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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Let’s get one thing straight before anyone starts sharpening their pitchforks: this isn’t a list of bad guitarists. Almost  ( 12 min )

a-ha’s “Take On Me” is one of the defining songs of 1980s pop, combining an unforgettable melody, Morten Harket’s  ( 5 min )

Rather than, you know, serving his constituents, the Pennsylvania senator is more interested in jumping on Fox News to yammer about Israel.  ( 72 min )

Sometimes the chaotic, unforgiving universe briefly and ecstatically snaps itself into harmony, like when the Fibonacci sequence shows up in a head of Romanesco broccoli, or a small rock balances atop a bigger rock, or when a certain permanently adrift Australian basketball player brings his destiny into sudden coherence. By which I mean: Ben Simmons is a Sacramento King. Simmons has taken the long road to Sacramento, though every step of his career has brought him closer to what Rudy Gay infamously yet correctly termed "Basketball Hell." In 2021, his top-seeded Philadelphia 76ers were in fantastic position to make it to the Eastern Conference Finals, only to get humiliated by the fifth-seeded Atlanta Hawks, as Simmons, on his home floor in Game 7, forgot how to dunk the basketball. This broke the Sixers. Simmons would never play for them again: The following season he staged an agonizing holdout under the pretense of a back injury that involved Joel Embiid and Doc Rivers debasing themselves, Simmons loafing through practice and then getting kicked out, and inadvertently creating the conditions for Tyrese Maxey to flourish. The Sixers traded Simmons to Brooklyn—while the borough is not remotely on the Sacramento spectrum, the Nets certainly are—where he flailed around hopelessly for chunks of two-and-a-half injury-marred seasons. Was he a small-ball center? Jumbo Rajon Rondo with a concussion? A defensive specialist? Not really, no; he was terrible, though in a way that seemed as much a matter of effort and intensity as a matter of talent.  ( 21 min )

As the media has covered the NBA's severe punishment of Steve Ballmer and the Los Angeles Clippers as a result of the Kawhi Leonard investigation, a common idiom has emerged: League commissioner Adam Silver dropped the hammer on them. He did not throw the book at the Clippers, or take a crowbar to their knees. No, there was only one tool in his toolbox, and it was dropped on the perpetrators. Obviously, this phrase is not unique to this specific scandal; anyone old enough will remember NFL commissioner Roger "Ginger Hammer" Goodell in the 2010s, when he was playing Whack-A-Mole so intently that he inadvertently created a league value system in which smoking weed was treated more harshly than domestic violence. But "dropping the hammer" is effective shorthand, a way to declare in a few words that authority has been wielded and a problem has been definitively solved. The book has been closed on the matter, perhaps because a hammer has nailed it shut. Silver and the NBA will happily accept this framing. It's so easy that even Shams Charania and his endless metaphors couldn't complicate it—if he hadn't biffed the story, that is. Still, it's funny to see how many places are running with this exact choice of words. Some of these outlets add a little flair by specifying the type of hammer, or elucidating who was or wasn't struck by it. Sometimes the hammer drops; sometimes it is brought down; sometimes "hammer" is the verb, leaving open the question of what hammer-like implement was used. (Could it have been a truncheon?) Below is a list of some hammerings.  ( 19 min )

Some people are fans of the Seattle Seahawks. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the Seattle Seahawks. This 2026 Defector NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far here. Your team: Seattle Seahawks. Your 2025 record: 14-3. Super Bowl champions. One of the best teams in modern history if you go by DVOA, which I don’t because Aaron Schatz has never revealed the formula behind his hallowed metric. He could calculate it by mashing on an old Casio, for all I know. But here’s what I do know: These Seahawks won a title last year thanks to a playoff schedule that may as well have been drawn up by a kindergarten teacher:  ( 45 min )

The first time I consciously contemplated a museum’s installation-specific smell was in Fernando Romero’s “El Sol” at Kristallwelten in Innsbruck, Austria. Viewers stand in a cave-like, red-lit room under a Swarovski crystal sphere exactly one-billionth the size of the sun. It even sounds like the sun—the University of Birmingham’s School of Physics and Astronomy spent 30 years recording solar acoustic wave data, which has been sped up about 100,000 times to create the installation’s soundscape.  Standing in the room is somehow both soothing and disconcerting. If you don’t read the informational display or listen to the audio tour, you might feel like you’re just standing under a particularly fancy disco ball, listening to a higher-pitched edit of dry wind across an empty plain. But it was the scent of the room that struck me: a blend of thyme, black juniper, moss, and gunpowder, inching the red cave toward the realm of the uncanny with the combination of color, sound, and scent, making it easy to envision yourself in the isolation of space or a very high-concept haunted house where that staticky pulsing wind might start saying your name.  Many of Kristallwelten’s other rooms (Chambers of Wonder, as they call them) have scent concepts as well, though less distinct. The rooms smell pleasant, usually lightly herbaceous. There’s a lot of pine and mint to go with all that glittering crystal. It makes sense for a museum that’s essentially a very lovely Swarovski advertisement.  ( 46 min )

If you’re as horny for football as I am, you’ve probably noticed that a vast, vast majority of NFL podcasts have some unwelcome amount of gambling/fantasy chatter in them. Corporate pods are often directly in bed with the sportsbooks, and a great number of indie pods have to take the books’ sponsorship money if they…  ( 14 min )

In 1858, William Parker Foulke, a member of the Academy of Natural Sciences—a group of naturalists committed to public education and outreach—was on vacation in the quiet Quaker community of Haddonfield, New Jersey. There, he befriended a local landowner, John Estaugh Hopkins, who showed him some unusually large vertebrae that had been dug up in a clay pit on his property 20 years prior. With Hopkins's permission, Foulke hired a crew to excavate the old pit. Around 10 feet deeper, the diggers' shovels clinked against a layer of fossil seashells and large bones. The skeleton unearthed from the pit was, at the time, the most complete dinosaur skeleton ever discovered, although it was unfortunately missing its head (and many other bones.) Ten years later, the dinosaur, Hadrosaurus foulkii, we…  ( 28 min )

It's been more than a month since UNC general manager Mike Lombardi was placed on administrative leave, and now he's gone for good. Lombardi and the school announced on Thursday that he is stepping down from his role. According to reporting from WRAL and ESPN, Lombardi's resignation may be just the beginning of the ugliness for North Carolina. When Lombardi was placed on leave in July, he was the subject of an internal investigation related to an HR complaint that was made by a former UNC front office employee, according to reports at the time. It appears that investigation's scope has significantly widened. WRAL reported on Thursday evening that lawyers hired by UNC have been questioning UNC staffers, current and former players, and players' parents about about drug use and sexual relationships within the football program. It appears that defensive coordinator Steve Belichick, son of head coach Bill Belichick, is of particular interest to the investigators. WRAL reports that they've been asking questions about his alleged drug use. From the report: Lawyers conducting the UNC probe focused a series of questions on Steve Belichick, according to people who were interviewed. The people said they were also asked about whether Steve Belichick had used drugs at the university’s facilities or if they knew of anyone who had seen him do so. Assistant coaches can be fired for cause if it is found that they used or distributed illicit drugs, according to UNC employment contracts.  ( 18 min )

Boxers almost never leave on their own terms, let alone get to say goodbye with the fight of their dreams. Then there’s Katie Taylor’s going away. The Irish superhero will take on Flora Pili of France for the undisputed super-lightweight championship on Saturday night in front of more than 80,000 fans at Croke Park in Dublin. Taylor, who turned 40 years old in July, has promised to hang up her gloves, win or lose.  Either way, she’ll go down as the most beloved and internationally accomplished athlete in Ireland’s history, as well as the most important female boxer from anywhere since Christy Martin.  ( 25 min )

Sort of a minor point of interest. But still notable. The Italian government of Georgia Meloni has now become the...  ( 7 min )

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

INSIDE: Matthew Evans ... Christian Castro ... Nigel Farage

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Republicans are facing electoral Armageddon in November

The most embarrassing aspect of Vice President JD Vance’s tough guy schtick is that he really does seem to think he’s selling it. His recent jabs at Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, the Democrat running for Michigan’s open Senate seat, as the latest cringeworthy example. As a recent Michigan event campaigning for El-Sayed’s Republican opponent, former Rep. Mike Rogers, Vance sneered, “Whatever you want to talk about, Abdul, keep my wife’s name the hell out of your mouth because she’s way out of your league,” trying and utterly failing to imitate the tone of a man who is truly outraged over an insult to his wife. Vance’s act wasn’t just painful because he’s such a bad actor. It’s that it made no sense at all. With “out of your league,” Vance was trying to imply that El-Sayed said something sexually unto…  ( 8 min )

Today we’re listening to Carmen Villain, a Mexican-Norwegian musician originally from Michigan.

Games". Thanks to Raymond Zeitler for hosting! One of the things I love about the Emacs community is people's sense of humour and whimsy. There's a grand tradition of people hiding Easter eggs in software, a bit of hidden fun that might make someone smile. But isn't this just bloat and frivolity? One might argue that the code that lets us play M-x tetris, dunnet, or doctor in Emacs is a waste of time and space compared to More Serious Things, but on the other hand, the Tetris source code could be a good jumping-off point if you find yourself wanting to make an interactive real-time simulation that displays graphical results. Want something more modern? Maybe DOOM on Emacs! Besides, the code for games isn't actually loaded until you choose to play it. It's okay for something to be fun …  ( 2 min )

These are my minimalist themes. They use few colours and will appear mostly monochromatic in many contexts. Styles involve the careful use of typography, such as italics and bold italics. If you want maximalist themes in terms of colour, check my ef-themes package. For something in-between, which I would consider the best “default theme” for a text editor, opt for my modus-themes. Package name (GNU ELPA): doric-themes Sample pictures: https://protesilaos.com/emacs/doric-themes-pictures Git repository: https://github.com/protesilaos/doric-themes Backronym: Doric Only Really Intensifies Conservatively … themes. Below are the release notes. Version 1.3.0 on 2026-09-04 New theme screenshots All sample images are updated to the current version and cover all the Doric themes: https://protesilaos.com/emacs/doric-themes-pictures. New doric-lilac and doric-borage themes I drew inspiration for both themes from plants that exist around my house. They both use the same colours in different shades and sequence. doric-lilac has a light background while doric-borage has a dark background. More commands to load a theme The commands doric-themes-rotate-light and doric-themes-rotate-dark are convenience wrappers of doric-themes-rotate. As their name suggests, they are restricted to one kind of theme in the collection. Similarly, doric-themes-load-random-light and doric-themes-load-random-dark are variants of doric-themes-load-random. Thanks to Lucas Jiménez for making this suggestion in issue 28: https://github.com/protesilaos/doric-themes/issues/28. Broader face coverage The following packages have some new faces or I tweaked them to look better with the rest of the theme. completion-preview elfeed erc flymake gnus mu4e query-replace Minor refinements to palette values I made several small tweaks to several themes. The changes are probably too fine to notice or they should now look correct enough to be unnoticeable.  ( 1 min )

As an Emacs user, your configuration can easily grow from a few lightweight adjustments to a massive, hundred-package IDE. Without careful management, Emacs startup time can degrade from sub-second execution to several seconds, or minutes, in the worst cases. Eager package loading is one common source of startup overhead. This guide explains how Emacs loads libraries, how use-package configures package loading, and how deferred loading can reduce startup time. Why does Emacs startup gets slow? A naive package declaration looks like this: ;; The kirigami Emacs package provides a unified method to fold and unfold ;; text in Emacs across a diverse set of Emacs modes. (use-package kirigami) By default, this causes use-package to load the package during initialization, unless the declaration co…  ( 12 min )

amusing post about the Vim UserGettingBored autocmd. Autocmds in Vim are essentially like hook functions in Emacs. They get fired when certain events happen in the editor. Way back before Vim 6.0, Bram Moolenaar added the UserGettingBored autocmd to the Vim documentation. It was a joke and the command didn’t actually do anything—or rather, it was never invoked and didn’t really exist. It was like an Emacs hook that was documented but didn’t actually occur. The documentation said “When the user hits CTRL-C. Just Kidding.” In 2013 the documentation changed to “When the user presses the same key 42 times. Just kidding! :-)” and, there were various other tweaks along the way. Finally, in 2022 an unofficial plugin was created by Mike Smith that actually implemented the autocmd and did something. You can read what it was in Hahn’s post. None of this matters at all, of course, except to provide evidence that Vim users can be as whimsical as us Emacs users. You probably won’t see anything like this in VSCode. It wouldn’t be “professional”.  ( 5 min )

A quick little update to next-gh-pr.el. Since writing the first version I've found it to be really useful, but I've also bumped into one small issue. Sometimes I'll create a draft PR before I remember to start the changelog entry, and so then I want to insert the current PR link rather than the next one. Now, sure, I can just go and copy the URL and create the link in the changelog, but where's the fun in that when I can solve the problem in Emacs Lisp? So, with this in mind, I've just updated the package so that, with a prefix argument to the command, it will include a link for the latest PR rather than for the next one. This does, of course, make the name a little less correct, but I'm not going to rename the package or the command for this one minor difference in intent.  ( 1 min )

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

In August 1996, Phish did something that seemed completely unreasonable even by Phish standards. Instead of simply booking another arena  ( 10 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 )

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 )

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 )

This is your TPM evening briefing.

