A humiliating surrender, a wind ban in ruins, and a GOP power grab collapses in Georgia

I got got by Connections this week. This is a rare occurrence, because I have a big strong brain that can make distinctions that other brains often cannot. So when I lose Connections, I feel great shame. I have disgraced not only my own legacy, but that of my family's as well. I did not live up to my standard playing Connections, and that will haunt me for a good long time, maybe even into lunch today. So what the fuck are you, The New York Times games app, to tell me this shit? PICTURED: A lie.  ( 20 min )

The most haunting entry in Search Work: A Collective Inquiry into the Job Hunt, a recently published anthology edited by Rachel Meade Smith, is also the most vulnerable: a collection of emails between games journalist and author David Wolinsky and anyone who can possibly help him find work. The tone and tenor of the missives will feel instantly familiar to readers who have ever found themselves in a similar position. In the messages, Wolinsky is eager, kind, honest about his situation and what he's willing to do and, most importantly, open to opportunity, however it may present itself. Reading through the entries, which are sprinkled throughout the collection's essays, graphics, and other ephemera, it's clear that the process of how we find work is broken. Wolinsky sends many followups that never waver in their tone—unflinchingly polite and casual with just enough urgency to show that he cares—toeing the line between follow-through and desperation. What Wolinsky, and the other contributors to the book, are really looking for is humanity and connection, two components that are, in 2026, absolutely necessary to a successful job search and seemingly in short supply. Looking for work has always been tough, but in 2026 it feels abysmal. It is a daily humiliation ritual. Toggling back and forth between job boards, cover letters, and four different versions of your own résumé, tailored specifically to listings that may not even be real, tests your own fortitude and tolerance for pain. The slog of seeking employment—looking at your email, closing your email, refreshing it, repeat—is its own kind of labor that is only rewarded when you achieve what feels impossible, which is getting a fucking job.  ( 26 min )

Hopefully you, like us, have the day off today. And hopefully you, like us, have plans to watch lots of World Cup soccer this weekend. While you do that, feel free to chat away in this open thread.  ( 10 min )

John Early has one of the most expressive faces of any actor working today. You've almost certainly seen it. The 38-year-old comedian, born and raised in Nashville, has had many small breaks into the zeitgeist over the past decade or so. His voice might also be familiar to you: He's worked on a gamut of animated shows including Bob's Burgers, Tuca & Bertie, The Great North, and Summer Camp Island (a personal favorite). He appeared most recently and prominently in the A24 comedy Eternity, but also in Tim Robinson's I Think You Should Leave, Julio Torres' Los Espookys, and the wildly underrated HBO series Search Party. It's this latter show where I first saw Early, not by actually watching an episode, but from clips circulating on Twitter.  Indeed, this is how I came to be familiar with seve…  ( 29 min )

The US Men's soccer team plays Australia at 3pm ET today - be sure to watch and cheer them on!

Welcome to the BIGGEST stories in tech and beyond * { -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; -moz-osx-font-smoothing: grayscale; } body { margin: 0 !important; padding: 0 !important; -webkit-text-size-adjust: 100% !important; -ms-text-size-adjust: 100% !important; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased !important; } p { /* padding: 0 !important; */ margin: 0 !important; } table { border-collapse: collapse; mso-table-lspace: 0px; mso-table-rspace: 0px; padding: 0; } table td { border-collapse: collapse; } td, a, span { border-collapse: collapse; mso-line-height-rule: exactly; } h1 { margin: 0; padding: 0; } h1 { font-size: 100%; font-weight: normal; } .ReadMsgBody { width: 100%; } .ExternalClass p, .ExternalClass span, .ExternalClass font, .ExternalClass td { line-height: 100% } .appleLinks a {…  ( 3 min )

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

96 ICYMI: How Trump Made America’s 250th All About Himself img{-ms-interpolation-mode:bicubic;} table, td{mso-table-lspace:0pt;mso-table-rspace:0pt;} .mceStandardButton, .mceStandardButton td, .mceStandardButton td a{mso-hide:all!important;} p, a, li, td, blockquote{mso-line-height-rule:exactly;} p, a, li, td, body, table, blockquote{-ms-text-size-adjust:100%;-webkit-text-size-adjust:100%;} .mcnPreviewText{display:none!important;} .bodyCell{margin:0 auto;padding:0;width:100%;} .ExternalClass, .ExternalClass p, .ExternalClass td, .ExternalClass div, .ExternalClass span, .ExternalClass font{line-height:100%;} .ReadMsgBody, .ExternalClass{width:100%;} a[x-apple-data-detectors]{color:inherit!important;text-decoration:none!important;font-size:inherit!important;font-family:inherit!import…  ( 6 min )

The end might not be nigh so much as it's already here.

The Blue Jays try to reach .500 as they send Kevin Gausman against Ben Brown in Chicago in a Friday afternoon game. Gausman limited both hits and walks this season with a 1.03 WHIP. Ten of the 74 hits against him did leave the yard. Brown brings a 1.74 ERA into the game, but his […]  ( 26 min )

The Log5 Method yields these top projected hit averages versus starting pitchers: 0.354, 0.747 — Jake Mangum batting at Kyle Freeland. 0.349, 0.733 — Nick Gonzales batting at Kyle Freeland. 0.339, 0.719 — Ryan O’Hearn batting at Kyle Freeland. 0.314, 0.691 — Spencer Horwitz batting at Kyle Freeland. 0.312, 0.687 — Bryan Reynolds batting at […]  ( 26 min )

The Baseball Musings Batter Rankings welcome Pete Crow-Armstrong of the Cubs to the top five for the first time. Armstrong did not play on Thursday, but moved into fifth place as Willson Contreras of the Red Sox went 0 for 4 in the 4-3 Blue Jays win. Armstrong appears to be the kind of player […]  ( 26 min )

Happy Juneteenth!  ( 25 min )

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

No Rain On The Knicks Parade96 :root { color-scheme: light; supported-color-schemes: light; } body { margin: 0; padding: 0; min-width: 100%!important; -ms-text-size-adjust: 100% !important; -webkit-transform: scale(1) !important; -webkit-text-size-adjust: 100% !important; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased !important; } .body { word-wrap: normal; word-spacing:normal; } table.mso { width: 100%; border-collapse: collapse; padding: 0; table-layout: fixed; } img { border: 0; outline: none; } table { mso-table-lspace: 0px; mso-table-rspace: 0px; } td, a, span { mso-line-height-rule: exactly; } #root [x-apple-data-detectors=true], a[x-apple-data-detectors=true], #MessageViewBody a { color: inherit !important; text-decoration: inherit !important; font-size: inherit !importa…  ( 7 min )

Years before he ran, the throughline that would define Donald Trump’s presidency was set: his racist, unhinged obsession with Barack Obama. Trump could have gone down in history with a minor but positive reputation, remembered vaguely but fondly by most Americans as the goofy New York character who hosted “The Apprentice.” Instead, he fell into a spiral of outrage that a Black man who was smarter, more handsome and more beloved than he could ever be had been elected president. Trump famously spent much of 2011 pushing the racist conspiracy theory that Obama could not be a native-born citizen. This resulted in Obama mocking him while Trump seethed at the White House Correspondents Dinner, a narcissistic injury that clearly stings Trump to this day. Trump spent the next decade-plus trying to…  ( 7 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 )

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

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

** 2 Things before I start.  I generally try to avoid making articles multiple pages, it pisses me off too having to click. But this article is 25,000 words and has 100 videos, so on one page it would take a million years to load and probably crash my server.  Second thing, for Tear For...  ( 18 min )

MLB proposed really terrible ideas for the draft. They’ll cut the number of rounds, the amount of money, set an age limit of 20, and extend the draft to international amateurs. What continues to get me is the response of the MLBPA. The MLBPA says in a statement that MLB’s proposals today re: amateur and […]  ( 25 min )

Trey Yesavage and Sonny Gray battle in Boston as the Blue Jays and Red Sox play what could be a game shortened by rain. Yesavage seems less invincible this season as his walk rate remains high, and a few balls left the park. Gray won eight of the Red Sox 29 victories. He owns a […]  ( 25 min )

The Log5 Method yields these top projected hit averages versus starting pitchers: 0.305, 0.711 — Bobby Witt Jr. batting vs. Matthew Liberatore. 0.295, 0.707 — Ernie Clement batting at Sonny Gray. 0.288, 0.701 — Brandon Marsh batting vs. Sean Manaea. 0.287, 0.685 — Bo Bichette batting at Aaron Nola. 0.281, 0.670 — Maikel Garcia batting […]  ( 27 min )

Bryan Reynolds of the Pirates tops the Baseball Musings Batter Rankings after a two for five with a double in a 12-4 win over the Athletics. In the same game, Nick Kurtz of the Athletics went one for four with three strikeouts and now ranks fourth. Shohei Ohtani started the game on the mound, but […]  ( 26 min )

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

‘Straight Up Intimidation’: The Latest on the FBI Raid of an Ohio Voter Registration Group#outlook a { padding:0; } .ExternalClass { width:100%; } .ExternalClass, .ExternalClass p, .ExternalClass span, .ExternalClass font, .ExternalClass td, .ExternalClass div { line-height: 100%; } table td { border-collapse: collapse; mso-line-height-rule: exactly; } .editable.image { font-size: 0 !important; line-height: 0 !important; } .nl2go_preheader { display: none !important; mso-hide:all !important; mso-line-height-rule: exactly; visibility: hidden !important; line-height: 0px !important; font-size: 0px !important; } body { width:100% !important; -webkit-text-size-adjust:100%; -ms-text-size-adjust:100%; margin:0; padding:0; } img { outline:none; text-decoration:none; -ms-interpolation-mode: bicubi…  ( 11 min )

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96 America’s 250th Shouldn’t Be Used as Trump’s Personal Rally img{-ms-interpolation-mode:bicubic;} table, td{mso-table-lspace:0pt;mso-table-rspace:0pt;} .mceStandardButton, .mceStandardButton td, .mceStandardButton td a{mso-hide:all!important;} p, a, li, td, blockquote{mso-line-height-rule:exactly;} p, a, li, td, body, table, blockquote{-ms-text-size-adjust:100%;-webkit-text-size-adjust:100%;} .mcnPreviewText{display:none!important;} .bodyCell{margin:0 auto;padding:0;width:100%;} .ExternalClass, .ExternalClass p, .ExternalClass td, .ExternalClass div, .ExternalClass span, .ExternalClass font{line-height:100%;} .ReadMsgBody, .ExternalClass{width:100%;} a[x-apple-data-detectors]{color:inherit!important;text-decoration:none!important;font-size:inherit!important;font-family:inherit!im…  ( 6 min )

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

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

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

1. Two Keys   emacs help Learning Emacs is not about scouring through documents and memorizing facts. Those who use Emacs fluently know that the real skill is knowing how to ask Emacs about Emacs. The answer to any question you might have about Emacs lives behind just two keys: M-x and C-h. If you internalize those, plus a handful of command prefixes for the auto-discovery commands, Emacs will teach you whatever you need to know, on demand. 2. Start with M-x   mx M-x (that's Alt-x) runs any command by name. That's cool, but what makes it really special is that it lets you auto-complete command names. Press M-x, type in some input, press TAB (for 'complete this input') and Emacs filters the entire list of commands based on your input: There are two important cons…  ( 13 min )

June’s Emacs Carnival about underappreciated Emacs builtins. His post is about the Emacs help system and how you can use it to learn everything about Emacs. It’s a commonplace to say that Emacs is self-documenting but that’s little more than a slogan. Holland takes a long look at what that actually means. He begins by noting that the help system is self-recursive is the sense that you can ask the help system about the help system. You simply call the help-for-help command intuitively bound to Ctrl+h Ctrl+h. If you’ve never tried it, try it now. It gives you a nice listing of every help command. Once you invoke help for a certain command or variable, you get a buffer containing a description of the command or variable as well as links to related commands/variables and the source code of the command so you can see exactly what it does and how it does it. You can discover what command a shortcut calls or what the shortcut for a command is with a simple help call. There are a bunch of other aspects to the help system. You can, for example, get a listing of what your last commands were, complete information about the character at point, the current value of a variable, the current mode, and lots more. For discovery, there are the apropos command and its siblings to help you find what you’re looking for even if you have no idea of its name. You merely need to have a general description of what it does. Fuzzy completion on command invocation (Meta+x) helps you find the right command even if you have only a vague idea of its name. Hoplland’s post is long and has a lot of information but it’s one that every Emacs n00b—or more experienced user, for that matter—should read. In Holland’s terminology, it’s the first node in the Emacs knowledge graph.  ( 5 min )

Money can't buy happiness, and it seems money plus an NBA title doesn't necessarily buy charisma. The New York Knicks held their championship parade and rally in Manhattan on Thursday, and although not everyone could get in to see the actual procession, there were plenty of fans celebrating in the area. Last week's good vibes kept rolling; Jerome "Junkyard Dog" Williams was in attendance. But for a moment, the ceremony at City Hall functioned as an inescapable reminder that James Dolan owns this team, and that means he gets some mic time whenever they appear as a group to celebrate their triumph. In less than two minutes, he was able to briefly derail the festivities like a heinous fart at happy hour. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eE0zd5IpfAw Dolan began his remarks with a comment about the younger Knicks fans in the crowd, but because he can't deliver a line, it came off as a weird dig about their sincere love for the team. "Thank you for waiting 53 years, although I have to say: When I look out over the Knick fans here, you all don't look older than 53 years," he said. "Some of you weren't waiting 53—you weren't born yet. But we're very, very happy to have brought you a championship." Is it their fault for not being born earlier?  ( 18 min )

There's no sense in dancing around it: The sports vibes are pretty damn good at the moment. New Yorkers celebrated a long-awaited championship in the streets with a minimum of property damage and a surfeit of giddiness. The World Cup is already attempting to redeem its shameful and odious origins by delivering some of the most potent sports spectacle on Earth, and communities of all kinds are rallying around the spirited overage of it all. The positive vibrations that emanate from groups of good-natured people getting together to do fun stuff are overwhelming, so much so that Drew and I knew what we needed to do. We needed to get Ray Ratto on the podcast to straighten this shit out, and quickly. It is not a well-kept secret that Ray, for all his gruffness and singular knack for compound literary burns, is an incredibly kind and pleasant human being, and even he has not been immune to the happy surprises that this World Cup has already delivered in bulk. But we eased into things on the grumpy end of the pool, with a discussion of The Alexis Lalas Experience, which is already threatening to tip over Fox's World Cup studio show under the weight of its smirking villain's thudding trollishness. We would return to soccer later in the show, but beginning with some familiar annoyances helped to level-set nicely.  ( 19 min )

The concept of "1966" is purely theoretical for almost anyone who wasn't alive then, 60 years of human history separating us from that singular point in time. Sure, the point of history as a field is to educate us about what was happening in, say, 1966, but I barely remember what it felt like to live through most of the years I've been around for, let alone those that came so long before. However, there is one subset of people who might soon get a taste of what 1966 was like, and that is fans of England, who have been waiting since then to lift the World Cup trophy a second time. Folks, it might be coming home. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5df9Pm1iFtQ  ( 24 min )

When Bryson DeChambeau tees off  at the U.S. Open this afternoon, he will be doing so with the future bearing down on him. The LIV Golf Tour is about to lose its funding from the Saudi Public Investment Fund, which means that DeChambeau, Jon Rahm, and the rest of the former PGA greats who defected to LIV will soon have a decision to make: Do they come crawling back to the PGA, or find new day jobs? DeChambeau’s options may be more limited than Rahm’s or Brooks Koepka’s, who has already begun his journey back at the bottom of the PGA Tour. That’s because DeChambeau is more or less the face of LIV Golf, and was happy to be something of an ambassador for the tour as it courted a right-wing fanbase and established itself as a culture-war front. A return to the PGA Tour would require DeChambeau to eat a lot of shit, and so far he doesn’t seem willing to do that. “I think there’s a way to solve any problem,” DeChambeau said last month when asked if he would consider returning to the PGA. “It’s really about if the membership wants me back.” Given his recent play, there’s no urgent reason for the PGA Tour to want DeChambeau back. At the Masters in April, he missed the cut with a brutal triple-bogey on the final hole of the second round, unable to extricate himself from a greenside bunker. He lost 2.5 strokes to the field over those two rounds, in line with senior golfer Zach Johnson. The next month, at the PGA Championship at Aronimink Golf Club, Bryson slapped it around the course and whined about his irons for two days before again missing the cut. Again he lost about 2.5 strokes to the field, a little worse than senior golfer Stewart Cink.  ( 27 min )

In the era of looksmaxxing, plastic surgery, Botox, and Ozempic, it's impossible to escape the tyranny of good looks. Are beauty standards fascist? Is losing weight about giving in or being healthy? The endless overdetermined debates about the ethics of aesthetics continues to haunt us. Even as we chase Kant's sublime through facial symmetry, we struggle to justify and categorize the various forms of body modification and whether or not they are feminist. In her debut novel New Skin, Sarah Wang wades into the culture wars with her own fictional take on facelifts, race, and desirability.  While trapped in a toxic mother-daughter dynamic, Linli Feng and her mother Fanny fall prey to a black-market plastic surgery ring. Fanny, a Chinese immigrant struggling to make rent, continues to get botched procedures in a failed bid for beauty, chasing after an imagined white-centered ideal. Linli, meanwhile, hopes to escape her mother's manipulative grasp in Los Angeles and go to graduate school in New York, but her mother continually sabotages her attempts to escape. Instead, Linli ends up taking care of Fanny after yet another dismal surgery. Soon, Fanny cooks up a plan to appear on a new reality TV show: America's Beauty Extreme. If she wins, she'll get the grotesque work on her face fixed. Meanwhile, Linli ends up working at Another Horizon, an abolitionist rehabilitation center as a way to pay her family's creditors. But she soon discovers the botched surgeries her mother receives may be a malicious attempt to weasel money out of poor immigrants looking for a cheap beauty fix. Like mother, like daughter, Linli ends up getting some whitening treatments in an attempt to nail down the shadowy gang who preyed on her mom. It's a packed novel that moves briskly in about 300 pages, full of politically minded plotlines about identity, class, and ICE raids.  ( 26 min )

Welcome to Listening Habits, a column where I share the music and musical topics I’ve been fixated on recently. In between spending the last month listening to every single song with "New York" in its title or chorus, I found time to keep up with the latest big album releases. We're only about halfway through but already this has been a damn good year for music: a good mix of quality releases from stars, stalwarts, and new names entering the ring. The new Olivia Rodrigo might be the best thing to come out recently, but this week I'm more moved to consider Cry Baby, the first independent release from rapper Vince Staples. https://youtu.be/qdcD99Pd0oo?si=QAbw5WSfvmAQbG8O  ( 25 min )

Beneath soaring ceilings, in a small darkly painted gallery off the main hall of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, two immense sunflower paintings hang side by side. The paintings are bigger than I expected them to be, big enough that when I watch people pose between them, their faces are the size of only one of the flowers. These paintings are sisters, not twins. Exhibited for the first time together, both show a vase of sunflowers painted by Vincent van Gogh. But they are subtly, uncomfortably different. On the left hangs one in all yellow. Fifteen sunflowers sit inside an earthenware pot, the kind you might have at home. They are painted with Van Gogh’s signature thick globs of paint.  Even the flat lemon-yellow background is textured with a basketweave pattern—for every vertical stroke t…  ( 27 min )

In late 2020, months after the murder of George Floyd, our colleague Justin Ellis moved back to his hometown of Minneapolis to begin work on a book about black life in the city, where promises of racial harmony have gone unkept to generations of black residents. The city's good, neighborly intentions are alluded to in that classic phrase, Minnesota nice. "But good intentions find a way to devastate Black lives all the same," Justin writes. His brilliant new book, The Cruelty of Nice Folks: Why Minneapolis Is the Story of America, is in bookstores now. It asks readers to consider what nice really means. Floyd's death, Justin writes, is less a departure from nice than a consequence of nice, a culmination of too many conversations avoided and too many problems swept under the rug. Inevitably, this became a personal project for Justin. He spent his year in Minneapolis also taking care of his mother, Viki, as she underwent cancer treatment. (You might recall reading his beautiful tribute to her at Defector a few years ago.) As Justin sought to understand how his family's "insistence on an ordinary life could be a skeleton key to understanding Minneapolis," Viki became a vital source. Woven through this rigorous urban history about the city's constraints on black life is the moving personal story of how three generations of the Ellis family lived in and adapted to them: "When the world was not enough, or it asked for patience, they found a way to make it work." Last week, the busy father of two was generous enough to grant Defector an interview. We talked about the "actively managed" myth of Minneapolis, the challenges of writing such a personal book, the legacy of the summer of 2020, and what lies ahead for Minneapolis in the wake of the monumental anti-ICE protests that swept the city earlier this year. The interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.  ( 51 min )

Portugal began its World Cup with a goal befitting a real contender. In the sixth minute, the Portuguese pinned the Democratic Republic of Congo in their own box, fired a dangerous cross from the right side that skittered across the face of goal before being cleared, recycled the ball to the left side, and then pumped in another cross that was met by the head of late-arriving midfielder João Neves. It was 1-0, and Portugal looked ready to fly. Too bad Cristiano Ronaldo would spend the rest of the game dragging them back to the surface, where they would ultimately draw, 1-1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SjumRdNESKg Ronaldo must have seen what Erling Haaland, Kylian Mbappé, and especially Lionel Messi got up to in their first games, and it must have burned him up inside. The 41-year-old's career-long rivalry with the GOAT has only become more trivial as time has gone on. Where once "Messi vs. Ronaldo, who ya got?" was one of the most hotly debated questions in sports, it becomes clearer every year that Ronaldo was never really on Messi's level. Case in point: Messi won the last World Cup and scored a hat trick in his first game at this one while re-establishing his bona fides as the best player on a contending team. Ronaldo just kind of sucks now.  ( 19 min )

The ghoulish deputy chief of staff remains the untrammeled id of the entire administration.  ( 110 min )

They managed the country through its birth pangs. They helped get us through a civil war, world wars, and a cold war. They pushed the Constitution until the parchment seemed ready to burst. They were not perfect, but they were great.  ( 122 min )

The country’s legendary main street celebrates its centennial against the backdrop of the nation’s 250th birthday. Could there be a better time for a road trip?  ( 133 min )

With our help Garcia beat Maureen Galindo in the primary run-off. Now he is working hard to win the general - and we need to help him again!

