Elon Musk loves them. Donald Trump thinks they’re “the best hope for Germany” and that they’ll “MGGA” (Make Germany Great Again). They’re an existential threat for fact-based reasoning, democracy, human rights, and multiculturalism. And they're in position to become the first far-right party to lead a German state since 1945. Over 77 percent of the eligible population of the German state of Saxony-Anhalt went to the polls on Sept. 6 in order to vote for their new state government. Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) was able to cruise to victory with a plurality 43.8 percent of the vote, slightly outperforming their polling. While the composition of the government has yet to be ironed out, it’s an unprecedented win for a party whose entire platform is based on hating immigrants and non-white Germans. For anti-right activists in Saxony-Anhalt, the weeks and days leading up to the election had been marked by a mix of anxiety, defiance, and energy, as organizations set up pro-democracy rallies and events throughout the state. Bettina Wiengarn is a board member and spokesperson of the Zerbster Bündnis für Demokratie, a local association based in Zerbst, a small town in eastern Saxony-Anhalt. She and others had gathered to watch the results roll in.  ( 35 min )

You can always count on our Monday crossword. This week's puzzle was constructed by Elijah Acquah, and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu.  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."  ( 14 min )

If you've read Nicholas Russell, here or elsewhere, you've gathered that he is thoughtful, erudite, and extremely curious. In addition to approximately one million reviews and essays here at Defector, he's published more than a dozen interviews, and they've ranged all over: politics podcasters, a film critic, an indie musician, a veteran foreign correspondent, a cruciverbalist, an English professor and Toni Morrison scholar, and the retired WNBA journeywoman Carolyn Swords. By now, you have probably also picked up on the fact that he is uncommonly driven. Reporting is hard. Interviewing, or at least doing it well, is hard. Freelancing is hard as hell. Russell churns out excellent freelance work while holding down a day job as a bookseller, in addition to writing short fiction. Now he is a…  ( 70 min )

Nothing beats watching a billionaire eat filth in public, unless the chefs and waiters at Maison De Merde are all billionaires too. And so it is that Steve Ballmer's semi-abject capitulation to reality, and to the penalty he was handed in the face of overwhelming evidence of salary cap contravention in the guise of botanical fraud, arrives without either the proper level of humiliation or the burn-down-the-village revenge that would have satisfied us all infinitely more. The fun was in the extremes. The middle road stinks. No one pines for the inevitable. Yet, there it was, conveniently dumped on an NFL Sunday night where only those people who were sick of Giants-Cowboys but couldn't yet fall asleep were paying attention. Ballmer took the knee with just a hint of middle finger behind the back, proclaiming that least defensible of legal positions, "I'm clean but I'll do the time anyway."  ( 23 min )

College football fans who tuned into ESPN's College GameDay this Saturday were forced to encounter the alarming visage of Texas Senator Ted Cruz. To make matter worse, he monopolized nearly 10 minutes of air time in order to stump for the Protect College Sports Act (PCSA), a bill that is like a lot of things Ted Cruz stumps for, in that it is explicitly designed to make workers' lives worse. Proponents of the PCSA rely on a familiar set of talking points when hyping up their pet bill, which could be voted on by the Senate this month. They are quick to point out that college sports are in "chaos," and they have plenty of material to support their case. They can point to the ludicrous number of player transfers that happen every offseason, constant conference realignment, ballooning NIL budg…  ( 25 min )

Emacs terminal buffers like eat, vterm, ghostel, term, and ansi-term can become slow when processing large volumes of standard output. Watching Emacs freeze while a build script dumps thousands of lines is frustrating, but terminal latency is not an unavoidable cost of living inside Emacs. Applying a few targeted configuration changes will eliminate scroll lag and restore immediate responsiveness. This article provides a configuration that speed up terminal buffers. Before we begin, please consider sharing this article on your website, blog, Mastodon, Reddit, X, LinkedIn, Hacker News, or other social media platforms. Sharing it will help other Emacs users discover how to improve the performance of their terminal emulators. Complete configuration for high-performance terminal buffers The fo…  ( 11 min )

Homebrew, a repository of easy to install apps and libraries. I use it all the time because it’s so much easier than hunting up all the dependencies required for compiling them yourself. If you’re a Linux user, you may or may not be familiar with Homebrew. It provides the same services for Linux but my—possible wrong—impression is that its Linux take-up is not as great as it is in macOS. Regardless, if you’re on Linux or macOS, you should definitely check it out. The TL;DR of this post is that Homebrew has just released version 7.0.0, a major release. That probably wouldn’t be worth an Irreal post except for the “major release” part. On the macOS side, macOS 10.5 and earlier are no longer supported. Being a Mac-head, I didn’t check discontinued versions on Linux so if you’re using Homebrew on Linux you should check that out. The other big change for Mac-heads is that Intel Macs are moved to Tier 3. You can check out the announcement for exactly what that means but basically it indicates that support is limited and end-of-life is approaching (in September of 2027). Homebrew is an excellent repository and well worth investigating if you’re not familiar with it. I still have an Intel Mac so it’s a bit of a pain that support is diminishing but I need to upgrade anyway so this is probably the push I need.  ( 5 min )

Hey, it’s the… *counts on fingers*… 22nd anniversary of me using Emacs to watch TV and movies! And in the start, it was a snappy, focused package that just listed directory contents and let me play the files… but then it grew to take care of resuming where I left off, and fixing the frame rate of the TV to fit the video file, and lately it’s also automatically choosing the correct subtitles and audio track. This means that it’s now calling mediainfo before playing the file to get all that data. And since it’s accessing the files over nfs, and mediainfo apparently has to load the entire file (or large parts) to cough up that data, things have gotten slower: Look at that! It’s horrible! I have to wait, er, two seconds before I can watch Saturday Night Live?! How can anybody live lik…  ( 6 min )

vc than I installed the bleeding edge and found Emacs 31 went and did it properly. Right there in the 31 NEWS: a whole C-x v w working-tree map. So before I get too attached to my own code I thought I had better do an honest head-to-head. Verdict up front: I am keeping mine, with one key moved. Here is why. First, what 31 actually ships under C-x v w: w c (vc-add-working-tree) prompts for a directory, then a branch, but you have to create a branch for yourself, where as my version and also Magit ask for the name of the branch to create, as when creating a new worktree, wouldn't you always want to create a branch? Also with the built-in there is no placeholder initial name, with something involving the branch name, so this command currently feels a little disjointed. w w (vc-sw…

everything Dear Leader got up to on his 48-hour vacation could have been done right here at home

In countries outside of the US, “libertarianism” is often synonymous with anarchy. In the US, it typically refers to folks who are really into unrestrained capitalism without the social support. I was talking about this with a libertarian friend some time ago, and they said something along the lines of… What you’re describing means you’d have to really depend on other people. They meant it in a bad way.  ( 20 min )

Today we’re listening to John Carroll Kirby, an American pianist and composer from Los Angeles.

Two songs. Two bands. Two completely different ideas of what punk rock could be. The Ramones’ “Blitzkrieg Bop” and  ( 8 min )

My Exif Manager app (Linux) After scanning a roll of film, I like to add camera make/model/lens exif data to the files. For years, I've done this via exiftool using the command line. It's not hard, but I thought I'd see if Claude Code could whip up something a little nicer to use. Turns out it could. Launch the app, open a folder, choose from a pre-defined list of my cameras and lenses, and write the exif info to the files. It took Claude maybe 30 minutes from my prompt to a working app. That's all I needed it to do, but I got a little fancy and added captioning, which many photo apps make more difficult than it should be. Speaking of making things difficult, some apps (::cough Darktable::) don't deal well with metadata during export, so I have my app allow me to write the information to already-exported files based on file name. Let's say I have Darktable export a bunch of images to ~/Pictures/Export but those images lose their captions (it happens!). I tell my app where the exported files are and it matches file names and writes the metadata to those files. The trouble with having an LLM at hand all the time is that now I want to work with it to build or extend little apps for everything. It's too easy, helpful, and fun to ignore. ✍️ Reply by email  ( 1 min )

Shot a roll in the Olympus OM-1n with the Zuiko 85mm f/2.0. I find long lenses nearly as challenging as wide ones. Adirondack chair on West Twin Lake Lock on boat house door Bryan's boat on the lift Weeds on the shore at Bryan's cottage Stairs on Bryan's dock Alice's food and water dishes Model wooden boat Flowers on our deck wrapping around nearby lamp post Kayaks Portrait of Jack by Bryan Lewis ✍️ Reply by email

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

Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey” arrives in theaters this week. And if you thought that “Oppenheimer” was the most Christopher Nolan movie that Christopher Nolan could possibly make, let this serve as either an exciting tease or a stern warning: You ain’t seen squat. Blessed with a reported $250 million budget, the Oscar-winning director has used Homer’s Greek epic to amplify (somehow) all of his trademark directorial tics. Is this movie long? Dude, it is SO long. Does the story center around a taciturn fellow (Matt Damon, never better) who’s got some heavy s—t going on? Absolutely. Do we get a plot timeline that’s been chopped and screwed? Very much so. Is the sound mix deafening, to the point of pain, and are entire swaths of dialogue still not comprehensible despite that loudness? (My …  ( 1 min )

Wildfires are once again eating their way across California. Three fires, one near Big Sur, one enveloping Lassen and Sierra counties and one raging in Humboldt County, have burned tens of thousands of acres of land, poisoned endangered condors, and closed off various highways and state parks indefinitely. The aforementioned fires have barely been contained by authorities. When (or, *shudder*, if) the fires die down, more fires will follow in their wake. And more after that, and more after that. Wildfire is a natural part of California’s environment, and thanks to humankind’s disastrous warping of the planet’s climate, fires will only grow more widespread and destructive in the years to come. Now, woke types might tell you that all of this is bad. But what if I told you that the ongoing s…  ( 1 min )

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

Aerial view of a 49.5-megawatt data center under construction in Vernon, Calif., on July 14, 2026. Myung J. Chun/LA Times via Getty Images I was watching some hot World Cup action the other day when this local ad from a lobbying group called Virginia Connects graced my television screen. I didn’t know that Virginia Connects was behind this spot until the very end of it, which is standard practice for all evilmongers these days. If I see a commercial that begins with a tasteful montage of Americans doing super-serious, deeply American things, that ad will inevitably end with a plug for AI, Meta pinky-swearing to keep your kids safe, or a promise that Jesus gets me. This Virginia Connects ad plays out in a similar fashion. It opens with an all-American dad using his smartphone to give his a…  ( 1 min )