Sometimes reality really is stranger than fiction.  ( 68 min )

Longtime election analyst Charlie Cook has a piece up on his Substack looking at the fast-approaching midterms. It’s an interesting...  ( 7 min )

Maria Bartiromo is out at Fox News and Fox Business. And apparently with so little advance warning that they barely...  ( 7 min )

As the dust settles following the NBA's obliteration of the Clippers over the Kawhi Leonard–Aspiration scandal, one of the more interesting vectors of fallout is on the media side. After all, the scandal kicked off following a series of reports from podcaster Pablo Torre, who is mentioned in the first line of the official investigation's report, and was later stage-managed for the public several times over by ESPN, Torre's former employer. Despite the company's status as the big dog of sports journalism, it bungled the biggest NBA story of the year at every stage. ESPN is where Clippers owner Steve Ballmer went to plead his innocence two days after Torre broke the story last September. It's also where the most seemingly authoritative piece of reporting on the scandal emerged in the weeks b…  ( 27 min )

Some people are fans of the New England Patriots. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the New England Patriots. This 2026 Defector NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far here. Your team: The New England Patriots, who are just outside of the frame here. I swear it. Ishika Samant/Getty Images  ( 54 min )

For all the fulminations about the million-ton craphammer dropped on the Los Angeles Clippers and owner Steve Ballmer for trying to evade the NBA salary cap, almost nobody has yet identified the situation as the entertainment bonanza it is about to become. Yes, it's time for another edition of the game show to end all game shows, and maybe also to end everything else: Billionaires Eating Billionaires. You've seen it, because it airs reruns on basically every channel. A bunch of insanely wealthy people get in their feelings about another colossally wealthy person who has gone rogue on the herd, and lash out accordingly; the gameplay generally unfolds as a series of lawyergasms across the continent and ends with some competitors going home naked and battered, all of it richly deserved. It's Turbo Survivor, only with bloody retributions handed out to all the contestants, even the winners, as well as the hosts and production team; even the intrepid team of reporters and researchers who started all this hilarity a year ago will take home a black eye for their trouble. That last group is Team Torre, named for its front man, Pablo Torre, whose name is on the door of the Pablo Torre Finds Out podcast. It was that program's collective team of researchers and newsjackals who found a disgruntled insider willing not only to expose the salary-cap games being played by the Clippers, but to provide the first few documents of proof that ultimately led to Ballmer and the Clippers being publicly pantsed for paying Kawhi Leonard under multiple tables. They will be part of the legal mess about to unfold—the heated letter the Clippers sent to the league after Wednesday's punishment came down sniffily referred to the malfeasance Torre et al. exposed as "podcast allegations"—and unlike all the other combatants, don't necessarily have tens of millions of dollars on hand to pay for it. Their sponsors, Meadowlark Media and through them DraftKings, do. So that'll be a hoot, too.  ( 27 min )

Welcome to the Defector College Football Watch Guide, where Israel Daramola and Ray Ratto will tell you which of the weekend’s college football games are worth giving a crap about. Ray: Week 0 is behind us, as well you might want it to be if you watched South Carolina State beat Savannah State 87-0 in Saturday. There will be more of that this week, undoubtedly, and every one of those games will serve as blessed relief from the hailstorm of turgid analyses about North Carolina being 1-0 without Mike Lombardi and TCU being 0-1 without the Fort Worth Star-Telegram (and yes, there may be lessons in those disparate things for all of us). But we have miles and thousands of administrative outrages to go before we sleep, starting with five days of ball glut as the industry tries to keep up with the NFL's new promotional masterstroke of Extreme Calendar Glut. But here's something to make your blood run cold this early in the year: Bill Belichick is the only coach who could conceivably win the season's opening and closing game, and if that happens, spring will next emerge in 2183, at which point Punxsutawney Phil will have been replaced by an eye-clawing psychobadger from the 11th dimension.  ( 53 min )

We can officially stick a fork in the fallout stage of former Athletic reporter Dianna Russini's long and handholdy relationship with Patriots head coach Mike Vrabel. Russini resigned in disgrace and remains unemployed, while Vrabel suffered absolutely no professional consequences. And now The Athletic has completed its five-month review to determine whether her work was up to the company's ethical standards. Spoiler alert: It was mostly fine. The review was published Thursday morning and conducted by Mike Semel, editorial director for standards and quality at The Athletic. There are few revelations in the details of Russini's relationship with Vrabel, but she was found "noncompliant" with the outlet's standard of conduct for employees for not disclosing the relationship to her editors. Most of her reporting was found to be sound and ethical. However, two of Russini's pieces have now had editors' notes attached: a video in which she speaks glowingly of Vrabel breaking up a fight in training camp, and an item in a notebook column that contained an unattributed but highly detailed description of Vrabel's thinking and also dinner order. How did Semel determine all this?  ( 17 min )

Earlier this year, Curry Barker and Kane Parsons became young Hollywood phenoms in quick succession. An actor and sketch comedian, the 26-year-old Barker wrote, edited, and directed Obsession, which is the story of a meek romantic who uses a magical novelty toy to make his crush fall in love with him with predictably disastrous results. Parsons, at 21, directed Backrooms, a feature-length adaptation of his own creepypasta-inspired web series about a labyrinthine extradimensional space that serves as a bizarre simulacrum of the real world. Both films were released two weeks apart in May and broke multiple commercial records. Having made half-a-billion dollars, Obsession is not just one of the highest-grossing movies of the year but one of the most successful horror films of all time. While Backrooms might trail Obsession as merely the second-highest grossing horror feature of 2026, it’s also the fifth most profitable independent feature in history; Parsons became the youngest director ever to helm a studio-backed film, besting even Orson Welles. Baker and Parsons got their start with popular YouTube channels, which has led agents and producers to scour the internet for the next young, digital-native filmmaker with a built-in following and an original story that might become an enormously profitable feature. That search is ongoing, but another twentysomething filmmaker with roots in the internet has recently released his debut feature, It Ends, a horror-ish film with a distinctly existentialist bent. His name is Alexander Ullom.  ( 39 min )

A nightmare has happened. Maybe you were minding your own business in the office when an earthquake hit, or maybe you were spelunking in some wretched cave never meant for humans to enter. Yet regardless of how you got here, you are now trapped and in need of urgent medical attention. There's too much debris to clear before a paramedic would be able to reach you ... a human paramedic, that is. But this guy? This guy eats rubble for breakfast. This is a giant burrowing cockroach, and it is approximately as long as a lime. It lives and burrows in—you guessed it—Australia. In the wild, the giant burrowing cockroach mostly stick around their burrows. They can live up to 10 years. The roaches only come to the surface at night, gathering leaves, twigs, and bark from the forest floor to feast on later, back underground. In other words, regular giant burrowing cockroaches do not have jobs or any semblance of medical training. Regular giant burrowing cockroaches would be ill-equipped to save you in an emergency situation. But this is not a regular roach. It is a cyborg roach, the fusion of an actual insect and a robot. The researchers behind this creation have dubbed it the paraborg, per a paper recently published in the journal Advanced Science.  ( 24 min )

The 35-page report released on Wednesday by the law firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, which contains a great deal of evidence that Kawhi Leonard and the Los Angeles Clippers circumvented the NBA's salary-cap rules, makes for some surprisingly fun reading. It includes some juicy and/or embarrassing emails and text messages sent by some of the parties involved in the Clippers' scheme, and my favorite part of the report is this one: In December 2021, Mr. Sanberg discussed with senior Aspiration executives his desire for the company to enter into an endorsement agreement with Mr. Leonard on the terms described above. Mr. Sanberg did not have the authority to sign such an agreement on Aspiration’s behalf and, according to internal Aspiration emails, the reaction among its C-suite executives …  ( 25 min )

Tom Dundon and the Portland City Council remain in a standoff. In early August, the city approved a $120 million expenditure of public money for renovations of the Blazers' longtime home arena, located in the city's Rose Quarter entertainment district. The city's proposed terms included a new 20-year lease, a $3 million annual payment to the city (compensation for property taxes the team avoids by playing in a publicly owned arena), and for the team to commit to using unionized labor. Dundon's response, as delivered by underlings at a July public meeting, was a resounding hell no. Portland is too crummy a town, says Dundon, to expect those kinds of compromises. It is beset by a "stagnant business climate, high income taxes, and [a] divisive political environment," and Portland's civic lead…  ( 29 min )

error fetching full text: Reqwest client error: error sending request for url (https://www.sfgate.com/collegesports/article/andrew-luck-stanford-bureaucrat-22414827.php)  ( 1 min )

yeah, I like the sound of that

INSIDE: Stephanie Gallagher ... Christian Castro ... Gloria Steinem

Today we’re listening to Patrick Gleeson, an American synthesist and composer from Seattle.

Ugly Kid Joe arrived at exactly the right moment to make fun of rock music while also being very good  ( 10 min )

The NBA has concluded its investigation of the Los Angeles Clippers and Kawhi Leonard, and the punishments are major. The league announced Wednesday that the independent probe, conducted by the law firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, uncovered "a pattern of misconduct and multiple significant rules violations by the Clippers organization, a prior offender of the salary cap circumvention rules," and as such the team will have to forfeit five first-round picks. The NBA also issued fines and suspensions to various members of the Clippers organization. The NBA opened an investigation almost one year ago, after Pablo Torre reported on a bizarre arrangement between Leonard and the scam greenwashing company Aspiration, in which the NBA player seemingly had a no-show marketing deal designed to funnel money from Clippers owner Steve Ballmer to Leonard and avoid the salary cap in the process. The law firm's report can read in full here; it's a breezy 35 pages. As a result, the NBA docked the Clippers five-first rounders, one in each draft from 2029 to 2033. The team is also fined $30 million; Ballmer and team president Gillian Zucker are both suspended for one year, Zucker without pay; Clips GM Lawrence Frank is suspended for six months without pay; the organization will be subject to an NBA compliance and monitoring program for five years; Leonard will have to pay $700,000 to the NBA; and Leonard's nefarious uncle Dennis Robertson has been banned from dealing with anyone or anything related to the NBA for five years.  ( 22 min )

Some people are fans of the Denver Broncos. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the Denver Broncos. This 2026 Defector NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far here. Your team: Denver Bron—***THE DEFECTOR OFFICE GETS HIT WITH A SUDDEN CATEGORY 12 BLIZZARD, PREVENTING ME FROM WRITING ANYTHING GOOD FOR THE REST OF THIS PREVIEW*** Your 2025 record: 14-3. Only three years removed from Nathaniel Hackett coaching Russell Wilson in the Sunset Boulevard phase of Wilson’s career, your Denver Broncos were the top seed in the AFC. Now, the advent of the 17-game schedule has, in a short amount of time, produced many strange outlier teams that ended their respective seasons with 13-14 wins despite failing the eye test. Eleven of Denver’s victories last season were by one score. I’m not saying they failed the eye test, but that’s mostly because there was too much snow falling for anyone to actually witness you guys being exposed as frauds:  ( 45 min )

Two hours after Tuesday night lapsed into Wednesday morning in the Eastern time zone, Alexander Zverev served out his grueling U.S. Open first-round matchup against Lorenzo Sonego. The final match of the night was a real thriller, with the top seed and the feisty Italian challenger letting each other have it for nearly five hours, on and on until Sonego stopped being able to hit a backhand with any zip and, at the exact right moment to avoid a catastrophic upset, Zverev remembered how to serve. As he watched a desperate Sonego forehand sail long to seal the match, Zverev raised his arms and stood still, courting the crowd. The tournament's top seed took a moment to soak in the quiet applause of what felt like 500 stragglers remaining in the cavernous, mostly empty Arthur Ashe Stadium. The …  ( 26 min )

Welcome back to Minor Dilemmas, where a member of Defector's Parents Council will answer your questions on surviving family life. Have a question? Email us at minordilemmas@defector.com. This week, Ray answers a question about making sure you don't turn into your own father.  ( 24 min )