Watch new video of the massive Ukrainian today on Moscow - Slava Ukraini!!!!!!!!!

Greetings all.

There were no dissents, but the four divergent opinions on Thursday show continuing disagreement over how to judge the constitutionality of gun regulations.

The government claims that it has the power to dismiss the NAACP’s lawsuit against one of the president’s political allies. The post xAI Memphis: The Trump DOJ Is Trying to Do Elon Musk a Big Favor appeared first on Balls and Strikes.  ( 7 min )

96 *{box-sizing:border-box}body{margin:0;padding:0}a[x-apple-data-detectors]{color:inherit!important;text-decoration:inherit!important}#MessageViewBody a{color:inherit;text-decoration:none}p{line-height:inherit}.desktop_hide,.desktop_hide table{mso-hide:all;display:none;max-height:0;overflow:hidden}.image_block img+div{display:none}sub,sup{font-size:75%;line-height:0} @media (max-width:660px){.row-content{width:100%!important}.stack .column{width:100%;display:block}.mobile_hide{min-height:0;max-height:0;max-width:0;display:none;overflow:hidden;font-size:0}.desktop_hide,.desktop_hide table{display:table!important;max-height:none!important}.row-3 .column-1 .block-1.heading_block td.pad{padding:10px!important}.row-1 .column-1 .block-1.image_block td.pad{padding:10px 10px 0 10px!important}.r…

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

Our latest new video bonus for paid subscribers walks through the three rulings in argued cases that the Supreme Court handed down on Thursday, June 18, 2026.

Plus, a 2020 Trump election plot case refuses to die

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 understand 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 )

Karthik Chikmagalur recently published another of his excellent "Even More Batteries Included with Emacs" posts, digging into lesser-known features that already ship with Emacs today. I wanted to write its mirror image. His post covers the batteries already in the box. Mine covers the ones arriving in Emacs 31. Emacs 31 isn't out yet, but I've been building it from both emacs-31 branch and master and daily driving it for months. Every time something new and useful lands, I fold it into Emacs Solo, my no-external-packages config, and mark it with a small ; EMACS-31 comment so I remember to revisit it once the release is official. This post walks those breadcrumbs. Every change below is one I'm touching in my config right now, with a note on what it does and why I keep it. None of it require…  ( 20 min )

Ray on Emacs, Raymond Zeitler writes about the Emacs Diary for the June Emacs Carnival. The June topic is underappreciated Emacs built-ins and for Zeitler that’s Emacs Diary. He was a little disconcerted at first by being offered a blank screen for each entry. He wondered where his previous material went but he came to appreciate the fresh start that that blank buffer gave him. He goes on to describes some of the functions and capabilities of Diary. I recently started keeping a personal journal too and considered using Diary—it was, of course, going to be written in Emacs in any event—but decided to simply use Org mode instead. I have an Org capture template to start a new entry—just like Zeitler’s method—but I can, of course, just bring up the journal Org file directly to see or edit anything. I’ve found that this works well for me. I don’t write in my journal everyday, just when something worth recording happens, so I don’t care about things like when the sun rose or set, what the temperature was on that day; just what happened that I felt was worth remembering. Of course, if I did care about such things it would be easy to arrange to add them. Or I could just use Diary. That’s the beauty of Emacs: you can make it do pretty much whatever you need it to and very often what you need is already there.  ( 5 min )

1. TLDR   tldr The folks who 'grok' Emacs aren't wizards. They don't learn Emacs, per se, but instead they learn the handful of built-in commands for asking Emacs about Emacs. Those same commands work on themselves, so once you know them you can teach yourself everything else you need to know about Emacs. This post tours that machinery (the C-h help family, apropos, Info, xref, describe- and friends) by following the questions a curious beginner typically asks, and ends by fishing a built-in game out of Emacs and reading its source with that machinery. Emacs teaches itself in this way. In other words, Emacs doesn't give you a fish, it teaches you how to fish! 2. About   emacs carnival builtins learning craft over the weakness of receiving crafts. Some nagging feeling tel…  ( 41 min )

The Royals are acquiring right-hander Randy Dobnak from the Mariners, reports Jeff Passan of ESPN. Dobnak triggered an upward mobility clause in his minor league deal with the M’s a few days ago. Kansas City will need to open a 40-man roster spot but have several players who could be transferred to the 60-day injured […]  ( 8 min )

The latest episode of the MLB Trade Rumors Podcast is now live on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and wherever you get your podcasts! Make sure you subscribe as well! You can also use the player at this link to listen, if you don’t use Spotify or Apple for podcasts. This week, host Darragh McDonald is joined by Steve Adams of […]  ( 8 min )

A D.C. Circuit ruling would have allowed the Trump admin's anti-trans policy to go into effect, but a new district court injunction issued hours later blocked the policy yet again.

Fifteen people were charged Tuesday as part of the Trump admin's effort to go after its “antifa” boogeyman. Also: The "Broadview Six" aren't going away.

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

I've fought for North Carolina voters for decades. The threat has never been greater. a.cta_button{-moz-box-sizing:content-box !important;-webkit-box-sizing:content-box !important;box-sizing:content-box !important;vertical-align:middle}.hs-breadcrumb-menu{list-style-type:none;margin:0px 0px 0px 0px;padding:0px 0px 0px 0px}.hs-breadcrumb-menu-item{float:left;padding:10px 0px 10px 10px}.hs-breadcrumb-menu-divider:before{content:'›';padding-left:10px}.hs-featured-image-link{border:0}.hs-featured-image{float:right;margin:0 0 20px 20px;max-width:50%}@media (max-width: 568px){.hs-featured-image{float:none;margin:0;width:100%;max-width:100%}}.hs-screen-reader-text{clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);height:1px;overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;width:1px} …  ( 5 min )

Americans United for Separation of Church and State /* CLIENT-SPECIFIC STYLES */ body, table, td, a{-webkit-text-size-adjust: 100%; -ms-text-size-adjust: 100%;} /* Prevent WebKit and Windows mobile changing default text sizes */ table, td{mso-table-lspace: 0pt; mso-table-rspace: 0pt;} /* Remove spacing between tables in Outlook 2007 and up */ img{-ms-interpolation-mode: bicubic;} /* Allow smoother rendering of resized image in Internet Explorer */ /* RESET STYLES */ img{border: 0; height: auto; line-height: 100%; outline: none; text-decoration: none;} table{border-collapse: collapse !important;} body{height: 100% !important; margin: 0 auto !important; padding: 0 !important; width: 100% !important;} /* iOS BLUE LINKS */ a[x-apple-data-detectors] { …  ( 3 min )

Election denier becomes GOP nominee for Nevada’s secretary of state a.cta_button{-moz-box-sizing:content-box !important;-webkit-box-sizing:content-box !important;box-sizing:content-box !important;vertical-align:middle}.hs-breadcrumb-menu{list-style-type:none;margin:0px 0px 0px 0px;padding:0px 0px 0px 0px}.hs-breadcrumb-menu-item{float:left;padding:10px 0px 10px 10px}.hs-breadcrumb-menu-divider:before{content:'›';padding-left:10px}.hs-featured-image-link{border:0}.hs-featured-image{float:right;margin:0 0 20px 20px;max-width:50%}@media (max-width: 568px){.hs-featured-image{float:none;margin:0;width:100%;max-width:100%}}.hs-screen-reader-text{clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);height:1px;overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;width:1px} …  ( 6 min )

Welcome new subscribers, and yes, we will be talking about Trump's pathetic surrender to Iran

Using a fake progressive PAC Republicans are spending millions to defeat Conley - Army vet, special ops leader, and 3 times Bronze star recipient - I'm asking folks to rally for her today....

Paid subscribers gather tonight at 7pm ET, Founding Members Friday at 1pm

It’s just not made up of the people MAGA thinks.  ( 85 min )

The president is aggravating his Senate majority by playing tug-of-war with two completely unqualified candidates for national intelligence director.  ( 88 min )

Its civil-rights division is moving to the DOJ, where it will definitely be given high priority. Meanwhile, Senator Roadkill J. Brainworm is now in charge of special education.  ( 84 min )

NEW: FBI probe of Ohio voting rights group expands to include affiliated national elections advocates96 :root { color-scheme: light; supported-color-schemes: light; } body { margin: 0; padding: 0; min-width: 100%!important; -ms-text-size-adjust: 100% !important; -webkit-transform: scale(1) !important; -webkit-text-size-adjust: 100% !important; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased !important; } .body { word-wrap: normal; word-spacing:normal; } table.mso { width: 100%; border-collapse: collapse; padding: 0; table-layout: fixed; } img { border: 0; outline: none; } table { mso-table-lspace: 0px; mso-table-rspace: 0px; } td, a, span { mso-line-height-rule: exactly; } #root [x-apple-data-detectors=true], a[x-apple-data-detectors=true], #MessageViewBody a { color: inherit !im…  ( 5 min )

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I Went To France-Senegal And All I Got Was Everything96 :root { color-scheme: light; supported-color-schemes: light; } body { margin: 0; padding: 0; min-width: 100%!important; -ms-text-size-adjust: 100% !important; -webkit-transform: scale(1) !important; -webkit-text-size-adjust: 100% !important; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased !important; } .body { word-wrap: normal; word-spacing:normal; } table.mso { width: 100%; border-collapse: collapse; padding: 0; table-layout: fixed; } img { border: 0; outline: none; } table { mso-table-lspace: 0px; mso-table-rspace: 0px; } td, a, span { mso-line-height-rule: exactly; } #root [x-apple-data-detectors=true], a[x-apple-data-detectors=true], #MessageViewBody a { color: inherit !important; text-decoration: inherit !important; fo…  ( 8 min )

So that settles it, then: Iberia's Team is Andorra. And the Andorrans didn't even know they were an option. This is what happens when Spain can't get past Cape Verde and then, maybe even more shockingly, Portugal gets stymied by the Democratic Republic of Congo. That is to say: Two of the heaviest favorites in this World Cup, each one of the most historically dominant teams in international soccer history, take nothing but shame from dropping points to a team that has never been in any World Cup and another that had never scored a goal in one. Middle fingers to the big man have never stood quite so proudly. The internet has already glommed on to the Blue Whales, but now it has to double back on the Warriors of the Equator after a 1-1 draw that was almost even more dramatic. A clothesline by Tomás Araújo on Congo star Yoane Wissa four minutes from the end drew a yellow card but also stopped a scoring opportunity for Wissa, whom Premier League dorks know from Newcastle United and who had scored Congo's goal just before halftime. He was breaking toward the underbothered Portuguese goal when Araújo took a chance on a red card to save a goal-scoring chance. He got away with it, and the game ended 1-1 rather than 2-1 Leopards as a result, thus robbing Andorra of even more bragging rights and the Portuguese from drawing up plans to recolonize Cape Verde to steal their point.  ( 17 min )

Have you heard the whispers? Jonas Vingegaard just went nuts in Italy, auguring a strong run at a third Tour de France crown and convincing some corners of the peloton that he's got the legs to ride into yellow. Isaac del Toro dominated the Dauphine, giving faint hope to those who would like to see him stage a coup against his team leader. Prodigal French son Paul Seixas has thus far only been slowed by the limits of his own bike handling, putting together a stunning full debut season when he's managed to stay upright. Hell, even the Red Bull guys might have figured out how to execute the Remco Evenepoel-as-super-domestique strategy, a concept that a director laid out for me last year as the ideal way to spring a Tour de France upset. Tadej Pogacar may be the best rider in the world, but that won't stop his rivals from trying him. All of which is to say that if the dynamic of the Tour de France is cohering into Pogacar vs. the field, and the field is the strongest it's been since Pogacar started winning Tours, he's still the heavy favorite. After a six-week layoff, the world champion returned to racing on Wednesday at the Tour de Suisse. How would he look in his first competitive action since retreating to the monastic refuge of the pre-Tour altitude camp? As it turns out, distinguishing between race and training camp is somehow actually quite difficult. Pogacar rolled off the front of the peloton with 70 kilometers to go in Stage 1 and put four-and-a-half minutes into all but one of his general classification "rivals," ending the fight for overall victory less than halfway through the first stage and making it clear that he's going to France with the same form that's seen him yawn his way to two straight yellow jerseys. The first stage of one of the two premier Tour de France tune-up races turned into a livestreamed training ride.  ( 20 min )

It's impossible to think about Lionel Messi's sixth and presumably final World Cup without those thoughts immediately acquiring the sepia tint of romanticism. On the cusp of his 39th year, 20 years to the day since his simultaneous introduction and eruption onto the world stage, Messi returns to the site of both his greatest heartbreaks and most definitive triumphs. He's here for a last dance, an epilogue to what has already been one of the greatest stories sports have ever told, a send-off less about putting his career in any new light and more about celebrating all that has come before. Messi himself seems to think about this Cup along similar lines. "I can't ask for anything more," he said after Argentina's tournament-debut victory on Tuesday. "God gave me too much, now everything is just to enjoy." Now, all this romance is well and good, but it's important not to let the easy narratives of fading greatness and curtain calls occlude a simple fact: Even though Messi is older and slower and less electric than you remember, he remains the absolute best at this soccer thing. If you'd overlooked that fact coming into the tournament, Messi's hat trick on Tuesday night should've made it crystal clear. He's not just here to take a bow. He's here to win. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOEy382GeVU  ( 21 min )

Yesterday was the most entertaining day of the World Cup when it comes to big names doing big things on the biggest stage. And by that we of course mean Zlatan Ibrahimovic and Thierry Henry openly dismissing Alexi Lalas on Fox's between-games studio set for the high crime of being persistently and unashamedly Alexi Lalas. Sure, Lionel Messi, Kylian Mbappé, and Erling Haaland also combined for seven of the day's 16 goals, which is all well and good if you ignore the fact that they've been doing that sort of thing for their entire careers. They make the extraordinary routine, and have done so routinely enough to make even multiple goals seem drab. But TV requires that people—or as they are often mistakenly termed in the industry, "talent"—on the same set pretend to get along even if they spend the entire pre-show prep thinking of ways they could murder each other without anyone noticing. That is why, despite the best efforts of the flawless Rebecca Lowe to keep the show both convivial and moving, Zlatan and Henry look at and speak to Lalas as though he is a badly disguised undercover cop. It's not just because of the massive discrepancy between their respective fútbol résumés, although there is that. No, this one can be pretty well chalked up to Alexi Lalas being Alexi Lalas.  ( 21 min )

Many animals are famous for their extravagant courtship dances. Consider the male Costa's hummingbird, who hovers in front of potential mates with his violet mantle feathers outstretched in the shape of a baby octopus. Or the male greater sage-grouse, who pops his colorful air sacs in a display that seems far less suitable for work than it is. It's not just birds. A flamboyantly colored male peacock spider dances for his life, waving his long legs and shaking his vibrant fan not just to impress a mate, but to dissuade her from eating him. And yet some of the planet's least seductive creatures have dances of their own. Many flies have courtship dances, moves that have gone unnoticed in popular culture because of their vanishing size or pestiferous reputation. But these dances are marvelously complex and quite beautiful, if you only get a chance to look. In a new paper published in Behavioral Ecology, a group of scientists discuss the surprisingly sophisticated courtship dances of the dancing dune fly Apotropina ornatipennis, whose males gallivant around sandy beaches in Australia dancing desperately in search of sex. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElNbhK9Tqb8  ( 24 min )

Vertical video makes Olivia Miles look good. Horizontal video makes her look better. Her gift shines in context, on the unadorned and unsoundtracked platform that is the next day's full-game replay. What the Minnesota Lynx rookie does best as starting point guard of the WNBA's top team is to understand every option available to her before choosing, inevitably, the right one. She's done well to earn the title "highlight reel player," but watch her enough and realize she's special for being a "film room player," too. Perhaps that's why this was not something everyone saw coming: the instant stardom, the MVP talks, the Lynx's surprisingly torrid start as they wait for franchise player Napheesa Collier to return from an ankle injury. When Minnesota drafted Miles with the second overall pick in April, it was fair to be curious about the match. The team lost most of its frontcourt in free agency and has lately been at a size disadvantage in the playoffs. Young players haven't always endeared themselves to head coach Cheryl Reeve, either. Since the bright spot of Collier, taken sixth in 2019, the draft has been unkind to the Lynx. Diamond Miller, their most recent lottery pick before Miles, was traded to Dallas at the 2025 deadline after playing sparingly.  But about a quarter of the way into the season, with the Lynx sitting at 11-3, Reeve has only been effusive in her praise. "The rookie," as Reeve will call her, has quickly earned the head coach's trust, enough so that Reeve sometimes even lapses out of that third-person common noun and into the first-person plural: "The team needs us," she recalled telling Miles during a game they spent jawing with the referees too much. "We're the brains behind it." Maybe all signs that this partnership would go well were there on draft night, before Miles had ever put on a Lynx jersey, when Reeve offered reporters a lofty comp: "This is the first real point guard we've had since Lindsay Whalen."  ( 40 min )

LOS ANGELES — Just off the ninth green at Riviera Country Club, during the first day of this year’s U.S. Women’s Open, a familiar face popped up in the gallery: Owen Wilson. But as fans milled about this congested space where multiple greens, tee boxes, and the path to the practice range converge, few seemed to notice. “Love your work,” one fan told the star of The Royal Tenenbaums, Zoolander, and the golf-centric series Stick; Wilson graciously thanked the man. But that was about it. Most everyone had their eyes on someone else. They were there for Nelly Korda.  ( 44 min )

Nobody told me that becoming a fan of the Chicago White Sox meant that I would have to suffer humiliating losses! Wait. Actually, everybody told me that. But I didn't listen. I arrived at Yankee Stadium for the first game of the White Sox series full of optimism. Even if the star sluggers, Aaron Judge and Munetaka Murakami, were out injured, we were still getting a treat of a pitching match-up: Chicago's breakout potential Cy Young candidate Davis Martin, and New York's recently reconstructed ace Gerrit Cole. I expected a tight, low-scoring game that the White Sox would pull out because they were fun, and because they'd just handled both the Dodgers and the Braves last week. Instead, I hear they're still finding scraps of Martin's uniform scattered amid the abandoned french fries in the bleachers after the Yanks blasted Chicago 12-2. The Sox ace seemed his normal self in the top of the first, surrendered a solo home run to Spencer Jones in the second, and then in the third looked like he was pitching with a 50-pound weight on his back. He walked three guys as the Yanks scored four runs, and when Will Venable made the decision to bring Martin back out for the fourth, it was a free-for-all. Martin's final line was 3.1 innings with eight hits and nine earned runs, mercifully exiting the game only after Paul Goldschmidt banged one into left for his 382nd career dong.  ( 16 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, Chris answers a question about how to help your child get good at things.  ( 29 min )

Major League Baseball will never get through a season without a Pride Night controversy. If that becomes the goal, then the only sure option is to eliminate the promotion altogether. That may not be the worst idea: The cowards and vampires who run the league and its teams don't deserve the simple goodwill that comes from saying "gesundheit" to a stranger on a bus, let alone the presumption of human decency that might otherwise belong to those who in sincere good faith open their doors to a marginalized group. All-devouring billionaire demigods are no more committed to dignity and equality in this context than in any other. The very moment they can get away with it, the very moment prevailing winds make it strategically advisable, MLB's owners will host Eat The Homeless Nights. On the other…  ( 21 min )

Josh Hawley suggests that his vote for Trump’s nominee for attorney general could be contingent on Blanche doing Hawley—and his wife—an anti-abortion favor. The post Republican Senators Can’t Wait to See What Todd Blanche Will Promise Them appeared first on Balls and Strikes.  ( 8 min )

Plus, Wisconsin judge sanctions far-right lawyers for lying

Shane McClanahan and Shohei Ohtani square off in an afternoon game in Los Angeles as the Rays and Dodgers finish their series. McClanahan pitched worse on the road this season, 1-4 with a 4.32 ERA in seven starts. He allowed four run in each of his last two road starts. Ohtani allowed just four runs […]  ( 25 min )

The Log5 Method yields these top projected hit averages versus starting pitchers: 0.338, 0.733 — Otto Lopez batting at Andrew Painter. 0.308, 0.717 — Jake Mangum batting at Aaron Civale. 0.304, 0.712 — Brandon Marsh batting vs. Sandy Alcantara. 0.302, 0.698 — Nick Gonzales batting at Aaron Civale. 0.301, 0.697 — Xavier Edwards batting at […]  ( 26 min )

Bryan Reynolds of the Pirates moved up to second place in the Baseball Musings Batter Rankings with the highest game score of the day, an 85. He went four for five with two home runs in a 6-5 win over the Athletics. The big night raises his OBP to .400, and five of his last […]  ( 25 min )

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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 )

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

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

The Court keeps "rescheduling" President Trump's cert. petition in one of the lawsuits he lost to E. Jean Carroll. The *other* lawsuit may be the reason why.

