The “heartbreaking endings to 2026 Chicago Sky games” montage that CBS showed in the final minute of the Sky’s Saturday matinee against the Las Vegas Aces hinted at how this game might unfold. One of the endings was from a game against the New York Liberty in late June, the same game 25-year-old undrafted rookie Sydney Taylor debuted in Chicago’s starting lineup. On the possession after Taylor hit a go-ahead three with 15 seconds left, the Sky let Sabrina Ionescu waltz to the rim for a layup to give New York the lead back, and Taylor’s next shot at the buzzer fell short. Her teammates had to peel her off the floor, where she sat in tears. Team minority owner Dwyane Wade, sitting courtside, came over and leaned down to pat her shoulder. Taylor called it a “tough feeling” after that game. “But if you’re willing to take those shots, you’ve got to be willing to live with the result.”   Fifteen games later, Taylor is the number-one option still taking those shots, and Saturday’s was a happier result to live with. A’ja Wilson’s much-too-easy go-ahead layup with three seconds left seemed destined for the Sky heartbreak montage. But on the next play, Taylor shook off Jackie Young (with the help of another screen from Elizabeth Williams) and hit the game-winning three. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BMiElP7QzD4 Chelsea Gray’s half-court heave, also unnervingly close to a place in the Sky heartbreak montage, would not have counted anyway.  ( 20 min )

The Boston Red Sox enjoyed a 15-game win streak that vaulted them back into the playoff picture last month, and they've stayed upright in the days since. Holding a four-game edge over the third and final wild card slot, Boston's preserved their flame with a series of games in which they've simply, pardon the cliché, found a way to get the victory. Whether they're smashing the ball over the fence or knocking it just a few feet beyond home plate, the Red Sox are proving very tough to handle. The active win streak at the moment is four games, and the first of the quartet was an extra-inning triumph at the Athletics' temporary ballpark, where Andruw Monasterio launched a two-run shot into orbit in the top of the 10th to deliver a 4-2 final. In Thursday's game, the Sox were down 4-3 in the eighth, but the demolition duo of Wilyer Abreu and Willson Contreras hit back-to-back solo dingers to take the lead, each of them feasting upon some juicy off-speed stuff as they sent Luis Medina's offerings to deep center field. Usually, when a team is winning as often as the Sox are, the clubhouse is happy and everybody's getting along. But Jarren Duran's remained a bit touchy. The man who was an All-Star outfielder two seasons ago and still put up 3.9 fWAR in a comparatively disappointing 2025 has been struggling through a brutal campaign where he's been unable to keep his average above .200. On Thursday, Duran shouted at Willson Contreras when Contreras didn't tag and score from third on a shallow fly ball Duran hit to left. Contreras downplayed the incident in the postgame, but Duran announced his feelings loud and clear.  ( 19 min )

If Shohei Ohtani doesn't return to the pitcher's mound for the Los Angeles Dodgers this season, they've got themselves a hell of a replacement. Late Saturday night, the back-to-back defending world champions made the biggest trade deadline move possible, acquiring back-to-back AL Cy Young winner Tarik Skubal from the Detroit Tigers in exchange for three prospects. This trade helps a strong team grow even stronger, and their 10-game lead in the NL West already makes the Dodgers the presumptive winners of that division yet again. If their starting rotation was looking a little thin with the injuries to Ohtani, Blake Snell, and Tyler Glasnow, it doesn't anymore. The thrill of imagining Skubal and Yoshinobu Yamamoto starting the first two games of a playoff series is exactly the feeling that contending teams should want to spark in their fans when they bring on a new guy at the deadline. While MLB continues its campaign to get people mad at the Dodgers for spending money and winning, a half-season of Skubal's services was clearly within the budget of the league's other franchises, too—even the ones that keep payrolls low. The Dodgers will spend $9.5 million on his contract before he enters free agency, and they haven't parted with any irreplaceable players. From this deal, the Tigers will add a pretty obscure single-A hurler; a 27-year-old pitcher in AAA named River Ryan that some folks seem to like; and, the best of the bunch according to MLB Pipeline, 21-year-old AA outfielder Zyhir Hope.  ( 17 min )

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

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

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 )

Since I confessed my enjoyment of em dash in my writing last week, I started using them more freely. On a Mac, it’s Option Shift Hyphen, as Sasha would tell you. In Linux, it’s a bit more involved: Ctrl Shift U to bring up a search for Unicode number reference, and then the number for em dash: 2014. This is all good and well, but what about Emacs, where I write most of my text? Emacs comes with abbrev-mode, a powerful text-expanding option that automatically converts something like “om” to “org-mode”, or even “fox” to “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” if I wanted to. But the em dash is a bit more tricky. I could, if I wanted, create an abbreviation like “em” to simply expand to “—”. But this doesn’t make much sense. When converting org-mode to markdown (as I do when I post some…  ( 3 min )

FoxTrot by Bill Amend | August 2, 2026  ( 12 min )

When the Beastie Boys released Paul’s Boutique in 1989, audiences expecting another straightforward rap-rock party album were in for a  ( 7 min )

Natural disasters usually involve earthquakes, hurricanes, floods, or fires. Industrial accidents often bring to mind explosions or chemical spills. Few  ( 9 min )

Neneh Cherry – “Buffalo Stance”: The Fearless 1989 Hit That Redefined Pop and Hip-Hop When “Buffalo Stance” exploded onto  ( 9 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

Emacs Smiley Functions Here's what my Emacs Tip of the Day dug up: smiley-buffer

I’ve been using Emacs in a terminal for some time now (an experience worth a blog post another day). One thing that bothered me a little was that the “splash screen” (what Emacs displays at the start) does not show the familiar Emacs logo. I decided to fix this.  ( 1 min )

Halloween has become synonymous with Phish in a way no other holiday belongs to a rock band. Long before giant  ( 15 min )

Raw link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQbXKvBT8HY In about 40 minutes from now I will do a live stream with Christian Arzu from the @linkarzu channel on YouTube. The video will be recorded. The topic of our meeting revolves around how Christian uses NeoVim and Kitty to handle sessions and write fleeting thoughts. Then we will try to do something along those lines using built-in Emacs functionality. Christian did a video a couple of days ago about this topic and here is my extensive commentary on it, with points that are useful in general: https://protesilaos.com/codelog/2026-07-31-re-linkarzu-what-i-need-from-emacs/.  ( 1 min )

The old man knows how to hold a grudge, as evidenced by his request to revive a failed lawsuit from years ago.  ( 78 min )

Market forces seem to be conspiring to make us denser by the day, to give us no options but the most idiotic.  ( 72 min )

Remember when Republicans used to care about their fellow human beings?  ( 69 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 )

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 )

There is a particularly unpleasant image of Brian Daboll that I return to in my mind from time to time. You can see it in the 2024 Why Your Team Sucks entry for the New York Giants; the image in that story is a photo of my TV, from an episode in the team's turn as the subject of that season of the HBO series Hard Knocks. Subtitles show that Daboll is saying "That guy's a stud on tape," a likely enough thing for Brian Daboll to say, but what is more notable about the image is that Daboll's lavishly bald head is the color of a ripe raspberry. I took the photo because the shade was so upsetting that I didn't know what else to do. Discretely contact the sunburn police? Mail some ointments to the team offices? Alert Sid Rosenberg? Even for the decently large cohort of football coaches with more…  ( 29 min )

In the spring of 2004, researchers monitoring a population of wild bearded capuchins in a Brazilian woodland saw an infant clinging to Chiquinha, one of the adult female monkeys. The baby was not a capuchin but a marmoset—a much smaller monkey species. The researchers dubbed the infant Fortunata. Chiquinha became Fortunata's primary caretaker until the following summer, when she fell pregnant and another capuchin female, Dendê, began mothering the marmoset. Fortunata behaved like any other capuchin in the group and was raised with the same level of care as a capuchin infant. Fortunata traveled and foraged with the monkeys, responded to their alarm calls, and even helped the group mob a snake. When the young capuchins played with the much smaller marmoset, they adjusted their strength to ensure they wouldn't hurt the smaller monkey. Fortunata eventually vanished the following spring, when the marmoset was almost an adult. The researchers who observed Fortunata described the marmoset's childhood as a kind of adoption in a 2006 paper in the American Journal of Primatology. The marmoset, after all, was taken in as an infant and raised by two different mothers. Although monkey adoption is common in captivity, it most often occurs between monkeys of the same species, and occasionally within the same genus. Fortunata the marmoset was clearly a very different kind of monkey, unable to leap from tree to tree or crack nuts like the others. And yet not one, but two capuchins cared for Fortunata as if it were their own child. For a long time, humans have considered ourselves unique in our penchant for forming close social relationships with animals of other species. (I say social relationships to exclude other longterm relationship models, such as the parasitic partnership that can exist between a whale and her tapeworm.) But a new review paper published in the journal Primates suggests that human pet-keeping has deeper evolutionary roots among primates.  ( 29 min )

