Police arrested a high school physics teacher for clapping during a city council meeting last Wednesday. Teacher Lux Claridge went to a meeting of the Emporia, Kansas City Commission on July 22 with their spouse and brother. All three were there to speak out against a proposed hyperscale data center that would sit on 1,000 acres of rural land in Emporia. They left the meeting in handcuffs, dragged out by police on the orders of a city commissioner.

Emporia PD denied 404 Media’s request for a copy of Claridge’s arrest report. “The requested record is part of an active criminal investigation. As such, it is considered a criminal investigative record,” Emporia PD told 404 Media. “At this time, the Emporia Police Department is denying your request, as disclosure of the requested report could interfere with ongoing investigative efforts. Therefore, the record will not be released.” 404 Media has formally appealed this decision.

The Emporia City Council met on July 22 and planned to vote on zoning ordinances that would pave the way for the massive Flint Hills Digital Campus data center. Dozens of people from Emporia showed up to speak out against the project. The meeting went on almost five hours — much of it over community concerns about the data center. The small room where the council met could only fit around 30 people. Others waited to speak in a hallway outside or in two nearby overflow rooms.

The overwhelming majority of Emporia’s residents did not want it. There was a strict two minute time limit on public comments and the commissioners repeatedly warned people in the room not to clap or make noise. Attendees clapped anyway, though usually quickly and politely. Again, there were not many people in the room and it was not a rowdy meeting.

But the clapping upset the commissioners. “It was very clear at the beginning that everyone was given their two minutes and we’re trying to be respectful of that. Snapping, clapping, rude comments or anything, and we’ll ask you to leave. You’ve been finally warned and we’re done,” city commissioner Monica Duncan said about 50 minutes into the meeting.

Claridge clapped a few minutes later as a speaker finished and their spouse—Jessica Danford—took the podium. 

“Chief, will you take the next person out who claps or anything? Please.” Duncan said. “Sorry, I’m done.”

Emporia’s police chief approached Claridge and asked them to leave. “I have a right to speak,” they said. 

“Come on,” the police said.

“Drag me out,” Claridge said. “Drag me out.”Then the police physically raised Claridge up, handcuffed them, and dragged them out. They were later charged with disorderly conduct and interference with police.

Danford panicked as she watched police arrest Claridge. “Take a breath,” Emporia mayor Becky Smith said.“That’s my spouse down there,” Danford said.

“I know. I know. Take a breath,” Smith said.“Please don’t hurt them,” Danford said.

“Let him stay!” People begin to shout in the room.“They can all leave,” commissioner Duncan said, pointing her finger at the room. Then the commissioners shut down the camera feed for the meeting. It resumed about 10 minutes later. Danford was back at the podium and delivered her prepared remarks speaking out against the data center.

A few minutes later, Claridge’s brother David — who is running for state representative — took the podium. “I really look forward to making life hard for you when I get to the statehouse,” he said. “Because you removed my older sibling against their constitutional first amendment rights. This is ridiculous. I have never seen politicians so abundantly terrible at their PR. It is insane. You had someone from the opposition removed for clapping because they enjoyed a speech another member made.”

David told 404 Media that they were angry when police removed his brother. “I was enraged and had to consistently remind myself that a felony battery charge would disqualify me from office,” David told 404 Media. “I don't understand how the commission could think it was a good idea when they are already being so heavily scrutinized. I'm running for office obviously, and I cannot imagine how they thought this political theater would paint them as anything other than a mustache twirling fascist.”

At the end of the evening the commissioners voted 5 - 0 to approve the data center zoning measure.

Emporia, Kansas is like many other towns and cities that are fighting against data centers. It’s small, with a population of around 20,000, and the details around the data center development are shrouded in mystery. The Flint Hills Digital Campus is supposedly the brainchild of developer Gary Pinkston. He penned an op-ed published in the local paper the Emporia Gazette about the importance of the data center for the future of the area. The op-ed was also posted on the website for the Flint HIlls Digital Campus.

