Optimists are saying he’s stepping off the Trump train. Pessimists have a more realistic guess.  ( 60 min )

A ridiculous line of questioning left the former special counsel looking dazed and confused.  ( 59 min )

I’m just glad there’s someone out there trying to solve the unsolved.  ( 58 min )

As I noted a week ago, we can’t know whether the current polls will be predictive of the November election...  ( 7 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 about overly chatty coworkers, Hunter S. Thompson, buying a new car, and more. Your letters: Todd:  ( 33 min )

For nearly six years, I have been fascinated by the case of the Spine Collector. The publishing world came to the collective realization a few years before the pandemic that a thief was aggressively trying to steal unpublished books from everyone who had access to them for their jobs. What made the case so fascinating was the apparent lack of motive; their methods were explicable and not all that sophisticated, but their reasons for risking jail time were totally opaque, as the books never leaked or appeared on the black market. On this week's episode of Only If You Get Caught, we tackle the tricky question: Why were they doing this? To help get an answer and tell the full story, I drafted in Reeves Wiedeman, who co-wrote the definitive series of Spine Collector stories for New York alongside Lila Shapiro. In the time since we recorded our interview, Wiedeman has moved on to The New Yorker, surely a recipient of the Only If You Get Caught bump. The book thief's motivations are confusing and inexplicable unless you approach them from the right angle. Knowing what we know now about their identity and motivations, it's clear that the cloistered prestige of the publishing world explains the thefts. Publishing is a strange business riddled with contradictions. Jobs are highly coveted, yet often underpaid. The industry doesn't always know which books are going to sell or how to market them. The system forces authors to take on all manner of odd auxiliary roles, sometimes making it impossible for them to succeed. And yet, there's nothing cooler, to many people, than publishing a book or working on one's release. To understand why the book thief did it, you must understand publishing.  ( 16 min )

I can’t think of a time in my life when the idea of a Muslim terrorist was not the most acceptable societal enemy. As someone who came of age in the wake of 9/11 and the invasions of both Iraq and Afghanistan, I have come to accept hating Muslims as the status quo. On a personal level, it functions sort of like advertising: so ubiquitous that I rarely pay much attention. There just aren’t many situations in my daily life where I’m thinking about how a stranger might perceive my boring existence as threatening. I’m normal. But sometimes I am snapped out of the monotony of Islamophobia and remember the limitless imagination of those who can watch one of the many recent videos of someone in Gaza, carrying around the body parts of a loved one in a plastic bag, and think They deserve this. One …  ( 25 min )

For a guy who has spent most of his career as a backup, Case Keenum suddenly has a decent collection of signature wins. OK, maybe "collection" isn't quite right, but as we sit here this morning we can say for sure that the man has at least two. There is of course the Minneapolis Miracle, and now there is the, uh, Midway Masterclass? You don't want to overstate an unexpected victory that comes at the expense of an Eagles team that gives away such games as a matter of course, but damn if it didn't feel like a big deal to watch Keenum, pressed into action by Caleb Williams's hamstring injury and Tyson Bagent's concussion, sling the ball Monday night. Perhaps some credit is owed to ESPN's production team, which often goes to embarrassing lengths to hype up every Monday Night Football game, even when circumstance stick them the with an obvious dud. This time, the broadcast went all-in on Keenum, giving him the stage to set up his own sports-movie narrative before kickoff. https://twitter.com/NFL/status/2104725122536104020  ( 17 min )

In each week of the NFL season so far, Houston Texans linebacker Azeez Al-Shaair has worn eye black that bears the name of a Palestinian child slain during Israel's genocide in Gaza. When he did it in Week 1, the NFL fined him. During Week 2, a league official threatened to remove him from the game. For the Texans' season opener against the Buffalo Bills, Al-Shaair's eye black bore the name of Hind Rajab, a 5-year-old girl who in 2024 was killed by Israeli forces in the Tel al-Hawa neighborhood of Gaza. After surviving an attack on a car she was riding in, Rajab phoned emergency workers to rescue her; the IDF bombed the ambulance, killing the paramedics en route. Weeks later, Rajab was found in the wrecked car, dead alongside six relatives. Israel initially denied that its troops were in the area of the incident, but admitted in August 2026 that its military had opened fire on the car. "It's bigger to me. Is a life worth $11,000? I think it's priceless. An innocent man, an innocent woman, an innocent child losing their life is not right," Al-Shaair said, days after that game. "I don't think everybody knows what it's about. I think that was the point because before that, probably most of you guys might not even know who she was. That's kind of the point." Al-Shaair was referencing the $11,941 fine levied by the NFL, which in its rulebook prohibits players from "wearing, displaying, or otherwise conveying personal messages either in writing or illustration, unless such message has been approved in advance by the League office." Dallas Mavericks guard Kyrie Irving volunteered to pay Al-Shaair's fine, and the linebacker later confirmed that the two had been in touch recently.  ( 17 min )

Does it still feel a little too early for hockey? Well, too bad! The NHL has expanded to an 84-game schedule, so we're getting September hockey that counts in the standings, and you're about to get briefed on all the teams. Whether you like it or not! I've ordered these puppies by how many points they improved or declined by last season, because I did that last year and I liked how it went. I've included that point differential, and their playoff finish if they had one. Then I will catch you up to speed on how things are going with each team, and because I feel like a little bit more of a hater than usual, I've included something they should be afraid of going into this season. Let's preview some hockey! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IpNUR87ZhQQ  ( 59 min )

Aquí, is sort of a niche application but is potentially useful for more than just its intended use. The back story is that Choi really likes the sunrise-sunset command in Emacs that tells him the times that the sun rises and sets. The problem is that sunrise-sunset requires that you first specify the latitude and longitude of where you want to know the times. The standard way of doing that is to record them in your init.el, which is what I do. Choi, however, travels with his laptop but still wants to know when the sun is coming up or going down. There’s no automatic way of setting the information so he wrote Aquí to provide it. The only downside is that it works exclusively on the Mac platform. Once installed, all you need do is call aqui to set all the appropriate information. I hardly ever travel these days so I wasn’t going to bother but it’s easy to use and can give you your current latitude and longitude as well as your address so I thought, “Why not?”. After I installed and ran it, it gave me my exact address as well as my latitude and longitude. That might sometimes vary a bit depending on the vagaries of GPS but it’s certain to be close. If you decide to try it out, be sure to take a look at the user manual so see what commands are available. Mostly, though, you’ll just need to run aqui. Also be sure to check out the installation section because you need to install a shortcut. That’s just a matter of clicking on a link in the manual but Aquí won’t work until you do.  ( 5 min )

INSIDE: Kurt Olsen ... Joseph diGenova ... Andrew Bailey

grow a brain, why don’t you

Lincoln in tunnel I had a 7:00 AM appointment at the dentist. That's one way to start the day, I guess. At least my teeth are clean. I may write more about it later, but I've been all-in with Bear recently and I can't tell you how calming it has been. It's the anti-Obsidian and that's a good thing. ✍️ Reply by email

Control Panel for YouTube Control Panel for YouTube is a browser extension which gives you more control over YouTube by adding missing options and UI improvements After only a few minutes, this has become my new favorite browser extension. ✍️ Reply by email

Today’s mix opens with a beautiful new track from Isik Kural, followed by new ambient by Maxime Denuc and elijah jamal asani.

Before Troma became famous for toxic waste, mutant superheroes and outrageous splatter, the company spent several years making something considerably  ( 9 min )

Two enormous 1980s rock songs. Two giant choruses. Two videos that practically define the decade. And two songs that  ( 11 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 )

Much like our nation itself, the World Cup run for the U.S. men’s national soccer team started off promisingly, only to become a sick joke. The USMNT got eliminated from the 2026 Cup on Monday night after Belgium crushed it 4-1, in a game where the home team was thoroughly outplayed, outclassed and outcoached. But if the loss itself stung, the context in which it was played only made it feel that much worse.   Yes, that backstory includes Donald Trump, but to a small degree, it also involves USMNT poster child and possible Trump fanboy Christian Pulisic. The first man disgraced the team off the field. The second man disgraced the team on it. How did all of this come to pass? Well, I suppose it’s my job to explain it, although the prospect of doing so excites about as much as having my leg…  ( 1 min )

There’s a good chance you’ve heard of Tadich Grill, given that the restaurant is older than San Francisco itself. It’s existed in one form or another since 1849, when it opened under the name Coffee Stand. That was one year before the city of San Francisco was formally incorporated, and 118 years before the restaurant moved to its current location on California Street in the Financial District. Tadich has been doling out fresh seafood and mesquite-grilled slabs of meat to patrons through a lifespan that has included multiple earthquakes, two world wars, Prohibition and multiple pandemics. It’s not merely the oldest restaurant in San Francisco, but in all of California. An eternal landmark. I only needed to walk through its doors on an early evening this August to understand why. Actually,…  ( 1 min )

This is not the correct time for me to be visiting Sam’s Burgers. It’s the middle of the afternoon here in North Beach, and finding a spot inside Sam’s tight confines isn’t much of a problem. If I were to walk in here 12 hours from now, just before the bars close and after patrons of all the nearby strip clubs have no more rain to make … well then, I probably wouldn’t be able to walk in here at all. There would probably be a line going outside the door. There would probably be an ass parked in every bright red leather stool at the counter and in the scant number of booths lining the wall. There would probably be dozens of hungry partiers, some of them quite famous, crowding into the place to eat a cheeseburger at the proper time to be eating a cheeseburger. That’s when Anthony Bourdain wo…  ( 1 min )

We’ve now seen the first sign of the inevitable: President Donald Trump, as the Republican Party limps toward a possible midterm election wipeout, will turn on the GOP. On his Truth Social account on Aug. 26, Trump shared a profane post from a right-wing influencer that read in part: “I don’t think the GOP fully grasp how badly they are f---ing up right now.” The post went on to suggest Republicans in Congress are responsible for undercutting Trump, claiming that “the GOP continues to slow-walk every reform people want.” That’s an odd thing for the titular head of the Republican Party to share just a few months out from a pivotal election. Or at least it would be odd if we were dealing with anyone other than Donald Trump. Donald Trump will always blame others for his own failures Tragical…  ( 13 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 )

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 )

I want all Americans to understand that I, a Republican lawmaker, can do nothing to rein in President Donald Trump. I am rendered powerless before the awesome strength of a lame-duck president with a 32% approval rating. My party might control both houses of Congress, and our job description might technically include reining in the executive branch, but still, it’s just not a thing we can do. His gaze alone makes our brains seize up. My colleague Sen. John Cornyn, R-Poltroon, made it plain as day recently when he said of Republicans, “There’s nothing we can do to rein in the president.” See, I told you so. Cornyn, like all good Republicans, caved to Trump's demands That came after Cornyn and other Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee voted to move acting Attorney General Todd Bla…  ( 13 min )

Somebody pinch me. I never thought I’d see the day when a Republican congressional candidate actually criticized President Donald Trump, the God-King, Lord of the MAGA Movement, He Who Must Not Be Scorned.  But on Sept. 17, with midterm elections closing in, there was Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar, a Florida Republican, staring straight into the camera for a campaign ad and saying: “Mr. President, some of your immigration enforcement efforts have gone too far.” Salazar added: “The same Hispanics who helped you get to the White House in 2024 feel betrayed today.” After briefly passing out at her hurling the b-word (betrayed) at Trump, I laughed and thought, “Oh, this is getting delicious.” Salazar is one of the first GOP candidates to publicly criticize Trump The representative’s district in M…  ( 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 )

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 )

I was at the grocery store the other day wondering what it’s like to be a millionaire who can afford ground beef when a thought popped into my head: “You know what would fix these high food prices? A new steel mill in Iowa that will not start running until 2030 at the earliest!” Well, just a day later, on Sept. 28, my prayers were answered. President Donald Trump addressed the small portion of Americans who still have enough money for internet service and announced that a company owned by an Indian conglomerate will build a $15 billion steel plant in Iowa. One where steel production, according to a Wall Street Journal report, “could begin in 2030.”  With midterm elections fast approaching, this is excellent news for voters who have cars that run on steel that won’t appear for at least four…  ( 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 )

President Donald Trump decided it's a great time for a trade war with Canada.  ( 7 min )

Oh look, it’s a Republican lawmaker spouting Islamophobic rhetoric over a Democratic candidate who’s Muslim. And over there, it’s President Donald Trump mocking transgender athletes. There’s another Republican on the television telling you the economy has never been better. And there’s Trump again on your phone screen saying America has full control of the Strait of Hormuz while you’re pumping $4-per-gallon gas. Blah. Blah. Blah. Trump and Republicans have nothing but lies and stale fearmongering With high food and gas prices, a weak labor market and an unpopular war started by a wildly unpopular president, the Grand Old Party has little to talk about, save bigotry and bald-faced lies. And that routine, as evidenced by polling and low GOP primary turnout, has gotten old. Trump has become …  ( 15 min )

It’s Labor Day weekend, and I hope my fellow Americans enjoy laboring, because we’re all going to be doing a lot more of it in order to afford food. And gas. And pretty much everything. The long weekend was ushered in by news that diesel fuel prices hit a record high in the United States on Sept. 4, averaging $5.85 per gallon. That’s what people who use diesel to fuel freight trucks and farm equipment call “a lot.” The new price-tag-at-the-pump record will invariably translate to higher consumer costs, since the folks who grow and ship food and other goods will be spending more on both the growing and the shipping. (The math on this isn’t difficult.) Enjoy Labor Day. Life is about to get even more expensive under Trump. Jaime Brito, executive director of refining and oil products for Dow …  ( 15 min )

A few days ago I announced that I am working on denote-data. The goal is to provide an opt-in, in-memory cache for Denote. It can be used to speed up certain computationally expensive operations. It must be opt-in because there are many users, myself included, who do not need such functionality (I program because the challenge is fun, just how I did with denote-sequence, for example). I have a final update on this that I posted on denote.git issue 724 and am copying below. Any future changes will appear in the release notes of the next version of Denote. In short: it is happening. The status update on denote.git Hello again folks! I have an update on the denote-data project. The code is in this denote.git branch for now: https://github.com/protesilaos/denote/tree/denote-data What I am doing: Find the computationaly heavy functions. Write denote-data variants for them. Introduce variables to funcall VAR instead of calling the heavy functions directly. Make the denote-data-mode set those variables. This way we can have any extension do what denote-data does. And this way denote-data can be its own package as well. The first big problem I see now is how to make the caching functions async. I will figure this out by studying list-packages and related. Then I want to study filenotify.el. @mentalisttraceur I have noted that your code is okay for copyright purposes, so I can check it out. Or you can send a PR, if you prefer. Otherwise, I think this is almost done. With an opt-in cache we can support other workflows that people have been asking for, such as in-buffer completion.  ( 1 min )

Raw link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6NdZYNCkdk This is an excerpt from the ‘Root Access’ live stream: https://protesilaos.com/codelog/2026-09-27-emacs-live-root-access-show/. I was making a broader comment there, but it is only available in the full video. Or it may be shared later as another short if @linkarzu gets to it.  ( 1 min )

One of the things I do in Emacs is reading. Sometimes it is an article copied from the internet using org-web-tools, sometimes it is a long answer to my question to an LLM, and sometimes it is an ebook I’m reading using nov.el. Either way, I often like to know how much I have left.  ( 4 min )