On Friday, CBS Sports announced that NFL analyst Tony Romo is on leave "until further notice," following his arrest in Milwaukee last week for operating while intoxicated. https://twitter.com/adamschefter/status/2083211920094466188?s=46 Romo was given three citations from the Milwaukee County Sheriff's Office after a traffic stop on July 23, when police spotted him driving on the highway, passing cars in a lane he shouldn't have been in. In the bodycam footage of the arrest, a glassy-eyed Romo can be seen failing field sobriety tests, despite him treating them like he was at the combine or something. He refused a breathalyzer, though an open container of alcohol was found inside his car, according to police. Romo has a court appearance scheduled for Sept. 21.  ( 15 min )

Some time ago, if you asked me for an example of the most romantic, childhood dream–ass achievement for a baseball player, I probably would have pointed to Bryson Stott's home run against the Miami Marlins in the 2023 NL Wild Card series: a first-pitch grand slam with the crowd singing his walk-up song. But if we're being objective, there are a few flaws with the moment. The Philly crowd was singing, but it wasn't a game-winning grand slam, even if it was the dagger. The Phillies were already up three runs. This moment was surely romantic, but maybe the question should be reframed: What would be the most mathematically comprehensive achievement for a baseball player? The ultimate grand slam is one answer. It's not just a walk-off grand slam, but a perfectly precise one, with the trailing t…  ( 19 min )

We’ve all been there. We’ve all done something so incredibly stupid that we wish the Earth were flat so we could walk off the face of it. We’ve all thought to ourselves, I hope nobody saw that, only to turn around and see that yes everybody saw that and oh god now the police are involved and I have to go to the hospital and I sure do hope the Major League Baseball team I work for doesn't spend any time looking into how I got this season-ending injury. It's all so relatable. On Tuesday, the Giants reported that center fielder Harrison Bader, already out for two months with plantar fasciitis, had aggravated the injury in a “scooter accident” over the weekend. While the team did not elaborate on the alleged mishap, SFist reported that witnesses saw Bader rear-end a fire engine with his scooter, which resulted in the truck's wheel running over his already injured foot. In a statement to SFist, the SFPD confirmed "a vehicle collision involving a scooter," and that "the individual was transported to a local hospital for non-life threatening injuries." Witnesses described seeing Bader drinking at bars across San Francisco the night of the big whoopsie, suggesting that perhaps this was not a sober scootering snafu. One of those bars was Balboa Cafe, where witnesses spotted him leaving right before the collision. The San Francisco Standard confirmed that the collision took place outside a fire station a few doors down from the cafe. They also reported that manager Tony Vitello is not a fan of scooters, which may be why Bader has not been cooperating with the Giants' investigation. Perhaps the Giants should have known what they signed up for when they acquired Bader. If his 19-game college suspension in 2014 indicates anything, it's that this man loves a scooter, a drink, and the wind whipping through his hair.  ( 20 min )

Some people are fans of the Washington Commanders. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the Washington Commanders. This 2026 Defector NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far here. Your team: Washington Comma—OH GOD NO NOT AGAIN https://twitter.com/ChadwikoTWW/status/1985195970687373778  ( 43 min )

Fans of the Portland Trail Blazers should prepare themselves for a very unpleasant time. Tom Dundon, the team's new owner, is digging in. Arena renovations would improve the value of his property, and so he wants arena renovations. He is simply and resolutely refusing to commit any of his own money to the project. If Portland refuses to pay for stadium renovations, and the stadium thus goes un-renovated, Dundon will have an ironclad pretext for packing the team into a U-Haul and moving it to Las Vegas, or Nashville, or—the monkey's paw finally directing a shriveled middle finger at the world—Seattle. That's how investor ownership works, and why it is fucked: The franchise has been in Portland for almost 60 years; Dundon bought it four months ago, and it is entirely and irrevocably his. Dundon dispatched a delegation of bottom-feeding deputies to Portland City Hall on Thursday, for the purpose of keeping the pressure on civic leaders. Those vile underlings, pressing a more aggressive line of attack, used the occasion to assert that Portland is too woke and broke, at present, to function as the host city of an NBA basketball team, per reporting from Oregon Public Broadcasting. Dundon is demanding that Portland pay $120 million up front for renovations, and to earmark another $275 million for continuing maintenance. The city, in return, wants a 20-year lease, the Blazers to pay a $3 million annual fee in exchange for the property taxes the team avoids by playing in a publicly owned arena, and for Dundon to commit to using unionized labor. For the sin of presenting these terms to the Blazers, the city is forced to sit there and listen to Dundon's proxies spit Fox News hysteria at a public meeting.  ( 20 min )

I started reading Valley of the Dolls for the first time the other night. It opens in 1945, with Anne Wells landing in New York and securing a job as a secretary at Henry Bellamy’s theatrical agency. She’s been tasked with finding an apartment for Henry’s handsome business partner; something on the East Side with a living room, bedroom, bath, and kitchen, furnished, for around $150 per month. He tells her not to come back to work until she’s found something. “Henry,” his handsome business partner warns, “We may never see this girl again.”  That’s as far as I made it before closing the book and bathing my face in the blue light of my laptop, my left eye twitching as I refreshed Craigslist for the hundredth time that day. I, too, have been tasked with finding an apartment in the city—not by my boss but by my current landlord, who, after mismanaging a bed bug scare for the past six months, is raising our rent by nearly $1,000. For the three years I have lived in this building, she has done little more than collect rent and turn a page a day in the picture book about dogs she has displayed in the mail room.  So. Looking for something in Central Brooklyn with a living room, bath, and kitchen, unfurnished, with fewer than 1,000 open housing code violations. Should an apartment meet these rigorous qualifications, there’s no choice but to move on it immediately. The city’s rental vacancy rate is 1.41 percent. If you don’t drop what you’re doing and beg, you will get left behind. My recent iMessage history looks something like: “Can I apply now? Can I see it RIGHT NOW? Can you draw up a lease? Can I give you everything? Can I give you all that’s in my bank account as a security deposit? Sir? Mr. Agent sir? I am a quiet and respectful tenant who spends most evenings cleaning my floors with a wood-and-bristle scrub while cartoonishly large bubbles float above me to the ceiling Cinderella style!!!!” Concrete jungle where dreams are maaaaaaaade of.  ( 31 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 )

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

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 )

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

I 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 )

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 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…  ( 14 min )

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

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

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 )

TL;DR Why I think software development is starting to feel a little more like conducting an orchestra. There’s a shift happening in software development that I don’t think we’re talking about clearly enough. For the last couple of years we’ve framed AI as a productivity tool. How much faster can it write code? How many more features can we ship? How much cheaper can we build software? I think that’s the wrong question, but I understand why. The first thing AI became good at was writing code, so naturally that’s where we focused. As AI got better at coding, I expected the bottlenecks to move through the software delivery lifecycle: from coding to design and specification, architecture, then verification. And they have. We spent a lot of time at the most recent FOSE event discussing how we…  ( 4 min )

Todd Blanche, President Donald Trump’s nominee to be attorney general, promises Americans that he has no intention of going forward with a $1.8 billion slush fund designed to funnel money out of the Treasury and into the pockets of right-wing attorneys. The outcry that followed the Justice Department’s May 19 announcement of the fund, which would pay the legal bills of political allies charged with crimes ranging from fraud to storming the Capitol on Jan. 6, was deafening. In addition to blowback from many congressional Republicans, a federal judge halted the administration’s disbursement of the money, which was created as part of Trump’s agreement with the federal government stemming from his lawsuit  for the leak of his tax returns. Blanche, in his role as acting attorney general, claime…  ( 7 min )

My desk (2007) Have you ever felt like you've simply run out of things to say? ✍️ Reply by email

It’s Friday so we’re listening to something more upbeat.