FLUSHING, N.Y. — One set into the first-round match, I wondered when the Gael Monfils show would begin. Tuesday was his 40th birthday, and this could be his last-ever match at a Slam—didn't he want to party? We did. Seven years after his last deep run at the U.S. Open, the elastic, buoyant Frenchman still held onto a well-deserved reputation for spectacle. But already down a brisk 6-2 set to Adolfo Daniel Vallejo, the world No. 60, Monfils seemed to be offering an uncharacteristically low-wattage farewell to New York. Somehow, all these decades later, I was still judging a Gael Monfils match by its opening set. My own unforced error. He got loose. As he reported after the match, Monfils started to move his legs better, stopped playing so upright, and remembered how well he'd been striking the ball all week. He styled on the 22-year-old Vallejo to win 2-6, 6-1, 6-2, 6-0, to the vast delight of those present, who got what they came for in the end: play that transcends the specificity of tennis fandom and becomes something like fundamental human entertainment. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhGo8Ws_K7Y  ( 27 min )

On Aug. 23, Texas Christian University Athletics announced they were pulling the credentials for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. The announcement came after the paper reported on a locker room fight that led to the hospitalization of wide receiver Dozie Ezukanma and the team expulsion of high-profile transfer player Jacob Fields. According to TCU spokesperson Kyle Neaves, the credentials were pulled because the newspaper's source "lacked direct firsthand knowledge of the locker-room incident and has since been discredited.” This all started on Aug. 18, when TCU announced that Fields was dismissed from the team due to an undisclosed "violation of team rules." The Star-Telegram's TCU beat reporter, Steven Johnson, investigated the situation, relying on both an unnamed source and the university's public crime log to find information about the altercation between players on the football team. The source claimed that Fields had been targeted by other teammates, with coaches doing nothing to de-escalate the issue, which eventually led to the confrontation. The Star-Telegram's initial reporting stated only that Fields had been removed following a locker room fight with an offensive player, but did not name the other player involved. On Aug. 21, the Star-Telegram identified Ezukanma, after the player posted a since-deleted Instagram video detailing his hospitalization for a brain bleed and concussion. The Star-Telegram also updated their original reporting after a second source who claimed to speak on behalf of Fields and his family disputed the original reporting that Fields had been mistreated or bullied. Fields has since been arrested for the altercation. All the while, officials and coaches for TCU, including head coach Sonny Dykes, have remained silent and unwilling to speak to reporters.  ( 19 min )

FLUSHING, N.Y. — As we waited for Alexandra Eala to walk into Louis Armstrong Stadium for the most anticipated first-round match of the tournament, the crowd whooping as a victorious 40-year-old Gael Monfils shed his shirt, I had a quick chat with Dyan Castillejo, the first Filipino ever to play on the WTA Tour. Castillejo is now a journalist; I'd read a number of stories in American publications by American authors that analyzed Eala's spectacular fame, but here was a chance to talk to somebody who could tell me firsthand about Ealamania in the 117-million-strong Philippines. Per ESPN, Castillejo has covered Eala since she was six years old. So, just how big a deal is she? "She's a super big deal. She's our biggest star now, whether athlete or non-athlete," Castillejo said immediately. "I would say she's probably the most celebrated Filipino right now. Because of her, tennis is introduced in the Philippines. Before, it was a segment of a tennis community. Now, the masses are learning about tennis, what the sport is all about. Tennis clubs are full, trainers are busy, rackets are selling, parents want their kids to take up tennis." By tennis metrics alone, the 21-year-old, 18th-ranked Eala's popularity startles. Roger Federer, who visited the U.S. Open on Monday night to rapturous cheers — people filmed him from so high up on Arthur Ashe Stadium that he couldn't have looked like anything bigger than a very fashionable ant on their screens — is often held up as the ultimate example of popularity in tennis. When he played the great British (Scottish) hope Andy Murray in a Wimbledon final in 2012, you'd hear the crowd's rooting interests described as 50-50. When Eala beat American Jessica Pegula in the final of the Washington, D.C.–based Citi Open last month, the crowd was around 95-5 for Eala.  ( 30 min )

This week on Nothing But Respect, we mostly talked about dumb stuff with a smart guy. The guy in question was Jake Bittle, staff writer for Grist and the author of The Great Displacement: Climate Change and the Next American Migration, while the dumb stuff was Jake's amazing spree of Twitter fights back when that was something worth doing, and also Drake. Jake is a Raptors fan, and Harry knows a ridiculous amount of ball on all things rap, so it was a long time coming. We also talked about the new politics of climate vis-a-vis Silicon Valley's right-wing turn. Primo offseason stuff, and not all dumb! 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 )

This Ketel Marte thing keeps getting stranger, at least linguistically. Marte made his return to the Arizona Diamondbacks on Monday, during their game against the Philadelphia Phillies. Before the game, Marte, who speaks through an interpreter, answered questions about his apparent no-call-no-show from Aug. 17's game against the Boston Red Sox, serving mostly to generate more questions. "It was a moment of frustration. I'm the type of person that when something is going on in my life, I don't like to talk about it. That morning I woke up, my body was in pain and I couldn't react. No one made the decision for me, I'm the one that made the decision not to show up," Marte said, raising some interesting philosophical considerations about whether the body or the mind dictates agency. He said that he would "stand in front of my teammates like a man" and "ask for forgiveness." He also, in one of the more direct responses, indicated that he had nothing to say to fans. The home Diamondbacks fans made their own opinions clear, booing Marte when he came up to bat. After the game, it remained unclear whether Marte still had nothing to say to fans. He showed up to the press conference wearing an either highlighter yellow or neon green (depending on your color opinions) hat reading MAY THE BRIDGES I BURN LIGHT THE WAY. This line, I am told, originated from Beverly Hills 90210; in neither case does it hold up to additional scrutiny, though the intended sentiment (burning bridges = good for me!) is obvious.  ( 20 min )

This turned out to be quite an eventful summer for Monaco and USMNT striker Folarin Balogun. After the red card-that-wasn't at the World Cup, Balogun has now become the main character in a perfect transfer saga for this deeply unserious transfer window. The 25-year-old's move to Everton seemed secure late into the dying hours of the transfer window on Tuesday, but on Wednesday, Balogun remains a player for AS Monaco, and along the way completely bricked three different teams' plans for the upcoming season. The whole saga is puzzling, rather funny, and a perfect example of why soccer gets just one thing right about its player movement system. OK, so what happened? Let's start with Everton. The Toffees were looking relatively settled as the transfer deadline approached, but the sudden departures of star winger Iliman Ndiaye and striker Beto meant they needed to bring in some attacking reinforcements. Balogun was a good target here; he's young, talented, and played exceedingly well at the World Cup, red card saga be damned. That's a great recipe for a move, and so Everton reached a deal with Monaco for around €47 million. So far, so good. But the problems started with Balogun's medical. Normally, medicals are a formality; most injuries are widely documented, and teams know roughly what they are in for when they agree to purchase a player. However, Everton's medical team flagged some issues with Balogun's fitness, which seemingly scuttled the move. Everton swiftly pivoted to try to loan Manchester United's Joshua Zirkzee, whose 2024 move to Old Trafford didn't really amount to anything last season. United, however, did not want to let Zirkzee go, which left Everton in a tricky situation with only hours to go in the window. The Toffees then decided to go back to Monaco and try to arrange a new deal for Balogun.  ( 28 min )

Once again, Normal Gossip returns to the crucible that is college housing, and for good reason. Not only do stints in the dorms and subsequent apartments provide ample opportunities for self-discovery, but you’re also pretty much guaranteed to come out of the experience with an enemy (or six). Today’s friend-of-a-friend moves in with five boys and one mysterious woman on short notice. If you’re thinking that sounds like a recipe for chaos, you’d be right.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dln0qLqPjtw&t=1s  ( 17 min )

To sum up the quarter century of Los Angeles Angels baseball under owner Arte Moreno requires someone who knows him and them better than we do, so let's go to Anaheim mayor Ashleigh Aitken, who responded to Moreno's abrupt decision to sell the team on Tuesday thusly: “I feel like it’s my birthday.” And there's your Angels postgame show for today. Our final score again, Yankees 7, Angels 3. We'll see you tomorrow, and please drive home safely.  ( 29 min )

On August 30, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope successfully launched from Florida and will spend the next three months heading to its new home: a Sun-Earth Lagrange point, a million miles from Earth, where the gravity of the two larger bodies are in equilibrium. It's a comfy place to be for a space telescope; Roman can say hi to her old classmate Webb, who got there four years ago and has been sending back brilliant images and doing good science. Roman's a strange bird by NASA standards. It came in under budget and ahead of schedule. Its primary mirror, donated from the National Reconnaissance Office, is from a canceled spy program. There'll be a shakedown period to make sure everything's working OK, so Roman won't officially enter service until some time next year. I'm sure I'll fawn over its debut images—half of Roman's job description is to look for new planets—but the other half is pretty valuable too. Without any hyperbole: What Roman sees could help us figure out what the universe is made of, and its ultimate fate. Big questions! Hope the plucky telescope is up to the job.  ( 30 min )

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

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

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 )

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 )

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

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…  ( 15 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 )

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

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

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 )

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 )

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

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

It 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 )

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

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

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 )

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-melti…  ( 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 )

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 )

This is your TPM evening briefing.

The difference between a medicine and a poison is dosage. Often we talk about certain habits, in programming or life, are good or bad. But few things are simple binaries. Some vary with context: reading a book is a good thing sitting in my garden, but not while driving my car. But another variable is dosage: a little pain-killer salves my headache, but too much will kill me. The importance of dosage was noticed by a 16th century Swiss physician called Paracelsus. His quote was originally in German “Alle Dinge sind Gift, und nichts ist ohne Gift; allein die Dosis macht, dass ein Ding kein Gift ist.” which (according to Wikipedia) translates as “All things are poison, and nothing is without poison; the dosage alone makes it so a thing is not a poison.” It's also known as “The dose makes the poison” or if you prefer your sayings in Latin “dosis sola facit venenum”. In programming, global data is a good example of the Paracelsus Maxim (as I like to call it). A little global data, especially when immutable, can be a handy way of propagating information that may needed anywhere in a program, but it quickly becomes dangerous if there is a lot of it about. This kind of thing crops up in lots of places. So when thinking about when things are good or bad, we should always ask “in what contexts” and “in what doses”?  ( 1 min )

Giles Edwards-Alexander reports that during an experiment to see how productive a team could be using fully agentic engineering practices, the team accidentally prompted the agents into creating a blackboard coordination system inside the git repository. more…  ( 5 min )

TL;DR Or, perhaps the problem isn't that AI has broken code review, maybe it’s that we've been using code review to solve the wrong problems I was on a panel recently with Brian Houck from DX at Code Remix, hosted by Moderne. It was one of the more interesting panels I’ve done, largely because we disagreed. As my colleague Martin Fowler says, panels are much more interesting when people disagree and both sides have a good argument. Brian and I definitely did. Brian has since written a thoughtful piece called What are code reviews even for? He is clearly passionate about his position, and I am passionate enough about mine that I’m writing this response. To be clear, I think we mostly want the same things. I just don’t think code review is the best way to get them. Brian is lovely, by the w…  ( 4 min )

I wanted to write a short update to my Emacs pinky / RSI situation. I am still using my Kinesis Freestyle Edge keyboard. I think I’ve decided on the Glove80 as a replacement, but the price and the inability to easily return it are giving me second thoughts. Its style is very different, and I know I will have a hard time adjusting. Still as someone pointed out to me it’s not like I’m forced to throw away my current keyboard, which is true. I see myself using my Kinesis for work on the Mac while trying the new Glove80 on Linux for blog posts and more leisure-time typing. I’ve made a few adjustments, however: First, the spread between the two halves is much wider. This is something I was considering when I first got this keyboard, but I didn’t follow through with it. I got used to the wider s…  ( 3 min )

HTML enforces the use of a single space to separate sentences. If you want to add another space, you need to use  . I still remember how annoyed I was about that. Back in the century in which I took my technical writing course, two spaces were required. Of course, we weren't using computers very often; hand-written sentences needed to appear more separated than the words within. I'm definitely not here to convince anyone to switch. Instead, I just want to share that I paid close attention to this detail when I was formulating my style guide for this blog. Should I continue with my out-of-date two-space habit? Or should I adopt the current convention? I turned to Emacs itself for guidance. It turns out that the individuals who wrote Emacs comments, docstrings and help text used two spaces. Although many times they started each sentence on a new line. It turns out that the content here mostly is one-space. I start out using two spaces in Org where most of this originates. But when I export to HTML, that second space vaporizes. That would seem like a bug to me. The only place where you'll see evidence of my two-space style is in the comments and docstrings of my source code. Am I the only person who nit picks about such details? Thanks to Irreal for highlighting a customization from macosguru

that file will open in my writing window, and I lose focus. Dedicating the window prevents this. I could dedicate a window manually by invoking toggle-window-dedicated (bound to C-x w d) every time I start writing. But because I clock in to anything I'm serious about, I let org-clock-in-hook to do it for me as shown below. Note that the hook calls set-window-dedicated-p rather than toggle-window-dedicated because the latter will un-dedicate a window that's already dedicated. I could configure org-clock-out-hook to un-dedicate the window; I'm debating whether it's necessary. (add-hook 'org-clock-in-hook (lambda () (set-window-dedicated-p nil t))) Interestingly, while I was writing this, JTR published his "Gems" article in which he writes about setting help-window-keep-selected to true "to keep help in its own dedicated window, so it won’t open in a separate window once we follow a link."1 Perhaps that’s his approach to the same issue. 1 Emacs Config Gems - Part 3  ( 9 min )

