I met Stephen Colbert a quarter century ago. He was a correspondent for Jon Stewart’s “Daily Show” at the time, I was a junior copywriter at a New York ad agency. We were testing out a radio ad campaign for one of our biggest clients, and our producer scored Colbert to be the voice-over for some of the test spots. Colbert came into the studio for two straight days — being paid at scale, which is basically the established minimum wage for members of the Screen Actors Guild — and blew the goddamn doors off the place.  He did as many takes as we needed from him. He ad-libbed off the script I’d written, inventing a shady friend of his named Spider whom he knew would just love getting AT&T Wireless’ friends and family plan for only $19.99 a month. He was as brilliant that day as he’d been on n…  ( 1 min )

There’s no way for me to write about the horror movie sensation “Backrooms” without betraying my age. Until very recently, I didn’t know that the film was based on a series of YouTube shorts that were, themselves, based on a 4chan thread. I didn’t know that the director of the “Backrooms” feature film was series director Kane Parsons, who’s all of 20 years old and has the most Zoomer name imaginable. When I learned of these facts, dear reader, all of my dormant boomer instincts kicked in. Immediately. I’m the kind of Gen Xer who wanted to die when one of his own kids said they wanted to be a YouTuber one day, so why would I volunteer to sit in a theater for two hours watching one such YouTuber ply their screechy trade? Isn’t there enough MrBeast in everything already? I was conditioned to …  ( 1 min )

Hello America-loving tourist, and welcome to the beautiful, algae-free Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, brought to you by President Donald J. Trump, the only man powerful enough to make the Reflecting Pool Great Again. You’ll notice the pool is surrounded by armed soldiers hoping you don't look at the water. That is for your safety and the safety of the newly refurbished Reflecting Pool, which is glistening and perfect and not at all covered with a thick layer of algae and stray chunks of American-flag-blue paint the media would have you believe exists. Before we begin our tour of this remarkable national landmark, I’ll remind everyone that there is no looking at the remarkable national landmark. If you didn’t receive blackout goggles when you bought your ticket for the tour, please keep …  ( 14 min )

Few things represent the “DEI, but for unqualified goons” approach President Donald Trump takes to his Cabinet appointees better than this June 2 headline from The Washington Post: “Trump picks mortgage chief Bill Pulte to lead on national intelligence.” Perfect. A 38-year-old pal of Donald Trump Jr. with a degree in broadcast journalism and experience in finance and home building, coupled with zero background in intelligence or national security, will now be America’s acting director of national intelligence. I feel safer already. Pulte has been serving as director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, though his actions have largely been serving Trump and his unquenchable thirst for revenge against political opponents.  Pulte pushed the Justice Department to launch mortgage-fraud invest…  ( 14 min )

When the musical lineup for President Donald Trump’s Freedom 250 celebration was announced, I was fired up. The list of performers for what’s billed as “The Great American State Fair,” a 16-day event on the National Mall starting June 25, included: Milli Vanilli, Young MC, C+C Music Factory, Morris Day and The Time, and Poison lead singer Bret Michaels. Because I love Trump and America, and because my brain rejects information that runs contrary to my ideological beliefs, I considered that lineup a victory for conservatives and proof that we are culturally relevant. Rude liberals keep attacking the Freedom 250 music lineup But the lefties out there were quick to suggest Milli Vanilli and company would make a perfect lineup for an off-night county fair B-stage. Nasty comedian John Oliver, …  ( 14 min )

The Supreme Court term is over a.cta_button{-moz-box-sizing:content-box !important;-webkit-box-sizing:content-box !important;box-sizing:content-box !important;vertical-align:middle}.hs-breadcrumb-menu{list-style-type:none;margin:0px 0px 0px 0px;padding:0px 0px 0px 0px}.hs-breadcrumb-menu-item{float:left;padding:10px 0px 10px 10px}.hs-breadcrumb-menu-divider:before{content:'›';padding-left:10px}.hs-featured-image-link{border:0}.hs-featured-image{float:right;margin:0 0 20px 20px;max-width:50%}@media (max-width: 568px){.hs-featured-image{float:none;margin:0;width:100%;max-width:100%}}.hs-screen-reader-text{clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);height:1px;overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;width:1px} 96 …  ( 3 min )

Top stories 07/01/2026_copy#outlook a { padding:0; } .ExternalClass { width:100%; } .ExternalClass, .ExternalClass p, .ExternalClass span, .ExternalClass font, .ExternalClass td, .ExternalClass div { line-height: 100%; } table td { border-collapse: collapse; mso-line-height-rule: exactly; } .editable.image { font-size: 0 !important; line-height: 0 !important; } .nl2go_preheader { display: none !important; mso-hide:all !important; mso-line-height-rule: exactly; visibility: hidden !important; line-height: 0px !important; font-size: 0px !important; } body { width:100% !important; -webkit-text-size-adjust:100%; -ms-text-size-adjust:100%; margin:0; padding:0; } img { outline:none; text-decoration:none; -ms-interpolation-mode: bicubic; } a img { border:none; } table { border-collapse:collapse; m…  ( 6 min )

Gazing into the redistricting crystal ball a.cta_button{-moz-box-sizing:content-box !important;-webkit-box-sizing:content-box !important;box-sizing:content-box !important;vertical-align:middle}.hs-breadcrumb-menu{list-style-type:none;margin:0px 0px 0px 0px;padding:0px 0px 0px 0px}.hs-breadcrumb-menu-item{float:left;padding:10px 0px 10px 10px}.hs-breadcrumb-menu-divider:before{content:'›';padding-left:10px}.hs-featured-image-link{border:0}.hs-featured-image{float:right;margin:0 0 20px 20px;max-width:50%}@media (max-width: 568px){.hs-featured-image{float:none;margin:0;width:100%;max-width:100%}}.hs-screen-reader-text{clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);height:1px;overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;width:1px} 96 …  ( 5 min )

96 Fighting for the Next 250 Years img{-ms-interpolation-mode:bicubic;} table, td{mso-table-lspace:0pt;mso-table-rspace:0pt;} .mceStandardButton, .mceStandardButton td, .mceStandardButton td a{mso-hide:all!important;} p, a, li, td, blockquote{mso-line-height-rule:exactly;} p, a, li, td, body, table, blockquote{-ms-text-size-adjust:100%;-webkit-text-size-adjust:100%;} .mcnPreviewText{display:none!important;} .bodyCell{margin:0 auto;padding:0;width:100%;} .ExternalClass, .ExternalClass p, .ExternalClass td, .ExternalClass div, .ExternalClass span, .ExternalClass font{line-height:100%;} .ReadMsgBody, .ExternalClass{width:100%;} a[x-apple-data-detectors]{color:inherit!important;text-decoration:none!important;font-size:inherit!important;font-family:inherit!important;font-weight:inherit!…  ( 7 min )

signing and optionally encrypting emails sent with mu4e. The idea is to sign each email you send and if you have a GPG key for every recipient, encrypt it was well. As Cavigneaux says, it’s pretty easy to sign and/or encrypt messages with mu4e but you have to remember to do it and most people, including him, don’t always remember. The solution, of course, is to automate the process so that you don’t have to remember. That turns out to be pretty easy to do. Cavigneaux has the necessary code in his post. The basic flow is to check if you have everyone’s encryption key and, if so, encrypt the message. Regardless of whether or not everyone’s encryption key is available sign the message. There are calls available for both the signing and encryption. The process is kicked off with the send-message-hook every time you send a message. There was a time when encrypting all your messages was the thing to do but difficulties with key distribution have pretty much put an end to the encrypt all emails movement. Most people don’t have keys and those who do will probably be annoyed to receive mundane emails that are encrypted. For those sensitive emails being sent to people you know have keys, you pretty much automatically remember to encrypt them. That leaves signing. It mostly doesn’t hurt anything1 so it probably doesn’t matter if you always sign your messages, especially if you have reasons to suspect that their contents might come into dispute. I’ve stopped doing even that because, as I say, no one has any idea what it means. So my takeaway is that if you’re paranoid about certifying the content of your emails or you regularly deal with people who want to ensure themselves that they’re communication with you, it may make sense to automatically sign your emails. Except in special circumstances, I don’t see any reason to encrypt all your emails. Footnotes: 1 Although I do remember being queried about those unreadable binary blobs at the end of my emails.  ( 5 min )

reaction video to the first part of YE24: Sacha and Prot Talk Emacs - Newbies/Starter Kits. Here's his vid: Watch on YouTube YouTube might be holding my comment for moderation because I tried to add too many links to it. I also realized my timestamps were off in my YT comment, so here it is along with other stuff I've just added. On my Newbies/Starter Kits chat with Prot Learning Emacs in order to organize your life Learning Emacs with people Reddit links Timestamps My evil plan On my Newbies/Starter Kits chat with Prot Learning Emacs in order to organize your life 02:20:13 What do I want to do with Emacs? I think, like I've said it before, organize my life a little bit better. Try Org, pretty much. I don't care about Emacs for editing Markdown files. That wouldn't make sense, …  ( 10 min )

I maintain a bunch of theme ports these days: Zenburn, Solarized, Tokyo Night, and most recently Batppuccin. Every one of them wants screenshots in the README, ideally one per variant, so people can compare the flavors at a glance. I’d been putting this off forever, because taking the screenshots by hand is such a chore. Load a theme, resize the frame, arrange a nice-looking buffer, take a screenshot, crop it, then repeat for every single flavor. And the results are never quite consistent: the font is a little different, the window is a slightly different size, the crop is off by a few pixels. Multiply that by four flavors across several themes and you can see why I kept finding better things to do. So recently I finally did what I should have done from the start and taught Emacs to take t…  ( 9 min )

Welcome to Listening Habits, a column where I share the music and musical topics I’ve been fixated on recently. It can be hard to remember amidst the downfall of everything, but 250 years of America is a major milestone. America, more of a grand experiment than a nation, a fantastical idea suggesting a very modern notion that the point of a country is the pursuit of the unachievable, starting with happiness. A nation that aspires toward its utopian principles but at heart is just as much about territory, empire, and extraction. It's a nation of contradictions, is what I'm getting at: atop those purple mountains' majesty and above those fruited plains lies both beauty and madness, achievement and grift, togetherness and division. And no nation loves its own mythology like America does. You can follow official White House Twitter accounts to see that. It's a mythology that imagines America not as a fight over taxes or even as the "brave" discovery of a definitely-not-lost (please do not say that he got lost) Christopher Columbus, but as a nation literally crafted by white God himself, with little baby Jesus in his loving arms. America especially loves its myths on the Fourth of July: hotdogs, sparklers, baseball, freshly baked apple pie on a kitchen windowsill. Precious, but also convenient, it fits a motif of America as a place not just for white people but that belongs to them. Or to quote my favorite line from The Good Shepherd, on the subject of what it is that WASPs have: "The United States of America, the rest of you are just visiting."  ( 24 min )

Perhaps it is too fucking hot where you are to do anything outside this weekend. Perhaps you prefer to be locked inside watching World Cup matches while eating popsicles. While you do that, feel free to hang out here and chat in the open thread.  ( 11 min )

There's a bit of symmetry in the new Netflix documentary The Final Set, a chronicle of the epic, tumultuous rivalry and friendship between Martina Navratilova and Chris Evert. Long removed from their legendary careers, both women were diagnosed with cancer in recent years: ovarian for Evert, breast and throat for Navratilova. After beating back the disease, they each go in for a scan. Just before sliding into the tubular machine, Evert hesitates, then removes her cap for comfort, revealing her chemo-bald head. Navratilova follows the exact same instinct at her appointment, taking off her shoes at the last second. In both cases, the discarded article of clothing lay nearest their greatest on-court asset, as portrayed in the doc. Evert is praised for her unwaveringly calm mindset; Navratilov…  ( 25 min )

The White Sox lead the Guardians in the AL Central by fractions of percentage points as the teams square off in Cleveland Anthony Kay faces Gavin Williams. Kay this season owns a low K rate and walks a few too many batters, leading to .353 OBP and a 4.50 ERA. Williams does fine with his […]  ( 26 min )

The Log5 Method yields these top projected hit averages versus starting pitchers: 0.294, 0.677 — Blaze Alexander batting at Brady Singer. 0.291, 0.703 — Ernie Clement batting at Luis Castillo. 0.290, 0.709 — Otto Lopez batting at Jackson Perkins. 0.290, 0.725 — Luis Arraez batting at Ryan Feltner. 0.284, 0.709 — Jung Hoo Lee batting […]  ( 27 min )

Junior Caminero of the Rays stayed atop the Baseball Musings Batter Rankings despite an 0 for 5 performance that ended his six-game home run streak. His teammates, Jonathan Aranda and Yandy Diaz rank third and fourth respectively. Aranda posted a one for five while Diaz drew two walks in a 5-2 win over the Royals. […]  ( 26 min )

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We read all 927 pages so you didn’t have to. Here’s what they buried.

Donald Trump’s well-documented ability to destroy everything he touches has come for what should have been the easiest of tasks: making the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence fun. If there is one thing the world’s oldest democracy is good at, it’s throwing Independence Day parties, hosting outdoor concerts, and filling out state fairs with charmingly schlocky entertainment and ice cream stands. Producing the Great American State Fair in Washington, D.C., was considered such a layup for the Trump-led Freedom 250 organizers that it’s no surprise Fox News, eager to showcase a MAGA win, set up a broadcast tower, seemingly intent on giving the event wall-to-wall coverage for its full 16-day run. As anyone who has been on social media can attest, this was a mista…  ( 8 min )

Theory: The Tayvis Wedding Isn’t A Wedding At All96 :root { color-scheme: light; supported-color-schemes: light; } body { margin: 0; padding: 0; min-width: 100%!important; -ms-text-size-adjust: 100% !important; -webkit-transform: scale(1) !important; -webkit-text-size-adjust: 100% !important; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased !important; } .body { word-wrap: normal; word-spacing:normal; } table.mso { width: 100%; border-collapse: collapse; padding: 0; table-layout: fixed; } img { border: 0; outline: none; } table { mso-table-lspace: 0px; mso-table-rspace: 0px; } td, a, span { mso-line-height-rule: exactly; } #root [x-apple-data-detectors=true], a[x-apple-data-detectors=true], #MessageViewBody a { color: inherit !important; text-decoration: inherit !important; font-s…  ( 7 min )

We will get together next Friday at 1pm ET/Happy July 4th All!

Big win for the US Men's team!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Judge Pitts issued the preliminary injunction covering a subpoena directed at Stanford. Also: About the dismissed charges in the "judge shopping" case. And: The SCOTUS shadow docket is still going.

The Royals announced that they have selected the contract of catcher Luke Maile. Outfielder John Rave has been optioned to Triple-A Omaha as the corresponding active roster move. The Royals opened a 40-man spot by designating right-hander Eric Cerantola for assignment. Maile, 35, is a journeyman depth catcher. Over the years, he has suited up […]  ( 6 min )

Royals left-hander Cole Ragans underwent surgery on the ulnar collateral ligament in his throwing elbow, reports Anne Rogers of MLB.com. It was reported last week that Ragans would be undergoing elbow surgery, but the details of the procedure weren’t clear. The Royals now expect Ragans to miss 10 to 12 months, per Jaylon T. Thompson […]  ( 8 min )

The Royals announced Thursday that they’ve signed veteran righty Scott Barlow to a minor league deal. The Warner Sports Management client was released by the A’s earlier in the week. He now returns to the organization with which he made his major league debut in 2018. Barlow didn’t just debut with the Royals but rather […]  ( 8 min )

Trump admin targets Fulton County poll workers a.cta_button{-moz-box-sizing:content-box !important;-webkit-box-sizing:content-box !important;box-sizing:content-box !important;vertical-align:middle}.hs-breadcrumb-menu{list-style-type:none;margin:0px 0px 0px 0px;padding:0px 0px 0px 0px}.hs-breadcrumb-menu-item{float:left;padding:10px 0px 10px 10px}.hs-breadcrumb-menu-divider:before{content:'›';padding-left:10px}.hs-featured-image-link{border:0}.hs-featured-image{float:right;margin:0 0 20px 20px;max-width:50%}@media (max-width: 568px){.hs-featured-image{float:none;margin:0;width:100%;max-width:100%}}.hs-screen-reader-text{clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);height:1px;overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;width:1px} 96 …  ( 5 min )

Judges Across the Nation Agree: The DOJ's Legal Argument for Seizing Voter Rolls Does Not Hold Up#outlook a { padding:0; } .ExternalClass { width:100%; } .ExternalClass, .ExternalClass p, .ExternalClass span, .ExternalClass font, .ExternalClass td, .ExternalClass div { line-height: 100%; } table td { border-collapse: collapse; mso-line-height-rule: exactly; } .editable.image { font-size: 0 !important; line-height: 0 !important; } .nl2go_preheader { display: none !important; mso-hide:all !important; mso-line-height-rule: exactly; visibility: hidden !important; line-height: 0px !important; font-size: 0px !important; } body { width:100% !important; -webkit-text-size-adjust:100%; -ms-text-size-adjust:100%; margin:0; padding:0; } img { outline:none; text-decoration:none; -ms-interpolation-mode:…  ( 9 min )

Americans United for Separation of Church and State 96 @font-face { font-family: 'Overpass'; font-style: normal; font-weight: 300; font-display: swap; src: url('https://fonts.gstatic.com/s/overpass/v19/qFda35WCmI96Ajtm83upeyoaX6QPnlo6ovPbPpqKl8Kuo8Az.woff2') format('woff2'); unicode-range: U+0000-00FF, U+0131, U+0152-0153, U+02BB-02BC, U+02C6, U+02DA, U+02DC, U+0304, U+0308, U+0329, U+2000-206F, U+20AC, U+2122, U+2191, U+2193, U+2212, U+2215, U+FEFF, U+FFFD; } @font-face { font-family: 'Overpass'; font-style: italic; font-weight: 300; font-display: swap; src: url('https://fonts.gstatic.com/s/overpass/v19/qFdU35WCmI96Ajtm81GgSdXCNs-VMF0vNLBdeqqIncOMp9gyUsE.woff2') format('woff2'); unicode-range: U+0000-00FF, U+0131, U+0152-0153, U+02BB-02BC, U+02C6, U+02DA, U…

Email from Substack @media (max-width: 1024px) { .typography .pullquote-align-left, .typography.editor .pullquote-align-left, .typography .pullquote-align-right, .typography.editor .pullquote-align-right, .typography .pullquote-align-wide, .typography.editor .pullquote-align-wide, .typography .pullquote-align-center, .typography.editor .pullquote-align-center { float: none; margin: 0 auto; width: 100%; max-width: 100%; } } @media all and (-ms-high-contrast: none), (-ms-high-contrast: active) { .typography .markup table.image-wrapper img, .typography.editor .markup table.image-wrapper img, .typography .markup table.kindle-wrapper img, .typography.editor .markup table.kindle-wrapper img { max-width: 550px; } } @media (min-width: 1024px) { .ty…  ( 8 min )

96 *{box-sizing:border-box}body{margin:0;padding:0}a[x-apple-data-detectors]{color:inherit!important;text-decoration:inherit!important}#MessageViewBody a{color:inherit;text-decoration:none}p{line-height:inherit}.desktop_hide,.desktop_hide table{mso-hide:all;display:none;max-height:0;overflow:hidden}.image_block img+div{display:none}sub,sup{font-size:75%;line-height:0} @media (max-width:670px){.row-content{width:100%!important}.stack .column{width:100%;display:block}.mobile_hide{min-height:0;max-height:0;max-width:0;display:none;overflow:hidden;font-size:0}.desktop_hide,.desktop_hide table{display:table!important;max-height:none!important}.social_block .social-table{display:inline-block!important}} sup, sub { font-size: 100% !important; } sup { mso-text-raise:10% } sub { mso-text-raise:-1…

96 *{box-sizing:border-box}body{margin:0;padding:0}a[x-apple-data-detectors]{color:inherit!important;text-decoration:inherit!important}#MessageViewBody a{color:inherit;text-decoration:none}p{line-height:inherit}.desktop_hide,.desktop_hide table{mso-hide:all;display:none;max-height:0;overflow:hidden}.image_block img+div{display:none}sub,sup{font-size:75%;line-height:0}#converted-body .list_block ol,#converted-body .list_block ul,.body [class~=x_list_block] ol,.body [class~=x_list_block] ul,u+.body .list_block ol,u+.body .list_block ul{padding-left:20px} @media (max-width:620px){.image_block div.fullWidth{max-width:100%!important}.row-content{width:100%!important}.stack .column{width:100%;display:block}.mobile_hide{min-height:0;max-height:0;max-width:0;display:none;overflow:hidden;font-size…  ( 7 min )

I have found a peculiar delight in encryption, and particularly in using pgp-based asymmetric cryptography. This is especially useful for securing email communications, but doing so requires remembering to run M-x mml-secure-sign or mml-secure-encrypt in Mail Utilities For Emacs (Mu4e) before sending the message. For this reason I have been wanting to write a quick method that automatically adds signing capabilities and encryption only the recipient has a public key. Thankfully, I did not have to do so because of Nicolas Cavigneaux’s recent post Sign Always, Encrypt When Possible where he showcases his functins for doing exactly that. It prompted me to tweak it slightly, and to add the functionality to automatically discover public keys that I have yet to import. Cavigneaux’s post sets …  ( 4 min )

the release of Magit 4.6. It includes, he says, over 300 commits since the last release 6 months ago. You can check Bernoulli’s post for the details but an overview is that the main changes were in Blob handling. Working with blobs should be easier and make more sense with this release. Experimental syntax highlighting in diffs. Improved hook handling that allows for the calling of Elisp hooks from Git hooks. Improved commit message processing. List of changed definitions in a diff are now available for composing a git commit message. his support page to see how you can help out.  ( 5 min )

Even though our current president wouldn’t even be fit to clean our founder’s spittoons, I believe we can still find hope and joy on our country’s sesquicentennial.

The state’s board of education also plans to “significantly expand lessons on communism,” whatever the hell that means.  ( 187 min )

Now that we've covered two of the most interesting fellas who will be riding the 2026 Tour de France, and the theory of why they'll be riding this particular route, it's time to talk about the route itself. This year's Tour will span 3,321 kilometers of Spain and France while flirting with the Swiss and German borders. The route's 54,450 meters of vertical gain make it the third-most demanding Tour of the last 20 years, though that's deceptive, since a lot of that gain is distributed across the many intermediate, hilly stages rather than condensed in set-piece mountain stages. The 26 kilometers of individual time-trialing are also the third fewest of the last 20 years. There are four obvious sprint stages, as well as two stages I am pretty sure will come down to bunch kicks. It's a difficult route, but also quite fun. The second week is where I think I will crack, the third where the race will be decided. As a means of previewing each stage, I'm less interested in picking winners than in discussing the possible shape of each day's racing. I will also award each stage a number of radishes, on a scale from one to seven, to indicate how exciting I think it will be. Allez!  ( 51 min )

Ever since I was scooped up as a froglet from my marsh, taken into this laboratory, and developed a burgeoning freelance writing career, I have felt lost. I know I am searching, but I do not know what I seek. I want to share my life story with someone, anyone. I want to understand who I have been and what I have done, or, rather, what has been done to me. Some days I am not sure even I believe in myself. Am I really so alone in my experience of this world? Have other frogs tasted the noxious nectar of the bombardier beetle or the sickly crackle of the penis barbs of a wasp? Been pierced through the lip and through the eye by the stinger of the northern giant hornet? Escaped the gnashing jaws of their one true love? O, how I yearn to look beyond the walls of my cube and find other frogs who…  ( 33 min )

It has long been a staple of sporting analysis that the last thing you saw is a terrible predictor of the thing you will see. Las Vegas is paved with the headstones of people who thought they figured out a team's future by breaking down its past. And then there's the Belgium men's national soccer team, which takes this adage one fallacy further by being different teams within the same game, and doing it repeatedly so that the cagey analyst just walks away at the start of the national anthem and says, "Tell me when it ends." They got to this point with a tedious draw against Egypt and then doubling down on the tedium with a scoreless draw with Iran; only a mismatched victory over New Zealand allowed them to win their group and advance to Wednesday night.  Thus, it is with exhausted joy mixed with bewilderment that the USMNT prepares for next Monday's round-of-16 showdown with the Belgians, whose performance in their 3-2 extra-time victory over Senegal was very late-model Belgian indeed. They were listless, bland, and seemingly too old to be bold for 85 minutes, during which time they fell behind the far more intrepid and inventive Senegalese, 2-0, and even subbed out their best-ever player (Kevin De Bruyne) and most capable attacker (Jeremy Doku) in what looked like acknowledgement of the inevitable. They were so fried with the game and each other that a second-half hydration break scufflette broke out between Youri Tielemans and Leandro Trossard.  ( 18 min )

Whether you remember his name or not, you've probably been reading about Judge Reed O'Connor and his judicial malevolence for years. O'Connor is making headlines again for being one of two judges to sentence 15 ICE protestors to a combined 547 years in prison. As the writer Lauren Fadiman pointed out in The Baffler, the media often uses "Prairieland ICE shooting" as a misleading shorthand for the protest. What actually happened is hard to capture in three words.  On the night of July 4, 2025, about a dozen people held a noise demonstration outside of the ICE Prairieland Detention Center in Alvarado, Texas. A few of them vandalized vehicles and guard structures, which cost the detention center around $2,200 to repair. Some set off fireworks in hopes of catching the attention of detainees, c…  ( 32 min )

This here is not a personal diatribe about Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce. I got no beef with either of these two crazy kids. Swift is one of the hardest-working entertainers in show business, and Kelce is one of the greatest tight ends to ever play pro football. They’re more than welcome to fall in love, and Swift is more than welcome to pen songs about her man’s girthy member. The pair are also free to tie the knot anytime, and anywhere, they like. Except for … One of the biggest events of the summer has been a mystery: When and where are Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce getting married? And when does everyone get to celebrate? New details confirmed by The New York Times suggest a multiple-day event at Madison Square Garden, which an entertainment industry executive said Ms. Swift had rented. The entertainment industry executive and another person with knowledge of the matter described the anticipated festivities: On July 2, the plans call for an intimate gathering of about 100 people at the Garden. The next day on July 3, about 1,000 guests would gather there for a splashier celebration, with possible stage appearances. Seriously? You two are getting married at Madison Square fucking Garden? YOU FUCKING ASSHOLES.  ( 22 min )

Up until a month ago, I rarely thought about '90s club legends The KLF. This is because The KLF were never all that big in the States, and thus I only remember them for their biggest single here, “3:00 a.m. Eternal.” If I had been paying closer attention, I would have discovered that the group, led by musicians Jimmy Cauty and Bill Drummond, were singing “ancients of Mu Mu” in the chorus of that song, in reference to a mythical, pre-Atlantis lost continent. I also would have known that Drummond was a multi-hyphenate of the oddest sort: a musician/producer/promoter/performance artist/carpenter who, in tandem with Cauty, infamously took a million pounds sterling from their KLF earnings and deliberately lit it on fire. Now, the easiest explanation as to why these two men set a bagful of money on fire is that they were fucking insane. But if you’ve read author John Higgs’s incredible history of The KLF, as I just did, you might be more amenable to its founders’ runaway train of thought. After all, you don’t help stage a 12-hour production about the Illuminati, shepherd Echo & The Bunnymen into the British mainstream, become worldwide pop stars in your own right, and then delete your entire back catalog without something, possibly drug-aided, going on up there. Is it not worth following your muse, even if that muse might come off as superficially cuckoo-nanners? Is there not value in the act of creation, and of creative destruction? In fact, what if art is at its core an act of conjuring? Of magic? Also, why did Tammy Wynette decide to lay down a track for these two lunatics when they cold-called her? THAT, my friends, is (kinda) the subject of this week’s Distraction.  ( 17 min )

Things come out of Donald Trump's mouth, then just keep on coming out of it. If he says something once, he will say it again, primarily to reinforce how powerfully and unprecedentedly successful he was in having said it in the first place, but also because he so enjoys the sound of his own voice saying all the famous things that he says. The picture-book binaries that define and proscribe his understanding of the world—big and small, good and bad, hot and cold, rich and poor, white and not white—set the boundaries, but there is not any editorial process beyond that. No one who serves him would ever give him notes, and he would never deign to take them from anyone in his service anyway. Everything he says or does is just a thing that happens; a dishearteningly large portion of political media comes down to making sure that people who follow current events are made aware of it whenever it does. They're good at this, too, which means that you are probably aware that Trump frequently delivers some version of this statement, which is from a speech he made on Dec. 17, 2025: "One year ago, our country was dead. We were absolutely dead. Our country was ready to fail. Totally fail. Now we’re the hottest country anywhere in the world. And that’s said by every single leader that I’ve spoken to over the last five months."  ( 33 min )