Among Phish fans, certain performances have achieved legendary status. The “Tweezer” from December 2, 1995. The “Runaway Jim” from  ( 6 min )

Christian Arzu from the @linkarzu channel on YouTube has just published a ~16-minute video with the title What I Need From Emacs: A Video for Prot. I am happy he has done this and am eager to discuss those concepts in further depth. In this article I will comment on the specific points Christian raises as well as on the overarching theme of his experiment with Emacs. Emacs has “sessions” out-of-the-box Christian has experienced friction with using Emacs. Much of it revolves around the notion of “sessions” that Kitty provides. At least for the way Christian uses sessions, Emacs has the equivalent concept of “projects”. Each project is a version controlled directory (Git in this case, though Emacs supports many others as well). To tell Emacs where your Git repositories are, so that it can re…  ( 6 min )

TMR provides facilities for setting timers using a convenient notation. Lots of commands are available to operate on timers, while there also exists a tabulated view to display all timers in a nice grid. Package name (GNU ELPA): tmr Official manual: https://protesilaos.com/emacs/tmr Change log: https://protesilaos.com/emacs/tmr-changelog Git repositories: GitHub: https://github.com/protesilaos/tmr GitLab: https://gitlab.com/protesilaos/tmr Video demonstration: https://protesilaos.com/codelog/2026-01-19-emacs-timers-tmr-demo/ Backronym: TMR May Ring; Timer Must Run. Below are the release notes. Version 1.4.0 on 2026-07-31 TMR is an efficient package that has been stable for years. This new version introduces some nice new features as well as several smaller internal refinements. Create…  ( 3 min )

My last post was a tour of Emacs 31, which has since moved into pretest. Sean Whitton announced 31.0.91, the second pretest, on July 23rd, and that's what I'm writing this on. One of the sections in that post was a short list of new completion knobs, three lines of config I mentioned and moved on from. Those three lines turned into a month-long experiment, so they get their own post. I know how that title reads, so let me put it in context before you close the tab. It comes from someone who ran company, moved to Corfu, and then left Corfu behind for icomplete, which has been my weapon of choice for years now, for both the minibuffer and in-buffer completion. And I didn't just use icomplete. I sent patches to it. bug#75784, which brought vertical in-buffer behavior and prefix indicators to …  ( 22 min )

~649 words. ~3 minutes. tags: guix emacs programming Emacs Carnival July 2026. GNU Guix is: It's an advanced package manager and a distribution of the GNU Operating system. With kernel support for both GNU Linux-libre and, experimentally, for the GNU Hurd. Nix, except that it uses GNU Guile instead of Nixlang for package definitions, system definitions. Also replacing Systemd with GNU Shepherd (GNU's Init System and Service manager). guix shell. Which allows you to create software environments with the specified packages. manifest.scm file. (specifications->manifest '( "gcc-toolchain" "gdb" "mupdf" "make")) guix shell in a directory containing the file, it gets the appropriate dependencies for you. (info "(guix) Invoking guix shell"). $ you@yourcomputer ~/Projects/awesome-program$ guix shell guix shell: loading environment from '/home/you/Projects/awesome-program/manifest.scm'... $ you@yourcomputer ~/Projects/awesome-program$ emacs M-x guix-shell inside Emacs itself. This was contributed to the emacs-guix package by yours truly. (info "(emacs-guix) Guix Shell"). $ you@yourcomputer ~/Projects/awesome-program$ guix shell python $ you@yourcomputer ~/Projects/awesome-program$ guix shell python python-numpy (Yeah, I forgot about the commas). manifest.scm file that you can use in the future? In the CLI, you would do, $ you@yourcomputer ~/Projects/awesome-program$ guix shell python python-numpy --export-manifest > manifest.scm guix shell's power, for which it would probably need a transient menu (library powering magit and the other menus in emacs-guix). ben.el.  ( 2 min )

Bicycle For Your Mind, macosxguru has a post that describes three of the recent changes he’s made to his Emacs environment. Two of them—showing tabs and newlines explicitly, and fiddling with his mode line probably won’t interest most Irreal readers. The third is importing the two space shortcut into Emacs. Emacs, of course, doesn’t have that capability but macosxguru added it with a bit of Elisp which he binds to the Space key with the text-mode hook. It looks for two consecutive spaces and repaces them with a period and space. The tricky part is capitalizing the next letter. He does that by reading the next character explicitly and capitalizing it if it’s a letter. He also checks for some special keys (like an arrow key) and “unreads” them so that Emacs can treat them normally. All the code is in the post so see it for the details if you’re interested. I’m ambivalent about this change. On the one hand, I use it all the time on my iPhone and iPad but that’s because typing is such a pain on virtual keyboards. On a regular keyboard, I’m pretty sure that I could type the period, space, and next letter just as fast. The shift for the next letter might slow things down a bit but not by much. I haven’t decided yet whether I will adopt it but inertia will probably cause me not to.  ( 5 min )

Let’s hope the vice president’s is so unlikeable that it keeps him from climbing the ranks any higher.  ( 76 min )

These masked psychos aren’t “removing criminal aliens from our communities,” as the DHS claims. They’re destroying families and hurting innocent people.  ( 80 min )

There are the very special episodes that Drew and I do before heading off on vacation, and then there are the rarer ones we do while one of us is on vacation. This week's installment was one of those, as Drew joined from a beach house in an undisclosed—well, he mentions it within the first two minutes, but I won't disclose it here—New England location and I joined from my damn apartment, albeit not long after returning from my extremely disclosed annual summer trip to Maine. And yet this is only sort of a Vacation Episode, because while Drew was within hailing distance of a beach and I could still see my own time away receding in the rearview mirror, the news cycle was not on vacation. After some talk about regional accents good and bad, complete with regional accent work of our own, we were on to the stuff that's happening. Regarding the NFL, we're still in the part of Why Your Team Sucks when all the teams actually do suck. But it was a treat to talk about the LeBron-Sixers situation for the first time in a conversation that included cautious optimism, a reckless invocation of the infamous Sports Illustrated "Now This Is Going To Be Fun" cover, and a frank disagreement about whether the Eastern Conference is actually as thin as Drew believes it to be. Decently substantive, but at the end also decently vacation-scented, as we drifted into a critique of LeBron's proposed helicopter commute, the perversity of Amtrak commuting as a concept and the apparently perverse way in which I say "Acela," and the many ways to commute like an idiot and go insane as a result. Also, there's some stuff about my experience writing an unpublishable novel on Amtrak in my twenties, which was pretty good as those things go.  ( 20 min )

Some people are fans of the Cleveland Browns. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the Cleveland Browns. This 2026 Defector NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far here. Your team: Cleveland Browns. https://bsky.app/profile/insidenflnews.bsky.social/post/3mqpa4rnsfs2h  ( 43 min )

UEFA, Europe's soccer confederation, confirmed on Thursday that it was not making empty threats over FIFA president Gianni Infantino's plan to sell the World Cup off to private investors. In a statement titled "Statement on behalf of UEFA and its 55 national associations" posted on the confederation's website, UEFA laid down the gauntlet, using its immense power and money to, it hopes, block Infantino's latest greedy, stupid idea. The key part of the statement reads as follows: Europe’s position is clear. We will never lend this model our legitimacy. No one has the moral authority to sell what they merely hold in trust for the next generation. As a result of today’s discussion, no UEFA national teams will participate in any FIFA competition for so long as these proposals remain alive, unless this proposal has been abandoned in its entirety and binding assurances have been given that FIFA will never again open its governance or competitions to private ownership. Nobody should be in any doubt: UEFA and its national associations will oppose these plans with absolute determination.  ( 21 min )

Take capelin, a small silvery fish in the smelt family. Now add salt. Then throw those two ingredients in 110 vats, each of them about 10 feet tall, and let them sit in a defunct factory for over two decades. The resulting stench might haunt an entire community, as it has the people of St. Mary's, a coastal town of about 300 people in the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador. In 2019, one resident described the ritual of abandoning her home every summer, boarding up the windows and doors so the smell doesn't permeate her belongings. The people of St. Mary's have long fought for the fish sludge to be cleaned up; after an aborted attempt in 2016, that work finally began in earnest this week. There are 900,000 liters of fish sauce to remove—some of it just liquid, some of it with fish solids. The province of Newfoundland and Labrador budgeted $2 million for the job, which was taken up by a local engineering firm and is expected to be completed in October. As workers cut open the vats, viscous brown fish goo shot out onto the factory floor. It will be mixed with peat moss, hauled out in about 200 truckloads, and thrown in a landfill lined with polyethylene, after which it will be sealed up "like a Ziploc," according to the lead engineer on the project. St. Mary's Mayor Steve Ryan reportedly teared up while describing new hope. "To be known as the 'sauce plant mayor' … it's time for that to be over," he said. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xn8KEpRqD1Y  ( 38 min )

Major League Baseball's upcoming CBA negotiations have generally been framed around the question of the salary cap. Owners want it. Players don't. The rest of it—Juan Soto makes $50 million a year, a third of the league's teams keep forgetting to try, so on—is both true enough and primarily noise made for the sake of making noise. Every CBA negotiation is at least a little bit like this. The question of “which side are you on?” is complicated somewhat by the fact that this is a dispute between the obscenely rich and the extremely rich; we aren’t dealing with the miner’s son against JH Blair here. But the question of where else this money would go is not complicated. It’s not going to the miner’s son, of course. It’s going into the pockets of people like David Rubenstein, the co-founder and co-chairman of the Carlyle Group, a private equity firm with $475 billion in assets, responsible for buying up property and raising rents in New York City, participating in union busting and exploitative labor practices, and investing in the defense industry; he owns the Orioles. And also to Ray Davis, whose company, Energy Transfer, owns the Dakota Access Pipeline that was the subject of protests in 2016 due to its encroachment on Sioux land and disastrous environmental effects; Davis owns the Rangers. That money would go to Giants’ owner, Charles B. Johnson, a billionaire who regularly donates to the political campaigns of right-wing fanatics. You get the point—this money is controlled by 30 cosmetically different versions of JH Blair, all of whom are trying to convince the public that they are on the side of fairness, unlike the greedy players union, which is made up mostly of players who will virtually all never have contracts even close to what Juan Soto is getting, and none of whom to my knowledge own even one oil pipeline. This makes deciding which side you are on a bit easier to answer.  ( 43 min )