Pinkston has also recently declared federal bankruptcy and in public testimony revealed by related to that, he told his creditors that he wasn't involved with the Flint Hills Digital Campus at all. It was, he said, his daughter’s project. “I did not write this,” Pinkston told his creditors when questioned about the op-ed. The Flint HIlls Digital Campus website is now offline. The Emporia Gazette published recordings from Pinkston’s bankruptcy hearing on July 20, two days before an Emporia City Commission meeting where police arrested Claridge.

The police posted a comment about the incident on Facebook. “During the course of the meeting, several individuals in attendance were issued verbal warnings by the City Commission regarding disruptive conduct that was interrupting the proceedings,” the Emporia Police Department said in a statement on Facebook. “One individual, Lux Claridge [...] continued this behavior and was directed to leave the meeting. Claridge did not comply with law enforcement's efforts to remove [them] from the premises, requiring officers to physically carry [them] out of the meeting.”

According to Emporia PD, Claridge was booked at the Lyon County Jail on charges of interference with law enforcement and disorderly conduct. “The Emporia Police Department remains committed to ensuring public meetings are conducted safely and in an orderly manner, while also respecting the rights of all citizens to participate in the civic process,” it said in its Facebook statement.

Claude is exposing a wealth of users’ chats and creations in Google search results, meaning anyone can dig through conversations or other material that people used Claude to make but may not have realized were publicly available for strangers to see.

Slime Dot, a young R&B artist from Las Vegas, currently has over 100,000 monthly listeners on Spotify. In an interview with GQ in May, after sharing an image of herself posing with Drake on Instagram, Slime Dot directly denied accusations that she was an “AI artist,” saying “The truth doesn’t matter these days. People are always gonna try to explain something they don’t fully understand and believe what they want.” GQ originally credulously published the interview and said it was “debunking the AI rumors.” Eventually, GQ added a note to the end of the article conceding Slime Dot was an AI avatar, but said the “talent behind the music remains undeniable.”

This confusion could have been avoided if Spotify had done what many of its users and critics have been begging it to do since AI music generators like Suno and Udio made it trivial to flood the internet with AI music. Spotify could flag Slime Dot and other AI-generated music on its platform as such. Other platforms, like YouTube, already do this. 

Since Spotify doesn’t do that, users can visit SoullessMusic.com, a database for “AI artists hiding on Spotify. No bands, no studios, no soul, just machines and melody.” There, Slime Dot is listed as “almost certainly AI” based on an analysis of three of the tracks and the fact that Slime Dot released such a large number of tracks in a short period of time. Alternatively, users could go to SlopTracker, where they can upload files or copy/paste links to Spotify tracks to run them through a tool which will tell them, with varying degrees of confidence, whether a song was AI-generated or not. SlopTracker found that Slime Dot’s track “Fully” was 95 percent likely to be AI generated by Suno. 

“I didn't know what's AI and what's not,” Graeme Fulton, who created SoullessMusic, told me. “And then I'm on Instagram Reels and I see loads of artists unhappy saying some artist has popped up with their song and just copied it. And there's loads of different cases where they [AI artists] would copy an artist's look and appearance […] sort of just stealing from artists.”

Last year, I wrote a story about an exceptionally bad example of what Fulton is talking about. A scammer used Spotify to publish AI-generated music under the name of a real, dead musician, seemingly in an attempt to syphon money from his popularity via streams. After I published that story I heard from several (living) artists who said the same thing happened to them. A similar case involving a Danish jazz musician was covered by Danish publications in April. 