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

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

With the midterm elections looming and Americans plagued by the cost of virtually everything, President Donald Trump decided it’s a great time for a trade war with Canada. You all know Canada, right? It’s the big place just north of us. Our close ally. The country known for being incredibly nice. That Canada. Trump slapped 50% U.S. tariffs on a number of Canadian goods after trade negotiations fell apart Aug. 22. Then, on Aug. 24, Trump posted additional threats on social media, saying he’ll double tariffs on imported vehicles and auto parts from Canada and adding: “WE DON’T NEED CANADA, THEY NEED US!” If I didn’t know better, I’d say Trump is doing more than Democrats to guarantee a Republican electoral wipeout in the midterms. Trump's trade war with Canada will make the GOP's life more m…  ( 14 min )

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

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

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

The easily influenced influencers in the Make America Healthy Again crowd are livid that the U.S. Supreme Court sided with the maker of Roundup weedkiller, rejecting a lawsuit that claimed the herbicide causes cancer. And they're feeling betrayed by the president they supported, Donald Trump, because he and his Department of Justice sided with Bayer, the company that bought out longtime Roundup-maker Monsanto. MAHA influencer Alex Clark decried the court’s June 25 decision on social media: “For an administration that promised to take on corporate capture and Make America Healthy Again, this is a STUNNING betrayal.” MAHA activist Alexandra Muñoz posted on Instagram: “The DOJ’s support of this case has betrayed the American people.”  Vani Hari, a MAHA mom who blogs as “The Food Babe,” poste…  ( 15 min )

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

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

Oft-fired conservative commentator Tucker Carlson, less than two years removed from calling Donald Trump “a wonderful person,” has dropped a new grift, claiming on a recent podcast that he will no longer support the Republican Party. He wasn’t gentle about his “I’m out” declaration. “I don’t share their values on any level,” Carlson said on the June 18 episode of the “Can’t Be Censored” podcast. “Their personal values, the way they live, greedy, bizarro sex lives, loyal to a foreign country above the United States, it’s like everything I dislike. Beginning with the speaker of the House, Speaker Mike Johnson, and extending to the president and the leaders in the Senate, I have nothing in common with these people at all. I do not share their values, I find their priorities appalling and so I…  ( 14 min )

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 )

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

How best to react to the latest news on the Los Angeles Rams? Easy. With complete abandon and logical recklessness. That's how the veterans do it. Said latest news, that massive offseason signing Myles Garrett has fouled his knee, failed to will it healthy again, and now will have surgery that will take out all of September and a chunk of October as well. Garrett was the big swing of the summer, but the fact that it was the Rams that took it is no surprise. General manager Les Snead and head coach Sean McVay love acquisitional bat speed more than nearly any team not named Real Madrid or Barcelona, and between Garrett and veteran ace in the hole Aaron Donald, they surely constructed the most unsettling defensive front since their own Fearsome Foursome six decades ago. In fact, they also apparently took another shot at cornering the pass-rush market by making a strenuous run at Las Vegas Raiders designated menace Maxx Crosby, one which failed in significant part because Crosby decided in the wake of his abortive trade to Baltimore that he wanted against all odds to remain a Raider, a choice we presume he will rue for the next six decades or so.  ( 20 min )

West Sacramento Athletics manager Mark Kotsay knew the drill from months of exercising it. Another game was on fire, and he needed someone who could at least let it burn itself out, so he went to Carlos Cortes in the bottom of the eighth inning, the bases loaded with Mariners and four runs already in. And Cortes did his duty, inducing Victor Robles to fly out modestly to right field to end the inning. Seattle still led, 16-1, but Cortes did the required work. Then he went out again for the ninth because it was still 16-1 and the A's didn't really need him to be the left fielder any more. And, predictably, he got kicked around the lot because that's what left fielders asked to pitch tend to do. He walked Cal Raleigh. Then he walked Julio Rodriguez. Then he walked Brock Rodden. Then he gave up a two-run single to Cole Young and a sacrifice fly to Michael Arroyo. Eventually he did get out of the inning, though, because Carlos Cortes does the required work, even if it takes a bit. This was his ninth appearance as a pitcher this year, which truly is remarkable given that he is indeed an outfielder by trade. But the A's get beaten by a lot a lot. In his nine appearances, Cortes has entered games in which they trailed at the time by an aggregate score of 129-20, so he gets an extraordinary amount of mop duty. He is The Other Ohtani, or at least that's how he should be marketed.  ( 21 min )

It was supposed to be a day to remember Chris Johnson, and it still can be. The NFL's all-time single-season yards leader was scheduled to be honored today by the Tennessee Titans, for whom he starred from 2008–2013, at halftime of their game against the New York Jets, for whom he played in 2014. But the Titans announced Friday that Johnson won't be able to travel to Nashville to be inducted into the team's Ring of Honor, and the ceremony will be postponed to a later date. I hope it does happen later. Johnson's appearance was canceled due to "unforeseen circumstances," and it's hard not to assume that's health-related. Johnson, 40, revealed in June on Good Morning America that he's been diagnosed with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, a degenerative neurological disorder that is invariably fatal. It is cruel and it works quickly: The average time between onset and death is between two and four years. Johnson said he first noticed weakness in one hand in March 2025, and by the time of his GMA interview just 15 months later, he required a computerized speech-generating device that he controls with his eye movements. A few days ago, Johnson published "A Letter to My Kids" in The Players' Tribune; it felt like a goodbye. "How can a man just be perfectly healthy one day," he wrote, "running around with his kids in the yard, and then the next, your hand starts getting weak, and it just travels throughout your whole body until you can’t talk anymore?"  ( 21 min )

The truest thing about college football is that there is no such thing as being too small, too petty, or too whiny about being too small or petty. We're not being frivolously critical here despite how good doing that makes us feel; blaming people in the industry for acting out is like blaming a fish for being wet. These are simply the conditions that prevail. You simply have to learn to forget everything you ever learned about the values the sport allegedly respects and take the mess it churns every week for the entertainment value. Which is why the resumption of the Kansas-Missouri football rivalry has gone so well for everyone involved, including those of us with no meat on the grill. Missouri won Friday’s game, 38-21, but it's the 8 at the end that stuck out because that was Missouri coach Eli Drinkwitz directing his team to score a needless late touchdown and in doing so sticking one last finger in the Jayhawks' eye for bringing up the Bleeding Kansas crisis of the 1850s in a pregame hype video called, in a triumph of subtlety, "Heroes and Villains": https://twitter.com/KU_Football/status/2098169671824404786  ( 23 min )

post that discusses optimizing buffer line numbering. It explains the different line numbering schemes and their relative costs. I not a big user of line numbering. I usually turn it on for the Elfeed index but hardly every use it otherwise unless I have a specific need. In particular, I hardly ever use them in code buffers because I prefer to jump to a particular construct rather than a line number, which, irrationally, always seem to me to be ephemeral. When I do use line numbers, I like absolute line numbers rather than the two types of relative numbers. That turns out to the right choice as far as efficiency is concerned but many people—including Cherti—prefer relative numbering. That can be expensive, especially for long lines, but there are some settings that can speed things up. The descriptions of those settings don’t really capture what they do and why you might prefer one value over another so Cherti’s post is especially helpful. If you’re one of the people who like having your buffers numbered in one way or another, take a look at Cherti’s post to see how to get the best possible performance for your choice of representation.  ( 5 min )

Tags: emacs  ( 2 min )

submitted by /u/DerekL1963 [link] [comments]

céad míle fáilte — now get the fuck out

So many anarchist principles seems like they would “never work”… because they literally cannot under capitalism, but would work just fine under a different system. One really good example of that is abolishing patents. Patents are silly, actually A patent says a person or company legally owns “an idea” or way of doing things, and no one else can use that idea or approach for many years. If you think about it for a bit, that seems really silly, doesn’t it?  ( 21 min )

FoxTrot by Bill Amend | September 13, 2026  ( 9 min )

When Guns N’ Roses released Appetite for Destruction in 1987, there was little reason to believe it would become  ( 22 min )

Disco had one of the most dramatic rises and falls in popular music history. For a genre whose period  ( 31 min )

There are bad albums, and then there is Metal Machine Music. Bad albums usually fail in recognizable ways. The  ( 30 min )

It is difficult to think of another band that changed the sound of modern music as profoundly as Kraftwerk.  ( 27 min )

Bob Marley remains one of the most recognizable and influential musicians in history. His face has become an international  ( 23 min )

A protest song is more than a song with an opinion. It is music made to challenge power, mourn  ( 26 min )

There are road trip playlists, and then there are playlists that require a little self-control. The songs on this  ( 14 min )

It sounds like something invented for a ridiculous comedy sketch: a farmer puts on his work clothes, goes about  ( 9 min )

Bon Jovi’s “Livin’ on a Prayer” is one of the defining songs of 1980s rock, a huge, emotional singalong that  ( 5 min )

wrote about the Bedrock starter kit for Emacs by Ashton Wiersdorf. Now Wiersdorf has issued a new major release of the kit. It’s mainly an update for Emacs 31 and requires that version to run. I liked his announcement and description of Bedrock 2.0 and decided to write about it on Irreal. To be honest, I’d forgotten that I’d already written about Bedrock and didn’t discover that I had until I chose the obvious name for the post source file (bedrock.org) and found that such a file already existed. You should read what I wrote before; everything from that post applies to the new version. The TL;DR is that although I don’t generally care for starter kits, I do like Wiersdorf’s because it mainly concerns itself with simple variable settings rather than configuring a bunch of packages that a user may or may not want1. His init.el is well commented to explain what everything does and some items are commented out with an explanation of why you might want to enable them. You can see the file here. If you’re looking for a simple, minimal configuration for Emacs as a starting point or you know a n00b who is, take a look at Bedrock. Footnotes: 1 There are, as with the original version, some auxiliary files that bring in some packages that Wiersdorf finds particularly useful.  ( 5 min )

The display-line-numbers-mode and global-display-line-numbers-mode modes render line numbers in the margin of an Emacs window. Line-number display is implemented in the core C display engine, avoiding the overhead of legacy Elisp overlays like linum-mode. Despite the native C implementation, and even after configuring Emacs scrolling for better usability, specific configurations can still trigger expensive Lisp evaluations during the interactive command loop, vertical scrolling, and buffer initialization. This article outlines configurations that avoid unnecessary width calculations and initialization scans. Speed comparison across line-number types The display-line-numbers-type variable specifies the type of line numbers activated by display-line-numbers-mode and global-display-line-numbe…  ( 8 min )

Watch on YouTube This is a quick demonstration of using Orukeet as a speech recognition model inside Emacs. I'm recording this in real time on a Lenovo P52 laptop using only CPU. I can replay just one part of my recording. I can switch languages in the middle of recording too. Par exemple, maintenant je parle français. Seems promising. Links/notes: oruk/orukeet · Hugging Face file:///home/sacha/vendor/orukeet/orukeet-server.py - I generated this with Google Gemini for a quick POC. It keeps the model in memory for slightly faster processing per segment. Run Orukeet locally: Python speech recognition | oruk https://oruk.ai/examples/orukeet-local.py - Python script you can run from the command line to transcribe files. file:///home/sacha/vendor/orukeet/orukeet-local.py sachac/whisper.el - my fork of natrys/whisper.el sacha-whisper-continue - This lets me cue transcriptions of previous segments while continuing to record new ones. I like it because I tend to pause while thinking out loud. I can define the chunk that will get transcribed so that I don't end up with incomplete chunks or lost context. View Org source for this post You can e-mail me at sacha@sachachua.com.  ( 1 min )

A few weeks ago I wrote about how I remapped yank to my command which allows to transform the yanked text. The whole setup – where I press C-y twice to trigger the transformation transient – has one drawback: I sometimes legitimately want to call yank twice in a row. This happens when I need to copy the current line and modify the copy so that I have two similar lines in a row. (I often need this when editing Ledger transactions, for example.) What I sometimes do in such a situation is basically a dance of C-a C-1 C-k C-y C-y. It turns out I don’t need to.  ( 2 min )

Donny snoozes on 9/11, MAGA loses its way to heaven, and so much more...