Above all things, the Ulitmate Fighting Championship spectacle on the White House lawn on Sunday was Donald Trump’s birthday present to himself. The self-proclaimed “Greatest President in History” once again reminded the public that the only record he’ll set is in White House corruption, using the fight both to line his own pockets and enrich his billionaire benefactors. But if the 80-year-old was hoping that proximity to half-naked men punching each other would make him look more robust and virile, the opposite happened. Despite the dramatic music and his ever-thickening foundation application, Trump looked frail and his ever-present hand bruise was hard to ignore, despite the efforts to cover it with makeup. The painful event was an almost too-perfect symbol of the larger problem infecti…  ( 7 min )

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Everyone’s laughing at my president, Donald J. Trump, because he cast a mail-in ballot for a March 24 special election in Florida. They think it’s funny that the GOP candidate he endorsed, in a district that contains the president’s Mar-a-Lago resort, lost. They find it hilarious that Trump, who has bravely and boldly and incessantly criticized mail-in voting and suggesting it was “Rigged,” just went ahead and voted that way anyway, even though the polls were open when he was in Florida. Well, hah-hah-hah, you chuckling losers. Very funny. Once again, you’ve proved your own ignorance. Trump used mail-in voting to PROVE that mail-in voting is fraudulent! Is Trump pushing the SAVE Act, which would make it much harder to vote by mail, like a man facing an existential crisis? Yes. Did he say …  ( 12 min )

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

President Donald Trump has talked endlessly and inaccurately about how his predecessor’s economy was a “disaster” and a “catastrophe.” He even once said, “You could take the five worst presidents in American history, and put them together, and they would not have done the damage Joe Biden has done to our nation in just a few short years. Not even close.” Well, Mr. President, I have some bad news. You’ve bungled your second term so thoroughly that voters are wishing they could return to the halcyon days of “Sleepy Joe” Biden.   A new Harvard CAPS/Harris survey found that more than half of U.S. voters think the economy is worse under Trump than it was under Biden. And 62% blame the current state of the economy on Trump rather than Biden. To adopt a bit of Trump’s typical patter: “They’re beg…  ( 14 min )

If California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s goal is to become liberal America’s least likable Democrat, he’s doing a bang-up job.  On March 25, responding to some babbling social media post by MAGA influencer Benny Johnson, Newsom’s press office wrote: “We got a call from Grindr after this and said your team was their biggest users. Congrats!” Grindr is an LGBTQ+ dating app. So the joke is that Johnson and his right-wing team are gay! And being gay is embarrassing! What a sick burn here in the year 2026! On behalf of decent people everywhere, allow me to say to Newsom and his team: Get lost. Keep your low-brow, high-school-bigot nonsense to yourselves and stop trying to pretend there’s some mythical “middle” in American politics that wants a Democrat unafraid to make homophobic jokes.  Americans are…  ( 15 min )

My fellow Americans, our nation is at war, and so it is vital that we set aside our political differences and patriotically rally around our president’s ballroom. President Donald Trump did not demolish the East Wing of the White House for nothing, and if we allow our war with Iran to draw attention away from the president’s planned $400 million ballroom, even for a moment, the enemy wins. On March 29, the president spoke briefly about the Iran war aboard Air Force One before pivoting to the more important subject: ballroom. “I'm so busy that I don't have time to do this,” he said, speaking at length and showing reporters a slew of large ballroom illustrations printed on poster boards. “But I'm fighting wars and other things. But this is very important, because this is going to be with us …  ( 16 min )

As attorney general, Pam Bondi lied for President Donald Trump. She hurled insults at Democrats for him. She tried to shield him from the Jeffrey Epstein files. She groveled and doused him with praise in Cabinet meetings. But in the end, doing everything the president wanted, selling her soul and whatever shards of dignity she had left, just wasn’t enough. Trump fired Bondi on April 2, making her the second female Cabinet member Trump has dispatched as his presidency spirals. The first was Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, whom Trump canned and then named “a special envoy for the Shield of the Americas,” which I’m still not convinced is a real thing. I assume Bondi will now become assistant to the regional special envoy for the Shield of the Americas. Or maybe she and Noem can start…  ( 13 min )

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

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

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

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

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

As NASA’s Artemis II mission continues and the four astronauts in the Orion capsule prepare to leave Earth’s orbit, one of my numerous cislunar sources asked that I relay the following note from the moon, our planet’s only natural satellite. Dear people of Earth: Hey there. It’s me, your moon. Hope you all are doing well and not getting too dizzy! (That’s a planetary rotation joke. Sorry, it’s been a while since I’ve communicated with anyone.) I can’t help but notice you’ve launched one of those tin-can-looking thingies into your orbit again. That’s cool. Yeah. Definitely cool. Anyhoo, I get the sense you all might be aiming that thing in my direction. In fact, I noticed a little write-up on the whole Artemis II mission that says you’re planning to whizz by my dark side and snap some pictu…  ( 12 min )

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’ve been struggling to understand the Republican Party for quite a while, but watching conservative lawmakers trip over themselves to say President Donald Trump’s White House ballroom is the most important issue facing America? Well, it’s got me thinking the cheese has fully slid off their crackers. The pro-ballroom fervor erupted after an armed man tried to get into the White House Correspondents' Association dinner at a Washington, DC, Hilton, where Trump and most of his Cabinet were glad-handing with the journalists they despise. The man, accused of targeting Trump and other administration officials, was stopped by security, thankfully, and arrested. One might think the reaction to this disturbing event would be to figure out how the person obtained guns and got that close to a sitting…  ( 15 min )

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hey, do you all remember “Sleepy Joe” Biden, the president whose age and cognitive decline Donald Trump and his plague of MAGA lemmings routinely mocked? Well, I have some news. In a living example of turnabout being fair play, 79-year-old President Trump himself is now viewed by a majority of Americans as being mentally and physically unfit to lead.  A recent Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll found that nearly 60% of Americans believe Trump isn’t mentally sharp enough to be president, and 55% think his physical health makes him unfit to lead. Americans think Trump is just as mentally unfit as Biden was Just a few months before Biden dropped out of the 2024 presidential race over concerns about his age, an AP-NORC poll found 63% were not confident he had the mental capability to be pres…  ( 14 min )

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

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

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 )

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

The doric-themes are the minimalist counterpart of my modus-themes and ef-themes. They define few colours and exercise restraint in how they customise faces. This means that there rarely is a context that has red, green, yellow, blue, magenta, and cyan. Those are reserved for cases where colour-coding is needed. Whereas with my other themes colour is used with the dual intent of establish rhythm and order in addition to any colour-coding. Because of this, it is difficult for me to test the relevant values. Each Doric theme defines entries in its palette like fg-red and bg-blue. So I decided to write a small snippet that shows text which uses those colours in context. The idea is to create faces that get the appropriate :foreground and :background attributes with their proper values. Then w…  ( 1 min )

In the last month or so, as I've mentioned a few times before, I've been trying to tidy up some of my older personal Emacs Lisp packages. I thought I'd updated all the ones I commonly use, but it turns out I hadn't. Somehow I'd missed become.el. This is another one of those packages whose content started out as ad-hoc commands, added to the ~/.emacs that first started to emerge as I got to know Emacs on OS/2 and then GNU/Linux back in the mid-1990s. I think it was back in 20161, when I did a big revamp of my Emacs environment, that I moved all of those roughly-related commands out into their own file. Honestly, I think I can dump most of them now. There's stuff in there for quickly and easily converting buffers between "DOS format" and "Unix format" (from back when I was still working a lo…  ( 2 min )

Ctrl+Meta+v and Ctrl+Meta+Shift+v shortcuts for pdf-tools. Sadly, these don’t work for scrolling PDFs but as mbork says, “… [I]t’s Emacs, so it shouldn’t be difficult…”. And, indeed, it isn’t. His idea is simple. If the buffer in the other window isn’t a PDF, return nil. Otherwise simply call pdf-view-scroll-up-or-next-page or pdf-view-scroll-down-or-previous-page. Finally, he simply advises scroll-other-window and scroll-other-window-down to run his code first and skip the normal code unless his code returns nil. Take a look at his post for the code. As I said, it’s easy to understand. The important takeaway from this, according to mbork, is how easy and understandable the solution is. The lesson, as it often is, is that if Emacs isn’t doing what you need, it’s usually pretty easy to make it do so.  ( 5 min )

Great news, everyone - CIDER 1.22 (“São Miguel”) is finally out! And “finally” is the operative word here. This release took me way longer than I wanted it to, but that’s because I decided to stop kicking a few cans down the road and finally tackle some long-standing problems that had been bugging me for years: Session and connection management - the logic for figuring out which REPL a buffer is associated with had grown into something I could barely follow myself. The decoupling of nREPL from CIDER’s UI layer - a piece of technical debt so old it predates most of you reading this (the tracking issue, #1099, is from 2017). A full audit of the codebase and the documentation, hunting for inconsistencies, dead code, broken menu entries, and gaps in the docs. None of this is the kind of work t…  ( 6 min )

Music has always been a magnet for outsized egos, chaotic personalities, and larger-than-life characters. While genius often walks hand-in-hand with flaws, some artists have elevated bad behavior, entitlement, volatility, and outright toxicity to legendary status. From rock legends throwing tantrums and inciting riots to modern stars entangled in repeated scandals and public meltdowns, the industry...  ( 14 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 )

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

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

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

Dylan Cease leads the Blue Jays into Boston to take on Payton Tolle. Davis Martin of the White Sox gets the assignment against Gerrit Cole and the Yankees. Framber Valdez of the Tigers face his old team and teammate Hunter Brown in Houston. The Rays and Dodgers go at in game two of their series […]  ( 25 min )

The Log5 Method yields these top projected hit averages versus starting pitchers: 0.316, 0.714 — Jackson Chourio batting vs. Slade Cecconi. 0.312, 0.707 — Michael Harris II batting vs. Adrian Houser. 0.311, 0.719 — Otto Lopez batting at Jesus Luzardo. 0.300, 0.696 — Drake Baldwin batting vs. Adrian Houser. 0.298, 0.685 — Andrew Vaughn batting […]  ( 26 min )

Nick Kurtz of the Athletics takes over the top slot in the Baseball Musings Batter Rankings with a three for five night, including a walk and two home runs. Kurtz is another power hitter at the top of the order this season, now with a .293/.443/.563 slash line. The A’s beat the Pirates 11-2. In […]  ( 26 min )

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Gaba estimates that the typical ACA plan holder has seen their costs rise $1,500 per person this year

June 30th filing deadline is approaching - let's help our candidates end strong!

By the standards and practices of the Vegas Golden Knights, John Tortorella had it coming. His first three-game losing streak as the team's head coach was enough for Knights general manager Kelly McCrimmon to decide he'd seen enough, and the fact that the three losses in question came in the Stanley Cup Final mattered not. Team policy is team policy. Gerard Gallant, the team's first coach, got it after a four-game losing streak in 2020. Peter DeBoer, who replaced him, got it after a win that came after a three-game losing streak, but it still counts because the win came in the team's final game that season. Bruce Cassidy got canned with eight games left after a three-game losing streak. And now Torts. No wonder the Knights have the reputation they have. In fairness, this might have been predetermined, that Tortorella, who lives in Florida, was called out of three years' quasi-retirement to replace Cassidy and didn't want to relocate to Nevada. Maybe McCrimmon told him ahead of time that this would be a temporary assignment, and sent him home with a lot of hoodies and tees and maybe even a souvenir skate sharpener for the grandkids. But Torts did say during the Finals run that he would like to coach in the NHL again, and the only open jobs are in noted hockey lunatic asylums in Edmonton and Toronto, and Tortorella would barely reach Christmas before pulling off his own head in a post-practice scrum and coating the gathered reporters in plasma. That's no way to go out, even for someone as polarizing as him.  ( 19 min )

If everyone in the United States weren't living downstream from its consequences, it would be a pretty good tragic flaw that Donald Trump wants more than anything to be seen as a brilliant man who has always been right about everything when he is transparently a butterfingered dunce whose professional expertise more or less begins and ends at making cutting remarks from a safe distance and directing other people to file nuisance lawsuits on his behalf. If assessed from a sufficient remove, the spread between the opening proposition—the man who knows more about every subject than any expert without even having to study or even pay attention to any of it, because he is just that much of a natural talent—and the relentlessly oafish output is a great bit, if admittedly also a bit one-note. Lot…  ( 27 min )

I haven't watched a single game of the World Cup yet. Not because I don't want to, but because the part of my brain reserved for paying attention to sports is still recovering from the NBA Finals. My wish for the New York Knicks to lose just enough to extend the series to a full seven games—I never know when to leave a party—did not come to pass. So it's only a matter of time before I learn who's playing in the tournament and let a vague sense of geopolitics guide me to the right plucky underdog.  For now, my relationship to the spectacle consists of the whiplash between horrible news of immigration shakedowns and World Cup Racial Harmony videos. I consume the latter greedily, sending them out to friends with a promptness you might expect from a newswire. Occasionally I behave like a one-person propaganda office for the concept of soccer-based multiculturalism. It is simply quite funny to watch a video titled something like "Spain National Team Arrives In Chattanooga, Tennessee." There is apparently no limit to the number of times I can enjoy clips of Korean fans binge-drinking alongside Mexican ones. A deli is just a deli until you hear "Can I get a chicken parm with vodka sauce?" in a London accent, and a thick New Jersey one coo "I'll make it beautiful for you" in response.  ( 17 min )

For one night, you could be forgiven if your failing eyes confused Pete Crow-Armstrong for the ghost of Hack Wilson stepping up to the plate at Wrigley Field. Actually, scratch that. Most nights you could be forgiven for confusing Pete Crow-Armstrong with a ghost. Frankly, I’m not quite convinced that he isn’t, especially with some of the defensive gaffes he made earlier this season, where the ball seemed to slip through his fingers as if he was fighting to remain on the plane of the living. But I digress. Last night, PCA became the 13th player in Cubs history to complete a cycle, hitting a single, a double, a triple, and a homer in one game. But PCA only took four plate appearances to complete the achievement, and he did so in a way no other Cub has done before.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9UlEIBrbMgM  ( 18 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 Graham Platner (ugh), the World Cup, imperfect movies, and more. PROGRAMMING NOTE: I'm off to the beach next week. But we'll have a guest host manning the post to answer all of your Funbag questions while I'm out, so go ahead and email them here. Who will be our mystery writer? I do not know. Why? I cannot say. How? I do not know how to answer that. Let's move on. Your letters:  ( 51 min )

For nearly as long as Canadian homes have had televisions, hockey fans have been able to spend their Saturday nights watching the country's teams on the public broadcast channel CBC. Initially a branding for CBC's radio coverage of the NHL, Hockey Night In Canada debuted on TV in 1952, and since then it's become a national institution—think Monday Night Football crossed with Jeopardy!, times two. But starting next season, the Saturday night hockey tradition will be a shell of its old self, because the games will be entirely behind a paywall. No more CBC broadcasts that you can pick up with just an antenna, or free over the internet within the country's borders. It'll be just cable and streaming games exclusively on the Rogers Media–owned Sportsnet. https://bsky.app/profile/rickspringhetti.bsky.social/post/3mog5cp2l322m This disappointing news is a long time in the making. While CBC has carried these games for generations, they've been doing so for over a decade as a kind of hanger-on while live sports rights fees zoom past the territory of the embattled budgets of public broadcasters. In 2014, Sportsnet began its multi-billion dollar contract to broadcast the NHL nationally in Canada, and in doing so they worked out a simulcast agreement with CBC for Hockey Night and their NHL playoff coverage to quiet any outcry about taking away such a beloved program. With an even more lucrative deal about to begin next season, however, there is no such reverence for the old way of watching. On Saturday nights, or during the postseason, it's now Sportsnet or bust. And while CBC is trying to positively spin the change as an opportunity for them to broadcast other sports, potentially making ad money that doesn't go straight to Rogers, I'm more than a little dubious at any implication that they're happy about their last ties to their most iconic program being severed. It feels like justifying getting dumped by saying "Well, now I can focus more on my painting."  ( 19 min )

For many players, just lacing up the boots and throwing on the national team jersey for a World Cup match marks the pinnacle of their career. Even in an expanded tournament field of 48 teams, the percentage of the population that gets to say they played in a World Cup is astronomically low, and so simply being there is reason for celebration. Just see how much one goal in a 7-1 loss meant for Curacao, or what a stunning draw against Spain meant to Cape Verde. It's the World Cup, and everyone wants to be a part of it, to soak in the world's attention, and to make their mark. This is all to say that the Iran national team should be flying high after not just playing in the World Cup on Monday night, but taking part in the best match of the tournament so far, a 2-2 draw against New Zealand that had gorgeous goals, back-and-forth trips to the fireworks factory, and the kind of white-knuckle intensity that is unique to this tournament. Twice, Iran went down a goal, and twice it tied the game back up, the second time from one of the best and most accurate crosses you will ever see, with Ramin Rezaeian finding Mohammad Mohebi's head in the box in perfect position to equalize. The match, which took place in Los Angeles, was a beautiful thing to watch, a reward for the late-night soccer sickos (at least on the East Coast and beyond) who love the World Cup almost as much as the players. Following that draw, and the crucial point that goes with it, Iran should have been able to celebrate as a team and with their fans. Instead, the other side of this specific World Cup reared its ugly, embarrassing head.  ( 22 min )

SAN ANTONIO — "Wow … more Knicks fans?" said a local child, dejectedly, as he rounded a corner on the River Walk, only to encounter a cheerful man wearing a "Nueva York" edition David Lee jersey. Saturday morning, before Game 5 of the NBA Finals, this child's Spurs team still had life in it yet. But from the tone of his voice, it was clear that he had lost some emotional battle already. Presumably this child had heard the visiting fans calling out "Knicks in five" from the guided river boat tours, like a flotilla of insurgents. He'd seen them traveling in packs on foot, downing margaritas, turning his sweltering city walkable by force of will. He knew the enemy was in his midst and there was nothing to be done about it. When I heard his voice, I began to consider the comic-book supervillainous aspect of a fanbase that can simply pick up and drop a borough's worth of its bravest—or most unwell, or least fiscally responsible—soldiers onto any city in the country. Then I remembered that the Knicks still had a game to win. If turning a road game into a home game by sheer invasion would help finish the job, after 53 years of waiting, then so be it. Sorry to that child. He'll get his in time.  ( 32 min )

The New York Knicks are NBA champions. That meant Harry and I had to bring back regular guest Giri Nathan onto Nothing But Respect to talk about what it felt like to watch his team win a championship, Jalen Brunson's big-ass head, and James Dolan's performance on the championship podium. Unlike last time around, his power did not cut out at the last second, so this was a real success! Everyone should also please go read Giri's excellent Finals coverage. You can find Nothing But Respect in Apple Podcasts or whatever podcast app you use. Follow the show on Instagram, and contact the Broke Jumper Tip Line at (347) 380-6426. Thanks for listening!  ( 14 min )

Well, that embarrassing 21-minute conference-room chat sure ended up being a big waste of everybody's time. Brendan Sorsby, the Texas Tech quarterback who admitted to placing over 9,000 bets on college and professional sports—including at lest 40 bets involving Indiana football while he was on the team—has decided to give up his fight to remain a college football player. He will now attempt to enter the NFL via the supplemental draft. The NCAA declared Sorsby ineligible to play soon after his betting activity was discovered, but the quarterback won a preliminary injunction against the NCAA in a Texas court on June 8, which restored his eligibility and opened the door for him to play in the upcoming season, before any appeal from the NCAA would have time to be ruled on. What followed was an embarrassing week where Texas Tech, happy to have a transfer quarterback they paid $6 million for back in the fold, went on an extended PR campaign to make the case that letting a compulsive gambler who had already made bets involving his own team back into their program was actually the right thing to do. Texas Tech's yapping only seemed to antagonize the rest of the Big 12, and so on Monday the conference, ignoring a stupid and stern warning from Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, filed for a federal injunction to restore its right to suspend Sorsby under conference rules. At the same time, the NCAA asked the appeals court to expedite its appeal of the June 8 ruling. All of this suddenly became too much of a headache for Sorsby and Texas Tech, and on Monday the university's board of regents released a statement announcing that Sorsby will be leaving the football program and setting his sights on the NFL.  ( 15 min )

