction, specific people and places in a way that AI struggles with.

A disclosure caught my eye at the bottom of the StoryScope study. “Large language models and coding agents (Claude Code and Codex) are used to aid with and polish writing and generate some tables and plots,” it said.

“I believe it's important to disclose AI use (and ideally think it should be more in-depth than I wrote in the paper),” Russell told me. “Most researchers are using AI, a lot of it seemingly 'slop' [...] but a lot of it is high-effort, good research. Also, technically you are supposed to disclose AI use for conference submissions, but most people don't. I want to help change that norm!”

She also explained a bit more about how AI agents helped shape the project. “I use AI agents to help implement the code (using the claude code / codex interfaces). I also use them as an editor during the writing process! They have access to the project codebase and the paper latex, so the agents can implement graphics for me much more quickly than I could,” she said. “They write comments and add to the paper draft, but I keep it all in different colors so I can manually review and accept/reject/edit any suggestions from AI. I am a big believer that AI can help or hurt writing, but usually helps when not used to create more internet 'slop'.”

I kept thinking about Harlan Ellison and Robert Silverberg’s story “Ship-Shape Pay-Off” being turned into an AI prompt and then spit back out by an LLM. Ellison died in 2018 and was notoriously protective of his work to the point of violence. He successfully sued James Cameron for plagiarism over The Terminator. I have a hard time imagining he’d be happy to see his story pumped into a machine, no matter the results.

“A lot of people, like teachers or readers, don't really care if AI was used in the writing process, but do care if the human is the one behind the heart of it,” Russell said. “A teacher wants to know if their student understood the lesson, and a reader wants to know that the creativity behind a touching story was truly the work of the human author.”

This is neat: Robin Sloan is rewriting his 2009 short story, Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore. “The interplay between books and technology has changed since I wrote them…but also that I have become a different writer, and a better one.”

Roselle (Hibiscus sabdariffa), also known as Florida cranberry, Jamaican sorrel, or red sorrel, is a vibrant, heat-loving annual that thrives in Florida’s warm climate and delivers both ornamental beauty and impressive health benefits.

Native to West and Central Africa, roselle is perfectly adapted to hot, sunny conditions and grows readily throughout Florida, especially in USDA hardiness zones 9–10. It tolerates high summer temperatures and even drought once established, making it an excellent choice for low-input, sustainable gardens.

• Planting time: Sow seeds or set out transplants in April–May (or again in August for a fall harvest).

• Growth habit: Plants reach 5–7 feet tall, with reddish-green lobed leaves and striking yellow flowers with dark centers.

• Harvest window: Calyces (the fleshy red cups beneath the flowers) mature in October–November; harvest before frost or temperatures drop below 40°F.

• Yield: A single healthy plant can produce up to 12–16 pounds of calyces with proper care.

  Edible and Medicinal Uses

  The star of roselle is its tart, cranberry-like calyx, used fresh or dried for the following:

  • Jams, jellies, and sauces (a Florida “cranberry” sauce)

  • Refreshing teas, cordials, and festive holiday drinks

  • Flavoring for pies, crisps, and smoothies

  • Dried calyces for long-term storage and year-round use

  Leaves can be eaten cooked as greens or added raw to salads for a tangy zing, while seeds are high in protein and can be roasted or ground into soups.

  

  Health Benefits Backed by Science

  Roselle is more than just a pretty garden plant—it’s a nutrient-dense superfood with a growing body of research supporting its wellness potential:

  • Rich in antioxidants: Packed with anthocyanins (which give it its deep red color), vitamin C, polyphenols, and organic acids that combat oxidative stress.

  • Supports heart health: Multiple studies show roselle tea or extract can help lower blood pressure, reduce LDL (“bad”) cholesterol, and improve blood vessel function.

  • Anti-inflammatory effects: Recent reviews highlight roselle’s ability to inhibit inflammatory markers, potentially easing symptoms of arthritis and other chronic inflammatory conditions.

  • Blood sugar regulation: Emerging evidence suggests roselle may improve insulin sensitivity and help manage blood glucose levels—promising for those with prediabetes or type 2 diabetes.

  • Digestive and immune support: High in fiber and prebiotics, roselle promotes gut health; its vitamin C and A content bolsters immune function.

  • Potential anticancer properties: Laboratory studies indicate roselle extracts may slow tumor growth and inhibit cancer cell proliferation, though more human trials are needed.

  Growing Tips for Florida Gardeners

  • Sun: Full sun is essential—roselle won’t thrive in shade.

  • Soil: Well-drained soil is key; amend with compost if needed.

  • Water: Water during dry spells, but avoid overwatering.

  • Pests: Watch for root-knot nematodes; practice crop rotation to reduce buildup.

  • Variety: ‘Victor’ is a proven performer in South Florida.