Drinks with Eggleston A couple days at a cottage was good for me. Never opened the laptop once. But then, I come home home, fire up the computer, and immediately regret it. I may just stop talking about the software and services I use, lest I'm suddenly labeled a supporter of fascism because one of them turns out to be built by an asshole or is friends with an asshole or once shared a quote by said asshole. Or maybe I'll quit the whole fucking show. ✍️ Reply by email  ( 1 min )

I guess brainwashing is a funny thing.  ( 80 min )

Thank God we’re still in good standing with the World Health Organization ... oh wait.  ( 62 min )

I’ve spent a day test-driving that Emacs minor mode for spellchecking using an LLM that I wrote the other day. I went through all the posts on the Total Eclipse blog (all 260 of them) to see whether the thing works or not. And, yes, it works now, but it took some tweaking. Well, I rewrote the mode. Twice. My original approach was to give the LLM the entire text, and then ask it to return it to me verbatim, but with changed words tagged up specially. This worked 90% of the time, but it would randomly decide to do something else… and I was never totally sure that it actually returned the entire text. That approach was a bit too nerve-racking. But Sacha Chua has done something along similar lines, and her approach is to ask the LLM to return just the changed parts: That sounds like a mu…  ( 6 min )

traverse icon Traverse | OPML Outliner for macOS Price: Traverse Lifetime: $17.99. Annual Subscription: $9.99. Monthly Subscription: 0.99 TL;DR:: Traverse is a competent outliner which deals in OPML, Markdown and Fountain files. It is well-designed with a column view which is addictive. OPML All The Way Traverse saves its files in the OPML format. “OPML (Outline Processor Markup Language) is an XML format for outlines (defined as”a tree, where each node contains a set of named attributes with string values”). Originally developed by UserLand Software as a native file format for the outliner application in its Radio UserLand product, it has since been adopted for other uses, the most common being to exchange lists of web feeds between web feed aggregators.”[^https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OP…

Welcome to the Defector College Football Watch Guide, where Israel Daramola and Ray Ratto will tell you which of the weekend’s college football games are worth giving a crap about. Ray: With all the braying about the blessed return of football games this past week, all by people who should be constantly monitored for their protection and ours, we note that while there were many games there was only some football. So far this season, ranked teams have beaten unranked teams by an aggregate score of 1,085-241, which is an average score of 45-10. (We are omitting the Mississippi-Louisville game since both teams were ranked and therefore treated the opener like the event it should be.) All the ranked teams won, with the neon green asterisk being Michigan. Now we will ignore the elephantine questions of who got fired at Kalshi after paying out on Western Michigan bets, and who is the guiltiest party in the swindling of those deeply screwed Kalamazoomers. It has been six days since the discovery of the Big Ten's Mystery Clock, and in a culture like college football's, where cheating can be the difference between the Bluebonnet and Peach Bowls, most outrages this obvious barely last three days, let alone six. Instead, we will note that three games last weekend were delayed by the bestial weather and a fourth, between the Colorado School of Mines Orediggers and Washburn Ichabods, became the first tie game in 31 years because even after starting the game early to avoid a heat index figure straight from Satan's colon, the two schools went into overtime and couldn't finish. And really, can you pick a favorite between Orediggers and Ichabods? Anyway, let the sad tales commence.  ( 43 min )

Britt McHenry, a former Fox host and ESPN reporter best known for a towing yard tirade, says she’s taken a job with the Trump administration. McHenry took to social media on Wednesday to confirm that she’d been hired as a “press advisor” for the U.S. Department of State. Her announcement, which was first reported by Barrett Media, included vague details about what her duties will be. She said she would be developing "strategies to address media concerns and enhance public understanding of State Department initiatives" on her updated LinkedIn page. But McHenry did say she’s "beyond excited" about working for Marco Rubio.  It's unclear what part of McHenry's résumé makes her a good fit for the State Department. The tiny and harmful secretary of state has gotten recent attention for hiring folks who’ve been caught on video being assholes. If that's an attribute Rubio's indeed after, McHenry made an unbeatable audition tape more than a decade ago. In fact, should McHenry somehow go on to broker an end to the Iran fiasco, negotiate a truce in the Ukraine war, and formulate some sort of McHenry Doctrine that ushers in an era of world peace, here’s betting that her obituary would still lead off with what a loathsome bully she was in the spring of 2015 at a Northern Virginia towing yard.  ( 24 min )

This week on Nothing But Respect, we welcomed back million-time guest Giri Nathan to talk primarily about his experience covering the U.S. Open. How bad is the phone situation? How does the memetic object of the Honey Deuce explain the current predicament? What's been the match of the tournament? We also touched on the biggest NBA news story of the past week, as well as the fallout from the NBA's hammer-style punishment of the Clippers. You can find Nothing But Respect in Apple Podcasts or whatever podcast app you use. Follow the show on Instagram, and contact the Broke Jumper Tip Line at (347) 380-6426. Thanks for listening!  ( 15 min )

On Sept. 10, ProPublica published a story by reporter Gus Garcia-Roberts detailing how Pittsburgh Pirates center fielder Oneil Cruz avoided prosecution after a traffic collision in the Dominican Republic in which he rear-ended a motorcycle, killing all three passengers. The crash occurred in Cruz's hometown of Nizao in the Peravia province, on Sept. 21, 2020; at the time, Cruz was 21 years old and still a prospect. While an initial press release from the public prosecutor's office stated that "according to investigations, the accused had ingested alcoholic beverages prior to the accident," prosecutors never raised the subject of either alcohol or intoxication at Cruz's arraignment. A Pittsburgh Post-Gazette article from five days after the crash reported on the discrepancy, with a spokeswoman from the public prosecutor's office stating that Cruz "smelled of alcohol," but due to a "procedural error," no official sobriety tests were performed. By the time Cruz was called up to the Pirates' big-league squad for the first time in 2021, the story was broadly forgotten. Garcia-Roberts's story details how Cruz came to face no charges related to the incident. Garcia-Roberts spoke to the families of the victims—19-year-old Daniela Perez Garcia, 20-year-old Deby Beato Charles, and 20-year-old Yohan Saba Mercado—all of whom withdrew their charges. According to his reporting, Cruz's family, while he was still in custody, reached out to Dominican businessman Santo Caraballo as a fixer, on the advice of a trainer. Caraballo, who had political connections, reportedly helped persuade the families of all the victims to accept a cash payment in exchange for withdrawing any legal claims against Cruz. In interviews, each family details the emotional fallout, and how they accepted the payments, which totaled roughly $66,000, due either to deceit, financial pressure, or pragmatism.  ( 20 min )

The power of a well and oft-told narrative is not to be diminished, but it also should not be feared if countervailing information comes to light. And so it is that the San Francisco 49ers, irradiated scoundrels though they may be and summer vacation wastrels they absolutely proved to be, came up with the one enduring rebuttal to all the amused schadenfreude that has been aimed their way. Specifically, they answered it with a comprehensive kicking of that arse. The 49ers put that indisputably goofy offseason all the way behind them—for a week, anyway—by taking the preseason Super Bowl favorite Los Angeles Rams and choke-slamming them and their national reputations on an Aussie Rules ground, 27-7. People made a point of saying afterward that this was the worst opening-game loss by a preseason championship favorite in 50 years, and it was. What this tells us is that all pregame gambling information, like almost all pregame information, has only one utility: to bait degenerates into spending money in defense of or repudiation of that information. The football stuff, by contrast, takes care of itself. The Rams, whose preseason standing was somewhere between consensus pick and indomitable favorite, never came close to proving it on Thursday. The score, for what it's worth, was probably a flattery to the Rams. The whompage was evident everywhere.  ( 23 min )

The NFL is built on parity. The middle exudes a tremendous gravitational force, with the schedule, the draft, and the salary cap all conspiring to pull every team toward 9-8 or 8-9 records year after year. While the larger-order churn of the league hews to that pattern, a number of teams have found ways to consistently defy the schematic, either by consistently posting winning records or failing to take advantage of the considerable structural help built into the way the NFL is organized. But why? What makes these organizations capable of resisting the pull of the middle? Joshua Robinson and Jonathan Clegg ask these questions in their new book, The Playbook: The Hidden Forces Shaping Winners and Losers in the Modern NFL, which is available now. This is the Wall Street Journal duo's fourth book together, and it's the product of a year of reporting and research. On Wednesday afternoon, I spoke with Robinson about the book's arguments, what makes team-building in the NFL so fascinating, and his and Clegg's co-writing process. Our conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.  ( 35 min )

I knew I had gone too far when the question of whether we should buy a gun crossed my mind. This came at the apex of a weeklong anxiety spiral triggered by a New York Times feature about the possibility of an 18-month nationwide blackout. I was uneasy seeing the phrase “art form” used to describe the archaic manufacturing process of the transformers that underpin our electrical grid; the process involves painstakingly bespoke techniques of winding copper coils, wrapping paper insulation, and binding wiring, all by hand. The intensity and intricacy of that process means that there is a backlog of transformer manufacturing and repair, sometimes stretching as long as five years. There are more than 55,000 substations in the United States, but according to a Federal Energy Regulatory Commissio…  ( 31 min )

The quality of the average tennis broadcast has skyrocketed in recent years. Analysts assume far more curiosity and intelligence on the viewer’s part than I can ever remember, and they're no longer limited to tropes and cliches, recycled set after set. Instead the television audience receives tasty morsels of granular observation. Sure, you might still have to deal with a certain American legend entering the booth and freshly learning about the existence of any player ranked below No. 12, but a lot of bright minds are on the mic now, working hard to elucidate the game. Recently retired players like Andrea Petkovic and Chris Eubanks mesh wit with analysis, and former greats Andre Agassi and Andy Roddick get shockingly nitty-gritty about stroke production and point patterns. I feel heartened that some sizable audience cares about this stuff, and that networks like ESPN, TNT, and Tennis Channel have decided it’s worth investing in. My current favorite commentator is Jim Courier, the former world No. 1 and four-time major champ, whose stateside employers are Tennis Channel and TNT, where he is especially adept at interpreting the interplay of variables in every tennis match: conditions, technique, tactics, fitness. You'll learn something new every time you hear him on the call. This past Monday at the Open, I sat down with Courier to talk about how he sees tennis, in hopes that it would help other fans see it better. Our conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.  ( 44 min )

Name an iconic scene from the first Spider-Man movie, the one directed by Sam Raimi that came out in 2002. You’re saying it’s the upside-down kiss? Yeah, that’s fair. Let me ask my question in a different way: What’s the most iconic line from the first Spider—OK now that I’m saying it out loud, it’s definitely “With great power comes great responsibility.” Which I know is not a creation of the film but it did popularize it and … we’re already getting off-topic. Let me try this again: Hey, remember the part in the middle of Spider-Man that’s about 9/11?  ( 36 min )

As you’ll see to the right (if you’re on a desktop or laptop) David Kurtz has a good run-down of...  ( 6 min )

We’re now flooded with articles about the threat of AI. Here’s another one from the Times op-ed page by a...  ( 7 min )

INSIDE: Joseph diGenova ... Todd Blanche ... Donald Trump

and abuses another woman reporter, too

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

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

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

Today we’re listening to Via Luna, an instrumental math rock band formed in Kansas City in 2013.