On Jan. 5, World Boccia, the sport’s governing body, announced on Facebook that they had a problem: Someone was selling counterfeit balls. In boccia, which is akin to lawn bowling and has been a part of the Paralympic program since 1984, athletes take turns throwing balls closest to the jack, a white ball that is thrown at the beginning of each contest. It’s played by disabled athletes with a variety of access needs that can include the use of a ramp that is controlled by a sports assistant. The balls can be different weights and sizes, or even have different materials inside of them, but like a spitball or an underinflated football (sorry, Patriots fans), there are standards. Some things just aren’t above board. The culprit? An account called Boccia Ball, which still exists as of press time, and is offering a set for $40. The company, which appears to be based in India, was doing its best to pass off the items as legitimate, despite the sport’s federation having a clear supply chain for officially sanctioned competition equipment. The account offers a steep discount: a sanctioned set of balls cost anywhere between $400 and $1,000, at least 10 times the price of the knockoffs.  ( 28 min )

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

Chief Justice John Roberts is nothing more than a presidential-power enthusiast in judicial garb.  ( 87 min )

No, not Joe Rogan’s awful tie. But that certainly didn’t help.  ( 92 min )

The Republican Party is getting nervous about the midterms. The Republican justices on the Supreme Court are doing what they can to help. The post The Roberts Court Is Trying to Stop the Political Pendulum appeared first on Balls and Strikes.  ( 7 min )

Bad week to be a Trump

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

After well over a year and a half of working through the 1997 portion of my hip-hop vinyl and CD collection, an end is in sight. The next six reviews will be recent ‘97 additions to my collection. Then I … Continue reading →  ( 18 min )

When I adopted Emacs in July of 2000, I hunkered down to learn the keybindings. But after I learned the basics1 I started to RTFM (C-h r), and I was instantly drawn to the Calendar/Diary2 node, which I consider to be an underappreciated Emacs built-in, and, therefore, the topic of Emacs Carnival for June 2026. Back then I mistook "diary" to mean a blank-page-confidant into which we write our thoughts, fears, ambitions or even just what we had for dinner last night. At that time I'd been writing in a journal for about 24 years (yes, since 1976, on and off), so my head swelled with ideas of using Emacs for a revamped computerized version. I imagined being able to forward-search-regexp in order to find, for example, that weird dream I wrote about in whic…  ( 12 min )

The simplification of my mode line is sticking, in that I like how it's turned out and I find it more useful to have it this simple. But I did notice something was missing: I'm a pretty constant but pretty casual user of projectile. I know it's a package that offers a wealth of tools, yet mostly I just use it as a project bookmark system. For this, though, it works well. Given this, having a quick and easy way to check that I'm in the project I think I'm in is a good idea. While I also have neotree open all the time, which gives a fairly obvious clue, my eyes keep flitting down to the mode line. The change I made the other day, deliberately, left the project off. I think this was a simplification too far. So now it's back. The core of my mode line configuration now looks like this: (setq mood-line-format (mood-line-defformat :left ((or (mood-line-segment-buffer-status) (propertize (mood-line--get-glyph :buffer-modified) 'face 'my/mood-line-good-status)) " " (mood-line-segment-buffer-name) (my/mood-line-segment-project) " " (mood-line-segment-major-mode)) :right ((my/mood-line-segment-vc) " " (propertize (mood-line-segment-cursor-position) 'face 'my/mood-line-cursor-position)))) A little busier than it started out, but still pretty clean. I do keep wondering about the cursor position. In most buffers I have line numbers showing to the left anyway, and it's rare (but not unknown) that I need to know what column I'm in. I'm very tempted to remove the cursor position altogether, then the right-hand side would just be the vc information, at which point it might make sense to also move the project name over to the right, given that the project and the repository information generally go hand-in-hand. I'll stick with this for now, but I can see this happening soon.  ( 2 min )

I have written about pdf-tools quite a few times – it’s a fantastic Emacs package for viewing and annotating pdfs without leaving the comfort of Emacs. It is not ideal, though – or at least, not ideal for me. One feature of Emacs I often use is the scroll-other-window command (bound to C-M-v), and its sibling scroll-other-window-down (C-M-S-v). They are extremely useful for example when reading documentation or watching live Markdown preview, and I wish they worked with the TeX and pdf-tools duo, too. Well, it’s Emacs, so it shouldn’t be difficult to make them!  ( 1 min )

Even More Batteries Included with Emacs (Reddit, HN, lobste.rs). Check it out! Upcoming events (iCal file, Org): M-x Research: TBA https://m-x-research.github.io/ Wed Jun 17 0800 America/Vancouver - 1000 America/Chicago - 1100 America/Toronto - 1500 Etc/GMT - 1700 Europe/Berlin - 2030 Asia/Kolkata - 2300 Asia/Singapore OrgDevMeetup https://bbb.emacsverse.org/rooms/orgdevmeetup Sat Jun 20 0900 America/Vancouver - 1100 America/Chicago - 1200 America/Toronto - 1600 Etc/GMT - 1800 Europe/Berlin - 2130 Asia/Kolkata – Sun Jun 21 0000 Asia/Singapore EmacsSF (in person): coffee.el in SF https://www.meetup.com/emacs-sf/events/315192115/ Sat Jun 20 1100 America/Los_Angeles Emacs Berlin: Emacs-Berlin Hybrid Meetup https://emacs-berlin.org/ Wed Jun 24 1000 America/Vancouver - 1200 America/Chicago …  ( 3 min )

Dustin May of the Cardinals pitches the first shutout and complete game of his career. He held the Padres to one hit and one walk while striking out nine, the Cardinals taking the game 3-0. He threw just 101 pitches, 69 for strikes. This was his 71st start. In the previous seventy, his longest outing […]  ( 25 min )

Dustin May of the Cardinals retired the first 18 Padres he faced. After striking out just two batters through the first five innings, he struck out the side in the sixth. The Cardinals lead 3-0 as the Padres come to bat in the seventh inning. Update: Fernando Tatis Jr. walks leading off the seventh inning. […]  ( 25 min )

Pitcher Ron Marinaccio of the Padres received a three-game suspension for hitting Gunnar Henderson of the Orioles on Saturday. Michael Hill, Major League Baseball’s senior vice president for on-field operations, concluded that Marinaccio intentionally hit Henderson with the pitch. Padres manager Craig Stammen was suspended one game and fined an undisclosed amount in connection with […]  ( 25 min )

There is a lack of good pitching matchups today, but the Rays do visit the Dodgers, two very good teams going head to head. The Dodgers offense averages the second highest runs per game in the majors, 5.36 R/G. They pitching and defense allow the lowest runs per game in the majors at 3.40, so […]  ( 25 min )

Every Monday Baseball Musings compares the offense of the current season to the previous season through the same number of full weeks. Through eleven full weeks, MLB game produced 8.97 runs per game compared to 8.62 runs per game in 2025. Three true outcomes are all up, with walks adding 0.5 batters reaching base per […]  ( 25 min )

The Log5 Method yields these top projected hit averages versus starting pitchers: 0.310, 0.672 — Carson Kelly batting vs. Michael Lorenzen. 0.309, 0.672 — Pete Crow-Armstrong batting vs. Michael Lorenzen. 0.306, 0.715 — Brandon Marsh batting vs. Ryan Gusto. 0.304, 0.681 — Nico Hoerner batting vs. Michael Lorenzen. 0.300, 0.666 — Alex Bregman batting vs. […]  ( 26 min )

Shohei Ohtani moved to the top of the Baseball Musings Batter Rankings drawing two walks in a 6-4 White Sox win. That was actually a weak performance in a fourteen game tear in which he is hitting .418/.522/.782 with eight multi-hit games. Yordan Alvarez of the Astros posted a one for four in a 4-0 […]  ( 26 min )

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

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

Top stories 06/15/2026#outlook a { padding:0; } .ExternalClass { width:100%; } .ExternalClass, .ExternalClass p, .ExternalClass span, .ExternalClass font, .ExternalClass td, .ExternalClass div { line-height: 100%; } table td { border-collapse: collapse; mso-line-height-rule: exactly; } .editable.image { font-size: 0 !important; line-height: 0 !important; } .nl2go_preheader { display: none !important; mso-hide:all !important; mso-line-height-rule: exactly; visibility: hidden !important; line-height: 0px !important; font-size: 0px !important; } body { width:100% !important; -webkit-text-size-adjust:100%; -ms-text-size-adjust:100%; margin:0; padding:0; } img { outline:none; text-decoration:none; -ms-interpolation-mode: bicubic; } a img { border:none; } table { border-collapse:collapse; mso-ta…  ( 6 min )

Americans United for Separation of Church and State /* CLIENT-SPECIFIC STYLES */ body, table, td, a{-webkit-text-size-adjust: 100%; -ms-text-size-adjust: 100%;} /* Prevent WebKit and Windows mobile changing default text sizes */ table, td{mso-table-lspace: 0pt; mso-table-rspace: 0pt;} /* Remove spacing between tables in Outlook 2007 and up */ img{-ms-interpolation-mode: bicubic;} /* Allow smoother rendering of resized image in Internet Explorer */ /* RESET STYLES */ img{border: 0; height: auto; line-height: 100%; outline: none; text-decoration: none;} table{border-collapse: collapse !important;} body{height: 100% !important; margin: 0 auto !important; padding: 0 !important; width: 100% !important;} /* iOS BLUE LINKS */ a[x-apple-data-detectors] { …  ( 2 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 around 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 signed later this week ‒ hasn’t been rele…  ( 14 min )

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

Welcome new subscribers!

Morning all.

The fact that there’s still a 60-day window on the table for nuclear negotiations doesn’t really inspire hope.  ( 89 min )

The less we talk about Trumpstock, the better, but there’s one grift to which we should pay attention.  ( 84 min )

Donald Trump’s 80th birthday weekend didn’t all go well for him, at home or abroad. His name finally got pulled off the Kennedy Center early Saturday, after lots of effort to halt and obscure the removal. And word got out that the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool that the president desperately wants credit for beautifying was already taken over by algae. Then there’s the matter of his dumbass and deadly Iran invasion ending in his thorough embarrassment. But, UFC Freedom 250, the bizarre fight card that Trump hosted on the damn South Lawn of the damn White House, allegedly to celebrate our country’s sestercentennial but really to glorify and enrich himself and his lousy rich friends, went off without much of a hitch. I’m not sure, as the administration and UFC boss Dana White would want me to believe, that my Uncle Pat lost his leg while storming the beach at Normandy so I and 80,000 others could drink bottomless cans of zero-sugar energy drinks on federal land while guys beat the holy hell out of each other. But the bouts, all of which ended in KO’s, weren't made any better or worse for their setting. Trump and his UFC pals made endless attempts to link the pugilistic proceedings to patriotism, each effort more hamfisted than the last. The hamfisticuffs peaked with featherweight Secretary of State Marco Rubio comparing hosting the fight card to putting a man on the moon.  ( 25 min )

This was the moment when Gianni Infantino, the grubby little cash slag who runs FIFA, could have made himself a noble and even admirable human being in the eyes of a world that absolutely knows he would lick an alley clean for 10 bucks. And of course, he passed on it because he checked his Venmo and nothing new was in the queue. All he had to do was announce that Cape Verde's 0-0 draw with Spain (yeah, you read that right) was actually a win, and the Tubaroes Azuis (a cool name on its face) would be awarded the three points that would have come with a victory. Because it was. An enormous victory. Bigger in its way than the Knicks winning the NBA title. In fact, something far closer to your local community college's team winning the NBA title. Instead, and the standings continue to prove this no matter how many times we refresh the page, all they got was the traditional one point for not losing their nation's first ever World Cup match, which came against one of the favorites to win the whole thing. That's a miscarriage of justice of the first magnitude, and Infantino is still, well, you know.  ( 22 min )

It's hard to explain what it's been like walking around New York City over the past two weeks. Even if the Knicks don't specifically come up, the spirits are high. Knicks gear and colors are everywhere, the people are smiling, the mayor is Muslim, the bagels are Jewish, etc. During the actual Finals games, every establishment with a TV was completely packed out, full of people losing their minds in communal celebration of the team and the city. I watched Game 2 in a Brooklyn sports bar that was so full they had to bring in a bouncer. The people were literally spilling out of these places and taking the party into the streets. I watched Game 3 from the post-operation room in a hospital after having an ablation procedure, where the Jamaican nurses in Knicks colors were losing their minds at …  ( 22 min )

It is easy to get lost in the scope of things when it comes to Sir Lewis Hamilton. There are the championships (seven, depending on how you count) and the race wins (106) and the longevity (19 years and counting), and his victory at the 2026 Barcelona Grand Prix this Sunday only added to that already unwieldy list of records. Lewis Hamilton's first race win in a Ferrari! Lewis Hamilton, age 41, adding his name to the list of oldest F1 race winners! But put aside the legacy for one moment, and just focus on the race itself. If there was a romantic quality to Hamilton's last victory, which took place nearly two years ago at Silverstone—a masterclass but also a miracle; a frantic wet weather classic at his home race; a welcome surprise—Barcelona, by comparison, was frighteningly mundane. In terms of the race situation, the only confounding factor was the sweltering heat; it was also Barcelona, which may as well be permanently subtitled "frighteningly mundane." Fortune was kind to Hamilton throughout, but only as much as it is to most race winners. And he won anyway. Or, in other words, the greatest surprise of Hamilton's victory was that it was barely a surprise at all. That would have been unfathomable during the ground-effect era and especially during Hamilton's miserable, miserable, miserable first year at Ferrari, which felt so much like an omen of the end. But given a new set of regulations and a new race engineer and the (presumably) second-best car on the grid, Hamilton has, like a perennial, somehow come back into bloom. After two consecutive P2 finishes and Mercedes' power-unit reliability issues, it was only a matter of time before Hamilton would get a victory of his own. And here, in Barcelona, was the proof: Lewis Hamilton is doing Lewis Hamilton things again.  ( 25 min )

Soccer is all about momentum. The distinguishing aspect of its competitive structure is that it's unsegmented, with a simple, 15-minute halftime bisecting two 45-minute blocks. The neophyte might see a goalless desert stippled with oases distributed seemingly at random and out of nowhere, but the joy of watching soccer is that the shifting sands of the game operate on the invisible logic of momentum. As the 20 field players fight and scrap for every meter of turf, patterns of play emerge, and eventually, things make sense. Until the 2026 World Cup, that is. This World Cup has seen the debut of mandatory three-minute hydration breaks, interspersed at the midpoint of each half, at the 22nd and 67th minutes. While the breaks themselves are not new, their ubiquity is. The new rule was rolled out following last summer's infernal Club World Cup, a dress rehearsal for the real thing played in oven-like conditions that dozens of participants criticized as straight-up unhealthful. In that tournament, referees were deputized to stop matches in order to give everyone water breaks if the weather was too punishing. This time around, every single match will stop twice, whether it's 71 degrees and breezy in Santa Clara or 101 and punishingly humid in Houston. Keeping players safe in extreme temperatures is important, and competitions and organizers must adapt as climate change makes summer sporting events increasingly dangerous. That said, if you think FIFA is doing this for any other reason than to make money, you likely are the sort of person who calls it the "FIFA World Cup" at every turn and cheers when your favorite brand makes a cool commercial. In practice, the hydration breaks serve as timeouts against which broadcasters can sell ads. I have watched the first week's worth of games on Fox, which cuts away for a long block of commercials every time.  ( 19 min )

Victor Wembanyama is maybe just kind of a corny guy. I think we are all going to have to get accustomed to that. His taste in reading material could scarcely be more embarrassing shy of, like, pickup-artist instruction manuals. He seems to go out of his way to cultivate a public Man of Sophistication image, which is among other things hilariously at odds with what he's reading. He can be tediously smug when things are going well—the "I'm in your head!" thing from Game 4 will endure like a tattoo on his forehead forever—and the rest of the time has developed an ugly penchant for dirty shit that is unbefitting a world-class athlete and, again, makes for an unflattering contrast with the whole Serene Warrior Monk thing. Two weeks ago the 2026 NBA Finals seemed like they might be his coronatio…  ( 29 min )

The story of the 2026 Stanley Cup champion Carolina Hurricanes is that of a team that made a lot of smart decisions over a period of many years and was eventually rewarded. Sebastian Aho, drafted in the second round in 2015, has been the foundational forward ever since they started making the playoffs as likeable upstarts back in 2018-19. Head coach Rod Brind'Amour, whose first year on the job coincided with the beginning of their playoff appearance streak, has spearheaded and maintained an effective and attractive style of play in which Carolina consistently outworks their opposition to earn the majority of a game's chances. And while there was no obvious path through the second- and third-round roadblocks that the Canes continuously hit, the more recent moves that they made—signing Nikol…  ( 20 min )

Despite its apparent ubiquity, the career of "online influencer" is so young that the first generation of people to use that title are not only still working, but still young. Ingrid Nilsen was one of the very first beauty and lifestyle YouTubers, and the work she did in her late teens and early 20s created the blueprint for what the industry has become today. A few of her highlights: She was the first online creator to work with CoverGirl, and she interviewed President Obama. Her coming-out video in 2015 went mega viral, and she invented Vlogmas, which is a daily vlogging challenge still used by thousands of creators every December. She had more than 3 million YouTube subscribers, and in 2020, she quit.  ( 15 min )

The expanded field at the 2026 World Cup is, from a competitive standpoint, a disaster. Upping the team count from 32 to 48 has robbed the best part of any World Cup, the group stage, of its famous intensity and tension. Even an extra round of knockout games won't salvage things, given that eight third-place teams will qualify for that, and there surely won't be eight good third-place teams. The expansion of the field is a blatant money grab by FIFA, and it's a real disappointment to see the way that the World Cup has been warped by greed. Now try telling that to Curacao, which scored its first-ever World Cup goal in its first-ever World Cup match against none other than Germany. Try telling that team, and that fanbase, that this is all terrible and bad for the sport: https://youtu.be/taI5dp_0C0Y?si=aLEEOOvKbRtzkl2S&t=105  ( 22 min )

Aren’t you happy to see our Monday crossword? This week's puzzle was constructed by Patrick Maher, and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. Patrick is a software engineer and sporadic crossword constructor who lives in Manhattan. His hobbies include having two young children and doing whatever they want. He still plans on watching the Jets this year for some reason. 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 )

For a team that was known for playing yesterday's hockey for a decade and being punished regularly for it, the Carolina Hurricanes played a lot like a historically elite team. You just didn't get to see a lot of it because they played so few games, which is proof if proof were needed that the historically elite thing was very real. The Canes won their first Stanley Cup in two decades with a clinical and almost bloodless 3-0 beatdown of the thoroughly gassed Vegas Golden Knights, and in many ways it was their most dominant performance of them all. All, of course, being 19 games, the fewest number of games needed by a champion since the 1988 Edmonton Gretzkys. After four bizarre games to start the series, Carolina controlled the Knights in Game 5 and utterly smothered and shrink-wrapped them…  ( 19 min )

Royals GBU from a disappointing weekend @media (max-width: 1024px) { .typography .pullquote-align-left, .typography.editor .pullquote-align-left, .typography .pullquote-align-right, .typography.editor .pullquote-align-right, .typography .pullquote-align-wide, .typography.editor .pullquote-align-wide, .typography .pullquote-align-center, .typography.editor .pullquote-align-center { float: none; margin: 0 auto; width: 100%; max-width: 100%; } } @media all and (-ms-high-contrast: none), (-ms-high-contrast: active) { .typography .markup table.image-wrapper img, .typography.editor .markup table.image-wrapper img, .typography .markup table.kindle-wrapper img, .typography.editor .markup table.kindle-wrapper img { max-width: 550px; } } @media (min-wi…  ( 13 min )

96 *{box-sizing:border-box}body{margin:0;padding:0}a[x-apple-data-detectors]{color:inherit!important;text-decoration:inherit!important}#MessageViewBody a{color:inherit;text-decoration:none}p{line-height:inherit}.desktop_hide,.desktop_hide table{mso-hide:all;display:none;max-height:0;overflow:hidden}.image_block img+div{display:none}sub,sup{font-size:75%;line-height:0} @media (max-width:660px){.row-content{width:100%!important}.stack .column{width:100%;display:block}.mobile_hide{min-height:0;max-height:0;max-width:0;display:none;overflow:hidden;font-size:0}.desktop_hide,.desktop_hide table{display:table!important;max-height:none!important}.row-1 .column-2 .block-1.paragraph_block td.pad>div{text-align:center!important;font-size:12px!important}.row-1 .column-2 .block-1.paragraph_block td.…  ( 2 min )

YOU'RE INVITED: Will the midterms happen? Your election questions, answered96 :root { color-scheme: light; supported-color-schemes: light; } body { margin: 0; padding: 0; min-width: 100%!important; -ms-text-size-adjust: 100% !important; -webkit-transform: scale(1) !important; -webkit-text-size-adjust: 100% !important; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased !important; } .body { word-wrap: normal; word-spacing:normal; } table.mso { width: 100%; border-collapse: collapse; padding: 0; table-layout: fixed; } img { border: 0; outline: none; } table { mso-table-lspace: 0px; mso-table-rspace: 0px; } td, a, span { mso-line-height-rule: exactly; } #root [x-apple-data-detectors=true], a[x-apple-data-detectors=true], #MessageViewBody a { color: inherit !important; text-decoration: …  ( 5 min )

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

This One Is Nothing But Knicks, Baby96 :root { color-scheme: light; supported-color-schemes: light; } body { margin: 0; padding: 0; min-width: 100%!important; -ms-text-size-adjust: 100% !important; -webkit-transform: scale(1) !important; -webkit-text-size-adjust: 100% !important; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased !important; } .body { word-wrap: normal; word-spacing:normal; } table.mso { width: 100%; border-collapse: collapse; padding: 0; table-layout: fixed; } img { border: 0; outline: none; } table { mso-table-lspace: 0px; mso-table-rspace: 0px; } td, a, span { mso-line-height-rule: exactly; } #root [x-apple-data-detectors=true], a[x-apple-data-detectors=true], #MessageViewBody a { color: inherit !important; text-decoration: inherit !important; font-size: inherit …  ( 8 min )

Jeffrey Lee did not ask the Supreme Court to spare his life. He just asked to be killed by a less barbaric method of execution. The post The Supreme Court’s Jeffrey Lee Decision Says a Lot About the Death Penalty appeared first on Balls and Strikes.  ( 7 min )

The Royals have acquired right-hander Connor Seabold from the Blue Jays, according to announcements from both clubs. The Jays, who designated Seabold for assignment last week, receive minor league righty Denis Samudio and cash considerations. Kansas City transferred righty Carlos Estévez to the 60-day injured list in a corresponding 40-man move. Seabold is out of […]  ( 7 min )

Plus, Ms. Rachel goes to Washington to end family detentions

The denial of Alabama's emergency application in Lee has two possible explanations. But because it was unexplained, it's not clear which was doing the work.