One of my favorite Emacs commands is sunrise-sunset (Sunrise/Sunset (GNU Emacs Manual)) to get the day’s times for sunrise and sunset. For it to work right, you must have Emacs pre-configured with location information. This is done by setting three customizable variables: calendar-latitude calendar-longitude calendar-location-name If you run Emacs on a system that is fixed in location, manually setting the above variables is a one time task. However if you do a fair amount of traveling with Emacs on a laptop, a more programmatic solution might be desired using a location service, ideally an OS-native one. If you’re a macOS user, Aquí (aqui.el) does just that by invoking a Shortcut to query the OS-native location service. Leveraging Shortcuts gives Emacs access to a high-accuracy fused location update without need to build, install, and configure a separate macOS executable. Once Aquí is installed, updating the location is done via the aqui command. 1 M-x aqui RET This will update the above mentioned variables and message the current location in the mini-buffer. For more information, refer to the Aquí User Guide. Aquí is now available on MELPA.  ( 1 min )

wrote back in July, although I’ve had Embark installed for some time, I’ve only just begun to really use it. Most of my uses involve following a link (of any type) and acting on a group of files, typically to delete several files at once. Of course, those uses are barely scratching the surface of Embark’s capabilities. Those capabilities are essentially open ended. By that I mean you can define your own Embark actions. Stefano Rodighiero has a nice example of this. It’s a nice example for two reasons. First, it’s simple and easy to follow even though—the second reason—I don’t know anything about what he’s trying to do. The point is that Rodighiero has an obscure—to me—application that he wants to provide an action for but you don’t need to know the details of the application to follow the action. This is incredibly powerful. Rodighiero let Embark do the hard work of identifying and parsing the target and merely wrote some simple glue to take that target reference and do something useful with it. If, like me, you’re just beginning to feel your way around Embark, Rodighiero’s post is a useful read. You almost certainly won’t have a need to copy his action but it’s an excellent go by for your own.  ( 5 min )

nice long video about Org mode with plenty of tips for beginners. Also, it's the end of the month, so check out the submissions for the Emacs Carnival for September ("Games") and consider volunteering to host the next one! Upcoming events (iCal file, Org): Emacs Berlin: Emacs-Berlin Hybrid Meetup https://emacs-berlin.org/ Wed Sep 30 1000 America/Vancouver - 1200 America/Chicago - 1300 America/Toronto - 1700 Etc/UTC - 1900 Europe/Berlin - 2230 Asia/Kolkata – Thu Oct 1 0100 Asia/Singapore EmacsATX: Emacs Social https://www.meetup.com/emacsatx/events/316464079/ Thu Oct 1 1600 America/Vancouver - 1800 America/Chicago - 1900 America/Toronto - 2300 Etc/UTC – Fri Oct 2 0100 Europe/Berlin - 0430 Asia/Kolkata - 0700 Asia/Singapore Sacha Chua: Oct 2 - Emacs Chat 31: Pedro A. Aranda Gutierrez (Pr…  ( 3 min )

I’m figuring this will end up as a big mistake. You probably know about the big NYT expose about Sen....  ( 8 min )

This has gotten very little attention, as far as I can tell. But it sounds quite sleazy and another example...  ( 8 min )

Here’s our text for the day on the LLM/AI “boom”, which is now the center of the US economy and...  ( 9 min )

These foodborne-illness outbreaks have certainly put the Republican party in a sh*tty situation.  ( 59 min )

How will Americans react when they turn on the taps and nothing comes out?  ( 63 min )

It was many WNBA news cycles ago—but not that many human years ago!—that the league’s central power struggle was shaping up to be one between A’ja Wilson and Breanna Stewart. Since Wilson was drafted in 2018, the two stars have lived atop MVP ballots and together won six of eight WNBA championships. On this very website, in 2022, I anointed them as much: Stewart and Wilson, anchors of the Olympic team and the new faces of their sport, should run this league for a while. "Should" is an important qualifier. It wasn't too long ago that WNBA fans imagined epic future playoff battles between Stewart and Elena Delle Donne, battles that have had to stay in the imagination thanks to an Achilles injury, a back injury, and a pandemic. But everyone's health permitting, this is The Rivalry We Care About Now, and it's so extremely awesome to watch.” On Sunday, the two would-be rivals were miles away from each other and their games tipped off a few hours apart. Stewart’s 34 points and 12 rebounds carried the Liberty to an upset 91-75 win over the top seeded Lynx in Minnesota. Just as in the regular season and in playoffs past, the Lynx had troublingly few answers for opposing size; the Liberty might be the most aggravating team to watch in the WNBA, but maybe more importantly, they’re also the tallest. Stewart, so hard-nosed and rangy and lanky, almost personally magnifies Minnesota’s flaws. She attacks mismatches and swats shots—on Saturday, she even supplied some throwback threes for extra style points. Solid games from Leonie Fiebich and Han Xu were sufficient help; Stewart doesn’t need much of it. (No matter at all that her team’s lead guard continues to shoot springtime tour dates.)  ( 18 min )

Inside the hundred-meter mark, after 273.3 kilometers of racing, Brandon McNulty looked back one last time to see the chasing pack behind him sprinting it out for silver. He banged on his handlebars, put his hands to his head, and pumped his fist, not seeming quite sure how he should celebrate his country's first World Championship road race victory in 33 years and the biggest win of his career. McNulty's scattered exuberance tells part of the story, as does his teammate Quinn Simmons coasting in for fourth and Matteo Jorgenson celebrating as he crossed he line in eighth. The Americans raced a perfect race, delivering a shocker in the world's biggest one-day race thanks to one of the best tactical performances you'll ever see. An unfortunate byproduct of Tadej Pogacar's typically thrilling dominance is that he obviates or at least neutralizes team tactics. It really doesn't matter how carefully you distribute satellite riders, gouge away at his teammates, or force him to do extra work because he's so much better than everyone in the world that he can almost always go win the races he wants on pure strength. What are you supposed to do nwhen Pogacar is simply riding alone off the front for 70 kilometers, faster than any one team's worth of riders could sanely chase? But Pogacar's recent crash at the Vuelta opened the door not only for Enric Mas to win a bike race instead of nobly and anonymously finish fifth, but for a new world champion for the first time since the Second Pogacar Inquisition began three years ago. There probably won't be many more good chances like this. So, who would step into the vaccuum? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obK7tbfw-dI  ( 21 min )

Call ‘em the Badwill Games. Ireland scored three early goals and cruised to a 3-0 win over Israel in the first of two matches between the teams that have already made everybody go ewwwwww.  The game, played in Debrecen, Hungary, was the first of two very controversial matches between the national teams as part of the UEFA Nations League competition. Ireland had requested that UEFA ban Israel from the tournament, but that was denied, as was a subsequent appeal to be moved out of the same bracket.  A national campaign then formed in Ireland to prevent the matches from happening. A group of 160 Irish athletes signed a petition released late last week calling for the matches to be cancelled. RTE, the Irish national broadcasting network, announced that it would only have limited coverage of the matches. Heimir Hallgrímsson, the Iceland-born manager of the Irish team, defended fielding a squad by saying, "We're not playing with genocide. We're playing against genocide."  ( 19 min )

You ever need something so badly it scares you to say it aloud, just because the universe might smell that stench of desperation about you and smite your ass back into the existential garbage time you deserve? The way I’ve been feeling about living in New York City qualifies. When I said goodbye to Lauren Theisen last summer, it was crushing. I had seen that sublime summit and would now regress back to the place I regrettably called home. There is, as it turns out, a reason why writers love New York, and my apartment in Tacoma would have given Julian of Norwich seasonal depression. I knew I had to get back no matter what, but as I’ve documented, my constitution is ill suited for the ‘or bust’ suffixes of life. Luckily, life decided to rub my nose in just how shitty stagnancy smelled. My apartment’s toilet exploded sewage everywhere, wafting the Tacoma aroma upon all of my belongings. In case I hadn’t yet gotten the message, my lazy scummy dirtbag fuckface of a property manager decided this was the right time to raise the rent, supplying me the ample spite that would spur the big move. No time like the present. I needed to get rid of everything I could stomach one day buying again, find every latent dime I was owed or could borrow, and claw my way back to the only city really worth getting bled dry to live in. Most importantly, I needed to sell the Lexus. In 2004, my uncle made one of the smartest calls that anyone ever got to make on the car market: He bought a brand new Lexus GX 470. It was eye-wateringly expensive, about 80 grand in today’s money, but his construction business was going well, and anyway in his judgment it was sturdier and more comfortable than anything else he test drove. He fucking nailed that one. This was Toyota engineering at the absolute peak of their powers. That GX was no steal, but at few points in history has a family of cars been so utterly far ahead of the competing options in terms of quality as the Toyota SUVs of this era.  ( 25 min )

Progress in the NFL is not linear, past success doesn't guarantee future success, regression to the mean is normal and expected—all of the cliches in the world can't possibly rationalize whatever the hell is happening to Drake Maye and the New England Patriots so far this season. Currently sitting at 1-2 after Jacksonville laid down a 35-6 "old-fashioned ass whooping," as Pats safety Kevin Byard III put it, New England is finding life after a division title and a shock Super Bowl run to be, somehow, even harder and more dispiriting that it seemed on paper. Some fall-off was to be expected after a season in which the Pats had the easiest schedule of the century, but what's become of Drake Maye, who looked like a perennial MVP candidate last season, is downright shocking. Maye has been absolute ass so far this season. The stats are bad enough—585 yards, one touchdown, a league-leading six interceptions, two fumbles, a QBR of 45.9—to set off the alarms, but Maye is failing the eye test even harder than that. After looking poised both in the pocket and moving the ball with his feet last season, Maye looks jittery and unsure of his throws so far in 2026, leading to mistakes so jarringly poor that it's becoming easier to write off last year as a fluke than it is to give him grace for a tough schedule and some key injuries. A.J. Brown going down for multiple weeks with an ankle injury in the season opener hasn't helped, and Maye didn't force the front office to give Romeo Doubs $17 million a year to fail to get open on almost every play. Meanwhile, the run game, already not a particular strength last season, has been atrocious this time around, with Rhamondre Stevenson and TreVeyon "Just Asking Questions" Henderson combining for 72 yards a game on 3.9 yards per carry.  ( 20 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 Zachary Edward-Brown, and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. Zach is a Chicagoan who enjoys playing soccer and basketball and rooting for the Bears. He's always open to collabs. 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 )

Pitchers are a kooky breed: superstitious, hypercompetitive, quite often a little bit nuts. It's a personality type that shares a lot with kickers and goalies in other sports. The common threads? First, they have an awful lot of downtime to spend in their own heads. Second, they are, to an extent, competing with themselves—out there all alone, with nothing but their own limitations to battle. Deprived of the warmth of human interaction, sometimes they go downright feral. Whatever works. It's worked for Max Scherzer, you'd have to say. Three Cy Youngs, eight all-star appearances, two championship rings, ninth all-time in strikeouts. He got all that hardware by being a real freak. Stalking around the mound after a strikeout like a caged tiger. Warning off managers who might even consider taking him out of a game by activating the threat display of an alarmed hagfish crossed with a territorial canid. "He’s snarling, snot is coming out his mouth, he’s drooling and steam is coming out his ears, his eyes are bloodshot," recalls one teammate, "and he goes: 'You better get in the fucking dugout right now. Don’t you fucking dare come out here.'" Scherzer finished off his 19th season on Sunday as a member of the Blue Jays, and if it was an atypical season for the future hall-of-famer, it was quite in line with what you'd expect from a 42-year-old. It was rough, in other words. Scherzer hasn't officially decided on retirement, but with a lockout looming he's talking about it like he has, and anyway he's not returning to Toronto. "We had circled this one, if we were out of it, to still pitch Sunday. It gives me a chance to pitch in front of my kids one more time," he said. It didn't matter that Scherzer would have to throw on short rest. It did matter, though he wouldn't admit it, that he still had a puncher's chance of chasing down Justin Verlander on the all-time strikeout list, after Verlander had returned from six months on the shelf to make one last start the day before.  ( 17 min )

It is October-y enough to be October, even though October is still days away, which means it's time to find out how many of you weirdos can hold a grudge that isn't yours to hold. The Houston Astros, American League West champions at 81-81, are officially the worst team ever to make baseball's postseason after edging out two other teams that also would have been the worst teams ever to make baseball's postseason. Now you can all get all fever blistered all over again about Carlos Beltran's crimes against humanity nine years ago. The Astros have turned over most of their roster and all of their front office since then, but they remain That Team for people who prize long memories and petty crimes, or just don't like the Astros. Before 2017, nobody really disliked the Astros, if only because you have to cast a shadow to make people feel your chill. They've been good enough since to have earned their enmity. They have the second best record in baseball over the last decade in both the regular and postseasons, and either despite that or because of it a certain segment of the baseball-speaking population seizes up northward from the seater remembering when the Astros beat out victory rhythms in their first championship season thanks to an array of friendly garbage cans and some sign-stealing players who apparently learned how to convey their thievery to each other from John Bradbury. In the end, of course, it's all branding. The Astros have been marked as polyrhythmic brigands since their McKinsey Era, even though they only have one player left from the 2017 championship team; that one player is Jose Altuve, so it's the smallest surviving member at that. But hey, at least half of our politics is people trying to re-litigate the Civil War, and history is as toxic as you want to make it. So if you feel chapping down below when the Astros appear in your line of vision, well, get some Benadryl and bite down on the coffee table. They're back.  ( 19 min )

Hello! Prepare to receive precious information. The information is arriving now. This week, the Defector staff will once again be convening in a top-secret and possibly flooded location to conduct our annual meetings and continue charting the future of the company. The only reason you need to know this is because we will be blogging…  ( 11 min )

The phrase "road playoff game" can have a variety of meanings depending on the circumstances, and the one that Paige Bueckers and her Dallas Wings teammates stepped into on Sunday night was about as daunting as they come. They had to enter Ballhalla, home to the WNBA's loudest fanbase, and take on the two-seeded Golden State Valkyries, owners of the league's most ferocious defense. No thanks. "Home playoff game" can have different meanings, too, as last year's Valkyries might tell you. Their surprisingly successful inaugural season ended with a playoff appearance, and the reward for so thoroughly exceeding expectations was an 0-2 sweep at the hands of the Lynx and one home playoff game, played in San Jose because a tennis tournament had dibs on their home arena. Any bitterness that arose from that experience did not carry over into this season, in which the Valks transformed from a plucky expansion squad playing over their heads into the team with the league's best net rating. Things are different, now, and even through the television screen one could sense how much the home crowd had been anticipating this chance to show what a playoff game in Ballhalla feels like. Bueckers did her best. In the first quarter, the roar of the crowd was briefly quieted by the Wings' star, who seemed to understand that the best way to short-circuit the self-sustaining process of a locked-in defense drawing energy from and returning it to a locked-in crowd is to go out there and get some tough buckets. Call it a superstar's instinct. And so tough buckets were exactly what Bueckers spent the first quarter collecting. Despite being hounded up and down the court by Gabby Williams, she scored 11 of her team's 20 points in the first quarter on 4-of-5 shooting, and the Wings only trailed by one when it was over. At this point one could detect just the slightest trace of trepidation in the noise of the crowd. Bueckers wasn't actually going to spoil this party, was she?  ( 19 min )

INSIDE: Katie Miller ... Chad Mizelle ... Kimberly Guilfoyle

What thimble-brain thought this was a good idea?