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

This is your TPM evening briefing.

Grab your popcorn, folks.  ( 58 min )

Fingers crossed this sets a precedent.  ( 68 min )

Given his history of stiffing workmen, I wouldn’t trust him to fork it over tomorrow for a vote today.  ( 59 min )

Following up on my previous post, I want to point your attention to this post by Gary Marcus, a highly...  ( 9 min )

You’ve probably seen these reports of an employee of the AI company Anthropic who quit his job and issued a...  ( 7 min )

You’ve probably seen that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has now tried to knock down interest rates on US debt –...  ( 7 min )

It’s being shouted from all corners: The U.S. Open has become an overcrowded, overpriced circus awash in influencers, aspirational influencers, corporate stooges, drunken buffoons, brand activations, inane stunt food, weed smoke, and bettors. It is newly hostile to children, people who value personal space, and genuine fans of tennis. These louts and narcissists, armed with their ring lights and stacked empty Honey Deuce cups, are ransacking this once-dignified event. I've been attending this tournament for over two decades—I used to go to qualifiers with a brown-bag lunch—so I’ve been hearing some version of this complaint for years, but never at such a pitch as right now. Sometimes I don’t buy that the writer has been paying close enough attention to the tournament over time, but sometimes it’s all articulated succinctly by a diehard. I agree with the overall spirit that animates these complaints: The U.S. Open is no longer what we remember it to be, and it's getting pretty weird as it tries to figure out what it will be next. Lest we romanticize the past, many aspects of the current circus have held steady throughout the tournament’s 21st-century existence. It is not scandalizing to learn that America's biggest tennis tournament is a shrine to conspicuous consumption. And the good parts of the U.S. Open are still life-affirmingly good. My eyelid, like yours, might twitch when I read that Craig Tiley, the recently installed CEO of the United States Tennis Association, wants to make the tournament more like "tennis Disneyland," but I don’t know if the organizers are necessarily at fault for the present malaise. The Open appears to be drawing in more fan interest than ever before, which falls in line with the USTA’s mission statement of growing tennis participation in this country. If there’s a problem here, it might merely lie in mankind. At the intersection of broader disconcerting trends—everything is phone, everything is gambling, and nobody knows how to be around each other in public—lies the 2026 U.S. Open.  ( 41 min )

The first line of Emily St. John Mandel’s new novel Exit Party sets the tone of the whole book. She writes, “In the first spring after the collapse of the United States, the blossoming of the jacaranda trees felt to Ari like grace.” We have been dropped into yet another one of Mandel’s post-apocalyptic worlds, but, as with Station Eleven and Sea of Tranquility, it retains a vivid glimmer of hope and life.  The book introduces Ari as our protagonist, but, as with other Mandel books, she is not our only main character. The first section of the novel is called the A side, and begins with a party in Los Angeles where something strange happens. We quickly come to find out that this isn’t our only world. A parallel universe, this record's B side, features many of the same people and places. Both worlds contain a sought-after painting, but where Ari’s America is grappling with the fallout of a second Civil War, this other version is a surveillance state. At first glance the B side appears more orderly than the A side, but we swiftly learn that neither world is a preferable future iteration of our own.  I spoke with Mandel ahead of Exit Party's release about time, multiple lives, and her unique revision method. Our conversation has been lightly edited.  ( 54 min )

Go ahead and listen to this. (For the real perverts, use this one; you just know you're about to stay up until 1:00 a.m. for a particularly shitty Sharks–Mighty Ducks game.) What does it evoke? What do you think of? More specifically, who do you think of? You immediately know you're about to spend some time with Barry Melrose, the formative face—and hair—of an entire generation of American hockey fans. Melrose died Wednesday at age 70, three years after he had been diagnosed with Parkinson's disease, which forced him to retire from ESPN, where he had spent more than three decades years as the network's lead hockey analyst. Paired with John Buccigross in the studio or Steve Levy in the booth, or sometimes Bill Pidto or John Saunders, Melrose was simultaneously a voice of reason and an outsized cartoon character. If a team was ass he'd say they were ass, in a way that few, more diplomatic broadcasters ever would. And he'd deliver his pronouncements from within an immaculately tailored suit and beneath one of the continent's finest and most immovable mullets. His style imparted a sort of hockey gravitas: You wouldn't trust a guy like that to sell you a used car, but you'd sure as hell trust him to tell you what's up with the Calgary Flames' power play.  ( 21 min )

The National Football League is back, in case you haven't already been lectured, hectored, and badgered into aural submission by the various communication venues that have been screeching about it for weeks. This post-modern Christmas, with all the soul-crushing commercialism that implies, has come five days later than last year, because the league decided it needed one more week of buildup before beginning its full 22-week Advent calendar, and that it wanted to see how strange football might feel on a Wednesday night. You're welcome. Some innovation was warranted, here, just given the running start that college football's naked greed, maniacal volume, and high level of resting chaos has given it. The NFL is more button-down and billionaires-up by contrast, and as such has struggled to embrace its inner WTF-ness. Sure, the league gave it a reasonable go between the 49ers' criminally eventful offseason and Mike Vrabel's clumsy media relations course, but mostly it stuck to the same menu it has operated on for years—272 big events, then the playoffs. They couldn't even expose any nerve endings with a new contract for Roger Goodell, the Ginger Avenger-turned-bank-manager who is either going to die in the job or already has. College football's first week featured a program that bent the rules of time to suit its immediate needs; the NFL basically announced grand opening of the same old supermarket, only with the big innovation being fewer checkers. In other words, the NFL is selling you the game, as usual. After the first NFL game of the season last night, you are more than entitled to ask, "Okay, what else ya got?"  ( 27 min )

The science fiction author William Gibson's pithy observation that "the future is already here—it's just not very evenly distributed" has had different shades of meaning since it was first formulated. In its original context, Gibson meant it as a measure of technological progress: certain people have access to gizmos, gadgets, and virtual reality dugongs before that blessed day when those innovations trickle down to the rest of us. There has always been an economic valence to this quote: its first full appearance includes a mention of the “elite.” Over time, though, what I might call the post-Gibson interpretation of this insight tended increasingly towards economic inequality and left the technological aspect behind, since economic security is the axis along which "difference" has seemed to vary the most meaningfully across society since, say, the dawn of the iPhone, and "progress" stopped feeling like the right way to describe how technology has been changing once we all started to pack more computational power in our pockets than what was necessary to take humans to the moon. The most salient ways the rich differ from us these days no longer seems to lie in the technological horsepower they can harness, but more in the privacy they can rely on, the laws they can break, the impunity with which they can disregard the social compact, the scorn they can have for the future of the planet, and more. Or so I've heard. But the uneven temporal and spatial impact of technology qua technology is having its moment again. Your experience of driverless cars is a lot different if you live in the Bay Area or Boston; the quality of your drinking water and the size of your electric bill depends on your proximity to a data center; and so on at ever finer scales, intruding on the neighborhood level, depending on how down your neighbors are with Flock cameras.  ( 39 min )

INSIDE: Deidre Henderson ... Denny Hoskins ... Ed Martin

shit’s not supposed to be this fucked up

Tailgating at Notre Dame (2015) I used to be entertained when I visited Mastodon. I sometimes still am, but more often lately I'm angry, disappointed, frustrated, and depressed. Not sure what to do about that, but I'm sure it's not more Mastodon. I'm addicted to my computer(s). It's unhealthy and I don't know how I'm going to fix it. For now, I'm going to a friend's cottage for a couple of days. Maybe that'll start something. ✍️ Reply by email

This is only 3 out of the five (soon to be 6[1]) notebooks I use regularly. I don't use all of them because I need them. I use them because I can't decide which notebook to use for which purpose. In the photo are: Traveler's Notebook. This is nice for when I want to have options. I can throw all sorts of inserts in there, and I do. The cover feels great and has worn nicely. Field Notes. I've carried a little Field Notes notebook for a long time. I'm not always sure why, as I seldom actually write anything in them. It's comforting to know it's there, though. Maybe one day I'll have a "thought or idea" while I'm out and about and I'll be ready. Baronfig Confidant Hardcover Notebook. My first Baronfig. It's nice, but I'm not sure I prefer it to my usual Leuchtturm. I use it for tasks, lists, etc. It's my version of a "bullet journal". Others are: a Leuchtturm for a kind of scrapbook where I paste photos, receipts, etc. and write short notes about them. The other is a Midori MD Notebook, which is supposed to be a journal/diary. It would be, but I have too many other places to write things, so this one is only used occasionally. See what I mean? These are just the ones I can reach from my desk I've been here a few times. See Three Notebooks from 2016. Just like with blogs, I'd prefer to have just one notebook for everything, but I'm not a person who can do that, apparently. I have a 2027 Hobonichi Techo on the way ↩︎ ✍️ Reply by email  ( 1 min )

Time for another bi-monthly update on the work that Clojurists Together are funding this year - my maintenance of nREPL, CIDER and friends. I published the previous one as a blog post for the first time and the feedback was good enough that I’ll keep doing it. Last time I said that I had plucked most of the low-hanging fruit and that the next two months were unlikely to be as productive. Well, I was wrong. CIDER 2.0 finally shipped, and once it was out the door I used the momentum to sweep through pretty much every corner of the nREPL/CIDER ecosystem. A few long-neglected projects got proper releases, and nREPL got a couple of brand new implementations in languages I play on the side from time to time. The big highlights from my perspective: CIDER 2.0 (“Terceira”) is out, followed by 2.0.1…  ( 8 min )

A few days back, I hacked up a little minor mode for Emacs to use an LLM for spell checking. (Before you get a heart attack — I did not say “editing”, “getting ideas” or “research”: Just spell checking. Using an LLM for actual writing isn’t just a bad idea — it leads to abhorrent results.) I’ve been running a random selection of blog posts I wrote for the Comico read through blog to see whether the thing works well — and… yes! But also no. OK, positives first: 1) For simple typos, it’s very good indeed — it finds them all. c) For word substitution errors, like “to” instead of “too”, it’s also very good. II) For grammar errors, it’s more mixed. It’s good at, for instance, basic noun/verb agreement, so if I’ve written “they writes”, it fixes that. But if the noun clause is long and com…  ( 6 min )

Today we’re listening to Cephas Azariah, an Indian-born British composer based in Brighton.