JD Vance is famously addicted to social media, to a degree that one wonders if he has any job duties as vice president at all. It’s almost certain that he’s well aware that the late Charlie Kirk has not become the movement martyr MAGA hoped for. On the contrary, the memory of the Turning Point USA founder has become a joke on social media. The cringeworthy efforts to deify Kirk are irresistible bait for online jokesters, who spent months turning his image and even an AI-generated song about him into fuel for irony-drenched memes mocking the deceased right-wing leader. Trying to shove Kirk on the public backfired for MAGA, causing most people to rebel with mockery. But even though most Republicans have quietly moved on, Vance is still hoping to get enough juice out Kirk’s death to sell book…  ( 8 min )

Rookie catcher Rodolfo Duran of the Padres posted a two for four with a double and a walk on Sunday, helping his team beat the Orioles 5-2. That raised his BA to .176. While that may make it seem like he hasn’t done much in his 42 plate appearances, his OBP is a decent .333 […]  ( 25 min )

Paul Skenes in many ways pitched better than Max Meyer on Sunday afternoon. They came in with nearly identical ERAs, with Skenes pitching better by Meyer winning more. That was the script today and as both went six innings but Skenes allowing two runs and Meyer one. Skenes allowed fewer hits and walks and struck […]  ( 25 min )

The games start at 12:15 with Marlins Max Meyer taking on Pirates Paul Skenes. The two own nearly identical ERAs, Meyer at 2.85, Skenes at 2.84. Skenes pitched better in terms of three-true outcomes. Both have six wins, but Meyer has yet to record a loss. The Marlins are 10-4 in Meyer’s starts, the Pirates […]  ( 25 min )

The Log5 Method yields these top projected hit averages versus starting pitchers: 0.306, 0.715 — Yandy Diaz batting at Grayson Rodriguez. 0.305, 0.722 — Jacob Wilson batting vs. Tomoyuki Sugano. 0.292, 0.687 — Dominic Canzone batting at Miles Mikolas. 0.287, 0.718 — Luis Arraez batting vs. Ryan Rolison. 0.286, 0.708 — Jung Hoo Lee batting […]  ( 27 min )

Shohei Ohtani moved into first place in the Baseball Musings Batter Rankings. He homered and walked three times in a 7-1 win over the White Sox, Chicago falling 1/2 game behind Cleveland in the AL Central. Looks like Ohtani’s knee injury the other day was indeed minor. His teammate, Max Muncy, posted the highest game […]  ( 26 min )

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There are still 20 argued cases awaiting action, with 19 opinions expected. Also: Talking with TPM about Trump's anti-trans attacks. And, for paid subscribers: Closing my tabs.

96 Weekly Scorecard: Jun. 6 - 12, 2026 @media only screen and (max-width: 620px) { table.body { width: 100%; min-width: 100%; } table.body .content { padding: 0 !important; } table.body .container { padding: 0 !important; width: 100% !important; } table.body .main { border-spacing: 10px 0 !important; border-left-width: 0 !important; border-radius: 0 !important; border-right-width: 0 !important; } table.body .img-responsive { height: auto !important; max-width: 100% !important; width: auto !important; } } @media all { .ExternalClass { width: 100%; } .ExternalClass, .ExternalClass p, .ExternalClass span, .ExternalClass font, .ExternalClass td, .ExternalClass div { line-height: 100%; } …  ( 11 min )

96 House: Here for It, #362 @media only screen and (max-width: 620px) { table.body { width: 100%; min-width: 100%; } table.body .content { padding: 0 !important; } table.body .container { padding: 0 !important; width: 100% !important; } table.body .main { border-spacing: 10px 0 !important; border-left-width: 0 !important; border-radius: 0 !important; border-right-width: 0 !important; } table.body .img-responsive { height: auto !important; max-width: 100% !important; width: auto !important; } } @media all { .ExternalClass { width: 100%; } .ExternalClass, .ExternalClass p, .ExternalClass span, .ExternalClass font, .ExternalClass td, .ExternalClass div { line-height: 100%; } .apple-lin…  ( 9 min )

There were a number of intriguing discoveries to be made from the first round of matches in Group D of the World Cup, or as it is coming to be known, the Group Of Deaf. Such was the torrent of nearly hysterical praise directed at the United States team after its nearly ritualistic beating of Paraguay Friday night. No U.S. team had ever been so demonstratively superior in World Cup history, and no team had the level of semi-journalistic and marketing hysteria driving home that point. In other words, a 4-1 victory has rarely looked so 4-1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXD1_mhODBU But the problem of making judgments based on one match worth of data is that it provides less useful information than one thinks. For instance, what if the quiet reveal from that match is actually that Paraguay isn't very good at all. To be sure, the Americans looked and played as though they were physically more imposing and demonstrably quicker both on and off the ball, almost as if the game were too easy for them. But we know from our reading that the U.S. is typically more devoted to grind-it-out games that are hard on the eye as well as the scoreboard, so it is wise to take their Day 2 victory with the proper amount of salt. Say, a metric ton.  ( 20 min )

Days of humidity had finally broken with a thunderstorm the night before. Brazilians were all over midtown, getting ready for their World Cup game. Puerto Rican and Pride flags were everywhere. "Knicks in five" was no longer a shibboleth or even a prediction; it was now the city's standard greeting. It was a glorious Saturday to be out in New York. The watch parties had started organically. Someone projecting the game onto the side of a building, or a deli tuning its window LED screen to show ABC instead of pictures of sandwiches. Near me, on Smith Street, one man had started by putting a TV in the back of his parked car and setting up a few lawn chairs; by Game 5 it had become the neighborhood spot. Every bar in the city was full, it seemed. Every official watch party sold out within seconds. But if you wanted to watch the game with others, you didn't need a plan. You just went outside. It was everywhere. And when it was over and it was time to party, you were outside already. Here, some photos from the wire of Knicks fans reveling, and occasionally destroying. There were five assaults, according to the NYPD, and 63 arrests. That's tragic and detestable and embarrassing. But mostly it was joyful out there. It's often surprisingly easy, in a huge city, to feel alone. That wasn't possible this month. NYC had a vibe I can only really compare to the 2020 election results coming in, and the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, and the 2003 blackout, and the days after 9/11. A sense that we were in this thing together. This was about the Knicks, but the lesson was that sharing it had been the entire point all along. All you had to do was go outside.  ( 43 min )

Gotham's true heroes, its sanitation brigades, are still sweeping up the dazed, delirious, and confused bodies from the streets of the city, and the clean-up will take them well into this evening. Then they'll have to do it all over again Thursday after the obligatory semi-violent boozer disguised as a parade. These New York Knicks are finally done with being the Knicks of yore, and the city that has come to rely on them as a work in perpetual progress, regress, and occasional undress, has one less thing to rely upon as enduring truth. That loss of identity begins after the parade, after approximately 50 gazumpty-skillion people clog and foul the streets of Manhattan to salute the logical inheritors of the crowns last worn by Walt Frazier, Willis Reed, Bill Bradley, Harthorne Wingo, and Red Holzman. The half-century and change of often performative suffering has finally ended, and Knicks fans finally have a team worthy of their occasionally obnoxious hubris. Now they have to figure out what to do with it, and they are not reliable right now when it comes to figuring that out because they are still on the post-coital cigarette portion of their new journey. They beat the San Antonio Spurs for the final time Saturday night, 94-90, to win the 80th NBA championship, and they did so in the most New York kind of way: by taking early body shots from the younger and springier Spurs and then clinically exposing San Antonio's collective naivete time and again. Through know-how, defensive pressure and new statue-in-training Jalen Brunson, they made the Spurs and allegedly indomitable centerpiece Victor Wembanyama grapple with and eventually submit to their own too-new-for-school demons. The Knicks had done the same things the same ways in Games 1 through 4, and the only reason they needed five games instead of the bare minimum is because Donald Trump attended the third.  ( 24 min )

With a 94-90 win in Game 5, yet another doughty comeback and superlative Jalen Brunson takeover, the New York Knicks are NBA Champions. This is an unsettling and unusual thing to say, because they are the New York Knicks.  Knicks fandom has, historically, been about feeling bad. But feeling bad together is still a communal experience. Much of the conversation in New York these past two months has involved proving and sharing fan bona fides, and given their track record, that takes the form of bragging about all the ways the Knicks have made us feel bad. It was a game of one-upmanship that everybody lost. The Charles Smith game. Oh yeah? How about the Reggie Miller game? Oh yeah? I lived through Eddy Curry. Oh yeah? Well, I believed in Frank Ntilikina. Oh yeah? I thought Kevin Knox was going to be a superstar. That sort of thing. (I don't believe in omens, but Knox and his Fortnite suit might've been both the low point and a portent. Take a look at this photo of him and their other draftee that 2018 evening—now the longest tenured Knick—and their jersey numbers.) Phil Jackson once said of his time with the Bulls that Madison Square Garden crowds were among the easiest to play against because of their pessimism. Fear was not very far below the surface; even a loud, seemingly confident crowd needed the smallest amount of stress to crack completely. They had seen it too many times, and expected it, and got it. Even now, the thought of the organ priming fans to chant "defense" inspires Nam-style flashbacks to all the times the Knicks needed a stop that they would not get. It was an unpleasant way to live. It felt bad.  ( 26 min )

Congrats to all Knicks fans. This a team for the ages........

The Royals have placed first baseman Vinnie Pasquantino on the 10-day injured list with a right hamate fracture, per a team announcement. Outfielder John Rave is being recalled in a corresponding active roster move. Pasquantino suffered the injury in the fifth inning of yesterday’s 8-7 loss to the Astros. Facing Houston’s Mike Burrows, Pasquantino swung […]  ( 10 min )

write a bit of Elisp that provides him with a flat list of files matching a regular expression in a specified directory structure. His post has the code so you can see how he did it but it’s mostly what you’d expect: after some setup, he calls directory-file-recursively to gather the list of files that he then passes on to Dired. It’s a pretty nice system but after using it for a while, Prot realized that when he was dealing with large directories a bit of initial filtering of the most recently modified files would be useful. He solved that by adapting his previous code to do the filtering. He does it by taking the list of files from his first function and running them through seq-filter to get the files he’s interested in. Again, all the code is in his post but Prot says he won’t be updating the post so you should check out his configuration for the latest version. If you frequently generate Dired listings and would prefer to deal with a flat list of the files without worrying about what directory they’re in, take a look at Prot’s post for an excellent solution.  ( 5 min )

Wow, I’m so good at overcomplicating things, I already made you go “huh?!” with the title alone! I have some mad skillz! On with the show: In the last couple of weeks, I slowly improved and tinkered with my Linux environment (Kubuntu). I’m not sure if it was a single thing that nudged me to do that, but between installing the latest version of Harper and switching to Vivaldi with its great features I keep discovering, I also started using denote-journal. Denote-journal, from the prolific Prot who also made Denote, was something I wanted to try for a while. I didn’t really have a good reason to, because I’ve been using Journelly for a long time, and on my Mac or Linux desktop, I’d call a capture template that would append to the file, adding my additional entries. But I always had one major…  ( 4 min )

I've released blogmore.el v5.3.0. This is a pretty small release but adds a command I realised I'd forgotten to add a couple of releases ago. Now that BlogMore has the concept of a post series, and now that blogmore.el lets you add and remove a series from a post, it makes sense that I'd want to link to a series in a post from time to time, like I can and do with categories and tags. So v5.3.0 adds a blogmore-link-series command. It can also be found in the transient menu.  ( 1 min )

Emacs features have a discoverability problem, and we’re chipping away at it one demo at a time. The years since I wrote the last one of these have yielded several more surprising and useful finds, so it’s time again for another “batteries included” report. This is the third in a series of articles highlighting useful but lesser-known features included in Emacs. Parts 1 & 2: Batteries included with Emacs More batteries included with emacs “Lesser-known” is a subjective judgment. Roughly, it means that at the time of writing, I have seen these features mentioned fewer than five times – and often never – in the past two decades of dipping in and out of online Emacs discourse. Some of the features covered in past entries are well known and often recommended today. I claim no credit. If yo…  ( 21 min )

writing I have been thinking of Separate Writing and Formatting. This is an interesting discourse on the need to separate the acts of writing from the act of preparing to present. I agree with the premise. The Notion of a Canvas Conceptually I look on the task of writing as starting with a blank canvas. The words then come in and fill the page. I don’t think of how it will look on the final document. Most of the time, I don’t care for the output. It is going to remain a text document in the Org format or Markdown format, depending on what I need. The Different Types of Writing I do two kinds of writing. The first kind is stream of consciousness writing. I have some idea of the topic and I type. I don’t know the topic completely, or don’t know how I feel about it. It is the act of writing t…

Plus, solar beat coal for the first time in US history

There's never been a better time to get WIRED. /* resets */ p {margin:0px;margin-bottom:0px;padding:0px;} table {border-spacing:0;} table, td {border-collapse:collapse;} * {-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased;-moz-osx-font-smoothing: grayscale;text-size-adjust: none !important;-ms-text-size-adjust: none !important;-webkit-text-size-adjust: none !important;} /* end resets */ /* outlook / hotmail */ .ExternalClass{width:100%;} table, td {mso-table-lspace:0pt;mso-table-rspace:0pt;} img{-ms-interpolation-mode:bicubic;} .ReadMsgBody {width: 100%;} /* end outlook / hotmail */ /* gmail */ u + #body a {color: inherit;text-decoration: none;font-size: inherit;font-family: inherit;font-weight: inherit;line-height: inherit;} img + div {display: none!important;} /* end gmail */ /* ios */ b…  ( 2 min )

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

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

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

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 )

The Guardians lost Jose Ramirez indefinitely due to a broken bone in his hand: Ramírez sustained a fractured left hamate bone leading off the fifth inning in the Guardians’ 3-1 win over the Detroit Tigers. The team didn’t update the condition of the 33-year-old until after the game, when manager Stephen Vogt confirmed the break. […]  ( 25 min )

Yoshinobu Yamamoto of the Dodges almost tied a record in his perfect game bid on Saturday: Dating to Yamamoto’s previous start, against the Angels, he retired 45 straight batters, one shy of the major league record set by Yusmeiro Petit in 2014. LATimes.com He lost the perfect game in the eighth on a Mookie Betts error […]  ( 25 min )

The Yankees send Cam Schlittler against the Blue Jays and Kevin Gausman in a mid-afternoon game. Schlittler started 14 games this season, the same as in 2025, his rookie year. He lowered his ERA by over a run, pitched nine more innings, cut his walks by more than half, and cut his home runs in […]  ( 26 min )

Jacob Misiorowski posted a game score of 100 in his one-hitter against the Phillies Friday night. That was the 10th game score of 100 this century. Max Scherzer holds the high score of 104 with a 17 K no-hitter on 10/3/2015. Clayton Kershaw posted a 102 with a 15 K no-hitter on 6/8/2014. Matt Cain […]  ( 25 min )

The Log5 Method yields these top projected hit averages versus starting pitchers: 0.354, 0.748 — Jacob Wilson batting vs. Kyle Freeland. 0.332, 0.709 — Carlos Cortes batting vs. Kyle Freeland. 0.328, 0.706 — Shea Langeliers batting vs. Kyle Freeland. 0.306, 0.683 — Nick Kurtz batting vs. Kyle Freeland. 0.304, 0.671 — Henry Bolte batting vs. […]  ( 27 min )

Yordan Alvarez of the Astros posted the best game score of the day, an 81, to move into third place in the Baseball Musings Batter Rankings. He went three for five with two home runs, both hit in a nine run first inning, Alvarez driving in six of the runs with an early two-run shot […]  ( 26 min )

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After feeling discomfort during a throwing session, Royals left-hander Cole Ragans is headed for testing, manager Matt Quatraro told reporters, including Jaylon Thompson of the Kansas City Star. Ragans is working his way back from an elbow impingement. His rehab process has already been paused once due to renewed elbow stiffness. “Cole woke up yesterday, […]  ( 8 min )

The illegal effort to put Donald Trump's name on the Kennedy Center has always been a metaphor — but, this weekend, it became a story of how we get through this.

Many thanks to those who've stepped up for our Independence Day subscription drive!

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Trump’s moves to erect voting hurdles face race against the clock96 :root { color-scheme: light; supported-color-schemes: light; } body { margin: 0; padding: 0; min-width: 100%!important; -ms-text-size-adjust: 100% !important; -webkit-transform: scale(1) !important; -webkit-text-size-adjust: 100% !important; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased !important; } .body { word-wrap: normal; word-spacing:normal; } table.mso { width: 100%; border-collapse: collapse; padding: 0; table-layout: fixed; } img { border: 0; outline: none; } table { mso-table-lspace: 0px; mso-table-rspace: 0px; } td, a, span { mso-line-height-rule: exactly; } #root [x-apple-data-detectors=true], a[x-apple-data-detectors=true], #MessageViewBody a { color: inherit !important; text-decoration: inherit !i…  ( 10 min )

Proof resistance works

96 We’re replaying the Civil War, but the turf this time is the US government p{ margin:10px 0; padding:0; } table{ border-collapse:collapse; } h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6{ display:block; margin:0; padding:0; } img,a img{ border:0; height:auto; outline:none; text-decoration:none; } body,#bodyTable,#bodyCell{ height:100%; margin:0; padding:0; width:100%; } .mcnPreviewText{ display:none !important; } #outlook a{ padding:0; } img{ -ms-interpolation-mode:bicubic; } table{ mso-table-lspace:0pt; mso-table-rspace:0pt; } .ReadMsgBody{ width:100%; } .ExternalClass{ width:100%; } p,a,li,td,blockquote{ mso-line-height-rule:exactl…  ( 5 min )

What’s Really Going on With All the Celebrities Trying to Pinkwash AI#outlook a { padding:0; } .ExternalClass { width:100%; } .ExternalClass, .ExternalClass p, .ExternalClass span, .ExternalClass font, .ExternalClass td, .ExternalClass div { line-height: 100%; } table td { border-collapse: collapse; mso-line-height-rule: exactly; } .editable.image { font-size: 0 !important; line-height: 0 !important; } .nl2go_preheader { display: none !important; mso-hide:all !important; mso-line-height-rule: exactly; visibility: hidden !important; line-height: 0px !important; font-size: 0px !important; } body { width:100% !important; -webkit-text-size-adjust:100%; -ms-text-size-adjust:100%; margin:0; padding:0; } img { outline:none; text-decoration:none; -ms-interpolation-mode: bicubic; } a img { border:n…  ( 12 min )

By pure coincidence, it's six years ago tomorrow that I finally, after years of running Emacs with a bright white background, moved to using a dark theme. It took a little bit of getting used to but eventually I got very comfortable with it, and since then have run everything I can in a dark mode too. On occasion, in the last year or so, I've had this urge to move to something darker. Also, in part, it's an urge to change things up a little. I felt it was time for a refresh of how my Emacs looks. I've tried a few themes, but none have ever stuck. When trying them I've run into various issues: It just didn't look nice at all Too many other things I use in Emacs didn't get themed It looked like there was going to be too much work to do to really theme things well It caused Emacs to crash1 …  ( 3 min )

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

Jacob Misiorowski pitched a gem against the Phillies. He allowed a single to Kyle Schwarber leading off the fourth inning, then removed him with a double play. That was all the Phillies offense as Misorowski struck out fifteen without issuing a walk in pitching a shutout in a 6-0 Brewers win. It is the 56th […]  ( 25 min )

Ryan Weathers squares off against Trey Yesavage as the Yankees visit the Blue Jays. Weathers owns a 2-4 record despite a 3.86 ERA. He had one hard-luck loss when he pitched well and the Yankees did not score. What hurt him is three high scoring game for the Yankees offense in which he did not […]  ( 25 min )

The Log5 Method yields these top projected hit averages versus starting pitchers: 0.312, 0.695 — Andrew Vaughn batting vs. Andrew Painter. 0.309, 0.699 — Jackson Chourio batting vs. Andrew Painter. 0.295, 0.679 — Christian Yelich batting vs. Andrew Painter. 0.295, 0.674 — William Contreras batting vs. Andrew Painter. 0.294, 0.696 — Nick Gonzales batting vs. […]  ( 26 min )