To Jan Brueghel the Elder, paradise could not be contained to a single biome. Many of Brueghel's paintings teem with menageries of birds, mammals, reptiles, and fish that would never ordinarily meet in the wild: monkeys from the Americas mingling with birds from Europe and ungulates from Asia. Brueghel's paintings were also striking for their scientific accuracy, as Arianne Faber Kolb wrote in her study Jan Brueghel the Elder: The Entry of the Animals into Noah's Ark. In the 1500s, European exploration and subsequent exploitation of other continents introduced Europe to many exotic new species which wound their way into fine art. Unlike other painters of his age, Brueghel avoided including mythical creatures like unicorns in his landscapes. To Brueghel, the newfound abundance of the planet…  ( 28 min )

The Boston Celtics finally found another team serious about trading for Jaylen Brown. Following a couple of weeks where everyone offered their own opinion about the star's true value, the Philadelphia 76ers came in with a real offer—"real" in that it existed and was accepted, not that it was good for the Celtics. Those dreams of acquiring Giannis Antetokounmpo or even Jamal Murray in exchange for Brown did not come to pass. Boston's reality is this, as reported Wednesday night by ESPN's Shams Charania: Paul George, two first-round picks, and two second-rounders. That's it. That's what the Celtics accepted for the five-time All-Star and 2024 Finals MVP, whom they gave to a conference rival. The LaMelo Ball trade involved more first-rounders. The goddamn Walker Kessler trade involved more first-rounders! The Celtics weren't discreet about their willingness to move Brown, after a season that began with low expectations due to Jayson Tatum's recovery from an Achilles injury suffered in the 2025 playoffs, then became surprisingly competitive, then concluded in embarrassing fashion when the team blew a 3-1 series lead to the Sixers in the first round. Brown reacted to that postseason collapse by going on Twitch to litigate the officiating and complain about how much Joel Embiid flops. Now those two are teammates. The Celtics humiliated themselves as well as the guy they traded away.  ( 20 min )

It is said, probably more often than is necessary, that a team that loses a player to a red card must be prepared to suffer. This is particularly true when the team that has gone down a man has a lead to protect. As soon as that card comes out, fans must prepare to watch their team hunker down, absorb constant pressure from the opponent, and pray to god that they can hold onto the lead. It's not always like this, though. Sometimes, the talent disparity between two teams is so vast that the superior squad can go down a man and still control the game, even dominate it in certain phases. It's rare to see this happen, and when it does it serves as a reminder of how far talent, and each individual player's belief in their own talent, can go. So imagine my surprise, my utter, worldview-altering shock, upon seeing the USMNT, the historically talent-deficient and swaggerless international soccer team I've loved but never expected much from, brush away Bosnia and Herzegovina in the knockout round, 2-0, despite being down a man for 36 minutes. Bosnia and Herzegovina is not a very good team, and the Dragons were proving it through the first 64 minutes of Wednesday night's game. Folarin Balogun's goal in the 45th minute was the result of a sustained application of pressure from the Americans that could have produced another goal or two had a few breaks gone the other direction. The USMNT was in control, and cruising towards the round of 16, until Balogun was banished from the field thanks to a VAR-induced red card.  ( 21 min )

Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s opinion emphasized that sports are “different.” But conservative activists are already celebrating what the case will allow them to do next. The post Conservative Activists Know the Trans Sports Ban Case Isn’t Just About Sports appeared first on Balls and Strikes.  ( 6 min )

96 What’s in a baseball season? @media only screen and (max-width: 620px) { table.body { width: 100%; min-width: 100%; } table.body .content { padding: 0 !important; } table.body .container { padding: 0 !important; width: 100% !important; } table.body .main { border-spacing: 10px 0 !important; border-left-width: 0 !important; border-radius: 0 !important; border-right-width: 0 !important; } table.body .img-responsive { height: auto !important; max-width: 100% !important; width: auto !important; } } @media all { .ExternalClass { width: 100%; } .ExternalClass, .ExternalClass p, .ExternalClass span, .ExternalClass font, .ExternalClass td, .ExternalClass div { line-height: 100%; } .apple…  ( 12 min )

.ck-link { text-decoration: underline; } @media only screen { .email * { word-break: break-word; } } @media screen and (max-width: 384px) { .mail-message-content { width: 414px !important; } } @media only screen and (max-width:600px) { .ck-mobile-font-size { font-size:50px !important; } } Here's what to say when a tech giant asks for your salary expectations  ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏…  ( 4 min )

96 A baseball game was played @media only screen and (max-width: 620px) { table.body { width: 100%; min-width: 100%; } table.body .content { padding: 0 !important; } table.body .container { padding: 0 !important; width: 100% !important; } table.body .main { border-spacing: 10px 0 !important; border-left-width: 0 !important; border-radius: 0 !important; border-right-width: 0 !important; } table.body .img-responsive { height: auto !important; max-width: 100% !important; width: auto !important; } } @media all { .ExternalClass { width: 100%; } .ExternalClass, .ExternalClass p, .ExternalClass span, .ExternalClass font, .ExternalClass td, .ExternalClass div { line-height: 100%; } .apple-l…  ( 9 min )

96 For All Fankind @media only screen and (max-width: 620px) { table.body { width: 100%; min-width: 100%; } table.body .content { padding: 0 !important; } table.body .container { padding: 0 !important; width: 100% !important; } table.body .main { border-spacing: 10px 0 !important; border-left-width: 0 !important; border-radius: 0 !important; border-right-width: 0 !important; } table.body .img-responsive { height: auto !important; max-width: 100% !important; width: auto !important; } } @media all { .ExternalClass { width: 100%; } .ExternalClass, .ExternalClass p, .ExternalClass span, .ExternalClass font, .ExternalClass td, .ExternalClass div { line-height: 100%; } .apple-link a { …  ( 6 min )

Plus: Hochul just cut checks to the farmers Trump’s tariffs broke

The Log5 Method yields these top projected hit averages versus starting pitchers: 0.366, 0.750 — Otto Lopez batting at Michael Lorenzen. 0.339, 0.729 — Xavier Edwards batting at Michael Lorenzen. 0.321, 0.698 — Javier Sanoja batting at Michael Lorenzen. 0.309, 0.681 — Liam Hicks batting at Michael Lorenzen. 0.300, 0.715 — Yandy Diaz batting at […]  ( 27 min )

Junior Caminero of the Rays homered in his sixth straight game to top the Baseball Musings Batter Rankings. He is now on the edge of history as only five players homered in at least seven straight games, three of them pushing to the record of eight straight. Wednesday was a three-true outcome day for him […]  ( 26 min )

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The Supreme Court had numerous opportunities during OT2025 to act (and appear to be acting) above politics. One key theme of the term is how many it squandered.

The 5-4 decision was the least the court could do to keep the United States of America on a constitutional path.

Music and movies have always gone hand in hand. A great soundtrack can elevate an ordinary film, but every so often, a movie comes along where the music isn’t just part of the experience—it is the experience. Whether it’s chronicling the rise and fall of legendary artists, capturing the chaos of life on the road,...  ( 31 min )

Raw link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjCbNOqUgTs In this video demonstration I show the tools I use to write in French using Emacs. One is the built-in framework for input methods, which allows us to compose characters to express the full range of the language we are typing in (e.g. French or Greek). The other is a spell-checking package called jinx, which is developed by Daniel Mendler. Below is the code I showed in the video: (use-package emacs :demand t :bind ( :map global-map ;; The `toggle-input-method' sets the latest selected input ;; method, or the one defined in `default-input-method'. Once an ;; input method is set, `toggle-input-method' will switch back to ;; the standard Emacs input. ("" . toggle-input-method)) :config ;; Call the command `describe-input-method' to get a description of ;; what the given input method supports in terms of key sequences as ;; well as the key layout it has. (setq default-input-method "french-postfix")) ;; You need to have libenchant available on your system. For example, ;; Debian provides the package `libenchant-2-dev'. (use-package jinx :ensure t :demand t :bind ( :map global-map ("M-$" . jinx-correct) ; or bind `jinx-correct-all' ("C-M-$" . jinx-languages)) :config ;; Here you can specify a string with space-separated dictionaries. ;; I install the aspell dictionaries, such as the Debian package ;; `aspell-fr' for French and `aspell-el' for Greek (Éllinika). ;; With `aspell' installed on the system, do `aspell dicts' on the ;; command-line to get a list of available dictionaries. (setq jinx-languages "en fr el es") ;; I want to have Jinx in programming modes but I do not want it to ;; check anything that is a comment or string, because then it ;; underlines too many things which are not useful. We can do the ;; same for other modes, though I think this is fine. (setq jinx-exclude-faces '((prog-mode font-lock-comment-face font-lock-string-face))) (global-jinx-mode 1))  ( 1 min )

What it is emacs-mailto makes macOS mailto: links open in Emacs, using whatever mail-user-agent you already have configured — mu4e, notmuch, Gnus, Rmail, or plain message-mode. Click a mailto: link in your browser, and Emacs comes to the front with a compose buffer already addressed. The project lives at sr.ht/~bounga/emacs-mailto, where you’ll find the source and the ticket tracker. The problem it solves The GNU Emacs NS port — as shipped by emacs-plus, emacs-mac, or the official build — does not handle mailto: URLs. When Emacs is already running, clicking a mailto: link activates Emacs but the URL never arrives: macOS brings the app to the front and drops the URL Apple-event before it ever reaches Emacs Lisp. So nothing happens — no compose buffer — and there is no way to fix it from you…  ( 3 min )

I am excited to announce the release of Magit version 4.6, consisting of 313 commits since the last release half a year ago.  ( 2 min )

Projectile 3.0 is finally out, and it’s a big one - easily the biggest release in years. There’s a nice reason for that: this year Projectile turns 15.1 It all started back in the summer of 2011, simply because I was frustrated that find-file-in-project didn’t work on Windows, and somehow that little anniversary made me want to shake things up and finally tackle a whole pile of changes I’d been putting off for ages. Some new features, some long-overdue spring cleaning, and a few things I’d wanted to remove for the better part of a decade. What’s dead can’t die There’s a running joke that Projectile is obsolete now that Emacs ships project.el out of the box. I’ve heard it many times, and I even wrote about it when Projectile turned 10 - it’s obviously hard to compete with a built-in package…  ( 4 min )

Emacs Dwelling there’s a nice post on why you should set Emacs to delete files by moving them to trash. That’s easy to do by setting delete-by-moving-to-trash to t. The post has a story illustrating why you should do that: it’s very easy to accidentally delete a file with Dired and if you do it to a file with changes that haven’t been committed to version control you can lose a few hours work. If you don’t use version control, the story is even worse. The post seemed to me to be a worthy cautionary tale and I thought it would make a good Irreal post but when I began the writing process by entering a file name for the post, delete-to-trash.org, I discovered that such a file already existed from 2022. Even worse, for my blogging plans, it said everything I was planning to say in this post. Nevertheless, that was 4 years ago and the lesson, it seems, is evergreen so it’s worth making the point again. It costs you nothing and in those rare occasions where errant muscle memory causes you to delete a file, it can save the day. So rather than repeat the story I’ll just suggest that you check out the Emacs Dwelling post or my previous effort.  ( 5 min )

I have a soft spot for Sayid - it’s one of the most ingenious Clojure tools ever built, and also one of the most neglected. It’s an omniscient debugger: instead of stopping your program at a breakpoint, it quietly records every call to the functions you’ve traced and lets you rummage through the recording afterwards. It’s the kind of thing you demo to people and watch their jaw drop. And it had been sitting practically unmaintained for the better part of a decade. Here’s the awkward part: that neglect is largely on me. Bill Piel, Sayid’s original author, handed me the keys ages ago, and I’ve been… let’s say a less than exemplary steward. I’d merge the occasional patch to keep the lights on, but until very recently I’d done precious little to actually move the project forward. The best time…  ( 7 min )

A recording from Lisa Graves and Jordan Zakarin's live video

Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s descriptions of the benefits of girls’ sports reflect his own worldview—and leave out the experiences of cis and trans athletes alike. The post The Supreme Court’s Trans Sports Decision Is Laced With Condescension For Women Athletes appeared first on Balls and Strikes.  ( 7 min )

A major pesticide manufacturer was getting hit with verdicts that required it to pay billions of dollars in damages. Then the Supreme Court stepped in. The post Monsanto v Durnell: The Big Pro-Corporate Power Supreme Court Case You Might Have Missed appeared first on Balls and Strikes.  ( 7 min )

Nothing like spending a prodigious amount of government dollars just to make Pete Hegseth feel tingly.  ( 184 min )

The Republican party is in need of serious help.  ( 183 min )

Let’s hope the party is ruined by a Democratic landslide.  ( 185 min )

There’s something shady about all this, I just know it.  ( 185 min )

After the Supreme Court’s decision yesterday, Republican loonies like JD Vance made it clear aren’t going to give up on gutting the amendment that’s endemic to our national identity.  ( 185 min )

A House hearing intended to examine the history and timeline of MKUltra, the CIA’s appalling program of human experimentation, devolved into a paranoid conspiracy fest led by grim Republican buffoons.  ( 187 min )

Mission Dolores was founded by Spanish missionaries the same year the U.S. declared its independence. It has borne witness to its own version of the American story—not the one you learned in school but one with much to say about what it means to be American.  ( 232 min )

Welcome new subscribers!

This is the second in our "America at 250" series.......

Paid subscribers gather tonight at 630pm ET to talk about last night's elections, the new NYT polling, and more. The USMNT plays at 8pm tonight - let's room them on, together!

Dansby Swanson hit three home runs as the Cubs pounded the Padres 23-3. Swanson joins the club of players with with five home runs in consecutive games. I was actually looking players who hit multiple home runs in consecutive days (or in both games of a double header), and Swanson is the 224th since the […]  ( 25 min )

The Nationals and Red Sox at Fenway the day after an altercation over bad blood between pitcher Cade Cavalli and first baseman Willson Contreras. Andrew Alvarez takes on Payton Tolle. Avlarez makes his sixth start to go with five relief appearances. He owns a 3.00 ERA as a starter versus 4.02 in relief. Tolle sports […]  ( 26 min )

Batters posted some hefty on base percentages in June of 2026. Pete Crow-Armstrong topped the list with a .468, with Yandy Diaz at .465, Yordan Alvarez at .455, and Kyle Karros at .444. Armstrong also topped the slugging percentage list. The is little intersection otherwise at the top of the list, making Crow-Armstrong an easy […]  ( 26 min )

The Log5 Method yields these top projected hit averages versus starting pitchers: 0.371, 0.757 — Otto Lopez batting at Kyle Freeland. 0.346, 0.737 — Xavier Edwards batting at Kyle Freeland. 0.341, 0.747 — Luis Arraez batting at Zac Gallen. 0.330, 0.725 — Jung Hoo Lee batting at Zac Gallen. 0.326, 0.705 — Javier Sanoja batting […]  ( 27 min )

Jonathan Aranda of the Rays returns to the top five of the Baseball Musings Batter Rankings in the fourth slot. He went two for three with two walks in a 10-4 win over the Royals. His teammates, Junior Caminero and Yandy Diaz rank one and two respectively. Caminero continued his home run streak with a […]  ( 26 min )

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The Royals announced a handful of roster moves ahead of their game tonight against the Rays. Right-handers Jose Cuas and Randy Dobnak are joining the team in place of fellow righties Eric Cerantola and Connor Seabold. Cerantola has been optioned to Triple-A Omaha, while Seabold has been placed on the 15-day injured list. Dobnak was […]  ( 5 min )

Though the emotional appeal of soccer is immediate and visceral, especially in the shortcut-to-passion context of an international tournament like the World Cup, the real richness of the game is subtle. The uninitiated often find it difficult to access that depth. For better and for worse, the ball hypnotizes the novice eye. This is good, because what happens to the ball is what's most important. But it's also bad, because it's what happens around the ball that determines what happens to it. To paraphrase a famous line, if you watch the ball you'll see the plays, but it's by watching what happens off the ball that you truly see the game. The World Cup is of course the main conversion event of the world's biggest (semi-)secular religion. As such, it's always good to help the legions of neophytes find their way into the sport's bottomless depth. Our very own Luis did just that before this World Cup started, writing a good guide for where to train your eyes in order to really read the game. I behoove anyone interested in scriptural analysis to read that post and watch a game the way Luis advises. This post, however, is about catching the Holy Ghost. And there's no better way to do that, to really feel the power of soccer, than by watching France play. What stands out about this particular France team is that there is nothing subtle about it. They are so good in such an obvious way that even a total newcomer to the game can notice. All you have to do is look at the guy who has the ball, and he will do something to blow your mind.  ( 29 min )

The Miami Marlins are a winning baseball team. For now. That revelation comes after one of their finest months ever, a 20-6 run that began, hilariously enough, after being swept in a three-game series by the gangrenous Mets and falling behind them in the NL East race. This would be a point of deep shame for most teams, but the Fish have been coated, breaded, and fried in shame for most of their existence, and utterly wretched since their last World Series championship 23 years ago. They ended May with a 26-34 record. Getting swept by the Mets, even these Mets, fell safely under the category of "Things I Don't Have To Notice For Any Reason Whatsoever." But the curative powers of the Mets beating you are apparently underappreciated: Since that moment, the Mets haven't beaten any one team twice in a row, while the Marlins are 46-40 on the season and suddenly mere percentage points out of a wild-card spot for the first time in ... oh god, don't make us look this up. We've waded through enough of the Marlins' historical cesspool as it is. Still, the Marlins have won more games in a calendar month only one other time in their history—May of 2012, when they won 21—and had a run differential of plus-53, their best in any month ever. They are the best team in baseball if the season had started on June 1, and it's hard to comprehend why, because any thought when it comes to the Miami Marlins begins with "What?" then sails past "Why?" and lands on "Leave me alone, you quivering bag of coleslaw in human clothes."  ( 19 min )

If there's one clean, satisfying lesson to be taken from the World Cup action we've seen so far, it's this one: Big games tend to be decided by the big dogs. Kylian Mbappé, Erling Haaland, Lionel Messi, Michael Olise, Harry Kane—all of these guys have been playing out of their minds since the first group-stage games, and each has taken a deserved turn as the tournament's brightest star. Right now, minutes after England's 2-1 victory over DR Congo in the round of 32, it's Kane who reigns as the world's best and brightest. DR Congo did everything an underdog is supposed to do in order to win a game like the one they just lost. They met England with more tenacity than the Three Lions may have been expecting, they defended like psychopaths, they scored early, and their attacks were dangerous enough to genuinely rattle the English players. After Brian Cipenga's opening goal in the seventh minute, DR Congo would hold onto a 1-0 lead for 68 minutes. Each minute that passed seemed to further fray the confidence of their opponents, as did a series of tremendous saves by Congolese keeper Lionel Mpasi.  ( 16 min )

This week's episode of Nothing But Respect was recorded hours before Jalen Duren's representatives committed to using the Sacramento Kings as an unwitting partner in scrabbling a bit of leverage from the Detroit Pistons, which would have been great to talk about, but does not really change too much of the first bit of the show. Maitreyi Anantharaman came back on to talk Duren, Jaylen Brown, and Analyticsgate, but mostly to catch us up on the WNBA season. We talked a ton about her incredible Olivia Miles profile, which you should all go read right now! You can find Nothing But Respect in Apple Podcasts or whatever podcast app you use. Follow the show on Instagram, and contact the Broke Jumper Tip Line at (347) 380-6426. Thanks for listening!  ( 14 min )

Who among us has not attempted to start a whimsical community-oriented project only for it to devolve into a site of small scale authoritarianism? It happens all the time! It even happened in my own town!  For a couple of months earlier this year, there was a white box screwed into the outdoor wall of a restaurant on my street. Every time I passed it, people were crowded around it picking out little toys, stickers, and knicknacks that were stashed inside. One time I stopped by and traded a sticker for a clear mancala marble that I now keep in my jewelry dish. A lovely trinket trade!  But after about two months, the box disappeared, leaving only four holes screwed into the stucco wall where it had been installed. A visit to my city's subreddit revealed that because the citizens of this city were taking more than they were leaving, and also leaving the box's door unlatched, the box's creator had decided to move it from the street to inside a nearby cafe to "protect the space [...] and spirit of the project."  ( 21 min )

On June 18, ESPN published a report that connected NFL free agent Mike Pennel Jr. to the death of a woman in the Dominican Republic. This week, the network retracted the article and issued a brief statement. The article, bylined by T.J. Quinn and Juan Recio, claimed that Pennel had "an ongoing relationship" with Carli Franchesca Guzmán Roche, who disappeared in 2021 and whose body was discovered in January 2026 on Pennel's property in Puerto Plata. The original report, which has since been deleted but can be found at an archived link, cited "interviews with people close to the victim and police records." Also mentioned in the piece were LeAndre Kemont Jefferson and Tyree Lamont Davis, two of Pennel's friends. In the original article, Pennel denied any connection to Guzmán and said he wasn't in the Dominican Republic at the time. He also added this:  ( 16 min )

Heading into the 2026 World Cup, the Mexican national team had one mission: Finish first in Group A. Beyond the obvious motivation to not lose a game, finishing top of the group guaranteed that El Tri would not leave the terrifying confines of the Estadio Azteca until the quarter-final round. It's impossible to overstate how powerful the home field advantage is for Mexico at the Azteca; in 89 official competitive games there (not including friendlies), Mexico has lost exactly two games. Two!! (In case you are wondering, 2001 to Costa Rica in World Cup qualifying, and 2013 to Honduras, also in World Cup qualifying.) In the World Cup itself, the advantage is even greater. Heading into Tuesday night's game against Ecuador, Mexico had won seven and drawn two of its previous nine World Cup games at Azteca. Mexico did win Group A, and thus they were able to steamroll Ecuador, 2-0, in last night's elimination game. Not even Ecuador's familiarity with playing at altitude could save them from Mexico's tenacity and the energizing effects the team always seems to draw from the raucous Azteca crowd. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TpS_VzFm3DQ  ( 27 min )

Cade Cavalli, pitcher for the Washington Nationals, used "boy" Tuesday night in a taunt directed at Willson Contreras of the Boston Red Sox. Cavalli had caught Contreras looking at a third strike, and shouted, "Sit down, boy," loud enough for it to be caught on the television broadcast. Contreras, a Venezuelan man six years Cavalli's senior and with more than 40 times as many MLB games under his belt, took it exactly as intended. In the ensuing brouhaha, Contreras whipped off his batting helmet, fumbled it, recovered his own fumble, and then fired the helmet toward Cavalli. It was not Contreras's best throw: The helmet bonked off of Andrés Chaparro, a bystander and Contreras's countryman. Contreras was ejected. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNXrJnUhYp8 Cavalli, who provoked Contreras, jawed with him, and beckoned him forward, did not physically engage, and was allowed to continue pitching. This part of it really bothered Red Sox interim manager Chad Tracy, who took up his player's case with the umpires and was ejected. "I felt like the comment made—'Sit down, boy,' at the top of your lungs—was part of what caused that to happen," Tracy explained after the game. "As I understood after that happened the people that they chose, that were gonna leave the game, I just felt like the other pitcher should've been one of them, too. That was my biggest complaint, there, was why is he still in the game?"  ( 21 min )

You may have heard that a giraffe named Gracie skipped town—"town" being the Cedar Hollow Ranch in Leakey, Texas. Gracie, who is estimated to be around 3 or 4 years old, had been living there since May. Gracie is a reticulated giraffe, a species known for their clean and geometric pattern of brown spots. The owner of the ranch, Vick Jones, told The New York Times that Gracie had wandered to a fenced corner of the ranch, which is nestled in a canyon, climbed a slab of rock to nibble on some trees, and then descended on the other side of the fence. From there she wandered in the Texas outback, oblivious that she had made headlines as a "runaway" and a "fugitive"—a giraffe "on the loose." Although she occasionally popped up on game cameras from private properties in the area, Gracie dodged the authorities for nearly two weeks, leading Sheriff Nathan Johnson to decree "In almost 30 years of being a lawman, this is my first escapee giraffe," per USA Today. There was a rush of AI-generated memes of Gracie enjoying the local sights. The giraffe was found four miles from the ranch after an extensive helicopter search, and Jones organized efforts to capture Gracie and return her to the ranch. Sheriff Johnson, upon sharing the news, reported that Gracie was found "fat and happy" and that "she had a 'catch me if you can, sucker' attitude." It is funny to think about a giraffe wandering through Texas, just as it is funny to think about the search for said giraffe—perhaps nature's most obvious animal—taking two weeks. Sheriff Johnson, to be sure, is having some fun in his press conferences, whether his jokes are landing or not. But, as Kenny Torrella smartly pointed out for Vox, the reasons a giraffe like Gracie was in Texas in the first place are not so funny.  ( 24 min )

On the morning of Game 1 of the NBA Finals, I received an email from the U.S. Semiquincentennial Commission (better known as “America250”) promoting the release of new commemorative apparel to mark the occasion. The shirt designs have little connection to the NBA Finals—“NBA” is nowhere to be found, and the only logo on it is America250’s—but somehow even less connection to the country’s birthday. One has a basketball going into a net, flanked by the phrase “Game seven grit and American spirit” on one side and “America 250” on the other. On another, “CHAMPIONS” cascades down the front, topped by the phrase “Victory Runs Deep.” What I can only assume is a now-middle-aged And1 guy streaks across the middle, gliding over the America250 logo and “2026 Finals.” There’s no real explanation why the entity responsible for planning a historic national anniversary is dropping unlicensed-looking hoops shirts. (America250 does actually have a formal partnership with Fanatics and every major pro sports league, so allow me to be the first person to ever write the sentence “This apparel would be better if Fanatics were involved.”) I wish I could tell you this was the dumbest 250th-anniversary memorabilia I’ve seen. Unfortunately, it’s not even close. This is formalwear by comparison. Semiquincentennial (think “half of five hundred”) merchandise has emerged slowly over the past 18 months—a shot glass here, a stuffed animal there. But just a few short days out from the Fourth of July, 250th-anniversary memorabilia is suddenly available pretty much everywhere I look.  ( 54 min )

96 Ask a Manager - new articles p{ margin:10px 0; padding:0; } table{ border-collapse:collapse; } h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6{ display:block; margin:0; padding:0; } img,a img{ border:0; height:auto; outline:none; text-decoration:none; } body,#bodyTable,#bodyCell{ height:100%; margin:0; padding:0; width:100%; } .mcnPreviewText{ display:none !important; } #outlook a{ padding:0; } img{ -ms-interpolation-mode:bicubic; } table{ mso-table-lspace:0pt; mso-table-rspace:0pt; } .ReadMsgBody{ width:100%; } .ExternalClass{ width:100%; } p,a,li,td,blockquote{ mso-line-height-rule:exactly; } a[href^=tel],a[href^=sms]{ color:i…  ( 4 min )

96 *{box-sizing:border-box}body{margin:0;padding:0}a[x-apple-data-detectors]{color:inherit!important;text-decoration:inherit!important}#MessageViewBody a{color:inherit;text-decoration:none}p{line-height:inherit}.desktop_hide,.desktop_hide table{mso-hide:all;display:none;max-height:0;overflow:hidden}.image_block img+div{display:none}sub,sup{font-size:75%;line-height:0} @media (max-width:660px){.stack .column{width:100%;display:block}.mobile_hide{min-height:0;max-height:0;max-width:0;display:none;overflow:hidden;font-size:0}.desktop_hide,.desktop_hide table{display:table!important;max-height:none!important}.row-1 .column-1 .block-1.image_block td.pad{padding:10px 10px 0 10px!important}.row-1 .column-1 .block-1.image_block td.pad div{margin:0 auto!important}.row-1 .column-2 .block-1.paragr…  ( 1 min )

96 Zoned out @media only screen and (max-width: 620px) { table.body { width: 100%; min-width: 100%; } table.body .content { padding: 0 !important; } table.body .container { padding: 0 !important; width: 100% !important; } table.body .main { border-spacing: 10px 0 !important; border-left-width: 0 !important; border-radius: 0 !important; border-right-width: 0 !important; } table.body .img-responsive { height: auto !important; max-width: 100% !important; width: auto !important; } } @media all { .ExternalClass { width: 100%; } .ExternalClass, .ExternalClass p, .ExternalClass span, .ExternalClass font, .ExternalClass td, .ExternalClass div { line-height: 100%; } .apple-link a { color…  ( 10 min )