Under Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., eating is becoming less and less advisable. We’re still living in fear of salads following a massive nationwide outbreak of explosive diarrhea linked to cyclospora-contaminated iceberg lettuce. And now Taylor Farms – the company at the center of the cyclospora outbreak – has recalled prepared salsa, guacamole and other products containing jalapeños connected to a multistate salmonella outbreak. The information coming from the Food and Drug Administration and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention about the cyclospora outbreak has been scant, with Politico noting: “Kennedy’s department has devoted little public messaging time or attention to foodborne illnesses, including cyclospora, having held just one press ca…  ( 16 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 )

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 )

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 )

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

I love President Donald Trump’s Great American State Fair. I love its emptiness. Its expensive food. Its ability to confound Trump-friendly media outlets that keep pretending it’s going great. This spectacle on the National Mall in Washington, DC, part of Trump’s Trump-centric celebration of America’s 250th anniversary, is like watching your high school bully host a party that no one attends. It’s a daily humiliation for a wildly unpopular president who coopted what should be a unifying national celebration and turned it into repellent schlock. And I love it so much it hurts. Trump's Great American State Fair humiliation is soothing America I love seeing Fox News broadcasting from the fair, its hosts claiming the place is filled with excited patriots while the scenes behind them show a va…  ( 15 min )

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reverend Horton Heat is one of those bands that makes the word “forgotten” feel a little unfair. They were  ( 10 min )

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

This is your TPM evening briefing.

As Americans, we must reflect on our past to find answers for our future. What happens when the president prevents us from posing questions in the first place?  ( 72 min )

It’s about time we rethink the entire idea of “special government employees.”  ( 64 min )

New York mayor Zohran Mamdani has responded perfectly.  ( 64 min )

Who knew Ben Shelton could do all that? Certainly not the Defector writer who was slandering him in the early stages of the match as "John Isner with WiFi." The 23-year-old American revealed levels to his game heretofore unseen, over the course of a U.S. Open quarterfinal that technically began Tuesday night but was mostly played early Wednesday morning. Matched up against defending champion Carlos Alcaraz, Shelton hit the apex of his career at 3:33 a.m., when he wrapped up the deciding set tiebreak to win 6-7(5), 6-1, 6-3, 1-6, 7-6(7) and advance to his second Open semifinal. In the great tradition of 21st-century American men's tennis players, Shelton's key weapon is his serve, which he hits not just with peerless top-end speed (he reached 149 mph in this match) but also a rich variety of spin and location. Bouncy and explosive, the 6-foot-4 Shelton has more to his game than the servebots of yore, but if you were to isolate the one reason that he's made it into the top 10, it's clearly that shot. Over the past 52 weeks, he has held serve 90.4 percent of the time, second on tour behind Jannik Sinner, per Tennis Abstract. Counterbalancing that dominance is his return game, which is the worst of any top-50 player on tour, as measured by break percentage (13.1) or return points won (31.9 percent). Big strong Ben can generate incredible racket head speed when he takes heavy cuts at the ball, but has struggled with the finer control of his racket face on shorter backswings, when rushed from the baseline or dealing with incoming serves. That's why Shelton, who has a reputation as a great entertainer, can actually be a rather choppy watch: He struggles to keep returns in play, and has a limited tolerance for longer rallies. Both traits have improved since he first arrived on tour, but not enough, I thought, to test gatekeepers Sinner and Alcaraz, who had removed Shelton from three Slams in 2025. (A shoulder injury retired him from the fourth.)  ( 25 min )

At my university, you had to take an introductory fiction writing workshop before you were eligible to apply for the more advanced workshops. Admission to these big leagues was by no means guaranteed. The first time I got in, I experienced about a week of absolute elation followed by several months of intermittent terror and imposter syndrome. At the time, it all felt very high-stakes, which is perhaps why I was so profoundly distressed when I showed up on the first day and realized that 90 percent of the class brought little black Moleskines to the table in lieu of normal notebooks. I rectified the problem immediately, of course, but the psychic damage was done.  Today’s story is about another fledgling taking her first steps into another artistic realm: the theater. What better backdrop for a bunch of young people to take everything too seriously, from their roller skates to their dramaturgy, from their secret affairs to their reviews in the campus newspaper? Get ready to be revolutionized by disco Les Misérables. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCKQz0jduY4  ( 17 min )

Drew Magary’s Thursday Afternoon NFL Dick Joke Jamboroo runs every Thursday at Defector during the NFL season (except when the season starts on a Wednesday; kiss my ass, Goodell). Got something you wanna contribute? Email the Roo. You can also read Drew over at SFGATE, and buy Drew’s books while you’re at it. I turn 50 a month from now. Hold your applause. About the only notable thing about hitting 50 is that I will no longer be eligible for a midlife crisis, seeing as how my life will officially be well past its midway point. I can believe in a Singularity-aided immortality all I like, but the facts remain what they are. There’s more behind me than there is ahead of me now, and what’s behind me isn’t always easy to keep track of. It’s getting harder, if I’m being honest. Because there’s a LOT of life to remember when you’re on the cusp of 50. Sometimes I find myself quietly aghast at some of the stats. I’ve been a parent now for 20 years, a stretch of time that defies my comprehension even though I was there for all of it. I’ve been cooking for our household for an even longer period of time, to the point where I can pour out a cup of rice perfectly without even looking at the measuring lines. Ta-fucking-da.  ( 52 min )

The time has once again come to break the rules: Only If You Get Caught is back for Season 2. If you listened to the first season, welcome back; if you didn’t, you have six days to do so before the show returns on Sept. 15. You can listen to the trailer here. OIYGC is…  ( 15 min )

Welcome back to Minor Dilemmas, where a member of Defector's Parents Council will answer your questions on surviving family life. Have a question? Email us at minordilemmas@defector.com. This week, Justin answers a question about helping your child find a best friend.  ( 25 min )

It is difficult, and yet important, to practice holding multiple truths at once, such as: No animal is inherently bad, and also the Surinam toad is a toad of nightmares. The diversity of life on Earth should be celebrated, and also the Surinam toad's particular eccentricities are satanic. Every living thing is beautiful because it is alive, and also the body of theSurinam toad is an affront to beauty itself. The Surinam toad, which has the dissonantly cute scientific name Pipa pipa, is an aquatic frog that lives in the murky, tannin-dyed waters of the Amazon and Orinoco rivers and tributaries in South America. You might not have heard of the Surinam toad by name, but you have probably seen it in images circulated on the internet that highlight its most peculiar evolutionary adaptation, which is the toad's ability to give birth through its back. Most toads lay eggs in the water that hatch into wriggling, boba-bodied tadpoles. Not the Surinam toad. After she lays her eggs in the water, the male will fertilize them and then push them onto her back, where she will grow a new, thick layer of skin over the eggs until they appear studded in her back like big blackheads waiting to be popped. There the babies grow until they are toadlets, at which point they spurt from their mother's back like fat gobs of sebum. If you would like to witness this miracle of life, you may do so at your own discretion. Once freed, the toadlets jet off and grow up. The adults are extremely flat and have no tongue. They spend their days lurking like a corpse in the brown water with their big hands outstretched like Mr. Mime. When a tasty morsel swims close by, the toads open their enormous mouth to vacuum in their prey and swallow it whole. It is an oddly impressive feat for such a flat frog.  ( 25 min )

Maybe you have heard of Roko's Basilisk. This is a thought experiment, for lack of a better term, popular among a certain set: hyper-rationalists, futurists, effective altruists. Tech-industry guys. You get the idea. The most exhausting humans who ever lived, that is to say. People who at present happen to command a critical share of the world economy. If you're not familiar with it, Roko's Basilisk, in broad terms, supposes that at some point in the future a sentient and omnipotent artificial intelligence could arise, and that this intelligence could then decide to punish all those who had anticipated its possible arrival and either worked to prevent it or refused to participate in its development. In that case, the wise course of action for people now, who are aware of even the theoretical possibility of this scenario, would be to work in good faith to bring this AI into existence, lest they put themselves or their descendants in its future crosshairs. I have been thinking about Roko's Basilisk this week. The occasion was a pair of engineers at the Anthropic artificial intelligence company using Twitter, as AI exponents regularly, exhaustingly do, to warn, as one of them put it, that "the people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade." The other guy was even more strenuous about it: "We really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans! I personally think it is >10% within the next decade."  ( 25 min )

This is a September blog about the Colorado Rockies. Do you think it will be a positive one? Let's find out. Coming off a series loss at home to the Cardinals, the Rockies traveled to the Bronx this week for a three-game tilt with the New York Yankees. In the first of these encounters, on Tuesday, they faced off against Cy Young contender Cam Schlittler, who threw seven innings of one-run ball to lower his ERA to 2.01. Not looking good so far. Colorado countered with the rookie Gabriel Hughes, who brought a 6.19 ERA and zero major-league wins in 10 career starts. Hughes got no help from his defense in the bottom of the first. With two outs and a runner on, Luis García Jr. knocked a little single to left-center that turned into trouble: Left fielder Jake McCarthy boofed it off his glove and then his foot to give each runner an extra 90 feet. The real disaster, however, was his throw back to the infield, which was somehow invisible to all of his teammates. Catcher Hunter Goodman, ostensibly the target of the toss, did his best impression of a blogger waking up 20 minutes after their shift started. (At least, that's what I imagine; I've never experienced such a thing.) Goodman jolted into action just as the ball passed him by, and the run scored before he could get to the backstop.  ( 19 min )

In her 1980 essay “Compulsory Heterosexuality and the Lesbian Existence,” Adrienne Rich lists over 60 examples of systematized female oppression. To name a few: the power of men to deny women their own sexuality or to force male sexuality upon them via rape, domestic violence, prostitution, chastity belts, incest; to command or exploit their labor via horizontal segregation in the workplace, pimping, and male control of abortion; to confine them physically or control their movement via rape as terrorism, high heels and restrictive clothing, or physical violence; to use them as objects in male transactions—the use of women as gifts, the use of women as entertainment in male transactions, wife-hostesses, call girls, cocktail waitresses. She concludes, after her harrowing delineation of the w…  ( 30 min )