1 on my Android device this morning. After following the tutorial, I exported the thread as an Org-mode-compatible package in a ZIP and emailed it to myself in order to transfer it to my desktop. After opening the Org file that Vakana generated, I exported the entire buffer to HTML. The result is shown below. The only change I wanted to make was to scale the bead of each heading 25%.2 It's fortuitous that Donovan Ratefison released Vakana in a month whose Emacs Carnival theme is "The Search for Knowledge," because Vakana provides a unique way to manage one's knowledge. I'll need to become proficient in it before adding it to my workflow. So my eventual Emacs Carnival submission will be more pedestrian. 1 Learn about Vakana here or download here. 2 The images used for beads a…

0 Org does not work the way my brain works,1 or rather, my brain doesn't work the way Org works. I do use Org. At first I created a few Org files (work.org and home.org, and maybe todo.org) thinking I could rigidly dedicate all my topics to them. Over time I had about dozen files, one for nearly every major facet of my life until I gave up. Why? Because it really doesn't matter where I put Org TODOs and their notes. When I need to locate something, Org provides a way to search entries for a regular expression, which is what grep does, sans all that Unixy CLI stuff. So faced with the task of paying one of my wife's medical bills, I could agonize over whether to put the task into wife.org or bills.org or medical.org.2 Or I could just: establish the task somewhere, act on it l…

Emacs produces a backup of each file by default. It does this by appending a tilde to the file's name. For example, Myfile.txt is backed up to Myfile.txt~. It's a reasonable strategy, assuming that a Version Control system is in place. But in the absence of version control, you're limited to restoring just the previous version; older versions need to be restored from backup. I use git for coding projects that I share to the public. But I didn't create a repository for my home directory. So when C-c a m TAG1 generated an error instead of a list of TAGged items, I hoped fervently that the latest init file change was to blame. After finding and fixing the problem quickly, (and realizing I was lucky this time), I resolved to be more diligent about disaster recovery. I looked into what backup schemes Emacs already provides. Emacs can create unique backups for a file rather than overwriting the previous backup. When Emacs sees a numbered backup for a given file, it will make a new, sequentially-named file for each backup of that file, while continuing to use the "append tilde" method for other files. Once I renamed (or copied) .emacs~ to .emacs.~1~, Emacs created backups named .emacs.~2~, .emacs.~3~ (and so on). I didn't even need to change a variable -- when Emacs detected .emacs.~1~, it knew that backups of .emacs needed to be numeric, so it acted accordingly. Emacs continues to use bills.org~ as the backup for bills.org. Until I tell it otherwise. Read the Emacs Manual to learn more about numbered backups. 1 C-c a m invokes org-tags-view The default values for the pertinent backup variables are: make-backup-files is t backup-by-copying is nil version-control is nil

newcomers-presets1. The idea is to provide newcomers with a set of useful configurations to help them ease into Emacs. It is, however, much more than training wheels for n00bs. The presets described in it are ones that most experienced Emacs users are already using. I know this because last April Sacha Chua wrote a splendid post that describes what’s in it. I somehow missed it back when she first posted it but she mentioned it in the latest Emacs News. As I’ve said before, I don’t usually write about things that she’s already covered in Emacs News but I broke that rule yesterday so I might as well break it again, especially since her post is especially worth your attention. When newcomers-presets was first introduced I didn’t pay too much attention to it but then Prot recommended it for experienced users as well as beginners. The problem was that I was unclear on what exactly it did. Then I saw the reference to Chua’s post. It has a comprehensive list of what it does along with a explanation for each setting. I won’t be using it because I’m not a fan of starter kits for experienced users and because even if I like everything in it today, it could change tomorrow. It’s better, in my opinion, to see what’s in it and add the things you think are useful to your own configuration. Chua includes a handy “Copy code” button with each item to make that easy. Footnotes: 1 For some reason it’s described and implemented as a “theme” but actually has little to do with themes as we normally think of them.  ( 5 min )

I’ll admit that until fairly recently I had no idea git worktrees existed. They’ve been part of git for a decade1 and I never once needed them. Feature branches did the job just fine - create a branch, do the work, merge it, delete it, and start over. What finally introduced me to worktrees was, of all things, AI coding agents. Tools like Claude Code create a worktree for each task, so several agents (or several sessions of the same agent) can work on the same repo in parallel without stepping on each other - or on you. Suddenly my projects directory was full of cider-this and cider-that siblings, and I figured I should understand what’s actually going on there. Worktrees vs Branches A branch is just a movable pointer to a commit, and making one is basically free. The catch is that a repos…  ( 4 min )

Remind me why anyone thought Bubba was a political genius.  ( 62 min )

Can nothing get in the way of the president’s disturbing obsession with naming things after himself?  ( 60 min )

All we needed was two months without self-sabotage. Instead, some Democratic Congresscritters have decided to sign on to a provision supporting the SAVE Act.  ( 62 min )

96 Aboard Newsletter: About That $30 Trillion img{-ms-interpolation-mode:bicubic;} table, td{mso-table-lspace:0pt;mso-table-rspace:0pt;} .mceStandardButton, .mceStandardButton td, .mceStandardButton td a{mso-hide:all!important;} p, a, li, td, blockquote{mso-line-height-rule:exactly;} p, a, li, td, body, table, blockquote{-ms-text-size-adjust:100%;-webkit-text-size-adjust:100%;} .mcnPreviewText{display:none!important;} .bodyCell{margin:0 auto;padding:0;width:100%;} .ExternalClass, .ExternalClass p, .ExternalClass td, .ExternalClass div, .ExternalClass span, .ExternalClass font{line-height:100%;} .ReadMsgBody, .ExternalClass{width:100%;} a[x-apple-data-detectors]{color:inherit!important;text-decoration:none!important;font-size:inherit!important;font-family:inherit!important;font-weig…  ( 13 min )

In response to my post about this data center backlash outside of Kansas City (specifically Independence, Missouri), I’ve been fielding...  ( 10 min )

As you can see in my most recent post, yesterday evening TPM Reader BC flagged this news out of Independence,...  ( 7 min )

After a couple of lazy months, I finally got back into the darkroom this morning. I bought the UGREEN NAS as a way to store files and host Plex. That has evolved somewhat. I'm still putting files there, but the number of hosted apps has grown. Miniflux (RSS reader) Navidrome (Music server) Forgejo (Git repos) Vaultwarden (Passwords) Immich (Photo library) JellyFin (Media streaming) Readdeck (Read-later service) All accessible only via my Tailscale network. Sure hope nothing breaks :) ✍️ Reply by email

the stupid is off the charts

INSIDE: Pete Hegseth ... Tina Peters ... Greg Bovino

Midterm elections are typically sleepier than presidential campaign years, so it’s genuinely shocking to see how much money is being unleashed, especially into GOP coffers, by the hyper-wealthy this cycle. Corporate political donations have reached a record of $646 million this cycle, which is 40% above what was spent on the 2024 presidential election from this sector. Another $1 billion — and likely much more — has been spent by dark money donors. While some of this money goes to Democrats, Republicans are by far the bigger beneficiaries, as moneyed interests focus their immense resources on trying to stop what looks very much to be a blue wave election.  The amount of money being thrown around by tech oligarchs is staggering — however, it’s important to remember that this is a sign of w…  ( 7 min )

Today we’re listening to Sarah Davachi, a Canadian composer, organist, and keyboardist based in Los Angeles.

Tonight in Independence, Missouri, hometown of Harry Truman, city councilman John Perkins got absolutely rocked, losing a recall election with...  ( 6 min )

Over the last week, there have been a number of examples popping up on social media of Republicans, often very...  ( 7 min )

I note Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed in the title of this headline mostly because controversies tied to his campaign...  ( 9 min )

Anya Taylor-Joy is an Argentine-British actress known for her striking screen presence, distinctive voice, and ability to move effortlessly between  ( 5 min )

I just installed Alpine Linux on an old laptop. Works great! Last year, I complained about all of the lightweight Linux distributions being based on Debian. Alpine is not based on Debian and is very lightweight indeed; it uses busybox in place of many GNU utilities, musl libc in place of glibc, and openrc in place of systemd. Alpine is so small that lots of folks use it for containers and things.  ( 1 min )

Fabrice Niessen d'Emacs pour la deuxième fois. Voici ses notes. Watch on YouTube Correction : J'ai voulu dire Speaches (un serveur de reconnaissance vocale) au lieu de speechd (un serveur de synthèse vocale) Voici notre conversation précédente : Emacs Chat 28: Fabrice Niessen (en français) Chapitres 0:00 Introduction 3:00 gptel 13:42 diff 17:52 gptel-commit-message 23:30 docstrings 24:03 hs-minor-mode - hideshow 31:03 Super-whisper 41:21 Dotfiler 59:12 Enseignement d'Emacs La transcription légèrement corrigée Details 0:00 Introduction Prot: Tu peux prendre le lien correct cette fois. Fabrice: Ah, voilà, je suis prêt avec. Sacha: Ah, ok. Ok. Nous sommes en direct. Prot: Ah, nous sommes en direct. Très bien. Sacha: Donc, je vais passer à vos notes. Bonjour à to…  ( 29 min )

Emacs ships with default settings intended for backward compatibility and convenience over strict security. The following settings enforce TLS certificate verification, reduce unintended ffap network lookups, restrict the evaluation of potentially unsafe local file, and directory variables, automated package review system, and protect authentication credentials stored by Emacs. Network and communication security By default, Emacs prompts the user interactively if a connection appears untrustworthy. You can additionally require certificate validation to fail at the TLS library level, causing invalid certificates to result in a connection error. Requiring certificate validation at the TLS layer reduces the possibility of accidentally accepting an invalid certificate in response to an interac…  ( 9 min )

lot of writing, almost all of it in Emacs so I’m always happy to see how other people use our editor of choice for writing. The latest example I’ve found is from JTR over at The Art Of Not Asking Why. His post considers some simple expansion functions in Emacs. He starts off with dictionaries. As many of you know, I’ve been a Webster 1913 dictionary user ever since James Somers explained why I (and you) should be. I have gone through many iterations of integrating it into Emacs but have converged on the same solution that JTR uses: the built in dictionary-search function built into Emacs that we both have configured to use the online collection dict.org, although I still have a local copy from my previous iterations. The dict.org collection is nice because it contains several dictionar…  ( 6 min )

In late April of this year, I’ve began experiencing a heightened anxiety. I started therapy then later taking anti-anxiety medication. I worked to change some of my behaviors. And started writing even more personal journal entries. Last Friday I found a list of feelings and responses that resonated with me: Angry: Lift weights Stressed: Go for a walk Procrastinating: Set a 10-minute timer Sad: Get sunlight Can’t focus: Clean your workspace Negative thoughts: Write 3 gratitudes Stuck: Change your environment Financial stress: Build an emergency fund Low energy: Fix your sleep Overthinking: Journal it out Lonely: Call someone No motivation: Start with 2 minutes Anxiety: Slow your breathing Brain fog: Drink water and move Low confidence: Keep small promises Lost: Define one clear goal Twic…  ( 3 min )

You’ll never guess the decision on which he joined the liberal rear-guard, either.  ( 58 min )

And it’s nothing useful, in case you were wondering.  ( 58 min )

This is your TPM evening briefing.