Welcome to Listening Habits, a column where I share the music and musical topics I’ve been fixated on recently. We are just over the halfway point of the year, and after a robust first quarter, the first half of 2026 has turned out to be a fascinating year of music, even when it isn't always successful. Some of our biggest artists have released their most curious music yet, sometimes in good ways even! A collection of burgeoning stars have made great strides toward realizing their potential. If there is one takeaway of this year so far, it's that there is no grand takeaway. No one can decide if music should be bubblier or uglier, hopeful or cynical. The algorithms shape what we hear, while at the same time artists are rebelling against the machine's influence. There is, however, so much yearning. Rap is in an interesting place, and so is every genre in what's left of the husk of the entire music industry. Fellas, I'm no longer scared to say it: music is good. The Best Rap Album Of The Year (So Far)  ( 24 min )

Everyone believes their generation is uniquely maligned; invariably, so do I. The formative years of my generation—I’m at the older end of the dreaded Gen Z—vanished within the global despair and uncertainty wrought by COVID-19. In lieu of the presence of other human beings, many of us retreated into our phone screens and never left. The pandemic irreparably altered our sense of the future. Many are concerned about the blankness in our eyes. We don't touch grass; instead, we bed rot. We have taken refuge in therapy speak, are increasingly skeptical of monogamy and our parents' relationships, and are incredibly, remarkably lonely. The New Yorker buzzily asked in 2025: “Are Young People Having Enough Sex?” From Vice, another headline: “Gen Z Isn't Having Sex. They're Doing This Instead.” The…  ( 27 min )

On Tuesday night, a small group of weirdos held an anti-trans rally outside of the Seattle Storm's home arena. The occasion for their gathering was a game against the Indiana Fever and bench player Sophie Cunningham, who had recently participated in an ESPN profile where she said she wants to "protect young girls in a locker room, or young girls in sport who shouldn't have to go against biological men." The rally seems like it was a dud, but the organizers got more of the attention they were after inside the arena. Sitting courtside during the game were two teen girls holding signs that read "Thank you Sophie for speaking up for girls," and "We love you Sophie." They were both wearing shirts from an apparel brand that donates money to anti-trans organizations. After the game, the two girls made a video with anti-trans agitator Brandi Kruse, in which they claimed they were told off in the arena by Storm minority owner Celeste Keaton. They said that Keaton told them they were "fucking insane." The Storm reacted to this accusation first by apologizing for Keaton's actions, and then the WNBA fined and banned her from the team's next five home games. The team's statement read:  ( 18 min )

Imagine how good it would feel to pluck the regulation-size basketball off the top of the Larry O'Brien trophy and get some shots up. Sure, you'd need to adjust your jump shot to account for its construction—sterling silver with a 24-karat gold vermeil—and you'd need a brave rebounder. I suppose you wouldn't be doing much "off the dribble." But when presented with such an exquisite basketball, one simply has to line up the seams and let it fly. That temptation was top of mind Monday as I examined the NBA championship trophy at the American Museum of Natural History, where it was unveiled as part of the ongoing exhibit "For the Win: Objects of Sports Excellence." The trophy was actually bound for the Manhattan museum no matter who won it in June. As museum president Sean Decatur said at its…  ( 24 min )

Coffee (2008) I don't know what's worse: the whining about macOS from Mac users or the constant bickering between Linux users. Well, I've retired the saltwater tank. I just couldn't keep ahead of it. Bad algae, unwanted critters, water changes, chemicals, testing, etc. It got to the point where the effort I was putting in wasn't worth the pleasure I was getting out of it. It was a good four-year run. ✍️ Reply by email

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

Giles Edwards-Alexander does an experiment to see if decomposing a large function helps reduce token costs, suggesting that is may now be possible to measure the economic benefit of refactoring more…  ( 11 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 )

Today we’re listening to BCMC, an American duo from Chicago, multi-instrumentalists Bill MacKay and Cooper Crain.

History is filled with artists who became legends through platinum albums, sold-out arenas, and chart-topping singles. Big Star’s story couldn’t  ( 9 min )

We should all be more angry at the incompetent scoundrels running this country.  ( 68 min )

The former CDC head even called out committee chairman Rand Paul for being “unhinged.” I’ll say.  ( 68 min )

A recent free speech fiasco at West Point is just the beginning.  ( 71 min )

I wanted it to be better. It dragged a few chuckles out of me. I gave it an extra star because I love Mary Steenburgen. ✍️ Reply by email

Remember that time I had 3 dogs? MojoPad is kind of amazing. I've been following along for a while now and boy howdy the updates are coming fast and furious. Perhaps too fast. I mean, he's shipping major updates every few days. The app is certainly being vibe coded. In fact, I'm starting to notice that nearly everything about the project is LLM-generated. The release notes, obviously. The website with its almost cartoonish illustrations is off-putting. More and more I'm thinking even the developer's replies in the forums are often AI-written. It makes me uncomfortable. I could probably overlook all this, but this morning I imported part of my old Obsidian vault (1,000+ pages) and MojoPad's performance slowed to a crawl. I'll keep an eye on things, but for now I think I'll pass. Datatype — variable font that turns text into charts is kind of wild. (via Christian Tietze) Why haven't I been using this blog's Notes for little posts like these? Maybe because they are currently sent to Mastodon automatically and sometimes I feel like keeping everything here. Mirador is fun. It's "An opinionated personal dashboard for your terminal — world clocks, calendar and agenda, weather, tasks, notes, markets and live system metrics in a tab you leave open all day" ✍️ Reply by email  ( 1 min )

Welcome back to Minor Dilemmas, where a member of Defector's Parents Council will answer your questions on surviving family life. Have a question? Email us at minordilemmas@defector.com. This week, Justin answers a question about discipline.  ( 24 min )

Well, that mystery has been solved. Kyle Shanahan was fishing around for his dropped phone while driving at 20 miles per hour when he crossed into the other lane and hit a car. There. Everyone satisfied? Great. Show yourselves out, and have a nice day. Well, no. Of course not. Shanahan, the coach and chief architect of the San Francisco 49ers, has been and still remains off work for an extended period of time because of the accident that neither he nor the officials and general population of Palo Alto, Calif., thought was noteworthy enough to mention for 11 days. He has a concussion, broken ribs, a broken nose, 40 stitches across his face and nearly lost an eye from the deployed air bag, which among other things means that he cannot perform his very public and vital duties protecting the nation from the absence of one-thirty-second of football. And, well, nobody's required to buy any of that story, even Shanahan's belated acknowledgement that he was the one at fault rather than the 21-year-old woman driving the other car. These are not times in which anyone is or necessarily should be trusted; lying is everywhere, and liars are both prevalent and prolific. The biggest reason nobody's required to buy any of it is because of the 11 days when neither Shanahan, the 49ers, the Palo Alto police, nor TMZ's sprawling army of camera sleuths felt it worthy of mention. In doing so, they violated the basic rule of information control—the less you provide, the less control you have, because gossip abhors a vacuum, and the public will fill in the details we need to have in order to understand it in whatever way best suits our personalities, preconceptions, and sick senses of humor.  ( 25 min )

The recently concluded World Cup was the shining example of FIFA president Gianni Infantino's particular brand of evil. It was nakedly greedy, nakedly corrupt, nakedly ugly, and also totally awesome. Infantino's bet was that he could openly screw everyone—fans, teams, referees, ear-havers, even the sport itself—and could still get away with it simply because soccer is too good. As expected, he was proven right. And unsurprisingly, he's already trying to push things even further. On Tuesday, The Times reported that Infantino's latest plan is to sell the World Cup to private equity investors, all under the guise of "growing the game," which not so coincidentally involves growing his own bank account. Specifically, Infantino's plan would include FIFA setting up a company, tentatively named FI…  ( 30 min )

Some people are fans of the New York Giants. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the New York Giants. This 2026 Defector NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far here. Your team: WHAT’S IN THE TENT?! I BET THERE’S FREE CANDY IN THERE! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z1fJjaYNclo  ( 44 min )

I think it would be really fascinating to know Kyle Kuzma. The man loves to stride confidently right up to the very threshold of insight... Let’s be real…the CBA makes sure owners, PE funds and outside investors can eat off NBA team equity, but the players driving the ratings and the merch are treated like short‑term contractors. [...] ...only to suddenly throw a complicated mixtape-style step-back move and fire up an airball.  ( 20 min )