What’s this we have here? Why, it’s the first-ever episode of Defector’s brand new NFL podcast, All Ball! Every week, the team of myself and elite indie blogger Arif Hasan break down every NFL matchup without ANY gambling or fantasy talk. We don’t even cite the Vegas point spreads, even though those lines possess a modicum of analytical value. All Vegas talk is verboten here, in favor of talking pure, hard BALL. https://art19.com/shows/the-distraction/episodes/6606c675-ab0a-4ea3-8ca3-4f940fd42380 In fact, Arif and I establish this law, plus a few other rules of engagement, early in this first episode. In addition to the whole no gambling thing, “The Reefer” and I also forbid ourselves from ever detouring into Vikings homerism. As such, we treat Sunday’s Minnesota-Green Bay tilt with a soberness (for us) that, upon further reflection, is a little bit too restrained. Because I fucking hate the Packers, but also because they suck! They have no pass rush without Micah Parsons, no viable cornerbacks, no running backs, no proven wideouts (don’t you even think of trying to make Christian Watson anything more than he is), and no coaches that I respect. That’s not homerism talking. Those are all FACTS you need to hear, and fuck you if you disagree!  ( 18 min )

Try this, maybe: Think of the internet as an ocean vast enough to contain a near-infinite constellation of distinct watery biomes, each populated by creatures that have evolved to suit the one in which they live—a bunch of weird creatures traveling in schools, chasing each other around, eating each other, and, in the most inhospitable depths, eating shit in the inky dark. Even to get your feet wet in this ocean is to know that it is bigger and colder than you could grasp. I don't know how to properly describe the uncanny feeling of becoming aware of how many online realities are unfolding, often in ways that draw big audiences and throw off real profits, in browser tabs I will never open, just as that hideous translucent deep-sea crapfish could not describe the experience of living in wate…  ( 31 min )

4x5 self portrait (2019). Blew the exposure so overdid the processing to compensate. I keep posting on baty.blog like it's my actual blog. It's got something to do with not feeling like being in Emacs for a minute. Emacs isn't required to post here, but I have a bunch of little helpful lisp functions that make it easy, so Emacs is the only place I do it. Baty.blog uses Pure Blog, which makes it even easier to post there. Also, baty.blog has comments and is now Webmention-capable, thanks to Kev's resent work on Pure Comments. Anyway, I'm not ready to bail on either blog, so you're stuck with two of them. The left Control key on the Framework 13 stopped working this morning. I thought to myself, "See!? I told you Linux was a bad idea!" but Claude Code did 10 minutes of troubleshooting and found a change made by a recent (CachyOS) system update and it was fixed. Sometimes Claude is a miracle. ✍️ Reply by email  ( 1 min )

96 Aboard Newsletter: A Brand-New Archive for a Historical Treasure 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:inher…  ( 9 min )

A quick survey of recent engagement of my posts on social media, indicating which service has by far the most engagement, and which service has seen a precipitous decline since early 2025. more…  ( 4 min )

INSIDE: Stephanie Gallagher...Markwayne Mullin...Jeffrey Epstein

On Tuesday the United Kingdom announced a series of sanctions against Israeli settlements in the West Bank. They were joined...  ( 7 min )

is that really too much to ask?

Along with death and taxes, invitations to celebrations you’d rather avoid are included on the list of adult life’s sad inevitabilities. Everyone has sucked it up to go to the wedding of a couple they disapprove of, or a family dinner that will inevitably turn into an argument. Still, most of us aren’t expected to shell out thousands to go to a get-together we know we’ll hate. But when Donald Trump demands ritual worship from Republican politicians, he can’t help but try to squeeze them for every humiliating drop. This week, only days after Labor Day weekend, he is expecting hundreds of candidates to show up for two days at the Republican Midterm Convention in Dallas — and to pay $25,000 a pop, at minimum — for the privilege of being seen to prostrate themselves before him inside the Ameri…  ( 8 min )

On today’s episode of Across the Horizon, host Bob Holmes of the band SUSS is joined by Canadian composer Sarah Davachi, who brings a playlist of her prog rock favorites including Genesis, Yes, King Crimson, and more.

Victoria Justice is an American actress, singer, and songwriter best known for becoming a familiar face to a generation of  ( 5 min )

There are bad movies, there are weird movies, and then there is Surf Nazis Must Die. Released in 1987, this  ( 9 min )

This is your TPM evening briefing.

What do you do when the gig you do on the side, that off-hours hustle to help pay the bills and keep busy in service of your real work, becomes the thing that attracts acclaim and recognition? Do you lean into the success? Does the side project become your life? Hrishikesh Hirway did not expect he would become a podcast guy, but the show he created and hosts, Song Exploder, took off, winning awards and making the leap to becoming a Netflix series. Then came other podcasts—maybe you know him from The West Wing Weekly, or as Samin Nosrat's buddy from the show Home Cooking. Yet all along the way, Hirway still felt the gravitational pull back to his original love of music as a singer/songwriter. This past spring, he released In The Last Hour Of Light, his first full-length album in 15 years. "The most central part of me is this music. It's my primary identity, and it's the thing that I am most passionate about and have been doing before I ever started making podcasts," Hirway said. "It's taken me a long time to get back here."  ( 17 min )

Time for your weekly edition of the Defector Funbag. Got something on your mind? Email the Funbag. You can also read Drew over at SFGATE, and buy Drew’s books while you’re at it. Today, we're talking about sentence diagrams, proper oven temperature, forbidden urinals, and more. Before we get to the business at hand, a quick reminder that All Ball, the Defector NFL podcast, debuts tomorrow morning. Co-host Arif Hasan and I are bringing you 100 percent football takes, with no added gambling or fantasy talk. Look for it in the organic podcast aisle! Your letters:  ( 50 min )

The U.S. Open is a city in miniature. The food is expensive; wealthy people flock to the tallest vantage points while richer experiences on the outskirts are ignored; influencers bother the masses. Read enough about the tournament, or just walk around the grounds for a few days, and you could forget that tennis is played here. At its worst, the Open feels like a 15-day cocktail party where a couple hundred of the world's best tennis players happen to be present. Those players aren't going anywhere, though, no matter how high the ticket prices get or how muted the ambiance becomes. And they tend to play some great tennis while they're here. Carlos Alcaraz is back from a four-month layoff for a wrist injury, and so is his forehand. He hit a winner at 107 mph to get his first break of the tournament. The serve's still missing, but that's fine; he's playing at an all-world level even without it, and the forehand was always more synonymous with his abilities as an entertainer. Alcaraz spent his first two matches reviving the gonzo, inventive style that went extinct during his absence. Rather than crush short backhands down the line, he wafted them crosscourt, trying to hit the advertising boards along the sides of the court before his opponent could reach the ball. He tickled the forecourt with drop shots and let the area around the baseline feel the vertical plonk of a lob as well as the horizontal swipes of his forehand. To some, though, Alcaraz's off-court movements are of more interest. During his first-round match, I inadvertently glanced at my media section neighbor's phone and caught an incoming text, printed here with neighbor's permission: "Is Carlos a pussy hound?"  ( 33 min )

Defector has partnered with Baseball Prospectus to bring you a taste of their work. They write good shit that we think you’ll like. If you do like it, we encourage you to check out their site and subscribe. This story was originally published at Baseball Prospectus on September 3. There is a legacy of bare competence behind the Angels’ 65-year run of never losing 100 games that shouldn’t be taken for granted. If this year’s iteration finally uncorks that bottle of swill, it will be a fitting monument to outgoing owner Arte Moreno who, finally, mercifully, agreed to bow out this week. What Stan Kroenke’s ownership will be like beyond the inevitable shiny new sports palace and adjoining pre-fab “neighborhood” remains to be seen, but the bar is as low as it was after Bob Quinn’s stewardship of the Red Sox or Frank McCourt’s misuse of the Dodgers.  ( 31 min )

Pretty much from the moment the Florida State Seminoles decided to retain Mike Norvell as their coach for the 2026 season, the word out of the football program has been pain and misery. They lost three dozen players to either graduation or the transfer portal, they couldn't entice any of the better available quarterbacks, and they have been famously poor at recruiting throughout the Norvell era. Going into the season, the mood was dour, and an unimpressive victory over New Mexico State in Week 0 didn't improve the mood very much. When the big Labor Day weekend of games came to its conclusion with an FSU home matchup against SMU, and America was treated to a darkened stadium and an extended delay, it was hard for me personally to not sit there cackling like Max Cady at the status of my once-proud football school. https://twitter.com/awfulannouncing/status/2097114243921232359?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E2097114243921232359%7Ctwgr%5E94ac4d061e8bfb73b0f3356d64113f29f0532308%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fawfulannouncing.com%2Fnews%2Fespn-power-outage-delay-florida-state-smu.html That's right! SMU–FSU kicked off nearly two hours late thanks to an unexplained power outage at Doak Campbell Stadium. As a Tallahassee native, my first thought was: Of course, there must be a hurricane or thunderstorm involved. But no, the weather was perfect (except for the humidity, and that's normal). The lights would flicker on and off for a while. It seems to have been some kind of power drain at the stadium (not a metaphor) that caused problems. After the lights did come on, the game had already lost any juice it might've had, starting with our problematic mascot throwing the flaming spear onto midfield and having it fall with a lifeless thud rather than stick the landing (also not a metaphor).  ( 20 min )

Four matches into the La Liga season, Barcelona has looked like one of the greatest attacking teams of all time. What other conclusion can I draw from the club's start? With Sunday's 5-0 whomping of Valencia away at the Mestalla, Barcelona has now played four matches, notched four decisive wins (5-0 vs. Elche, 2-0 vs. Athletic Bilbao, and 5-2 vs. Rayo Vallecano were the others), scored a ludicrous 17 goals, and conceded only two. The Barcelona monster has been gluttonous from the word go, and the way that the blaugrana has been performing is more than sustainable, even if the actual tallies are out-of-this-world unbelievable. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVeuyol-th4 About that Valencia match: The Bats are a disaster of a club, mired in last place domestically with just one point, and its fans are currently feuding openly with ownership. It's hard enough to keep up with Barcelona, never mind to actually beat the Catalan giant, and so there was little question about the result on Sunday. Lamine Yamal opened the scoring in the sixth minute with a feathered chip past Valencia goalie Stole Dimitrievski, and it went downhill for Valencia from there.  ( 27 min )