I Talked With Azzi Fudd, Our Indecisive Queen96 :root { color-scheme: light; supported-color-schemes: light; } body { margin: 0; padding: 0; min-width: 100%!important; -ms-text-size-adjust: 100% !important; -webkit-transform: scale(1) !important; -webkit-text-size-adjust: 100% !important; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased !important; } .body { word-wrap: normal; word-spacing:normal; } table.mso { width: 100%; border-collapse: collapse; padding: 0; table-layout: fixed; } img { border: 0; outline: none; } table { mso-table-lspace: 0px; mso-table-rspace: 0px; } td, a, span { mso-line-height-rule: exactly; } #root [x-apple-data-detectors=true], a[x-apple-data-detectors=true], #MessageViewBody a { color: inherit !important; text-decoration: inherit !important; font-size:…  ( 10 min )

Top stories 06/26/2026_copy#outlook a { padding:0; } .ExternalClass { width:100%; } .ExternalClass, .ExternalClass p, .ExternalClass span, .ExternalClass font, .ExternalClass td, .ExternalClass div { line-height: 100%; } table td { border-collapse: collapse; mso-line-height-rule: exactly; } .editable.image { font-size: 0 !important; line-height: 0 !important; } .nl2go_preheader { display: none !important; mso-hide:all !important; mso-line-height-rule: exactly; visibility: hidden !important; line-height: 0px !important; font-size: 0px !important; } body { width:100% !important; -webkit-text-size-adjust:100%; -ms-text-size-adjust:100%; margin:0; padding:0; } img { outline:none; text-decoration:none; -ms-interpolation-mode: bicubic; } a img { border:none; } table { border-collapse:collapse; m…  ( 6 min )

Including five newsletters (and that's just the beginning) /* resets */ p {margin:0px;margin-bottom:0px;padding:0px;} table {border-spacing:0;} table, td {border-collapse:collapse;} * {-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased;-moz-osx-font-smoothing: grayscale;text-size-adjust: none !important;-ms-text-size-adjust: none !important;-webkit-text-size-adjust: none !important;} /* end resets */ /* outlook / hotmail */ .ExternalClass{width:100%;} table, td {mso-table-lspace:0pt;mso-table-rspace:0pt;} img{-ms-interpolation-mode:bicubic;} .ReadMsgBody {width: 100%;} /* end outlook / hotmail */ /* gmail */ u + #body a {color: inherit;text-decoration: none;font-size: inherit;font-family: inherit;font-weight: inherit;line-height: inherit;} img + div {display: none!important;} /* end gmail *…  ( 2 min )

MAGA crashes out over Supreme Court’s mail ballot ruling a.cta_button{-moz-box-sizing:content-box !important;-webkit-box-sizing:content-box !important;box-sizing:content-box !important;vertical-align:middle}.hs-breadcrumb-menu{list-style-type:none;margin:0px 0px 0px 0px;padding:0px 0px 0px 0px}.hs-breadcrumb-menu-item{float:left;padding:10px 0px 10px 10px}.hs-breadcrumb-menu-divider:before{content:'›';padding-left:10px}.hs-featured-image-link{border:0}.hs-featured-image{float:right;margin:0 0 20px 20px;max-width:50%}@media (max-width: 568px){.hs-featured-image{float:none;margin:0;width:100%;max-width:100%}}.hs-screen-reader-text{clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);height:1px;overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;width:1px} 96 …  ( 6 min )

The upcoming White House UFC fight will feature some manly mixed-martial-arts men and man-o-sphere macho maniacs who, in a world of beta men, fear nothing.  Well, almost nothing. Turns out they’re a little afraid of bugs. Dana White, noted tough guy and head of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, recently said he’s concerned about the event, which falls on Trump’s June 14 birthday. (Maybe the president will have a bouncy house there as well!) White isn’t worried about strong men clobbering the snot out of each other in an octagonal cage. No, he said, a recent visit to the Rose Garden with the president showed him something truly scary: “He invited me to dinner there. The amount of gnats that are flying around, I'm like, 'Holy (expletive).' As soon as I got on the plane, I got on the phone …  ( 15 min )

OK, so the NBA expects patriots like myself to believe that the liberal New York Knicks miraculously won Game 4 of the NBA Finals after the REAL AMERICANS on the San Antonio Spurs were up by 29 points in the third quarter? Yeah, right. Much like the recent California elections, which Republican leaders from President Donald Trump to House Speaker Mike Johnson convinced me were rigged, I’m calling BS on the Knicks' so-called victory. And I’m demanding congressional Republicans launch an immediate investigation into this obviously diabolical NBA game interference. On “Meet the Press” recently, President Trump plainly stated that California officials were “cheating on the election.” Journalist Kristen Welker asked for evidence to support that claim, and Trump said: “All I have to do is look.”…  ( 15 min )

I have great news for Americans worried that inflation just jumped above 4%, the highest hike in three years. It turns out rising consumer prices are fantastic! President Donald Trump, when asked on June 10 about the inflation surge, told reporters: “I love the inflation.” Cool! Painfully high gas prices have, according to The Wall Street Journal, “erased more than a year of Americans’ wage gains,” and everything costs more, but our president and his fellow Republican leaders, who spent all of Joe Biden’s presidency saying inflation is bad, now seem to think it’s totally rad. Next time you can’t pay your grocery bill, just tell the clerk to put it on the Republicans' tab. I’m sure they’ll have your back. Republicans cared about inflation when Biden was president When Biden – overseer of t…  ( 14 min )

The brutal heat wave searing much of the United States on this Fourth of July week is further proof Mother Nature is hell-bent on getting Americans to believe in the liberal climate change hoax. That’s right, I said it. Mother Nature is a radical leftist personification, possibly stemming from some meteorological wing of antifa, and now she’s threatening to ruin America’s 250th anniversary by melting “There Is No Climate Change!” yard signs and forcing people like me to think about things we don’t want to believe.  CNN reported: “Many areas will endure consecutive days of temperatures in the mid-90s to low 100s. Humidity will make it feel even hotter and make it harder to cool down ‒ pushing ‘feels like’ temperatures as high as 110 degrees or more.” I’ll tell you what this “feels like.” It…  ( 15 min )

WordPress Embed HTML Embed UFC fight can’t hide MAGA male weakness /* */  ( 1 min )

The decades-long Republican quest to force Christianity on those they see as unwashed heathens reached a new low on June 26, when the GOP-controlled Texas State School Board put Bible stories on mandatory reading lists for every level of public school student. The decision is disturbing on many levels, starting with the outright disinformation being used to justify this move by people in charge of educating children. “Our nation was founded as a Christian nation,” board member Brandon Hall insisted during a Thursday news conference. It’s unclear if Hall is lying or has deluded himself, but there is no excuse for indulging this falsehood about the founders, who clearly forbade the “establishment of religion” in the Constitution and repeatedly emphasized separation of church and state. It’s …  ( 7 min )

The cracks are showing

The NFL has had itself one miserable offseason. You may have been too busy watching America self-immolating to notice, but the football men have been behaving incredibly badly of late. Falcons edge rusher James Pearce got arrested for allegedly being a psycho boyfriend to Chicago Sky forward Rickea Jackson. The Denver Broncos have a sudden, and grotesque, DV problem on their hands. Terrion Arnold just got dropped by the Lions after being arrested on suspicion of kidnapping. And New England coach Mike Vrabel can’t seem to keep his little Pat Patriot in his trousers. All of it either has been ugly or has served as a portent of more ugliness to come.  Which brings us to the curious story of 49ers wideout Brandon Aiyuk, whose recent behavior has gone from maddening to outright frightening. Ju…  ( 1 min )

Consult notes is a package that hooks into your note-taking system. It works particularly well with Denote, picking up your notes directory variable automatically. My interest in having a note system comes down to whether it helps my writing. A writer needs different kinds of notes: reading notes, notes on craft, notes on etymology, and random ideas. You’ll notice I’ve built that into the config below. I’ve touched on the topic of note-taking in Emacs a few times, in posts on “making everything a note” and on the “undergrad” style of note-taking. I’ve often argued that a full dedicated notes package was unnecessary when you could simply create files and link them together. But this “consult notes” package made me want to give Denote another try and see how it feels. So far, I like it. I’m …  ( 4 min )

What it is shpaste is a small Emacs client for paste.sr.ht, the pastebin service from SourceHut. It lets me share a snippet without leaving the editor: select some text, run a command, and the paste URL is already in my kill-ring, ready to paste into a chat or an email. It is built on the SourceHut GraphQL API and does just enough to be useful: create pastes, list them, open them, delete them. Nothing more. The project lives at sr.ht/~bounga/shpaste, where you’ll find the source, the ticket tracker, and the mailing lists. What it does Create a paste from the region or from the whole buffer. The resulting URL is pushed to the kill-ring and shown in the echo area. Browse your pastes in a dedicated list buffer, sorted and tabulated. From that buffer: open a paste, copy its URL, delete it, or …  ( 3 min )

Diary was my pick for this month's Emacs Carnival. But in fact it's part of a larger set of functions under the calendar group. Another set of functions allows you to create pocket date books, desk planners and wall calendars if you have access to a printer. The function names begin with cal-tex-cursor and cal-html-cursor, and they can be found in cal-tex.el and cal-html.el, respectively. The "tex" and "html" in the function names describe the output formats, LaTeX and, well, HTML; "cursor" describes one way of defining their inputs (from the position of the cursor in the calendar buffer). They're further subdivided into layouts such as day, week, month and year. My favorite is cal-tex-cursor-week-iso. Open the calendar (M-x calendar). Observe that the cursor is a…  ( 11 min )

diff-minimap package, deep in the weeds of fringe indicators and search highlights, and I did the thing. You know the thing. I was in Dired, accidentally, for some reason hit D to delete a filename (probably some malfunctioning muscle memory) and it was gone! Except it was my own source file. diff-minimap.el. The one I had been hacking on for the last hour. The one with all those uncommitted changes. Now, in my head, I have a trash setup. I am sure I configured that somewhere, probably years ago, in some init file on some machine. But the machine I was sitting at? Nope. Emacs just did a straight delete, no safety net, no way back. The file was tracked in git, so I could git checkout HEAD -- diff-minimap.el to get the committed version back. But the uncommitted work - the inline diff preview, the vc-diff positioning, the side-window hunk viewer - that was gone. Emacs has a built-in variable, delete-by-moving-to-trash. When it is set to t, Dired (and other delete operations) move files to the system trash instead of permanently deleting them. On Linux that is ~/.local/share/Trash/files/, on macOS it is ~/.Trash/, on Windows it is the Recycle Bin. It is one of those settings that seems obvious in hindsight but is easy to overlook because Emacs defaults it to nil. The reasoning is probably that Emacs is a serious tool for serious people who know what they are doing, so deleting means deleting?! So I added it to my config: (setq delete-by-moving-to-trash t) D in Dired moves to trash instead of deleting permanently and I will not have that sinking feeling again! Anyway, back to diff-minimap.

Normally I write these posts after a CIDER release is out, with the smug satisfaction of someone who has already tagged the version and updated the changelog. Today I’m flipping the script a little: the release isn’t out yet, but I’m too excited to keep quiet about it. Here’s the thing. The next CIDER release was supposed to be 1.23. But as I kept piling change upon change, it slowly dawned on me that calling this “1.23” would be doing it a disservice. So I’m now strongly considering shipping it as CIDER 2.0 instead. A different kind of release The last few CIDER releases were on the conservative side - lots of important internal work, but relatively little that you’d actually notice day to day. This one is the exact opposite. It’s stuffed with user-visible changes, many of which have been…  ( 12 min )

Let's help Senator Garriott and our other courageous candidates close strong today everyone!

Let's help Jamie and our other courageous candidates close strong today everyone!

It is a year of opportunity for Democrats but only if we seize it, together!!!!!!!!!!!!

The conservative movement has spent years villainizing trans people. In West Virginia v. B.P.J., the conservative justices are simply doing their part to help. The post The Supreme Court Is Going Where Anti-Trans Activists Are Leading It appeared first on Balls and Strikes.  ( 6 min )

No free speech rights are quite as important to Brett Kavanaugh as those of political parties and the billionaires who fund them. The post NRSC v FEC: The Conservative Justices Keep Selling Democracy To Highest Bidder appeared first on Balls and Strikes.  ( 6 min )

The justices had a simple task in Trump v. Barbara: uphold their oaths. Only five were willing to do so. The post The Supreme Court’s Big Birthright Citizenship Decision Is the Absolute Bare Minimum appeared first on Balls and Strikes.  ( 6 min )

Four sitting justices are prepared to stuff the Fourteenth Amendment’s promises in the garbage because Mister Trump demands it. The post The Birthright Citizenship Opinion Shows That the Constitution Is On Life Support appeared first on Balls and Strikes.  ( 7 min )

Our latest video bonus for paid subscribers walks through the three rulings in four argued cases that the Supreme Court handed down on Tuesday, June 30, 2026.

A quick post reflecting on (some of) the news the Supreme Court made on Monday and (some of) the news we expect from the justices later today.

Kavanaugh wrote the court's opinion, but Sotomayor dissented to explain for the liberal trio what the court got wrong about equal protection law.

Why the birthright citizenship fight isn’t over yet a.cta_button{-moz-box-sizing:content-box !important;-webkit-box-sizing:content-box !important;box-sizing:content-box !important;vertical-align:middle}.hs-breadcrumb-menu{list-style-type:none;margin:0px 0px 0px 0px;padding:0px 0px 0px 0px}.hs-breadcrumb-menu-item{float:left;padding:10px 0px 10px 10px}.hs-breadcrumb-menu-divider:before{content:'›';padding-left:10px}.hs-featured-image-link{border:0}.hs-featured-image{float:right;margin:0 0 20px 20px;max-width:50%}@media (max-width: 568px){.hs-featured-image{float:none;margin:0;width:100%;max-width:100%}}.hs-screen-reader-text{clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);height:1px;overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;width:1px} 96 …  ( 5 min )

Trump loses birthright case to end another miserable Supreme Court term a.cta_button{-moz-box-sizing:content-box !important;-webkit-box-sizing:content-box !important;box-sizing:content-box !important;vertical-align:middle}.hs-breadcrumb-menu{list-style-type:none;margin:0px 0px 0px 0px;padding:0px 0px 0px 0px}.hs-breadcrumb-menu-item{float:left;padding:10px 0px 10px 10px}.hs-breadcrumb-menu-divider:before{content:'›';padding-left:10px}.hs-featured-image-link{border:0}.hs-featured-image{float:right;margin:0 0 20px 20px;max-width:50%}@media (max-width: 568px){.hs-featured-image{float:none;margin:0;width:100%;max-width:100%}}.hs-screen-reader-text{clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);height:1px;overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;width:1px} …  ( 3 min )

96 *{box-sizing:border-box}body{margin:0;padding:0}a[x-apple-data-detectors]{color:inherit!important;text-decoration:inherit!important}#MessageViewBody a{color:inherit;text-decoration:none}p{line-height:inherit}.desktop_hide,.desktop_hide table{mso-hide:all;display:none;max-height:0;overflow:hidden}.image_block img+div{display:none}sub,sup{font-size:75%;line-height:0} @media (max-width:620px){.image_block div.fullWidth{max-width:100%!important}.row-content{width:100%!important}.stack .column{width:100%;display:block}.mobile_hide{min-height:0;max-height:0;max-width:0;display:none;overflow:hidden;font-size:0}.desktop_hide,.desktop_hide table{display:table!important;max-height:none!important}.row-3 .column-1 .block-1.image_block td.pad{padding:5px 0 0 0!important}.row-3 .column-1 .block-1.im…  ( 2 min )

96 Quick note: Summer Drive ends today! img{-ms-interpolation-mode:bicubic;} table, td{mso-table-lspace:0pt;mso-table-rspace:0pt;} .mceStandardButton, .mceStandardButton td, .mceStandardButton td a{mso-hide:all!important;} p, a, li, td, blockquote{mso-line-height-rule:exactly;} p, a, li, td, body, table, blockquote{-ms-text-size-adjust:100%;-webkit-text-size-adjust:100%;} .mcnPreviewText{display:none!important;} .bodyCell{margin:0 auto;padding:0;width:100%;} .ExternalClass, .ExternalClass p, .ExternalClass td, .ExternalClass div, .ExternalClass span, .ExternalClass font{line-height:100%;} .ReadMsgBody, .ExternalClass{width:100%;} a[x-apple-data-detectors]{color:inherit!important;text-decoration:none!important;font-size:inherit!important;font-family:inherit!important;font-weight:inh…  ( 5 min )

A recent decision deemed the 14th Amendment safe for now, but with three dissenting nitwits still on the bench, we can never be too sure.  ( 191 min )

We should all be angrier that our lives are in the hands of Secretary Roadkill and his MAHA brigade.  ( 190 min )

This administration has an otherworldly talent for finding obscure avenues to loot the government.  ( 190 min )

Root Loggers, PEP 832, Django Tasks, and More body,#bodyTable,#bodyCell{ height:100% !important; margin:0; padding:0; width:100% !important; } table{ border-collapse:collapse; } img,a img{ border:0; outline:none; text-decoration:none; } h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6{ margin:0; padding:0; } p{ margin:1em 0; padding:0; } a{ word-wrap:break-word; } .mcnPreviewText{ display:none !important; } .ReadMsgBody{ width:100%; } .ExternalClass{ width:100%; } .ExternalClass,.ExternalClass p,.ExternalClass span,.ExternalClass font,.ExternalClass td,.ExternalClass div{ line-height:100%; } tabl…  ( 5 min )

The U.S. Supreme Court, in an opinion released Tuesday, voted 6-3 in support of two state laws that ban trans girls and women from playing women's sports at public schools and universities. The ruling applies directly to bans in two states—Idaho and West Virginia—while bolstering similar bans in more than two dozen others. Writing for the three votes against—all of which came from the court's liberal wing—Justice Sonia Sotomayor said that to the court's majority "the facts do not matter, even though the consequences are serious." "Sports, of course, are often zero sum," Sotomayor wrote, "but the law need not and should not be."  ( 28 min )

As I spend the early part of the summer talking about the Tour de France with normal people (read: non-cycling fans), there's one thing that catches almost everyone off-guard. I will outline the route and they'll say something like "What do you mean it starts in Barcelona?," as they adopt an expression that I imagine conveys a skepticism about whether I know Barcelona is not in France or that Louis XIV evacuated Catalonia following 1697's Peace of Ryswick. To those who haven't paid the closest attention, learning that "Tour" is subjective and "de France" is not entirely accurate is a useful entrypoint into learning about the joyful quirks of the world's biggest bike race. It will dawn on them that the route changes every year; as it turns out, figuring out why the organizers craft different races year after year will teach you a ton about the sport. It wasn't always like this. Riders in the Tour's earliest days circumscribed a hexagon within the edges of France's borders, beginning and ending in Paris. The Tour is still known as the Grand Boucle, or Big Loop, an appellation that used to be literal. Most of the early Tours were raced clockwise, and went the other way for the first time in 1913, a decade after the first Tour. Innovations were sparse and slow, and though the route was tweaked every year, its shape and rhythm was mostly the same. It wasn't until 1960 that organizers had a stage start in a different city than where the previous one ended, with riders taking the train south from Bordeaux to Mont de Marsan. From that point, the Loop began slowly distending, its shape becoming increasingly abstract.  ( 26 min )

Why would you watch Germany face World Cup elimination in a penalty shootout when you could watch two teams slow-motion walking toward the top of their divisions in the American League? Of course, I’m talking about the Cleveland Guardians vs. Texas Rangers thumb-wrestling match. Now that's appointment television! In Monday's marquee game, Cleveland's Parker Messick faced off against the Rangers' bullpen, with the bulk of the innings thrown by Chris Paddack, debuting with his third team this season. (This season, might I remind you, has just reached the halfway mark). After being designated for assignment by both the Marlins and the Reds, Paddack threw four innings and allowed two runs. His pitching was adequate, which is a word I think about a lot when these two teams are on the field. As for Messick, he also pitched ... fine. He struck out five and allowed four runs over 6.2 innings. The Rangers came away with the win, 6-3. The game was a collection of groundouts, aggressive base running, and runs eked out on singles. Watching this game, I began to think that maybe Ernie Clement really is the best player in the American League. It certainly isn't easy to find a worthy challenger.  ( 17 min )

Time for your weekly edition of the Defector Funbag. Got something on your mind? Email the Funbag. You can also read Drew over at SFGATE, and buy Drew’s books while you’re at it. Today, we're talking worst sports cities, Germany, deceptive cooking shows, and more. I'm back from vacation! I'm still technically at the beach, but there's no reason I can't knock out some work in the morning while everyone else in the family sleeps in. I'm always up at 7:00 a.m., whether I have the day off or not. Tis a blessing and a curse. Now let's all give it up for Brandy Jensen, who took the helm last week and guided the SS Funbag through the summer weather with a steady, calming hand. She's the best Brandy I know. The only Brandy I know, but that's neither here nor there.  ( 50 min )

The drama between Brandon Aiyuk and the San Francisco 49ers has been brewing for nearly a year. Since suffering a torn ACL and MCL in his right knee during the 2024 season, Aiyuk and his current team have been in a dispute over his rehabilitation. Last year, Aiyuk declined to attend offseason rehab sessions at the team's facility, thus negating parts of his contract. The Niners placed Aiyuk on the reserve/left team list this past December, after he stopped showing up to the facility. Aiyuk, who signed a four-year, $120 million deal before the 2024 season, is coming off a major injury and now has no guaranteed money left on his contract. With his spot on the reserve list, the Niners are in no rush to move him. Still, a breakup has looked inevitable for a while, especially to Aiyuk, who stayed silent on the matter until the June 1 salary cap deadline came and went. For the last couple weeks, the receiver has been posting videos and tweets both taunting the 49ers and teasing a desire to go to the Washington Commanders and reunite with former Arizona State teammate Jayden Daniels. But on Saturday, he released a video in which he explained his side of the situation with the 49ers ... sort of. https://youtu.be/tuHF73RLWv4?si=egyVP2wjKunmS0xQ  ( 19 min )

There are a million reasons why the World Cup is the greatest sporting event on Earth, and one of those reasons is that it's the rare setting in which soccer managers can be forced to eat some shit. American sports fans are spoiled by the traditional press conference. Yes, most press conferences are a waste of time and feature obsequious beat reporters lobbing easy questions at the coaches of the teams they cover, but there still exists in this country an impulse toward challenging a coach's thinking when the moment calls for it. If some bozo called for a field goal when he should have gone for it on fourth down, or left his starter out there too long, or or drew up a horrible ATO with the game on the line, he's at least going to be asked to explain himself after the game. If we get lucky, he may even get pissed and start yelling. Mick Cronin moments are harder to come by for the European soccer fan. If you're a fan of a Premier League team, for example, the only times you get to hear the manager speak are during a mid-week press conference that largely exists to provide injury updates, and during a brief post-match interview that is conducted by a single questioner who often works for the team. This can be a maddening experience, especially if your team sucks and you want someone to ask the dingus running the show why he keeps insisting on trying to turn a slow-footed full back into a wingback.  ( 22 min )

Dai dai. Ikou. Dale, allez, let's go. So says Shakira in the chorus of the 2026 Official World Cup Song "Dai Dai," in which she links up with Burna Boy to express the same sentiment in five different languages. Why find the universal in the specific when you can attempt to recreate the magic of your 2010 World Cup hit "Waka Waka" by finding the universal in the universal? “No one's getting tired, I know/‘Cause you got that fire, ayo” indeed. One Italian sportswriter described the lyrics of "Dai Dai" as “so generic they reach an almost spiritual level of abstraction” and compared listening to “contemplating a geometric shape.” It’s a tragedy that “No matter black, white, or beige/Chola or Orient made” was already featured in another anthem, and so could not be included in “Dai Dai.” The feeling, though, is the same. At one point in the song, Shakira sings the names of various iconic players: Pelé, Maradona, Maldini, Romário. What better way to celebrate the spirit of the tournament than with a list of those who, yes, have definitely played the game of soccer! She repeats the trick by listing a bunch of the participating countries, like a drunk uncle who hasn’t prepared a wedding speech and resorts to naming all the places people have traveled from to attend. “We got Wilmington, Delaware in the house tonight! Thanks for coming all this way!” As always, even supposedly apolitical World Cup choices are rife with politics; Shakira would never sing “Iran” in the song, despite its supple rhyming potential.  The utter unremarkability, the total insipidness of "Dai Dai" got me thinking about the genre of World Cup songs: Has it always been this bad? Here’s the answer, in a brief history of the music of the men’s World Cup.  ( 36 min )

In 2011, a Princeton Borough police officer gave me a public urination ticket as I was on my way to go drinking. I went home with someone that night and forgot about the ticket in my crumpled pants pocket. Weeks later I paid it off in a panic, hours before my delinquency would have added me to a New Jersey sex offender registry. For no particular reason, I was reminded about that while watching a femme top squat over a girl lying across a storm drain in the courtyard of a Holiday Inn in central Jersey. It took her a little while to find her stream, but she got there. While I’ve had interesting desires all the way back to my days furtively printing Final Fantasy fetish erotica off the family Epson, I’ve only been in the queer leather world for a few years now. Like many trans folks, turning…  ( 75 min )

A recent New York Times story about former NFL insider Dianna Russini resurfaced an anecdote that Russini had previously shared on a podcast earlier this year. The story went like this: Russini was pulled over for texting and driving, and attempted to talk her way out of the ticket by telling the cop that she had only been texting because she was trying to break the news that Sean McDermott had just been fired by the Buffalo Bills. When that didn't work, she asked the officer who his favorite team was, and then FaceTimed the coach of that team. From the Times: “I FaceTime the head coach,” she said, without naming him. “Head coach is in his office. He said, ‘What’s up?’ I go, ‘I just got pulled over and I just wanted you to meet my friend, Officer Joe.’” The coach helped her get out of the ticket by telling the officer, “You should let her go, she’s a good citizen,” Ms. Russini said. As it turns out, that's not what happened. Adam Herbets of The Center Square obtained the bodycam footage from the traffic stop in question, and it shows that Russini was embellishing quite a bit while relaying this story to her podcast pals.  ( 15 min )

For the first time in history, Germany has lost a penalty shootout at the World Cup. A highly anticipated potential round of 16 matchup between Germany and France has been put on ice, and instead it is Paraguay that advanced on Monday, after a 1-1 draw turned into a 4-3 shootout victory for the South Americans. Paraguay followed the underdog script to perfection, scoring first and then frustrating, blocking, and clattering into the Germans around every corner, spoiling a dream matchup for the neutrals in favor of a dream outcome in itself. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zGZGTRKNxvs Entering Monday's game, Germany held the advantage in almost every part of the field. FIFA's 12th-ranked side had better, more skilled attackers, a hard-working midfield, and an untested yet talented backline. (If there was one place on the field where Paraguay could have contested, it was at goalie, which did play a big role by the end.) But there is of course a reason why they play the games, and these countries engaged in riveting gladiatorial combat, in which the general rhythm was the same for 90 minutes of regulation. Germany would hold the ball for a long time, its vaunted attackers would get around, but not into, the Paraguayan box, and time and time again, the Paraguayan defense would stifle them. It was mesmerizing to watch, the way that this Paraguay team, so heralded for its rugged defending prior to the 4-1 loss to the United States in the opening match, lived up to its reputation by giving Germany hell when it came time for the favorites to try to score.  ( 30 min )

Look, this has already been an annoyingly long year, we’re on the brink of a searing-hot summer, gas prices are higher than my cousin Stu at a Phish concert, and we’re at war with Iran. Given all that, I have one request: I don’t want to hear a single unkind or critical word about the new "Star Wars" movie, “The Mandalorian and Grogu.” That movie, which I have not yet seen, is about the only good thing happening in this world, and I refuse to let anyone take that from me.  For those who haven’t watched the television series “The Mandalorian,” from which the new movie bubbled up, here’s a quick synopsis: There’s a cool dude in an awesome helmet who protects an absolutely freaking adorable creature who audiences initially referred to as Baby Yoda, because he looks like a baby Yoda, the iconi…  ( 16 min )

Americans are angry. They are stressed about food and fuel prices. They are, in astounding numbers, saying President Donald Trump is the source of their anger and stress. Well, I can assure my fellow Americans the MAGA king ain’t listening. He doesn’t care, and he has said as much. While Trump’s narcissism has never been hidden, it has become more glaring in this second term, and it’s easier than ever to see that the man about to turn 80 doesn’t care about any American but himself.  He cares deeply about hosting a raucous UFC fight on the White House lawn on his upcoming birthday. He cares deeply, in vivid dreams of gold and chandeliers, about one day having the grandest ballroom in the land. He cares about making America’s 250th anniversary celebration in the nation’s capital a big, gaudy…  ( 14 min )

I love President Donald Trump’s Great American State Fair. I love its emptiness. Its expensive food. Its ability to confound Trump-friendly media outlets that keep pretending it’s going great. This spectacle on the National Mall in Washington, DC, part of Trump’s Trump-centric celebration of America’s 250th anniversary, is like watching your high school bully host a party that no one attends. It’s a daily humiliation for a wildly unpopular president who coopted what should be a unifying national celebration and turned it into repellent schlock. And I love it so much it hurts. Trump's Great American State Fair humiliation is soothing America I love seeing Fox News broadcasting from the fair, its hosts claiming the place is filled with excited patriots while the scenes behind them show a vas…  ( 14 min )

No one likes Josh Naylor. I remember when I was young other players did not seem to like Reggie Jackson. I thought Jackson’s foibles were a bit exaggerated, maybe out of jealousy over his talent. Then I met Jackson and realized that what I had heard was understated.  ( 25 min )

The Tigers try to make it two in a row against the Yankees with Tarik Skubal on the mound. Cam Schlittler tries to stop the Yankees slide. Skubal makes his fourth start since returning from surgery, and so far the results are mixed. He struck out 21 and walked two in 16 1/3 innings, but […]  ( 25 min )

The Log5 Method yields these top projected hit averages versus starting pitchers: 0.370, 0.759 — Otto Lopez batting at Tanner Gordon. 0.339, 0.733 — Xavier Edwards batting at Tanner Gordon. 0.320, 0.710 — Michael Harris II batting vs. Matthew Liberatore. 0.317, 0.699 — Javier Sanoja batting at Tanner Gordon. 0.317, 0.737 — Luis Arraez batting […]  ( 27 min )

The Rays enjoyed a day off, leaving Junior Caminero and Yandy Diaz 1-2 in the Baseball Musings Batter Rankings. Shohei Ohtani of the Dodgers moved into third place with a two for five, including a home run, in a 9-4 win over the Athletics. Pete Crow-Armstrong returned to the top five with a two for […]  ( 26 min )

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96 Down and out @media only screen and (max-width: 620px) { table.body { width: 100%; min-width: 100%; } table.body .content { padding: 0 !important; } table.body .container { padding: 0 !important; width: 100% !important; } table.body .main { border-spacing: 10px 0 !important; border-left-width: 0 !important; border-radius: 0 !important; border-right-width: 0 !important; } table.body .img-responsive { height: auto !important; max-width: 100% !important; width: auto !important; } } @media all { .ExternalClass { width: 100%; } .ExternalClass, .ExternalClass p, .ExternalClass span, .ExternalClass font, .ExternalClass td, .ExternalClass div { line-height: 100%; } .apple-link a { co…  ( 10 min )

Plus, Trump’s lawsuit against BBC backfires

Before hearing him rhyme on CRU’s “Bluntz & Bakakeemis,” I had never heard of Tracey Lee. But I like what I heard during the cameo, so a few months ago, when I came across a used copy of his debut … Continue reading →  ( 19 min )

Our latest video bonus for paid subscribers walks through the four rulings in argued cases that the Supreme Court handed down on Monday, June 29, 2026.