Like many readers, I’m wary of AI generated prose. Simon Wilison has written an LLM cliché highlighter - paste in some text, or a URL, and it will flag various patterns common to LLMs. It references a wikipedia page of signs of AI writing. That page points out that: Humans are notoriously bad at distinguishing human and LLM-generated text. While research on humans’ abilities to detect AI-generated text is still limited, a 2025 study has shown that human ability to distinguish LLM text from human is no better than random chance. Another 2025 study on German theses has shown that humans managed a “recognition rate of 57% for AI texts and 64% for human-generated texts”.[ Not just do I find myself repelled by prose with an LLM-voice, I also wonder how accurate my reaction is. I’m old enough to…  ( 4 min )

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

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 )

Some pathetic, frontrunning dorks are fans of the Rams. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the Rams. This 2026 Defector NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far here. Your team: Los Angeles Rams. Your 2025 record: 12-5. Heh. Haha. MWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!  ( 86 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 iPhone complaints, America’s infrastructure tragedy, changing clothes at the airport, and more. Your letters: Monte:  ( 49 min )

The Chicago Cubs have maintained an awfully low profile for a team that 1) wins often, and by a lot of runs, 2) homers more than anyone, and 3) has an increasingly sure-thing MVP patrolling center now that Shohei Ohtani is slumping through his ouchy season. The Cubs hit nine homers on Monday night in a full 17-3 clocking of the Milwaukee Brewers, the team with the best record in baseball, and it landed as quietly as something that inherently loud could land. That feat has been eclipsed only once in baseball history, but it was also eclipsed more or less instantaneously by one homer that very dramatically wasn't.  That the Cubs are the secret in plain sight may be for any number of reasons, starting with the fact that none of those nine dingers was hit by Pete Crow-Armstrong, the MVP we men…  ( 21 min )

It did not take a lot of special insight to suspect that recently installed CBS News boss Bari Weiss played some role in the production of a story the outlet ran on Monday, headlined "Michigan Democrat Abdul El-Sayed's deleted tweets on Sept. 11 attacks invite scrutiny of past remarks." If you know even a little bit about Weiss, you know that such a story combines two of her favorite things: talking about people's old tweets and blatant Islamophobia. That suspicion was confirmed Monday night by Status News, which reported that Weiss was so impressed by the story she specifically praised it during the network's daily editorial meeting on Monday. She also personally directed a change in the headline to include explicit reference to El-Sayed, deleted posts, and 9/11, according to sources who spoke with Status. This has apparently caused some outrage among CBS staffers who noted, along with many others who read the story, that the whole thing is stupid and shamelessly racist. The posts in question are completely anodyne, which is obvious even in the way the story describes them:  ( 17 min )

It's been an eventful year for Ringer founder and podcast host Bill Simmons. He ended 2025 and began 2026 at a peak in popularity, thanks to his performance on a podcast titled "Bill’s 50 Most Rewatchable Movies of the 21st Century," which earned him the kind of crossover appeal he's rarely enjoyed. Just before that, he signed a deal to have to have several Ringer podcasts licensed to Netflix. Then he got to tell the world about how the Jaylen Brown trade happened during his colonoscopy. For the last eight months or so, Simmons has been, to borrow a phrase, on Apex Mountain. But mountains are slippery, and Simmons has been steadily sliding back to sea level over the last few months. Consider the following pieces of information: During episodes of The Rewatchables, Simmons established a new segment in which he uses ChatGPT to produce, in Roger Ebert's voice, a review of a movie that Ebert never got to write about, on account of him being dead. ChatGPT recently became a presenting sponsor of The Bill Simmons Podcast, and during his first attempt at reading the ad copy he pronounced it "ChatGBT." On the Aug. 9 episode of his podcast, he once again brought up the fact that he does not wear a seatbelt when he drives. On the Aug. 25 episode of a Ringer podcast about historic box-office flops, he wore an Anduril hat. Where one even acquires an Anduril hat is not a question that can be answered by a person in my tax bracket. On the most recent episode of his podcast, he gave a detailed description of his participation in proxy betting. Because he lives in California, where sports gambling has not been legalized, he calls his daughter's boyfriend, who lives in a state where sports gambling is legal, gives him his FanDuel login information, and has the boyfriend place bets on his behalf. FanDuel, with whom The Ringer signed a lucrative sponsorship deal, explicitly prohibits proxy betting.  ( 19 min )

As Lauren Theisen pointed out last month, the ongoing, abstracted debate about trans inclusion in sports uses almost no proper nouns and lots of hypotheticals. Back in the late 1970s, there was a very real, very human example of a trans athlete playing at the highest level of a mainstream sport. Renée Richards competed in professional tennis, and her fascinating life is explored meticulously in Julie Kliegman's new biography, Finding Renée Richards. The book is an invaluable intervention in the tortured public discourse, which in recent weeks has been polluting the WNBA. Read this book and forget that Enes Kanter Freedom or Royce White exist. I led a Q&A with Julie for the book's launch last week, and have condensed and edited parts of our conversation below.  ( 54 min )

PHILADELPHIA — The Benjamin Franklin Parkway was designed in 1917 by French architect Jacques Gréber in the European style of boulevard, specifically inspired by the Champs-Élysées, which means it is a thematically apt and suitably picturesque locale for the end of a cycling race and a horrible—I mean absolutely dogshit, for all involved parties—road. On Aug. 30, the first Philadelphia Cycling Classic in a decade, by simple virtue of being a cycling race that necessitated mass closure of roads to their invasive predators (cars), rendered the Parkway back down to its theoretical beauty: a shaded, expansive corridor connecting City Hall to the Philadelphia Art Museum, one which happens to be flanked by flags. Pedestrian traffic was dictated by volunteers in bright orange shirts. Sometimes the impending cyclists were well-telegraphed by the blaring horns of incoming organizer cars, but other stragglers were conveyed by word of mouth. "Batter up!" one volunteer yelled, before the whistling and cowbells commenced for a lone cyclist. When the volunteer waved a crowd of pedestrians by to the shaded side of the road, she directed us to pause halfway and look to the left for potential cyclists. I stood somewhere between India's and Iceland's flags to watch the final stretch of the women's race, mostly on a gigantic screen set in the middle of the road. The crowd was a mix of locals, legitimate enthusiasts of the sport of cycling, more general enthusiasts of cycling in general, and foreign tourists. To my left were three older men who had done some amateur bike races before. To my right, past India, was a crowd of spectators sitting on bleachers.  ( 33 min )

They don't give style points in baseball, but if you were scoring Orioles-Rockies, you'd want to break out a second, third, maybe even a fourth color of pen to decorate the box with Colton Cowser's ninth-inning catch to save the game for Baltimore. Maybe some tempera as well. You can't make that "F8" pretty enough. All home-run robberies are special, but they come in flavors. On most, the fielder is totally vertical—having had time to settle on the track for a towering fly ball, and lofting himself at the right moment to haul it in. On Cowser's grand larceny of Jake McCarthy, he had no time to plan it, no time to set. He was at a full sprint back, and hurled himself into the wall, and as he reeled in what would have been a game-winning home run, his legs were scissored outward, his momentum back instead of up. Barely controlled ballet. O's manager Craig Albernaz called it "the best play I’ve ever seen." Dare you dissent? https://youtu.be/_LuMGPrkbZ0?t=707  ( 18 min )

If you haven’t yet encountered the cover story for the August issue of The Atlantic, I have some bad news to share: "The End of Reading Is Here." It’s an intentionally provocative headline for a slightly less provocative story; while it may portend doom, Rose Horowitch’s piece makes a smaller claim than its headline. She speaks more of a “decline of reading,” and, in a nod to Marshall McLuhan, argues that the U.S. is “postliterate.” Certainly there are crises well-covered within the piece that represent real challenges to readers today: attacks on our capacity for attention, metrics that show marked declines in reading comprehension, the impacts of generative AI on readers and reading, and more. But The Atlantic's framing places it firmly in a tradition with which the still-existing readin…  ( 41 min )

INSIDE: Jim Comey ... Dan Driscoll ... Wendell Berry

Charlevoix in the morning (2026). Leica MP. Sorry, I can't right now. I'm too busy vetting every goddamned company even remotely attached to every single piece of software and hardware I use or am thinking of using. Why does everything have to suck, now? I'm sure everyone will be selling their MacBooks and iPhones and canceling all Apple services now that Ternus is on X. I wanted to post this on Mastodon but I really don't feel like starting a fight I don't have the energy to finish :) ✍️ Reply by email  ( 1 min )

what kind of bullshit is ‘Lake America’?

Today’s mix opens with a new track from harpist Lara Somogyi’s new album, a [time] patterned, which is a collaboration with cellist Clarice Jensen.

I don't play games within Emacs. Instead I enjoy learning about the many functions and modes it has. I even derived a Tip of the Day that displays help on a randomly-chosen function. I invoke it at startup; there's a non-zero probability that I'll spend 15 minutes or so exploring the function it provides. I get the impression that I'm not the only one who enjoys Emacs this way. When I read others' postings, I see references to "customize," "configure," "init file," "rabbit hole." I'm pretty sure I also came across a few posts that contained this: "my ex-spouse made me chose between him/her and Emacs." Often, reading these posts is enjoyable in itself. I enjoy writing and blogging, too. I started my first journal when I was 13 years old. My answer to "What book would you choose if stranded on an uninhabited island?1" would be "a blank notebook that comes with a pencil." I also enjoy interacting with the Emacs community. It's as if this "Ray on Emacs" blog provides entertainment squared. This can be expressed mathematically as E2, where E is entertainment and 2 is two. While researching this topic, I was surprised at how many games we can choose from, even in plain vanilla. Naive folks might scoff at programmers who write games for Emacs. But they don't understand that games demonstrate Emacs' capabilities. I suspect the underlying motivation is that writing games for Emacs is fun. It's a challenge that leads to accomplishment.2 I'm looking forward to reading submissions to Emacs Carnival September 2026 and trying some games. participate is Humor not to necessary.3 1 aka "Desert Island" see Uninhabited island on Wikipedia 2 Folks in the MS-DOS USENETs would joke about writing Batch Files that could do calculus. At least I think it was a joke. 3 "Humor is not necessary to participate" (as evidenced by this post).  ( 10 min )

;;; -*- lexical-binding: t -*- (add-to-list 'warning-suppress-types '(files missing-lexbind-cookie)). There are more details on lexical-binding in the Elisp info manual. Emacs Carnival: Check out the entries for August in "The Search for Knowledge" and stay tuned for September's topic, "Games." Emacs 31: Emacs 31.1 is released! (Reddit, HN, HN, HN, Irreal, lobste.rs) - including this again from last week Mickey Petersen: What's New in Emacs 31.1? (Reddit, HN) - including this again from last week Android builds of Emacs 31.1 now available Emacs 31.1 binaries now available for Windows (Reddit) Upcoming events (iCal file, Org): EmacsATX: Emacs Social https://www.meetup.com/emacsatx/events/316121976/ Thu Sep 3 1600 America/Vancouver - 1800 America/Chicago - 1900 America/Toronto - 23…  ( 4 min )

Emacs automatically applies project-specific configurations through file-local and directory-local (.dir-locals.el) variables when opening a file or directory. While this feature ensures consistent settings across environments, it can cause security risks and persistent prompt fatigue when editing source code. Malicious .dir-locals.el files or file-local variables containing eval forms can execute arbitrary Lisp code if Emacs is configured to evaluate them, or if the user approves the relevant prompt by mistake. This article outlines configurations for securing file-local and directory-local variables while reducing prompts. Allowing safe local variables The enable-local-variables variable controls how Emacs handles file-local variables. File-local variables are configurations embedded dir…  ( 8 min )

August Emacs carnival is about the search for knowledge. While I take notes and link them, I don't use Emacs. I've been on the Obsidian train pretty much since it came out with a short deviation into Craft. I've loved the plugins that Obsidian has, but those plugins are also it's downfall. I used the Long Form plugin for a while, but then stopped and move that writing to Emacs because the plugin was loosing my data any time I tried to use it. But despite my love for Emacs, I haven't moved my notes over to it and I have no plans on moving my notes over to Emacs. Currently Obsidian has around 9,000 individual files across my notes and writing. It's saved in a portable markdown format. Obsidian's sync service works flawlessly all the time and the mobile apps are good. On the Emacs side, every few weeks I have some issue with Syncthing that means I need to sort out some type of sync conflict and because of this I really only add content from my phone via Beorg to my inbox.org file. I don't edit other files if I can help it, the risk is simply to high that I'll have some huge mess to sort out when I get back to my desktop. The main reason I don't switch is that I don't think that migrating tools is the big productivity boost that most people think it is. Yes the Emacs vim key bindings are better than what Obsidian provides. Yes I can very easily hack Emacs to do whatever I want, but Obsidian does everything I need already. So moving my notes to Emacs would most likely be me finding Emacs more fun right now than Obsidian because it's new. I've wondered about accessing Obsidian from Emacs so I have Emacs goodness in my Obisidian, but even that feels like me searching for a reason to use Emacs where I don't really need it. If you want to read how I setup Obsidian, my 2026 walkthrough is still how I do it.  ( 1 min )

There are movies that try to be scary, movies that try to be funny, and movies that seem to have  ( 11 min )

Last week, after the death of Dolly Parton, I wrote about how Parton had aggressively and carefully preserved her various...  ( 7 min )

This is your TPM evening briefing.