Did you forget about the Yankees? I know you did not because you are not allowed to. But New York has had a relatively quiet season by their flamboyant and national-TV-darling standards. A big part of this is that the AL East has looked pretty much the same for a while now: The Rays have maintained a comfortable but not secure division lead; the less said about what's happening down there with the bird teams, the better; and in the middle, the Red Sox have ended child hunger and positioned themselves for what feels like an inevitable three-game wild card series against New York. If the Yankees have been invisible, it's because they've only been "pretty good," and mostly because they can't hit for shit. Since June 1, they've slashed .227/.295/.385, rank 26th in MLB in runs scored, and 29th in wRC+. That they remain safely in playoff position is testament to their league-best pitching, but any self-respecting Bronx Bomber fan will tell you that's an unethical way to win ballgames. That's what the "Milwaukee Brewers" do. Yankees fans demand big boys! Big meaty boys swinging those big bats! Instead they got Trent Grisham. That changes tonight. Why choose June 1 as the cutoff for the stats above? That's the day Aaron Judge went on the IL for a stress fracture in his rib, suffered more than a month earlier. “We’ve had long stretches where the offense has struggled. I think a big part of that is not having your guy,” manager Aaron Boone said. Their guy has now missed more than half the season, and as goes Judge so go the Yankees: They were a .610 team with him in the lineup, and a .536 team without him.  ( 20 min )

Before the NFL season kicks off this weekend, it will kick off Wednesday night with a primetime game between the New England Patriots and Seattle Seahawks. And then on Thursday night it will kick off again, with a game between the San Francisco 49ers and Los Angeles Rams, except that game will actually be happening on Friday morning, on account of it being played in Melbourne, Australia. Probably nobody should ask the Rams what day it is when they arrive for the game, because they won't have much time to get acclimated. They aren't leaving Los Angeles until tonight. Rams head coach Sean McVay made the team's travel plans known over the weekend, telling reporters that the team will be boarding a flight from Los Angeles to Melbourne on Tuesday night, and arriving in Australia roughly 24 hours before their game against the 49ers kicks off. The flight from L.A. to Melbourne is roughly 16 hours, which when combined with the 17-hour time difference between the two cities, means that it will be Thursday morning in Australia when the Rams finally land. The game starts at 10:35 a.m. local time on Friday, which leaves the players about a day to acclimate and rest before kickoff. The 49ers left home almost a week ago, and have been practicing in Melbourne this whole time. The Rams are insistent that their plan is better, though, in part because of how they successfully navigated a game in London last season. After beating the Ravens in Week 6, the Rams stayed on the East Coast for a few days before flying to London the day before their Week 7 game against the Jaguars, which they won 35-7. Of course the potential destabilizing effects of a flight from the East Coast to London is nowhere near those presented by one from L.A. to Melbourne, but McVay told reporters that every player on the flight will have a lie-flat bed.  ( 21 min )

The Israeli daily Haaretz published a big and consequential exposé today alleging that weeks before the October 7, 2023 massacres...  ( 13 min )

Yesterday I was kind of randomly rereading some details about Spain’s transition to democracy after the death of Francisco Franco...  ( 7 min )

The consult Emacs package provides asynchronous search commands such as consult-fd, consult-find, consult-grep, consult-git-grep, and consult-ripgrep. For these commands, Consult does not necessarily start a new search for every change to the minibuffer input. Instead, it uses configurable debounce and throttle delays to control when asynchronous processes start, while a separate refresh delay controls how frequently asynchronous results are pushed to the completion UI. The first time I tried Consult, I thought to myself: this feels slow compared to Counsel (I had a similar feeling about Emacs settings such as show-paren-delay). With Counsel, results updated immediately on every keystroke, while Consult seemed to hesitate for a fraction of a second before updating the list. As it turns out…  ( 8 min )

I first started, my main problem was that the selection procedure described in the documentation didn’t work for me. I was almost certain that was because of an interaction with Ivy; my commenters agreed and offered some things to try. After some experimentation, I still wasn’t able to get that aspect of Jinx working. I decided to wait for Emacs 31 to revisit the issue. Emacs 31 is here but I still haven’t addressed the problem. Most of the reason for that is that I’ve developed some efficient muscle memory for dealing with the problem. I have jinx-correct bound to Ctrl+; and when I call jinx-correct, I continue holding down Ctrl and can easily move down in the list of alternatives by pressing n. Usually the first choice is the one I want so it’s only a single press. Then I type Return to update the text. That seems like a little more work than simply pressing a number but I don’t need to move my hands or reach to do it so it seems easy to me. I’ll probably do a bit more research and get the default method working when I get a chance but in the mean time, I’m pretty happy with how it’s working for me now. I’m really enjoying how easy it is to put an “unknown spelling” in a variety of places—the current file, the current directory, or in a personal global dictionary—and am happy I switched. If you haven’t tried it yet, you should give it a spin.  ( 5 min )

The other week I made a calendrical display for the eink thing I have. The problem is that I don’t really use a calendar — I guess the main reason is because I hate planning, but the other reason is because I really dislike all the calendar entry interfaces I’ve used. I haven’t used all that many, though, so I may well be missing some ingenious calendar out there. But what I’ve been resentfully using is the standard Google calendar on Android. I filmed one of my interactions with this thing, and I swear — I didn’t try to make it more awkward than it is for me: I’d be climbing up the walls if I were to try to use it more than I do now — I just put the absolute bare necessities in there, like dentist appointments and Boris shows. (One coming up in November!) But now I have this calendar in the hall… wouldn’t it be nice to have it display more stuff? Stuff that I really should be remembering, anyway? There’s also org-gcal, if you’re in the Org ecosystem… but… I’m not. Does a command line interface to Google Calendar work? Because I want to have the calendar in my pocket, too. And… Yes, there’s gcalcli. (Which I noticed hasn’t been updated for two years and is probably going to be deprecated, but it works for now, so I haven’t bothered to redo my code.) After going through the byzantine process on Google Cloud Console to create an “application”: Yes! You have to create a logo! Behold my magnificent logo! Anyway, after all that… tada: Yes! The system works! It does the normal Do What I Mean Thing — “fri 9” means “next Friday at 9am”, and “aug 11 1930” means “half past seven on August 11”, etc: I’m freee! I never have to enter a calendar entry on the mobile phone ever again! I’ve put the resulting code on Microsoft Github.  ( 5 min )

INSIDE: Todd Blanche ... Tony Fauci ... Christian Castro

Christian Catalini says we’re in a situation where we are vastly reducing the cost of generating things, but not the cost of verifying them:. This explains why the first major AI products appeared in chat, image generation, and code assistance. Not because these were the hardest human problems, but because their outputs were relatively easy to inspect. A user can judge the tone of a message, look at an image, or run a test on a piece of code. […] The old automation boundary was routine versus non-routine work. The new boundary is increasingly measurable versus non-measurable work. The issue is then over how well you can measure something. In our profession, we know there’s a big difference between how many lines of code we write and how productive we are, and we’ve seen a regular failure t…  ( 7 min )

Like me, Sumeet Gayathri Moghe is tired of poor presentations with bad slide decks. He's started to write a series of posts on how to avoid these calamities, beginning with a post that questions whether a presentation is needed at all. more…  ( 8 min )

submitted by /u/pr06lefs [link] [comments]

watch what they do, not what they say

When Charlie Kirk was alive, his wife Erika had a retrograde role that was easy to understand. She didn’t use the word, but she was a tradwife. Her position at Turning Point USA, the organization her husband co-founded in 2012 to promote conservative politics on high school, college and university campuses across the country, was essentially to dote on him as her leader. After they married in 2021, she became the evidence that Charlie Kirk was living up to his own beliefs about male leadership — and female submission — at home during the crucial period that he was rebranding himself as an evangelical leader from the secular libertarian he had been. He died a year ago this week, shot to death while speaking at Utah Valley University. While Erika Kirk is still out there preaching marriage an…  ( 7 min )

Today’s mix opens with Ludwig Göransson’s piece “Sirens” from The Odyssey. There’s new ambient by Francesca Heart, Exportion, Sarah Davachi, and Carmen Villain. We revisit a Harold Budd track from his score for

Games". Enjoy! Other really cool uses of graphics in Emacs: org-timegrid, poimap, canvas-minimap. Also, public service announcement: doomemacs.com is not affiliated with doomemacs.org (see this Github discussion). Just in case someone reading this happens to be the person who made doomemacs.com, please consider setting up a redirect to doomemacs.org for more awesomeness and less confusion. Thank you! And a reminder: EmacsConf - 2026 - Call for Participation target date for proposals Sept 18, conference is online Dec 12-13. Hope to see you there! Upcoming events (iCal file, Org): London Emacs (in person): Emacs London meetup https://www.meetup.com/london-emacs-hacking/events/316294538/ Tue Sep 8 1800 Europe/London Emacs Berlin: In-Person-Only Emacs-Berlin Stammtisch https://emacs-…  ( 4 min )

A few years ago I wrote about a setup I coded for myself for when I want to make paying my bills a tiny bit less painful. One thing I mentioned then was the primary selection. For those of you who don’t know it: under X.org, you can select a portion of text (for example by dragging the mouse over it) and then paste it in the same or another application with clicking the middle button. It is extremely useful for quick copy-and-paste operations where you do not have to issue a separate “copy” command (usually C-c, but often also found on mouse context menu). And by the way, Wayland also supports this. Sometimes I find it useful to use it even without the mouse.  ( 1 min )

Like many nerds, I feel so embarrassed whenever I see that I’ve misspelled something. But some years back when I started producing text in huge amounts for things like the Eclipse Comics read-through I realised that my options were: 1) Remain neurotic about this stuff and produce one blog post per week, or 2) Start caring less and produce a lot of blog posts. I think I made the correct decision — I just don’t have time to proff-read all this stuff, so typos will abound. It’s just not feasible to put as much work into that stuff as you’d do for a properly published article. The reader gets what they pay for. But now there’s a way to have your delicious cake and eat it too — just ask an LLM for help. NOOOO! *audience runs in slow motion towards camera* I know, I know. Whenever I read som…  ( 5 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 )

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 )

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 )

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 )

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

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

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

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

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

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

Over the last day or so, a number of the big inside DC sheets have run pieces striking a skeptical...  ( 6 min )

“I’m coming to the cottage,” Ilya Rozanov growled, and Canada has never been the same—at least the American film and TV industry’s depiction of it. The final episode of the first season of Heated Rivalry introduced the world to Canada’s cottage country, presenting the regions to the north of major cities where many families own second homes as a soft escape from the friction of urban life. In Heated Rivalry, as well as a slew of other recent shows, Canada’s rural expanses are not only lush, they’re sexy. There’s something about lakes, trees, and short shorts that loosens inhibitions, lest the summer be wasted. “A Canadian summer is fleeting and precious,” Every Year After author Carley Fortune said after her romance book was adapted into a British Columbia-based show in June. “That feels Canadian to me—it’s the lake, the dock, the boat, the mosquitoes.” As an American who’s lived in Canada for five years, I think the liberal American perception that Canada offers the American Dream without the facism has contributed a great deal to the country’s recent turn in the spotlight. The reality up here is less idyllic—Canada’s social programs are getting weaker, their discriminatory immigration system is simply less attention-seeking than the States’, and their right-wing figures are often just as repugnant. But Canada is nevertheless preferable to Trump’s America in many ways, and besides, romanticization has never relied on realism. Romance media set in rural Canada doesn’t look to be stopping anytime soon.  ( 29 min )

You'll have a grand time solving our Monday crossword. This week's puzzle was constructed by Katie Hoody, and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. Katie lives in North Newton, Kansas, where she is enjoying the puzzle constructing era of her life. She grew up in northern Minnesota and won a middle school speech contest with a monologue describing the thrill of watching the Twins win the 1987 World Series. 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."  ( 14 min )

another day, another shit-blizzard of posts

Lincoln with beach ball (2026). Leica MP I just learned about FerrumPix: Photo Management and RAW Editing for Linux, Windows, and macOS. It's very new and changing rapidly. It's an ambitious project. ✍️ Reply by email

Today we’re listening to and remembering William Orbit, an English keyboardist and producer from London.