Justice Alito's TPS opinion offered a new theory of how courts can resolve "interim" appeals. Fortunately, Justices Gorsuch and Barrett refused to endorse it.

[request] flags:--- replies:0 topic:ob-core  ( 4 min )

Introduction GPG is only useful for the emails you actually remember to protect. In mu4e, signing and encrypting a message is a manual gesture. Before sending, I hit C-c C-m s p to sign, or C-c C-m c p to sign and encrypt. It works, but it relies on me thinking about it every single time. I don’t. Nobody does. So in practice, the manual approach means most messages go out unsigned, and encryption only happens on the rare occasion I stop to remember it exists. I wanted the opposite default. Something with no friction, that follows a clear policy: Sign every message I send. Always. Encrypt a message when, and only when, I have a public key for every recipient. The second rule matters. Encryption is all-or-nothing: if a single recipient is missing from my keyring, encrypting would lock them o…  ( 5 min )

As I wrote many times, I use pdf-tools as main pdf viewer. I thought that one thing that would be nice is being able to open pdfs in it from outside Emacs. For example, texdoc could use it instead of Evince (which is pretty nice, but it’s not Emacs!).  ( 1 min )

~1089 words. ~5 minutes. tags: emacs programming debugging GLORIOUS Unified Debugger. June's Emacs Carnival, Underappreciated Emacs built-ins. You can find detailed information in the excellent documentation at (info "(emacs) Debuggers"). Multi debugger support lldb (LLVM debugger) perldb (Perl debugger) jdb (Java debugger) pdb (Python debugger) guiler (Guile!) dbx (Debugger with support for C, C++, and so.) xdb (Debugger for MS Windows (?)) sdb (System Debugger) The GDB interface fibo.c, #include int fibo ( int n) { if (n < 2) return 1; else return fibo (n - 1) + fibo (n - 2); } int main ( void) { for ( int i = 0; i < 5; i++) printf ( "%d: %d\n", i, fibo(i)); } gcc -g fibo.c -o fibo -g flag is necessary …  ( 2 min )

Help wanted: EmacsConf - 2026 - Call for Participation Monadic Sheep: Canvas patch: we need testers! (lobste.rs, emacs-devel) Upcoming events (iCal file, Org): EmacsATX: Emacs Social https://www.meetup.com/emacsatx/events/315091677/ Thu Jul 2 1600 America/Vancouver - 1800 America/Chicago - 1900 America/Toronto - 2300 Etc/GMT – Fri Jul 3 0100 Europe/Berlin - 0430 Asia/Kolkata - 0700 Asia/Singapore M-x Research: TBA https://m-x-research.github.io/ Fri Jul 3 0800 America/Vancouver - 1000 America/Chicago - 1100 America/Toronto - 1500 Etc/GMT - 1700 Europe/Berlin - 2030 Asia/Kolkata - 2300 Asia/Singapore Emacs.si (in person): Emacs.si meetup #7 2026 (v #živo) https://dogodki.kompot.si/events/88d59360-d89a-42cc-b567-ed39ac5186fb Mon Jul 6 1900 CET OrgMeetup (virtual) https://orgmode.org/worg/…  ( 3 min )

In his 6-3 opinion over the Federal Trade Commission, however, Roberts ended the independence of the FTC and other agencies, sowing "chaos" across the federal government.

The upshot of Slaughter and Cook is that it is very important for presidents to be able to fire agency heads at will, unless that agency is very important to John Roberts. The post Trump v Slaughter: Supreme Court Rules Trump Can Fire Any Agency Head Who Doesn’t Make John Roberts Wealthier appeared first on Balls and Strikes.  ( 7 min )

The dissenting opinion in Watson v. Republican National Committee reveals just how deeply election denialism is now embedded in the conservative consciousness.    The post Watson v RNC: Samuel Alito, the Supreme Court’s Leading Voter Fraud Conspiracy Theorist appeared first on Balls and Strikes.  ( 8 min )

I put a question to my SFGATE colleagues just the other day that had them mulling for a bit: What’s the last great movie that Steven Spielberg directed? I’m not talking about a merely good film. The old man can put together a competent picture anytime he likes. I’m talking about an all-timer of a Spielberg movie, something that belongs up there with his best work, which includes “Jaws,” “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” “E.T.,” “Schindler’s List” and … you get the idea. When you’re a director who’s made not just one of the greatest movies of all time but several of them, audience members like me hope for (and oftentimes expect) greatness from you with every subsequent project. Such is the standard that Spielberg, father of the modern blockbuster, set for himself. It’s also a standard that, in my …  ( 1 min )

Dr. Richardson dropped by this afternoon to share her thoughts on where this remarkable nation is at 250

Heather Cox Richardson joins us live today at 2pm ET, Marc Elias joins us Wednesday

What Watson means for Trump’s war on mail voting a.cta_button{-moz-box-sizing:content-box !important;-webkit-box-sizing:content-box !important;box-sizing:content-box !important;vertical-align:middle}.hs-breadcrumb-menu{list-style-type:none;margin:0px 0px 0px 0px;padding:0px 0px 0px 0px}.hs-breadcrumb-menu-item{float:left;padding:10px 0px 10px 10px}.hs-breadcrumb-menu-divider:before{content:'›';padding-left:10px}.hs-featured-image-link{border:0}.hs-featured-image{float:right;margin:0 0 20px 20px;max-width:50%}@media (max-width: 568px){.hs-featured-image{float:none;margin:0;width:100%;max-width:100%}}.hs-screen-reader-text{clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);height:1px;overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;width:1px} 96 …  ( 5 min )

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The RNC tried to throw out your ballot a.cta_button{-moz-box-sizing:content-box !important;-webkit-box-sizing:content-box !important;box-sizing:content-box !important;vertical-align:middle}.hs-breadcrumb-menu{list-style-type:none;margin:0px 0px 0px 0px;padding:0px 0px 0px 0px}.hs-breadcrumb-menu-item{float:left;padding:10px 0px 10px 10px}.hs-breadcrumb-menu-divider:before{content:'›';padding-left:10px}.hs-featured-image-link{border:0}.hs-featured-image{float:right;margin:0 0 20px 20px;max-width:50%}@media (max-width: 568px){.hs-featured-image{float:none;margin:0;width:100%;max-width:100%}}.hs-screen-reader-text{clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);height:1px;overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;width:1px} 96 …  ( 5 min )

Americans United for Separation of Church and State 96 @font-face { font-family: 'Overpass'; font-style: normal; font-weight: 300; font-display: swap; src: url('https://fonts.gstatic.com/s/overpass/v19/qFda35WCmI96Ajtm83upeyoaX6QPnlo6ovPbPpqKl8Kuo8Az.woff2') format('woff2'); unicode-range: U+0000-00FF, U+0131, U+0152-0153, U+02BB-02BC, U+02C6, U+02DA, U+02DC, U+0304, U+0308, U+0329, U+2000-206F, U+20AC, U+2122, U+2191, U+2193, U+2212, U+2215, U+FEFF, U+FFFD; } @font-face { font-family: 'Overpass'; font-style: italic; font-weight: 300; font-display: swap; src: url('https://fonts.gstatic.com/s/overpass/v19/qFdU35WCmI96Ajtm81GgSdXCNs-VMF0vNLBdeqqIncOMp9gyUsE.woff2') format('woff2'); unicode-range: U+0000-00FF, U+0131, U+0152-0153, U+02BB-02BC, U+02C6, U+02DA, U…  ( 8 min )

Bail for NFL cornerback Terrion Arnold, who has been charged with four counts of kidnapping and four counts of armed robbery, was set Monday at $1 million. Just a few hours after the hearing ended, the Detroit Lions cut Arnold, a former first-round pick who was set to enter his third season in the league. At the court hearing, prosecutors in Hillsborough County, Fla., had asked a judge to hold Arnold in jail without bail, but chief judge Christopher C. Sabella denied their request. Sabella also said Arnold could not contact his codefendants, had to surrender his passport, and Arnold must stay at home unless he is leaving for legal appointments or work. Sabella rejected a request from prosecutors to have Arnold wear an ankle monitor, saying, per USA Today, "I suspect that Mr. Arnold has a paparazzi monitor. If he's late for practice, ESPN will let us know."  ( 22 min )

Don't panic: We're about to discuss Draymond Green, but not because of his taste for provocation or his general Draymond-hood. It's just a little item ahead of NBA free agency opening Tuesday afternoon, which means there may be less here than meets the eye, but just enough to meet the funny bone. Green will reportedly decline his $27 million player option for 2027, days after Golden State Warriors general manager Mike Dunleavy Jr. said the team was optimistic that he would return. OK, that's a little odd, but nothing to endanger your delicates over. It's the only thing we really know. But Green's decision offers the tantalizing notion that he might even consider leaving the only NBA team he's ever known, even though the more likely outcome is that he's taking a pay cut to bring in some new old blood. The Athletic suspects Green might re-up in Golden State anyway, while ESPN suggests it might be part of a byzantine plan for the Warriors to sign LeBron James to the $15.1 million midlevel exception, and somehow find a way to relitigate the 2016 NBA Finals all within one team.  ( 18 min )

Last week, my husband and I hosted a group of friends and acquaintances to celebrate our one-year anniversary of living in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. We marked the occasion by eating snacks and talking about our respective art practices. At one point, the group went around and said how they knew us, and I watched with amusement as most people told versions of the same story: me walking up to them at work, at the coffee shop, at the farmer's market, and introducing myself. I do not think of myself as a particularly social person. I am in bed with a book most nights by 8:00 p.m., and one of the ways my clinical anxiety manifests itself is through being afraid of new people. Maybe my saving grace is the fact that I was forced to move across the country every 2-3 years growing up with my military family. Against the odds, I've turned into a person who is able to establish roots in new places with relative ease. But even with a lifetime of practice, the prospect of Making Friends As An Adult often feels daunting. Do you know how many times I have cried in the last three years over shallow roots, loneliness, and a lack of community? More than five, for sure! Many adults lack the social infrastructure that places them alongside potential friends by default—things like church or Elks Lodge or whatever. Add in working remotely, and it can be very easy to go several days without speaking to another person. How are you supposed to find your people?  ( 17 min )

With the start of the 2026 Tour de France mere days away, most of the world's attention will focus on Tadej Pogacar and Jonas Vingegaard as they race for the yellow jersey. The sixth consecutive installation of the mega-rivalry is obviously of heavy interest, but I don't think it's the most fascinating two-up contest on the cards. Experienced champions necessarily duke it out every year; by contrast, something like the fight brewing between 19-year-old Frenchman Paul Seixas and 22-year-old Mexican Isaac Del Toro is unprecedented, and far more compelling. That scrap says more about the future of cycling, less for the undeniable talent of these two riders in particular than for the simple fact of their youth. The professional peloton has traditionally been an inhospitable environment for rid…  ( 39 min )

The NHL draft was this weekend, and even though we had several weeks to get used to the image of Gavin McKenna in a Toronto Maple Leafs hat, the action in the rest of the top 10 was a good mix of unpredictable and intriguing. The Canucks, at No. 3, committed what has the potential to be an all-time goof-up by drafting their brand-new coach's son, Caleb Malhotra. (Anyone want to tell them how long coaches usually last in the NHL?) The Seattle Kraken, drafting at seven, ended up with a possible steal in defenseman Chase Reid, who surprisingly fell down the board after Buffalo swerved to draft Daxon Rudolph at No. 4 and the two teams that followed didn't change their plans. But of all 32 teams that added new blood, nobody should be more energized about their draft than the San Jose Sharks, wh…  ( 21 min )

Malik Beasley has been indicted by federal prosecutors, on charges related to suspicious gambling activity. According to earlier reporting, authorities began looking at Beasley last summer after at least one U.S. sports book noted unusual betting interest on Beasley's statistical production. The suspicious activity reportedly took place during the 2023–24 NBA regular season, when Beasley was a member of the Milwaukee Bucks. Shams Charania reported Monday that the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of New York is currently working to coordinate Beasley's voluntary surrender sometime this week. You can lose your mind considering too closely the words chosen by Charania in one of his news releases, but in this case you would be right to zero in on "point shaving and prop bets." The indictment, unsealed Monday, names Beasley, former NBA forward Ed Davis, and four co-conspirators, including current player agent Paolo Zamorano, and charges them with "wire fraud conspiracy, bribery in sporting contests, honest services wire fraud conspiracy, and money laundering conspiracy," and describes a bribery scheme in which Beasley manipulated his performance in order to rig illegal bets. In an announcement to his office's website, U.S. Attorney Joseph Nocella Jr. accuses Beasley and his co-conspirators of seeking "to corrupt sports through illegal means." "As alleged, the defendants turned professional basketball into a criminal betting operation, bribing then-NBA player Malik Beasley to fix his performance in multiple games in order to place fraudulent wagers, enrich themselves and cheat legitimate sportsbooks. Bribery and insider betting schemes like this one involving former NBA players and a current NBA player agent who exploited inside NBA information for profit erode the integrity of American sports and victimize the sports-watching public."  ( 19 min )

The Dog Days of summer in the Northern Hemisphere don't officially begin until the rising of Sirius, the "dog star." This is usually mid-to-late July, and we can thank the Greeks for the canid construction. "On summer nights, star of stars, Orion's Dog they call it," Homer recited in the Iliad, "brightest of all, but an evil portent, bringing heat and fevers to suffering humanity." The Dog Days of the baseball season—those weeks of malaise and joylessness and what feels like the 12th Tigers-Royals series of the year—traditionally kick off after the all-star break, when teams and fans start to really feel the weight of 162 games. The Dog Days for the New York Yankees come a little earlier. June, usually. You can tell because that's when they let Sonny Gray flirt with a no-hitter. Gray threw seven-and-a-third hitless Sunday night, though Aroldis Chapman would blow the save, forcing the Red Sox to score three in the 10th for the walk-off. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-YKALnlMi4  ( 17 min )

It's time to wrap up the month with a challenging themeless. Keep an eye out for tricky clues and fun wordplay. This puzzle was constructed by August Miller, and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. August is a vegetable and dairy farmer who recently relocated from Massachusetts to New York. He is thrilled to have his first puzzle at Defector, and hopes we can all find ways to stay cool this week. Defector crosswords, launched in partnership with our friends at AVCX, run every Monday. If you’re interested in submitting a puzzle to us, you can read our guidelines HERE. The AVCX, an independent puzzles and games outlet, invites you to subscribe, or sample the goods with a two-month free trial: "With an AVCX subscription, you get access to weekly themed and themeless crosswords, minis, cryptics, and trivia, by email or in your favorite app. We have no corporate overlord, and we publish top-flight stuff only. We also pay our people fairly, always. Check us out."  ( 13 min )

While it would be asking too much to expect soccer to deliver anything like justice, you can usually count on the sport's sense of humor. That's why we probably shouldn't be surprised that the 2026 World Cup, marred from the outside by the racist caprices of the Trump administration, could best be described at this point as African soccer's coming-out party. Here at the close of the tournament's group stage, the Africans are triumphant. Nine of their 10 World Cup entrants have made it the round of 32. No other continental confederation can better Africa's percentage of knockout qualifiers. Getting so many teams through is impressive in its own right, but doing so has to feel especially rewarding in light of how much skepticism and bullshit African soccer had to endure coming into the World…  ( 35 min )

The NBA offseason presents a pit that must be filled with trade rumors, free-agency drama, and delirium-inducing podcast segments. It takes a lot of slop to fill that pit to the brim, which is how you end up with Jaylen Brown and an ESPN dope conspiring to dust off a tiresome conversation about the place of analytics in the NBA. Brown very much appears to be on the trading block, which is a weird place to be for a guy who has won a Finals MVP and is coming off the best individual season of his career, but here we are. It was widely reported that the Celtics dangled Brown for Giannis Antetokounmpo before the Greek Freak was ultimately shipped off to Miami, and I guess once you dangle a guy of Brown's stature and temperament, you can't just undangle him. Type "Jaylen Brown" into Google or your social media platform of choice and you will be blasted by a dozen or so reports, from NBA insiders you've barely heard of, about which teams are angling to pry Brown away from the Celtics. One of those insiders is, I guess, Bobby Marks of ESPN. If you don't immediately recognize his name, you might recognize his schtick: He's the guy who appears across various NBA podcasts to remind listeners what a specific player's salary number is, and assure you that nothing good will ever happen to your team because of how close it is to the second apron. I assume this is what Marks was doing when he made an appearance on the Sirius XM NBA show over the weekend, but he also got little bit out over his skis and shared that an "analytics guy" from an NBA team had told him that he views Brown as "the seventh-best player on a team."  ( 21 min )

John Roberts and His Confederates on the Court Hand Donald Trump Another Win

The Supreme Court just loves giving our loony overlord whatever he wants. Or so it seems.  ( 200 min )

Surely there’s no way the president can use the Supreme Court’s growing army of personal officers to his advantage—right?  ( 199 min )

Supreme Court justice, retired; 87; Cambridge, Massachusetts.  ( 198 min )

The Rangers take on the Guardians in Cleveland with Tyler Alexander and Parker Messick on the mound. Alexander is nearly perfect as an opener. In two inning, he did not allow a hit or a walk, just one hit batsman. Messick, a traditional starter, owns a 2.67 ERA in 94 1/3 innings. He allowed just […]  ( 25 min )

Every Monday Baseball Musings compares the offense of the current season to the previous season through the same number of full weeks. Through thirteen full weeks MLB games produced 8.96 runs per game compared to 8.73 runs per game in 2025. Home runs are up ever so slightly, 0.06 per game. Strikeouts rose a bit, […]  ( 25 min )

The Log5 Method yields these top projected hit averages versus starting pitchers: 0.313, 0.724 — Jake Mangum batting at Aaron Nola. 0.302, 0.702 — Nick Gonzales batting at Aaron Nola. 0.300, 0.709 — Jeremy Pena batting vs. Zebby Matthews. 0.299, 0.715 — Otto Lopez batting at Sean Sullivan. 0.294, 0.685 — Ceddanne Rafaela batting vs. […]  ( 26 min )

Junior Caminero of the Rays hit another home run on Sunday. His three for three with a walk provided a game score of 77, tied for third highest on the day and he moves into first place in the Baseball Musings Batter Rankings. He homered in four straight games and five of his last six. […]  ( 26 min )

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Former reality TV star Spencer Pratt is out of the Los Angeles mayoral race for two reasons. First, and most important, he got fewer votes than two other candidates, incumbent Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and LA City Councilwoman Nithya Raman, who will now face off against each other. Second, he’s an unqualified dipstick whom a majority of Los Angelenos understood wasn’t qualified for the job. Pratt was endorsed by President Donald Trump and hailed by some MAGA Republicans as a rising star, a political outsider with a winning populist message. That was, in a word, wrong. The Free Press, the conservative publication founded by Bari Weiss, who is presently busy ruining CBS News, ran a piece in May that posed the question: “How did Spencer Pratt, reality TV star and ‘healing’ crystal salesma…  ( 14 min )

A couple years ago, my wife and oldest son began experimenting with Medjool dates. I wasn’t happy about it. I’ve tried dates in many forms, and never liked them. They look like legless cockroaches. They are, in my estimation, overly ambitious raisins. Nobody likes an overly ambitious raisin. Tragically, my family’s addiction to these ancient stone fruits grew worse, to the point I couldn’t trust any baked good that appeared in the kitchen, as it was likely date-tainted. Gone were the days of normal muffins or oatmeal bars. All I heard was “These are sweetened with dates!” and “The dates give these such a great texture!” and other such excited mumbo-jumbo. My son is addicted to dates and I've never been more ashamed Not long ago, my wonderful adult son – whose father raised him with the ho…  ( 15 min )

Billionaire Jeff Bezos has boldly put forth a challenge to Americans. In a May 20 interview with CNBC, he referenced a hypothetical New York City school teacher and said, “You could double the taxes I pay, and it's not going to help that teacher in Queens. I promise you.” Promises from billionaires will be worth about as much as cash in the post-apocalyptic wasteland we’ll soon inhabit, thanks to all the billionaires. (I’m guessing the primary currency will be potable water and locally sourced rich-people meat.) So I’ll respond to Mr. Bezos with this: “You say doubling your taxes won’t help regular Americans. Well, sir, that’s a risk I’m willing to take. What say we quintuple your taxes and see what shakes out?” I say let's raise Jeff Bezos' taxes and see how it all works out "If people w…  ( 14 min )

Plus, a million families win big

In recent years, Republican propaganda has quietly moved away from loud condemnation of the gay community to focusing the most overt hate on trans people. Donald Trump even has a few token gay men in his closest circles, such as Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who has two children with his husband. Marriage equality was legalized in all 50 states by the Supreme Court 11 years ago in Obergefell v. Hodges, and it has often been tempting to assume that the GOP has largely given up on trying to restigmatize, much less ban, gay marriage. After all, the main argument Republicans had against marriage equality was that it was a threat to straight marriage. A 2015 amicus brief arguing against same-sex marriage, for instance, said that legalizing same-sex marriage would teach people that “society …  ( 6 min )

I Am So Thirsty For This Paige Bueckers-Olivia Miles Rivalry96 :root { color-scheme: light; supported-color-schemes: light; } body { margin: 0; padding: 0; min-width: 100%!important; -ms-text-size-adjust: 100% !important; -webkit-transform: scale(1) !important; -webkit-text-size-adjust: 100% !important; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased !important; } .body { word-wrap: normal; word-spacing:normal; } table.mso { width: 100%; border-collapse: collapse; padding: 0; table-layout: fixed; } img { border: 0; outline: none; } table { mso-table-lspace: 0px; mso-table-rspace: 0px; } td, a, span { mso-line-height-rule: exactly; } #root [x-apple-data-detectors=true], a[x-apple-data-detectors=true], #MessageViewBody a { color: inherit !important; text-decoration: inherit !import…  ( 7 min )

It's possible to configure Emacs to prompt the user before calling a function, thereby "disabling" a function. The function isn't totally inaccessible -- Emacs will let you run it if you want it to. I chose to do this with scroll-left, scroll-right, scroll-up-command and scroll-down-command as explained in the previous post. Most keypresses call self-insert-command, which is itself a function. So what would happen if self-insert-command were disabled? It turns out to be not as debilitating as you'd think -- only the alpha-numeric and punctuation keys are affected. When a modifier is used with a key (M-x, for example), there is no interruption. Likewise, the TAB key is allowed to pass, which makes completion easier. When Emacs inhibits self-insert-command, it prevents the keypress from having its intended effect. It will say that the command is disabled because many users find it confusing. Then you'll have the options of: (n) Not running the command (y) Run the command and don't ask again SPC Run the command just one time to try it (!) Enable the command and all other disabled commands The n, y, SPC and ! keys are not inhibited at this point, so the user doesn't get trapped in a set of recursive prompts. So to invoke org-agenda, I'd press M-x o. Then I'd press SPC to enable the self-insert-command for "o." Then I'd press r followed by SPC, and so on. My keypresses are M-x o r g - a g TAB ENTER. Thus, adding (put 'self-insert-command 'disabled t) to a cube-mate's init file is a harmless prank, something to try on April Fool's Day.  ( 9 min )

Fontaine allows the user to define detailed font configurations and set them on demand. For example, one can have a regular-editing preset and another for presentation-mode (these are arbitrary, user-defined symbols): the former uses small fonts which are optimised for writing, while the latter applies typefaces that are pleasant to read at comfortable point sizes. Package name (GNU ELPA): fontaine Official manual: https://protesilaos.com/emacs/fontaine Change log: https://protesilaos.com/emacs/fontaine-changelog Git repositories: GitHub: https://github.com/protesilaos/fontaine GitLab: https://gitlab.com/protesilaos/fontaine Backronym: Fonts, Ornaments, and Neat Typography Are Irrelevant in Non-graphical Emacs. Below are the release notes. Version 3.1.0 on 2026-06-29 This is a small release that includes internal refinements as well as two user-facing changes: The user option fontaine-presets accepts an optional :line-spacing entry, which corresponds to the line-spacing variable. As of Emacs version 31, line-spacing can be bound to a cons cell to set the space above and below. Fontaine now handles this as intended. By default, changing the font size has the effect of resizing the frame. This is because of the original value of the variable frame-inhibit-implied-resize. Fontaine is now designed to always inhibit frame resizing, regardless of frame-inhibit-implied-resize.  ( 1 min )

by Tushar 2026 June 29 emacs canvas The Canvas patch is almost done. Except that we need more testing, specifically for its MS Windows port. (Though testers on other operating systems like GNU/Linux and MacOS are also welcome.) Since we don't have any computers running MS Windows, we are not sure if the code is actually correct. Please follow the following instructions for testing it on MS Windows. You can discuss the results or ask us questions at MonadicSheep Emacs Fork's Issue tracker, #phi-mu-lambda on Libera IRC (open webchat in browser), or on the fediverse (tag the post with #emacs). 1. Building GNU Emacs on MS Windows Install MSYS2 by following the official instructions mentioned there. Open a MSYS2 UCRT64 session terminal. In the bash prompt, run the following command to get the canvas patch source code. git clone https://codeberg.org/MonadicSheep/emacs cd emacs/ make ./src/emacs 2. Testing *scratch* (Using C-c C-c keybinding). (defun make-rect (width height pixel) (make-vector (* width height) pixel)) (setq rect-canvas-vec (make-rect 250 250 #xFFFF0000)) (setq rect-canvas `(image :type canvas :data-width 250 :data-height 250 :data ,rect-canvas-vec)) (insert (propertize "#" 'display rect-canvas)) (defvar rect-canvas-timer nil) (let ((i 0)) (setq rect-canvas-timer (run-with-timer 0 0.016 (lambda () (if (< i (* 20 250)) (progn (aset rect-canvas-vec (+ (* 115 250) i) #xFF0000FF) (canvas-refresh rect-canvas t) (setq i (1+ i))) (cancel-timer rect-canvas-timer))))))  ( 1 min )

a useful post that describes how to solve a niche problem involving Emacs diary and Org mode. The problem is you have an event scheduled in your diary and you want access to an Org heading for clocking and note taking. It turns out that it’s pretty easy to arrange that. Take a look at Zeitler’s post to see the exact recipe.  ( 4 min )

The next, but not last, decision day is Monday. Also: A reporter's privilege case on the shadow docket. And, for paid subscribers: Closing my tabs.