  Final Thoughts

  Roselle is a resilient, multipurpose plant that fits seamlessly into Florida’s subtropical gardens while offering a tart, cranberry-like harvest and an impressive portfolio of health-promoting compounds. Whether you’re brewing a refreshing tea, making a holiday drink, or exploring its anti-inflammatory and cardioprotective potential, roselle is a worthy addition to any heat-tolerant edible landscape.

…and Florida residents can get the wasps free.

Tamarixia radiata is a roughly 1-millimeter parasitoid wasp that kills the Asian citrus psyllid (Diaphorina citri), the insect that spreads the bacterium behind citrus greening (HLB). It won’t cure an infected tree, but by suppressing the psyllid it slows the disease. As you will find here, Florida residents can request the wasps for free!

A Very Small Ally with a Very Big Job

Meet one of the smallest and hardest-working allies in Florida’s and California citrus story. Tamarixia radiata is a gnat-sized parasitoid wasp, no bigger than the head of a pin, , and it has a single mission: hunting down the Asian citrus psyllid, the insect that spreads devastating citrus greening disease. In this blog, we’ll walk through where this wasp came from, why it matters to your dooryard citrus, what the research says, and how you can get your own vial.

Figure 1. An adult Tamarixia radiata magnified under a lab microscope. At roughly 1 mm long, this wasp is easy to miss but hard at work. Credit: Edwin Gutierrez-Rodriguez, UF/IFAS.

 A Little History: How a Wasp Became Florida’s Ally

The trouble began in 1998, when the Asian citrus psyllid (Diaphorina citri) was first discovered in Palm Beach County, Florida (The Discovery of Huanglongbing in Florida), feeding on orange jasmine. The psyllid itself is a problem, but the real danger is what it carries: the bacterium that causes Huanglongbing (HLB), better known as citrus greening, one of the most destructive citrus diseases in the world.

Scientists needed a natural enemy. In October 1998, researchers imported Tamarixia radiata from Taiwan and Vietnam into a high-security quarantine at the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services (FDACS) Division of plant Industry in Gainesville.

To keep the disease out, no plant material or psyllid hosts came with them, and the wasps were reared on psyllids raised on orange jasmine. Over more than a dozen generations, every colony was tested to be sure it was clean.

Permission to release came in 1999. The first Tamarixia were set free near Fort Pierce. It was the start of Florida’s classical biological control program against the psyllid, and the wasp has since spread and worked across the state…read more.

Did you know?

The wasp had already proven itself overseas. According to the EPPO Global Database, T. radiata may be present on all continents except Antarctica. Over the two time periods (2030 and 2050), T. radiata is projected to expand its known distribution into new climatic regions, mainly due to increases in the mean temperature of the coldest quarter in those regions. EPPO Global Database

The word parasitoid is different from parasite, which you are probably more familiar with.

A parasite generally feeds on a host without killing it. A parasitoid, like Tamarixia, ultimately kills its host as part of completing its life cycle. And this one is remarkably specific: it does not attack any insect other than the Asian citrus psyllid, making it a very safe, targeted tool for your yard.

A two-front attack

This little wasp fights the psyllid in two ways at once:

• Parasitism: A female lays an egg beneath a psyllid nymph. The larva hatches and feeds on that nymph from the outside (an “ectoparasitoid”), killing it before emerging as a new adult wasp.
• Host feeding: The female also punctures psyllid nymphs with her ovipositor and feeds on the fluids that ooze out. This protein lets her lay more eggs and kills the psyllid directly.

Add it up, and a single female Tamarixia can kill up to 500 psyllids in her lifetime through the combination of host feeding and parasitism. Not bad for an insect you can barely see.

Why It Matters for our Citrus

Citrus greening has no cure yet! Infected trees show blotchy, mottled yellow leaves, heavy leaf drop, dieback, and small, misshapen, bitter fruit. Because the bacterium is spread by the psyllid, controlling the psyllid is one of the best ways a homeowner can slow the disease, for their own trees and their neighbors’ trees, too.

Commercial groves manage psyllids as part of a larger integrated program. But backyard and dooryard citrus often go untreated, and those trees can quietly build up large psyllid populations that spread greening through the neighborhood. That is exactly the gap biological control is designed to fill: it is environmentally sound, needs no spraying, and keeps working on its own.

What the Research Says

Florida has studied this wasp closely, and the honest picture is one of a helpful, but not magic, tool.

UF/IFAS and FDACS research (Qureshi et al. 2009) found parasitism rates in Florida averaging under 20% in spring and summer, rising to roughly 39–56% in the fall. Some earlier Florida surveys recorded much lower rates, showing how variable results can be across sites and seasons (Especially summer).

Elsewhere, results have been even stronger: parasitism rates of 79–88% have been reported in Puerto Rico, and Brazilian mass-rearing studies have recorded rates of 72–89%. Lab work also points to the wasp’s “sweet spot”: Tamarixia develops and survives best at about 26–30 °C, and does better on older psyllid nymphs.