Popular music history is filled with legendary songs that changed culture, launched careers, and defined generations. Yet every so often, something completely unexpected happens. A song that sounds more like a joke than a serious recording suddenly captures the public’s imagination and climbs to the top of the charts. These novelty songs often arrive out...  ( 7 min )

Music has always attracted larger-than-life personalities, mysterious deaths, hidden messages, and strange coincidences. Combine those ingredients with passionate fan bases and the result is inevitable: conspiracy theories. Some are harmless fun. Others have become so deeply embedded in popular culture that millions of people still discuss them decades later. The fascinating thing about music conspiracies...  ( 12 min )

The Royals placed starter Seth Lugo on the seven-day concussion injured list this evening. Righty Eli Morgan is up from Triple-A Omaha to provide an extra bullpen arm for the time being. It was a scary scene on Wednesday when Lugo was struck in the face by a comebacker hit by Brandon Nimmo. The ball came off […]  ( 8 min )

When we call dired from Lisp, we can pass it a list of files instead of a directory. This gives us a fully fledged Dired buffer for those files. My most common use-case is to produce flat listing, so that I do not have to go searching in exactly which directory some file is (e.g. in the Downloads folder there is some zip archive that I downloaded with a bunch of files in a complex structure). A flat Dired listing For a while now I have been using my own command to create a Dired buffer from the current directory (which can always be updated on demand with M-x cd). It is prot-dired-search-flat-list. Here is the code: (defvar prot-dired-regexp-history nil "Minibuffer history of `prot-dired-regexp-prompt'.") (defun prot-dired-regexp-prompt () (let ((default (car prot-dired-regexp-histor…  ( 2 min )

Every so often I get the urge to change how Emacs looks. Ever since I finally fell to the dark side, my Emacs has stayed looking pretty much the same. I like how it looks, but I do keep having this urge to find a darker theme, and to also make things just a wee bit more minimal. At one point I was very much about, and in favour of, having as much information as possible in the mode line. Eventually I realised I didn't use that much and tried to declutter somewhat, mostly cleaning up minor mode information with diminish. Even then though, I had this feeling that there was still more information in the mode line than I really needed. So, just now, as an experiment, I've decided to start fairly clean. I've dropped powerline and instead decided to have a play with mood-line. Rather than use on…  ( 2 min )

announcing a couple of new Emacs modes for AsciiDoc. In the usual Batsov way, he’s significantly improved the support for AsciiDoc in Emacs. He loves AsciiDoc but found it hard to use in Emacs because the support was so bad. I’ve never used AsciiDoc so I don’t know why Batsov prefers it to Org mode. Org mode can be and has been used to produce first class technical documentation. If needed, it can bring to bear all the power of LaTeX to produce a polished product. As far as I can see, the only reason not to use Org mode is because you’re not an Emacs user or are collaborating on a document with someone who isn’t. It offers everything you’re apt to need short of bringing in a heavyweight dedicated document preparation system. I’m sure Irreal readers not as ignorant as I about the situation can tell us why we should prefer AsciiDoc. Our lines are open. If you are an AsciiDoc user, Batsov’s two new modes are sure to be a blessing. The update to adoc-mode is designed to work with all versions of Emacs and updates the regex-based font-locking to the current AsciiDoc grammar. It’s perfect for an AsciiDoc user who’s running an older version of Emacs. Asciidoc-mode is the more modern solution using tree-sitter to handle things like font-locking but it only runs on Emacs 30.1+. Take a look at Batsov’s post for the details on the two modes. And if you know why an Org mode user should care, leave a comment.  ( 5 min )

Another quick update to blogmore.el, again to fix an issue I've run into with the new frontmatter-handling code. This time it's to address an actual crash that could happen if a property was available but empty. For example, if a post had frontmatter that looked like this: title: "blogmore.el v5.2.0" date: "2026-06-12 08:31:15+0100" category: Emacs tags: And I then went to use blogmore-add-tag, I'd get a crash saying: Wrong type argument: sequencep, :null The reason being that tags was being parsed with a value of :null, rather than (as before) having a value of nil (which of course meant I had a nice empty list to do things with). It was an easy enough fix. At this point I think I've managed to shake out any serious issues with the proper YAML-parsing approach to frontmatter, as I've used it to write a handful of posts now.  ( 1 min )

FBI raids Ohio voter registration group in ‘blatant act of intimidation’ a.cta_button{-moz-box-sizing:content-box !important;-webkit-box-sizing:content-box !important;box-sizing:content-box !important;vertical-align:middle}.hs-breadcrumb-menu{list-style-type:none;margin:0px 0px 0px 0px;padding:0px 0px 0px 0px}.hs-breadcrumb-menu-item{float:left;padding:10px 0px 10px 10px}.hs-breadcrumb-menu-divider:before{content:'›';padding-left:10px}.hs-featured-image-link{border:0}.hs-featured-image{float:right;margin:0 0 20px 20px;max-width:50%}@media (max-width: 568px){.hs-featured-image{float:none;margin:0;width:100%;max-width:100%}}.hs-screen-reader-text{clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);height:1px;overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;width:1px} …  ( 5 min )

96 *{box-sizing:border-box}body{margin:0;padding:0}a[x-apple-data-detectors]{color:inherit!important;text-decoration:inherit!important}#MessageViewBody a{color:inherit;text-decoration:none}p{line-height:inherit}.desktop_hide,.desktop_hide table{mso-hide:all;display:none;max-height:0;overflow:hidden}.image_block img+div{display:none}sub,sup{font-size:75%;line-height:0} @media (max-width:670px){.row-content{width:100%!important}.stack .column{width:100%;display:block}.mobile_hide{min-height:0;max-height:0;max-width:0;display:none;overflow:hidden;font-size:0}.desktop_hide,.desktop_hide table{display:table!important;max-height:none!important}.social_block .social-table{display:inline-block!important}} sup, sub { font-size: 100% !important; } sup { mso-text-raise:10% } sub { mso-text-raise:-1…  ( 2 min )

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

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

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

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

Royals GBU @media (max-width: 1024px) { .typography .pullquote-align-left, .typography.editor .pullquote-align-left, .typography .pullquote-align-right, .typography.editor .pullquote-align-right, .typography .pullquote-align-wide, .typography.editor .pullquote-align-wide, .typography .pullquote-align-center, .typography.editor .pullquote-align-center { float: none; margin: 0 auto; width: 100%; max-width: 100%; } } @media all and (-ms-high-contrast: none), (-ms-high-contrast: active) { .typography .markup table.image-wrapper img, .typography.editor .markup table.image-wrapper img, .typography .markup table.kindle-wrapper img, .typography.editor .markup table.kindle-wrapper img { max-width: 550px; } } @media (min-width: 1024px) { .typography:…  ( 13 min )

96 Wacha Way: The dynamic duo saves the day...and the bullpen @media only screen and (max-width: 620px) { table.body { width: 100%; min-width: 100%; } table.body .content { padding: 0 !important; } table.body .container { padding: 0 !important; width: 100% !important; } table.body .main { border-spacing: 10px 0 !important; border-left-width: 0 !important; border-radius: 0 !important; border-right-width: 0 !important; } table.body .img-responsive { height: auto !important; max-width: 100% !important; width: auto !important; } } @media all { .ExternalClass { width: 100%; } .ExternalClass, .ExternalClass p, .ExternalClass span, .ExternalClass font, .ExternalClass td, .ExternalClass div { li…  ( 10 min )

Are These Knicks Fans For Real?96 :root { color-scheme: light; supported-color-schemes: light; } body { margin: 0; padding: 0; min-width: 100%!important; -ms-text-size-adjust: 100% !important; -webkit-transform: scale(1) !important; -webkit-text-size-adjust: 100% !important; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased !important; } .body { word-wrap: normal; word-spacing:normal; } table.mso { width: 100%; border-collapse: collapse; padding: 0; table-layout: fixed; } img { border: 0; outline: none; } table { mso-table-lspace: 0px; mso-table-rspace: 0px; } td, a, span { mso-line-height-rule: exactly; } #root [x-apple-data-detectors=true], a[x-apple-data-detectors=true], #MessageViewBody a { color: inherit !important; text-decoration: inherit !important; font-size: inherit !impo…  ( 11 min )

This past Sunday, Alexander Zverev won his first major title. On the surface, the 29-year-old's Roland-Garros victory is the story of a player who, after roughly a decade of high expectations, accomplished the signature feat in his sport while benefiting from injuries and early upsets that removed the biggest obstacles in the men's bracket from his path. Perhaps it's the story of an elite athlete succeeding despite a childhood type-1 diabetes diagnosis that requires him to regulate his blood sugar levels during competition, or the story of a player who finally conquered the nerves that previously undermined his talent once he arrived at the late stage of a major. But for many journalists and a large swath of the tennis-watching public, it's also the story of a player who has faced allegations of domestic violence from two previous partners. The first accuser, Olya Sharypova, took her allegations public in 2020 through interviews with journalist Ben Rothenberg. Sharypova accused Zverev of repeated instances of physical abuse, including him punching and choking her. There were no legal charges; the ATP commissioned an independent investigation and concluded that there was "insufficient evidence" to substantiate the allegations. (Zverev filed a lawsuit against Rothenberg in German court over the reporting; the case is "winding down," according to Rothenberg.) Brenda Patea, the second accuser and mother of Zverev's daughter, took him to trial in Germany. Court records obtained by German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung said that Patea accused Zverev of pushing and strangling her. At every turn, Zverev has claimed that the allegations are false, and, as recently as this past weekend, he has claimed that he has been proven innocent in court, even though the 2024 out-of-court settlement does not constitute a ruling on his innocence or guilt.  ( 25 min )

After a Texas court granted Brendan Sorsby an injunction against the NCAA's suspension of his eligibility due to his gambling activity, the reaction inside and outside of college sports was intense. At Texas Tech, they hear you and they're listening. That's why the school assembled a braintrust to record a 20-minute State of the Union address to assure the public that the school truly has the best of intentions, by welcoming a guy who gambled on his own team back into the fold. https://twitter.com/TechAthletics/status/2065245076280750107 To some, like the commissioners and athletic directors who have decried the judge's ruling and called for stern punishment for Sorsby in spite of it, it is a gross miscarriage of justice that an athlete could directly compromise his sport's integrity by betting on his own team's games but suffer little consequence. But to Texas Tech's braintrust—which includes Red Raiders football coach Joey McGuire, university president Lawrence Schovanec, senior associate athletic director for student-athlete health and wellness (whatever that means) Grant Stovall, and AD Kirby Hocutt—all of this is purely about the best way to treat Sorsby's mental illness, which would naturally involve the healing power of college football and Texas Tech not having to eat its $6 million investment in Sorsby.  ( 18 min )

There are very few people on Earth who want to see Carter Hart in net for Vegas. Most of them are Golden Knights fans, but no one cares what they think because they are Golden Knights fans. One of them is John Tortorella, who has displayed a deep and occasionally baffling level of loyalty to the goalie, likely dating to their time in Philadelphia. The only others are the Carolina Hurricanes, because they have been beating the shit out of Hart every night and would like that to continue. Hart had already made history by being the first goalie to give up at least four goals in each of the Stanley Cup Final's first four games, so what did he do in Game 5 Thursday night? Gave up four more, as fans gleefully chanted "No means no," as they have before in this series. I find the chant in poor taste, but certainly not for reasons that involve sympathy for Hart. There could be some pathos in watching a man steadfastly earn himself the undisputed title of worst goalie in Cup Final history, were it another man. But it's Hart, whose role in the Hockey Canada sexual assault scandal came with an acquittal, but also a fairly clear-eyed consensus in the NHL world that the limits of basic decency did not extend to allowing Hart to resume his career as if nothing happened. That consensus did not apply to the Golden Knights; it rarely seems to. They signed Hart in October 2025, nine days after he became eligible to sign, and put him in net on Dec. 2, one day after he became eligible to play.  ( 19 min )

Calder Gardens is not so much a museum as it is a shrine to abstraction. The 1.8 acres of land it sits on is immaculately landscaped so that the flowers and grasses change throughout the year from vibrant, flowing, waist-high beauties in the summer to yellow in the winter. The Gardens, which opened in Philadelphia in September 2025, say that "the objects on view respond to architectural moments rather than art historical narratives.” It is not a gallery presented with an eye toward education, but a space built to contain the work and amplify it. In other words, it is a vibe. The building, designed by Herzog & de Meuron, twists and turns in surprising ways. Outside, massive sculptures sit gracefully in pockets of the building. Inside, the ceiling is low in places to compress a work that towers in the middle. The balcony from the second floor looks out at eye level to the Alexander Calder mobiles hung from the ceiling. Down the stairs, you can look up at them from underneath as they rotate.  On the lower floor, a few of these "architectural moments" take the shape of notches in the walls, rounded and concave like the inside of an egg. It is only after wandering amongst the mobiles, your neck bent back so that your eyes can gaze up, that you might notice these little spaces, just deep enough to tuck yourself into. They are places to perch—not quite benches, but sills. The architects have built these spaces as if they are suction cup platforms stuck to a window, and we are their beloved, uninterested housecat who must be encouraged to observe the world outside ourselves.  ( 26 min )

[STEPS OUT ONTO THE STAGE WITH A WIRELESS MICROPHONE ATTACHED TO MY CHEEK] Meet Andre. Andre is a teddy bear, but one with a secret. Would you like to tell everyone your secret, Andre? [SQUEEZES THE BEAR]  ( 21 min )

On Sunday in Monaco, Alpine's Pierre Gasly received pit-lane speed penalties totaling 10 seconds, which demoted him down to P7; on Thursday, Formula 1 reporter Chris Medland reported that Alpine's appeal for a review of those penalties had been deemed admissible. From that point it was obvious shenanigans would abound, no matter the review's result, and here shenanigans have arrived: On Friday the stewards confirmed that the penalties had been incorrectly given, and rescinded them, promoting Gasly back to the podium place, P3, in which he'd finished the race. As a result, Red Bull's Isack Hadjar has been demoted from the podium back into P4. To start from the beginning, the Monaco Grand Prix saw five drivers from four different teams receive penalties for speeding in the pit lane. All five drivers were held to have exceeded the speed limit by 0.1 kph, and Gasly, who received two penalties, also exceeded it by 0.4 kph the second time around. This proved to be one of the most dramatic and pivotal factors in the race. Left unclear was how so many teams wound up making the same error with the pit limiter, to the point where the stewards queried race control after the third penalty. Well, the answer, as provided by the stewards in the Gasly decision, was that Formula One Management, the Official Timekeeping Supplier (sick position) of the formula, just seriously botched it. FOM stated prior to the race that the length of the first timing zone in the pit lane—where every single speeding penalty occurred—was 2,692 cm, accurate to the centimeter, but LIDAR scans found that the actual distance was 2,615 cm, or 77 cm shorter than initially stated. This then led to the 60.1 kph speeding penalty that all the drivers received.  ( 19 min )

One thing that's always fun at a World Cup is a good old-fashioned clash of styles. With so many different teams, and so many different managers and tactics and players, no two sides play quite alike, and so a central tension of any match becomes the stylistic conflict. Imagine my delight when it took only the second match of this tournament to find what could very well prove the summer's starkest contrast of styles, as South Korea's Real Hooper Shit ran headfirst into the Czechia set piece wall and, somehow some way, came out ahead 2-1, thanks to the power of having better players playing better. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztKvwczBmqk Both of these teams have well-established identities, and given that it was the first match of the tournament for both, there was no reason to veer from the default gameplan just yet. For South Korea, that meant a wide-open 3-4-2-1 formation that gave the side's technical players plenty of space and options with which to work their magic. For Czechia, it meant almost the exact opposite, despite an almost exactly equivalent 3-4-2-1 formation; the Czechs were rigid and compact, aiming to utilize not so much individual brilliance but more the blunt-force instrument of crosses and set pieces.  ( 25 min )

Knicks mania is in the air, but how does that affect local businesses beyond the obvious cases, like bars packed out on random weeknights? Beer is a constant, but what about print media? To find out, I stopped by Casa Magazines, a well-loved corner store in the West Village where you can procure pretty much anything printed, from the daily tabloids to esoteric small-batch fare. I spoke to content strategist Tammy David and staffer Mirza Ayan Baig about how the New York Knicks' Finals run has changed business at the store. The Knicks had also been in the postseason the previous three years, but it wasn't until they earned a Finals berth that buyer behavior began to drastically change. Customers walked in not seeking out a particular publication, but the team in general. "Sometimes they were like, 'Do you have any New York Knicks?' 'No.' It's like looking for gum or vape—they move on to the next," David said. The Knicks covers of the New York Post and New York Daily News, with their classically brash headlines, were selling out within an hour of the store's 8 a.m. opening, sometimes even within 15 minutes. They were so sought after that ahead of Game 4, David put on social media an instructional video for customers to grasp where in the (very small) store the tabloids are stocked, minimizing confusion. But as popular as the tabloids are, Casa's biggest explosion in sales was a weekly magazine. The cover of the New Yorker's June 1 issue is a Mark Ulriksen illustration of Jalen Brunson, flexing over a lineup of storied Knicks. That was the one.  ( 20 min )

It's time for the World Cup. We've been previewing each of the top 15 teams by FIFA rankings that made the tournament. Why the top 15? Because that's how many we needed to do in order for the USMNT to make the cut. You can read all of our previews here. As the largest event humanity has ever come up with, it's safe to say that the World Cup is a big deal. In some way or other the tournament connects to literally everything, from politics, to culture, to war, to art, to philosophy, to biology, to economics, and on and on. As such, it can sometimes get overlooked that, on its most fundamental level, the World Cup is just a collection of soccer games. And the simplest explanation of a game of soccer is that the team with the best players usually wins. That is why Spain is the clear favorite. At this World Cup, Spain has the best players.  ( 35 min )

Well, it had to happen eventually. We'd been putting it off and pushing it back and wallowing earhole-deep in the adrenaline rush of it all, bouncing from Las Vegas to San Antonio to Raleigh to Manhattan in a poker game in which we'd finally reached the rarefied land of the eight-bet, but in our vacant, decrepit, spider-encrusted souls we all knew it would end up here: A normal game, played normally, with normal deeds, normal screeds and a normal result. Hardly seemed worth it in the end. Then again, after 10 full days of increasingly preposterous in-play behaviors and performances by the Golden Knights, Spurs, Hurricanes, and Knicks, something and someone had to give. And Thursday night, in Game 5 of the Stanley Cup Final, that something and someone was the Knights. Carolina slowly but su…  ( 20 min )

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

Finally, this administration has identified a form of “disparate impact” it finds objectionable. The post The Trump DOJ’s Disparate Impact Changes Are About Putting Black People In Their Place appeared first on Balls and Strikes.  ( 7 min )

The US Men's Team plays Paraguay tonight at 9pm ET - Big Day!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Luckily, Vice President J Divan Vance isn’t on vacation this weekend, so he’ll reportedly fill in for the president on Sunday to sign the terms.  ( 107 min )

One, a ceremony of respect. The other, a form of protest. Both explained here.  ( 93 min )

Plus, MAGA’s invincibility myth dies in Iowa and South Carolina

Turning Point USA was co-founded by Charlie Kirk and its fundraising apparatus since his death has centered around fading MAGA fantasies that he will be a movement-reviving martyr. So it was a little surprising that one of the speakers at TPUSA’s Women’s Leadership Summit in San Antonio, Texas, Alex Clark, spoke about how Kirk made her feel bad about herself. Speaking last weekend to a crowd of largely high school and college-aged attendees, the host TPUSA’s “Culture Apothecary” remembered the cruelty of Kirk’s talk at last year’s summit, in which he shamed women who aren’t married by 30, suggesting they are old maids who likely would never find a husband. “I was sitting in the audience and it stung a little bit,” Clark, 33, confessed. “I was sitting there as a woman in her 30s who very mu…  ( 6 min )

The Rays took off Thursday, so Yandy Diaz remains in first place, but Junior Caminero moved back into the top five as Bryan Reynolds posted a one for five to drop a few points. Shohei Ohtani of the Dodgers went two for two with two walks and a home run, For second place, but left […]  ( 25 min )

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The Rangers try to reach .500 as they send Kumar Rocker against the Royals and Michael Wacha. Rocker provides a nice example of regression to the mean. Last season, his ERA was well above his FIPs; this season his ERA is well below his FIPs. In 2021, Wacha transitioned from mostly a fly ball pitcher […]  ( 25 min )

I bet you didn’t think it would be the White Sox that would be the Chicago team in first place at this point of the season. The offense is second to the Yankees in runs per game at 4.75 R/G. Their pitching and defense allow 4.60 runs per game. That’s not a big difference, it’s […]  ( 26 min )

The Log5 Method yields these top projected hit averages versus starting pitchers: 0.311, 0.717 — Otto Lopez batting vs. Merrill Kelly. 0.285, 0.686 — Troy Johnston batting vs. Edward Cabrera. 0.283, 0.688 — Michael Harris II batting at Anthony Kay. 0.281, 0.688 — Xavier Edwards batting vs. Merrill Kelly. 0.268, 0.669 — Riley Greene batting […]  ( 26 min )

Yandy Diaz of the Rays grew his lead in the Baseball Musings Batter Rankings with a three for five in a 7-5 win over the Red Sox. Shohei Ohtani of the Dodgers gave up a few runs on the mound but homered in five plate appearances to remain in second place. He owns a .527 […]  ( 26 min )

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Two lower courts had earlier refused Alabama's request to let the state proceed with its plans to use the method of execution declared unconstitutional on Tuesday.