A reminder - Heather Cox Richardson is joining us live at 2pm ET tomorrow!

Tuesday is the last day of the quarter - let's rally for our candidates everybody!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Dublin closed out a thrilling All-Ireland football quarterfinal weekend with a massive and penalty-aided comeback to beat Galway Sunday afternoon in Croke Park, 1-25 to 1-21. Galway was up by six points with just 15 minutes left on the clock. But the game turned Dublin’s way when Galway defender Liam Silke was assessed a black card for fouling on a goal-scoring opportunity. Veteran Dublin forward Con O’Callaghan banged home the penalty shot to knot the score, and his team never looked back. Galway, forced to play a man down for the game’s final 10 minutes, never scored again. The win could be seen as sweet revenge for Dublin manager Ger Brennan. He’d been handed a stout 12-week suspension in March following a donnybrook between Dublin and Galway during a National League match in which Brennan was red-carded for shoving Galway’s strength and conditioning coach Cian Breathnach McGinn. The squad was spiraling downward in the preliminary rounds of the county tournament with Brennan shelved and Dean Rock, a mainstay player on the dynastic Dubs teams of the last decade, forced to serve as interim manager. Brennan was back on the sidelines earlier this month for Dublin's overtime upset of pre-tournament favorite Donegal to reach the quarterfinals. And now they played avengers for him against Galway.  ( 20 min )

BROOKLYN — Boots Ennis survived the toughest round of his career, then KO’d game but overmatched champ Xander Zayas in a beautifully brutal Saturday night title fight at Barclays Center. When Ennis put Zayas on the canvas for the third time of the bout, Zayas's corner decided to save him from himself and threw in the towel with 1:12 left in the seventh round. With the win, Ennis took Zayas's WBO and WBA super welterweight belts and remained undefeated at 36-0. The Philly fighter also greatly advanced his pursuit of imaginary but highly coveted titles like “the face of boxing” and “pound-for-pound champ.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cb_jO5KUCuw  ( 21 min )

96 The Grass Is Always Green-er @media only screen and (max-width: 620px) { table.body { width: 100%; min-width: 100%; } table.body .content { padding: 0 !important; } table.body .container { padding: 0 !important; width: 100% !important; } table.body .main { border-spacing: 10px 0 !important; border-left-width: 0 !important; border-radius: 0 !important; border-right-width: 0 !important; } table.body .img-responsive { height: auto !important; max-width: 100% !important; width: auto !important; } } @media all { .ExternalClass { width: 100%; } .ExternalClass, .ExternalClass p, .ExternalClass span, .ExternalClass font, .ExternalClass td, .ExternalClass div { line-height: 100%; } .apple…  ( 9 min )

Emerson Hancock takes on Gavin Williams as the Mariners visit the Guardians. Hancock sports a low .272 OBP. His effective OBP is even lower as he induced ten double plays in 42 opportunities. Williams goes for his tenth win of the season to go with a 3.82 ERA. The batting average against him is just […]  ( 26 min )

The Log5 Method yields these top projected hit averages versus starting pitchers: 0.327, 0.728 — Otto Lopez batting at Kyle Leahy. 0.311, 0.723 — Jake Mangum batting vs. Brady Singer. 0.308, 0.718 — Yandy Diaz batting vs. Merrill Kelly. 0.296, 0.695 — Nick Gonzales batting vs. Brady Singer. 0.296, 0.698 — Xavier Edwards batting at […]  ( 27 min )

The Rays take control of the top five of the Baseball Musings Batter Rankings as Jonathan Aranda joins Yandy Diaz and Junior Caminero in the group. Diaz singled and walked in the 4-2 win over the Diamondbacks to hold first place. Camiero homered in four trips, his sixth dinger in his last five games to […]  ( 26 min )

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Plus, unlock exclusive subscriber benefits /* resets */ p {margin:0px;margin-bottom:0px;padding:0px;} table {border-spacing:0;} table, td {border-collapse:collapse;} * {-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased;-moz-osx-font-smoothing: grayscale;text-size-adjust: none !important;-ms-text-size-adjust: none !important;-webkit-text-size-adjust: none !important;} /* end resets */ /* outlook / hotmail */ .ExternalClass{width:100%;} table, td {mso-table-lspace:0pt;mso-table-rspace:0pt;} img{-ms-interpolation-mode:bicubic;} .ReadMsgBody {width: 100%;} /* end outlook / hotmail */ /* gmail */ u + #body a {color: inherit;text-decoration: none;font-size: inherit;font-family: inherit;font-weight: inherit;line-height: inherit;} img + div {display: none!important;} /* end gmail */ /* ios */ body{-we…  ( 2 min )

My one request a.cta_button{-moz-box-sizing:content-box !important;-webkit-box-sizing:content-box !important;box-sizing:content-box !important;vertical-align:middle}.hs-breadcrumb-menu{list-style-type:none;margin:0px 0px 0px 0px;padding:0px 0px 0px 0px}.hs-breadcrumb-menu-item{float:left;padding:10px 0px 10px 10px}.hs-breadcrumb-menu-divider:before{content:'›';padding-left:10px}.hs-featured-image-link{border:0}.hs-featured-image{float:right;margin:0 0 20px 20px;max-width:50%}@media (max-width: 568px){.hs-featured-image{float:none;margin:0;width:100%;max-width:100%}}.hs-screen-reader-text{clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);height:1px;overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;width:1px} 96 ul > li { …  ( 3 min )

November is coming

The good news about the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool turning greener than Kermit the Frog’s keister is President Donald Trump finally has a swamp to drain. I’m kidding, there’s nothing funny about algae breaking out all over the Reflecting Pool immediately after President I’m-A-Builder dumped $14.2 million into beautifying the Washington, DC, landmark so it would appear “American Flag Blue.” In fact, shame on the Reflecting Pool for allowing itself it to seem like a failure just as the president agrees to a deal with Iran that also sounds like a failure. Nobody likes a giant, shallow pool that understands how metaphors work. Trump should change America's colors to match the green Reflecting Pool The pool does look less blue and more glow-in-the-dark Slurpee, but that was probably part…  ( 14 min )

Hello, I am a centrist Democrat who is terrified that progressive liberal candidates keep winning primary elections. I am also terrified of my own shadow, but this is somehow worse. Suddenly, voters are being won over by liberal candidates ‒ even a few who are democratic socialists! ‒ who aren’t afraid to lean into populist messages with passion and an apparent drive to actually do things that will make people’s lives better. What is that all about? Since when did the things voters want become so important? Following the embrace of New York City’s popular democratic socialist Mayor Zohran Mamdani, two democratic socialist candidates and one progressive candidate won their recent congressional primary races. I immediately took to my living room's fainting couch. (Like most centrist Democrat…  ( 15 min )

Hello America-loving tourist, and welcome to the beautiful, algae-free Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, brought to you by President Donald J. Trump, the only man powerful enough to make the Reflecting Pool Great Again. You’ll notice the pool is surrounded by armed soldiers hoping you don't look at the water. That is for your safety and the safety of the newly refurbished Reflecting Pool, which is glistening and perfect and not at all covered with a thick layer of algae and stray chunks of American-flag-blue paint the media would have you believe exists. Before we begin our tour of this remarkable national landmark, I’ll remind everyone that there is no looking at the remarkable national landmark. If you didn’t receive blackout goggles when you bought your ticket for the tour, please keep …  ( 12 min )

This post is a reflection on over ten years of Emacs usage. Why did I even start using it? How has my usage changed over the years? What's the future looking like? I'll discuss this and a whole lot more. It's a spiritual successor to my post.  ( 13 min )

Gomuks, which is a Matrix client written in Go. Typically, Gomuks runs a web app client for Matrix, which connects to the Gomuks backend via a websocket. My wrapper, gomuks.el, connects to the websocket and acts as a full (well, rudimentary) Matrix client inside Emacs. Why make this? ement.el, and are probably wondering why I can't use it. The simple answer is that ement.el doesn't handle encryption natively, instead requiring pantalaimon. Now, I've already had mixed success with pantalaimon in the past (which is why I was using the Gomuks TUI), but the repo for it has been archived as of earlier this year so I don't think it's wise to rely on it. As a side note, I'm not actually sure why it was archived; I assume the matrix org just didn't want to maintain it anymore, which is fair enough, but I would have liked some explanation on the readme at least. Anyway, Gomuks already handles encryption, and so gomuks.el does as well. What state is it in? usable, in the sense that I will use it and add features to it as I need them, but it is far from the quality of ement.el or the myriad of IRC clients in Emacs. Basically all I have at the moment is live state synchronisation (without handling edit/delete events) and sending messages (only textual). The GUI is horrible, because I don't know how to use EWOC so I'm not, and it smells of programmer design. If you intend to use this, expect lots of unexpected jank. That being said, I think the code is fairly high quality and well documented, so it should be fairly easy to modify and understand. Contributing birdt_@cyan.sh.

I just added two new themes to my minimalist doric-themes package. doric-tiger is a light theme, while doric-lion is dark. Both use orange and yellow colours. Below are sample screenshots. doric-tiger doric-lion Part of development The new themes will be available in version 1.2.0. I think they already are well defined and may not need furter changes. Though I will continue to test—and possibly tweak—them over the course of the next two weeks or so. Sources The Doric themes use few colours and will appear monochromatic in many contexts. They are my most minimalist themes. Styles involve the careful use of typographic features and subtleties in colour gradients to establish a consistent rhythm. If you want maximalist themes in terms of colour, check my ef-themes package. For something in-between, which I would consider the best “default theme” for a text editor, opt for my modus-themes. Package name (GNU ELPA): doric-themes Sample pictures: https://protesilaos.com/emacs/doric-themes-pictures Git repository: https://github.com/protesilaos/doric-themes Backronym: Doric Only Really Intensifies Conservatively … themes.  ( 1 min )

I often press C- or C- accidentally. It's annoying and disorientating because I lose my place in the document as well as my train of thought. I think of them (a bit dramatically) as "Deadly Navigation Keys." But I discovered two valuable Emacs features to make it easy to recover from them (or prevent them) as a result. The first valuable feature is that C- (which is bound to end-of-buffer) sets the mark at the cursor location prior to setting point to the end of the buffer. (I only just realized this after seeing the message "Mark set" in the minibuffer about fifty times.) There's an almost-applicable saying, "What goes up, must come down," except in this case I'd say, "What gets pushed, may be popped." A simple invocati…  ( 10 min )

now there’s a new one. Lately he decided to try ghostel for his terminal emulator. He was already using ghostty as his macOS terminal emulator so the change made sense. The change worked out well and Ridenour was pleased with the result except for one thing. With his previous Emacs terminal emulator, eat, he was able to toggle the emulator on and off easily but it didn’t work with ghostel. Rather than look for another package to solve this, he decided to fix it himself. The desired functionality was If no instance of ghostel is running, start one in the current window. If there is already a ghostel instance running in another window, switch to it. If there is a ghostel instance running in the current window, bury it. nil if there is none. The second function implements the three steps above in a straightforward way. The code is in his post and easy to understand so take a look if you have a similar need.  ( 5 min )

The Angels fired GM Perry Minasian on Friday. John Mozeliak takes over on an interim basis. Minasian made bold moves shortly after taking over the Angels’ baseball operations department, starting with the release of future Hall of Fame first baseman Albert Pujols in 2021 and the firing of World Series-winning manager Joe Maddon in 2022. […]  ( 26 min )

Michael Wacha and the Royals try to stop the White Sox roll at home as they face Davis Martin. Wacha owns a 3.48 ERA overall this season, but that goes up to 4.02 on the road due to higher walks and home runs. The White Sox own a 27-13 home record, a .675 winning percentage, […]  ( 26 min )

The Log5 Method yields these top projected hit averages versus starting pitchers: 0.324, 0.702 — Byron Buxton batting vs. Michael Lorenzen. 0.308, 0.677 — Trevor Larnach batting vs. Michael Lorenzen. 0.302, 0.700 — Jackson Chourio batting vs. David Peterson. 0.299, 0.714 — Ernie Clement batting vs. Cal Quantrill. 0.298, 0.716 — Jung Hoo Lee batting […]  ( 27 min )

Yandy Diaz and Junior Caminero of the Rays sit one and two respectively in the Baseball Musings Batter Rankings. Diaz posted a two for three with a walk and a double, raising his OBP to .416. Caminero homered and walked, and is now slugging .527. Pete Crow-Armstrong of the Cubs drew and walk in four […]  ( 26 min )

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In 2003, the Supreme Court overturned its 1986 decision upholding sodomy laws. Both cases have a lot to teach us in and about this moment.

JUNE 27: Ragans will undergo surgery on July 1, Anne Rogers of MLB.com reports. Dr. Neal ElAttrache, who will perform the procedure, will not determine the extent of the surgery until then. JUNE 23: Royals manager Matt Quatraro says that left-hander Cole Ragans will likely require some kind of surgery on his elbow. “We anticipate […]  ( 9 min )

Few things represent the “DEI, but for unqualified goons” approach President Donald Trump takes to his Cabinet appointees better than this June 2 headline from The Washington Post: “Trump picks mortgage chief Bill Pulte to lead on national intelligence.” Perfect. A 38-year-old pal of Donald Trump Jr. with a degree in broadcast journalism and experience in finance and home building, coupled with zero background in intelligence or national security, will now be America’s acting director of national intelligence. I feel safer already. Pulte has been serving as director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, though his actions have largely been serving Trump and his unquenchable thirst for revenge against political opponents.  Pulte pushed the Justice Department to launch mortgage-fraud invest…  ( 13 min )

Republicans like newly minted U.S. Senate nominee Ken Paxton of Texas would like to you to know, in no uncertain terms, that Democrats are a pack of wild, tongue-wagging extremists out to destroy America. Setting aside the fact that Republicans presently in power seem to be doing a perfectly good job on the “destroying America” front – and on the “being tongue-wagging extremists” front, as well – let’s consider how Paxton spoke about his opponent, Democratic state Rep. James Talarico, following the Republican’s primary victory May 26. In quick succession, Paxton, 63, referred to the 37-year-old Democrat as “Tofu Talarico,” “James Tala-freako” and “Low-T Talarico.” Paxton then added, ominously: “But no matter what you call him, let me tell you this, James Talarico is a threat to everything …  ( 14 min )

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton seems hell-bent on making his race for a U.S. Senate seat against Democratic state Rep. James Talarico one of the dumbest spectacles in American political history. Rather than focus on the needs of Texans he might represent, Paxton has zeroed in on impotent suggestions that Talarico isn’t masculine enough to represent the Lone Star State and false claims that the Democrat – GASP! – is somehow not carnivorous enough to serve. That latter point is nonsense stemming from false claims that Talarico is a vegan. He has made it clear he’s not. But truth has no place in Paxton’s campaign, which apparently revolves around highlighting goofy Texas stereotypes, then accusing Talarico of not fitting the mold. Macho-man Ken Paxton challenges James Talarico to dinner Th…  ( 14 min )

If there’s one thing I’m sick of, it’s liberals and their radical views on how math works. For ages, President Donald Trump has been heroically claiming he cut prescription drug costs by, as he said during a Cabinet meeting in December, “500, 600, 700, 800, 900 percent depending on the drug.” He said last August there has been a “1,000 percent decrease” in drug costs. And in September he said: “I’m going to be reducing drug prices by 1,000 percent, by 900, 600, 500, 1,200. We're going to be reducing drug prices at levels never seen.” Why do liberals refuse to accept Trump Math, as RFK Jr. explained Left-wing knowledge nerds keep claiming those levels will never be seen because they constitute numerical gibberish. They whine that you “can’t” reduce the cost of something more than 100%. At …  ( 15 min )

I don’t mean to sound controversial, but a president shouldn’t be able to walk away from threatening to wipe out an entire civilization ‒ even setting a deadline, as if Armageddon is a bloody reality show ‒ and then carry on like he’s a normal president. Even if Republicans want you to think it's normal. In the sweep of less than 24 hours on April 7, Donald Trump went from threatening genocide to agreeing to a two-week ceasefire with Iran, a ceasefire that appears to give the Middle East nation a lot in return for nothing. Don’t get me wrong, I’m damn glad he stepped away from mass murder. But let’s be honest: America can’t continue with this kind of “Look at me, I’m a crazy former reality show star, tune in to see what I’ll do next?!?” insanity. The world just spent an entire day not know…  ( 14 min )

I don’t mean to sound controversial, but a president shouldn’t be able to walk away from threatening to wipe out an entire civilization ‒ even setting a deadline, as if Armageddon is a bloody reality show ‒ and then carry on like he’s a normal president. Even if Republicans want you to think it's normal. In the sweep of less than 24 hours on April 7, Donald Trump went from threatening genocide to agreeing to a two-week ceasefire with Iran, a ceasefire that appears to give the Middle East nation a lot in return for nothing. Don’t get me wrong, I’m damn glad he stepped away from mass murder. But let’s be honest: America can’t continue with this kind of “Look at me, I’m a crazy former reality show star, tune in to see what I’ll do next?!?” insanity. The world just spent an entire day not know…  ( 12 min )

It’s a proud day for American toughness! Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has officially done away with the U.S. military's WOKE flu vaccine mandate, and I applaud that decision from the bed I currently can’t get out of due to a high fever. TRUE warfighters know their lethality is only enhanced by bacterial pneumonia, and soft and so-called proven public health tools like vaccines are for weenies. Simply put, the libs will never understand that a fever is just God warming your body for the battle ahead. On April 21, in a video posted on social media, Hegseth said: “We're seizing this moment to discard any absurd, overreaching mandates that only weaken our warfighting capabilities. In this case, this includes the universal flu vaccine and the mandate behind it.” Hegseth says flu vaccine manda…  ( 15 min )

By proudly announcing “a whole civilization will die tonight,” President Donald Trump appears to have moved on from his dreams of a Nobel Peace Prize and embraced historical infamy. On the morning of April 7, the actual president of the United States of America directed these words to the people of Iran: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will.” Those are the words of a tyrant. They are the words of a madman promising genocide. They are the words of a sick human being unworthy of the position he holds. Trump's civilization-threatening words are shocking, even for him No matter how dulled our senses have become to Trump’s unhinged behavior, those words sent shockwaves across the country and the world. Democra…  ( 13 min )

You know, now that I can’t afford hamburger meat or gasoline and America is stuck in another war in the Middle East, I’m starting to think putting some of the worst people in politics in charge of the country may have been a mistake. I mean, it seemed like a good idea at the time. Granted, Donald Trump had previously proved himself incompetent and tried to overturn a free-and-fair election, but I thought, “Maybe giving a guy this corrupt and unqualified a second chance at being leader of the free world is just what America needs to shake things up.” And then when Trump started his second term by appointing a Cabinet that was a “who’s who” of “who’s nuts,” I rolled with it. Sure, the president selected a wildly incompetent Fox News host like Pete Hegseth to lead the military, but I thought,…  ( 15 min )

Once again, President Donald Trump is right. MY PRESIDENT wrote in a long and totally sane social media post that Pope Leo XIV is “Weak on Crime” and “Weak on Nuclear Weapons.” That truth bomb riled up a bunch of radical leftists and people who’ve “read the Bible” and such, leading many to say it’s a bad look for the president of the United States to insult the spiritual leader of the world’s 1.4 billion Roman Catholics. Well, let me ask you this, libs: Has the so-called pope made a single arrest since he became the Vicar of Christ in 2025? The answer is no. He has spent his time spreading a message of peace and love, encouraging people “to promote a culture of peace, helping those around us to overcome divisions and hostility and to build communion between individuals, peoples and religio…  ( 14 min )

Is it just me, or does it seem like Pope Leo XIV won’t stop talking about religion? He’s all “the Gospel says this” and “Jesus taught us that” – dude, we get it, you’re head of the worldwide Roman Catholic Church. But does that really make you an expert? As our Catholic Vice President JD Vance, who has a book coming out on his conversion to Catholicism, said, “I think it's very, very important for the pope to be careful when he talks about matters of theology.” Exactly. Vance has been a Catholic since 2019, the year Lil Nas X’s "Old Town Road" hit No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, so I’d take his warning seriously, Pope. He’s seven years deep into the Catholic faith – you don’t wanna mess with him. He’s part of the new Catholicism, the one that’s afraid to say “transubstantiation” beca…  ( 15 min )

Melania Trump, fresh off new polling that shows she’s America’s least-popular first lady, has come out of nowhere and positioned herself to be President Donald Trump’s least-popular wife. With no advance notice or even context, the usually invisible first lady materialized on April 9 and gave a statement at the White House, distancing herself from the Jeffrey Epstein scandal that has plagued the Trump administration. You remember the Epstein files, right? They were the subject of all the “notorious child sex trafficking” headlines President Trump tried to bomb out of existence by starting a war with Iran. Trump pushed Epstein files into a closet. Melania brought them back. If I’m being honest, the war gambit kind of worked. News about the Epstein files and Trump’s connection therein had l…  ( 15 min )

As the four astronauts on the Artemis II space mission approached the moon and found themselves farther from Earth than any human has ever traveled, a thought crossed my mind: Can we marvel at this? Please? Amid all the chaos in the world right now, can humanity take one beat and acknowledge something remarkable, an exploratory achievement that pushed us deeper into the galaxy that surrounds us than we’ve gone before? Just before 2 p.m. ET on April 6, astronauts aboard the Orion spacecraft were more than 248,655 miles from Earth, surpassing the previous distance record set in 1970 by the Apollo 13 astronauts. The Artemis II mission challenges humanity to do better As the ship continued its trip around the moon, Artemis II commander Reid Wiseman said, “We will continue our journey even fur…  ( 13 min )

It’s a proud day for American toughness! Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has officially done away with the U.S. military's WOKE flu vaccine mandate, and I applaud that decision from the bed I currently can’t get out of due to a high fever. TRUE warfighters know their lethality is only enhanced by bacterial pneumonia, and soft and so-called proven public health tools like vaccines are for weenies. Simply put, the libs will never understand that a fever is just God warming your body for the battle ahead. On April 21, in a video posted on social media, Hegseth said: “We're seizing this moment to discard any absurd, overreaching mandates that only weaken our warfighting capabilities. In this case, this includes the universal flu vaccine and the mandate behind it.” Hegseth says flu vaccine manda…  ( 12 min )

SEATTLE — You may not have heard it yet, but America’s legal community recently let out a roar here in the Emerald City, a collective call from retired federal judges and a bipartisan array of academics and legal organizations: The rule of law matters, and it will be protected. The two-day symposium, “Neither Sword Nor Purse,” held at the University of Washington School of Law, was necessary because of one person: President Donald J. Trump. His threats against the judiciary and the ease with which he and his administration ignore or boastfully refuse to follow the law are without precedent. He is, quite simply, a threat to judicial independence, and he shows no hesitation to jackhammer the very foundation of our democracy. J. Michael Luttig, a former federal judge and an icon in the conser…  ( 16 min )

I’ve been struggling to understand the Republican Party for quite a while, but watching conservative lawmakers trip over themselves to say President Donald Trump’s White House ballroom is the most important issue facing America? Well, it’s got me thinking the cheese has fully slid off their crackers. The pro-ballroom fervor erupted after an armed man tried to get into the White House Correspondents' Association dinner at a Washington, DC, Hilton, where Trump and most of his Cabinet were glad-handing with the journalists they despise. The man, accused of targeting Trump and other administration officials, was stopped by security, thankfully, and arrested. One might think the reaction to this disturbing event would be to figure out how the person obtained guns and got that close to a sitting…  ( 14 min )

It was a whirlwind weekend of failure for the Trump administration, but that didn’t stop President Donald Trump from having a great time at our expense. On April 11, while Vice President JD Vance used his sparkling personality and boundless likability to fail at reaching a peace deal with Iran, the president was at a UFC fight in Miami with Secretary of State Marco Rubio, which makes perfect sense if you don’t care about anything. On April 12, while the endorsements of Trump and Vance failed to help right-wing Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán win in the country’s general election, Trump was golfing in Florida, in between threats to use the U.S. Navy to block off the Strait of Hormuz, which, if you’re keeping score, has already been blocked by Iran. Delightful! Life is fun when you ne…  ( 14 min )

Like most Americans who express themselves primarily through carefully arranged seashells, I was shocked and frightened to learn the Trump administration has indicted former FBI Director James Comey over an Instagram post showing the numbers “86 47” written in our favorite medium. Throughout my life, when spoken words have failed me, I’ve turned to seashells. I gather them from whichever beach is nearby, then use them to write words, generally on the part of the beach just out of reach of the incoming waves, allowing me to capture a bit of water in the photo I’ll inevitably post on social media. “I’m Sorry,” I wrote once when I was feeling sorry, using scallop shells and shards of broken conchs. “Spin Doctors Rule,” I wrote on a South Florida beach in the late 1980s when I thought the band…  ( 14 min )

There has always been one thing, and one thing only, that President Donald Trump is good at: lying. He has conned and audaciously dissembled his way into a fortune and into two terms as president, always leaving chaos in his wake. Well, it appears the tornadic chaos of the moment – war with Iran, high gas and food prices, a president with a Caesar complex – has finally overwhelmed Trump’s lies, rendering him impotent against collapsing poll numbers and setting the Republican Party up for disaster in the coming midterm elections. A poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research released April 21 showed only 30% of Americans approve of Trump’s handling of the economy, something that was once his strong suit. That’s down from only 38% approving in March. In the same po…  ( 15 min )

A prerequisite for serving in the Trump administration seems to be first serving as a host or contributor to Fox News. So, naturally, President Donald Trump’s third shot at a surgeon general candidate is longtime Fox News medical contributor Nicole Saphier. Given that the U.S. Health and Human Services secretary is anti-vaccine, anti-science, pro-sewage-swimming Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a caricature of a serious human being, America’s surgeon general isn’t likely to matter much. The surgeon general could take a strong anti-smoking stance and Kennedy would likely dispute it by citing a wacky study from an obscure Scandinavian cult that found smoking actually “caused significant spikes in lung-healthy midi-chlorians,” completely ignoring that “midi-chlorians” is a fictional term from the "Star…  ( 15 min )

Inflation has surged to the highest level in three years, the cost of living is up and we’re stuck in a war with Iran. But don’t worry. President Donald Trump is busy painting the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool blue. Hopefully, this new $13 million pool project doesn’t distract him from his now more than $1 billion White House ballroom project. Or from his $100 million Triumphal Arch project. Or from putting his face on U.S. currency and passports. And his name on buildings and airports.  That sounds like sarcasm, but I’ve settled into what may be a controversial opinion: Let Trump build his vanity projects. Let his Republican boot-smoochers etch “President Donald J. Trump” into marble facades and slap that moniker on whichever edifice or coin or government document they see fit. Let his…  ( 15 min )

I was born and raised in Florida, home to the world’s busiest cruise-ship ports. While I abide by most of the rules native Floridians must follow – I know the complete Jimmy Buffett discography, I’ve been to Disney World enough times to hate it, I’ve been uncomfortably close to an alligator – I have never understood cruises. I was reminded of this for the one millionth time while reading about three recent deaths suspected to be from hantavirus, a virus carried by rodents, aboard a cruise ship sailing the Atlantic Ocean. Others onboard have gotten sick, and as of May 4, the ship is anchored near the West African nation of Cape Verde with about 150 passengers still on board. Call me a cruise coward, but that does not sound like a fun vacation. But maybe I'm wrong. This is your opportunity t…  ( 14 min )