The FBI has lowered its employment standards, no doubt because the guy in charge is an absolute fool.  ( 60 min )

Another L for the incredible shrinking secretary of state.  ( 62 min )

Three NFL players were placed on the commissioner's exempt list this past weekend: Seattle Seahawks cornerback Terrion Arnold, Denver Broncos outside linebacker Jonathon Cooper, and Green Bay Packers running back Josh Jacobs. All three will be unable to play while they are on the list, but they still get their game checks. It's the NFL's version of paid leave. All three have been charged in criminal court. For Cooper and Jacobs, the charges are in cases that include allegations of intimate-partner violence. Arnold is charged with playing a role in a violent robbery and kidnapping in Florida. The commissioner's exempt list was a little-used tool until 2014, when video came out showing then–Baltimore Ravens running back Ray Rice hitting his fiancée in an Atlantic City elevator and fans were outraged that Rice had been suspended just two games for what happened. Since then, the list has become a tool used by the NFL to get players off the field before a full investigation can be done. It also usually involves a player getting a lot of negative media attention and typically, though not always, involves intimate-partner violence. As Mike Florio put it over at ProFootballTalk: "The league regards the move as not punishment (even though it absolutely is)."  ( 24 min )

There are tired fighters, and then there’s Moses Itauma in the ninth round of Saturday night’s heavyweight title bout against Filip Hrgovic.  With about 30 seconds left in what would be the last round of this odd but completely fascinating fight in London, the gifted but inexperienced Itauma was suddenly so gassed that he seemed utterly incapable of raising his hands above his waist, let alone defending himself from the durable Croatian veteran who was suddenly swarming him with blows from hell. Referee Howard Foster rightly called the fight and shocked the boxing world.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QLGEoGQGXPg  ( 21 min )

On Friday, the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals issued a 3-0 ruling against Kalshi, a ruling that in theory gives states the power to regulate the "prediction market" platform. However strong that sounds, one can't fairly characterize the decision as authoritative. While the San Francisco–based court's unanimous ruling represents the most significant curtailment of the don't-call-it-gambling gambling platform, the fight between the Kalshian cohort of bloodsuckers and those who would regulate them is of a larger and stupider nature than even the biggest appeals court in the nation can handle. We have to start with the odd fact that Kalshi, and the Polymarket prediction market, are presently regulated by the federal government. Not in any meaningful way, of course—befitting a pair of organizations that have each hired Donald Trump Jr. as a "strategic advisor"—but both are technically overseen by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, a small agency, created in 1974, that typically governs futures markets and other forms of derivatives. The prediction markets' core argument in the case before the Ninth Circuit is that CFTC oversight is sufficient, which is to be expected given that the scope of that regulatory relationship has amounted to a big thumbs-up in exchange for whatever it costs to buy a Trump son or two. The CFTC has become a critical arm of the Donald Trump financial crimes apparatus because it has statutory authority to regulate commodities and to classify all sorts of things that are not commodities, like cryptocurrency and online sports bets, as such. This designation lightens the regulatory burden. Securities, by contrast, are subject to stricter rules, which is part of why the Bitcoin people are obsessed with calling the obviously securitized asset digital gold.  ( 20 min )

For the first time in over 20 years, Novak Djokovic lost his first-round match at a Slam. On Sunday he fell in five sets to world No. 49 Mariano Navone, a 25-year-old clay-court specialist appearing in just his third-ever U.S. Open main draw. In other words, the sort of opponent Djokovic has made a career of dispatching, even if it did sometimes take him a leisurely five sets to do it. In this late period of his career, Djokovic has professed his love of the best-of-five format, which affords him time to recalibrate. His comeback after a hot start from a plucky youth has played out so many times that there's an air of inevitability in the stadium as he goes about his business, overcoming his aches and steadying the scoreboard. But this was not the Djokovic of matches past, and there was no air of inevitability Sunday night—just a gruesome scene. The 39-year-old labored, vomited, and cried en route to losing 7-6(5), 5-7, 4-6, 6-2, 6-1. Not since the 2006 Australian Open—a tournament he'd go on to win 10 times—has Djokovic exited a Slam in the first round. He'd also never lost in the U.S Open’s first round before. But this loss was not without recent precedent. Djokovic had struggled with the heat at the Cincinnati Open in mid-August, losing his first match there to Thiago Agustin Tirante: coincidentally, another 25-year-old Argentine then ranked around No. 50. During that match, Djokovic appeared to vomit and took a medical timeout. After that loss, he referenced an unspecified health condition "that has been bothering me for the past couple of years," making it hard for him to play in hot and humid weather. To the best of my knowledge, that was his first-ever public reference to such a condition.  ( 25 min )

Two matches into a new Premier League season is the perfect time to overreact. One match is a fluke; three matches feel too real. Two matches, however, give an overeager observer just enough pattern recognition to make claims that far exceed reality. This is doubly true if a club has shown quality and frailty in almost equal part. Therefore, after two barnstorming wins and/or two near-collapses to open the 2026-27 campaign, I feel confident in saying that Chelsea is great, doomed, and a work in progress. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mfN4qZtc5sk Really, how you feel about Chelsea will depend on how you feel about life. For an optimist, the club beating last year's 11th- and 8th-placed teams to start the season, the former away from home and the latter at Stamford Bridge, is a beautiful start to the Xabi Alonso era. On the flip side, Chelsea's inability to see out either game without letting the opponents back into them is a pessimist's fantasy, a red klaxon blaring over Chelsea's lopsided roster construction and a manager who, while highly regarded, is coming off of a high-profile flameout. The boring and most correct feeling is probably somewhere in the middle, of course, but that's no fun. What is fun is Chelsea Football Club as it stands after two matchweeks; similarly to last season's Liverpool, the Blues have declared themselves as the main event for neutrals, a must-watch whirlwind of chaos that might leave Chelsea fans needed heart medication.  ( 25 min )

Some people are fans of the Houston Texans. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the Houston Texans. This 2026 Defector NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far here. Your team: Houston Texans. Your 2025 record: The Texans won 12 games last year. Their defense stomped around like King Ghidorah ravaging Tokyo. Their offense puttered along like a dump truck with two flat tires and one square one.  ( 51 min )

We're ending the month with a challenging themeless puzzle. Keep an eye out for tricky clues and fun wordplay. This week's puzzle was constructed by Greg Snitkin and Glenn Davis, and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. Greg is a dad with three small kids and a hedge fund controller from South Orange, N.J. He's been in a fantasy football league with Glenn since 2013 and spanks him every year. Glenn is a reformed sports blogger now working in the non-profit space. He and his wife live in New Jersey with two human children and two cats. He won the league in 2018, so Greg is an unreliable narrator. 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."  ( 15 min )

Last week, the U.S. Department of Justice announced the arrests of two men in Portland, Ore. A 35-year-old man named Daejon Love and an 18-year-old man named Taylor Jamie Chan were charged with wire fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud. Those charges stem from Love and Chan running an alleged scam operation that involved defrauding various women through Love (unconvincingly) pretending to be a wide receiver for the San Francisco 49ers. Prosecutors say Love and Chan stole a total of $1.3 million from several women between 2022 and 2026. Love would meet the women on dating apps, Chan would pose as his financial advisor, and then they would convince the women to send them money to be used in investment strategies. From the DoJ's press release: Love and Chan also exchanged investment-related electronic communications in which Chan pretended to be Love’s investment adviser. Chan sent Love messages purportedly encouraging Love to invest in new opportunities. Love then sent screenshots of those messages to numerous victims to further convince them to send money to either Love or Chan. Chan and Love also hosted three-way FaceTime calls in which they showed victims falsified investment gains and encouraged victims to part with their money. Victims sent Love and Chan money due to their belief that their money would be invested in legitimate investment vehicles on the victims’ behalf. Some victims also loaned Love large amounts of money, if victims did not have cash to invest, Love sometimes instructed them to take out personal loans in both scenarios Love assured the victims that they would quickly be repaid.  ( 19 min )

INSIDE: Kash Patel ... James Clyburn ... Pete Hegseth

it’s the skirmish that has never happened the most

I spent several hours yesterday trying to get Wifi to remain up on the Framework after installing CachyOS. It was not easy. I had to drag Claude Code in to help. I'd have never been able to find and fix it, otherwise. Flaky Wifi is a commonly-reported problem with the Framework 13. In my case it was related to the Orbi mesh, so I don't know if this helps anyone else, but I'll leave it here, just in case. It's working for me. TL;DR is pin wifi to a 5 GHz BSSID so the 6 GHz band doesn't get in the way. Here's a slightly edited version of Claude Code's summary: The fault. The Framework connects, gets a DHCP lease, and stops passing traffic about two minutes later. The link never drops — =iw= says =Connected= throughout, the AP keeps acking frames, signal is fine. What dies is ARP: ping starts returning Destination Host Unreachable from the machine's own address, which is the kernel giving up after its ARP entry expires at ~60s and cannot be refreshed. The "two minutes" is the ARP cache lifetime, not a coincidence — and that is why every log looked healthy. The cause. The Orbi's 6 GHz radio is the mesh backhaul. It accepts a client association and acknowledges frames but does not bridge that client to the LAN. The MT7925 is Wi-Fi 7 and can see 6 GHz, so it sometimes anchors there and is then deaf. Every Wi-Fi 5/6 device in the house is immune because it cannot see the band — which is exactly why this ThinkPad sat on the same AP all day without a hiccup, the comparison that finally cracked it. Measured, same machine, same AP, minutes apart: 6 GHz primary — stalled in 21 seconds 2.4 GHz — clean for 11 minutes 5 GHz anchored — over an hour, and survived a suspend/resume, which had been a reliable trigger. The fix. Pin 802-11-wireless.bssid to a 5 GHz BSSID so it can never anchor on 6 GHz. MLO still attaches 6 GHz as link 2 and that is harmless; what matters is which band anchors the association. Costs roaming — the machine stays on one unit. Here's the wifi-pin.sh script. ✍️ Reply by email  ( 2 min )

It’s easy to see why Ken Paxton thought he could waltz right into the role of senator from Texas. Sure, the state’s Republican nominee and current attorney general is widely seen as one of the most corrupt men in politics, a man with so many scandals that even his fellow Republicans impeached him. (Sadly, the Texas Senate refused to convict him.) Still, Donald Trump won over 56% of the vote in Texas in 2024, despite the Jan. 6th riot and his felony convictions for fraud in New York, so it seemed voters don’t care about corruption. Paxton has been so sure it would be simple to beat his Democratic opponent, state Rep. James Talarico, that he even blew off campaigning over much of the summer in favor of a luxury European vacation with his alleged mistress, a conservative Christian influencer …  ( 8 min )

Today we’re listening to Toshphic., a Japanese ambient musician from Tokyo.

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 )

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

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

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 )

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 )

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

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 )

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 )

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 )

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 )

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

The 1980s were filled with songs about everyday life, but nobody made everyday problems sound quite as catchy as Bananarama  ( 13 min )

No content preview  ( 4 min )

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

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

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

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

I was an adult when I encountered Dolly Parton’s “I Will Always Love You” for the first time. I grew up thinking Whitney Houston’s 1992 cover was the original; I can’t say exactly when my ignorance was rectified but Twitter was almost certainly where. There was a type of tweet that would, and maybe still does, reliably go viral about the origins of the song, usually referring either to the fact that Parton wrote it and “Jolene” in the same day or to the fact that she did all that only to be outsung, and in some quarters, almost entirely eclipsed by Houston’s cover. I know that I saw a variation on that tweet a couple of times before I actually sought out Parton’s original recording. I remember finding it a bit boring. The story goes that “I Will Always Love You” was written as a sort of parting gift to Parton’s mentor Porter Wagoner, who introduced Parton to the world in the ’60s on his long-running nationally syndicated musical variety show The Porter Wagoner Show. The two worked together through the late ’60s and early ’70s before Parton decided to do what she came to Nashville to do: become her own star. In a stripped down 2009 performance, Parton recounts how Wagoner took the news.  “When I started working with Porter, I told him I had come to Nashville to be my own star and to have my own group. But the money was so good that I told [him] I would stay for 5 years. And he agreed to that. Well, 5 years came and…I told him I wanted to go out on my own. He was just having a fit about it. We argued a lot and I thought, he’s never going to listen to me. He’s not hearing a word I’m saying…So, I went home, wrote a song about it, came back the next day and I said, ‘Porter, just sit down, let me sing you something, then you’ll know how I feel.’”  ( 20 min )