Another reader recently told me about a popular Spotify artist that was publishing hours of Iranian jazz every week. The channel, Qajar Jazz, which popped up in December of last year, has 29,579 monthly listeners, gained more popularity after the start of the U.S. war with Iran and the channel making vague allusions to resilience and preserving culture in video descriptions and comments on YouTube. Unlike Spotify, Qajar Jazz videos on YouTube are labeled as being AI-generated in the fine print, though it’s unclear if the channel tagged itself as such or if YouTube did. Both SoullessMusic and SlopTracker detect it as being AI generated. 

Qajar Jazz did not respond to a request for comment. 

Many of the YouTube comments on Qajar Jazz videos indicate that people think the music is made by real people. In addition to creating a database of AI generated music on Spotify, SoullessMusic also collects social media posts from people who say they were similarly tricked by AI generated music. Some posts are from musicians who lament the fact that they are now competing with algorithms that can produce thousands of tracks with no effort, and others are from artists whose music was directly ripped off by AI artists. 

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Fulton said he started looking around on GitHub for open source AI music detection tools, and ended up building a new, open source detector that relies on open source models called SONICS, the lofcz vocoder fakeprint detector, and other open data sets. SoullessMusic also  scans a track’s metadata for any tags that might tie it back to a specific AI music generator, and Fulton says he also has a script that scans Wikipedia for existing entries on an artist. Users can submit tracks from Spotify to the site they suspect are AI generated, and Fulton reviews them manually before adding them to the database. Despite all of this, he admits the system is not perfect. 

Both Soulless Music and SlopTracker use AI and other automated tools to detect AI music. As we’ve written previously, using AI detectors to detect AI content is an inherently flawed process that can lead to false positives. When I asked him how he handles cases of false positives, Fulton said “it's not ideal when that happens, but it's going to happen because it's still quite tricky to check what's AI and what’s not.”

Spotify’s lack of transparency and unwillingness to label AI-generated music makes it impossible to track how much money its making on the platform. Last year, the company announced that it would it would AI disclosures on AI generated music, but I haven’t seen it on any of the dozens of tracks I reviewed for this story. Udio and Sudo both include inaudible digital watermarking in their generation, which in theory could make it easy for Spotify to tag these tracks. 

Spotify did not respond to a request for comment. 

Soulless music attempts to quantify that number based on publicly available streaming data. The small number of AI artists tracked on SoullessMusic generate an estimated $5.7 million a year, with the most popular AI artist, mikeeysmind, generating $1.5 million annually alone. In April, Deezer, a Spotify competitor that attempts to tag all AI-generated music on its platform, said 44 percent of all new music uploaded to its platform is now AI generated. SlopTracker, which attempts to track AI generated music on Spotify that is featured on official Spotify-curated playlists, that those artists are “draining” $0.1188 per second from real artists who could be making the music instead.

For most young professionals, the prospect of renting a decently sized apartment in the center of a major U.S. metropolis like New York, Denver, or Miami can seem impossible. The cost of living in highly desirable urban centers has far outpaced overall salary increases. Urby is seeking to rectify this widespread dilemma and flip the script on what urban living looks like.

Launched in 2010 by seasoned developer David Barry, the chain has expanded into secondary and tertiary markets near these major urban cores, with suitable transportation links. Though the units are smaller, the emphasis is placed on the communal spaces.

Photography by Robert Tsai; courtesy of Urby and Concrete Amsterdam

“Apartment living in the United States has become especially transitory and sterile,” Barry says. “My goal has always been to create a more human experience and better facilitate social interaction.”

In locations like Staten Island, Jersey City, and Washington, D.C., these complexes have emerged as alternatives—fully amenitized, condensed communities, but not hermetically sealed enclaves. Rather, they’ve been successfully implemented to open up and embrace their surroundings.  Innovative, concept-oriented Dutch architecture firm Concrete Amsterdam has been involved since day one.