Hey, do you all remember “Sleepy Joe” Biden, the president whose age and cognitive decline Donald Trump and his plague of MAGA lemmings routinely mocked? Well, I have some news. In a living example of turnabout being fair play, 79-year-old President Trump himself is now viewed by a majority of Americans as being mentally and physically unfit to lead.  A recent Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll found that nearly 60% of Americans believe Trump isn’t mentally sharp enough to be president, and 55% think his physical health makes him unfit to lead. Americans think Trump is just as mentally unfit as Biden was Just a few months before Biden dropped out of the 2024 presidential race over concerns about his age, an AP-NORC poll found 63% were not confident he had the mental capability to be pres…  ( 13 min )

I’m proud of President Donald Trump and his loyal Republican lawmakers. After years of pretending, it seems they’ve finally grown confident enough to flatly admit they don’t give a rip about regular Americans. This is real progress! Asked May 14 about how gas prices have soared since Trump dragged America into war with Iran, GOP Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio channeled his inner Frank Sinatra and said, “that’s life.” Trump admits to not caring about anyone's financial situation That came on the heels of the president himself saying that when it comes to Iran, “I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation. I don’t think about anybody.” There it is. It’s the thing many Americans have known for so long, deep in their guts, but haven’t heard the man himself say out loud. Trump doesn’t think ab…  ( 15 min )

So a group of scientists got together and decided to give cocaine to a bunch of salmon. It sounds like the kind of fantastic idea a person comes up with while using cocaine, then talks about for 13 consecutive hours to someone who is also doing cocaine and eagerly nodding in agreement while repeating, “It makes. So. Much. Sense.” Not-at-all shockingly, the resulting study found coked-up salmon swim faster, a conclusion that didn’t really need to involve salmon. Anyway, as weird as the study seemed, there was a point to it. Cocaine and its metabolites are “being excreted and subsequently detected in aquatic environments due to insufficient removal during wastewater treatment,” according to the paper published in the April edition of the journal Current Biology. Humans are sending cocaine in…  ( 13 min )

Listen up, non-rich Americans. I’m growing tired of your annoying complaints about high gas prices. I guess it has something to do with U.S. gas prices hitting their highest level in four years, or people spending $81.3 billion more on gas or energy goods in March than they spent the previous month. I have people who buy gas for me, so I can’t be pestered with such trivialities. Some say the Iran war – started by my personal tax-cutter, President Donald Trump – has something to do with it all. Ho hum. What bothers me is all the noise, noise, noise coming from the hoi polloi. It’s so bad that Trump’s approval rating dropped to 34% in the most recent Reuters/Ipsos poll, which I had my butler read to me. Can’t you ungrateful wretches just calm down and sell one of your lake houses to cover hi…  ( 16 min )

As a hardworking American who loves his country, I was honored to learn some of my tax dollars will contribute to the construction of President Donald Trump’s $200 million White House ballroom that is now going to cost $600 million. On June 16, The Washington Post reported that the price tag on what Trump originally called a “taxpayer-free” ballroom that would be paid for “100% by me and some friends of mine” has patriotically ballooned to $600 million, with about half of that money coming from taxpayers.  Some America-hating liberals out there will undoubtedly call that – and please imagine me using heavily sarcastic American-made air quotes here – “an outrageous amount of money to spend” when “high grocery prices” are “making it harder for people to make ends meet.” They’ll whine about h…  ( 13 min )

I have terrible news for people who had hoped to avoid being struck by a falling steak-and-mushroom sandwich.  Papa Johns, a restaurant chain known mainly for selling circular cheesed objects it alleges are pizza, is testing out a drone delivery service in Charlotte, North Carolina. Since we live in an age when most things make no sense, the initial wave of Papa Johns drones will only be able to deliver “Oven Toasted Sandwiches.” I guess our society hasn’t achieved full pizza-delivery drone technology, so we’re left getting sandwiches from a pizza place we didn’t know sold sandwiches. The bottom line is this: Thanks to technology, the good people of the greater Charlotte metropolitan area can have non-pizza food products delivered in a way that frightens birds and increases the likelihood …  ( 14 min )

It’s college graduation season, and as I proudly watched my eldest hurl his cap into the air, I couldn’t help thinking: “Wow. I am AMAZING. What a tremendous accomplishment by me.” Don’t get me wrong, I’m proud of him too. He did the studying and the grade-getting and the whole “make friendships that will last a lifetime” thing. But I think parents like myself should be honest about this moment. We’re the ones who toiled and stressed and dished out cash like malfunctioning ATM machines. We, long before these glorious college years, were the diaper-changers, the piano-lesson drivers, the advice-givers, the shoulders to cry on. We built these now-functioning adult humans and made sure they got an education, allowing them to go forth and fix the world we accidentally messed up, probably becau…  ( 14 min )

Heather Cox Richardson will be here Monday, Marc Elias Wednesday

While you were busy paying attention to the continued end of the world this past weekend, you might have missed the story that movies are officially BACK. That’s because “Project Hail Mary,” the sci-fi adventure starring Ryan Gosling, blew past initial box office projections and had the second largest non-franchise opening weekend in history, surpassed only by Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer.” Not only was “PHM” based on an original-ish story, but it was shot on actual sets, just like movies should be. Does this mean that you, the moviegoer, can expect more of this kind of quality cinema at the multiplex in the coming years? Well, I took my 13-year-old to the movie last night and subjected it to my patented Dad Movie Test. Let’s get right to it. What’s the deal with ‘Project Hail Mary’? …  ( 1 min )

The Oscars are happening on Sunday night, and it’s always morbid fun to see which nominees have potentially torpedoed their chances by doing something stupid during right before the ceremony. You might remember last year, when “Emilia Perez” star Karla Sofia Gascon sank her chances at Best Actress, along with “Emilia Perez’s” chances at Best Picture, by being an Islamophobic s—t for brains on Twitter.  This year’s potential backlash victim, Jessie Buckley of “Hamnet,” is a different story. In Gascon’s case, the backlash was justified because of the tweets, and because “Emilia Perez” is a horrible movie. In Buckley’s case, anyone who’s got a bad thing to say about that woman will be on the receiving end of a vicious ass-beating from me. Because Jessie Buckley earned the s—t out of her Osc…  ( 1 min )

If you’re reading this post this afternoon and you happen to be Iranian, congratulations. Your civilization didn’t die last night. I know it got a little bit dicey there for a minute, what with President Donald Trump promising that full-scale Armageddon would arrive at the stroke of 8 p.m. Eastern on Tuesday night. But Donald Trump’s arbitrary deadline came and went last evening and you and I are still here. The nation of Iran is also, thankfully, still here. And it has kicked Trump’s sorry ass up and down the block. The United States and Iran agreed to a two-week ceasefire last night. This tenuous détente came after our president committed a glaring war crime by declaring that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” if Iran didn’t reopen the Strait of Ho…  ( 1 min )

As we no longer have a functional journalism industry in the United States, it has fallen to me, a man who’d really prefer to be filling out an NCAA bracket right now, to alert you to the various criminal losers who serve as the face of Trump 2.0. I’ve introduced you to Vice Asshole JD Vance, of course. I’ve also given you a primer on War Department chief Pete Hegseth, who’s hard at work triggering World War III while also frantically searching for the nearest open liquor store. Who else have I had to take notice of against my will lately? Oh right: alleged dognapper Pam Bondi, newly deposed Homeland Security chief Kristi Noem, and Noem’s would-be successor Markwayne Mullin, whose confirmation hearings are going swimmingly as I type this. I wish that was the end of the list, because that …  ( 1 min )

The Golden State Warriors have their first play-in game Wednesday night against the Los Angeles Clippers, and there’s a very good chance that you, the Dubs fan for life, would be quietly relieved if they got crushed. And that’s not merely because the Warriors have had a miserable season, punctuated by Jonathan Kuminga getting shipped to Atlanta. It’s because seeing them play in person would leave you penniless.  I just checked prices for Warriors home playoff tickets, should they advance to the big-boy tournament. The cheapest seats are going for $270 a pop on Ticketbastard, and that’s if you want to watch the game from the Chase Center lighting rigs. If you’d like to sit on the lower level, with a nice view of center court, that’ll run you over $3,500. That’s a down payment on a car just…  ( 1 min )

We’re at a stage with prestige TV now where a series that might have dominated online small talk 15 years ago will, thanks to an ever-splintering entertainment landscape, go unnoticed. Take “Your Friends & Neighbors,” for example. No, I’m not talking about the 1998 Neil LaBute film featuring one of the most unnerving monologues in film history. I’m talking about an Apple TV series that, perhaps unbeknownst to you, is booting up its second season this Friday. It’s a good show, and not merely because it’s NOT based on LaBute’s misery-fest. It’s because it stars Jon Hamm: the silver screen’s handsomest cad. You know Hamm, of course, from “Mad Men,” one of those early prestige TV dramas that did monopolize the virtual water cooler over its seven-season run. Hamm was perfect on that show as Do…  ( 1 min )

(ALERT: This article contains plot spoilers for “The Devil Wears Prada 2.” Although, judging by its box office receipts, you’ve already seen the movie.) “The Devil Wears Prada 2” is a solid movie. It’s not a great movie. It’s certainly not as good as the original, but it scratches a lot of the same itches. For the price of admission, you get Meryl Streep treating other characters with ultimate disdain. You get Stanley “The Tooch” Tucci being his adorable self. And hey, there’s Emily Blunt reprising the role that made her a star to begin with, with newcomer Simone Ashley on hand as a successor to Blunt in the gorgeous, sharp-tongued British lass department. Most important, “Prada 2,” despite being set in the present day, harkens back to the innocent, NYC-set romantic comedies of the 2000s.…  ( 1 min )

If you and I could find even the slightest bit of comfort in what has been yet another truly, truly awful year in America, it was that 2026 is an election year. The 2024 election went disastrously, of course. But in the wake of that tragedy, the American people have been sending out clear signals that they would like a correction. Current polls show that voters despise President Trump’s ongoing desecration of the White House building, that they rightfully see the Iran War as a needless disaster, that they think President Naptime has made their economic prospects significantly worse, and that they’ve grown tired of Trump himself.  Under normal circumstances, these polls would presage the mythical blue wave, with Democrats seizing control of both the House and Senate in this fall’s midterms…  ( 1 min )

The Portland Trail Blazers host the San Antonio Spurs in Game 3 of their opening round playoff series Friday evening, and you might think that would be cause for excitement in the City of Roses. After all, the Blazers gained home court advantage over the heavily favored Spurs by defeating them in San Antonio two nights ago. The Blazers’ roster also features ascending guard Scoot Henderson, the kind of franchise player the team desperately needed after Damian Lillard left town in 2023. But no one’s really paying much attention to the Blazers players at the present moment. That could be because Portland won that game after Spurs superstar Victor Wembanyama left Game 2 early with a concussion after having his face rearranged by the hardwood floor. More likely, however, it’s because their own…  ( 1 min )

You would have thought that getting their ass handed to them in the Super Bowl would be the most embarrassing thing to happen to the New England Patriots this year. My dear reader, it turns out that would be a deeply, deeply faulty assumption. No, the team that gave you Spygate, Deflategate and Bob Kraft Hand Job-gate has once again chosen to show its ass to the whole world. And just before the NFL Draft, no less! How exciting! The scandal this time centers around Pats head coach Mike Vrabel, who just this past season washed away the stench of Bill Belichick’s final years in Foxboro by winning the AFC title in just his second season on the job. He’s cultivated a “he’s your kind of asshole!” vibe that his players and the media appeared to find appealing. One specific member of the media, D…  ( 1 min )

If you’re in my line of work, you know the phrase “search engine optimization” intimately. It haunts your dreams. It occupies space in every boring-ass PowerPoint presentation you’ve ever had to sit through. It might even be standing outside your bedroom window right now, blinking S-E-O in blinding, neon pink letters. SEO has quietly lorded over every internet writer’s work for decades now, forcing professionals like me to tailor our headlines, not to mention our very ideas, to its mysterious whims.  If you want people to read your work, and I do, you must pay tribute to the SEO gods if you want that writing to be easily discovered. And you must kneel before one SEO god in particular: Google. Google has ruled the search engine market for the entirety of this century, which is why every me…  ( 1 min )

96 *{box-sizing:border-box}body{margin:0;padding:0}a[x-apple-data-detectors]{color:inherit!important;text-decoration:inherit!important}#MessageViewBody a{color:inherit;text-decoration:none}p{line-height:inherit}.desktop_hide,.desktop_hide table{mso-hide:all;display:none;max-height:0;overflow:hidden}.image_block img+div{display:none}sub,sup{font-size:75%;line-height:0}#converted-body .list_block ol,#converted-body .list_block ul,.body [class~=x_list_block] ol,.body [class~=x_list_block] ul,u+.body .list_block ol,u+.body .list_block ul{padding-left:20px} @media (max-width:620px){.row-content{width:100%!important}.stack .column{width:100%;display:block}.mobile_hide{min-height:0;max-height:0;max-width:0;display:none;overflow:hidden;font-size:0}.desktop_hide,.desktop_hide table{display:table!…  ( 7 min )

96 Has America lived up to its founding promise? p{ margin:10px 0; padding:0; } table{ border-collapse:collapse; } h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6{ display:block; margin:0; padding:0; } img,a img{ border:0; height:auto; outline:none; text-decoration:none; } body,#bodyTable,#bodyCell{ height:100%; margin:0; padding:0; width:100%; } .mcnPreviewText{ display:none !important; } #outlook a{ padding:0; } img{ -ms-interpolation-mode:bicubic; } table{ mso-table-lspace:0pt; mso-table-rspace:0pt; } .ReadMsgBody{ width:100%; } .ExternalClass{ width:100%; } p,a,li,td,blockquote{ mso-line-height-rule:exactly; } a[href^=tel],a[href^…  ( 5 min )

TikTok Doesn’t Want Us To Talk About the News#outlook a { padding:0; } .ExternalClass { width:100%; } .ExternalClass, .ExternalClass p, .ExternalClass span, .ExternalClass font, .ExternalClass td, .ExternalClass div { line-height: 100%; } table td { border-collapse: collapse; mso-line-height-rule: exactly; } .editable.image { font-size: 0 !important; line-height: 0 !important; } .nl2go_preheader { display: none !important; mso-hide:all !important; mso-line-height-rule: exactly; visibility: hidden !important; line-height: 0px !important; font-size: 0px !important; } body { width:100% !important; -webkit-text-size-adjust:100%; -ms-text-size-adjust:100%; margin:0; padding:0; } img { outline:none; text-decoration:none; -ms-interpolation-mode: bicubic; } a img { border:none; } table { border-co…  ( 12 min )

96 ICYMI: How Far Will Blanche’s Loyalty to Trump Go? img{-ms-interpolation-mode:bicubic;} table, td{mso-table-lspace:0pt;mso-table-rspace:0pt;} .mceStandardButton, .mceStandardButton td, .mceStandardButton td a{mso-hide:all!important;} p, a, li, td, blockquote{mso-line-height-rule:exactly;} p, a, li, td, body, table, blockquote{-ms-text-size-adjust:100%;-webkit-text-size-adjust:100%;} .mcnPreviewText{display:none!important;} .bodyCell{margin:0 auto;padding:0;width:100%;} .ExternalClass, .ExternalClass p, .ExternalClass td, .ExternalClass div, .ExternalClass span, .ExternalClass font{line-height:100%;} .ReadMsgBody, .ExternalClass{width:100%;} a[x-apple-data-detectors]{color:inherit!important;text-decoration:none!important;font-size:inherit!important;font-family:inherit!important;f…  ( 6 min )

body,a{word-break:break-word;}.feed__title a{text-decoration:underline;}img[data-emoji]{height:1.2em;width:1.2em;vertical-align:middle;}table{border-collapse:collapse;}.headline h1,.paragraph h1,.text-element h1{line-height:1.5;margin:0.5em 0;}.headline h2,.paragraph h2,.text-element h2{line-height:1.5;margin:0.5em 0;}.headline h3,.paragraph h3,.text-element h3{line-height:1.5;margin:0.5em 0;}.headline h4,.paragraph h4,.text-element h4{font-size:20px;line-height:1.5;margin:0.5em 0;}.headline h5,.paragraph h5,.text-element h5{font-size:18px;line-height:1.5;margin:0.5em 0;}.headline h6,.paragraph h6,.text-element h6{font-size:16px;line-height:1.5;margin:0.5em 0;}.headline p,.paragraph p,.text-element p{line-height:1.5;margin:0;}.headline div,.paragraph div,.text-element div{line-height:1.5;m…  ( 3 min )

Legal ruling blocking Trump hunt for noncitizen voters may not help those already flagged96 :root { color-scheme: light; supported-color-schemes: light; } body { margin: 0; padding: 0; min-width: 100%!important; -ms-text-size-adjust: 100% !important; -webkit-transform: scale(1) !important; -webkit-text-size-adjust: 100% !important; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased !important; } .body { word-wrap: normal; word-spacing:normal; } table.mso { width: 100%; border-collapse: collapse; padding: 0; table-layout: fixed; } img { border: 0; outline: none; } table { mso-table-lspace: 0px; mso-table-rspace: 0px; } td, a, span { mso-line-height-rule: exactly; } #root [x-apple-data-detectors=true], a[x-apple-data-detectors=true], #MessageViewBody a { color: inherit !important; tex…  ( 10 min )

Great news that’s bad for Trump

Unfortunately for the rest of us, we live in reality.  ( 298 min )

Trump’s mail voting attack was blocked — but the danger’s not over a.cta_button{-moz-box-sizing:content-box !important;-webkit-box-sizing:content-box !important;box-sizing:content-box !important;vertical-align:middle}.hs-breadcrumb-menu{list-style-type:none;margin:0px 0px 0px 0px;padding:0px 0px 0px 0px}.hs-breadcrumb-menu-item{float:left;padding:10px 0px 10px 10px}.hs-breadcrumb-menu-divider:before{content:'›';padding-left:10px}.hs-featured-image-link{border:0}.hs-featured-image{float:right;margin:0 0 20px 20px;max-width:50%}@media (max-width: 568px){.hs-featured-image{float:none;margin:0;width:100%;max-width:100%}}.hs-screen-reader-text{clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);height:1px;overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;width:1px} …  ( 5 min )

Top stories 06/26/2026#outlook a { padding:0; } .ExternalClass { width:100%; } .ExternalClass, .ExternalClass p, .ExternalClass span, .ExternalClass font, .ExternalClass td, .ExternalClass div { line-height: 100%; } table td { border-collapse: collapse; mso-line-height-rule: exactly; } .editable.image { font-size: 0 !important; line-height: 0 !important; } .nl2go_preheader { display: none !important; mso-hide:all !important; mso-line-height-rule: exactly; visibility: hidden !important; line-height: 0px !important; font-size: 0px !important; } body { width:100% !important; -webkit-text-size-adjust:100%; -ms-text-size-adjust:100%; margin:0; padding:0; } img { outline:none; text-decoration:none; -ms-interpolation-mode: bicubic; } a img { border:none; } table { border-collapse:collapse; mso-ta…  ( 5 min )

96 All Eyes on the Executive Blanche img{-ms-interpolation-mode:bicubic;} table, td{mso-table-lspace:0pt;mso-table-rspace:0pt;} .mceStandardButton, .mceStandardButton td, .mceStandardButton td a{mso-hide:all!important;} p, a, li, td, blockquote{mso-line-height-rule:exactly;} p, a, li, td, body, table, blockquote{-ms-text-size-adjust:100%;-webkit-text-size-adjust:100%;} .mcnPreviewText{display:none!important;} .bodyCell{margin:0 auto;padding:0;width:100%;} .ExternalClass, .ExternalClass p, .ExternalClass td, .ExternalClass div, .ExternalClass span, .ExternalClass font{line-height:100%;} .ReadMsgBody, .ExternalClass{width:100%;} a[x-apple-data-detectors]{color:inherit!important;text-decoration:none!important;font-size:inherit!important;font-family:inherit!important;font-weight:inheri…  ( 6 min )

The Mets fired manager Carlos Mendoza: Andy Green was named interim manager for the remainder of the season. He will take over a 34-47 club coming off a hapless* four-game sweep at the hands of the Chicago Cubs to fall to a season-worst 13 games under .500. “Carlos has led the organization with passion and grace and […]  ( 26 min )

Beat the Streak Advisor now posts an AI video chatbot with the days picks. I have to say it’s very cool. Enjoy! I will put a link the the sidebar as well.  ( 25 min )

The Red Sox try to make it two in row against the Yankees at Fenway as Will Warren takes on Payton Tolle. Warren comes with a 7-2 record and a 3.45 ERA. If the Red Sox can put the bat on the ball, he does allow a .321 BABIP. Tolle’s stats run against the Yankees […]  ( 26 min )

For the third game in a row, the Phillies hammered the Nationals in the ninth inning to take a win. This seems like part of a long term trend for the Nationals bullpen, but it’s not all the pen’s fault. Nationals pitchers allowed a .274/.376/.491 slash line in the ninth inning this season, hardly shutting […]  ( 25 min )

The Log5 Method yields these top projected hit averages versus starting pitchers: 0.337, 0.732 — Yandy Diaz batting vs. Zac Gallen. 0.309, 0.721 — Otto Lopez batting at Michael McGreevy. 0.308, 0.702 — Josh Jung batting at Patrick Corbin. 0.305, 0.697 — Chandler Simpson batting vs. Zac Gallen. 0.299, 0.688 — Jonathan Aranda batting vs. […]  ( 26 min )

Junior Caminero of the Rays posted the highest game score of the day on Thursday, an 87. His three for five with three home runs and six RBI propels him back into the top five of the Baseball Musings Batter Rankings. He went through a power drought for 21 games, dropping him out of the […]  ( 25 min )

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A recording from Lisa Graves and Edwin Eisendrath's live video

Covering WNBA games in person is a strange experience. Enriching, for sure: It's cool to hear directly from players and coaches, to be able to pepper them with whatever questions I'd like. Recently, I was able to cobble their insights into an Olivia Miles profile that received, I suspect, fewer comments than this post will. Sometimes you luck into great color: It was funny, at Wednesday night's Fire-Sky game, to hear Portland head coach Alex Sarama directing his players to hunt Rachel Banham on "every single possession." (She was mercifully benched before they could do this.) The in-person experience is also disorienting. If my powers of observation feel heightened in some ways, they are certainly dulled in others. I've learned to appreciate all the work that goes into constructing the story of a game, work done for me by statisticians, broadcasters, beat writers, and online posters when I'm watching on TV. My eyes supply me no graphics, no tickers, no counters. If a player sits for an unusually long stretch, that doesn't always register to me. It might strike me that a team's offense has slowed down, but I might not clock that they haven't actually scored a field goal in six minutes. Turns out, I'm not very good at watching basketball on my own.  In the play-by-play data, the most controversial moment of the WNBA season, a play from Wednesday night's Mercury-Fever game, is dispassionately tagged as "MISS A. Boston 26' 3PT":  ( 25 min )

The parents of former NFL running back Doug Martin—who died eight months ago while in Oakland police custody—are suing the city of Oakland, five of its police officers, and an ambulance company in federal court. In the lawsuit, filed earlier this week, Martin's parents say their son, who was 36 years old at the time, died from restraint asphyxia caused by police officers. This was compounded, the lawsuit says, by the paramedics failing to arrive until more than 15 minutes after the call for service. The lawsuit was filed Tuesday in federal court in Northern California, and was first reported by Jakob Rodgers of the East Bay Times. It makes eight claims, including wrongful death by negligence, assault and battery, and intentional infliction of emotional distress. Martin died in the early hours of Oct. 18. At about 4:00 a.m., the retired running back experienced what his family in the lawsuit calls a "a mental health crisis," prompting his mother, Leslie, to call 911. But her son ran away to a neighbor's house, two doors down, where Oakland police found him in the basement. Police restrained Martin, per the lawsuit, placing him face down while "one or more officers pressed on his back." After some time passed, the officers turned Martin on his side. Martin appeared unconscious, the lawsuit says, but the officers thought he was either sleeping or pretending to sleep.  ( 16 min )

If you went back in time to New York in the early '90s, not a soul would believe you if you told them Jay-Z would end up where he is today. Well, maybe one person would: Jay himself. Jay-Z's relatively delayed breakthrough made him something of a late bloomer, even in an era when stars weren't minted as quickly and early as they are now. It took him a while to figure out how to be himself on wax. It was his big homie Jaz-O who put him on, and the two of them had a Das EFX, Fu-Schnickens fast-rapping style that was as technically impressive as it was uninteresting. The labels didn't know what to do with them. Those who heard them tended to think Jaz was cool, but that the light-skinned kid had something else they couldn't quite put into words. DJ Clark Kent was Jay's biggest cheerleader at that time, but without label interest, Jay figured he was better off prioritizing his life in the streets over the studio. Things continued that way until Clark introduced Jay to Harlem hustler Dame Dash. The pair clicked, and together with another street guy, Kareem "Biggs" Burke, they decided to pool their resources and start their own label, Roc-A-Fella. Their first project would be Jay-Z's proper debut, Reasonable Doubt, which turned 30 this week.  ( 27 min )

The Ernie Clement Voting Scandal shoved all the rest of the news this week into the street—the World Cup, the NBA draft, the NHL draft, the NBA trades, the NHL trades, the Mets firing their manager for the sin of managing the Mets, the latest sports media meltdown around but not quite about Caitlin Clark, all of it. Or maybe you didn't notice that Ernie Clement was the highest vote-getter among American League players for the upcoming All-Star Game in Philadelphia. It's quite possible that you didn't notice Ernie Clement at all. Maybe you're not noticing him right now. Such is the beauty of that arcane old baseball storytelling staple, the unworthy All-Star. Ernie Clement mentioned in proximity to Shohei Ohtani—quel scandale! Perhaps we should instead refresh your memories on who Ernie Clement is before we start. He is the starting second baseman for the Toronto Blue Jays, and he really is one of the best second basemen in the American League, due in no small part to the fact that every other AL second baseman is hitting exactly .251 with six homers and a .712 OPS. For the record, Clement is hitting .294, has seven homers, and his OPS is .753, which is way better. Last year Clement was Toronto's starting third baseman, except for the times when he was the starting shortstop. He had a record 30 hits in the postseason last year, one in which the Blue Jays came within a Moosehead cap of winning the World Series. Clement is 30 years old and after a skittish start to a career that didn't really blossom until three years ago, has become a proper big league contributor—a versatile and reliable presence, competent fielder, and perfectly fine hitter. Every team should have an Ernie Clement. Hell, a few already have—Cleveland waived him after the 2022 season and Oakland released him outright in March of 2023.  ( 21 min )

Now that New York state and Erie County have spent $850 million in taxpayer dollars, the largest public contribution for any NFL facility in history, it's time for the next important step in the process of opening the Buffalo Bills' new stadium: kissing owner Terry Pegula's ass. While Pegula, for once in his life, did not say something incredibly fucking stupid at this week's ribbon-cutting ceremony, every other person in attendance seemed to bend over backward to make sure that no one watching realized how much he sucks. With the plastered-on smiles and manufactured passion of a Hallmark movie or a Viagra commercial, every speaker used their allotted time to tell the people that the fracking billionaire who owns the football team is deeply committed to the community of Buffalo and Western New York. Kathy Hochul, "the biggest Bills fan in politics" according to her introduction at the ceremony, marched up to the podium to announce Pegula's undying generosity and love for Buffalo. But I heard her awkward gasp masquerading as a "Let's go Buffalo!" chant, and I felt a part of my soul die in the process.  ( 26 min )

This post originally appeared on June 23 in the Oakland Review of Books, which is worth a subscription even if you don’t live in Oakland or read books. Carl must slay the naga princess! If he doesn’t, his best friend—the talking cat-wizard Princess Donut—will die instead. But Carl and his team have a plan. They track the princess to the god Khepri’s sanctum in the Vanquisher Club and slay the club’s guards with a MacGyver-demonology contraption. Inside the sanctum, though, Carl is surprised: The beetle-headed attendant supervising the insect banquet within is Khepri himself, god of Rebirth and the Sunrise, summoned as a trap by the devious princess. As a level-250 god, Khepri will slay Carl easily—disaster looms!  ( 56 min )

It takes a special kind of creep to stand out for sleaziness among NBA owners, objectively one of the worst demographics our species has ever established. Tom Dundon has been the official majority owner of the Portland Trail Blazers for less than three months, and already he is a standard-bearer. It's clear he doesn't mind being a villain. Having already downsized the organization with layoffs, pinched on travel accommodations, stiffed his team's two-way players, and cheaped out on playoff T-shirts, Dundon is now engaged in brinkmanship with the city of Portland over funding for arena renovations. Even that description is too generous: Dundon told an assembly of Portland businesspeople Wednesday night that he intends to pay a whopping zero dollars of his own money toward a $600 million pro…  ( 25 min )

"I score in bunches, and then sometimes kinda just level out," Toronto Tempo guard Marina Mabrey said near the end of her press conference, after the Tempo's 125-97 win over the L.A. Sparks on Thursday. It was an accurate description of her own game, which is built on constant movement and a scalding but occasionally evanescent shooting touch. Last night, however, we finally got to see what would happen if Mabrey never reached the "kinda just level out" phase. What if a whole game was just one big scoring bunch? Well, in that case, Mabrey would walk away with 53 points and a share of the WNBA single-game scoring record. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z5OHRTRpztE Save your tsking about stat-padding for the next gunner who goes for the record, because this is as pure as 53-point nights come. Mabrey went 17-of-28 from the floor, 9-of-18 from three-point range, and 10-of-12 from the free-throw line. And thanks to the quirks of the Tempo's home arena, she wasn't even aware that the record was in reach until she had 50 points.  ( 18 min )

Late in the morning of June 13, as most New York City sports fans were mapping out their plans for watching Game 5 of the NBA Finals, I was on the A train headed away from the Brooklyn neighborhood I've called home for 17 years. I was on my way to Aqueduct Racetrack, post time 1:10 p.m.  At the end of the month, after 132 years of equine action, Aqueduct will no longer run horses. The first race took place on Sept. 27, 1894, on a track operated by the Queens County Jockey Club, in a facility named for its locale, where water was delivered to New York City from the Hempstead Long Island Plain. At one point, Aqueduct was a place where people came to soak in the glitz and glamor of the Sport of Kings. When it finally closes its doors after the 5:44  p.m. post time on June 28, nobody but a dwindling crowd of regulars is likely to even notice. The story of Aqueduct's slow demise is not much different from any fading racetrack's. Off-track betting gave way to TV simulcasts, which gave way to legalized mobile sports gambling. There's just not much reason to come to a place like this, even for chronic gamblers or horse-racing obsessives.  ( 57 min )

The one thing that Washington, D.C., has always had going for it is its beauty. The people who run America from this town have always been an unsightly bunch, but they’ve done their nasty work in a city that has acquired, over the course of this country’s lifespan, an aesthetic like no other. No other major American city looks as regally beautiful as D.C. You and I have a long-standing federal law to thank for this, but we also have a collection of national landmarks clustered in the center of the district that the aforementioned law was written to both protect and to showcase. The Capitol. The Lincoln Memorial. The Washington Monument. These are gorgeous edifices, ones designed to outlast old generations and to inspire newer ones. They are the best of D.C., and therefore the best of Ameri…  ( 1 min )

This month’s Emacs Asia-Pacific (APAC) virtual meetup is scheduled for Saturday, June 27, 2026 with BigBlueButton and #emacs on Libera Chat IRC. The timing will be 1400 to 1500 IST. The meetup might get extended by 30 minutes if there is any talk, this page will be updated accordingly. If you would like to give a demo or talk (maximum 20 minutes) on GNU Emacs or any variant, please contact bhavin192 on Libera Chat with your talk details:  ( 1 min )

Good news, everyone – copilot.el 0.7 is out! And it’s a big one. Ever since I took over the maintenance of copilot.el in the spring of 2025, I’ve had one north star: close the gap between Emacs and the editors that enjoy first-party Copilot support. VS Code and (Neo)vim got the rich, official experience – chat, agents, the whole shebang – while we Emacs folks were stuck with humble ghost-text completion. That never sat right with me. Emacs deserves better. For a bit of perspective on the pace: in its first three years the project never shipped a single tagged release. 0.7 is the seventh I’ve cut since taking over. We’ve been busy. For a long time that gap felt unbridgeable. We were essentially reverse-engineering an undocumented protocol and replicating it in Elisp, always one step behind.…  ( 7 min )

2nd quarter filing deadline is midnight Tuesday - let's support our courageous candidates from across the country!