The takeaway from UF/IFAS science is consistent: Tamarixia radiata can meaningfully suppress psyllid populations and is considered the most effective natural enemy of the Asian citrus psyllid, especially as one part of an integrated approach. It works best when released widely and repeatedly, which is where you come in.

The numbers at a glance

• Up to 500 psyllids potentially killed by one female wasp (host feeding + parasitism)

• 39–56% parasitism in Florida in fall; higher in some regions

• 26–30 °C is the ideal temperature range for the wasp

• Attacks only the Asian citrus psyllid, no other insects

How to Get Your Own Tamarixia

Since 1999, these wasps have been released in research and commercial groves, and today they are available to Florida home gardeners at no charge. FDACS Division of Plant Industry provides vials of live Tamarixia radiata for release on your property, and UF/IFAS Extension county offices often host distribution and “access” events.

Two easy ways to request wasps

• Apply online through FDACS: FDACS Asian Citrus Psyllid Biological Control (Asian Citrus Psyllid Biological Control – Florida Department of Agriculture & Consumer Services).
• Contact your county Extension office: find your local UF/IFAS office. Solutions for Your Life – University of Florida, Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences – UF/IFAS.

Releasing them in three steps (from FDACS instructions)

Your vials contain live wasps and a small strip of paper towel lightly coated with honey to keep them fed. Release them as soon as possible for best results; the sooner they’re in your tree, the better they survive. Then follow these steps:

1. Find the psyllids first. If possible, locate an infestation of Asian citrus psyllids on your citrus, or on orange/orange jasmine plantings. If you can’t identify an infestation, that’s OK, release within the citrus canopy anyway; the wasps will actively seek out psyllid nymphs on their own.
2. Uncap the vial in the canopy. Hold the vial near the canopy with the opening facing upward and place it securely in the tree so the wasps can leave on their own.
3. Return to release the rest. Come-back a little later to remove the vial, gently tapping out any remaining wasps into the tree.

See here how it looks like! 

Quick Check: Test Your Tamarixia Know-How

Question 1: You can’t find any psyllids on your tree. You should:

A) Skip the release and save the wasps
B) Release in the canopy anyway, the wasps will hunt
C) Spray insecticide first

Question 2: You received two vials. You should:

A) Empty both into one tree
B) Spread them among different trees or areas
C) Save one on the shelf for next month
(Answers: B, B)

Be Part of the Solution

Releasing Tamarixia on your property helps your citrus and your neighbors’ citrus, and it adds one more foothold for this beneficial wasp across Florida. It’s free, it’s easy, and it puts real UF/IFAS and FDACS science to work right in your own backyard. Reach out to your county Extension office to get started.

Let biology work ! Tamarixia is a marathon ally, not a one-shot fix.

Remember: You can’t spray your way out of greening — but a pinhead-sized wasp, released again and again, quietly tips the odds back in your favor.

Questions?

Does Tamarixia  cure citrus greening? No. It works by kills the Asian citrus psyllid; it does not cure the bacterial infection in an already-sick tree.
How big is Tamarixia radiata? About 1-millimeter length. Imagine the size of a pinhead… or see my Facebook video
Is it safe to release in my yard? Absolutely. It goes only to the Asian citrus psyllid and no other insects.
How many psyllids can one wasp kill? Depending on above discussed, about 500 in her lifetime, through parasitism and host feeding.
How do I get Tamarixia in Florida? Free from the FDACS Division of plant Industry… see below

Something else…Contact Your Local Extension Office

Every grove is unique. Reach out to your UF/IFAS Extension Agent or the biological control team that supplies the wasps at FDACS:

Amy Croft, Biological Scientist I/ Gloria Lotz, Biological Scientist III

FDACS Division of Plant Industry, 1911 SW 34th Street, Gainesville, FL 32608

Email: Amy.Croft@fdacs.gov     Phone: (352) 395-4738

Learn More & Sources

• EENY 475/IN858: An Asian Citrus Pysllid Parasitoid Tamarixia radiata (Waterston) (Insecta: Hymenoptera: Eulophidae)
• Citrus Psyllid Wasp – Gardening Solutions
• pdf
• Tamarixia radiata Waterston [Hymenoptera: Eulophidae],an ectoparasitoid of Diaphorina citri Kuwayama [Hemiptera: Psyllidae]Tamarixia radiata
• Asian Citrus Psyllid Tamarixia Parasitoid / Natural Enemies Gallery / UC Statewide IPM Program (UC IPM)

An Equal Opportunity Institution. UF/IFAS Extension, University of Florida, Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences. This document is available in alternative formats upon request; contact your local UF/IFAS Extension office for accommodations.

Something for the digital crate-diggers: The 40 Best Albums From the Last 40 Years That You Probably Didn’t Hear (But Should’ve). I’d only heard of one or two these…