When you turn your personal life into your business, the lines between boyfriend and coworker can start getting fuzzy pretty fast. How do you handle conflict with your coworker if you know their flossing habits? When things begin to fall apart with a boyfriend, what’s a microinfluencer girlboss with a pair of non-refundable plane tickets supposed to do?  Life decisions like these call for expert analysis, which is why we called back the Scam Goddess herself, Laci Mosley.  https://youtu.be/YgYTYa2Gsek  ( 16 min )

If you are anything like me, you probably have a neck—a neck you take for granted. Maybe you do not think often about having a neck, given said neck's relatively unobtrusive placement below your head and out of your line of sight. Maybe you are trying to look at your neck right now, pressing your chin against your neck, which remains obscured below your chin, which you also can't see. And yet your ability to even attempt to see your neck is made possible by your neck. Neck-less animals such as valiant Jimothy or every jellyfish have no such rotational privilege. Perhaps it is unsurprising, then, that science has long neglected the humble neck. "There have been a multitude of studies on the development and evolution of the head and pectoral girdle but little on the region in between," scientists wrote in a 2012 paper about the vertebrate neck in the Journal of Anatomy. Only in the last 30 years has scientific interest in the neck awakened, the researchers write. We here at Defector do not wish to neglect the neck any longer. So please gather round for a long-overdue neck report, because there is breaking neck news. "Think that fishes and amphibians don’t have necks? Think again"  ( 26 min )

Patrick has spent the last three weeks following the Tour de France with our friends from Escape Collective. This post was originally published on Escape Collective on July 27. Defector readers can now get a six-month free trial of Escape Collective, with ad-free and independent coverage that goes beyond the Tour de France. Claim the offer here. There was a point there, about three hours into a five-hour drive in 105 degree heat on the back of an enormous cauliflower, where it started getting old. And then, three things happened. In the space of 20 seconds, there was a sad-faced middle-aged man in a kind of regal medieval gown with fur sleeves and cuffs, standing a few meters away from a hauntingly still figure in a full fox suit complete with head; a few meters later, a five-year-old cosplayed as Tadej Pogacar, full UAE yellow kit and all. This was not an atypical series of sightings, I should stress. But its barrage did snap me out of my funk and back to the very strange reality in which I found myself. After years surveying the Tour de France promotional caravan as a sociological phenomenon, I was now in the thick of it, on the Tour de France’s hottest day, on the race’s funniest vehicle.  ( 54 min )

Listen to enough sports podcasts, and eventually you will hear someone spit the name of every podcaster's greatest enemy: The aggregators. Oh, how the fellas who talk about sports into a mic for a living love to complain about the aggregators. Don't aggregate this! yelps Zach Lowe, before sharing a mild opinion about the Toronto Raptors. Listen up, aggregators, I am not reporting this, groans Bill Simmons before guessing where LeBron James might sign. I need to be careful here, because of the aggregators, murmurs Brian Windhorst before doling out a trade rumor. These men are beset on all sides by the dreaded aggregators! But who are the aggregators, and what exactly are they doing to these podcasters? More often than not, "the aggregators" is a phrase used to describe various social media accounts that circulate quotes from podcast episodes for the sake of baiting engagement. A recent Tweet from Yahoo Sports acts as an exemplar of the form: a graphic with Bill Simmons's face above something he said on a recent podcast episode about how the 2026 Philadelphia 76ers might end up being just as bad as the 2012 Lakers. "This is bullshit," Simmons angrily tweeted in response. "We went thru all the scenarios for how the Philly signing could play out on Friday’s pod good and bad. I thought Yahoo was trying to be a real place? Don’t you guys pay respectable writers and podcasters to do content? But you also do fake clickbait crap?"  ( 22 min )

Now that LeBron James has found his newest version of joy with the Fanatics 76ers and the nation has finished chewing over all the ramifications thereof, be they ridiculous and absurd or merely improbable and stupid, the discourse cries out for a new main character in the hired-and-fired/signed-and-resigned marketplace. And there is only one name left that anyone finds appealingly rumormongerable: Stephen Curry. As in: "Why didn't the Warriors get LeBron to help Steph win that last ring?" Or: "Why didn't the Warriors get someone, really, anyone to help Steph win that last ring?" And: "Since they didn't get anyone to help Steph win that last ring, why does Mike Dunleavy Jr. still have his general manager's job?" And also: "Since they didn't get anyone to help Steph win that last ring, is owner Joe Lacob an idiot, and if so, for what specific reason?" And finally: "Since they didn't get anyone to help Steph win that last ring, shouldn't they trade him as an act of basic human decency?" This all puts Curry at the center of the story to an extent that raises an additional question, which is more or less, "Since they didn't get anyone to help Steph win that last ring, why isn't he demanding that signing/firing/trade?"  ( 26 min )

96 Aboard Newsletter: Summertime Software img{-ms-interpolation-mode:bicubic;} table, td{mso-table-lspace:0pt;mso-table-rspace:0pt;} .mceStandardButton, .mceStandardButton td, .mceStandardButton td a{mso-hide:all!important;} p, a, li, td, blockquote{mso-line-height-rule:exactly;} p, a, li, td, body, table, blockquote{-ms-text-size-adjust:100%;-webkit-text-size-adjust:100%;} .mcnPreviewText{display:none!important;} .bodyCell{margin:0 auto;padding:0;width:100%;} .ExternalClass, .ExternalClass p, .ExternalClass td, .ExternalClass div, .ExternalClass span, .ExternalClass font{line-height:100%;} .ReadMsgBody, .ExternalClass{width:100%;} a[x-apple-data-detectors]{color:inherit!important;text-decoration:none!important;font-size:inherit!important;font-family:inherit!important;font-weight:i…  ( 9 min )

really likes being able to cycle folding in Org buffers. Of course, then he wanted to be able to do the same thing in any buffer. In particular, he wanted to be able to fold and unfold groups of functions as a set. He experimented with all sorts of solutions including the builtin outline minor mode. None of them were quite what he wanted. Then he found outli. It was perfect for his needs. It’s a third party package but appears to be well maintained and is less than 400 lines of code. What he really likes, though, is the keybindings. Most important to him is that Tab cycles the folding just like in Org mode. Although I like and use headline folding in Org mode, I’ve never been able warm up to code folding. On those rare occasions when I want to narrow focus to a single function—usually to delimit searches—I simply narrow to the function or region in question. Of course, others, like mbork, disagree and those folks may want to check out mbork’s post to get the details of his solution.  ( 5 min )

Continuing the series on the notable changes in CIDER 2.0, let’s talk about ClojureScript - forever the trickier sibling in the CIDER family. I’ll start with a confession I’ve made before: I rarely use ClojureScript myself, which is a big part of why its support in CIDER has historically lagged behind Clojure’s. Every “State of CIDER” survey reminds me of this, usually in the comments section, occasionally in all caps. So in the 2.0 cycle I decided to stop feeling vaguely guilty about it and actually do something - across every layer of the stack: CIDER itself, cider-nrepl, and Piggieback. First, a strategic decision The most important ClojureScript change in CIDER 2.0 isn’t a feature - it’s a decision about what not to build. Some of CIDER’s most powerful tools (the debugger, enlighten, t…  ( 5 min )

Not all those who wander are lost. – J.R.R. Tolkien Today I’m happy to announce Flycheck 38 - easily the biggest and most ambitious Flycheck release since I took over the stewardship of the project. It’s the release where Flycheck grows a proper story for language servers, gets the kind of inline diagnostics you’d expect from a modern editor, and learns to apply fixes - all without giving up the checker model that made it popular in the first place. The version number, I’ll admit, doesn’t do this one justice - it’s just the next integer after 37, and nothing about “38” whispers “special”. But that’s how it goes with version numbers: some releases are more special than others, and you’d rarely guess which from the number alone. There and back again A little history, because it’s what makes …  ( 7 min )

JD Vance sees himself in a former president. In a recent on-stage conversation about his memoir “Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith,” the vice president was apparently inspired when talking about how this politician was a “political genius” and “peacemaker” who pulled America out of an unpopular war. “Young senator, writes some bestselling books,” he said, ticking off a number of shared qualities. “It kinda sounds like JD Vance.” The vice president was talking about Richard Nixon. But it’s understandable if readers first imagined the face of Barack Obama. As Vance gears up to run for president in 2028, he’s clearly trying to position himself as the GOP’s answer to the 44th president, who remains the most popular political figure in the country. Vance will likely never say this out lou…  ( 7 min )

On today’s episode of Across the Horizon, Bob Holmes of SUSS invites co-host Brad Rose to play the inaugural edition of musical Jeopardy.

