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Imagine you’re in a bookstore and you wander over to the fiction section. There, you find two shelves: one for human-written novels… and one for novels written by AI.

That future may not be as far off as you think. Roughly 4 million books were published in the U.S. in 2025. That’s a more than a 32 percent increase from 2024, according to the trade magazine Publisher’s Weekly.

It’s unclear how many of those books were written by AI, in part because software used to detect it can be ineffective. And the literary waters were made even murkier by the fact that at least 3 million of those 4 million books were self-published. That makes it even more difficult to know if they were written by human hands (er, minds).

That’s not to say the self-published portion of the industry is the only part where this tech is showing up. Hachette, one the largest publishers in the U.S., canceled one of its novels, “SHY GIRL,” after allegations that its author used AI to write it.

All this is marking a turning point for the publishing industry. How can authors ethically use this technology? And do readers really need new AI-authored books in a market already saturated with options?

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It’s that time of the year again. Have you finished filing your return?

Doing taxes this season has been particularly fraught – for both taxpayers and the Internal Revenue Service. It’s been a year since DOGE slashed federal funding and cut droves of federal employees. Those departures hit the IRS hard. Its leadership has largely turned over.

Also, Republicans in Congress took back billions of dollars the agency had received to improve its systems. Then, they gave the IRS even more tax code changes to enforce.

Can the IRS handle it all? And what do taxes – and a functional tax agency – have to do with the strength of U.S. democracy? We sit down with a panel of experts to find out.

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The Democrats are having a moment. They’ve enjoyed massive turnout for recent primaries, special elections, and local races. And voter data shows they’re also gaining support among Republican and independent voters.

In Wisconsin, liberal judge Chris Taylor recently won a spot on the state Supreme Court by nearly 20 points. That’s nearly double the margin of victory another liberal candidate in 2025.

Some Republicans are worried about what wins like these mean for the GOP’s performance in the midterms. And as a shrinking job market, high inflation, and a costly war in Iran drag down the economy, Democrats are seizing the moment to capture voters.

In this installment of our weekly politics series, “If You Can Keep It,” we go deep on the Democrats’ recent successes. How are voters responding to a Republican party struggling to deliver on its promises?

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The U.S. and Iran have agreed to a two-week ceasefire after President Donald Trump threatened that “a whole civilization will die” in a social media post this week. Iranian officials are temporarily reopening the Strait of Hormuz as long as the truce remains unbroken.

Trump also signed an executive order this week that restricts mail-in voting, a practice he’s long criticized due to his belief that it leads to fraud. There is no evidence for the president’s claim.

Meanwhile, the president’s former attorney general, Pam Bondi, has signaled she will not appear for a scheduled Congressional deposition over the crimes of Jeffrey Epstein.

And, in global news, despite the ceasefire between the U.S. and Iran, Israel is continuing its offensive in Lebanon meant to target the terrorist group Hezbollah.

Now that the Strait of Hormuz has temporarily reopened, analysts are expecting that it will take weeks for global energy supplies to rebound.

JD Vance was in Europe this week for a visit to Hungary where he repeatedly praised its president, Victor Orban, and attacked the European Union.

We cover the most important stories from around the world in the News Roundup.

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In 2019, Colorado Gov. Jared Polis, the first openly gay governor elected in the U.S., signed a bill banning conversion therapy in the state. Last week, the Supreme Court ruled that ban may be unconstitutional.

Conversion therapy seeks to change someone’s sexual orientation or gender identity. The practice has been deemed unethical and ineffective by most major mental health groups. And a study from the Trevor Project found that young people who go through conversion therapy were more than twice as likely to have reported attempting suicide compared to those who did not.

Only one Supreme Court justice dissented in this case. Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote that this decision “opens a dangerous can of worms” and “threatens to impair states’ ability to regulate the provision of medical care in any respect.”

What’s behind the Supreme Court’s decision that will likely overturn this ban? And how might this decision affect nearly two dozen other states that have similar bans?

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