Photography by Robert Tsai; courtesy of Urby and Concrete Amsterdam

The company has been instrumental in defining smart layouts and finishing options for the compact, flexible studio to three-bedroom residences, as evidenced in Urby’s latest property in Philadelphia’s Fishtown neighborhood. Beta-tested in a factory before being introduced at scale, these units were designed to more closely align with the needs of Millennial and Gen-Z renters. The kitchens are galley-style but feature all of the essential top-line appliances. Large enough to accommodate queen-size mattresses and a dresser, bedrooms are separated in the layout so roommates have privacy.

Photography by Robert Tsai; courtesy of Urby and Concrete Amsterdam

Concrete Amsterdam has also been a crucial partner in shaping the program and design of shared spaces at each location, which include everything from a multifunctional work-from-home lounge that moonlights as a party room to an onsite hotel-style lobby restaurant, a fitness center, outdoor patios, and even a dog park.

After 15 years of collaboration, Fishtown Urby represents how the two companies have developed a distinctive yet refined approach through trial and error. “You’re always balancing your own experience with how trends are shifting,” says Barry. One such tendency that has emerged in the past few years is the ability to seamlessly move between social and fitness spaces.

Photography by Robert Tsai; courtesy of Urby and Concrete Amsterdam

At Fishtown Urby, a larger-than-average gym sits on the ground floor. It connects directly to a large backyard barbecue area and dog park. Nearby, a well-lit living room features soundproof office pods and banquette seating. The lobby is preceded by a semi-enclosed entrance courtyard designed with native plants by Belgian landscape architect Bas Smets. Percy, a retro-style cafe serving regional staples, also opens into this calm green space.

On the top floor, a hidden door leads into a purple-clad disco-style speakeasy with a picture window perfectly framing the Downtown Philly skyline. The rooftop patio serves as yet another gathering space; the strategically introduced cutaways help bring down the sheer scale of the block-wide, all-brick building, better aligning it with the proportion of the repurposed industrial structures and rowhomes in its vicinity.

Photography by Robert Tsai; courtesy of Urby and Concrete Amsterdam

“Every architectural detail here is designed to enhance daily living, from the robust brick envelope to the smartly positioned transom windows that balance privacy with daylight,” says Erikjan Vermeulen, partner at Concrete Amsterdam. “It’s about creating spaces that are not only beautiful, but genuinely functional for urban life.”

The most critical factor, Urby and Concrete’s key strategy across the chain, has always been to carefully introduce site-responsive elements that are functional, aesthetic, and allow the buildings to blend into the neighborhood. In Fishtown, the structure is emblazoned with a distinctive mural that honors the area’s industrial and creative heritage as well as the Dutch heritage of its maker, noted tattoo artist Henk Schiffmacher.

Photography by Robert Tsai; courtesy of Urby and Concrete Amsterdam

True to form when considering the particular strain of ironic irreverence that has defined Dutch design over the past few decades, Schiffmacher collaborated with Royal Delft, the renowned ceramic producer, on a series of Delft Blue plates. The traditional painted pottery features playful, tattoo-inspired patterns and imagery, including dragons, crying hearts, swallows, sailors, and clipper ships.

One of many in Fishtown, the mural also recalls the age-old tradition, developed by Dutch craftspeople in the 16th and 17th centuries, to imitate Chinese painted porcelain, which was hard to find at the time. Adding to the complex of cultural references embedded in the work, Schiffmacher also drew inspiration from the sacred songline motifs used by Aboriginal Australians as a form of wayfinding. Here, this type of pattern, introduced between the transom windows, is also chosen to honor the local indigenous Lenape people, who used beadwork as a means of communication.

Photography by Robert Tsai; courtesy of Urby and Concrete Amsterdam

The rest of the layered imagery nods to the more recent past and present of the location: tools used in the seafood industry that once thrived and the supplies of many of the artists that now live here. The blue-on-white paint scheme is what brings everything together.

Rather than functioning as a standalone apartment block, Fishtown Urby uses architecture, interiors, and public art alike to weave itself into the neighborhood it now calls home.

Photography by Robert Tsai; courtesy of Urby and Concrete Amsterdam