Olivia Rodrigo is an American singer, songwriter, and actress who has become one of the defining pop stars of her  ( 5 min )

1. TLDR Your Emacs is full of markup-free hyperlinks embedded in your text, but you're missing a way to utilize them. Think about a file path in a README, a URL in an email, a commit 55a1f0 in a git log, or a function call. All of these have a logical referent (a location or action), and you likely have a good idea of what they should point to. GNU Hyperbole's implicit buttons are pattern recognizers that identify different hyperlink buttons in many Emacs contexts. Hyperbole's Action Key (a single keybinding) then activates such buttons when it is pressed. This post walks through the built-in recognizers, shows how to ask Emacs "what will happen if I press the Action Key here?" (C-h A), explains the cascade of Hyperbole's pattern recognizers that picks the winning action, and dem…  ( 28 min )

Raw link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yH0Gan6xMTo In this video I provide an overview of the default interface for minibuffer completions in Emacs. This is an interface that has been improved considerably over the years. In Emacs version 31, this interface gets some nice new features which make it even more appealing to use. Below is the article I prepared for this video, with all the code samples. Table of Contents The default settings are usable but inconvenient Tweaks for a more refined default completion interface The completion-category-overrides for maximum control How to find the completion category Completion categories and all the other completion-metadata The default completions and related packages The core Emacs infrastructure for completions is quite capable. In a pre…  ( 5 min )

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1, 2, 3, 4]. I was always a little skeptical of those who said they made significant use of EWW for their browsing but then I realized that I had started doing the same thing. It certainly hasn’t replaced Safari but I am using it more and more. It started fairly innocently. I use elfeed-webkit to render the web pages from my RSS feed. That has the significant disadvantage that my ad and tracking blocker doesn’t work for them. That, in turn, means that I get all sorts of junk displayed. It’s usually a dickover but sometimes there’s a seemingly never ending train of popup ads. Fortunately, elfeed (and elfeed-webkit) have a hot key to display the page in EWW and avoid all that. Now as soon as a dickover covers up the text or a avalanche of ads starting popping up, I simply switch over to EW…  ( 6 min )

Emacs I got distracted by MojoPad and Kosshi for a while there. Emacs has been plugging away. Always launched. Always handling my writing. It is the centerpiece of my efforts. I have been making changes to it. Nothing too big, but designed to improve my experience in it. I will talk about three of those in this article. Whitespace I like seeing the marks for return and tabs. Returns are valid for every file but tabs are valid for only content which is copied from other programs or sources. I like seeing them. I made sure that they show up in Emacs. (setq whitespace-style '(face ; Use faces to colorize tabs ; Look for tabs tab-mark ; Visualise tabs newline ; Look for newlines …

As if we needed more confirmation that Pete Hegseth and our defense department are both psychotic and ineffectual.  ( 67 min )

It doesn't take a doctor to see that Trump has always been an "obnoxious toddler" spreading a pandemic of BS.  ( 71 min )

If we’re going to repair our broken republic, progressive and establishment Democrats need to play nice. I’m not so sure they’re capable.  ( 69 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 )

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 )

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 crabs, eating butter by itself, living near a McStadium, and more. PROGRAMMING NOTE: I'm currently locked into my Why Your Team Sucks duties, so you're getting a somewhat truncated bag today, plus a guest host in this space next week. Be sure to email them here with your deepest, darkest queries. Then I'll be back the week after to give you another helping of my endless bullshit. Got all that? Neato bobeato. Your letters:  ( 45 min )

Andrea Pirlo is one of the greatest Italian soccer players of all time. His résumé as a player is impeccable. He won six Serie A titles, two Champions Leagues, and most crucially, the 2006 World Cup. His evolution from a classic trequartista, attacking-style player into one of the defining deep-lying playmakers of his era spoke to both his talent and his tactical intelligence. In every sense of the word, he is an Italian legend. But not even Pirlo is immune from the humiliation vortex that has encircled Italian soccer over the last decade. On Friday, it was reported that Pirlo was on the brink of being named manager of the Italian national team, signaling a new era for a country that failed to qualify for three straight World Cups. On Monday, Pirlo's appointment was called off due, in part, to his ties to a Russian betting company. That reversal also led to the resignation of Italy's new technical director and fellow Italian legend Paolo Maldini (and I mean new; Maldini was at the job for 16 days before leaving his post on Monday). On Tuesday, Roberto Mancini was officially appointed for his second stint with the Azzurri, after his first ended in disgrace following the failure to qualify to the 2022 World Cup. What the hell happened?  ( 30 min )

Within a few weeks of the country's highest court giving states permission to ban trans girls from nearly all school sports, the influential right-wing think tank The Heritage Foundation made clear its newest target: the rest of girls and women's sports. Specifically, as laid out in a lengthy position paper, Heritage believes that women's sports are, in general, not womanly enough. What do they want? The paper, authored by Boise State professor Scott Yenor—who once called career-oriented women "medicated, meddlesome and quarrelsome"—proclaims that Title IX has pushed girls and women's sports to become more aggressive, against the nature of most women. Specifically, the paper says, these "male-normed" women's sports are not "celebrating distinctly feminine virtues of service, grace, and character." Why should you care? There is no denying Heritage's power in shaping Republican politics and what Donald Trump is likely to do; it's the foundation that published Project 2025 and actively campaigned for trans bans in sports. Trump denied knowing about Project 2025, only to enact its recommendations once he took office. Whatever Heritage says it wants, there's a good chance this administration's actions will follow.  ( 29 min )

Some people are fans of the Tennessee Titans. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the Tennessee Titans. This 2026 Defector NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far here. Your Team: The Tennessee Titans. Your 2025 record: 3-14, after going 3-14, after going 6-11, after going 7-10. This makes them the worst team in football over the last four years. None of it is a fluke, either, as they also have the second-worst point differential in that period. More important, though, is that the Titans have been genuinely representative of the AFC South for nearly two decades now, and yes, we mean it exactly the way you took it.  ( 41 min )

On Monday the visiting Baltimore Orioles beat the Detroit Tigers by a score of something to something. This is not important. What is important is that there was a squirrel. With a squirrel's innate mischievousness and ability to completely derail whatever else is going on, the Detroit squirrel spent a couple of innings exploring increasingly precarious locations around the diamond, before a phalanx of grounds crew members and one visiting outfielder were dispatched to remove it from the premises. If you have ever tried to capture a squirrel, you know this was easier proposed than accomplished. There is a reason the official MLB squirrel highlight video is 12 minutes long. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJj6D3FPF1M  ( 20 min )

Secretary of State Marco Rubio convened representatives from 66 different nations on July 16 for a “ministerial meeting” on the resurgence of “political terrorism.” The White House described the summit as the launch of “an unprecedented global offensive against the transnational threat of Radical Left terrorism.” This historic occasion took the form of Rubio, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent taking turns as they said Nazi shit for an hour.  Rubio began his remarks by suggesting that the post-9/11 war on “global jihad” is the counterterrorism strategy of yesterday, in need of serious updating to address the blind spot of “extremist violence from the political left.” For too long, he said, “the very idea that far-left terrorism could be a…  ( 34 min )

LeBron James is coming to Philadelphia, a fact anyone who lives in Philly would have learned from interacting with strangers on the street, no matter their interest in basketball. This is salient because, according to ESPN's Brian Windhorst, James will not be among the ranks of those living in Philly. Instead, he will be living in New York City and commuting to Philly, potentially via helicopter. This is a forgivable error if one has never lived along the Northeast Corridor and experienced its bounteous public transit, thus remaining ignorant to the plethora of options at his disposal, all of which are surely safer, if not necessarily quicker, than taking a helicopter. James has tragically spent the past eight years of his life in Los Angeles. Being LeBron James, making a LeBron James–scale salary, he surely never had to take LA Metro to either Pico or 7th Street/Metro Center and walk to the arena. But now that he has taken a severe pay cut, it is time to consider more frugal options. Here are just a few alternative commutes for LeBron James to consider. Bus  ( 28 min )

The War on Truth Being Waged Is Both Familiar and Jarring

Subagents get justified by time saved and parallel execution, but Rahul Garg explains that's not what matters most. Every token in the orchestrator's context is competing for its attention, and the real value of a subagent is what it keeps out of that context. Subagents should be treated as a tool for protecting the orchestrator's working memory, offloading reasoning it doesn't need to hold onto. Doing this well means giving the orchestrator explicit ground rules for when and how to delegate. more…  ( 10 min )

TL;DR I have ideas. I haven’t been writing them. That’s about to change. I promise… myself. I’ve been thinking a lot about talent. Actually, I’ve been thinking a lot about thinking. And writing. Or more specifically, not writing. This really hit me earlier this year at the Future of Software conference. I was surrounded by people sharing their latest ideas and I had a slightly uncomfortable realization: I have my own. Not just opinions. Actual patterns. Hypotheses. Things I’m seeing across clients, across teams, across the industry that feel new or at least not well articulated yet in a way that a leader can think about and act upon in some way that can influence how they strategise and plan for the future. Because helping clients and other leaders internal and external to thoughtworks do…  ( 3 min )

Today we have a guest mix by James Bernard, whose new album In A Small Room, Decades Ago is excellent.