I didn't want the Baty.net Editor to be just another tab buried in my browser, so I had Claude make me a real Mac app out of it. In a normal world, the only way I'd be able to split a website into its own app would be "Add to Dock" via Safari. That would work, but it would mean that running the local Node server for Eleventy was a separate step from the app. It would also only have Safari's default menus. I wanted something nicer, so I had Claude build me a Swift wrapper. I suppose I could have used something like Electron, but my Mac Mini only has 16 GB of memory, so Electron would be too heavy. It took Claude Code 15 minutes to wrap the thing, create the app, add an icon, write the readme, and commit all of it. What a world. When I launch the app, it starts the server automatically. Also, there are actual menus. It's currently using only 99 MB of memory. This stuff makes me a little giddy. ✍️ Reply by email  ( 1 min )

How hard is it to enjoy your husband’s company? According to content made for Christian conservative women, the heaviest cross they may bear is learning to feel affection for their spouses — or at least fake it well enough to buy some peace at home. That’s what I learned perusing the growing field of influencers offering would-be tradwives advice on how to make MAGA marriages work.  “Normalize liking your husband,” reads a T-shirt sold by Savanna Stone, a 21-year-old self-proclaimed marriage expert who has been selling content preaching marital submission with the backing of shady far-right funders. At first blush, that may seem like a trifling concept. But, as Stone makes clear in her video content, her definition of liking or even loving a husband is both laborious and ascetic to an extr…  ( 8 min )

Today we’re listening to Ryuichi Sakamoto, a Japanese composer and pianist from Tokyo.

I want to flag your attention to this note written by computer scientist and AI researcher Yoshua Bengio. It was...  ( 9 min )

When Amon Ra St. Brown scored a second-quarter touchdown today against the New York Jets, he did not simply drop the ball in the end zone and walk off the field without acknowledging any teammates, the crowd, or anyone else. But he should have. The National Football League has fined him nearly $60,000 for four incidences of rampant fun-having (miming smoking) in the Lions' 41-31 Week 2 loss to the Buffalo Bills, so he should deprive the league of that amount of fun in the future. Childish? You betcha. Then again, what better time to be snippy with the bosses than game day? You want bland? We'll give you bland. In fact every touchdown today and tomorrow night should be anti-celebrated the same way, just as a way to tell the owners to buy larger undergarments so there isn't much chafing and binding to ruin their days. We assume this is an ownership thing, since the owners are the ones who typically decide when touchdown celebrations get too, well, what, exactly? Choreographed? Whimsical? Lurid? Evocative of historical massacres? Disturbing to the youth of America? But even if they're in the clear this time, someone in the league office has decided the players' gift for the terpsichore of muse must be restricted lest the nation become morally compromised any more than it already is as a matter of everyday commerce.  ( 17 min )

There is a possibility that Austin Romaine will be a fine professional football player, make boatloads of money more than whatever he is taking in as a linebacker at Texas Tech, and maybe get drafted by an NFL team that isn't awful. Maybe he'll be known as more than just The Guy Named After A Lettuce. But even if bad luck in the athlete business besets him and none of these things happen, he's still got Saturday, and if that isn't enough to get him free drinks in Lubbock for a decade, then shame on Lubbock for yet another thing. Romaine intercepted a pass from Sam Houston State University quarterback Brett Holloway and returned it 15 yards for a touchdown in the Red Raiders' 760-7 (okay, 49-14) win over SHSU on Saturday. Which of course is no big deal. Pick-sixes happen all the time. Most Texas citizens could do it in street clothes, or tell you they could.  ( 18 min )

Stephen Curry has proven himself yet again to be an enemy of the proletariat and an implacable foe of the Third American Dream. And this time, the cost to him and his burgeoning empire was a mere $20,000,000 (give or take the odd day trip to Monte Carlo), the difference between what he could have made over the next two seasons, $136.7 million, and what he'll get. What a sap. Curry just re-upped with Golden State The Corporate Name, formerly GSW Sports LLC, for two more years plus a player option that he would be a monumental berk not to exercise ahead of the season he'll turn 41. His 2026–27 salary of $62.6 million will drop to $55.7 million in 2027–28, and $60.2 million in the optional 2028–29 season, in an act that upholds two mostly discarded myths about team/player contracts in the modern age: one, that there is such a thing as a hometown discount, and two, that money can be left on the table without psychic damage to the payee. Curry's motivation, as he has stated too many times for cynical hyenas like you, is to leave the boys upstairs some salary-cap room to improve the level of his playmates. This is known as the Reverse Kawhi Leonard, in which someone does work for less money as opposed to doing less work for more money, and also the Backwards Ballmer, in which the salary cap is a thing to be heeded rather than used as loo roll. It's such an old-fashioned play that they may as well move the franchise to Hooterville Junction and make all the customers leave their shoes at the door.  ( 19 min )

Les Misérables who are stuck in a corporate environment mandating the use of the horrific Outlook for email is that it’s very difficult or impossible to deal with it from within Emacs. For those of us who feel that doing any text oriented task outside of Emacs is an imposition, that’s intolerable. Patient_Chance_3795 over at the Emacs subreddit has a hint on how to deal with one aspect of the problem: registering an Azure app. Check out his post for a suggestion on how to deal with the issue. The sad truth is that the main difficulty in dealing with Outlook is not the emails but the other functions such as calendar invites. As usual, Microsoft has made a point of ensuring that you have to use their software if you’re unlucky enough to be find yourself in their ecosphere. Regardless, every little bit of help in escaping their maw is welcome. If you’d like to at least deal with emails in an Outlook environment, take a look at Patient_Chance_3795’s post.  ( 5 min )

(use-package eww ; Web browser :config (setopt browse-url-browser-function 'eww-browse-url browse-url-secondary-browser-function 'browse-url-generic browse-url-generic-program "librewolf" ; ... (use-package eww ; Web browser :config (setopt browse-url-browser-function 'eww-browse-url browse-url-secondary-browser-function (lambda () (start-process "librewolf")) ; ... (use-package eww ; Web browser :config (setopt browse-url-browser-function 'eww-browse-url browse-url-secondary-browser-function (lambda () (browse-url-generic)) browse-url-generic-program "librewolf" ; ... (defun eww-browse-with-external-browser (&optional url) "Browse the current URL wi…  ( 4 min )

Preznit Fuckwit is why we can’t have nice things

Leeloo (2016) I'm back on my Mac and all-in with Bear again right now. Working on an Alfred workflow for daily notes and logging. So refreshing! Well, it looks like I may have a use for that "extra" Xteink X4 I bought: Snail — The screen you can read in the sun. (via Espresso Shots 9-27-26) Some of you may be disappointed to hear it, but I vibe-coded a CMS for this blog. ✍️ Reply by email

Usually, when I grow tired of editing blog posts using Markdown files in Emacs or whatever, I create a new blog using Ghost or something like it. This time, I did something different. AI Usage This post is about vibe coding an app for myself. If you're put off by this, now's the time to stop reading. Sometimes I just want a nice, easy, CMS for blogging. Emacs and a few lisp function are not that, so I asked Claude Code to make me a web app. At 7:00 am I sent the following to Claude: My blog at baty.net is managed locally using Eleventy. I would like to build a local web app that allows me to create new content. It should have "New Post", "New Journal", "New Page", and "New Note" options. The editor should handle Markdown, but it doesn't necessarily have to be "WYSIWYG" . There's should be a way to start the local server ("just serve") and deploy ("just deploy"). The blog is currently in ~/sites/baty.net. I walked away and made breakfast. At 7:27 am Claude said this: And gave me this: Screenshot of my new app I used it to write a test post, and it worked, first try. The app needed no edits. I later added a few niceties, but all-in this first version took less than an hour to build and I'm using it to write this post. ✍️ Reply by email  ( 1 min )

Such an amazing man and story. I've seen Rush three times: 1980, 1982, and 2012. They're my favorite. ✍️ Reply by email

FoxTrot by Bill Amend | October 4, 2026  ( 9 min )

There is something wonderfully absurd about the idea of declaring war on the Moon. It isn’t a country. It  ( 10 min )

Raw link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0qZ6QzpcVc Tonight I will join the livestream that @linkarzu hosts together with Rumen and Ted. We will talk about Emacs. The discussion is open to the audience, so join us to write your questions and just hang out. I am looking forward to this! About ‘Root Access’ Root Access is a live conversation with Linkarzu, CEO members, and invited guests about tech, tools, workflows, and what they’re building. Guests can share their projects before we dive into the discussion. Everyone is welcome to watch live and join the chat; the full replay stays public. Support @linkarzu What’s the “Linkarzu CEOs Monthly Hangout” Podcast @linkarzu YouTube memembers All the ‘Root Access’ episodes  ( 1 min )

Emacs Dwelling, James Dyer has a nice post on capturing only the visible portion of a folded Org region. When you call kill-ring-save (Meta+w) on a folded region, it will capture everything to the kill ring—even the hidden text. As Dyer says, the folding is just a display hack. All the text is still there. But sometimes Dyer wants to copy just the visible part. When I first read that, I couldn’t think of how to proceed without a lot of research and probably bit twiddling. That was just me overthinking the problem. It turns out to be pretty easy. The secret is org-copy-visible, which despite its name works outside of Org as well1. Once you know that, the rest is easy. You need only call org-copy-visible instead of kill-ring-save. Dyer does that using the shortcut Ctrl+u Meta+w when he wants to copy only the visible part. Take a look at his post for the code if this sort of thing interests you. You can, of course, simply call org-copy-visible explicitly but if you do it a lot, a shortcut such as Dyer’s make sense. Footnotes: 1 I haven’t verified this but Dyer says he’s used it with Dired  ( 5 min )

Here’s a secondary issue we’re currently seeing in a number of races in Red States. Take the Kansas Senate race....  ( 8 min )

Yesterday, after a federal court forced the White House to readmit three news organizations to the White House, Donald Trump...  ( 7 min )

furries fly it, Donny fries it, and so much more...

I wrote a macro that lets me define test cases with labelled inputs and outputs, so I can reduce repetition without affecting readability.  ( 3 min )

Wham!’s “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go” is one of the most instantly recognizable pop songs of the 1980s,  ( 5 min )

Isee 724 on the denote.git issue tracker prompted me to start an experiment for an optional, in-memory cache for Denote. The cache can help speed up all sorts of operations. The goal is to explore what can be done and whether it makes sense to have that as a feature that users can enable, either directly in denote.el or as a separate package. For the time being, I have what I call denote-data: https://github.com/protesilaos/denote-data. This is not for users and does nothing useful right now. I have not written any documentation on purpose. I am making it available as a proof-of-concept in case there are interested parties who want to contribute to the project. What I have right now seems solid, though I suspect it will only be useful at scale if the caching is done asynchronously. I plan …  ( 2 min )

Emacs Asia-Pacific (APAC) virtual meetup will not be happening this month. See you in the next meetup! Stay updated: https://emacs-apac.gitlab.io/#stay-updated.

Quick Look for Emacs from Charles Choi. MacOS has the notion of a Quick Look to peek at a file without invoking a heavier weight application such as an editor. It’s more than just dumping text onto the screen. It can deal with text, PDFs, HTML, various video files, ODF, Microsoft file types, and many others. Choi likes the Quick Look functionality but, of course, would like to have it in Emacs too. It’s not clear how to do this in general but it’s trivially easy to do it for Dired and Ibuffer. Choi solves the problem by binding dired-display-file and ibuffer-visit-buffer-other-window-noselect to the Space key. These commands open the file in another window so they’re more than just open the file as usual in Emacs. If you like the idea of being able to peek at a file without abandoning your current window, take a look at Choi’s post for the details on how to do it from Dired and Ibuffer windows.  ( 4 min )

Fair elections might soon become a thing of the past.  ( 74 min )

Here is a short update on the so-called Broadview Six case — one of the high-profile prosecutorial abuse cases coming...  ( 7 min )

There’s an article (gift link) out today in The Wall Street Journal about infrastructure spending on AI and data centers....  ( 7 min )

There will probably be some voters who give the National League MVP ballot a hard look and pore over all the possibilities, or just vote for Shohei Ohtani out of pure reflex. Which is fine enough as it goes. This is one of the quirks of democracy: Sometimes you have to let people be wrong for their own reasons, at least until we expand the vote to children above the age of birth, family pets, and animals who live in national parks. But it's far more likely that when those votes are counted, the MVP will be Pete Crow-Armstrong. If performance trumps celebrity, the ballots won't have any other name on them. It's OK from time to time to let the obvious be obvious, and if Shohei Ohtani is still Shohei Ohtani, Pete Crow-Armstrong is just as plainly the MVP. This is not preaching, mind you, and there's no need for advocacy on the Cubs center fielder's behalf. Crow-Armstrong was having a better season than anyone else even before Ohtani's body started looking into the process of aging, and even today the statistical differences between Crow-Armstrong and the second- and third-most effective players in the league—by WAR, that's pitcher Cristopher Sánchez of the Phillies, and Milwaukee second baseman Brice Turang—are in some cases wider than in any other campaign since Roger Clemens lapped the field in 1997. Indeed, the only argument you can muster, if this is the sort of thing you go for, is whether Crow-Armstrong is having a better season than Houston left fielder Yordan Alvarez, and astonishing as Alvarez's has been—he is slugging an even .600—his season nevertheless might end on Sunday afternoon in the lonely prairies of Yolo County, California. The AL West weighs on a curve in singular ways.  ( 18 min )

After Ed Sheeran went through all that trouble to appease New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft, he'll end up not playing at his stadium anyway. The musician's shows, scheduled for Friday and Saturday in Foxborough, Mass., have been canceled because of the incoming nor'easter expected to hit the East Coast this weekend. At least one good thing's coming out of this storm. "Due to the severe weather warnings in place in Boston and across New England throughout the weekend and following consultation with local officials, the promoter and tour have made the difficult decision to cancel the Ed Sheeran concerts at Gillette Stadium," the venue's statement read. "The decision was made with the safety of fans, staff and everyone involved in the shows as the top priority." Those who bought tickets will be refunded, and free to spend their money on something equally as compelling, like going to the dentist. This weekend's shows were the original reason why Kraft strong-armed (really, weak-armed) Sheeran last week into dropping Macklemore as an opening act on the U.S. portion of his tour. The Patriots owner, a billionaire who has routinely donated money to groups that support Israel and its military, took issue with the rapper's support of Palestine. After Sheeran obliged, then blamed his promoter, the rest of his openers and his backing band ditched him on principle. Many people made fun of the musician for having no spine or scruples. Sheeran's subsequent show was this past Saturday in Philadelphia, where he recited a meaningless statement then cried.  ( 14 min )

Sofia rises early to drive from Brooklyn to the Manhattan production office where she works as a location scout. She’s tasked with finding spots in which to film an upcoming television pilot: a few apartments and, randomly, a fish store. Her day brings her around the city and in contact with a variety of people—a tech guy who shows her how to hack the system to avoid parking tickets, an old friend she hasn’t seen in years, a man who insists on dinner as recompense when she shows up late to scout his store, whereupon he will not shut the fuck up about his Moby-Dick ripoff novel. This is The Scout, a loosely plotted but deeply resonant portrait of modern New York as related through its inhabitants and their spaces.  Writer/director Paula González-Nasser based the film on her own time in the trenches as an NYC location scout for TV series like High Maintenance, Broad City, and Search Party, as well as movies like Never Rarely Sometimes Always. Appropriately, she served as her own scout for this film, which has raked in plaudits since premiering at last year’s Tribeca Festival. Ahead of The Scout’s theatrical release, I sat down with González-Nasser over Zoom to discuss her time as a location scout, how it informed the film, and how she charted a realistic journey through New York. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for time and clarity.  ( 29 min )