The 1990s ska revival produced plenty of songs that were loud, fast and impossible to take completely seriously. But two  ( 13 min )

Great playlists do not always need a theme. Sometimes the best ones are built around a simple idea: put together  ( 23 min )

The concept of A Cop On The Edge was once a disreputable film genre unto itself. This was not really a good thing in terms of what it indicated about where the culture was on the issue of vigilante violence, among other things. But its passing is also unworthy of much mourning because these movies were bad enough that one of the genre's signature moments was a twitchy and inexplicably be-gloved Sylvester Stallone cutting a slice of pizza with some desk scissors while wearing sunglasses indoors. All of the defects in our popular and political culture naturally flow in the direction of making the archetypal furious American dunce into a hero, and the fantasy of a man Taking Matters Into His Own Hands after being Pushed To The Limit, with maximal punishment exacted against everyone you'd expe…  ( 26 min )

Do you believe that Formula 1 can be romantic? Before immediately answering to the negative, at least consider Kimi Antonelli. He is freshly 20 years old, and just became the first Italian driver to win the Italian Grand Prix since Ludovico Scarfiotti did so in 1966. If your answer is still negative, and fair enough, at least consider that Antonelli achieved his victory by breaking the record for most overtakes during a Grand Prix in F1 history and after starting from P19 on the grid. Consider, too, that this is Monza we're talking about. If the answer is still negative, well. Have you ever considered becoming Italian and seeing how that changes your perspective on the matter? Before getting to Sunday, we must first go through Saturday, a fact that is true of the passage of time more gener…  ( 24 min )

Given that tennis is effectively professionalized, legalized psychological torture, a choke and an epic comeback often go hand-in-hand. Take, say, when Zheng Qinwen faced Madison Keys at the U.S. Open on Saturday. Zheng won a match in which she was down 6-1, 6(3)-7, 5-1 and had to save a match point on her opponent's serve. A comeback, absolutely, but also, perhaps, a choke on Key's part. So: yea or nay? If one were to point to said match to support the case for "yea"—shown in the extraordinarily meager and insufficient official highlights here at 2:18—it would not be because Keys lost that point but because of how she lost it. Viewed in isolation, the match point looks like it was lost after a good return on an 85 mph second serve. In context, it is worse: Keys caught her first ball toss, then decided to more or less just kick in an 85 mph first serve. Zheng made a backhand return that was deep but not necessarily unmanageable, but Keys's feet got stuck as she hit a backhand into the net. Deuce. Zheng returned a 105 mph first serve on the next point, then finished a brief rally by smashing an off backhand that hit the line. On break point, Zheng made a weak, shallow, return that Keys misread, hitting a weak forehand up the middle rather than a plus one winner. That limp forehand allowed Zheng to wrestle control of, and ultimately win, the point. Zheng Qinwen would not lose another game for the rest of the match; conversely, Madison Keys would not win another one. After Keys was broken for a third consecutive time to go down 6-5 in the final set, she smacked her head with her racket several times. On Zheng's own match point at 6-5, 40-30, she successfully wrestled a backhand down the line off a strong Keys return, and Keys hit a running forehand error. Game, set, match.  ( 21 min )

Even before it slipped into janky comedy in its dying moments, you wouldn't necessarily say that Michigan's season opener against Western Michigan on Saturday was "a good football game." But also just making such an assessment would be missing the point to an extent. It was certainly shaping up as a very specific type of college football game. It's one in which a power conference team playing poorly loses to a MAC team—it has to be a MAC team; that's the type of game it is—that makes fewer mistakes. This is not necessarily a fun kind of game to watch, although if you're on social media at the moment it can be fun to watch other people watching it. But it is absolutely a type of game that happens, and one of the gnawing anxieties that would confront a FBS team—especially one fresh off a bun…  ( 26 min )

I'm typing this in Emacs using a completely new config and it's so weird. I've been running Emacs v31 everywhere and thought I'd try leaning on more of the built-in completion behavior, and it spiraled out of control. I ended up looking at emacs-solo because it's a fancy configuration that only uses built-in packages. It was easy to try out, so I did. And I liked it. I added the necessary-for-me missing components of my old config. My favorite part is that I went from 143 installed packages to 49 and got rid of hundreds of lines of config that I didn't really need. Also, my startup time was cut in half and is now under 1 second. Nice. It'll take a minute for everything to burn in and shake out, but so far I don't hate it. ✍️ Reply by email  ( 1 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 )

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 )

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

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

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

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

Compilation commands by project type haskell-ng-project-mode, to my Haskell mode. The idea I had was that I could use it to add keybindings for running various tools (via compile), e.g. I bound cabal build and cabal test , p b and , p t respectively. Then I hooked in the minor mode in my haskell-ng-mode. Soon I realised it'd be nice to have those shortcuts available in dired too, so I hooked it in there as well. When I later wanted to re-run the tests after modifying a JSON file that was part of a golden test I realised that this wasn't a very nice solution at all. After looking around a bit I found emacs-multi-compile. I removed the minor mode and add this configuration instead (add-to-list 'multi-compile-alist '((haskell-ng-is-project) . (("cabal build" "cabal build -j --semaphore" (project-root (project-current))) ("cabal test" "cabal test" (project-root (project-current))) ("fourmolu" "fourmolu -i $(fd .hs$)" (project-root (project-current)))))) emacs-multi-compile works very well for me so I'm very happy with it. Jumping between implementation and test, again a while ago. At the time I came up with a way of bending ff-find-other-file to my will, but soon after that I ran into a case where there may be 2 "other files" – one of the Haskell projects at work put unit tests in files ending in Spec.hs and property tests in filed ending with Prop.hs. Unfortunately this is a situation that ff-find-other-file can't handle. I ended up hacking together consult-kith to deal with it. The configuration to handle two kinds of test files looks like this (setq-local consult-kith-alist `((,(rx (seq "Spec.hs" eol)) (".hs")) (,(rx (seq "Prop.hs" eol)) (".hs")) (,(rx (seq ".hs" eol)) ("Prop.hs" "Spec.hs"))) consult-kith-search-directories '("src" "test")) Spec.hs for tests, but I'm sticking to consult-kith for now. Tags: emacs  ( 1 min )

Doric Themes. They’re sort of minimalist, like my non-theme theme but still very nice looking if you don’t want your Emacs screen to look like an arcade. The doric-almond variation is, in particular, very similar to my color scheme. Mine has a little more contrast: the foreground text is a bit darker and the keywords in my code buffers are a blue that’s slightly brighter than doric-almond’s light green. Still, it’s a theme that I’d be comfortable with if I hadn’t taken the easy way. Some people have multiple themes and change them according to the time of day, their mood, the phase of the moon, or whatever. I’d hate that probably for the same reason that I don’t do well with trying to use different editors: I’d always be confused as to what’s what. If you’re looking for a minimalist theme and my method seems too minimal, take a look at Prot’s Doric Themes. There are several variations in both light and dark mode.  ( 5 min )

vc stuff, and this week's rabbit hole was git worktrees (Bozhidar Batsov's Working with Git Worktrees in Magit is what sent me down this particular rabbit hole!). It was an itch that manifested itself while reading this blog and mainly seeing that worktrees seemed to make a good deal of sense to me (especially as I am quite a subversion veteran). I have always felt uncomfortable with the default git in-situ branch switching and prefer to branch develop away from the mainline in a physical separate directory and this is just what worktrees facilitate. So how to do this with built-in vc-mode tools?, well as always this requires a little work and yes, I could use Magit, but I'm seeing how far I can push the built in vc. The funny thing is that vc already understands worktrees perf…

the Emperor’s new hair is just the latest in a lifetime of bad decisions

FoxTrot by Bill Amend | September 6, 2026  ( 12 min )

Few stories from the history of World War II sound as unbelievable as that of Tsutomu Yamaguchi, a Japanese  ( 10 min )

If you have been here through the years, through the monkey, and monkey’s den and to the site now,  ( 11 min )

Table of Contents In-buffer completion Jump to definition and references Syntax checking Conclusion lsp) is standard to communicate information about a current programming project to an editor integration, powered by a “language server” for the specific programming language. Emacs has two major implementations of this editor functionality: eglot (built-in) and lsp-mode. Getting this set up is usually one of the first things that new users will want to do, but in my experience one can get by for a surprisingly long time using Emacs without needing to reach for eglot or lsp-mode. That is because many of the functions that lsp-servers provide can be provided by Emacs through other means. As someone who quite often moves between different programming languages, I find the need to set up eac…  ( 6 min )

optimizing Emacs startup with use-package. The idea is that many configurations load a substantial number of packages and that this can cause a significant increase in startup time. Most of you know by now that we here at the Irreal bunker refuse to worry about that because, after all, we hardly ever restart Emacs. Still, plenty of people do worry about it and there’s nothing wrong with learning a few easy to implement principles that will speedup Emacs startup without having to obsess about tiny details. The TL;DR is to get use-package to defer loading of packages until they are actually needed. Most Emacers who aren’t complete n00bs already know this. The question is, how exactly, to specify the use-package commands to achieve that. The obvious answers aren’t the right ones. For example, the :defer keyword seems like the natural answer but Cherti explains why this isn’t usually necessary and that it doesn’t do what you probably think it does. It’s much better to use one of the commands that implicitly defer loading but also arrange for autoloading the required functions when they’re needed. Cherti also explains how to get use-package to add logging information to the *Messages* buffer to help with understanding the load process. There’s a lot of information in Cherti’s post and it serves as a handy reference for how to use use-package to control the loading of packages at startup time. If you’re at all worried about startup time or just want to understand how to use use-package to control package loading, take a look at his post.  ( 5 min )

Jeanine Boxwine pumps it, Bobby Brainworms dumps it, and so much more...

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