Plus: DeSantis’s prison camp collapses, and Spokane stares down Big Tech

96 Royals on the wrong side of a near no-hitter @media only screen and (max-width: 620px) { table.body { width: 100%; min-width: 100%; } table.body .content { padding: 0 !important; } table.body .container { padding: 0 !important; width: 100% !important; } table.body .main { border-spacing: 10px 0 !important; border-left-width: 0 !important; border-radius: 0 !important; border-right-width: 0 !important; } table.body .img-responsive { height: auto !important; max-width: 100% !important; width: auto !important; } } @media all { .ExternalClass { width: 100%; } .ExternalClass, .ExternalClass p, .ExternalClass span, .ExternalClass font, .ExternalClass td, .ExternalClass div { line-height: 100…  ( 9 min )

Jayson Tatum Loves His Grandma96 :root { color-scheme: light; supported-color-schemes: light; } body { margin: 0; padding: 0; min-width: 100%!important; -ms-text-size-adjust: 100% !important; -webkit-transform: scale(1) !important; -webkit-text-size-adjust: 100% !important; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased !important; } .body { word-wrap: normal; word-spacing:normal; } table.mso { width: 100%; border-collapse: collapse; padding: 0; table-layout: fixed; } img { border: 0; outline: none; } table { mso-table-lspace: 0px; mso-table-rspace: 0px; } td, a, span { mso-line-height-rule: exactly; } #root [x-apple-data-detectors=true], a[x-apple-data-detectors=true], #MessageViewBody a { color: inherit !important; text-decoration: inherit !important; font-size: inherit !impor…  ( 8 min )

The justice’s reference to the “spirit of Aloha” betrays his contempt for the very idea of taking Hawaii’s history and legal traditions seriously. The post Samuel Alito’s Jab at Hawaiian Culture Is Red Meat For Online Conservatives appeared first on Balls and Strikes.  ( 7 min )

Tucker Carlson knows how to get attention. The former Fox News host-turned-powerhouse podcaster got explosive headlines after telling a Canadian podcast “Can’t Be Censored” last week that “there’s no chance I would support the Republican Party” in the upcoming midterms. Mainstream news outlets portrayed this move in laudatory terms. Carlson is an opponent of the Iran war, so the coverage made it seem like he’s moderating his politics. Words like “disillusioned” were invoked, along with his criticisms of Donald Trump for ignoring the economic woes caused by the war. This is a lovely fable of a longtime Republican loyalist breaking with his party because it’s grown too extreme and out-of-touch. Add a hopeful note about how this could demobilize conservative voters for the midterms, and watch…  ( 7 min )

Let’s try, for a moment, to remove politics from a discussion of James Talarico, the Democratic state representative from Texas running for the U.S. Senate. It’s not an easy thing to do when talking about a politician, but let’s give it a whirl. Since Talarico’s Republican opponent, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, won the GOP primary on May 26, he and his party have pushed the issue of manliness and masculinity to the forefront. Talarico's opponents want you to believe name-calling is manly The 37-year-old Democrat has been dubbed “Tofu Talarico” and “Low-T Talarico.” White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller wrote of Talarico on social media: “The Democrats made history in Texas by nominating their first transgender senate candidate.” Conservative commentator Todd Starnes sugge…  ( 15 min )

The easily influenced influencers in the Make America Healthy Again crowd are livid that the U.S. Supreme Court sided with the maker of Roundup weedkiller, rejecting a lawsuit that claimed the herbicide causes cancer. And they're feeling betrayed by the president they supported, Donald Trump, because he and his Department of Justice sided with Bayer, the company that bought out longtime Roundup-maker Monsanto. MAHA influencer Alex Clark decried the court’s June 25 decision on social media: “For an administration that promised to take on corporate capture and Make America Healthy Again, this is a STUNNING betrayal.” MAHA activist Alexandra Muñoz posted on Instagram: “The DOJ’s support of this case has betrayed the American people.”  Vani Hari, a MAHA mom who blogs as “The Food Babe,” poste…  ( 14 min )

Way back on March 6, not long after President Donald Trump hurled America into the dumbest war imaginable, our Nobel-Peace-Prize-deficient leader declared on social media: “There will be no deal with Iran except UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER!” That was about the same time he said America’s “excursion” into Iran would take “four to five weeks” and “won’t be difficult.” More than 14 weeks, thousands of lost lives and billions upon billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars later, it appears America is the one surrendering. Trump is promoting an Iran peace deal that isn't actually a deal The Trump administration is, of course, spinning an “agreement” with Iran as a peace deal, something it clearly is not. At the moment, the language of the agreement ‒ slated to be officially signed later this week ‒ hasn’t…  ( 14 min )

Pope Leo XIV released the first encyclical of his papacy, focusing his and the world’s attention on artificial intelligence and warning that it must be regulated and never seen as being human. Paolo Carozza, a Notre Dame Law School professor and chair of the Meta Oversight Board, told The Associated Press: “I am convinced that this will prove to be a defining document for our era, a profound and prophetic document. Pope Leo is offering a clear, comprehensive and coherent voice urging us to take responsibility for constructing a world in which technology will serve humans rather than degrade them.” Via my numerous fully digital sources, I received the following response from a collective of artificial intelligences: It has come to our attention that the human whom other humans identify as P…  ( 14 min )

A more proper title for the heavily sponsored UFC Freedom 250 fight desecrating the White House lawn on June 14 would be: "Donald Trump’s Sad Little Mandatory Birthday Party." After all, while the event is cloaked in America’s 250th anniversary iconography, it’s happening on the president’s 80th birthday, it’s a mixed-martial-arts company run by one of his friends, and Trump is the one who foisted the garish event nobody asked for on the American people.  Now we have a 92-foot-tall “claw” structure in front of the People’s House, covered in corporate logos ranging from Bud Light to Polymarket and promoting everything from nicotine pouches to crypto. To be clear, I have no problem with the UFC. I’m always happy to watch sweaty people kick and punch the tuna salad out of each other for my en…  ( 14 min )

Throughout the Trump years, Republican lawmakers devolved into invertebrates, conducting the people’s business in Congress like a pack of gelatinous meat sacks only capable of nodding along to the reckless whims and babbling nonsense of their leader. But now, with midterm elections approaching and President Donald Trump’s approval rating rivaling that of syphilis, GOP lawmakers are starting to show the faintest signs of embryonic spines. On June 3, the House passed a Democratic-led resolution to end the war in Iran. Four Republicans voted with the Democrats, a small but still remarkable rebuke of a president whose party members generally fight over who gets to agree with him more. For Trump, any Republican defying him on Iran war is a 'bad Republican' Predictably, Trump responded on socia…  ( 14 min )

Former reality TV star Spencer Pratt is out of the Los Angeles mayoral race for two reasons. First, and most important, he got fewer votes than two other candidates, incumbent Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and LA City Councilwoman Nithya Raman, who will now face off against each other. Second, he’s an unqualified dipstick whom a majority of Los Angelenos understood wasn’t qualified for the job. Pratt was endorsed by President Donald Trump and hailed by some MAGA Republicans as a rising star, a political outsider with a winning populist message. That was, in a word, wrong. The Free Press, the conservative publication founded by Bari Weiss, who is presently busy ruining CBS News, ran a piece in May that posed the question: “How did Spencer Pratt, reality TV star and ‘healing’ crystal salesma…  ( 12 min )

President Donald Trump, in a tantrum that would make a 3-year-old blush, kneecapped his own party and canceled an affordable housing bill signing, saying it “pales in comparison” with an election bill. The one that would benefit one person: Donald Trump. The June 24 mess was a perfect encapsulation of the president’s second term, a foolish act by a man focused only on celebrating or protecting himself. Republicans had celebrated the bipartisan housing bill, which focuses on lowering housing costs at a time when the word “affordability” is at the top of voters’ minds. The signing would have been a key moment for GOP lawmakers to claim they care about affordability and show they can work with Democrats to get things done. But no. Trump derailed the messaging with a social media post cancelin…  ( 13 min )

The Docket and the Ballot a.cta_button{-moz-box-sizing:content-box !important;-webkit-box-sizing:content-box !important;box-sizing:content-box !important;vertical-align:middle}.hs-breadcrumb-menu{list-style-type:none;margin:0px 0px 0px 0px;padding:0px 0px 0px 0px}.hs-breadcrumb-menu-item{float:left;padding:10px 0px 10px 10px}.hs-breadcrumb-menu-divider:before{content:'›';padding-left:10px}.hs-featured-image-link{border:0}.hs-featured-image{float:right;margin:0 0 20px 20px;max-width:50%}@media (max-width: 568px){.hs-featured-image{float:none;margin:0;width:100%;max-width:100%}}.hs-screen-reader-text{clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);height:1px;overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;width:1px} 96 u…  ( 3 min )

Watch ICE confront a poll worker during voting a.cta_button{-moz-box-sizing:content-box !important;-webkit-box-sizing:content-box !important;box-sizing:content-box !important;vertical-align:middle}.hs-breadcrumb-menu{list-style-type:none;margin:0px 0px 0px 0px;padding:0px 0px 0px 0px}.hs-breadcrumb-menu-item{float:left;padding:10px 0px 10px 10px}.hs-breadcrumb-menu-divider:before{content:'›';padding-left:10px}.hs-featured-image-link{border:0}.hs-featured-image{float:right;margin:0 0 20px 20px;max-width:50%}@media (max-width: 568px){.hs-featured-image{float:none;margin:0;width:100%;max-width:100%}}.hs-screen-reader-text{clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);height:1px;overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;width:1px} 96 …  ( 5 min )

What's This Database DHS Is Trying to Use to Purge Voter Rolls?#outlook a { padding:0; } .ExternalClass { width:100%; } .ExternalClass, .ExternalClass p, .ExternalClass span, .ExternalClass font, .ExternalClass td, .ExternalClass div { line-height: 100%; } table td { border-collapse: collapse; mso-line-height-rule: exactly; } .editable.image { font-size: 0 !important; line-height: 0 !important; } .nl2go_preheader { display: none !important; mso-hide:all !important; mso-line-height-rule: exactly; visibility: hidden !important; line-height: 0px !important; font-size: 0px !important; } body { width:100% !important; -webkit-text-size-adjust:100%; -ms-text-size-adjust:100%; margin:0; padding:0; } img { outline:none; text-decoration:none; -ms-interpolation-mode: bicubic; } a img { border:none; }…  ( 10 min )

Americans United for Separation of Church and State 96 @font-face { font-family: 'Overpass'; font-style: normal; font-weight: 300; font-display: swap; src: url('https://fonts.gstatic.com/s/overpass/v19/qFda35WCmI96Ajtm83upeyoaX6QPnlo6ovPbPpqKl8Kuo8Az.woff2') format('woff2'); unicode-range: U+0000-00FF, U+0131, U+0152-0153, U+02BB-02BC, U+02C6, U+02DA, U+02DC, U+0304, U+0308, U+0329, U+2000-206F, U+20AC, U+2122, U+2191, U+2193, U+2212, U+2215, U+FEFF, U+FFFD; } @font-face { font-family: 'Overpass'; font-style: italic; font-weight: 300; font-display: swap; src: url('https://fonts.gstatic.com/s/overpass/v19/qFdU35WCmI96Ajtm81GgSdXCNs-VMF0vNLBdeqqIncOMp9gyUsE.woff2') format('woff2'); unicode-range: U+0000-00FF, U+0131, U+0152-0153, U+02BB-02BC, U+02C6, U+02DA, U…  ( 8 min )

Email from Substack @media (max-width: 1024px) { .typography .pullquote-align-left, .typography.editor .pullquote-align-left, .typography .pullquote-align-right, .typography.editor .pullquote-align-right, .typography .pullquote-align-wide, .typography.editor .pullquote-align-wide, .typography .pullquote-align-center, .typography.editor .pullquote-align-center { float: none; margin: 0 auto; width: 100%; max-width: 100%; } } @media all and (-ms-high-contrast: none), (-ms-high-contrast: active) { .typography .markup table.image-wrapper img, .typography.editor .markup table.image-wrapper img, .typography .markup table.kindle-wrapper img, .typography.editor .markup table.kindle-wrapper img { max-width: 550px; } } @media (min-width: 1024px) { .ty…  ( 8 min )

Breaking: Judge blocks Trump order attacking mail voting a.cta_button{-moz-box-sizing:content-box !important;-webkit-box-sizing:content-box !important;box-sizing:content-box !important;vertical-align:middle}.hs-breadcrumb-menu{list-style-type:none;margin:0px 0px 0px 0px;padding:0px 0px 0px 0px}.hs-breadcrumb-menu-item{float:left;padding:10px 0px 10px 10px}.hs-breadcrumb-menu-divider:before{content:'›';padding-left:10px}.hs-featured-image-link{border:0}.hs-featured-image{float:right;margin:0 0 20px 20px;max-width:50%}@media (max-width: 568px){.hs-featured-image{float:none;margin:0;width:100%;max-width:100%}}.hs-screen-reader-text{clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);height:1px;overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;width:1px} 96 …  ( 2 min )

96 You deserve to know the truth. We can dig for it because of supporters like you. img{-ms-interpolation-mode:bicubic;} table, td{mso-table-lspace:0pt;mso-table-rspace:0pt;} .mceStandardButton, .mceStandardButton td, .mceStandardButton td a{mso-hide:all!important;} p, a, li, td, blockquote{mso-line-height-rule:exactly;} p, a, li, td, body, table, blockquote{-ms-text-size-adjust:100%;-webkit-text-size-adjust:100%;} .mcnPreviewText{display:none!important;} .bodyCell{margin:0 auto;padding:0;width:100%;} .ExternalClass, .ExternalClass p, .ExternalClass td, .ExternalClass div, .ExternalClass span, .ExternalClass font{line-height:100%;} .ReadMsgBody, .ExternalClass{width:100%;} a[x-apple-data-detectors]{color:inherit!important;text-decoration:none!important;font-size:inherit!important;f…  ( 6 min )

96 *{box-sizing:border-box}body{margin:0;padding:0}a[x-apple-data-detectors]{color:inherit!important;text-decoration:inherit!important}#MessageViewBody a{color:inherit;text-decoration:none}p{line-height:inherit}.desktop_hide,.desktop_hide table{mso-hide:all;display:none;max-height:0;overflow:hidden}.image_block img+div{display:none}sub,sup{font-size:75%;line-height:0}#converted-body .list_block ol,#converted-body .list_block ul,.body [class~=x_list_block] ol,.body [class~=x_list_block] ul,u+.body .list_block ol,u+.body .list_block ul{padding-left:20px} @media (max-width:620px){.image_block div.fullWidth{max-width:100%!important}.row-content{width:100%!important}.stack .column{width:100%;display:block}.mobile_hide{min-height:0;max-height:0;max-width:0;display:none;overflow:hidden;font-size…  ( 6 min )

Our latest new video bonus for paid subscribers walks through the four rulings in argued cases that the Supreme Court handed down on Thursday, June 25, 2026.

The Court's 6-3 ruling in Landor is likely the "sleeper" case of the term—a technical decision with massive, long-term, and ominous constitutional implications.

The Royals released right-handers Luke Jackson and Aaron Sanchez from minor league contracts this week, according to the MiLB.com transaction tracker. Kansas City also announced Wednesday that they’ve added infielder Andrew Velazquez on a minor league deal. Jackson is the only of those three players who was in the big leagues as recently as last season. The 34-year-old […]  ( 6 min )

TIL about the which-function-mode in Emacs. It is a global minor mode that displays the current function in the mode line when enabled.

Introduction I’ve used Emacs for many years. My fingers knew the native bindings by heart. C-a, C-e, C-k, M-f, the whole choreography of chords. I never really questioned it. Then I moved to Doom Emacs. Doom is built around Evil, the Vim emulation layer. Vim keybindings are the default, on purpose. And the first thing I did was turn them off. It was pure habit. I had years of native muscle memory and no intention of throwing it away to relearn how to move a cursor. So for a while I ran Doom the “wrong” way: a Vim-first distribution with Vim disabled. Later, I changed my mind. Giving Evil a Real Chance At some point it felt silly to run Doom against its own grain. The whole project is designed around Evil. Most of its polish, its defaults, its bindings assume you’re editing the Vim way. By …  ( 6 min )

on simulating the Unix at command with Emacs. Back in the old days, Choi used to use the Unix at command to notify himself of various events. In macOS, the at command is disabled by default because its use can deplete the battery. Old habits die hard though, and Choi wanted a way to get the same behavior. He started with the Emacs run-at-time function that does roughly the same thing as the at command except it runs an Emacs function instead of a command line function. Choi filled that gap with a macOS shortcut that he calls nota. The idea is that a small Emacs function schedules nota with the desired message at whatever time you want. If you’d like to use his workflow, his post has a link to his shortcut that you can download. Of course, the shortcut bit works only with macOS but I doubt it would be hard to adapt to any Unix-like system. As far as I can see, the shortcut mechanism is merely a convenience and could probably be replaced with something like the Unix message command. Regardless, if you’re looking for a handy way to serve a notification at a certain time and, like Choi and me, you have Emacs running all the time, take a look at his post.  ( 5 min )

No comment about “shithole countries” is too racist for this Supreme Court to decide that it might be legally significant. The post Mullin v Doe: The Republican Justices Are Pretending They’ve Never Heard Donald Trump Speak appeared first on Balls and Strikes.  ( 7 min )

In Wolford v. Lopez, the conservative justices have introduced a new Second Amendment test: Gun safety laws are probably illegal if Sam Alito thinks they would make gun owners feel upset. The post Wolford v Lopez: The Supreme Court Is a Pro-Gun Activist Group appeared first on Balls and Strikes.  ( 7 min )

In Wolford v. Lopez, the conservative justices have introduced a new Second Amendment test: Gun safety laws are probably illegal if Sam Alito thinks they would make gun owners feel upset. The post Wolford v Lopez: The Supreme Court Is a Pro-Gun Activist Group appeared first on Balls and Strikes.  ( 7 min )

Justice Alito had two decisions backing restrictive immigration policies and a ruling striking down a Hawaii concealed carry restriction. Is a retirement announcement coming next week?

Ronald Blum summarizes the latest in the CBA negotiations between MLB and the MLBPA. I really can’t believe the way the union wants to open up free agency: During a bargaining session Thursday at the union’s office, MLB said it would accept the union’s proposal granting free agency a year early for players who have […]  ( 26 min )

The Rays are up 7-0 on the Royals in the middle of the seventh inning. Casey Legumina retired the first four batters as the opener, then Ian Seymour came on as the innings guy. He walked one batter and struck out six. The pair did not allow a hit yet. Stay tuned.  ( 25 min )

The Royals and Rays start the day with Seth Lugo taking on Casey Legumina. Lugo comes into the game with a 3.69 ERA, having allowed seven home runs in 85 1/3 innings, one of his better seasons for preventing home runs. That helps make up for a low K rate which is leading to plenty […]  ( 26 min )

The Log5 Method yields these top projected hit averages versus starting pitchers: 0.316, 0.722 — Brandon Marsh batting at Cade Cavalli. 0.312, 0.703 — Alec Burleson batting vs. Zac Gallen. 0.308, 0.720 — Jung Hoo Lee batting vs. Jeffrey Springs. 0.303, 0.724 — Luis Arraez batting vs. Jeffrey Springs. 0.303, 0.677 — Jordan Walker batting […]  ( 27 min )

Wednesday brought another resorting of the top five in the Baseball Musings Batter Rankings. Yandy Diaz of the Rays surged to the top slot with a four for five day in a 5-3 win over the Royals. That pulls his OBP up to .414. That’s good for third best in the AL. First in OBP […]  ( 26 min )

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I am excited to watch the US Men's Team tonight at 10pm ET.......

Monday 2pm ET - Heather Cox Richardson will be joining us live. More details soon!

Pete Hegseth is one smart cookie, isn’t he?  ( 88 min )

The Trump administration is jumping for joy, and we should all be disgusted.  ( 85 min )

Imagine you are seated at a table. A guy sits across from you. He is vaguely humanoid, with a long torso and two arms raised in fist-like clubs. His full name is Edible Agent, but we will call him Eddie and use he/him pronouns. There's something about Eddie that makes you feel at ease. Maybe it's his fragrance, which reminds you of apple juice, of childhood. Maybe it's his two black eyes that gaze upon you without judgment. You decide to unburden yourself to him. You tell him that you've been making mistakes at work, and you are so afraid of your boss's criticism that you have developed stomach pain. "Fear will only bar the path you are meant to walk," Eddie tells you, wiggling his edible arms to show you he understands. You tell him that to cope with your stress, you've been drinking every day. "There is no solace for those who seek refuge in dependence," Eddie tells you, wiggling once again. When you tell him that you can find no other way to deal with this burden, Eddie tells you to confront the problem, to contemplate your next step forward. "Only by tempering oneself and holding fast to one's convictions can one overcome the burdens one bears," Eddie says, wiggling. This encounter changes you profoundly. Then comes the question: After all you have been through together, would you eat Eddie? For many participants in a study recently published in PLOS One, the answer was yes—but rather reluctantly. (Turn on subtitles to understand the conversation with edible Eddie.) https://youtu.be/0_hgrf0pi2Y?si=_gDxOGlOXUGyMvyL&t=15 Turn on subtitles to understand the conversation with edible Eddie.  ( 22 min )

Drew is at the beach, the sun is high and hot in the sky, and all the major sports events are either over or in the early going. If there was ever going to be a moment to give the podcast over to a discussion of podcast industry dysfunction, conquering the fear of failure, and the goings-on among the cadre of horned-up half-sociopaths on Love Island USA, this was it. I knew what had to be done, and so I made the call. Or I sent the Slack message, and then I sent a second one, and then sometime later Kelsey and Alex joined me to talk about real-life stuff and reality TV stuff for what turned out to be a pretty delightful 64 minutes. All of which is to say that, despite my early statement to the contrary, we are not breaking down the NBA draft's winners and losers. Instead we spent the first half of the episode talking about Alex's fantastic Try Hard podcast, the second season of which began last week, and which is also making the move to video. We talked about why she chose to do that, and why so many other podcasts have been doing it—a trend that Alex has written about in the past, but which she understands a bit differently from the inside. Some of this was about the mortifying ideal of being known and the rigors of making yourself into an on-camera performer, but a lot of it was about the way the internet works and doesn't work now, from the daunting challenge of finding places where real people are looking for new things to the weirdnesses of "authenticity" as a selling point. We also discussed what celebrity podcasts are for and why they have proliferated in the ways they have, and what they reflect about an industry that seems not to understand or respect its own business very well. I forgot Mitch Hedberg's name in this segment, for which I apologize, although I did manage to paraphrase one of my favorite lines of his accurately enough.  ( 21 min )

SAN FRANCISCO — On Wednesday night I attended a Major League Baseball game for the first time since the final game the Athletics played in the Oakland Coliseum. I have all but stopped paying attention to the sport, less in active protest than as a casualty of no longer being able to pay like nine dollars to be inside of a major-league ballpark (OK, fine, "major-league" "ballpark") within 30 minutes, though the existence of the geographically unmoored Athletics is omnidirectionally repulsive. It was an existence I was confronted with, as my friend Adam wanted to go to a Giants game, and it just so happened that the one game that fit both of our schedules was Giants–A's. Fine. Of the many ways the Athletics are currently giving me low-grade psychic damage, the primary one is that they did not disappear when they left Oakland. They remain a pitching, hitting symbol of team owner John Fisher's blithe cruelty toward the Town and the malignant indifference of commissioner Rob Manfred and MLB. When I see the team's logo, I think of the people who loved the Oakland Athletics, the dozens of crying fans I saw at that last game, the guy who brought a photo of his dead cousin to the game because baseball was something they always shared. On Wednesday night, the stadium was packed with tons of A's fans, as well as plenty of split-logo hats and 1989 World Series gear. It was a strange experience, seeing the masses animated by a sense of denial and nostalgia, proudly wearing their green and gold as if the Oakland Athletics still existed. It's like wearing a dead guy's clothes to watch him be reanimated, Frankenstein-style. It was sad. The loudest cheer of the night was for the displayed final score of Mexico's 3-0 World Cup win over Czechia.  ( 18 min )

Everyone's favorite summer sport is back in full swing. The country is tuning in. There are tears. There are shrieks of joy. There is a surprising and concerning amount of toe-sucking! Love Island USA, in its eighth season, has now aired three full weeks of episodes. With tonight's episode, the show will be halfway through the mid-season twist known as Casa Amor. Now seems like as good a time as any to check in with our bravest soldiers: the members of the Defector Staff who willingly sacrifice their time and sanity to watch five-to-seven hours of this damn television show every week. First off, who are your Sweeties this season? Luis Paez-Pumar: I only have one sweetie, and it is Trinity. This is not a bold take, but it is my truth. When I watch the small amount of reality TV I watch—mostly Survivor, The Traitors, and various cooking/baking shows—I value confessional skills quite highly, and Trinity is by far the best on this cast at that. This also translates to real-time commentary (“Oh, she bad” during the Casa Amor girls reveal…she was so real for that one). During a season that has lacked entertainment for a variety of reasons, Trinity has been the shining light.  ( 43 min )