Most people think of the tits. That’s understandable, given they would enter a room some not-insignificant amount of time before the rest of her. But there was also the hair, often high enough to occupy a distinct micro-climate, or the rhinestones, which reflected enough light to obscure everything save the tits and the hair.  Saying Dolly Parton had a signature look is a bit like saying water has a signature wetness. What she had was a constitutive way of being. What she had was a relationship to femininity that I found, in turns, inspiring and confounding. Inspiring because she was always in on the joke—“it costs a lot of money to look this cheap;” “I’m not offended by all the dumb blonde jokes because I know I’m not dumb… and I also know that I’m not blonde”—and confounding because I would find myself thinking doesn’t she ever get tired of having to be in on the joke? I’ve never had a particularly vexed relationship with my gender, but I do sometimes find the outward trappings tiring. Possibly this is because there are certain parts of it I’m just not very good at. Style has always been a thing that other people are able to have while I—no matter how much effort or money I expend—kind of just wear clothes. Every once in a while I’ll watch make-up tutorials on Instagram and get annoyed ping-ponging between the women showing me how to do a “no-makeup make-up look” who don’t actually need to wear any make-up and the ones who approach it with the kind of rigor one might more readily associate with big engineering projects. I realized years ago that having very long hair is an easy way to avoid ever having to learn what to do with it, and so when I tip my head back my hair touches my ass.  ( 20 min )

Like all people not gravely deficient of soul, I teared up a little when I heard Dolly Parton died. I am by nature something of a patch of soft pavement—easily impressed upon —and so there’s not much surprising here. What was odd came a bit later when, attending to the funerary rites proper to these exhaustingly online days, I scrolled through one performance after another. There was an inner tumult, an upwelling excess. Soon enough I wasn’t merely damp-eyed; I was choked up; I snuffled; I was, you would have to say, losing some real quantity of my shit. Here’s the odd part: More or less the whole time I was thinking of my mom, an Italian-American lady from the East Coast in her middle-80s who is very much alive, and isn’t much at all like Dolly Parton. Except, perhaps, for how she is.  ( 35 min )

Rep. James Clyburn (D) of South Carolina said today on Meet the Press that he supports adding 4 new Justices...  ( 7 min )

I made another unhoused friend today. Jon is a tattoo artist who suffered a chronic injury his thumb a year ago and can’t do his work anymore as a result. He only recently became homeless. He told me the same thing I’ve heard from so many unhoused folks I’ve talked to over the last year. It’s embarrassing. And I always tell them some version of the same thing.  ( 20 min )

This weekend, I finished tending my guide on AI that I had planted a seed for in my digital garden. It includes links to various articles on it’s roles in environmental destruction, labor exploitation, economic failure, degrading critical thinking skills, and fascist empowerment. I’ve also included my own personal thoughts, and links to various other thought pieces from other people that I’ve found useful or informative. You can find the guide here.  ( 20 min )

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useful post on directory local variables. The idea is that rather than putting a lot of context specific configuration in your init.el file, you can put those configurations in a .dir-locals.el file and they will be set only when you open a file in that directory. I really like the idea of directory local variables but it has never worked well for me. That’s mainly because I usually wanted to execute some code using the eval keyword. That always causes some problems involving a stack overflow, no matter how simple the code is. Lately, I’ve been using them a lot in conjunction with Jinx, which has the nice feature of adding words to the local file or local directory in addition to the other usual options. I find that really useful for my blogging. I can add post specific words to the post source file itself or I can add them to all posts in my blog directory. Maiorana uses then to set things like compilation settings, fill and wrap settings, and indentation styles. If you have different workflows with different setting needs, directory local variables is a very nice way of dealing with them. Of course, not everything should go in a directory local variable. Some things apply to all your buffers and should go in your init.el but for those things that are specific to particular workflows, directory local variables are just what you need.  ( 5 min )

In latest versions of Cedet support of GNU Global was introduced, and very useful command - semantic-symref, was implemented. It allows to find places in source code (for C & C++ now) where given function is used. And if GTAGS database wasn't found, then this command tries to find occurrences with find-grep command. As result, user gets something like this...  ( 3 min )

Busy day ahead, all self-inflicted: Replace Fedora with CachyOS on the Framework using the Runbook I made yesterday Update Emacs to 31 everywhere (it's default on Cachy, but macOS and Fedora need work Process/Scan a roll of 35mm (test on both SilverFast/macOS and Vuescan/Linux) UPDATE: That took WAY longer than expected. The Framework's Wifi would drop every few minutes. Had to send Claude Code in to help. Even that took hours. I think we got it, finally. The trick was to pin the Wifi connection to a specific interface/channel and force it to use v5 first and ignore v6. Something to do with the Orbi mesh, I dunno, it works now. ✍️ Reply by email  ( 1 min )

FoxTrot by Bill Amend | August 30, 2026  ( 12 min )

When people think about valuable commodities, gold, diamonds, oil, and rare artwork usually come to mind. Maple syrup rarely makes  ( 9 min )

G.G. Allin was never interested in being a normal rock star. While most punk musicians built their reputations by rejecting  ( 9 min )

The Bangles – “Manic Monday”: The Prince-Penned Hit That Became an ’80s Pop Classic Few songs capture the universal feeling  ( 9 min )

Hey. It's been a spell since I've posted here. I'm currently infatuated with Pure Blog running at baty.blog, but I wanted to test my Emacs->11ty->VPS deployment on the newly-restored 2015 Thinkpad. If you're reading this, it worked. ✍️ Reply by email

Posting this because it does something science writing rarely does well: it ranks its own evidence, steelmans the rival theory, admits what has not yet been demonstrated, and still lands a substantive claim without overreaching. The four-tier evidence structure (strong / strong-and-persuasive / suggestive / missing) is worth the read on its own as an example of how to write about underdetermined science honestly. The essay covers: the radical pair mechanism, the Mouritsen group's radio-frequency disruption experiments, the magnetite rival hypothesis and where its evidence has failed, Bell's theorem and what the 1972 Clauser–Freedman result actually settled, and the closing argument that quantum indeterminacy may be a biological resource rather than a nuisance to be engineered around. Ends with a line I've been thinking about for a week: "The strangest thing available to us this week is a bird the size of a fist, sitting in a hedge, quietly doing something with the structure of reality that we have not finished explaining." submitted by /u/no3us [link] [comments]

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

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

Like most 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 )

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 )

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 )

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 )

After the bruising Michigan Senate primary a new Fox News poll was published showing Abdul El-Sayed four points behind Mike...  ( 9 min )

This article presents a set of Emacs Dired configuration changes to enhance file management. The configurations sort directories before files for easier navigation, hide dotfiles, reduce unnecessary confirmation prompts, prevent UI lockups caused by network latency, among other improvements. Each configuration explains the behavior of the relevant setting, its benefits, and its tradeoffs, making it easier to determine which changes are appropriate. Keeping Dired clean by hiding dotfiles Using dired-omit-mode helps hide hidden files and directories, such as .git or .DS_Store, by applying a specific regular expression. The tradeoff is that required configuration files are hidden by default, forcing you to toggle dired-omit-mode off to see them. Disabling dired-omit-verbose prevents the mode …  ( 10 min )

well shuffled card decks: no two are alike. But, as Arlo Guthrie famously sang, that’s “not what I came to tell you about”. Rather, this post is about differing organizations for those Emacs configurations. The idea was suggested to me by a post from Andros Fenollosa on his own Emacs configuration. Fenollosa says that he doesn’t use any of the all-in-one configurations like Spacemacs or Doom because they include too much and are hard to understand and make changes to. He also doesn’t use the popular literate configuration method using Org mode because it’s just another layer of complexity that can go wrong. His idea is to to have a separate file for each “area of responsibility” and to use init.el as a sort of index that loads them in order. I like that idea but don’t use separate files. I keep everything in init.el and just organize it in sections. Still, Fenollosa has a good argument for the separate files but I think I get the same benefits with a single file broken into sections. Actually, it’s not quite true that everything is in a single file. I run Emacs on several type of systems and keep the system/OS specific information in separate files that I load conditionally based on the system and OS type1. That way I don’t have a lot of conditionals dealing with system/OS type in init.el itself. There aren’t as many ways of organizing your Emacs configuration as there are configurations but there are a lot of them. What principle do you use? Footnotes: 1 If you’re interested, here’s the code: ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; ;; Pull in system and platform specific configurations ;; ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; ;; Just keep on going if the requisite file isn't there. ;; Manipulations in second load is for "gnu/linux" → "linux" (load (car (split-string (system-name) "\\.")) t) (load (car (reverse (split-string (symbol-name system-type) "/"))) t)  ( 5 min )

Carnaval d'Emacs sur la recherche de connaissances. Merci à Charlie Holland pour son accueil ! C'est une bonne occasion de réfléchir à la gestion de mes notes, qui est un de mes intérêts forts. Saisir : Je souhaite saisir et publier ce que j'apprends autant que possible parce que ma mémoire n'est pas fiable. Je préfère le format texte brut car il est le plus consultable et le plus archivable à long terme. Je suis loin de mon ordinateur la plupart du temps, donc j'utilise Orgzly Revived sur mon téléphone pour saisir des notes courtes dans ma boîte de réception inbox.org ou mon fichier de brouillons posts.org. Une fois que je suis sur mon ordinateur, je développe mes notes en utilisant Org Mode sur Emacs. J'utilise org-refile pour déplacer des notes vers d'autres fichiers comme organizer.…  ( 7 min )

Being a text editor (among other things), Emacs has quite a few tricks up its sleeve for making writing not just easier but also fun and seemingly magical. I call this section in my config “Wordcraft.” Emacs Dictionary When we need a dictionary, Emacs got us covered and then some. After version 28, Emacs connects to a dictionary as a two-step process by default: It tries to connect to a local host. If it fails, it next connects to an online dictionary at www.dict.org, This workflow remains in place as long as dictionary-server is nil, which is the default. It’s a bit confusing (to me anyway), since “nil” might indicate that no dictionary is set up, but here it means we simply didn’t introduce any configuration to it. The online version at dict.org contains the Webster dictionary from 19131…  ( 8 min )

This post is my participation in this month’s Emacs Carnival, on the theme of The Search for Knowledge. About my current workflow My way of handling notes and knowledge has evolved a lot over time. I’ve written about my note-taking journey in this blog post. As of today, my knowledge management sauce is composed of Emacs and Vakana.mg. I’ve been using Logseq less and less over the past few months. Indoor In my day-to-day computer usage, I have the Emacs client open all day long with a scratch buffer ready for anything. I dump everything into the scratch buffer, remove or add paragraphs as needed and use vundo for time traveling. I use no structure except some dashes as separation between topics. Whether it’s to capture fleeting insights or mold prompts for LLMs, the scratch buffer acts as …  ( 3 min )

A couple of days ago I wrote that smarter form targeting was coming to CIDER, and I ended that post by asking whether I’d got the resolution rules right and whether anything still surprised people. I got an answer. CIDER 2.1 will ship with the classic behaviour intact. This is not a sad story, though. The detour turned up a bug that was quietly mangling people’s comments, and CIDER came out of it better than it went in. What I was actually after The targeting change wasn’t really about cursor positions. What I wanted was for every CIDER command that operates on a form to behave the same way, without adding yet another command to get there. CIDER has an enormous surface of evaluation commands, and every “at point” variant I could have added would have made that worse. If the existing comman…  ( 5 min )

Natalie grins, Donny spins, and so much more...