Look around the modern culinary landscape, and you will find an absolute clown show. We are living in a golden  ( 9 min )

A great television guest appearance is a balancing act. An actor has less than an hour—sometimes just a few scenes—to  ( 17 min )

Horror movies have always had room for strange ideas, but few films have embraced complete insanity with the confidence of  ( 9 min )

Andrew Johnson is rolling over in his grave, and that’s saying something.  ( 70 min )

The president clearly doesn’t know how to solve the water crisis, so he’s turning to one of his predecessor’s programs.  ( 71 min )

Mia Bieniemy, the wife of Kansas City offensive coordinator Eric Bieniemy, was hospitalized after being shot Sunday night. The couple's son, Elijah Zion Bieniemy, 27, was arrested after the shooting and charged with malicious wounding, using a firearm in a felony, and discharging a firearm inside a home, according to law enforcement. The shooting happened in Ashburn, Va., a few miles away from the Washington Commanders practice facility. Eric Bieniemy served as Washington's offensive coordinator for the 2023 season, then coached for UCLA and the Chicago Bears before returning to Kansas City, where he was OC from 2018 to 2023. According to the Loudoun County Sheriff's Office, law enforcement got a call shortly after 7:30 p.m. Sunday reporting a shooting in the 20000 block of Northpark Drive. Deputies who responded to the call found a woman who had been shot multiple times. Paramedics took her to a nearby hospital.  ( 19 min )

I have become an anxious mother, and I have adopted Jacob Misiorowski as my son. I don’t know how this happened, and I would like it to stop, because it’s taking a toll on me. Life used to be so simple. I used to watch his outings with a detached amazement. Back when I had a normal relationship to his pitching prowess, Misiorowski had already thrown 79 of the 100 highest-velocity pitches since tracking began. As of last night, he holds all 100 spots. Now he is my son, and let me be the first to say, it is really difficult being a parent to a child who you have never met and who is also older than you. I am so proud of and so worried for my boy.  I spent last night in a cold sweat as I fought off the urge to join Facebook, just so I could tell everyone how wonderful and successful my beautiful son is. They must know how impressive his outing was, I whispered to myself as I clawed at the drawer where my husband (wait, when did I get a husband?) had locked away my laptop. They must know that he broke his own record for most 100-mph pitches in a game. He threw 66 fastballs, and every single one of them was more than 100 miles per hour. I frantically searched for the key. They have to know that only three were hit hard and into fair territory, and that Jakey struck out 12 batters, including seven in a row to begin the game. I took a hammer to the wood. But I can’t let it slip that he was pitching against the Rockies. Susan from knitting club would have a field day with that. As if HER kids have 185 strikeouts and a 1.58 ERA! Speaking about the history he had once again made, Mis said, “I had no idea. I’m just throwing to Gary.” My humble boy! Someone has to brag about him if he won’t. Maybe I should send Susan that video.  ( 19 min )

One of the great joys of friendship is getting to see your friends evolve into the person they were meant to be all along. In our 10 years of friendship, I've gotten to watch Jazmine Green reinvent herself a few times, including the development and eventual birth of her alter ego, CMD+Jazmine. In the latest Try Hard episode, I'm talking to Jazmine about how going to all-day raves in Brooklyn helped unlock parts of her physicality as she was transitioning, and how all of that culminated in the creation of CMD+Jazmine as her musical identity and alter ego. As a certified indoor cat, this conversation is probably the closest I'll get to going to a rave, but I particularly loved Jazmine's story because it reminded me that it's never too late to turn your life upside down (or at least nocturnal) to become the person you were meant to be.  ( 15 min )

Some people are fans of the Arizona Cardinals. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the Arizona Cardinals. This 2026 Defector NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far here. Your team: “Oh my goodness.” https://twitter.com/NFLFrance/status/1974969244019491007  ( 43 min )

DUBLIN — Misery loves company, but ecstasy attracts it. And so it was that Irish football fans by the tens of thousands shed happy tears together inside Croke Park on Sunday during the All-Ireland Final, as historically downtrodden Mayo vanquished both mighty Kerry, 1-20 to 1-17, and oh-so-many demons. It’s impossible to make up for 75 years of pain and suffering caused by all the brutal championship-game losses in one afternoon, but the outpouring of joy among Mayo players and the green-and-red clad faithful that packed one of the biggest (capacity: 84,000) and holiest sporting grounds in the world was as close to an equal and opposite reaction as anybody could have conjured. I’d never experienced anything in sports nearly as emotional before. And, yeah, I was crying like a baby and smiling as wide as could be, as was everybody around me.  I’d fallen hard for all things Mayo, but mostly the football team, during a work trip there in 2023. I learned lots about the supposed "curse" that was placed on the county after the 1951 All-Ireland championship. The legend holds that while on their way home from their second Sam Maguire Cup in a row, Mayo players who were either riding on the back of a lorrie or in a bus (depending on the teller of the tale), were so caught up in their victory celebration that they paid no mind to a funeral taking place in the town of Foxford. A peeved local priest then decreed that Mayo would not get another Sam Maguire Cup until every member of the championship panel had died.  And Mayo, by coincidence or bad luck or divine intervention, started losing big games, and kept on losing them. Since the 1951 placement of the mythical or ecclesiastical hex, the team played in 13 All-Ireland Final games, including two replays, and went 0-fer.  ( 36 min )

It is an unfamiliar pleasure of this Chicago White Sox season that, in the two months when big slugger Munetaka Murakami did not hit a home run for them, the team improved from 3.5 games back in the AL Central, to first in their division with a 1.5-game lead. But you know what's even cooler than winning games? Winning games in blowout fashion when big slugger Munetaka Murakami smashes two dingers on his very own bobblehead day. The Sox had lost their first two in a weekend series against the Astros, though their sliding rivals in Cleveland could not gain any ground on them. When Chicago loses games, as they've done a little less than half the time in their 55-49 campaign, it's easy to slip back into "Well, they're the White Sox" fatalism. But when they're firing on all cylinders, it's worth marveling at just how many contributions they're getting from so many different guys on the roster. Hitters like Miguel Vargas, Tristan Peters, and Sam Antonacci shouldered the load when Murakami injured his hamstring at the end of May (and then had to shake off some apparent rust upon returning two weeks ago). But it's also hard to deny that this team carries a clear-cut superstar when you see him crush dongs as part of his walk-strikeout-or-blast approach to hitting. The crowd in attendance on Sunday—including Murakami's parents, who threw out first pitches (first and second pitches, maybe?)—didn't have to wait long to witness his mighty power. Batting second and facing Ronel Blanco, Murakami worked a 1-2 count full and then went opposite field on a slider outside to give a fan a second souvenir, after the bobblehead. It was only the beginning of a commanding day where Murakami's other at-bats went as follows: RBI groundout; productive out that moved the runner over; RBI single; and another home run as Part II of eighth-inning back-to-back jacks that delivered the Sox their 12-3 final.  ( 17 min )

It's time to wrap up the month with a challenging themeless. Keep an eye out for tricky clues and fun wordplay. This puzzle was constructed by Jack Hatchett, and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. Jack is a Washington Wizards fan who, for the first time in 10 years, is excited to watch his favorite team play a game of basketball. In addition to crosswords, he enjoys playing ultimate, golfing, and cycling. Defector crosswords, launched in partnership with our friends at AVCX, run every Monday. If you’re interested in submitting a puzzle to us, you can read our guidelines HERE. The AVCX, an independent puzzles and games outlet, invites you to subscribe, or sample the goods with a two-month free trial: "With an AVCX subscription, you get access to weekly themed and themeless crosswords, minis, cryptics, and trivia, by email or in your favorite app. We have no corporate overlord, and we publish top-flight stuff only. We also pay our people fairly, always. Check us out."  ( 14 min )

UNC football general manager Mike Lombardi has been placed on paid administrative leave, according to a statement released by the school Monday morning. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has placed Michael Lombardi, general manager for the Carolina football program, on paid administrative leave, effective immediately. As is standard procedure with personnel matters, leadership, staff, and student-athletes are prohibited from addressing this topic further, and has no reflection on the merits. Lombardi, whose $1.5 million salary makes him the highest-paid general manager in college football, joined the UNC staff prior to the 2025 season as a member of Bill Belichick's coterie of advisors and yes men. Lombardi helped Belichick put together one of the more uninspiring rosters in college football, as the Tar Heels finished 4-8 and didn't beat a single team that finished with five or more wins.  ( 17 min )

VARIOUS CITIES AND TOWNS, France — The Tour de France is over. I hope you enjoyed my 16 dispatches from France, on topics such as the race's impossible future, how cycling solved sleep, the unforgiving life of a photographer, France's vibrant unc ecosystem, and the chaotic frenzy of Alpe d'Huez. It was a privilege to be able to cover all three weeks of the race, and we couldn't do it without your support, so thank you. This is the final dispatch before I go sit in the ocean for a week and try to become normal again. As I wrote at the end of last year's Tour, covering the race is both incredibly fun but also somewhat daunting, since there is simply so much to see and experience. Not everything can fit comfortably into a blog post, though I took copious notes every day on little stuff I saw,…  ( 25 min )