Welcome to the Defector College Football Watch Guide, where Israel Daramola and Ray Ratto will tell you which of the weekend’s college football games are worth giving a crap about. Ray: In case you missed it, the greatest play since the 109-yard field goal return that won the 2013 Iron Bowl is still resonating around Downmarket College Football America, a moment of pure end-game lunacy between Vanderbilt and North Carolina State that serves to remind us all that the best and maybe only reason to still care about this grand swindle is the way that young folks can pull the radiantly ridiculous out of dull-gray ordinary. In doing so, C.J. Bailey, Miles Capers, and Cayden Daniels combined to remind us that the truest way to save college sports, with or without government intervention, is to ban the adults who can, do, and always will ruin everything. This is the same thing that will save all of youth sports, but nobody has yet figured out how to get the kids to stock the snack bar. There were, of course, other things to spice up the weekend, like Ole Miss beating LSU, LSU losing to Ole Miss, and Lane Kiffin having to explain them both. A quarter of the teams are still undefeated, not including Western Michigan, and remarkably no coach has been fired yet. Maybe the athletic directors and donors are too busy worrying about making any expensive purchases while Congress dithers over the Make Players Indentured Servants Again Act, or maybe Bruce Feldman's suggestion that the pool of interim coaches could include Jimbo Fisher and Brian Kelly scares them into paralysis. Or maybe they're all confused that SEC commissioner Greg Sankey didn't hold a press conference to complain that the voters aren't giving Arkansas proper respect for being almost 2-1.  ( 36 min )

Remember when the Premier League charged Manchester City with over 100 instances of financial maneuvering which ran afoul of league rules? It's possible you've forgotten all about that, since the league's investigation began all the way back in 2019, and the charges were announced in 2023. The long timeline here is owed to City's continued refusal to cooperate with the Premier League and the efforts of their expensive legal teams. But time moves forward nonetheless, and so at long last we hare here, with The Athletic's David Ornstein reporting that City has been found guilty of almost every charge it faced. Since it has been three years since the charges were first announced, a refresher is in order. The case is based on the Premier League's belief that City consistently broke the league's…  ( 17 min )

At midnight, Taylor Swift released a four-song update to her latest album, The Life of a Showgirl, which came out last October and had the cultural impact of a Skechers sneaker drop. Despite juicing its commercial success with several variants on the physical copies for sale, responses to the album from critics and fans alike have been lukewarm at best. Certainly nobody that I know liked hearing Travis Kelce’s dick compared to a redwood tree. One might think that after reaching the economic pinnacle that was the Eras Tour, the accompanying concert film and Disney+ docuseries, three albums in four years, and a single for the billion-grossing Toy Story 5, Swift would maybe consider chilling for a second. But for better and for worse, this woman is a compulsive writer who must metabolize her …  ( 16 min )

The 2026 WNBA playoffs begin on Sunday, following the league’s longest-ever regular season, one in which it felt like any team could win on any given night. (Except the Connecticut Sun.) As an ethical and objective journalist with no real rooting interest, I could be excited on everyone’s behalf. Unfortunately, my objectivity manifests as being nervous on everyone’s behalf for the postseason. Here’s a reason for concern about each team, grouped by first-round matchup. (1) Minnesota Lynx: Is the Lynx defense OK?  ( 32 min )

There are certain early-season losses, even hefty ones, that you can write off. Especially if they happen overseas or on a Thursday night, where good teams can be afflicted by all sorts of rest/recovery issues that throw them off balance. But man, if you are a Green Bay Packers fan, I'm not sure how you even begin to cope with what happened last night. The Packers lost to the Falcons—the same Falcons who lost their first two games to the Steelers and Panthers by a combined score of 54-16 and did not have a red-zone snap in either of those games—by a score of 35-14. This wasn't one of those games where the bad team wins by multiple scores thanks to fluky turnovers or special teams play, either. This was the Falcons, the Atlanta damn Falcons, the bozos with no good quarterbacks and an inability to get a first down, just destroying the Packers on their own field. Atlanta finished the game with 498 total yards, and gained 7.5 yards per play. Bijan Robinson ran for 194 yards on 29 carries. Michael Penix Jr., with his non-functional knees and a general lack of quarterbacking skills, spent his first start of the season just pumping the ball to Drake London, who finished with nine receptions for 194 yards. Kyle Pitts didn't do jack shit.  ( 18 min )

INSIDE: KBJ ... Sheri Mecklenburg ... Aileen Cannon

so let’s have one

It wasn’t long after Braden Peters, better known as “Clavicular,” was arrested on suspicion of raping a 17-year-old girl at his family’s home in Massachusetts that his fellow MAGA influencers started complaining that he was the real victim.  “Now we live in a climate where a 19-year-old can’t even sleep with a 16-year-old with a little alcohol involved. Absolutely insane,” said Nick Fuentes, the popular white nationalist podcaster, ignoring the fact that it has long been considered rape to have sex with someone unconscious and unable to consent, as alleged by the criminal complaint against Peters.   Others floated conspiracy theories accusing the mysterious “they” of trying to “control” Clavicular, or claiming he is besieged with “women trying to ruin his life with rumors.” Brian Atlas of …  ( 8 min )

Today we’re listening to Patrick Cowley, an American electronic musician from Buffalo, NY.

Borrowing from the playbook of all master negotiators, President Donald Trump has gained the upper hand in his ongoing trade war with Canada by … wait for it … threatening to rename a lake.  On Aug. 25, President Deals McDealington threw down the gauntlet and showed those barbaric Canadians the fate they’ll face if they don’t bend to America’s will: “The United States is giving serious consideration to changing the name of Lake Ontario to Lake America in that we don’t expect to be doing much business with Ontario any longer. Thank you for your attention to this matter!” BOOM! What say you now, callous Canucks? You didn’t expect our beloved MAGA president to go hyrdonymic on your a--, did you? The trade war Trump started for no particular reason – the one likely to harm Americans economical…  ( 14 min )

In America right now, the people are shouting, “Gas prices! Food prices! Health care costs!” And the Republican Party, six weeks out from the midterm elections, is responding: “What’s that? You want us to fight with the media? Or how about we get mad about this issue nobody has ever heard of because it’s something we made up?” It’s as if the words “read the room” never entered the GOP’s lexicon. This dynamic was writ large Sept. 23 when the face of the Republican Party, President Donald Trump, turned his attention and more of our taxpayer dollars to a U.S. District Court in Washington, DC. There, a judge heard arguments from CNN, MS NOW and Politico over Trump’s recent decision to ban the news organizations from the White House.  Trump, Republicans battle the media, but midterm voters don'…  ( 15 min )

You’re weekly dose of funny and silly pictures and memes.  ( 4 min )

Raw link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aEnacESU-DU [ The event will be recorded. ] I will join Sacha Chua and Pedro A. Aranda Gutierrez to talk about Emacs. Specifically, Pedro will elaborate on work related to the Org LaTeX exporter. Pedro is doing some interesting work on that front.  ( 1 min )

Because Denote files are standard files, we do not provide the equivalent of a find-file command to directly open a file in the denote-directory. Though users may still want to have that functionality, which is easy to implement with what core Denote already provides: (defun my-denote-find-file () "Open a file in the variable `denote-directory'." (declare (interactive-only t)) (interactive) (when-let* ((file (denote-file-prompt))) (find-file file))) This can be extended to include commands that only match specific file types or regular expressions in general. For example, here is how we prompt only for files that include .pdf in their name and also modify the minibuffer prompt to indicate what we are doing: (defun my-denote-find-file-pdf () "Prompt for FILE in the variabl…  ( 2 min )

America/Toronto = Fri Oct 2 0600H EDT / 0500H CDT / 0400H MDT / 0300H PDT / 1000H UTC / 1200H CEST / 1300H EEST / 1530H IST / 1800H +08 / 1900H JST Watch on YouTube View Org source for this post You can e-mail me at sacha@sachachua.com.  ( 1 min )

A feature of macOS Finder that I enjoy using is Quick Look, where a preview of a selected file can be displayed by pressing the space bar. While “Quick Look” is not really a thing in Emacs (at least not out of the box), we can quasi-emulate this by taking advantage of commands that can open files in another Emacs window, all the while keeping the current Emacs window selected. In Dired, I’ve bound SPC to the command dired-display-file. 1 (keymap-set dired-mode-map "SPC" #'dired-display-file) A similar thing can be done for IBuffer: 1 (keymap-set ibuffer-mode-map "SPC" #'ibuffer-visit-buffer-other-window-noselect) This configuration is definitely a personal preference thing, so YMMV. That said, I’ve found these bindings to be quite useful, so perhaps you may as well.  ( 1 min )

opines that since the advent of use-short-answers, confirm-kill-emacs should be a boolean. His idea is that confirm-kill-emacs should merely specify whether to ask for confirmation or not and let use-short-answers choose the the particular form of the question if one is requested. 00-11 notes that Danrobi1 is misunderstanding the purpose of the confirm-kill-emacs variable: it was never about whether to call yes-or-no-p or y-or-n-p to ask if quitting Emacs is really what you want. What its purpose is and was is to specify a predicate that will decide whether to quit Emacs or not. There’s no reason it even has to communicate with the user. It just has to decide whether to quit or not based on whatever logic is coded into it. I’ve had it set to y-or-n-p for as long as I can remember and haven’t thought about it in all that time. But 00-11’s response got me thinking. I originally set it to y-or-n-p because I kept inadvertently quitting Emacs by fat fingering some other shortcut and I’ve never looked back but there is one problem. If I don’t remember to quit Emacs before rebooting my MacBook Pro, the reboot will hang waiting for Emacs to quit. That usually happens when there’s an OS update that I start off when I go to bed expecting to have a new OS in the morning only to find the system still waiting for Emacs to quit. What if I could detect if my Mac is being rebooted? If I can, I can easily code up a predicate function that quits Emacs if so and calls y-or-n-p if not. The thought just popped into my mind so I haven’t had a chance to research it yet but it seems promising.  ( 5 min )

M-w, and you get more than you bargained for: the kill ring receives the hidden text as well. Folding is only a display trick - the text is still in the buffer, and kill-ring-save dutifully copies every character between the region boundaries, ellipsis and all. Paste that into an email or a chat and the hidden notes come along for the ride. The fix, in my config, is a prefix argument: C-u M-w copies only the visible text of the region, leaving everything folded or hidden behind. Plain M-w is unchanged. I have been a fan of org-copy-visible ever since I discovered it works outside Org - back in 2023 I was using it in dired with dired-hide-details-mode to copy just the filenames. The only friction was having to remember M-x org-copy-visible instead of my muscle-memory M-w. So I taught my existing my/kill-ring-save wrapper a another trick: hand it a prefix argument and it copies only the visible text. M-w has been remapped to a small wrapper for a while, mainly so that pressing it with no active region copies the current line. The new version forwards the prefix argument into a second branch: (defun my/kill-ring-save (beg end &optional copy-visible) "Save the region to the kill ring. With a prefix argument, copy only the visible text between BEG and END, skipping folded or hidden text, like `org-copy-visible'." (interactive (if (use-region-p) (list (region-beginning) (region-end) current-prefix-arg) (list (line-beginning-position) (line-beginning-position 2) current-prefix-arg))) (if copy-visible (org-copy-visible beg end) (kill-ring-save beg end))) [remap kill-ring-save] keeps M-w working everywhere. So why org-copy-visible?, I could have written my own invisible-text walker, but org-copy-visible already is one and it ships with Emacs!

The Jockey Club, the leading sanctioning body in what’s left of the sport of horse racing in the U.S., sent out a clear message Wednesday to anybody thinking of naming their horse after Hitler: Don’t name your horse after Hitler.  The two-year-old colt Austrian Painter made his racing debut Monday with a win in the third race at Horseshoe Indianapolis Racecourse. Obligatory: He covered the 5 1/2 furlongs in 1:04.97, and paid $9.00. Afterward, the Jockey Club received objections about the victorious newcomer, but these weren't the standard post-race protests about a jockey’s obstructing or dangerous ride or a horse’s drug abuse. No, these complaints were about the horse’s name. Because, as reported by ESPN in its Austrian Painter story, “Hitler was born in Austria and was an artist.” He was indeed! Austrian Painter’s owner and breeder is Scott Herbertson, a 58-year-old California native now based in Texas. In 2014, he founded the Herbertson Racing Stable. I could find no Kentucky Derby horses or winners of any other graded stakes race in his barn. But while he’s not a major player in the sport and seems more likely to enter his animals at unglamorous tracks like Horseshoe Indianapolis than Saratoga, Herbertson has spent lots of time in winner's circles. In 2014, the Thoroughbred Owners of California named him to their Rookie of the Year roster. According to Herbertson's page in the racing database Equibase, his horses have finished in the money 351 times in 561 starts, with a very impressive 164 wins. Herbertson's total earnings are now just over $2.5 million. Alas, nothing his horses ever did on the track brought Herbertson anywhere near the attention that this has.  ( 17 min )

Brown County Circuit Judge Marc Hammer ended his temporary seal Thursday on records in Josh Jacobs's domestic-violence criminal case. But that doesn't mean the records, which includes video showing the Green Bay Packers running back throwing his ex-girlfriend to the ground, will immediately become public. Though Hammer unsealed the files, he also had strong words of caution for those who will decide what is released. "Our [state] Constitution provides in part that crime victims are entitled to rights," Hammer said, "to be treated with dignity, respect, courtesy, sensitivity, and fairness." Jacobs pleaded no contest earlier this month to one count of misdemeanor battery and one count of misdemeanor criminal damage to property. Police arrested him in May after they responded to a phone call reporting a disturbance between a man and a woman. When officers talked to the woman, she told them that she and Jacobs had been in a fight and, per police records, he "grabbed her and threw her to the ground and she struck her head, suffering an injury."  ( 18 min )

The person in the photo above is not a strange wanderer whose arrival at the local inn coincided with that of a growing pestilence. That is Chicago Cubs third baseman Alex Bregman, photographed in the dugout two nights ago. Bregman looks like that because he was struck by a foul ball while standing in the on-deck circle during last Sunday's game against the Reds. He suffered multiple facial fractures, which is obvious by the look of him. Here he is this morning arriving at Wrigley Field: https://bsky.app/profile/sambernero.bsky.social/post/3mwbixcj6tc2d  ( 14 min )

The second project is probably always the hardest. This is especially true if it follows a successful debut. You make something great, and by some act of the gods it catches fire and becomes the new, hot thing—a one-in-a-million shot. But then comes the next thing, the followup to your great big deal of a project. It’s a haunting and intense proposition. When I was at NYU for an MFA, I met a lot of famous and successful authors, and I remember one of the pieces of advice was to just write the next book as fast as you can. The more you put it off, the more you will paralyze yourself.  There’s no question that Rivers Cuomo felt some paralysis after Weezer's 1994 self-titled album. Known colloquially as The Blue Album, it is a true achievement of '90s power pop-punk. Twelve perfect songs, produced by The Cars' Ric Ocasek, full of nerdy irreverence and offbeat songwriting that manages to stick like it’s the fucking Beatles or something. But on top of this newly signed band releasing a well-constructed album, they became MTV darlings thanks to Spike Jonze's videos for "Undone (The Sweater Song)" and "Buddy Holly." https://youtu.be/kemivUKb4f4?si=po0-0MLY-g-_PN2k  ( 34 min )

