BG Reads Weekend (4.27.2025)

Author

A.J. Bingham
April 27, 2025

PRESENTED BY

[TOP CLICKS OF THE WEEK]

[CITY OF AUSTIN]

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[WEEKEND NEWS]

🟪 Hugh Forrest no longer leading SXSW (Austin Business Journal)

Hugh Forrest, the president of South by Southwest — one of Austin's most consequential events — is no longer running the organization.

"Leaving South by Southwest was definitely not my decision," he said. "I put my heart and soul into this event for more than 35 years, and I was looking forward to leading several more additions. To this end, I will be rooting big time for the Austin team on the go forward. The city, the country, the world needs the positive energy South by Southwest has traditionally provided and needs it now more than ever."

Multiple sources said it was part of a broader staff reduction at SXSW but details weren't immediately available. Jody Arlington, communications director for SXSW, declined to comment.

Forrest took the reins late last year but has been with SXSW since nearly the beginning, working his way up for about 36 years. Along the way, the president has picked up numerous awards — he was Austinite of the Year in 2012 awarded by the Austin Chamber of Commerce, received an honorary doctorate of humane letters in 2018 from Kenyon College, his alma mater, and was an Austin Business Journal Power Player two years in a row… ✅ (LINK TO FULL STORY)

🟪 Eeyore's Birthday Party, a celebration of Austin's weirdness, turns 60 this weekend (KUT)

Austin's eclectic community festival is back at Pease Park on Saturday from 11 a.m. to dusk.

The annual birthday party in honor of the sad, lovable Winnie-the-Pooh character is celebrating its own milestone: 60 years of music, extravagant costumes and keeping Austin weird.

Though it's now a staple of Pease Park, Eeyore's Birthday originated at Eastwoods Park near UT Austin in 1964 as an end-of-year celebration for a university English class. The class had studied A.A. Milne, author of the Winnie-the-Pooh stories, hence the name of the event.

"Every spring, thousands of fans of A. A. Milne’s chronically gloomy donkey gather in their brightest costumes to cheer everybody up," a history on the festival's website reads.

Eeyore's Birthday moved to Pease Park in 1974. Over time, the event grew from a UT party to a nonprofit-run festival for the Austin community… ✅ (LINK TO FULL STORY)

🟪 1 in 5 Texas schools got a D or F rating under new performance standards (Texas Tribune)

Texas public school ratings — which grade how well districts educate their students — drastically dropped after the state implemented stricter scoring standards, new data released Thursday shows.

Low performance ratings on the state’s A-F scale set the stage for big consequences. Parents may enroll their students at a different campus, and businesses may forgo investments in those communities. Districts that get consecutive failing grades can face bruising state sanctions, like an order to shut down underperforming schools or a state takeover.

The Thursday release of ratings for the 2022-23 school year marked the first time failing grades for districts have been made public in five years. The percentage of schools in the state that got an F rating increased from 4.5% in 2019 to 7.6% in 2023.

Of the 8,539 public schools evaluated in the state, 19.3% received an A. Another 33.6% got a B, 24.7% a C, and 14.8% a D… ✅ (LINK TO FULL STORY)

🟪 U.S. judge says 2-year-old apparently deported to Honduras 'with no meaningful process' (NPR)

A Trump-nominated federal judge in Louisiana said that a 2-year-old American citizen appears to have been deported "with no meaningful process." This comes as the Trump administration has faced growing criticisms for its hurried proceedings to remove as many noncitizens from the country as quickly as possible.

U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty wrote that the toddler, identified as VML, had been sent to Honduras on Friday, alongside her mother and sister, even as the court had sought to clarify the girl's status. He set a hearing on the case for May 16 "in the interest of dispelling our strong suspicion that the Government just deported a U.S. citizen with no meaningful process."

On Friday afternoon, Doughty had called counsel for the federal government to try to speak with VML's mother and better understand the child's situation, but VML and her family were already "above the Gulf of America," the judge wrote, using President Trump's preferred term for the Gulf of Mexico… ✅ (LINK TO FULL STORY)

🟪 Tech industry tried reducing AI’s pervasive bias. Now Trump wants to end its ‘woke AI’ efforts (Associated Press)

Half an hour east of Austin, past the airport, the clogged-up traffic starts to melt away fter retreating from their workplace diversity, equity and inclusion programs, tech companies could now face a second reckoning over their DEI work in AI products.

In the White House and the Republican-led Congress, “woke AI” has replaced harmful algorithmic discrimination as a problem that needs fixing. Past efforts to “advance equity” in AI development and curb the production of “harmful and biased outputs” are a target of investigation, according to subpoenas sent to Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI and 10 other tech companies last month by the House Judiciary Committee.

And the standard-setting branch of the U.S. Commerce Department has deleted mentions of AI fairness, safety and “responsible AI” in its appeal for collaboration with outside researchers. It is instead instructing scientists to focus on “reducing ideological bias” in a way that will “enable human flourishing and economic competitiveness,” according to a copy of the document obtained by The Associated Press… ✅ (LINK TO FULL STORY)