If you grew up watching television in Rochester, New York, during the 1990s and early 2000s, there was a  ( 8 min )

A few years ago, and by a few I mean probably well over 25.  There was a night The Infamous  ( 5 min )

Donald Trump has apparently decided that the next front in his ongoing battle with Canada is a Great Lake.  ( 18 min )

The NFL is finally almost back. After months of free-agent signings, trades, draft speculation, training-camp battles and endless preseason  ( 25 min )

Raw link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8V4ZyEL_i-s The built-in completion-preview-mode lets us expand what we type in a minimalist, distraction-free way. It can also be combined with the default Completions buffer to show all the available options. The Completions buffer has several nice features, starting with Emacs 31, which make this an excellent combination that does not require any third party packages (though packages can still augment the overall experience). I also mention the Emacs 31 ‘newcomers-presets’ theme, which configures some of these options as well: it is a great way to start your Emacs configuration. Sample configuration (use-package completion-preview :ensure nil :demand t :bind ( :map completion-preview-active-mode-map ("M-i" . completion-preview-inser…  ( 1 min )

As an Emacs configuration grows, startup time can gradually increase. Measuring that increase accurately makes it easier to identify regressions. The majority of Emacs users use emacs-init-time. However, this built-in function does not measure all the work performed during startup. Emacs startup proceeds through several stages: it loads the early init and regular init files, processes command-line options, sets after-init-time, runs emacs-startup-hook, performs additional initial-frame setup such as applying frame parameters from the configuration, and then runs window-setup-hook after the initial frame parameters have been configured. This makes window-setup-hook a useful place to record a broader startup-time measurement. For a more accurate startup-time measurement, add the following Em…  ( 8 min )

I am not going to share my Emacs configuration, but the way I keep it organized. I do not think I am discovering anything new, but it might be useful for someone who is starting to organize their configuration and does not know where to begin. I do not use any framework (neither Doom nor Spacemacs) nor the literate approach of Org mode. Everything is vanilla Emacs and each file is an area of responsibility, while init.el acts as the index. Why vanilla and not a framework? Frameworks decide for you. They lend you a huge configuration that you do not understand and that is hard to tweak. For me, the literate approach of Org is one more layer where something can break. I prefer the simplicity of the file I edit being the file that runs. The less magic, the fewer things that break. So, inside …  ( 4 min )

A $10 million pickle, to be exact. Oh, and it involves multiple important people in Florida politics.  ( 79 min )

The president signed an executive order to rename the Great Lake, and now we’re going to have to buy our maps from Canada.  ( 60 min )

Bang! Reds Week is over. Thank you for joining us. I hope you had at least half as much fun reading this week's collection blogs as we did writing them. You can catch up on anything you missed here. Normal business resumes on Monday. Onward.  ( 17 min )

Over the past decade, the Cincinnati Reds have done roughly as little as a baseball team can do in a very distinctive way. It has been effective only at producing memorable outlier seasons in otherwise unremarkable careers. The generic, create-a-player image of a Contemporary Reds Guy has become much easier to summon than a memory of a Reds team that played winning baseball. This almost certainly works better for people like me—people who will calm themselves, on a crowded train platform or in a stormy emotional moment, by rotating the concept of a guy who hits .217 with 34 homers in their mind—than it does for Reds fans. Recent Reds seasons each contain a high potency of Guys. Scott Schebler hit 30 homers for the Cincinnati Reds in 2017; he was done in the Majors by 2021, when he struck o…  ( 29 min )

Two things are true about me: I hate rich people and I love architecture. These days, that presents a terrible contradiction because only the extremely rich are able to finance the perpetuation of architectural production, whether in the form of new and interesting houses or in the financing of skyscrapers and grand, expensive public-facing private projects like museums or concert halls. Meanwhile, places like schools or libraries are cash poor, public resources like parks or housing are privatized, and much of what remains of the political infrastructure that ushered in the 20th century’s great social programs is as decrepit as some of the buildings, bridges, and roads they’ve left behind.  For about two or three years now, it’s become increasingly difficult to know what to say about arch…  ( 33 min )

Everyone knows now that the deep sea has a monopoly on strange fish. There is the uncanny inflation of the gulper eel, the peeled-grape eyes of the barreleye, and the eternal frown of the sea toad. These spooky fish's great and insurmountable distance from us might offer some reassurance that we are not likely to encounter them in the wild, at least not while either of us is alive. But the world's weirdest-looking fish, at least in my estimation, does not live in the deep sea. The red-lipped batfish trudges in the sludge near the Galápagos Islands, no deeper than 250 feet, which means it is a fish that people are able to encounter in the wild, perhaps even on a special vacation. I sometimes imagine what it would be like to see a red-lipped batfish in the wild without prior knowledge of the species. I have known about the red-lipped batfish for at least a decade now, and each time I see a photo of the fish I still feel the need to blink, to remember that the fish is, indeed, real, to ask myself for the millionth time, What the hell is going on with that fish? Let me show you what I mean. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6gp-ACJK6g  ( 32 min )

Redheads feel your pain. And then some. I got this tidbit, the wackiest medical trivia of my life, a couple years ago from a doctor at Johns Hopkins. I was there real shortly after another doc told me in scary tones that a weird bump could be something awful and had to be dealt with post-haste. Spoiler alert: Turned out fine. Sometimes a bump is just a bump. But before removing it, the specialist asked a question unlike any I’d ever gotten from a doctor. See, I must’ve flinched more than the Hopkins doc thought I should when she commenced to burn my flesh, because she stopped the procedure to ask, “Did you used to be a redhead?”  ( 22 min )

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 here. Your team: San Francisco 49ers. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXtMFDcAprg  ( 51 min )

Welcome to the Defector College Football Watch Guide, where Israel Daramola and Ray Ratto will tell you which of the weekend’s college football games are worth giving a crap about. Israel: College football is back! Sort of! Week 0 exists in a strange reality all its own. It is not preseason, as its games are real and important, and yet, the vast majority of teams will not be playing during it. Week 0 is therefore an imaginary weekend of real football, but if any sport values the power of imagination it is this one. Imaginary championships. Imaginary rivalries. Imaginary rules, ethics, and college classes. Even imaginary conferences, like the PAC-12. It's a sport filled with creative silliness. Speaking of imaginary things, the 2026 season hasn't even officially started and it's already filled with drama. Louisiana has ruled that guys who recently left school and got cut from NFL rosters can re-enlist in college. The big conferences are already colluding to nip this potentially imaginary new rule in the bud, so it's no surprise that Lane Kiffin has sprinted in to take advantage before it disappears. It wouldn't be this sport if things weren't an absolute mess.  ( 33 min )

My Grandma Powell was a knitter. She’s still alive, but she’s too old now to knit. Before there were YouTube tutorials, or YouTube, or the internet, she taught herself how to do it. She spent years knitting sweaters, scarves, mittens, and toques (Canadian for "beanie") for herself, her husband, and her four children. By the time my cousins and I came along starting in the ’70s, she was extremely fast. My younger cousin and I got matching sweaters. We also got sweaters with matching leg warmers when that was in vogue. A little later, we got sweaters with matching miniature duplicates to dress our Cabbage Patch Kids in.  No needle held by human hands can produce stitches as fine as you get in a machine-knit sweater, of course. But even when a loose-knit sweater is sold in a store, you can ju…  ( 30 min )

Is there life on Mars? That's the wrong question. Every time scientists from NASA, the European Space Agency, or any other terrestrial organization bring news back from Mars of fresh discoveries in the hunt to find evidence of life on the fourth planet, I find myself mildly annoyed that the general populace's focus is trained exclusively on the quest to find the tiniest microresidue of exobiota. That's a narrow angle, one that crops out everything in the background that makes the quest possible or worthwhile. Mars is fascinating because of its broader planet-scale dynamics. It is both earthlike (the two planets rotate at roughly the same speed, their inner layers and elemental compositions are roughly equivalent, and they both have moons), and alien (Mars is relatively small and light, has no atmosphere, and orbits the sun very slowly) in some important ways. Also, the larger-order mysteries about the state of life on Mars are mostly settled. Whatever lived there has been dead and gone for billions of years, unless one generously expands the parameters of "lived." The better question is something like: Why would there have been life on Mars? Is this question even more enticing? We have to be honest: no, of course not. Nothing down that road is as cool as life. But there is still cool stuff. I am talking of course about Mars's glacial spiders.  ( 24 min )

When I learned that Defector would be running Reds Week for its random annual late-summer theme week, I had one thought: Man, I really wish I had another week of time off to spend. Every year, Tom Ley announces the theme of theme week, and people start kicking around story ideas, and I think to myself, OK, next year, no matter what, I have to remember to leave myself one full week of time off, so that I can skip theme week. And then I blow it. Blowing it is part of the tradition. Anyway, here I am. Let's make some romesco. By the grace of God, romesco fits not only thematically but seasonally. It is a paste made of roasted tomatoes, nuts, and bread. Here where I am—and by that I mean literally inside of my property line, and possibly nowhere else—now is the very climax of Tomato Time. You …  ( 42 min )

A few different times when I was in my teens, my dad, my younger brother and I would go on a sports-themed road trip. This particular one 12 years ago took us from our home in suburban Detroit to baseball games in Cincinnati, Louisville, and finally St. Louis. I have good memories of this trip: watching on TV as Germany obliterated Brazil in the World Cup; seeing Matt Adams (I could tell it was Matt Adams) hit what I thought was a triple in Busch Stadium from way, way up in the Gateway Arch (turns out he was actually out at third); exchanging subtle low-fives with my brother as the Cardinals failed to win the game we went to the next day. Even the sheer nothingness that defined the drive through Southern Indiana and Illinois comforts me in retrospect. Most surreal of all these moments, though, was the sky on the night we saw the Reds play in Cincy. July 7, 2014, I went to the Reds game and the sky caught fire. As the Sun sank in right field, it lit up the low clouds with a riot of reds and oranges and the purple of an old bruise. Without looking it up, I couldn't have told you how the game went—my second-most prominent memory from my lone trip the Reds' ballpark was the fact that they had "Teenage FBI" by Guided By Voices on the pregame playlist, which rocked. But I'd never observed anything in person like that combination of mammatus clouds and blazing sunset before or since. You can see in the photos that the heavens looked like a scene out of an alien-invasion movie, and I recall the crowd being awestruck but also a little anxious, like maybe they should be feeling more urgency instead of continuing to watch a baseball game under a blood-red sky. I also never forgot that the website Deadspin, a future employer of mine, linked the pictures, which made me feel like I'd attended a special occasion. (In case you were wondering about the whole "Red sky at night, sailor's delight" proverb, there was recorded precipitation in Cincinnati each of the following two days after this game.)  ( 21 min )

There's a mission about halfway through Red Dead Revolver that I have not forgotten, even in the 22 years since I first played Rockstar's original Western. It's called "The Traitor." In a flashback, the player takes over the villainous General Javier Diego of the Mexican Army, as he attempts to take control of a bridge at the border between Mexico and the United States. Your goal in the mission is simple: Stay alive long enough to wipe out the U.S. Army soldiers and cannon artillery. There's nothing simple about the mission, though. The game just obliterates you with garbage: Your two NPC partners can't hold up against a stiff breeze, the American soldiers are everywhere, and the fucking cannons will not stop barraging you. The cannon shots don't kill you, but they do send you flying and make you watch in agony as the General takes approximately nine hours to stand back up. All the while, the soldiers are whittling your health down and oh another cannon is shooting at you. It's frustrating, it's unfair, it grinds the game's pace to a halt as you struggle for hours on end to complete "The Traitor" or just give up. I passed the mission on my own game back in 2004 relatively easily, but my best friend was so frustrated by it that he had me come over to beat it for him. I somehow lost all my skill on the walk to his place, and we couldn't beat it a second time; he never finished the game. "The Traitor" is everything that is brutal about video games, just a mess where you as the player fight the game as much as the gameplay. It also rocks. "The Traitor" feels truly epic as explosions go off around you while you dodge bullets, and the challenge becomes addicting; landing a perfect flare gun shot on a cannon while diving behind cover is a thrill not unlike those found in Bloodborne or Elden Ring. "The Traitor" is, without a doubt, one of the definitive video game experiences of my life. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PLYWlY2KeZE  ( 26 min )

Four movies about The Beatles are currently in production. There will be one movie for each Beatle, and director Sam Mendes has said that the four movies will be the "first binge-able theatrical experience." No one has explained exactly what this means yet. Will all four be released to theaters at the exact same time in April 2028? On consecutive days? Weeks? It's unclear. But we do have some sense of what these movies will look like. Last week, a picture from the set went viral. In it, Harris Dickinson as John Lennon, Paul Mescal as Paul McCartney, Joseph Quinn as George Harrison, and Barry Keoghan as Ringo Starr playfully flip off the camera. The attention, though, was not on the costumes, or the flipping off, or even the actors themselves. Everyone was focused on how wiggy the wigs looked. This is presumably an expensive production, so why does the hair look like that?  ( 26 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 )

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 )

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 )

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 )

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 )

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 )

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 )

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 )

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

President Donald Trump decided it's a great time for a trade war with Canada.  ( 8 min )

INSIDE: Roy Cohn ... Mark Carney ... Dolly Parton

guess who it is

If there’s one thing MAGA males believe deep in their bones, it’s that “real” men eat a lot of beef. Multiple members of Donald Trump’s Cabinet, including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., are obsessed with men’s testosterone levels and are highly attuned to right-wing social media chatter that conflates eating red meat with being “high-T,” despite the fact that science doesn’t support this theory. Kennedy in particular has been invested in defending the honor of red meat, repeatedly arguing, against standard medical recommendations, that diets high in animal fat are good for you. But long before the popularity of this pseudoscientific nonsense, a rare steak or hamburger was treated as the icon of manhood, especially in conservati…  ( 7 min )

Today we’re listening to Carl Craig, an American electronic musician and DJ from Detroit.

The 1990s are often remembered for flannel shirts, grunge guitars, and alternative rock bands that embraced darker, more introspective sounds.  ( 9 min )

Among the thousands of concerts Phish has performed, only a handful have achieved truly mythical status. One of the  ( 7 min )

This is your TPM evening briefing.

This is a touch meta. But indulge me because I think it could have real world effects. When real world...  ( 6 min )