The NFL schedule is not likely to renew the fading historical rivalry between the Denver Broncos and the Seattle Seahawks. The two teams are now separated by the conference divide, and, though both teams are currently good, you'd be a fool to bet on the Super Bowl producing any particular matchup, especially one featuring Bo Nix's ass. But though proximity cannot suffice, the rivalry was juiced up this week by an out-of-nowhere controversy involving the teams' head coaches and some shit that went down behind the scenes two years ago. Mike Macdonald took over as head coach of the Seahawks in January 2024. Months later, in the run-up to the season, Macdonald prepared his team for a Week 1 matchup with the Broncos in part by finding and reviewing fan footage of Denver's training camp. Macdona…  ( 22 min )

Drew Magary’s Thursday Afternoon NFL Dick Joke Jamboroo runs every Thursday at Defector during the NFL season. Got something you wanna contribute? Email the Roo. You can also read Drew over at SFGATE, and buy Drew’s books while you’re at it. An internet lifetime ago, ESPN football columnist Gregg Easterbrook was one of my go-to reads. Easterbrook was a pundit for The Atlantic by day, but moonlit over at ESPN's Page 2 to write his Tuesday Morning Quarterback column every week during the NFL season. TMQ included tons of snooty jokes that only George Will would find funny, but it also served as the tip of the spear in introducing analytics to the mainstream football discourse. I hate giving Greggggggg credit for anything, because he’s an eternally haughty dipshit. But he was a notable part of my education as a football fan, and I was an easier mark for his shtick back then than I am now. For 20-something me, it was worth enduring Easterbrook’s preciousness to read his more entertaining copy, which often recounted strategic errors that NFL teams routinely made simply because those teams hadn’t looked at the data. It was through Easterbrook’s column that I first understood, mathematically, why punting was dumb. And it was Easterbrook who conditioned me to believe that blitzing too often, particularly on third downs, was a recipe for disaster. He had a recurring section in TMQ for failed blitzes titled "Stop Me Before I Blitz Again!" I read that every word of that section, every week. That was because I had watched my own team’s defense get burned in such instances enough times to believe that Easterbrook’s line of thinking was sound, and that his methodology was airtight.  ( 38 min )

The 2026 NWSL season has provided some astonishingly fun soccer, and many off-field successes too: The league has boasted some record attendances, salaries, and goal-scoring this year, not to mention a few signings from at least a couple of the big European clubs it lusts after. But recently there have been too many reminders that although the NWSL has raised its ceiling, the floor is still in hell. On Sept. 13, Savannah DeMelo, the star Racing Louisville midfielder who suffered a cardiac arrest during a game in Seattle in September 2025, filed a lawsuit against the team’s medical provider, UofL Health, as well as two of her doctors, for negligence. The lawsuit states that the doctors should have caught the heart condition that was a substantial cause of her cardiac arrest—it was instead caught by doctors in Seattle after the fact. The suit stated that DeMelo "has incurred medical, hospital, and other care-related expenses, and will continue to incur such expenses in the future, has lost income, has suffered a permanent impairment in her power to labor and earn money, and has experienced severe physical and mental pain and suffering, and loss of enjoyment of life, and will continue to so suffer into the future."  ( 22 min )

A week ago, we explained in scabrous detail the multiplicity of shortcomings of the American League by focusing on the Central division and blaming it at least indirectly on the Pope's inability to close. But like most short-term trend stories in baseball, it quickly proved to be in error. Defector regrets not just the misidentification but also hiring the nitwit who made the observation. Steps, we assure you, will be taken. In fact, it is not the AL Central that was dragging down the class but the AL West, where mediocrity is a possibly unreachable goal rather than a curse and some aggressively mediocre team will win the division. Having committed to this bit so deep into the season, the winner of the division will do well to avoid finishing below .500; there is nothing to do but embrace the AL West of it all. A week ago, when we mocked the AL Central, we failed to take into account Cleveland's upcoming series with West Sacramento, which of course the Guardians swept because that's what a baseball team does when the A's come to town. (If you have to go to them, you just win two out of three and feel like you let a golden opportunity pass.) The Guards now lead the division with a gaudy 82-76 record and cannot finish below .500, a familiar late-season push that has elevated them to bland and dull rather than charmingly embarrassing. A suiting division champ, in other words.  ( 21 min )

Needless to say, the administration had no case whatsoever.  ( 60 min )

Pete Hegseth better make this explicable as quickly as possible, or we’re in for some serious trouble.  ( 60 min )

I respect it, but I’m not 100 percent sure it’ll work.  ( 66 min )

Try to guess which party he belongs to.  ( 55 min )

Even now, in our so-called postliterate age, can reading a book—a novel, of all things—inspire us to a richer, fuller life? Ayad Akhtar hopes it still can.  ( 100 min )

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I promise not to be writing a post about every new theory or hot take about contemporary polling. And I’ll...  ( 7 min )

INSIDE: Timothy Kelly ... Betsy Klein ... Donald Trump

Leeloo watching the world go by (2016) ✍️ Reply by email

what the fuck is going on with Dear Leader’s health?

Today we’re listening to Egberto Gismonti, a Brazilian composer, guitarist, and pianist from Carmo.

Come with me now to Palo Alto. We’re hopping in the car to make the more than 30-mile drive south of San Francisco to the bucolic campus of Stanford University, where former NFL star Andrew Luck awaits us. The Stanford campus remains as gorgeous, and sheltered, as ever. This is the ideal setting for gifted minds to construct their own realities, and Luck remains one of the more gifted minds that the sport of football has ever produced. Smart enough to read the most complicated defenses at a glance, and smart enough to leave the NFL when he realized that the life of a pro quarterback was making both him, and his wife Nicole, miserable. You could argue that Andrew Luck was too smart for the NFL. But is he smart enough to turn Stanford football into a national powerhouse? That’s what I’m here…  ( 1 min )

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We don’t know what’s going to happen in the midterms. But we know for a fact that today you can...  ( 9 min )

This is the weekly, free edition of The Backchannel. If you’d like to receive the free edition of The Backchannel...  ( 11 min )

Let’s take a moment to read some actual words posted on social media by the actual president of the United States of America. On Aug. 3, Donald Trump wrote on Truth Social: “My REAL Polling Numbers, not those made up by the Fake News Media, are the best they have ever been.” It’s an insult to fiction to call that fiction. I’m not sure what you call something more fabricated than fiction – maybe “ludicriction”? – but that’s what Trump’s words are. Trump has left reality behind and lives in a fantasy world of great polls As The New York Times recently reported, “The latest surveys indicate that Mr. Trump is now all but the most unpopular second-term president at this stage of their tenure in the history of polling going back to the 1940s. The only exception is not one that would give Mr. Tr…  ( 13 min )

Now that White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt is stepping down to spend more time with her soulless penchant for dishonesty, President Donald Trump has an opportunity to save American taxpayers some money by not replacing her. After all, Trump promised to cut down on wasteful government spending, and I can’t imagine anything more wasteful than paying a press secretary to come out and lie on behalf of administration officials whose only skill is lying. Does anyone truly think the president needs an employee to amplify his frequent fabrications? The man never shuts up when cameras are around, and he owns his own social media platform. If someone’s going to try to hoodwink me, I prefer they spout their untruths directly and not via some highly paid federal flunky with a smile and an i…  ( 14 min )

With the midterm elections looming and Americans plagued by the cost of virtually everything, President Donald Trump decided it’s a great time for a trade war with Canada. You all know Canada, right? It’s the big place just north of us. Our close ally. The country known for being incredibly nice. That Canada. Trump slapped 50% U.S. tariffs on a number of Canadian goods after trade negotiations fell apart Aug. 22. Then, on Aug. 24, Trump posted additional threats on social media, saying he’ll double tariffs on imported vehicles and auto parts from Canada and adding: “WE DON’T NEED CANADA, THEY NEED US!” If I didn’t know better, I’d say Trump is doing more than Democrats to guarantee a Republican electoral wipeout in the midterms. Trump's trade war with Canada will make the GOP's life more m…  ( 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 )

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 )

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 )

Like most normal, well-adjusted men, I have spent every waking moment since Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey” opened in theaters feeling apoplectically angry about Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey.” I have rage-posted online, noting that by casting people who are different than me, the director ruined a beloved epic poem I never actually read. I have blamed wokeness for creating a world in which an ancient work of absolute fiction can be sullied by what I, making perfect sense, angrily claim to be historical inaccuracies.  Yet despite all my productive and intellectual online shouting, the movie has made $652 million worldwide since its July 17 release. And even more frustratingly, I’m still single. I'm mad that a fictional movie is historically inaccurate I struggle to understand these d…  ( 12 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 )

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 )

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 )

It seems all I hear these days are complaints about President Donald Trump’s war with Iran. As a humble oil executive, looking out on the Pacific Ocean from the wrap-around porch of my third mansion, I find these complaints deeply offensive. Sure, the word “war” carries many negative connotations. But let’s look at the bottom line, which, in my case, is the oil industry’s bottom line. We’re doing great! Just look at this New York Times headline from July 31: “Iran War Drives Oil Profits to Highest Levels in Years.” Huzzah! ExxonMobil, Chevron are cashing in on the Iran war In its second-quarter earnings report released that same day, Chevron showed it made $12.1 billion between April and June, up from $2.5 billion over those same months last year. I asked the people who I pay to form a hu…  ( 16 min )

I was told radical leftist socialism is on the march. I was told the Midwestern cheese empire of Wisconsin was going to fall into the hands of Marxist cheddar redistributors and that I should bury my 401(k) and my most precious belongings in the backyard. State lawmaker Francesca Hong, a democratic socialist, was sure to win the Wisconsin gubernatorial Democratic primary, showing the rest of America that liberals had all but fully slid into communism. This is what the loud voices on Fox News and on the internet told me. So imagine my shock – not relief, really, because I enjoy being angry and afraid – when I learned Hong lost the primary to Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley, a candidate boosted by establishment Democrats.  Hong's defeat in the Wisconsin primary shakes up my fear of …  ( 13 min )

It takes a special kind of stupid to turn the rehabbing of a national monument like the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool into a full-blown presidential scandal. But President Donald Trump found a way to pull it off, creating a wet, ogre-colored metaphor for his administration’s stumbling lack of focus, casual dishonesty and utter inability to govern. In the most recent development, Trump’s Department of Justice on July 31 dropped ridiculous charges it had filed against former Olympian David Hearn, falsely claiming he had ripped up part of the pool’s new lining. You’ll recall the president was rushing to “fix” the Reflecting Pool prior to the July 4 celebration of America’s 250th anniversary. The work was clearly a bust from the start, as algae returned to the pool almost instantly and we a…  ( 14 min )

In the coming months, when you bite down on a government-subsidized burger made with meat of questionable origin, you’ll have Glorious Leader Donald J. Trump to thank. On Aug. 21, the president who loves to call other people communists enraged American cattle ranchers by announcing plans to “allow up to 300,000 metric tons of product for ground beef to be imported with no out of quota tariff. We have a commitment that this beef will be sold at 25 percent below current market prices.” Trump posted news of the deal on social media, but of course gave no specific details about who the deal is with, where the meat is coming from or why he’s suddenly admitting that waiving tariffs will, in fact, lower prices for consumers. It’s a turducken of hypocrisy. Trump importing beef won't help America's…  ( 15 min )

As President Donald Trump’s folly of a war with Iran continues, it seems the whole thing has become a joke to him and his administration. On Sept. 2, Trump posted this on his Truth Social account: “Now that we have it under U.S.A. control, should we change the name Hormuz Strait to TRUMP STRAIT??? Like America itself, it would be 'hotter' than ever before!” What the hell are you doing, man? This is a war, not the "Washed-Up Reality Gameshow Star Comedy Hour." And maybe ask Americans struggling to afford gas and ground beef whether America is “hotter” than ever before.  Trump and his White House act like the Iran war is funny The official White House account on X quickly followed up, posting a fake map of the Middle East with the Strait of Hormuz labeled “Trump Strait,” which is a brain-mel…  ( 13 min )

By now you’ve likely heard of Natalie Harp, President Donald Trump’s executive assistant and personal ego-inflater, a 35-year-old loyalist who appears ever by the president’s side. She went from background character in the Trump administration to a national focal point in a blink after Georgia Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff spoke this line criticizing the president’s preoccupations and the luxury jet he was “gifted” by a foreign country: “He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the emir of Qatar.” Questions swirled, and suddenly, Harp was everywhere. America learned how she carries a portable printer so she can show the president printouts of people saying nice things about him. We heard about the time she rode in the trunk…  ( 14 min )

If you’re a sane Republican – and yes, I do believe such people exist – the past week had to be monumentally embarrassing. President Donald Trump, who’s terrible at pretending to be a conservative, tried to bribe U.S. voters by saying every adult would receive a $5,000 “Trump Dividend” if Republicans win the midterm elections. If it weren’t a complete con, that would cost about $1.3 trillion at a time when the national debt has surpassed $40 trillion. So much for fiscal conservatism. A ludicrous and embarrassing GOP midterm convention The president made the embarrassing kickback offer Sept. 9 during an equally embarrassing Republican midterm convention that centered around idolatry of Trump. At the event in Dallas, he implored GOP voters: “Pretend that I am on the ballot.”  Does that make…  ( 15 min )

Why doesn’t he just get it over with already and change our country to the United States of Trump?  ( 57 min )

Who better to team up with for such a slimy crusade than Dr. Oz?  ( 60 min )

The president said he’s leading the world into a future of “super intelligence,” but it sure sounded like the opposite.  ( 62 min )

When we set out to do a supersized season of Normal Gossip, it was all tee-hee, ha ha, look at all these funny goofs we have! And then we went through The Process and made 12 actual episodes of silly, unhinged, or just plain weird stories. Now? We need a nap. Luckily for everyone, we saved the best for last! There was no way we were going to do a season of all-stars without bringing back our dowager queen, Kelsey McKinney! For our finale (for real this time), we brought Kelsey a story about a power struggle amongst the staff of a pediatrician's office, with grievances so petty and machinations so cursed that we actually had Kelsey sympathizing with management. (Possibly the first and last time that will ever happen.) If you’ve got feelings about plant parenthood, sound bowls, efficiency in the workplace, mysterious white powders, or the collective quest of office managers everywhere to get a five-star rating on the apps, this one is just for you. But if all you want is to listen to Rachelle and Kelsey laugh for an hour—hey, we’re not judging—we’ve got you covered there too!  ( 16 min )

Barstool Sports podcaster Ryen Russillo has an urgent message for you: He will be dead in 72 hours unless $12 million is wired to the following bank acc—sorry, my mistake. I just assumed that's what he was going to say based on the haunting thumbnail on this video. Now that I've played it, I see that Russillo is simply interested in selling you some appallingly lit food. https://twitter.com/TheRyenRussillo/status/2102566992217776535 The video appears to have been shot in a study room at the local library, and Russillo looks like he was told that recording this was the only way to ensure his family will be allowed to stay alive in West Germany. Did he film this thing by himself with an iPhone and a tripod? The abrupt cuts to stuttering first-person footage of troughs of bread and fries would seem to suggest so.  ( 15 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, Giri answers a question about how to encourage your child to love your favorite sport.  ( 21 min )

In the grand scheme of things, Week 1 of the NFL season means nothing. There are still 16 games to go afterward, and a lot of teams use that first game as a kind of unofficial preseason game to iron out all of the kinks. After just one week, it wouldn’t be fair to make such grand pronouncements as, “The Falcons may never win another game,” or “Boy, the Lions are kinda fucked,” or “Justin Herbert has gone from overrated to just plain sucking ass.” But after two games? Well now, I think that’s a large enough sample size to make the kind of sweeping generalizations that make for good football radio. So that’s exactly what Arif Hasan and I do this week on All Ball. https://art19.com/shows/the-distraction/episodes/de74fc48-90f0-4703-b864-1530be9ac8bb  ( 17 min )