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

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

A Seasoned Big Liar May Soon be Running Elections in Nevada#outlook a { padding:0; } .ExternalClass { width:100%; } .ExternalClass, .ExternalClass p, .ExternalClass span, .ExternalClass font, .ExternalClass td, .ExternalClass div { line-height: 100%; } table td { border-collapse: collapse; mso-line-height-rule: exactly; } .editable.image { font-size: 0 !important; line-height: 0 !important; } .nl2go_preheader { display: none !important; mso-hide:all !important; mso-line-height-rule: exactly; visibility: hidden !important; line-height: 0px !important; font-size: 0px !important; } body { width:100% !important; -webkit-text-size-adjust:100%; -ms-text-size-adjust:100%; margin:0; padding:0; } img { outline:none; text-decoration:none; -ms-interpolation-mode: bicubic; } a img { border:none; } tab…  ( 11 min )

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96 An antidote to authoritarianism (Not just alliteration!) img{-ms-interpolation-mode:bicubic;} table, td{mso-table-lspace:0pt;mso-table-rspace:0pt;} .mceStandardButton, .mceStandardButton td, .mceStandardButton td a{mso-hide:all!important;} p, a, li, td, blockquote{mso-line-height-rule:exactly;} p, a, li, td, body, table, blockquote{-ms-text-size-adjust:100%;-webkit-text-size-adjust:100%;} .mcnPreviewText{display:none!important;} .bodyCell{margin:0 auto;padding:0;width:100%;} .ExternalClass, .ExternalClass p, .ExternalClass td, .ExternalClass div, .ExternalClass span, .ExternalClass font{line-height:100%;} .ReadMsgBody, .ExternalClass{width:100%;} a[x-apple-data-detectors]{color:inherit!important;text-decoration:none!important;font-size:inherit!important;font-family:inherit!impor…  ( 5 min )

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

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

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

World Cup Preview96 :root { color-scheme: light; supported-color-schemes: light; } body { margin: 0; padding: 0; min-width: 100%!important; -ms-text-size-adjust: 100% !important; -webkit-transform: scale(1) !important; -webkit-text-size-adjust: 100% !important; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased !important; } .body { word-wrap: normal; word-spacing:normal; } table.mso { width: 100%; border-collapse: collapse; padding: 0; table-layout: fixed; } img { border: 0; outline: none; } table { mso-table-lspace: 0px; mso-table-rspace: 0px; } td, a, span { mso-line-height-rule: exactly; } #root [x-apple-data-detectors=true], a[x-apple-data-detectors=true], #MessageViewBody a { color: inherit !important; text-decoration: inherit !important; font-size: inherit !important; font-fa…  ( 8 min )

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Breaking News: More Original OffBall Content 96 :root { color-scheme: light; supported-color-schemes: light; } body { margin: 0; padding: 0; min-width: 100%!important; -ms-text-size-adjust: 100% !important; -webkit-transform: scale(1) !important; -webkit-text-size-adjust: 100% !important; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased !important; } .body { word-wrap: normal; word-spacing:normal; } table.mso { width: 100%; border-collapse: collapse; padding: 0; table-layout: fixed; } img { border: 0; outline: none; } table { mso-table-lspace: 0px; mso-table-rspace: 0px; } td, a, span { mso-line-height-rule: exactly; } #root [x-apple-data-detectors=true], a[x-apple-data-detectors=true], #MessageViewBody a { color: inherit !important; text-decoration: inherit !important; font-size:…  ( 5 min )

Trump decided not to nominate the acting intelligence director, who was intended to replace Tulsi Gabbard. I’m not sure I like the next guy in line either.  ( 86 min )

Somehow climate deniers will try to blame this on the Biden administration.  ( 93 min )

David Rush told former colleagues all sorts of tall tales, but the key to any great con is to master the believable details.  ( 85 min )

Josh is helping lead a very talented ticket in what has become one of our most important battleground states this election cycle

We sure do have lots to talk about!

Another gauge of inflation - PPI - came in really hot today.........

The sounds coming out of me were causing the sleeping baby to stir, so I had to remove myself from the premises. But I had just seen the hand of god steal Game 4 in the greatest comeback in NBA Finals history, giving the New York Knicks a 3-1 series lead, and I was in a city full of fellow witnesses making similarly feral sounds. Earlier in the fourth quarter, while the San Antonio Spurs' lead over the Knicks hovered around 15, I laid catatonic on the sofa during a timeout; my wife was threatening to tell my friends that I had almost drifted asleep during my team's Finals run. At that juncture, I was mentally steeling myself for a tied series and trying to look at the bright spots in this loss: Jalen Brunson finally found some freedom, and the dual point guard lineups I'd clamored for allowed Jose Alvarado to shoulder some of the ball-handling. Soon enough I was on all fours, slapping the floor, laughing hysterically. There was movement on the baby monitor. Cans from the fridge, then off into the howling night. I have been watching every game of this series in my own home, sober as OG Anunoby in a franchise-altering moment, too anxious to enter society. My broadcast stream Wednesday night had a tiny delay. Until I turned up the sound on my TV to mask it, the ambient roar of my city kept giving me a sneak preview of future elation—which is fun, like how people might read the Wikipedia entry for a horror movie they’re about to watch. Clawing out of a 29-point hole is basically a horror movie in reverse.  ( 28 min )

There are many people who are capable of watching dramatic sporting events in crowded bars and enjoying themselves. You may be one of them, and you have almost certainly seen them out there erupting in celebration at big moments, or just chanting "U-P-S" at a UPS truck because they don't know what else to do with themselves. The NBA playoffs are great for these people, and the subset that have given themselves to the New York Knicks have been having a pretty incredible time of it as of late. But this is not the only type of fan that exists, and this week we welcomed a different type of fan onto the podcast—our resident Knicks diehard Giri Nathan, who has watched his lifelong fan dream come to the very edge of realization while sitting on the floor of his apartment, nursing a seltzer and trying not to wake up his baby with OG Anunoby-inspired ululations. The sickos matter, too. We recorded the episode around midday on Wednesday, as is our custom, which means that the events of that evening's implausible Game 4 were not covered. In their place, we have an assessment of what the first three games illustrated about these two fascinating teams, and also of what the series has done to Giri's emotional state. There is a good deal of vibe assessment and basketball analysis, a retrospectively unavoidable amount of Robert Kraft voice, and a consideration of the oafish security theater that surrounded both Game 3's accursed presidential visit and, for reasons that have not been specified, also Game 4. But there's a lot of basketball talk, too, including Giri's prescient Jose Alvarado prophecy, a consideration of the specific officiating problems and broader officiating challenges of these NBA Finals, and how the game is struggling to keep up with the emerging foul-all-the-time-on-every-play exploit.  ( 19 min )

When I first saw the press release announcing that scientists had harvested yeast from the remains of Ötzi the 5,000-year-old iceman and used it to make a sourdough bread, I admit I was not terribly moved. The announcement smelled like a publicity stunt designed to get Ötzi back in the headlines—as if he does not get enough coverage as is! Ötzi the iceman makes the news more than any other 5,000-year-old person, given each new horrible clinical diagnosis scientists make after analyzing his mummified body with newer and newer technology. Of course Ötzi not the only person we know of from around that time. There is Ginger, the man whose body was naturally preserved in the hot, dry sands of Gebelein in Egypt more than 5,000 years ago. There is the 4,000-year-old Cashel Man who appears to have been violently sacrificed in a bog. But have you heard of Ginger? Have you heard of the Cashel Man? No. You have only heard of Ötzi. I do not mean this as a slight against the iceman. Rather, I mean to suggest that he makes headlines on his own terms, by which I mean the fact that his body is a Pandora's box of medical maladies. Ötzi has never needed to become bread to go viral. As such, I was prepared to close the tab spreading the good word of Ötzi's yeasts. But then I saw the publicity photo the researchers had chosen to accompany this paper, which was published in Microbiome, a paper that found four cold-adapted yeasts that survived in the sub-zero temperatures of the iceman's tummy. The photo was, to me, even more shocking than the revelation of the yeasts. It was a crisp close-up of the iceman's glossy feet.  ( 24 min )

If OG Anunoby's miraculous put-back of Jalen Brunson's long three is the Hand of God, maybe the play before it was the Brain of Squirrel. It was Spurs guard De’Aaron Fox, currently finishing up his ninth year in the NBA, who made a pre-rookie mistake that allowed the Knicks the chance to take the 3-1 series lead. With under 20 seconds to go and the Spurs up one, a Brunson drive to the hoop led to a loose ball off the backboard. It was Fox, heroically, who tipped the ball past the last Knicks defender and chased it down in the Spurs' end. Basketball convention dictates that you play it safe and wait to be fouled, to take more time off the clock and go to the line to extend the lead. However, Fox decided that the layup would be more automatic than the free throws, and Anunoby made a play that you can add to the list of legendary NBA Finals blocks. No foul, no points, Knicks ball. “I just thought I’d be able to outrun him,” the 28-year-old Fox said after the game. “That’s it.”  ( 16 min )

The World Cup is great for surfacing fun facts. Here's one that might shock your ears as you watch Bosnia-Herzegovina play its first group-stage game on Friday: The team's coach, Sergej Barbarez, is 54 years old and working his first job as a manager. Also, he was most recently a professional poker player. Don't worry, Barbarez does actually know a thing or two about soccer. He played professionally for 14 years, and was no slouch. He spent most of his professional career in the Bundesliga, where he scored 105 goals in 377 appearances. From 2004 to 2006, he was captain of Bosnia-Herzegovina's national team, and acquired his coaching license a few years after retiring in 2008. That's around when he started playing cards professionally. According to Cardplayer.com, between 2010 and 2022 he won $143,628 in 26 games. He doesn't have any recorded tournament wins, but he did make it to two final tables in the World Series of Poker. Throughout his time as a poker player, Barbarez enjoyed something approaching national icon status, and remained an outspoken critic of the Football Association of Bosnia and Herzegovina's governance decisions.  In 2021, Vico Zeljkovic became president of the association and helped throw the team into chaos. Zeljkovic oversaw a rapid succession of managers, three of whom were hired and fired months apart as the team failed to qualify for the 2024 Euros. Fans criticized the FA's leadership, including the 2022 decision to schedule friendlies with Russia right after it had invaded Ukraine and was banned FIFA and UEFA competitions. One of the loudest critics of the FA was Barbarez, so it was something of a shock when he was announced as the national team manager.  ( 18 min )

It's almost time for the World Cup. Before the tournament, we'll be previewing each of the top 15 teams by FIFA rankings that made the tournament. Why the top 15? Because that's how many we needed to do in order for the USMNT to make the cut. You can read all of our previews here. Nobody fell in love with France this year, for the same reason nobody fell in love with France in 2022 or 2018. Under Didier Deschamps, the football manager most likely to make you think of Jerry Sloan, the French are deep in flair but play as though every goal they surrender results in the death of a puppy. Deschamps is best described as an "arch-pragmatist," which is the polite way of saying, "He doesn't celebrate his own birthday so don't expect him to celebrate yours."  ( 22 min )

Consider the perspective of the soccer goalkeeper. Turn the game 90 degrees from how you watch it at home, and observe as the best part of it—your team attacking in the final third—recedes away from you. The players are small, the action muddled. Should your team score, you celebrate alone, distant. When the opponent attacks, the game rushes forward into sudden full-scale focus.  The kind of person who chooses this existence—yelling at their teammates, staving off disaster, parrying for a living—has internal wiring that does not come from the Regular Human Factory. They are different from you and me, and different also from their teammates in the field. They grew up loving the beautiful game, and ultimately their abilities and affinities and long limbs placed them in a photo-negative version of the sport. Or in some cases, more worryingly, they were simply Always Like That. Oh, I love them! I love these sickos.  It is important that I establish my goalie-watching bona fides, because I am here to tell you that in 2026 there are only two kinds of quality goalkeepers at the top of the men's game: OCD Super Soldiers and Shifty Greaseballs. From the titles alone, you might already see them: Manuel Neuer, the square-jawed, square-shouldered Teuton who anchored Champions League and World Cup–winning teams, is the ur–OCD Super Soldier. Gianluigi Buffon, the lynchpin of a defensive-minded World Cup champion back when Italy made it to World Cups, is the ultimate Shifty Greaseball. (Please note: I am not diagnosing an entire class of goalkeeper with obsessive-compulsive disorder; I merely lack a better adjective for the Super Soldier's reflexive and repetitive organization of his defenders.)  ( 29 min )

With 104 games over the next six weeks, and with the United States (along with Canada and Mexico) hosting, the World Cup will be all-encompassing for the near future. Soccer is a very easy sport to get drawn into, especially during a World Cup, but the complexity of the game lives below the surface. Sure, you can enter the tournament with minimal knowledge and still appreciate the appeal of a well-hit ball that flies into the top corner, but my hope is that I can break down some of the intricacies of soccer a little, in order to give you a head start on impressing the half-drunk hooligans you might encounter at your local watering hole between now and the final on July 19. Worst case, this guide will serve as an ode to one specific USMNT player I have been a fan of for years, and that feels worth it to me right there. There's a famous quote, almost certainly apocryphal, about former Spain and Barcelona midfielder Sergio Busquets that will be helpful here. Supposedly said by World Cup–winning Spanish manager Vicente del Bosque, it goes like this: "If you watch the game, you don't see Busquets. But if you watch Busquets, you see the whole game." It's a little pat, and again almost definitely did not originate from Del Bosque himself, but it still gets at a truth about soccer, which is that most of what's important in the game happens away from the ball. With that in mind, I want to introduce you to what I will call the Busquets Method, a way to understand what happens and why by looking away from where your eye is most naturally drawn.  ( 28 min )

Some games get you thinking about a higher power. Not because it seems like some cosmic force has put a thumb on the scale in favor of one side or the other, but because the game in question produces a result so unlikely, so ornately designed, that it can only have occurred exactly as it did. Game 4 of the NBA Finals has me feeling like one of those Kansas creationists who point to a bacterial flagellum and start shouting about the presence of God in the creation of life. How else could something this unlikely, this beautiful, this fate-altering have happened? The Knicks won, 107-106, after erasing a 29-point deficit. They were down 76-49 at halftime. They trailed by 20 with 9:33 to play in the fourth quarter. How? How? How? The Knicks' performance in the first half was just as strange and stultifying as their second half was miraculous. An ill omen seemed to have wrapped itself around Madison Square Garden when Karl-Anthony Towns picked up his second foul—the result of an incredibly bold challenge by Spurs coach Mitch Johnson—barely a minute into the game. The Knicks' success in this series has felt inextricably linked with Towns's ability to stay focused and on the floor, as he's their best defensive matchup for Victor Wembanyama and their most efficient offensive hub, and here he had been removed from the game basically before it started.  ( 24 min )

A quick little update to blogmore.el to fix a couple of issues introduced by the new YAML-parsing approach to reading frontmatter; both pretty much stemming from how falsy values are handled. Simply put, both boolean false values, and also empty values (something that could commonly happen with tags and series) would end up showing up in the frontmatter as null. This release handles that situation. Also, under the hood, I cleaned up some repeated boilerplate related to how the cached dump calls to BlogMore took place. The code for categories, tags and series data was almost exactly the same, save for the actual name of the thing being dumped. So I turned it all into a macro: (defmacro blogmore--cache-dump (dump-name) "Generate a function to get DUMP-NAME from BlogMore, with caching." (let ((cache-name (intern (format "blogmore--current-%s-cache" dump-name))) (getter-name (intern (format "blogmore--current-%s" dump-name)))) `(progn (defvar ,cache-name nil ,(format "Cache for the list of %s from existing posts." dump-name)) (defun ,getter-name () ,(format "Get a list of %s from existing posts." dump-name) (or ,cache-name (setq ,cache-name (blogmore--list-of ,(symbol-name dump-name)))))))) and now the defvar that creates the variable that holds the cache, and the defun that creates the getter function for the data, are reduced to this for all three collections of values: (blogmore--cache-dump categories) (blogmore--cache-dump tags) (blogmore--cache-dump series) Sure, I probably could have done all of this in a single global, a central getter function, and a hash table, but the macro approach feels so much more elegant, and more... lispy.  ( 1 min )

And it’s understandable — things are getting worse and worse all the time, and anybody who is running a web site (that has interesting information) is under constant attack from badly programmed AI scrapers. But where does that leave us li’l smol peeps who are just scrapin’ a li’l data for ourselves so that we don’t have to type as much? I’ve got two small use cases that have been torpedoed by this arms race lately — I use the imdb search to find the data on movies I’ve ripped from blu rays that I’ve bought. And I use the Goodreads search when I’m entering (manually) e-books that I’ve bought into the Emacs package for that. (Physical books have ISBNs printed in bar code form, so I can use various APIs for that and don’t need to resort to anything as tawdry as web scraping.) These are just minor convenience things I’ve gotten used to over the years, so I could give them up… or I could go raging, raging against the dying of the open web. Guess what I chose! The result is on Microsoft Github. The idea is: First try to fetch the URL using the normal, fast method. If this fails, use Selenium headless. This involves spinning up a web browser and then dumping the resulting DOM. If this fails, spin up Selenium and a web browser window. This will allow the user to click around a bit, answering any challenges. In 2) and 3), fetch-dom will save and reuse cookies, so that So this requires a Python/Selenium installation that works, and fetch-dom is synchronous by default, but is asynchronous if you give it the :callback keyword parameter. This seems to work for my use cases — things usually work automatically, but once in a while it pops up a browser window, and I click a bit, and then things work headlessly for a while again. *sigh* These are the days of your life…  ( 5 min )

I was asked recently, "Do you use Org Mode protocol ... for browser to Emacs interaction? If so, were there any complications to set it up on Windows? Is there like bookmarklets for capturing or doing things?"1 At the time I wasn't doing anything too fancy to incorporate Web Content into Org. I'd copy the URL from Vivaldi's address bar to the clipboard and (if applicable) the Web Content I'm interested in.2 Then in Org, I'd yank the Web Content (if applicable), mark it and then do org-insert-link (C-c C-l) to turn it into a hyperlink. The marked text becomes what you see in the document. But I usually just specify the link Description simply as "LINK." In fact I created a macro (bound to the Insert key) to do this. But I've started to use eww as my web browser for this. If I write something that I need to verify, I'll mark it and invoke eww-search-words (M-s M-w), which brings me to a DuckDuckGo page of search results. If I follow a search result that I like, I'll mark a small section and invoke org-store-link (C-c l) and create the link with org-insert-link, with the marked content as the Description. Thus org-store-link captures both the location and the context in one magical swoop. Here's an animated GIF that illustrates the process. Note that the video shows me capturing and referring to part of Sacha Chua's website that shows some neat solutions to launching a web browser from Emacs.3 1 Sacha Chua's Emacs Chat with Raymond Zeitler transcript. Please scroll to 35:50 2 I use a clipboard manager so that I can copy content to the clipboard multiple times without clobbering all but the most recent item. 3 https://sachachua.com/blog/2025/07/emacs-open-urls-or-search-the-web-plus-browse-url-handlers/  ( 9 min )

argued a pad and pen is the ultimate writedeck. I reject that for the reasons I stated above. Maiorana recognizes that often a computer is a good idea and has an article that describes building his own writerdeck. He wanted something free or cheap so he used a Raspberry Pi 4 that he had lying around, put Linux and Emacs on it, and restricted it to text mode. Later he added a few utilities such as Git but it remains a text only machine dedicated to writing with Emacs. Maiorana considers it the “maximum digital minimalism” but I’m more inclined to think of it as a minimal acceptable writing environment. I don’t do social media other than Irreal, if you consider that social media, so I have no difficulty concentrating on my writing while using my everyday laptop. Not everybody is like that, of course, so if you find it’s hard to resist doom scrolling while you’re supposed to be writing, you may want to take a look at Maiorana’s post on his writerdeck.  ( 5 min )

"...how can people keep up with what you're learning?"1 I've always kept a low profile on the Internet.  It can be a scary place!  But I've been asked to show glimpses of my online work to the people I was meeting in real life. I agreed to chat with Sacha Chua about Emacs and Life (but not the Universe -- that'll be next time).  Emacs is worth revealing oneself for.  If people really do want to keep up with what I'm learning, they can visit here. My init file2 shows only a small aspect of how I have Emacs configured.  You'll want to see an example of my org file(s), my diary file, and the Lisp I have tucked away under my home directory. Aside from Emacs, my workflow relies on Vivaldi and LibreOffice, so I'll try to show what I'm doing with them, as well.  Perhaps I can provide screen recordings, too! "Sometimes it just takes somebody saying, your stuff is interesting. I'm telling you, your stuff is interesting."3 Thank you, again, Sacha! 1Sacha Chua, https://sachachua.com/blog/2026/05/emacs-chat-with-raymond-zeitler/#ID-ec23-transcript 2https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/RaymondZeitler 3Sacha Chua, ibid. 2026-06-11 Fix link in footnote 1.  ( 9 min )

1. TLDR svg-line package (demo), really is several times heavier than the native text engine. The skeptics were right. But it doesn't matter in practice: even a fully-repainted 3000-pixel ultrawide bar holds ~77 fps, and a thin inline animation rasterizing a fresh frame every tick runs at 130–520 fps. To put that into perspective, this is still well above the 60 fps that high-frame-rate games target. More than enough for a text editor if you ask me! I got two real take-aways from this benchmark. First, the rendering cost of SVG scales with the SVG's pixel area, not with what's drawn on it (text and icons cost the same as you'll see). Second, in any real Emacs config the bottleneck is the content query (I'm looking at you, git), not the renderer (I'm looking at you, SVG, with doe e…  ( 17 min )

Regular readers know I have a soft spot for AsciiDoc – I’ve written about it more than once, and it’s the markup behind the documentation of most of my bigger OSS projects (CIDER, nREPL, Projectile, RuboCop). It hits a sweet spot Markdown never quite reaches: rich enough for proper technical writing (admonitions, includes, real tables, cross-references), without dragging in the full ceremony of something like DocBook. There was just one problem, and it nagged at me for years: editing AsciiDoc in Emacs was never much fun. Background For years the only real option was adoc-mode, and it was showing its age. The font-locking was uneven, it predated modern Asciidoctor syntax, and it lagged far behind what markdown-mode (and org-mode) offered. So I’d catch myself reaching for Markdown in situati…  ( 4 min )

The Royals placed center fielder Kyle Isbel on the 10-day injured list last night due to plantar fasciitis. Manager Matt Quatraro announced at the time that Isbel was undergoing an MRI to determine the severity of the issue. That imaging came back with unfavorable results, it seems. The Royals announced this morning that Isbel has […]  ( 9 min )

Plus, Lexington takes a stand against data centers

The Court has issued eight summary reversals this term, after two last term and none the term before, raising questions about how the justices see their role.