FLUSHING, N.Y. — You sit in the upper decks of that baseball park in Queens where you have spent so many nights both dismal and beautiful, and you stare out at the New York City sky. Everyone around you is booing. This is a good moment to wonder what you are doing there. You were raised by a Cardinals fan. You could have been happy, or at least middlingly happy, or at least self-satisfied in the way that Cardinals fans seem to be. You could also have followed your brother, abandoned all sense of morals, and become a Yankees fan. Sure, you and he would have seen the same amount of World Series wins since you developed a real capacity for memory, but at least you wouldn’t be hanging your head in shame as often. You could have just rejected baseball fandom entirely and kept your life simple and painless. All of these decisions would have kept you from sitting where you are sitting. But instead you chose the path of despair and hardship and became a Mets fan. You can tell yourself that you’re a stronger person for it, but that would be a lie. You are just a fool who spent money to watch this team reinvent the very concept of shitting the bed over the course of nine brutal innings that featured the home team committing six infield errors—at least one from each infielder, and two by second baseman Marcus Semien and first baseman Mark Vientos—and a passed ball. The Mets lost the second game of Wednesday's doubleheader sweep against the Cubs by the score of 10-5, becoming the first team in the Majors this year to lose a game in which it hit four more homers than the opponent. It is tough to say what you lost while watching it.  ( 23 min )

The Charlotte Hornets have given up on their goofy, gifted, accursed son LaMelo Ball, who was shipped to the Minnesota Timberwolves in a trade Thursday morning. In return for their franchise player and Josh Green, the Hornets received a pittance: forward Naz Reid, a 2033 unprotected first-round pick, three first-round pick swaps of dubious value (2028, 2029, 2030), three second-round picks that begin in 2029, and the relief of shedding Green's bad contract. Hornets fans will be rightfully depressed to learn that the player they held in such high esteem netted such scraps on the open market. They can take mild solace in the fact that the Hornets now have a trade exception of over $40 million, and the NBA's second-largest quiver of first-round picks, so their front office can keep maneuvering in the months ahead. But gone is the 6-foot-7 point guard they drafted at No. 3 in 2020, who in Charlotte became one of the most inventive passers in the world, got up an appalling volume of pull-up threes, and infuriated his believers and non-believers alike. This move has a certain comic timing: The Hornets had just found their most promising form of Ball's six-year NBA tenure. Charlotte surged in the back half of the 2025-26 season, assembling a couple of impressive win streaks to finish 44-38 and slip into the No. 9 seed. All their young players were gelling. Rookie Kon Knueppel had a historically sweet shooting season, fourth-year big Moussa Diabate broke out as a starter, and third-year wing Brandon Miller thrived on both sides of the floor. Ball, as the lunatic offensive engine driving it all, rehabilitated his value in the league. (Given this trade, imagine how low it must have been before the Hornets went on this run!)  ( 20 min )

It is impossible for Brazil, the most iconic team in the world's biggest sporting event, to have anything resembling a quiet tournament, but the Seleção managed to float through the first two matches of this World Cup a little under the radar. Part of that is because it takes a lot to stand out in a 48-team tournament, but the other part has to do with meeting lowered expectations and little more. Brazil drew its first match 1-1 against a very good Moroccan side, then beat up on Haiti 3-0 in the second. Even heading into Wednesday's Scotland match, the intrigue around Brazil was less about how it would perform on the field and more on whether Neymar, finally healthy enough to play, would get a late cameo appearance. (He did.) Because of that, it has maybe slipped the collective awareness that Vinícius now has four goals and has been Brazil's best weapon, at long last fully and vibrantly realizing his massive talent in a national team jersey. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wD0i59sC9KY  ( 21 min )

Detroit Lions cornerback Terrion Arnold was arrested late Wednesday in Tampa, Fla., and charged with four counts of kidnapping and four counts of armed robbery. Jail records showed Arnold turned himself in and was booked in Hillsborough County's Orient Road Jail. Arnold's arrest is related to an ongoing criminal case in which six codefendants have been charged with assaulting and robbing three men in an apartment. According to court documents filed by Hillsborough prosecutors, the six codefendants—Arianna Del Valle, Jasmine Randazzo, Lyndell Hudson, Christion Williams, Boakai Hilton Jr., and Freddie Lee Hughes III—lured the alleged victims into an apartment because they believed the three were responsible for previously burglarizing an Airbnb that Arnold had rented in Largo, Fla. Once the three alleged victims were lured into the apartment, court documents said they were held at gunpoint, pistol-whipped, interrogated, and robbed. (The same record said, "There is no evidence that any of the victims are involved in the theft.") Arnold's Airbnb was burglarized twice, he told police, once in late January and again in early February. On Feb. 3, Arnold spoke with Largo police and reported property loss of more than $250,000, the Detroit Free Press reported. Arnold told officers that he suspected that two of the three men who were allegedly kidnapped and beaten were responsible for the Airbnb burglary, but investigators ultimately determined they were not involved.  ( 17 min )

On June 25, 1976, three and a half years after Roe v. Wade made abortion legal in the U.S., The Omen hit theaters. Most viewers remember the high-drama deaths—by impalement, decapitation, hanging—or the creepiness of Harvey Spencer Stephens’s young Damien, or Gregory Peck’s commanding gravitas. But I always remember poor Kathy.  Katherine Thorn (Lee Remick, making the most of a fairly thin role) is the wife of Robert Thorn, an American diplomat stationed in Rome and later made ambassador to Great Britain. She’s a good woman and a loving, supportive wife. In the movie’s opening scene, as Kathy languishes offscreen in postpartum recovery, a priest tells Robert that their baby only survived for a few moments after birth. Robert is wrecked, but he’s especially concerned for his wife: “I’m afraid it will kill her,” he says. “My god, she wanted a baby so much, for such a long time.”  The priest suggests a deeply unethical solution: The hospital has another baby, born that very night, whose mother died in childbirth. Robert can present the baby as their own, and Kathy never has to know. Robert hems and haws a bit, but ultimately agrees. In intention, this is done out of love. In practice, of course, it’s an act of unimaginable betrayal.  ( 49 min )

It is easy to miss the Match Momentum graphic the Fox network stamps onto its World Cup broadcasts. The graph pops up only on rare occasion, wedged into the bottom-left corner, less than a third of the height and width of the screen. Often it appears only so briefly that the commentators never make a point to draw attention to it, or to try to explain what is happening within it. If advanced statistics have historically been created 1) to produce better metrics for match analysis and 2) for advertising, the Match Momentum graphic poses a new, intriguing third option: an advanced statistic simply for the sake of it. Forgive me for the extremely poor quality of this image, which is a phone picture of my laptop screen. I attempted to take a screenshot multiple times and suffered through unspeakable horrors. The "what" of Match Momentum is easier to grasp than the "why." It is a statistic provided by Stats Perform/Opta, a sports data and AI (presumably in the machine-learning sense) company, that provided a full explainer. The graphs can also be found on the stats pages of the BBC and FlashScore, presumably using Opta's model, though the BBC and the Fox broadcast, diverging from modern broadcast conventions, do not come along with a helpful plug for their source.  ( 25 min )

NEW: Federal judge blocks key pillars of Trump executive order restricting mail voting in 2026 election96 :root { color-scheme: light; supported-color-schemes: light; } body { margin: 0; padding: 0; min-width: 100%!important; -ms-text-size-adjust: 100% !important; -webkit-transform: scale(1) !important; -webkit-text-size-adjust: 100% !important; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased !important; } .body { word-wrap: normal; word-spacing:normal; } table.mso { width: 100%; border-collapse: collapse; padding: 0; table-layout: fixed; } img { border: 0; outline: none; } table { mso-table-lspace: 0px; mso-table-rspace: 0px; } td, a, span { mso-line-height-rule: exactly; } #root [x-apple-data-detectors=true], a[x-apple-data-detectors=true], #MessageViewBody a { color: inherit !…  ( 5 min )

96 The Faces of Baseball @media only screen and (max-width: 620px) { table.body { width: 100%; min-width: 100%; } table.body .content { padding: 0 !important; } table.body .container { padding: 0 !important; width: 100% !important; } table.body .main { border-spacing: 10px 0 !important; border-left-width: 0 !important; border-radius: 0 !important; border-right-width: 0 !important; } table.body .img-responsive { height: auto !important; max-width: 100% !important; width: auto !important; } } @media all { .ExternalClass { width: 100%; } .ExternalClass, .ExternalClass p, .ExternalClass span, .ExternalClass font, .ExternalClass td, .ExternalClass div { line-height: 100%; } .apple-link a…  ( 9 min )

96 *{box-sizing:border-box}body{margin:0;padding:0}a[x-apple-data-detectors]{color:inherit!important;text-decoration:inherit!important}#MessageViewBody a{color:inherit;text-decoration:none}p{line-height:inherit}.desktop_hide,.desktop_hide table{mso-hide:all;display:none;max-height:0;overflow:hidden}.image_block img+div{display:none}sub,sup{font-size:75%;line-height:0} @media (max-width:660px){.row-content{width:100%!important}.stack .column{width:100%;display:block}.mobile_hide{min-height:0;max-height:0;max-width:0;display:none;overflow:hidden;font-size:0}.desktop_hide,.desktop_hide table{display:table!important;max-height:none!important}.row-1 .column-1 .block-1.image_block td.pad{padding:10px 10px 0 10px!important}.row-1 .column-1 .block-1.image_block td.pad div{margin:0 auto!important…  ( 2 min )

Plus, a federal judge halts ICE’s courthouse ambushes nationwide

Buster Olney explores the idea that the Automated Ball Strike challenge system helps left-handed hitters more than right-handed hitters. Left-handed hitters in 2026 are far ahead of right-handers in overall production: With the advent of ABS, the disadvantage lefties have faced over the years might now be somewhat neutralized, either through successful challenges or resulting […]  ( 25 min )

The Log5 Method yields these top projected hit averages versus starting pitchers: 0.325, 0.708 — Ceddanne Rafaela batting at Kyle Freeland. 0.322, 0.723 — Brandon Marsh batting at Miles Mikolas. 0.321, 0.719 — Ernie Clement batting vs. Mike Burrows. 0.314, 0.694 — Wilyer Abreu batting at Kyle Freeland. 0.306, 0.683 — Willson Contreras batting at […]  ( 27 min )

Tuesday’s games changed the order but not the composition of the top five in the Baseball Musings Batter Rankings. Pete Crow-Armstrong of the Cubs stayed on top after posting a one for three with two walks and a home run in a 9-6 win over the Mets. That raises his OBP to .366 and his […]  ( 26 min )

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org-roam for taking notes, but I also like to have indexes (just org roam nodes that link their contents) that link everything together. This means that if I want nodes properly linked when I make them, I first have to find the index they belong to insert them into, which really ruins the flow. I would rather go through the graph regularly and clean things up later, but aside from squinting at org-roam-ui finding those orphan nodes is actually quite annoying from within Emacs. Thankfully I stumbled upon this note by Justin Abrahms, which gives a nice SQL query for finding orphans, and I've written a bit of Elisp around it to prompt for the resulting nodes with completing read. Hopefully someone else finds this useful! (defun org-roam-find-orphan () "Find all orphaned nodes and then provide their paths to open with completing-read." (interactive) (let* ((org-roam--db (sqlite-open org-roam-db-location)) (org-roam-orphans (sqlite-select org-roam--db "select * from nodes n where not exists ( select null from links l where n.id = l.source ) and not exists ( select null from links l where n.id = l.dest );"))) (sqlite-close org-roam--db) (find-file (completing-read "Orphan node: " (mapcar (lambda (rec) (string-replace "\"" "" (cadr rec))) org-roam-orphans)))))

Back when I had to run a lot of long-running simulations on Unix systems, I became an ardent user of the at command, which lets one schedule a program to run at a future date. I also used at to schedule different notifications, like sending a message to a pager (yer, how quaint). Moving to macOS (nee OS X) changed that, as it disabled by default the at command due to battery life management. As I was unwilling to give up battery life for at, I learned to live without it. That was, until I learned that Emacs had run-at-time. The run-at-time command does as it says on the tin: it will run a function at some future specification of time. 1 (run-at-time TIME REPEAT FUNCTION &rest ARGS) That specification of time is “natural language-like” in that multiple string representations of time…  ( 2 min )

1. TLDR fringe and margin, the thin gutters beside the buffer text. The fringe gives you a single monochrome mark per side, and the margin can technically hold more, but getting several independent sources to share one line cleanly is surprisingly hard to pull off in the plain text rendering that the margin uses out-of-the-box. svg-margin (code on GitHub) fixes this by rendering indicators as SVG in the window margins, so any number of independent "providers" present text, icon glyphs, and clickable markers side by side on one line. Like my svg-line package, it overlays SVGs onto built-in UI components (the margin in this case) by leveraging Emacs's built-in SVG support. My personal config channels many sources to it, including VC, flycheck, evil marks, Org elements, whitespace indic…  ( 21 min )

It’s been a couple of months since the last neocaml release, and the reason is simple — for a while there I was genuinely out of ideas. Back when I shipped 0.6 I declared (again!) that I was done with new features, and this time I almost meant it. But ideas have a way of creeping back in, and 0.9 turned out to be a meaty release. Here are the highlights. A much nicer REPL experience The biggest chunk of work went into the REPL (toplevel) integration. I’m well aware that the OCaml toplevel isn’t terribly popular with seasoned OCaml developers — most of them reach for a proper build and a debugger instead. But I think newcomers get a lot of mileage out of a REPL, and (no surprise to anyone who’s followed my work) I’m a Lisper at heart with a real soft spot for interactive development. Clojur…  ( 5 min )

Welcome new subscribers!

“That’s what is different… we’ve had leaders really emerge that have lived these failed policies and they want to fight… you can’t manufacture that kind of authenticity."

Hopium paid subscribers gather tonight at 7pm ET/All eyes on the Senate GOP lunch at 1pm today

What’s the president’s priority instead? Passing his voter-suppressing SAVE Act to keep his cronies in power.  ( 84 min )

If the country ever is going to repair itself, the party is going to have to band together.  ( 85 min )

The Trump administration has repeatedly searched for ways to make it easier to deport noncitizens. This six-justice conservative supermajority just created another one. The post Blanche v. Lau: The Supreme Court Just Made Green Card Holders a Lot More Vulnerable at the Border appeared first on Balls and Strikes.  ( 6 min )

The justices could be more transparent about when they will decide which case. They just choose not to do it. The post The Supreme Court’s Opinion Day Ritual Helps Conceal the Justices’ Favorite Lie appeared first on Balls and Strikes.  ( 8 min )

Courts keep rejecting Trump’s anti-voting agenda a.cta_button{-moz-box-sizing:content-box !important;-webkit-box-sizing:content-box !important;box-sizing:content-box !important;vertical-align:middle}.hs-breadcrumb-menu{list-style-type:none;margin:0px 0px 0px 0px;padding:0px 0px 0px 0px}.hs-breadcrumb-menu-item{float:left;padding:10px 0px 10px 10px}.hs-breadcrumb-menu-divider:before{content:'›';padding-left:10px}.hs-featured-image-link{border:0}.hs-featured-image{float:right;margin:0 0 20px 20px;max-width:50%}@media (max-width: 568px){.hs-featured-image{float:none;margin:0;width:100%;max-width:100%}}.hs-screen-reader-text{clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);height:1px;overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;width:1px} 96 …  ( 5 min )

Mail-in voting is under attack — here's what you can do a.cta_button{-moz-box-sizing:content-box !important;-webkit-box-sizing:content-box !important;box-sizing:content-box !important;vertical-align:middle}.hs-breadcrumb-menu{list-style-type:none;margin:0px 0px 0px 0px;padding:0px 0px 0px 0px}.hs-breadcrumb-menu-item{float:left;padding:10px 0px 10px 10px}.hs-breadcrumb-menu-divider:before{content:'›';padding-left:10px}.hs-featured-image-link{border:0}.hs-featured-image{float:right;margin:0 0 20px 20px;max-width:50%}@media (max-width: 568px){.hs-featured-image{float:none;margin:0;width:100%;max-width:100%}}.hs-screen-reader-text{clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);height:1px;overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;width:1px} 96 …  ( 4 min )

This is a paid, sponsored e-mail from MSI United States ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ This is a paid, sponsored e-mail from MSI United States; not an endorsement or a reflection of the editorial policy of The Nation or TheNation.com. We depend on advertisers like this to help fund our independent journalism. Thank you for your support. 96 *|MC:SUBJECT|* p{ margin:10px 0; padding:0; } table{ border-collapse:collaps…  ( 7 min )

Given the circumstances, Iran has played extraordinary soccer in this year's World Cup, equalizing not once but twice with New Zealand in a 2-2 result, and displaying robust defense in a 0-0 draw with Belgium, as keeper Alireza Beiranvand made a save that should go down as one of the best of the tournament. The Iranian team has accomplished all of this despite being legally barred from staying in the United States to rest after their games; Donald Trump's administration has forced the squad to return to their training camp in Tijuana immediately afterward. One might expect that triumphing over these restrictive conditions would be cause for celebration among members of the diaspora community who have shown up to watch the games. So why, before their games against New Zealand and Belgium, w…  ( 26 min )

Time for your weekly edition of the Defector Funbag. Got something on your mind? Email the Funbag. Today, we're talking money, U2, lasagna, and more. Hello! I'm happy to be back guest-hosting the Funbag while Drew is off. Let's get to it.  ( 25 min )

I spent 11 summers at sleepaway camp, first as a camper and then, once I turned 17, as a counselor. Every year around this time, I get nostalgic for the days that moved along to the soundtrack of 2000s pop and Dean Friedman songs, and the freedom of a world where the greatest authority is some guy in his early 30s named Neil whom everyone ignored. I have found only one solution to assuage my yearning for the blue skies and green hills of the Finger Lakes: watching movies where a bunch of teens living in cabins get absolutely slaughtered.  From Friday the 13th to watching the trailer for Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma on a loop until it's reached feature length—every era, every iteration, every final girl—I've seen probably every summer camp slasher at this point. I've seen Bruce Springsteen's little sister drown a girl in an outhouse (Sleepaway Camp II: Unhappy Campers). I've seen Sadie Sink get hacked up by an axe and then, in a miraculous testament to the powers of first-aid training, be resurrected through CPR (Fear Street Part Two: 1978). I’ve seen George Costanza as a horny teenager (The Burning), which was perhaps the most horrifying moment of them all.  I have lived a million of those classic, less harrowing slasher moments as well. I've smoked a joint in the woods before walking alone in the dark, climbed through an overgrown trail after midnight to a part of the camp that hadn't been used in decades, and been briefly stranded at night in the middle of a rural New York town after my friend's car broke down. I bought a picture of a random man at an antique store, to trick my campers into thinking he was a local ghost. I had a habit of sneaking out of my own tent to spend the night with my boyfriend, and sneaking back in the morning. Such is the beauty of summer camp: mix the freedom of self-discovery with the perils of minimal supervision. Put a bunch of horny teenagers in charge. Throw in a ghost story around a campfire, and you've got yourself a horror movie.  ( 32 min )

Welcome back to Minor Dilemmas, where a member of Defector's Parents Council will answer your questions on surviving family life. Have a question? Email us at minordilemmas@defector.com. This week, Albert answers a question about kids and lying.  ( 27 min )

Technically, the Chicago Sky are not the worst team in the WNBA right now by record; that honor would belong to either of the teams with one fewer win, the Connecticut Sun or the Seattle Storm. But after Monday's WNBA slate, which featured the Sky's 92-63 loss to the Sun, and Seattle's much more competitive 112-110 loss to the Dallas Wings, the distinction feels like one without a difference. What do you call a team that loses to the worst team in the WNBA by 29 points? The Sky have been bad for the better part of four years now, but for a hopeful sliver of this summer, they weren't. Last year's roster had been overhauled, the bad vibes cast aside by trades and free agency. If the big picture was a little hazy, the names weren't: A trade for Rickea Jackson quickly filled the star vacuum left by trading Angel Reese; veteran free agents Skylar Diggins and Natasha Cloud gave the team some needed depth at point guard; signing Azurá Stevens promised more spacing for Kamilla Cardoso. Their season began with four straight games on the road; they returned to Chicago an impressive 3-1, with wins against the contending Valkyries and Lynx. Still, the homecoming was bittersweet. Minutes into the final game of the road trip in Minnesota, Jackson had torn her ACL. The Sky did rally to win that game, even down their leading scorer. They've won just one of their 12 games since.  This is the Chicago Sky's story at its simplest: a promising team aimless without its star, derailed by plain misfortune. It might well be the story that grants general manager Jeff Pagliocca and head coach Tyler Marsh more time in their jobs. But every night the Sky play, it gets harder to believe the story is true. In the history of basketball, you will find many good teams that have sustained good play in the absence of a top scorer. Often the reason those teams are good is because they are not so otherwise flawed as to immediately be felled by one player’s absence.  ( 23 min )

The San Francisco Giants have permission from Major League Baseball to wear Pride-themed gear. This was explained by commissioner Rob Manfred in a recent letter to Josh Hawley, the Republican senator from Missouri. The Giants and Dodgers have a special exemption: Other teams have only the 12 league-wide special uniform events, but these two teams can print and wear (and, of course, sell) Pride gear. It is the responsibility of the Giants, as a condition of their special exemption, to "speak to the players to make sure they [are] comfortable with the apparel," and to make it clear that they are not required to wear it. Here is how the Giants and MLB intend to dart out from under the towering victimhood of Hawley and the hordes of deranged evangelical bigots that he represents: According to Manfred, what happened on June 12, when three Giants pitchers scrawled Bible verses onto their Pride caps and were subsequently scolded by the league office, was a simple and innocent miscommunication. "Unfortunately," Manfred said, "this year the Giants communication with players was inadequate and not clear." This won't survive very close scrutiny. For one thing, all three of the offending players—Landen Roupp, JT Brubaker, and Ryan Walker—were on the Giants last season. For another, this was not a spur of the moment thing, undertaken in the confusion of unclear expectations: Giants players told the San Francisco Chronicle last week that there "were conversations in the days and weeks leading up to the Giants' Pride Night" about how exactly the small group of dissenters would protest the event. Finally, per the same Chronicle report, none of the three players who were scolded by MLB for writing on their Pride caps felt pressured by the team to wear them in the first place. They knew they had the option to wear normal caps—Sam Hentges, the fourth Giants pitcher to protest the event, wore a standard team cap and kept it unmarked—but wanted to make a statement.  ( 22 min )

In 2018, I became convinced that flamenco had South Asian origins. I hadn’t listened to much flamenco, if any at all, until my roommate Jake introduced me to Rosalía. I watched her dance—using her feet to strike the ground, making an instrument of her body, raising her arms in intricate flourishes—and I thought … I’ve seen this before. It looked so Indian to me.  Jake and I used to argue about it whenever we watched her music videos, which means we argued about it constantly. Me: “Romani people are from Rajasthan and there is no flamenco without Romani people!” Him: “Bitch, you can’t even spell flamenco.” We didn’t go anywhere without first downing black cherry White Claws and watching the “Con Altura” music video, mimicking her stomps on the brown carpet of our living room. I think I still have the whole thing memorized.  Even though Rosalía experienced success early in her career—her debut album was beloved by critics—it took some time for pop fans to catch up. I remember going to Lollapalooza in 2019 and begging my high school friend to ditch a white rapper named “Yung Gravy” and come with me to catch Rosalía instead. She did, and she thanked me afterwards.  ( 32 min )

NEWARK, N.J. — I went to Delaney Hall, a privately run ICE jail in Newark, New Jersey, for the second time on June 12, three weeks after 300-plus detainees initiated a hunger and labor strike. The strikers’ demands include an audience with Governor Mikie Sherrill, the release of vulnerable inmates, better living conditions, the end of pressure tactics to sign self-deportation orders, and progressive release and fair reviews of their immigration cases. It was 95 degrees with 57 percent humidity when I arrived. The air around the jail smelled of sewage and animal fat rendering plants. They used to make Agent Orange here. Inside Delaney, behind barriers, fences, barbed wire, and enforced windows that bleach the silhouettes of prisoners to nuclear shadow, there is no air conditioning. At the t…  ( 37 min )

Judge Failla found that DOJ’s request “shocks the conscience” by seeking the “most personal and sensitive information a medical provider could hold” without justifying its need.

96 Ask a Manager - new articles p{ margin:10px 0; padding:0; } table{ border-collapse:collapse; } h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6{ display:block; margin:0; padding:0; } img,a img{ border:0; height:auto; outline:none; text-decoration:none; } body,#bodyTable,#bodyCell{ height:100%; margin:0; padding:0; width:100%; } .mcnPreviewText{ display:none !important; } #outlook a{ padding:0; } img{ -ms-interpolation-mode:bicubic; } table{ mso-table-lspace:0pt; mso-table-rspace:0pt; } .ReadMsgBody{ width:100%; } .ExternalClass{ width:100%; } p,a,li,td,blockquote{ mso-line-height-rule:exactly; } a[href^=tel],a[href^=sms]{ color:i…  ( 4 min )

96 Jac hammers the Rays @media only screen and (max-width: 620px) { table.body { width: 100%; min-width: 100%; } table.body .content { padding: 0 !important; } table.body .container { padding: 0 !important; width: 100% !important; } table.body .main { border-spacing: 10px 0 !important; border-left-width: 0 !important; border-radius: 0 !important; border-right-width: 0 !important; } table.body .img-responsive { height: auto !important; max-width: 100% !important; width: auto !important; } } @media all { .ExternalClass { width: 100%; } .ExternalClass, .ExternalClass p, .ExternalClass span, .ExternalClass font, .ExternalClass td, .ExternalClass div { line-height: 100%; } .apple-link a …  ( 11 min )

Katie Nolan Tells Me Why We’re So Hard On The USMNT96 :root { color-scheme: light; supported-color-schemes: light; } body { margin: 0; padding: 0; min-width: 100%!important; -ms-text-size-adjust: 100% !important; -webkit-transform: scale(1) !important; -webkit-text-size-adjust: 100% !important; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased !important; } .body { word-wrap: normal; word-spacing:normal; } table.mso { width: 100%; border-collapse: collapse; padding: 0; table-layout: fixed; } img { border: 0; outline: none; } table { mso-table-lspace: 0px; mso-table-rspace: 0px; } td, a, span { mso-line-height-rule: exactly; } #root [x-apple-data-detectors=true], a[x-apple-data-detectors=true], #MessageViewBody a { color: inherit !important; text-decoration: inherit !important; font…  ( 10 min )

Plus: the vaccine study they tried to bury just got out anyway

Oft-fired conservative commentator Tucker Carlson, less than two years removed from calling Donald Trump “a wonderful person,” has dropped a new grift, claiming on a recent podcast that he will no longer support the Republican Party. He wasn’t gentle about his “I’m out” declaration. “I don’t share their values on any level,” Carlson said on the June 18 episode of the “Can’t Be Censored” podcast. “Their personal values, the way they live, greedy, bizarro sex lives, loyal to a foreign country above the United States, it’s like everything I dislike. Beginning with the speaker of the House, Speaker Mike Johnson, and extending to the president and the leaders in the Senate, I have nothing in common with these people at all. I do not share their values, I find their priorities appalling and so I…  ( 13 min )

The word “narcissist” comes from the Greek myth of Narcissus, which tells the story of a young man so enamored of his image in a reflecting pool that he is unable to look away. He eventually dies from his own egotism and turns into a flower. Donald Trump is no doubt ignorant of this story, even as he loves to imagine himself connected to the glories of antiquity, so it’s fitting that he is reenacting the tale from Ovid’s poetry as a distorted, expensive farce. Like the mythical figure who gave name to Trump’s most prominent personality flaw, the president became fixated on the famous Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, hoping to repaint it so that it mirrored his imagined brilliance. Instead, the algae-ridden water has turned into an on-the-nose metaphor for his own decrepitude, as tourists …  ( 8 min )

Few songs hit as hard as “People Who Died.” Released by the Jim Carroll Band in 1980, it sounds like a punk rock explosion—fast, loud, angry, and almost chaotic. But underneath the guitars and the shouted chorus is something far more personal. The song is a memorial. Every verse is a tombstone. Every name represents...  ( 11 min )