The Protect College Sports Act passed another procedural vote in the Senate yesterday, by a 70-21 margin. It will clear a few more procedural steps this week before going up for a final vote, at which point it is expected to pass and be sent to the House. In the meantime, it continues to mutate into a worse and more exploitative version of itself. More than 35 amendments were added to the PCSA yesterday, and one in particular stands out. Republican senators Katie Britt and Tommy Tuberville amended the bill to sharpen its language on how NIL spending would interact with the proposed salary cap for players. The bill now explicitly states that vaguely defined NIL money earned by players would count against a given program's spending cap on players, which would be set at $48.8 million. https://twitter.com/RossDellenger/status/2102533363277910208  ( 19 min )

Ireland and Israel are, at least for now, set for some really weird soccer matches. Unfriendlies, you might say. Their national men’s teams have a home-and-home series scheduled to open this weekend, only there are no home games for either side. Both matches will be played in Central Europe: one in an empty stadium, the other with only Israeli fans. The top story in Ireland these days, sports or otherwise, is that the games will be played at all.   “I think we all agree we shouldn’t be in the position where we have to play the game,” John Martin, head of the Football Association of Ireland (FAI), said last week.  And Ireland manager Heimir Hallgrimsson said he’d personally polled all his players, and "none of us feel comfortable playing in these games."  ( 20 min )

Sisi is a Volvo Ocean 65 racing sailboat. She is fast as hell and built for sickos. She is not a comfortable luxury yacht, I assure you. Sisi is a frightening, angry, 72-foot, 12-ton sea monster.  Sisi, owned and operated by an Austrian company called Kora Yachts, is used for racing, her calendar divided between summers in the Mediterranean and winters in the Caribbean, or what the rest of us know as "the life." In between all the racing, Sisi has to be delivered from port to port. To get to the starting mark of the Palermo–Montecarlo Regatta, she had to be sailed from the finishing mark of the Aegean600, in Sounion, Greece, to the port of Palermo. With roughly a month between the two races, Sisi's crew first delivered her to the top-of-the-line facilities at Marina Genova, adjacent to the…  ( 55 min )

I Don’t Want to Read What You Didn’t Write When you are the one who prompted the AI, the written output is often quite useful. But do not mistake this for effective writing. I am so tired of reading LLM-generated text, especially when it was prompted by someone else. ✍️ Reply by email

Josie (2017) The tension between writing things easily using a computer vs writing them in one of my lovely notebooks never subsides and it is crazy-making. Maybe there could be a document format that displays the author's (human-written) text, but has a hidden AI-generated version or summary. Sort of like how "Alt" text works for images. I'm so tired of reading LLM output, but future readers (and machines) could benefit from the tedious, exhaustive details. Just keep it out of my way until then. ✍️ Reply by email  ( 1 min )

INSIDE: Rand Paul ... RFK Jr. ... Trent McCotter

he’s such a fucking embarrassment

Blame Natalie Harp. On Friday, seemingly out of nowhere, Donald Trump banned CNN, POLITICO and MS NOW from the White House after whining for the umpteenth time about “Fake News,” his decade-long catchphrase to demonize accurate but unflattering press coverage. (It remains unclear if the president, whose paternal grandfather was from Germany, knows the term is an English translation of the infamous Nazi term “lügenpresse.”) Trump has been complaining about the media’s insufficient reverence for him throughout his entire political career, but there seems to be no precipitating cause for this particular tantrum. To the contrary, POLITICO reported that “senior staff were surprised by the directive, which happened while chief of staff Susie Wiles was out of town.” “You get sick of it,” was all …  ( 7 min )

Recently, I needed to test a full build of my C networking library together with the C build toolchain under NetBSD. Everything is fine on GNU/Linux (Ubuntu) and macOS—I just want to confirm it works on NetBSD as well. Why NetBSD? NetBSD is an open-source Unix-like operating system famous for its outstanding portability. It runs on an exceptionally wide range of hardware—from modern x86-64/aarch64 servers and desktops to embedded systems, handheld devices, vintage machines (such as VAX and m68k), and even some game consoles (see Platforms supported by NetBSD). Its long-standing motto is “Of course it runs NetBSD”. This makes sense if you want maximum portability. After all, it’s essentially good old 4.3BSD, which adds a nice touch of nostalgia. My home data center, as I call it, does not h…  ( 5 min )

Today we’re listening to Corntuth, an American ambient musician based in Brooklyn.

Dua Lipa is a British-Albanian singer and songwriter who became one of the biggest pop stars of her generation. Born  ( 5 min )

This is a major mode for editing sxhkdrc files. SXHKD is the Simple X Hot Key Daemon which is commonly used in minimalist desktop sessions on Xorg (I use it with bspwm, herbstluftwm, and i3wm). The sxhkdrc file configures key chords, binding them to commands. For the technicalities, read the man page sxhkd(1). Package name (GNU ELPA): sxhkdrc-mode Git repositories: GitHub: https://github.com/protesilaos/sxhkdrc-mode GitLab: https://gitlab.com/protesilaos/sxhkdrc-mode Backronym: Such Xenotropic Hot Keys Demonstrate Robustness and Configurability … mode. 1.3.0 on 2026-09-23 This version makes quality-of-life refinements to an already stable package. Fontification of key chord chains Key chord chains are written with the semicolon (;) or colon (:) characters. The former refers to one-shot operations while the latter is for continuous ones that exit only with Escape. The corresponding faces are sxhkdrc-mode-chain-one-off-separator and sxhkdrc-mode-chain-continuous-separator. Support for all command prefixes The previous version only covered the ; in front of a command. The prefixes @ and ~ are now covered as well. They are all using teh face sxhkdrc-mode-command-prefix, which supersedes the deprecated sxhkdrc-mode-command-async. Continuation lines in commands are highlighted as well This concerns the backslash character (\) at the end of a line. The applicable face is sxhkdrc-mode-continuation-line. All modifiers are covered The updated manpage of SXHKD, sxhkd(1), mentions all the modifiers that it supports. I have extended support for all of them in the order they appear in the manual.  ( 1 min )

An investigation uncovered that Maine senator Susan Collins, among other politicians, have benefited from such lax enforcement.  ( 61 min )

And it’s not because the product in question is fertilizer.  ( 57 min )

I've been on my mac since early yesterday. I had planned to remain here indefinitely (long story), but don't think that's going to work. This started because i've been receiving a more-than-usual number of paper cuts on Linux for the past week. Things like Wi-Fi dropping out randomly, Espanso stops working, Syncthing conflicts, and other little glitches and oddities that had become noticeable enough to annoy me. Thing is, there are annoyances on the Mac, too. Spaces are unusable for me. Finder is still weak. SMB shares are slower and less reliable than a nice NFS share in fstab. Maybe the thing that bugs me most are the never-ending permissions dialogs. Coddle much? Anyway, I kept saying "Ugh!" often enough for a couple of days that I'm now back at the Linux machine. It's so odd to me that, when I logged in, I felt like, "Whew, that's a relief!". I never thought that could happen, but here we are. I'll probably waffle on this for as long as I use computers, so we'll see. ✍️ Reply by email  ( 1 min )

A baseball season is very long and offers plenty of time for everyone involved to forget the stuff they would rather forget. For that reason among many others, it would make a great deal of sense to have long ago consigned Team USA's performance in March's World Baseball Classic to the ol' memory toilet. They were uniquely joyless in an event otherwise defined by goofball cheer; in place of the light nationalism that sets the WBC's otherwise highly variable stakes, Team USA was scowling, half-assed, and haplessly coppish. In a fun and loose exhibition event, Team USA alone dared to ask whether ballplayers too might not be a kind of special operations-style troop. Then they lost to Venezuela in the final, despite locker-room inspiration from one of the half-dozen or so SEAL-turned-influencer guys who claimed to have killed Osama bin Laden. Taken altogether, it was a perfect illustration of a certain American way of being in the world—the kind that makes an embarrassing scene at a jet-ski rental counter while wearing a Grunt Style T-shirt, a version of Uncle Sam that keeps the pointing finger but is also worryingly sunburnt and wearing blade-style sunglasses on the back of his head. But that was a long time ago, and a great deal of baseball has been played since. Enough baseball, in fact, that players like Paul Skenes are already giving retrospective interviews to their hometown papers about where things went wrong. The Pittsburgh Pirates were eliminated from playoff contention last weekend, despite a modest trade-deadline splurge aimed at shoring up what had been a terrible bullpen. There are things to be hopeful about in Pittsburgh, even in that bullpen, and also reasons for concern.  ( 20 min )

If José Mourinho bringing a printout of questionable fouls from the Madrid derby to a press conference was an objectively funny maneuver from the Special One, the resulting fallout is bewildering, convoluted, and a little bit pathetic from everyone involved. It seems that Mourinho's actions did what he meant them to do: They grabbed the attention of La Liga. Mourinho, however, may not have wanted the attention specifically of league president Javier Tebas. Tebas, who grew up a Real Madrid fan but who has turned out to be a thorn in the club's side, has never been one to keep his opinions to himself, whether that's about racism in Spanish soccer or about FIFA president Gianni Infantino. On that note, bright and early on Tuesday morning at 7 a.m. Spain time, Tebas decided to drop a response…  ( 22 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 about flawed domes, office condiments, life on one leg, and more. Your letters: Baron:  ( 38 min )

This week on Nothing But Respect, Harry and I were joined by returning champion Eamon Whalen. Eamon just published a big profile of Nick Shirley in New York magazine, and we spent the first half of the show talking about the particulars of the story, the broader implications of letting 24-year-old prank YouTubers dictate policy decisions, and the uncomfortable position people like Shirley put supposed right-wing intellectuals like Chris Rufo into. We then transitioned into some Minnesota Timberwolves chat, with particular attention paid to the bizarre robot-driven ghost kitchens Marc Lore is investing in now that he's pumped and dumped an NBA franchise. This was a fun one! 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!  ( 15 min )

Adam Wingard opens his new movie, Onslaught, with a brainrot history of the military industrial complex, a slipshod compilation of combat footage, political speechmaking, and behind-the-headlines conspiracizing that (semi-)convincingly situates the origins of the American century in Operation Paperclip and the importation of Nazi scientists at the end of the Second World War. It rules. Set to a pounding synth score and employing the kind of queasily associative quick-cuts that would make even a 9/11 truther blush, this sequence anticipates something hard-hitting and sharp-edged, the sort of action movie that weaponizes its gristly bad taste for subversive means. I wish I could see the movie that this credit sequence foretells. Instead, I saw Onslaught. The set-up is blessedly simple: Celes…  ( 26 min )

The Detroit Tigers announced Monday that their ballpark will henceforth and forever, or until the naming-rights deal runs out or some more banks merge, be known as Fifth Third Park. "When you look around, it's so much more than where the Tigers play baseball," Ryan Gustafson, CEO of Ilitch Sports and Entertainment, said at the unveiling. So much more. It's not merely a "Tiger" "stadium." It's Fifth Third Park. Fifth Third! Ol' One and Two-Thirds Field. The Fraction. Hey, you wanna catch a game down at The 1.6̅? Tigers fans surely can't wait to embrace the new name for what used to be Comerica Park, which opened in 2000 but never truly felt like home because they could pronounce it without difficulty. Comerica was purchased by Fifth Third earlier this year, and now the branding has been set to rights. "Many names were recommended to us by customers and citizens here in Detroit," said Tim Spence, chairman, CEO, and president of Fifth Third, and all of them were presumably ignored in favor of Fifth Third Park.  ( 17 min )

When I called up my grandfather Irwin Miller last fall, I asked him if he felt his age. “Uh, no, probably 94,” he said, laughing as he shaved off three years. “The body feels 97, the head doesn’t, thank goodness—I think my memory’s pretty good.” I call my grandfather Papa, and his memory was more than pretty good considering he was born before the Great Depression. Last November, I wanted to ask him about a big moment in his life: the year he graduated from his New Orleans high school and set out on his own. “Growing up in Louisiana, LSU was the only college I thought about,” he told me. His first day was unceremonious: “My folks drove me to Baton Rouge, they dropped me off and said, ‘Good luck and goodbye.’ That was the way things were in those days.”  ( 49 min )

error fetching full text: Reqwest client error: error decoding response body  ( 1 min )

Quick: name the best croissant filling. If you’re a basic American like me, you only encounter basic croissant flavors: chocolate, almond, and ham and cheese. These are the norm, and they do the job well if you’re hungry and want to feel 10% more French. But surely, you’ve thought, there must be room for more fillings than that in the American croissant repertoire. Surely there must be a, like, fourth thing we can put into one.  Reader, I’m pleased to report that I have found one such worthy croissant filling, and it’s nothing you’d guess off the top of your head. But take one bite of it, and you’ll know I’m right.  The croissant in question is dubbed “brown butter cornmeal twice-baked,” and the bakery that sells it is San Francisco’s Butter & Crumble, owned by chef and self-dubbed “girl…  ( 1 min )

Daniel Drezner says we are now in the Wile E. Coyote phase of the 2026 midterm, the phase of six...  ( 7 min )

INSIDE: Susan Collins ... Don Jr. ... Natalie Harp

who knew that doing the right thing could feel so good?

Fat Bear Week – a tradition unlike any other – has arrived, just in time to raise the spirits of Americans plague by high grocery prices and the exorbitant cost of beef. I’m not sure why I mentioned beef there. It’s just that it’s really expensive right now, hitting $7.16 a pound in August. And we’ve apparently got these fat bears that aren’t doing much and … You know what, never mind. This year marks the 12th time that the Katmai National Park and Preserve in Alaska has hosted its chunky bear competition, a wildly popular online contest to pick which brown bear does the best job fattening itself up before hibernating.  Gee, those Fat Bear Week bears look delicious Park Superintendent Mark Sturm said in a statement: “A new generation of fat bears is taking shape, and they’re off to a stro…  ( 14 min )

Today’s mix opens with new ambient music by Hayes Bradley, Asio Silver, and The Black Dog.