Bryce Eldridge of the Giants hit a walk-off grand slam against the Nationals this afternoon, setting a record: He is now the youngest player in Major League Baseball to smack a walk-off grand slam. As reported by Maria Guardado of MLB.com, he surpassed the previous record holder Roberto Clemente who set the record in July […]  ( 25 min )

I was watching the Padres broadcast of the Cincinnati at San Diego game, and Brady Singer struck out Sung-Mun Song. There was then a scoreboard item that this was the first game in which a Singer faced a Song. Barry Manilow could not be reached for comment. The Reds and Padres are tied at two […]  ( 25 min )

The Yankees and Guardians offer the best pitching matchup of the day as Carlos Rodon takes on Parker Messick. Rodon seems to be healed from his time on the illjured list,with a 2.88 ERA in 25 innings. He allowed just one home run so far. Messick’s 2.40 ERA ranks second in the AL to the […]  ( 26 min )

I actually like this concept if they kept playing baseball there: Report: Developer files plans to convert defunct site where professional baseball used to be played in Boston into apartments pic.twitter.com/HvE5RpwQjc — Boston Globe Pitchbot (@BostonSatire) June 10, 2026 Although this, in fact, might be more realistic: They put Breslow in charge of development, here’s […]  ( 25 min )

The Log5 Method yields these top projected hit averages versus starting pitchers: 0.328, 0.692 — Carson Kelly batting at Michael Lorenzen. 0.318, 0.698 — Nico Hoerner batting at Michael Lorenzen. 0.316, 0.722 — Brandon Marsh batting at Max Scherzer. 0.310, 0.706 — Miguel Andujar batting vs. Brady Singer. 0.309, 0.677 — Alex Bregman batting at […]  ( 26 min )

Yandy Diaz of the Rays holds a five point lead in the Baseball Musings Batter Rankings. He singled and walked in a 4-3 win over the Red Sox, the Rays maintaining first place in the AL East by percentage points. Shohei Ohtani of the Dodgers sits in second place after a double and a walk […]  ( 26 min )

No content preview  ( 25 min )

It's been a little while since my last agent-shell update, so let's go through the latest highlights as of v0.55. What's agent-shell? agent-shell is a native Emacs mode to interact with AI agents powered by ACP (Agent Client Protocol). Picking up where I left off If you noticed slower project activity in April, this is why. I'm getting better at the new 24-hour job, so I've resumed working on agent-shell. I'm still chipping away at the backlog that built up while I was away, but if there's anything in particular you'd like me to look at, feel free to ping. Anthropic, Google, and why ACP matters With Anthropic's SDK subscription support changing, Google's Gemini CLI deprecation, and Antigravity's unclear support for the Agent Client Protocol (ACP), vendor-neutral tools matter more than ever…  ( 10 min )

Emacs caught in the wild. By “in the wild” I mean “in popular culture”: things like movies and comics. Most of us have seen the familiar scene from Tron but Pan has a bunch of others. One example is the famous scene from Silicon Valley in which Richie and Winnie start arguing about Tabs versus Spaces and end up discovering that one is a Vim user and the other an Emacs user. I’ve seen that scene many times but didn’t realize where it came from so I learned something new from his post. The other surprising thing—to me—is that Emacs also makes appearances in comics. What’s interesting is that you rarely see any editor other than Emacs or Vi(m) mentioned outside geek circles. Perhaps the current cohort of hackers will change that and we’ll start seeing references to VS Code. Or maybe not. VS Code does have a lot of users but I haven’t seen the same culture grow up around it. We’ll see.  ( 5 min )

I recently wrote a post about writerdecks and minimalist “distraction-free” writing environments in general. I concluded that the most minimalist writing environment you could get is a cheap notebook and Bic pen you could get at any supermarket. However, as a digital minimalist, and one who writes at a high enough volume, a writerdeck starts to make a lot of sense. So I thought I’d try to make one. But, I wanted it to be a “low buy” or “no buy” situation. Luckily, I had a Raspberry Pi 4 lying around unused, so I snapped it up. I installed a lightweight, minimalist distribution of Debian called DietPi and installed Emacs with no GUI. (Of course, I also installed git and a lot of other stuff by now, but I am keeping it GUI-free.) We’re talking MAXIMUM digital minimalism here. I am using tmu…

When I released blogmore.el v4.7.0 yesterday I finished off by saying that it was my intention, at some point, to rework the frontmatter-handling code so that it did proper YAML parsing. As often happens with these sorts of things, "some point" ended up being that evening. I've rewritten everything to do with handling properties in the frontmatter so that it now uses yaml.el. This has a number of knock-on effects. The first and most obvious effect is that anything that is a list/array in the frontmatter is actually properly treated as a list. A good example here is tags. Now you can have your tags look like: tags: [BlogMore, Emacs, "Emacs Lisp", Lisp, "blogmore.el", coding] or: tags: - BlogMore - Emacs - Emacs Lisp - Lisp - blogmore.el - coding and blogmore.el will still …  ( 3 min )

[request] flags:--- replies:1 topic:add  ( 1 min )

vc-dir and vc-mode led me into wanting to delete a stash (not to pop). There are "z" keybindings in vc-dir: z c vc-git-stash z p vc-git-stash-pop z s vc-git-stash-snapshot vc-dir you get a rather nice little Stash section tacked on at the bottom listing all your stashes: I genuinely assumed I was missing something obvious, so I did the sensible Emacs thing and hit C-h m to describe the mode, scrolled through the whole keymap, and, nothing about stashes at all. Well how about C-h b (describe-bindings)?, initially nothing!, however I stumbled on a solution, if the point is on a stash name, the following is exposed! C-k vc-git-stash-delete-at-point RET vc-git-stash-show-at-point = vc-git-stash-show-at-point A vc-git-stash-apply-at-point C vc-git-stash P vc-git-stash-pop-at…  ( 2 min )

The Royals placed center fielder Kyle Isbel on the 10-day injured list before Wednesday’s game against Texas. Kameron Misner was recalled from Triple-A Omaha in a corresponding move. Isbel is dealing with plantar fasciitis in his left foot. Manager Matt Quatraro tells Anne Rogers of MLB.com that the team is awaiting results of an MRI before […]  ( 9 min )

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

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

Americans United for Separation of Church and State 96 @font-face { font-family: 'Overpass'; font-style: normal; font-weight: 300; font-display: swap; src: url('https://fonts.gstatic.com/s/overpass/v19/qFda35WCmI96Ajtm83upeyoaX6QPnlo6ovPbPpqKl8Kuo8Az.woff2') format('woff2'); unicode-range: U+0000-00FF, U+0131, U+0152-0153, U+02BB-02BC, U+02C6, U+02DA, U+02DC, U+0304, U+0308, U+0329, U+2000-206F, U+20AC, U+2122, U+2191, U+2193, U+2212, U+2215, U+FEFF, U+FFFD; } @font-face { font-family: 'Overpass'; font-style: italic; font-weight: 300; font-display: swap; src: url('https://fonts.gstatic.com/s/overpass/v19/qFdU35WCmI96Ajtm81GgSdXCNs-VMF0vNLBdeqqIncOMp9gyUsE.woff2') format('woff2'); unicode-range: U+0000-00FF, U+0131, U+0152-0153, U+02BB-02BC, U+02C6, U+02DA, U…  ( 7 min )

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

Welcome new subscribers! Lots to discuss tonight!

MN AG Ellison joined us to reflect on this extraordinary event, and to update us on their efforts to bring accountability for the lawlessness and violence we all witnessed......

Hopium paid subscribers gather tonight at 7pm ET, Founding Members Friday at 1pm

Does the president realize that if he keeps dismantling infrastructure meant to prevent climate change, then there won’t be a country left for him to ruin?  ( 87 min )

Christian nationalism and “Matthew 25” Christianity are set to clash in upcoming elections. Let’s hope the fallout causes religion to disappear from our politics.  ( 86 min )

"Accept it. Accept it. It’s an uncontrollable. You cannot change it. Get over it. Get on with it." Emma Hayes's words may have aspired to equanimity, but her tone betrayed her. Coming off a 2-1 loss to Brazil in São Paolo—the first of two consecutive friendlies played on the Brazilians' turf—the U.S. Women's National Team coach kept coming back to her refrain: the raucous crowds, their opponent's physicality, the officials' (in)competence, and the late start time for Tuesday's match were things the U.S. couldn't control, so best not to dwell on them. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0cPuocsk9BI  ( 28 min )

The screwworms are here, as we predicted they would be. More than half a century after the parasitic pest was declared eradicated, the insects have escaped containment in South America and made it all the way to Texas, where they have not been seen since 1966. There are now five cases of the flesh-eating parasite in the United States, all confirmed in under a week. The first two were in calves in Zavala County, followed soon after by a calf in La Salle County; a goat in Gillespie County; and a dog that lives in Lea County, N.M., but recently traveled through Texas. These five cases are alarming but expected, as Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins tweeted. On this fact, Rollins is correct. But expected is different from inevitable. The screwworm's arrival was expected because over the p…  ( 24 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, Ray answers a question about best practices in being a grandparent.  ( 33 min )

Nobody wants to think about officiating, much less talk about it. Joyce Carol Oates knows it. The NBA Finals are no occasion for rational nonpartisanship. The middle ground is out of reach. If I want to say something straightforwardly true about the officiating, like, "Referees are still sorting out how to protect Victor Wembanyama from a kind of mauling that only he faces," unless I surround the statement in 1,000 caveats so that the eventual sum of what I have said is, "Victor Wembanyama should be strapped to the electric chair," my observation is guaranteed to zoom right past the part of the brain of a Knicks fan that assesses the truth value of language. And that Knicks fan is likely to respond with something like, "Ey, you wanna talk about protection, dis freakin' Victor Wembanyama got away with assassinatin' our guy Jalen Brunson, ey, fugget about it." Which, hyperbole aside, is both true and irritatingly orthogonal to my own observation, and tempts us into a tangle of conflicting grievances. Just last night our own Giri Nathan shouted those very words, and then stormed off in a huff, slapping the hood of a taxi and exchanging angry exclamations and rude gestures with the driver. He's out there now, no doubt ranting at strangers on the subway. The assassination in question occurred in the first quarter of Game 3. Brunson screened Wembanyama near the top of the key and then stuck to him, at approximately navel-height, as the Knicks moved the ball to Landry Shamet on the wing. It's not even all that clear that Brunson was restricting Wembanyama's movement, but Wembanyama has been getting hugged and arm-barred and clobbered all playoffs, and the Frenchman responded to this particular crowding of his personal space by wedging a forearm under the back of Brunson's skull and then violently shoving him to the ground. The officiating crew, led by Marc Davis, failed to whistle what was at minimum an obvious common foul.  ( 25 min )

It's almost time for the World Cup. Before the tournament, we'll be previewing each of the top 15 teams by FIFA rankings that made the tournament. Why the top 15? Because that's how many we needed to do in order for the USMNT to make the cut. You can read all of our previews here. It's quite possible that the best moment of Brazil's 2026 World Cup happened a month before the tournament even started. The day was May 18, the occasion the announcement of World Cup roster. The tension was high, almost all of it weighing on whether or not Neymar, in what would be his first Brazil appearance in two years, would get called up. When manager Carlo Ancelotti did read his name, the country went wild.  ( 45 min )

As of publication, the New York Knicks maintain a 2-1 edge in the NBA Finals against the San Antonio Spurs. It's been an entertaining, nervous, and extremely high-level series, and this week on Nothing But Respect, Harry and I sought out two returning champions. Devon Walker, comedian and podcaster and generally very funny internet person, is a big Spurs fan; he expressed his loathing for the Oklahoma City Thunder, and discussed his optimism about his team's youngsters. Then, Will Menaker, co-host of the great Chapo Trap House, joined us to complain about Donald Trump and his cadre of evil scumbags fucking up the vibes, and made a case for Knicks fans to remain calm and level-headed. You can find Nothing But Respect in Apple Podcasts or whatever podcast app you use. Follow the show on Instagram, and contact the Broke Jumper Tip Line at (347) 380-6426. Thanks for listening!  ( 14 min )

If the AL Central is like an apartment building, then the Chicago White Sox spent the last few years as a shut-in neighbor with some smelly, unidentifiable substance leaking out from under their front door. It was best to stay as far away as possible. But after the first few months of the 2026 season, the windows have been cracked and the rooms aired out. If you come knock on the White Sox's door with an open mind, there's a good chance they'll welcome you in and give you an enjoyable evening in their company. And it won't smell nearly at all. The latest collision of "White Sox" and "happiness" came Tuesday night on the South Side, with the Atlanta Braves in town for the start of a three-game series. The Braves' garish, tasteless 45-21 record dwarfed the Sox's humble, earthy 34-31 mark, an…  ( 19 min )

Recently while picking up a banh mi in my neighborhood, I found myself transfixed by a TV in the restaurant showing what I assumed was a nature documentary. At first the footage soothed: Gentle humpback whales sailing through hazy blue waters and killer whales gliding in packs under glacial ice. But the longer I waited for my banh mi, which was not very long at all, the more unsettling the video became. When a fleet of eight or so orcas moved in uncanny alignment under ice that looked a little too crystalline, I realized the video was AI, a realization that felt first bleak but then reassuring for my ability to detect such things. I was re-unsettled when the video then cut to footage that looked absolutely real. It was another humpback gliding through murky, sun-drizzled sea, its grizzled …  ( 25 min )

At approximately 11 pm on Dec. 13, 2025, I thought I’d lost it all. I found myself at the Williamsburg location of Barcade—a combination bar and vintage arcade—for my j-school’s end-of-semester party. No particular part of me wanted to spend the night in Williamsburg or at an arcade, let alone both at once. But I needed to make more friends at school. Recently, after a professor offered me some advice, she recommended I also consult my “j-school besties.” When I thought to myself, “Girl, that’s you,” I realized I had a problem. Thus, Barcade, along with pleasantries about the upcoming winter break, travel plans, and holiday traditions. When someone asked if I wanted to grab a drink, I offered a friendly “Yes!” and ordered a Sam Adams “Just The Haze” non-alcoholic IPA.  It tasted so good—so IPA-like—that I thought the bartender accidentally served me alcohol, less than a month away from my one year sober anniversary. Bready fizz pooled at the back of my throat while I considered how upset to feel about 337 days of hard work gone in an instant—at a locale named Barcade, of all places. Does an accidental sip count as a relapse? I turned to the bartender, who saw the look of alarm in my eyes and immediately anticipated my concern. “It’s really good right? Almost tastes too much like the real thing?”  ( 23 min )

On Dec. 5, 2025, FIFA President Gianni Infantino presented Donald Trump with the inaugural FIFA Peace Prize, nominally for Trump's "tireless efforts to bring people together in a spirit of peace." I found myself less interested in the cynicism of placating Trump with the sort of bribe one would bestow upon a recalcitrant 10-year-old—nobody considers FIFA the imprimatur of global peace—and more interested in the physical award itself. The FIFA statue is a miniature of a hulking bronze sculpture, on display at the UN, entitled Thoughts and Desires. It offers a hackneyed and vacuous statement of connectivity, depicting five bronze hands reaching up to touch a globe. The viewer is supposed to see the statue and think, Wow, people are important on the planet, and be moved. OK. It was made by Az…  ( 38 min )

The Stanley Cup Final is, to use the industry term, drunk off its ass. Not one game, not one occurrence has seemed to follow logically from what came before it. Goals are plentiful. Goalkeeping is optional. Leads are temporary, and possibly even cursed: Each of the four games has seen multi-goal leads evaporate. (Empirically, the only sure thing is to go up four; that lead will disappear too, but you'll get it back in overtime.) Is it good hockey? It's hockey, that's for sure. Is it fun hockey? "Not really," said Carolina coach Rod Brind'Amour. "It's pretty stressful." Brind'Amour's Canes beat the Golden Knights 5-3 in yet another thriller Tuesday to even things up at two games apiece, and there are vanishingly few narrative constants in this series to cling to outside of inconstancy itself. One has been that Carter Hart has been playing like Carter Shart, becoming the first goalie in history to give up at least four goals in each of the first four games of a Final. Another has been Jordan Staal turning back the clock and playing like it's 2008. Those are teasers for the rest of this blog. Game 4's drama started even before puck drop, with the news that Frederik Andersen, who has started every game in net for Carolina, wouldn't even dress. Brandon Bussi, who played in relief in Game 3, got the start, with Pyotr Kochetkov backing him up. There's speculation that Andersen is hurt, but that wouldn't have to be disclosed since he was a scratch, so who knows; he also did give up four goals in one period. Brind'Amour insisted Andersen just needed a break. It would become a moot point if Bussi, the 27-year-old rookie, could claim the crease with a statement game. That's not quite what happened. Bussi would allow a trio of Vegas goals, largely against the run of play, but then he would tighten up as the Golden Knights brought the house in the third. Mixed results. Brind'Amour wouldn't tip his hand for Game 5's starter.  ( 21 min )

96 Ask a Manager - new articles p{ margin:10px 0; padding:0; } table{ border-collapse:collapse; } h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6{ display:block; margin:0; padding:0; } img,a img{ border:0; height:auto; outline:none; text-decoration:none; } body,#bodyTable,#bodyCell{ height:100%; margin:0; padding:0; width:100%; } .mcnPreviewText{ display:none !important; } #outlook a{ padding:0; } img{ -ms-interpolation-mode:bicubic; } table{ mso-table-lspace:0pt; mso-table-rspace:0pt; } .ReadMsgBody{ width:100%; } .ExternalClass{ width:100%; } p,a,li,td,blockquote{ mso-line-height-rule:exactly; } a[href^=tel],a[href^=sms]{ color:i…  ( 3 min )

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

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

DANNIJOPRO And The Therapeutic Power Of Merch96 :root { color-scheme: light; supported-color-schemes: light; } body { margin: 0; padding: 0; min-width: 100%!important; -ms-text-size-adjust: 100% !important; -webkit-transform: scale(1) !important; -webkit-text-size-adjust: 100% !important; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased !important; } .body { word-wrap: normal; word-spacing:normal; } table.mso { width: 100%; border-collapse: collapse; padding: 0; table-layout: fixed; } img { border: 0; outline: none; } table { mso-table-lspace: 0px; mso-table-rspace: 0px; } td, a, span { mso-line-height-rule: exactly; } #root [x-apple-data-detectors=true], a[x-apple-data-detectors=true], #MessageViewBody a { color: inherit !important; text-decoration: inherit !important; font-size:…  ( 8 min )

Congress gave judges the power to shorten a prison term if “extraordinary and compelling reasons” warrant relief. But the Republican justices on the Supreme Court won’t let judges use it. The post The Supreme Court Suggests Any Compassion For Criminal Defendants Is Too Much appeared first on Balls and Strikes.  ( 8 min )

As we enter the three key weeks of the Supreme Court's term, a guide to what's still left to be decided, what to expect, and some of the broader takeaways.

He slept through the Finals, got dumped by voters, and his son's company cashed an Indian billionaire's check

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

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

Pete Hegseth is not a coherent thinker. This was demonstrated yet again on the D-Day anniversary event in France, where the defense secretary gave a speech that was supposed to be anti-Nazi but ended up employing a metaphor that made the Nazis sound like the victims in WWII. Hegseth claims he wants military promotions based on merit, but has systematically blocked promotions of people are more qualified than he’ll ever be, for no other seeming reason than they aren’t white men. And, of course, he keeps saying the U.S. has won the Iran war, which still has no end in sight, while also begging for more time and money to wage it. So it’s no surprise that the famously incompetent Donald Trump appointee recently claimed to be “simplifying” the military’s religious coding system, but only ended u…  ( 7 min )

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