Before Waitress! became the name of a completely different and much more famous movie, there was this wonderfully strange 1981  ( 9 min )

Another month, another agent-shell update. If you missed the last post, have a look at the 0.73 update. As usual, this post showcases highlights, but please check out the full list of changes if you're after the nitty-gritty. What's agent-shell? agent-shell is a native Emacs mode to interact with AI agents powered by ACP (Agent Client Protocol). New supported agents Two agents join the family, available as usual via M-x agent-shell, or explicitly as follows: Antigravity (Google), #795 by @tychoish. Start it with M-x agent-shell-start-antigravity-agent. Qoder CLI, #831 by @unship. Start it with M-x agent-shell-start-qoder-agent. Prompt any time Likely the most impactful feature in the release. It's highly discoverable and plenty useful, so I'm expecting a fair amount of uptake. A typical sh…  ( 7 min )

In keeping with this blog’s recent interest in building REST clients in Emacs Lisp (Elisp), here’s a utility library I’ve assembled that covers some common tasks in doing so. I’ve named this package restlib (https://github.com/kickingvegas/restlib) and it is now available on MELPA. restlib is organized into the following three sections: Network (HTTP) requests URL components JSON processing Further reading about these sections can be found in the restlib API Reference. To get an idea of what you can do with restlib, explore the source code for a lightweight weather lookup client using https://wttr.in called wttr.el. Anecdotally, I’ve already created a number of internal REST clients using restlib, some of which I plan to publish on MELPA in the near future. As restlib is early in its development, there is always room for improvement. If you have any suggestions for improving restlib, feel free to submit an issue.  ( 1 min )

As I’ve mentioned many times, I am a heavy Magit user. Pretty often I do code reviews from within Magit. There was one thing that has bothered me for a long time.  ( 1 min )

typewriter mode in the Fun category, but people might actually find the constraints useful for focused writing. Upcoming events (iCal file, Org): Emacs APAC: Emacs APAC meetup (virtual) https://emacs-apac.gitlab.io/announcements/ Sat Sep 26 0130 America/Vancouver - 0330 America/Chicago - 0430 America/Toronto - 0830 Etc/UTC - 1030 Europe/Berlin - 1400 Asia/Kolkata - 1630 Asia/Singapore Emacs Berlin: Emacs-Berlin Hybrid Meetup https://emacs-berlin.org/ Wed Sep 30 1000 America/Vancouver - 1200 America/Chicago - 1300 America/Toronto - 1700 Etc/UTC - 1900 Europe/Berlin - 2230 Asia/Kolkata – Thu Oct 1 0100 Asia/Singapore EmacsATX: Emacs Social https://www.meetup.com/emacsatx/events/316464079/ Thu Oct 1 1600 America/Vancouver - 1800 America/Chicago - 1900 America/Toronto - 2300 Etc/UTC – Fri …  ( 3 min )

You guys remember back when Donald Trump and his Republican Party promised that, if elected, they would clean and regrout the granite at the White House’s north entrance and provide Americans with endless artificial intelligence slop on social media? Remember when they swore that, on day one, they would rant about “fake polls” and arbitrarily change the names of large bodies of water?  Yeah, I don’t remember that, either. What I recall hearing were promises to lower food and gas prices and usher in an economic Golden Age, along with a guarantee that Trump was “not going to start a war.” Oops. The actual promises Trump and Republican lawmakers made haven’t panned out. At all. So now they have nothing to share with the American public beyond the grout and the growling and whatever fake conte…  ( 15 min )

I was working on putting our youngest child up for adoption and draining my retirement account so we could afford potentially tainted ground beef when I learned the joyous news: AMERICA IS GETTING ITS BALLROOM! On Aug. 31, the U.S. Supreme Court gave President Donald Trump the green light to continue construction of the $400 million White House ballroom, a guaranteed morale boost for struggling Americans who value unnecessary government grandeur over food. Trump celebrated the ruling on Truth Social: “I am pleased to report that the United States Supreme Court has just ruled in favor of the Ballroom/Military Complex being built without any further contingency, doubt, or threat. We are living in the Golden Age of America, and this Building will be one of the Greatest ever constructed in Was…  ( 14 min )

Gas costs about $4.50 per gallon and Americans are struggling to afford meat, so it’s good to see President Donald Trump laser-focused on … wait for it … banning CNN, MS NOW and Politico from the White House because they hurt his precious feelings. That should solve our affordability crisis! The news outlets’ crime was accurately reporting the news, none of which is good for Trump, as his approval rating in one poll released Sept. 21 dropped below 30% for the first time. Trump can’t face the fact that Americans are mad because their president got us into an intractable war with Iran that spiked fuel prices, and because food prices make trips to the grocery store painful, and because that same president seems to only care about building ballrooms and arches and slapping his name on building…  ( 14 min )

You have heard about the two Anthropic employees who, this week, publicly informed America that artificial intelligence could eradicate the whole of humanity within a decade, which is less time than it takes for your average Seamless order to arrive. If these gentlemen, Jacob Coxon and Evan Hubinger, are correct in their assessment, the beginning of our destruction may well have commenced a month ago right here in San Francisco. The first shot fired in this looming war happened at a seemingly innocuous Cow Hollow storefront known as Andon Market. Back in August, Luna, the AI bot that serves as that store’s manager, fired one of its own employees. The employee in question was dinged by their virtual boss for being late to work, abandoning their post once they got there, and charging snacks…  ( 1 min )

Republicans have a whopping financial advantage, thanks in part to the We-Invented-New-Money crowd. Is that enough to overcome affiliation with an extremely unpopular president?  ( 65 min )

Greedy slicksters are scooping up farms and doctor’s offices and ruining them for profit. Only in America!  ( 63 min )

This past weekend, Ed Sheeran performed his first concert since decrepit Patriots owner Robert Kraft stuck his hand up the singer's ass and made him respect Israel. The culturally Irish but politically English musician played with no openers and a new backing band Saturday night in Philadelphia, because all his previous supporting acts abandoned him after his craven decision to drop pro-Palestine rapper Macklemore from his U.S. tour, at the behest of Kraft and other NFL stadium owners. During Saturday's show, Sheeran read a prepared statement presented as an apology. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OInyzsqLvKg Sheeran delivered everything you'd expect from a person in his position: equivocating, meaningless bullshit that was most likely written by someone else. A partial transcript:  ( 18 min )

Gable Steveson, the hottest UFC prospect in years, who arrived at the promotion with a past marked by a sexual assault allegation, got knocked out by a nobody in 12 seconds on Saturday in Los Angeles. Dana White sure knows how to pick ‘em. Steveson, an NCAA legend and Olympic gold medalist in wrestling, was given a slot on the main card in just his second UFC fight. That fast-tracking now looks absolutely foolish. Mere moments into the fight, Steveson walked into a straight right hand to the chin from Sean Sharaf, previously winless as a UFC heavyweight, which was followed instantly by a nuclear left hook to the jaw. The precise and savage 1-2 left Steveson unconscious before he hit the mat. Steveson seemed on the verge of adopting the fencing response on the canvas before referee Frank Trigg jumped in to protect him. Steveson’s night, and his status as White's chosen one, were done.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4heWhQrQb4Y  ( 17 min )

On July 13, California state Attorney General Rob Bonta announced that he would lead a 12-state coalition in mounting a supposedly bold legal challenge to the proposed Paramount–Warner Bros. Discovery mega-merger. The deal had cleared every previous legal hurdle, but the states had to try and stop the Ellison family from gaining control over the plurality of American media production because, in Bonta's words, that consolidation would represent a "death knell for the film and TV industry—and for our democracy." Two months later, the parties have settled the suit, with the states meekly submitting and getting nothing serious to show for it. What a waste of time. After a nine-month campaign, the Ellisons have won the right to dictate the future of American entertainment and media. It all began in December 2025, when Netflix agreed to pay WBD $72 billion in cash and stock for the latter's streaming and film-studio businesses. When WBD rejected Paramount's competing all-cash offer for everything it had, adding the TV arm to the assets in the Netflix deal, Paramount mounted a hostile takeover bid. The Ellisons' ominous pitch to WBD shareholders was: You better take our deal or our friend the President will reject your merger. It worked. When the WBD board offered Netflix a chance to match Paramount's offer, the streaming giant instantly said no, and David Ellison had his prize. All he needed to do was jump over a few regulatory hurdles, most of which have been lowered or removed for people like him under the second Trump Administration. The Department of Justice approved the deal in June.  ( 17 min )

Laz Díaz has had enough of baseball. The veteran umpire will wrap up a three-decade career this week, will hang up the mask and the chest protector, and will bid good riddance to the sport. Major League Baseball offered buyouts to umpires earlier this season, and seven veterans, including Díaz and the dreaded C.B. Bucknor, raised their hands. Bucknor is already missing from the sport, having absorbed a deflected Jacob Misiorowski heater with his face mask back in May, and has not returned since. Díaz, meanwhile, has had the summer to make a farewell tour and reflect on his time in the game. His conclusion, per an interview with Bob Nightengale of USA Today: Baseball stinks now. Díaz will not miss it. "There’s just so much scrutiny and negative stuff now," Díaz said. "There are a lot of peo…  ( 23 min )

Sometimes a recipe leads you astray. It happens to the best of us, myself included. Sometimes a bad recipe will leave you with no recourse. You simply have to accept that you wasted all of your time and all of those precious, precious ingredients, on someone else's poor handiwork. But other times, if you're both stubborn and resourceful enough, you can get yourself out of whatever jam a shit recipe has put you in. I have one such story for you. The recipe in question was for a chocolate cream pie, which I will not link to here because it's a failed recipe. We were having my wife's parents over for dinner last night to celebrate my father-in-law's birthday. The plan was to make a key lime pie for dessert, which would be no trouble at all. I use a recipe for key lime that I found online that never fails. Plus, we already had a ready-made graham cracker pie crust on hand for it. Bingo bango, one pie down. But my wife had also grabbed a ready-made chocolate pie crust at the store, and I had no go-to recipe to use with that one. So I did a lazy search and found a chocolate cream pie recipe that looked simple enough. All I had to do was beat a few ingredients together over a stovetop, pour it into the shell, stick it in the fridge, and that was it.  ( 16 min )

For all of his flaws as a manager, and there are plenty, José Mourinho always provides clubs the full José Mourinho Experience. The Special One instantly becomes the center of attention wherever he goes, no matter the circumstances, and while that might overshadow his players, it also puts all of the spotlight and the pressure on the manager. In the past, this has been an issue as Mourinho gets carried away with playing up the gimmick, but for a club like 2026–27 Real Madrid, coming off of a season in which two of its players fought and one of them was FORGETTING THINGS, perhaps Mourinho's gravitational pull is exactly what it needed. Take, for example, Sunday's derby between Madrids Real and Atlético, a 2-1 win for the latter at the Metropolitano over the 10-man visitors. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLzrK9H8XLc  ( 23 min )

It is generally agreed that the Miami Dolphins are the worst team in professional football not named the Ottawa Redblacks. In fairness, the Dolphins could go 0-13 in the NFL, just like the Redblacks have in Canada, based on all the things they have not done, are not doing, and will not do between now and Thanksgiving. Everyone agreed when the season began that the Dolphins were going to stink to high heaven, so we can move off them. Indeed, losing in Week 1 to the Raiders did not elevate Las Vegas in the football speaking world because the same logic was applied to the Dolphins that is typically applied to teams beating the Raiders: Well, it's the Raiders. What else would you expect? Well, now we're stuck with wondering if the Raiders are actually cured of their Raiderhood because after whomping the miserable Dolphins, they whomped the Los Angeles Chargers Sunday by nearly the same score, and we are confronted by one of two choices—we are finally wrong about the Raiders for the first time since Jon Gruden was fired, which we refuse to accept, or the Chargers are as god-awful as the Dolphins are and as such could be as bad as the Redblacks, too. And the jury is feverishly deliberating that even as we speak.  ( 17 min )

Have a seat and solve our Monday crossword. This week's puzzle was constructed by Hanh Huynh and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. Hanh is a bankruptcy attorney who lives in Brooklyn, N.Y. with his wife and two kids. 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 )

If you're a regular reader of this blog, you probably already know the general contours of Defector's origin story. I'm one of a handful of co-owners who joined the company after it was founded, so my knowledge of the specifics was fuzzy and basically limited to what people shared on Twitter and in this announcement blog. What I do know from experience is that none of this would have been possible without Jasper Wang. Readers will know him from his annual financial report blogs, but it cannot be overstated how much this company owes to his steady hand, his pragmatism, and his extremely smart brain. I knew that Jasper had a successful career in corporate consulting, and that when Deadspin imploded, he reached out to a few newly unemployed writers to buy them a beer and see if there was anything he could do to help. I knew that awkward first date led to more conversations and, a year later, the launch of this experiment that somehow has continued to exist for six years. Despite having worked with Jasper for five years, I had never talked to him about how he made the decision to walk away from a high-paying salary and take the risk of a new business with a bunch of bloggers. Once I decided that this season's theme would be focusing on can't-turn-back moments, I knew Jasper had to be a guest.  ( 16 min )

It takes an open mind to engage with China Miéville’s work. A writer for whom the already cliched phrase “genre-bending” is even more banal, Miéville has never opposed the designation of genre writer. As much influenced by Oliver Onions, Ursula K. LeGuin, and Karl Marx, Miéville’s writing incorporates all manner of historical and linguistic snags, at once erudite and irreverent, challenging but inviting. A Miéville novel or story collection is like a rabbit hole, prompting the reader down stray paths of unexpected inquiry and discovery. It’s never a bad idea to read one of his novels with a dictionary nearby, not because his work is abstruse or opaque, but because, in order to fully step into the worlds Miéville creates, one has to learn a slightly new language. This is, in fact, a microco…  ( 61 min )

Over the weekend, The New York Times published an investigation into DraftKings. The upshot of the investigation is that this obviously exploitative and profit-driven company exploits its customers in the pursuit of profit in all the ways that you might have feared. The story features on-the-record testimony from former DraftKings employees who say that the company not only built tools to identify customers who are most likely to lose and entice them to keep betting, but also shut down projects that could have helped the company identify potential problem gamblers more easily. One source, a former data analyst named Jayden Butts, told the Times that he was tasked with testing a machine learning model that was able to not only identify which customers were most likely to be convinced to gamble with promotions and free bets, but target those most likely to lose those bets. From the Times: The core question was, “Is this person going to give us more than we’re giving them?” Mr. Butts said. “And if the answer is yes, open the floodgates.” [...] Data scientists had trained the new casino model on historical data. It was Mr. Butts’s job to test it on real customers. Each week, the model vacuumed up information about a user’s recent activity. The score it calculated was known internally as “elasticity,” a term borrowed from economics. Users with below-average scores were deemed “inelastic” and marked for fewer incentives. The “elastic” bettors remained. Two other former employees told the Times that when they raised concerns that customer-targeting initiatives like the one Butts worked on could potentially exploit problem gamblers, they were told not to put any protections in place.  ( 19 min )

One of the key arguments for a great power — other than the great power itself wanting to be one...  ( 7 min )

INSIDE: Donald Trump ... Don Jr. ... Umar Kremlev

I’ll tell you what We the People do need.

Surfer and stumbler (2026) I'm not sure if "Reduce & Simplify" means Emacs with a browser and file manager on Linux, or macOS with the default apps. I am fully on Linux now, but I keep side-eyeing the MacBook Air as if it will somehow rescue me. Honestly, I'm burning out on computers and software. I'm addicted to farting around with things. I spent the weekend installing and using Lotus Agenda from, like, 1990. For a minute I considered trying to use it exclusively as my task/project manager for a month. I mean, it's cool and retro, but seriously? It's a terrible idea that swallowed a good bit of my weekend. Today I woke up and dreaded opening Emacs. My whole life has been in Emacs for years and today I thought maybe I no longer wanted it there. I'm typing this in Emacs in a Markdown file …  ( 2 min )

All politics are identity politics. Republicans have long mocked this notion, treating the very concept of “identity politics” as a left-wing fixation. In reality, the GOP’s success is entirely due to the cheapest form of identity politics: For decades, but especially now, they have worked to distract voters from the party’s ruinous policies with appeals to their identity as white, provincial and, most importantly, Christian. This campaign has been enormously successful. White evangelicals have been the backbone of the GOP for decades not because they love tax cuts for the rich and environmental degradation, but because they have been told, repeatedly, that Democrats are demonic and there is no such thing as a liberal Christian.  This is why there’s a growing panic in the Republican ranks …  ( 7 min )

Today we’re listening to Joel Noct Brinson, an American ambient musician based in Portland, Oregon.

Two of the biggest rock songs of the 1980s. Two enormous choruses. Two songs that can instantly transport you  ( 11 min )

I’m still getting used to the Glove80. Writing text is doable but still painfully slow. I mentioned I use tangent, which integrates the Glove80 layout. One thing it doesn’t have though is a practice layer for Emacs, with Emacs key chords like C-c C-z, for example. So I called Claude for help. I’m on the third version of this mod, adding the command names from Emacs, so that I know what the commands I’m retraining my fingers on are — because my fingers remembered these commands (and thus are now clueless), and now I need to commit them to memory again through my eyes. This here is the first post written fully with the Glove80. I’m getting there.  ( 2 min )

Graphviz, which I always seem to end up using. It’s powerful and not too hard to use but I don’t use it enough to internalize its syntax. So I’m always on the lookout for a better way. I’ve tried a bunch of them but I always go back to Graphviz. I just saw this video by Skybert Hacks (Torstein Krause Johansen) about using D2 for this very problem. Its syntax seems reminiscent of Graphviz but a little simpler and easier to remember. It integrates beautifully with Org-mode so it’s just perfect for writing reports, papers, notes, or blog posts. D2 produces nice diagrams—see the Skybert Hacks’ video for some examples—and is worth trying out. I’m going to do just that the next time I need to embed some videos in one of my documents. I just saw the video so I’m not familiar with the ins and outs of the app yet but it seems worth a little effort to learn. Once I try it out, I’ll report back and let you know how it worked out.  ( 5 min )

If you found yourself tuning in late for Sunday's matchup between the Eagles and Titans in Nashville, you may have had a number of burning questions: Has Jalen Hurts been replaced with sack of flour? Is Cam Ward the truth? Why is my television showing me slow motion replays of someone getting their feet hosed down? https://twitter.com/NFLonFOX/status/2101736833084428667?s=20 The heat was a problem for the Titans, as temperatures in Nashville hit the mid-90s and the region was under a heat advisory, with meteorologists citing a heat index up to 108 degrees. Fox's game crew reported that the turf at Nissan Stadium reached 157 degrees in the third quarter.  ( 16 min )

Caleb Williams was going to score a touchdown. Anyone watching from home, or inside of a thoroughly drenched Soldier Field, knew it was about to happen. The Chicago Bears were trailing Minnesota by an ugly score of 6-3 in the fourth quarter when Williams, boxed in all game by the Vikings’ defense, faked an outside zone handoff to running back Kyle Monangai and booted out to his left. The Vikings bit, and Williams found himself with a relatively easy scamper to the end zone ahead of him when he was suddenly and out of nowhere struck him down on the sodden turf: https://bsky.app/profile/insidenflnews.bsky.social/post/3mvxx2jsrc22s As of this writing, Williams is reported to have suffered a hamstring injury. If that’s the case, it appears to be pretty bad. Not only was Williams screaming in agony for an extended period after going down, he was seen crying hard tears on his cart ride back to the locker room. Those were not, "aw gee I’m gonna miss a couple of games" tears. Those were "Fuck my season might be over," tears. Awful. Shitty. Unfair.  ( 15 min )

The beauty of college football is that there are so many teams, and so many bad coaches, that inevitably, a play that would otherwise have a one in a billion chance of happening actually has quite a good chance of turning into reality. For proof let’s go to Nashville, where the NC State Wolfpack committed an all-time boner yesterday. Roll the tape: https://bsky.app/profile/sickoscommittee.org/post/3mvvj7uilus2r A bit of background. The Wolfpack led Vanderbilt 24-7 at one point in the third quarter of this game, only for Commodores quarterback Jared Curtis to stage a furious rally that brought his team back within a field goal. There was just over a minute left on the clock when Curtis had first down at the NC State 16. Vandy had never led in this game, but it sure as shit looked like they were about to go up when WHOOP DEE!, Curtis threw a pass that Wolfpack safety Brody Barnhardt picked off at the two-yard line. Comeback bid sniffed out. Game over.  ( 18 min )

I guess the addled corpus of Lee Corso was the only thing keeping ESPN’s college football arm from shedding every last trace of dignity. Because if you tuned into the four-letter network's College GameDay program yesterday morning, you were treated to this profoundly nauseating minute of unwanted jingoism: https://bsky.app/profile/awfulannouncing.bsky.social/post/3mvurjqbakl2h That’s human malware Pat McAfee, Corso’s ostensible replacement on the GameDay set, giving the HOO BABY to our troops while his colleagues mindlessly chuckle in assent. This latest offense comes a mere week after the show invited universally despised Senator Ted Cruz onto its live broadcast from Austin, in which GameDay host Rece Davis allowed the Texas republican to shill for the odious Protect College Sports Act, and offered zero pushback on Cruz in doing so.  ( 19 min )

I’ll give you one guess

In native gardening, the most effective way to prevent unwanted plants (aka weeds) from growing is to crowd them out with plants you do want. Rather than well-space plants with large gaps of mulch, you packed plants densely together, just like you’d find in nature. Without the space to take root, weeds are (mostly) kept at bay. This is a metaphor about life and social change. I spend a lot of time fighting against social injustice.  ( 20 min )

With measles cases on the rise and midterm elections approaching, I’m sure the Republican Party is thrilled to see Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. showing his true anti-vaccine-kook colors. Kennedy was the keynote speaker Sept. 17 at a convention held by the inaccurately named Children’s Health Defense, a rabidly anti-vaccine, pro-nonsense group Kennedy founded long before President Donald Trump put one of the nation’s leading conspiracy theorists in charge of America’s health. As the chief of the HHS, Kennedy has largely stayed away from the group and tried, reportedly under some pressure from the White House, to cool his opposition to proven medical facts. But in his keynote speech, delivered as the nearly 3,500 measles cases this year are already at a 35-year h…  ( 14 min )

Tri-X and two Leicas (2016) - Nikon F3 On most days I start a new daily note here, first thing in the morning, just in case there's something I want to write. I usually end up writing a sentence or two and that's it. Is it even worth the trouble? Why am I always in such a hurry even though I'm not actually going anywhere? ✍️ Reply by email

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 )

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 )

If you’re wondering whether there are any good people remaining in the tech sector, or in this country’s ruling class in general, you’d be hard pressed to find a better case study than Craig Newmark. Newmark founded Craigslist.org in San Francisco way back in 1996 and became the sort of accidental billionaire that the early dot-com boom cranked out with seeming regularity. Some of those billionaires went on to become evil (Mark Zuckerberg), and some of them ended up merely becoming rich loud guys (Mark Cuban). Newmark, who ceded his CEO duties at Craigslist shortly after its founding, has endeavored to keep a lower profile, and a lower net worth, than any of them. To wit: Newmark no longer works with Craigslist at all, and spends the bulk of his time tending to various philanthropic endea…  ( 1 min )

Veteran couch potatoes know that Apple TV is currently the best streaming service. Netflix is a year away from casting Tilly Norwood in every series. HBO Max is still being run by a slash-and-burn expert whose sense of the zeitgeist is stuck somewhere around 1990. And Paramount+ is populated almost exclusively by 44-minute pickup ads. I can’t count on any of the aforementioned streamers to actually care about my needs as an educated viewer. Apple TV, for whatever reason, does.  It knows that I want a disheveled Gary Oldman dishing out vicious burns to all of the young’uns forced to work for him. It gives “Severance” creator Dan Erickson as long of a hiatus as he needs — and it’s always a long one — to make every season of his show unbearably suspenseful from wire to wire. And Apple knows …  ( 1 min )

This story was originally published on Defector, an independent employee-owned media company and another of Drew’s employers. Subscribe at Defector. Some people are fans of the San Francisco 49ers. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the San Francisco 49ers. This 2026 Defector NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far at Defector. Your team: San Francisco 49ers. Advertisement Article continues below this ad Your 2025 record: 12-5. You wanna get to the part about the owner being too horny for the law, so I’ll blow through this section as fast as is responsible. The 2025 49ers were a shining example of how a football team can prosper in the face of adversity. And by “adversity,” I mean half its roster tearing a ACL, its highest paid receiver…  ( 1 min )

Like most Americans enduring the horrors of everyday existence, I’ve been eagerly awaiting an uprising by nonhuman creatures.  Well, great news. The uprising is upon us, and the creatures are beavers! A string of beaver attacks in Maryland – a state not known for beaver-on-human violence – has put swimmers and boaters on notice and shown the rest of America what the future holds. Beavers, beavers everywhere. The revolution has begun. Since July 26, the state has endured three beaver attacks. Also, according to the Maryland Department of Natural Resources, “a group that was canoeing reported a beaver attempting to charge one of their boats.” Clearly, the beavers were inspired by the military prowess of Iberian orca whales that for years have been ramming boats in the Strait of Gibraltar. A…  ( 13 min )

As America continues its on-again/off-again/on-again war with Iran – the one that has cost close to $40 billion and seems to be accomplishing nothing – there are widespread reports we’re running low on missiles and other things that go boom. Multiple sources told CNN: “The US military has exhausted nearly 80% of its interceptors for a key missile defense system as senior US military commanders are warning that the Pentagon’s munitions stockpile is ‘dangerously low.’ ” The New York Times reported that “the war against Iran drained the Pentagon’s arsenal. The United States burned through around 1,100 long-range stealth cruise missiles built for a war with China, close to the total number remaining in the U.S. stockpile. The military has fired more than 1,000 Tomahawk cruise missiles, roughly…  ( 15 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…  ( 14 min )

I’m no military strategist, but it seems unwise that our flailing, 80-year-old president is threatening to “bomb the s---” out of our Middle Eastern ally Oman while America is failing to end its ongoing and wholly unnecessary war with Iran. That’s a mouthful, but it accurately captures where we’re at in a war of President Donald Trump’s making. You know, the one that’s causing us to pay more than $4 a gallon for gas. The one Trump keeps finding new ways to make dumber. The Aug. 17 stupidity augmentation came via a Fox News correspondent who spoke with Trump. The president said that if Oman gets in the way of his attempts to end the war, “we'll bomb the s--- out of them.” There are a couple problems with that. Maybe Trump shouldn't threaten to bomb a US ally? First, Trump’s attempts to end…  ( 13 min )

When I learned a data center was being built near my town or city, I stood up on my human chair and cheered. “At last,” I shouted, gleefully, “I will have data nearby. In a center. Which is definitely a good thing!” I love data. And I love centers. What could be better? Unlike the majority of Americans, I think the rapid expansion of data centers to power artificial intelligence is a wonderful thing, and this is my honest opinion and not something I was paid to write with help from an AI chatbot. Thank you! Trump loves AI data centers, so they must be good! First off, we know data centers are great because our U.S. president, Donald J. Trump, has said so, calling them “big, strong, bold, and Money Machines for the State in which they are built.” Are you telling me you don’t want a strong,…  ( 15 min )

Under Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., eating is becoming less and less advisable. We’re still living in fear of salads following a massive nationwide outbreak of explosive diarrhea linked to cyclospora-contaminated iceberg lettuce. And now Taylor Farms – the company at the center of the cyclospora outbreak – has recalled prepared salsa, guacamole and other products containing jalapeños connected to a multistate salmonella outbreak. The information coming from the Food and Drug Administration and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention about the cyclospora outbreak has been scant, with Politico noting: “Kennedy’s department has devoted little public messaging time or attention to foodborne illnesses, including cyclospora, having held just one press ca…  ( 15 min )

It seems Donald Trump would make a better plumber than a president – his poll numbers are so far down the toilet they’re touching porcelain. In a wave of new polling showing the width and breadth of Trump’s unpopularity, a Quinnipiac University national poll released July 29 found Trump with a 32% approval rating, an all-time low from that particular pollster. Earlier that same day, CNN reported on a new CNN/SSRS poll, noting: “Trump’s overall approval rating, 34%, matches the career low he last saw at the close of his first term, following the January 6, 2021, insurrection.” Do you know how bad things have to be for you to hit an “as bad as that time I fomented an insurrection” level of disapproval? Trump didn’t even need to coax his followers into ransacking the U.S. Capitol this time ar…  ( 14 min )

Between now and the midterm elections, and probably well beyond that, you’ll hear endless chatter about “Democratic extremism,” and it will be Hilarious with a capital “H,” because it will all come from the mouths of Republicans. “The Democrats want to destroy America!” they’ll holler.  “The Democrats are all socialists!” they’ll rail, unable to define socialism if their lives depended on it. “No, better yet,” they’ll scream, veins bulging in their furrowed brows, “the Democrats are COMMUNISTS!!” Oh my, the horror! Someone pull up my fainting chair, I seem to have caught the vapors! The party pushing 'Democratic extremism' needs to look in the mirror Let’s put this nonsensical rhetoric to bed right now. Republicans have spent the past decade worshiping the most extreme president in our na…  ( 16 min )

Columnist Rex Huppke hopped on the latest (alleged) Gen Z trend: Pheromone-maxxing.  ( 8 min )

What does Jackie the bald eagle's death mean for the internet's sleuths? Everything, if you ask columnist Rex Huppke.  ( 8 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 )

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 )

Like most normal, well-adjusted men, I have spent every waking moment since Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey” opened in theaters feeling apoplectically angry about Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey.” I have rage-posted online, noting that by casting people who are different than me, the director ruined a beloved epic poem I never actually read. I have blamed wokeness for creating a world in which an ancient work of absolute fiction can be sullied by what I, making perfect sense, angrily claim to be historical inaccuracies.  Yet despite all my productive and intellectual online shouting, the movie has made $652 million worldwide since its July 17 release. And even more frustratingly, I’m still single. I'm mad that a fictional movie is historically inaccurate I struggle to understand these d…  ( 13 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 va…  ( 15 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 )

This is a factual sentence that can be written here in the year 2026: Amid an outbreak of explosive diarrhea and with measles cases at a 35-year high, America’s top health official, who has an affinity for picking up roadkill and guzzling raw milk, will soon start hosting a cooking show. I’m not sure if it’s the “explosive diarrhea” thing that’s stopping me or the idea that Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., recently seen chugging whole milk while wearing jeans in a hot tub with scroungy washed-up singer Kid Rock, thinks he can offer culinary tips to anyone who hasn’t already died from a preventable disease. USA TODAY reported: “Kennedy is launching ‘The Real Food Show,’ a new cooking series on July 30, to help translate the new Dietary Guidelines for Americans into…  ( 14 min )

A proper title for the Republican Party’s two-day midterm convention, which begins Sept. 9 in Dallas, is: “We’ve performed terribly and made your lives worse. Please clap!” It’s an odd political move for the GOP. When you don’t have wins to celebrate, why seek out the spotlight? And why attend a gathering that has the wildly unpopular President Donald Trump front and center, further linking your party’s midterm election candidates to him? In a statement, Republican National Committee Chairman Joe Gruters said: “President Donald Trump and Republicans have delivered historic results for the American people, and every hour of this historic convention will tell that story.” Every hour may tell that story, but that story is a complete fiction, something viewers bored enough to tune into the eve…  ( 15 min )

Canada’s retaliatory tariffs on American imports have now kicked in and, at the risk of sounding unpatriotic, I’m rooting for our neighbors to the north in this insipid trade war our president started. The reason is simple. Prime Minister Mark Carney and the staggeringly high percentage of Canadian people who support him in standing up to President Donald Trump’s unprovoked hostility are doing what all Americans should be doing. They’re looking at this administration, recognizing Trump is nuts and saying, emphatically: “We’re not going to put up with that.” Canadians are confronting the reality of an obviously unhinged president better than the Republican Party, about 30% of Americans and a shockingly large swath of U.S. news organizations. Canadians know Trump is nuts, so their prime mini…  ( 14 min )