This is not really a blog about trains. A blog about trains in Los Angeles, and my experience with them across 10 days, would ultimately be very short: Despite its notorious gaps in coverage, LA Metro was perfectly functional. If there were any calendar window during which it would be easy, relatively speaking, to visit Los Angeles without a car, it would be during the World Cup, with swarms of European tourists purportedly accustomed to better things. Some of the World Cup's influence was directly in LA Metro's hands: Subways still bore advertisements for the D Line Extension which opened on May 8, connecting the Miracle Mile and a large stretch of museums to the rest of the network. Getting to Inglewood had never been easier. A noticeable population of Metro workers wearing high-visibility vests answered questions at stations, particularly on World Cup match days. An equally noticeable population of Metro police gathered in packs ranging from two to six. Other impacts were more abstract, but no less important: There were simply more people riding the subway. There are very few ways that combining 10-minute frequencies with a $1.75 fare can go wrong. Ten minutes is just fine enough to never have to check schedules or run for a train or even fret overly much about delays or cancellations. Pair that with two lines running along the same stretch, particularly through the more trafficked areas of Downtown Los Angeles (DTLA)—most importantly, for me, to and from Union Station—and that wait time effectively halves. $1.75 a ride is, as a friend of mine declared, "basically free," though she is from Munich, which is comfortably the most expensive transit city I've ever visited. Factor in free transfers within two hours, a $5 daily cap and an $18 weekly cap, and taking the Metro is really, truly, basically free.  ( 66 min )

One of the Emacs’ “killer apps” is Org mode, and one of the most iconic features of Org mode is visibility cycling. It is no wonder people (including me) want a similar feature in other modes.  ( 2 min )

Embark lately has a nice post on integrating CIDER and Projectile into Embark. I don’t use either of them so you might wonder why I care. The answer is that Batsov’s post is a good example of how to add a new application to Embark. That turns out to be pretty easy. For projectile, Batsov built it into the app so you’ll have to check the source code to see the details. For CIDER, though, he adds the Embark functionality externally so you can see how it’s done. It’s mainly a matter of writing some straightforward wrapper functions, binding them up in a keymap for Embark, providing a target function that identifies symbols, and finally adding the keymap to Embark. For me, then, the value of Batsov’s post is that it serves as a how to that shows you the recipe for extending Embark to include new applications.  ( 5 min )

For years, I’ve been using verbatim emphasis in org-mode to mark files and keyboard strokes, while reserving code emphasis to show function names, variables, and other elements of code. With the reintroduction of tags to the blog yesterday1, I wanted these tags to follow the same logic derived from my usage in org-mode: if I used verbatim in org-mode to indicate keystrokes and filenames, then I should use tags on the blog to indicate the same thing. I explained in a footnote in the post: “The reason I have it different here is because I often talk about files in my posts without referring to code.” That might have been my preference, but it was wrong. We’ll get back to it in a minute. I wanted to get my markdown-exported posts to preserve the verbatim emphasis from …  ( 3 min )

Emacs is a Lispboard (HN) and Malleable Computing, Emacs, and You (HN). Also, last call for Emacs Carnival posts for June (theme: Programming). The theme for August is The Search for Knowledge. Enjoy! Emacs 31: Emacs 31.0.91 pretest is available (Irreal) Upcoming events (iCal file, Org): Emacs Berlin: Emacs-Berlin Hybrid Meetup https://emacs-berlin.org/ Wed Jul 29 1000 America/Vancouver - 1200 America/Chicago - 1300 America/Toronto - 1700 Etc/UTC - 1900 Europe/Berlin - 2230 Asia/Kolkata – Thu Jul 30 0100 Asia/Singapore Emacs.si (in person): Emacs.si meetup #8 2026 (v #živo) https://dogodki.kompot.si/events/3944ee8f-6da1-4720-b086-b9217e4f5c7b Mon Aug 3 1900 CET EmacsATX: Emacs Social https://www.meetup.com/emacsatx/events/315091679/ Thu Aug 6 1600 America/Vancouver - 1800 America/Chi…  ( 3 min )

Fabrice Niessen () d'Emacs, de ses flux de travail, de sa configuration, et d'autres sujets en français. Je suis un peu intimidée, mais si vous posez vos questions dans le chat, je pense que nous pouvons survivre à mon faible niveau de français. =) Watch on YouTube La diffusion en direct aura lieu le [2026-08-13 Thu 07:30]–[2026-08-13 Thu 08:30] dans le fuseau horaire America/Toronto, soit 0730H EDT / 0630H CDT / 0530H MDT / 0430H PDT / 1130H UTC / 1330H CEST / 1430H EEST / 1700H IST / 1930H +08 / 2030H JST. Si vous voulez parler d'Emacs avec Prot et moi en français, n'hésitez pas à m'envoyer un courriel ! View Org source for this post You can e-mail me at sacha@sachachua.com.  ( 1 min )

Projectile 3.3 is out! That’s the fourth release this month, which probably tells you something about how much fun I’ve been having with Projectile lately. This one is mostly about a single theme - Projectile knowing more about your project without you having to tell it anything. Tasks you never configured Projectile has had named tasks for a while now - you put an alist in projectile-tasks (or in your project’s .dir-locals.el) and projectile-run-task (s-p c x) offers them with completion. Useful, but there was a catch that always bugged me: the variable starts out empty, so the command did precisely nothing until you sat down and filled it in. Meanwhile every project I work on already has its tasks written down somewhere. The npm scripts are in package.json. The Makefile targets are in th…  ( 5 min )

Next up in the series on the notable changes in CIDER 2.0: cross-references. Or, as most people call the feature, “find usages” - for years the most commonly cited reason to run clojure-lsp alongside (or instead of) CIDER. Let’s talk about why that gap existed and how we finally closed it. Why runtime xref wasn’t enough CIDER has had runtime cross-referencing for a while: the cider/fn-refs op walks the loaded vars in your REPL and reports which functions reference the one at point. It’s a genuinely cool trick - the REPL literally knows your program - but as a “find usages” answer it has three structural problems: It only sees loaded code. Namespaces you haven’t required yet - often most of the codebase - are invisible. It reports functions, not occurrences. Each hit points at the caller’s …  ( 10 min )

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

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

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

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

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 )

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 )

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 )

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 )

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 )

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Today we’re listening to Sofie Birch, a Danish multi-instrumentalist and composer based in Copenhagen.

No content preview  ( 4 min )

You know how I said last time Part 1 was just the introduction? I lied. My emacs-settings.org file includes an introduction that covers what I already went over and more. I thought I’d skip it, but as I looked through the notes I left to myself — various guidelines, warnings, and tips — I realized that this is exactly the kind of stuff I should share. Style As I was writing this, I fell into a rabbit hole (of course) and made a couple of additional changes. Style and style guides are important to me. In college, as an editor, I used the AP Stylebook as a bible almost, along with the Chicago Manual of Style for academic papers. When I worked as a technical writer, it was Microsoft’s stylebook I checked constantly — and some of it stuck (don’t say “click”; say “select”, don’t say “sign in”; …  ( 6 min )

[request] flags:--- replies:0 role:maintainer  ( 1 min )

Ray on Emacs has a nice post on copying the link at point in EWW. It’s sort of hidden so that’s the reason for his post and this one. He decided to write his own because he couldn’t find anything that already did the job. It was only after he wrote it that he stumbled on the existing functionality. The short answer is that the u key does just what he wanted. The longer answer is that sometimes w also works. The documentation says that w copies the URL of the current page but if the point is on a link, it will copy the link’s URL instead. I’m finding that I’m using EWW more and more so I’m glad to have this information. Zeitler has more details so be sure to take a look at his post.  ( 5 min )

[request] flags:--- replies:0 topic:org-agenda  ( 1 min )

In antiquity, tennis players could win with a diverse mix of skillsets, with some even relying on speed, anticipation, net touch. This variety is often mourned by the old heads. Because in the sport's present—and, given the arc of string and racket tech, its foreseeable future—the skill that looms above all else is mighty ball-striking from the baseline. Though I do mourn the loss of off-speed demons on grass, for example, I have made my peace with this reality, and perhaps because I had my own tastes shaped by this evolution in the game, I am content to watch a punishing groundstroke all day. But I'd enjoy it even more if there's at least some neat technical twist. My ideal would be a player who thrives in the today's power-baseline meta, but does it while cultivating a technique at risk …  ( 23 min )

PARIS — Every story has a beginning and an end, but the best stories have worthwhile middles. Narrative stakes are established are established and then resolved. It's what happens in between that makes a story. This is where the greatest cyclist of all time currently finds himself. Pogacar rode to his fifth Tour victory with an astonishing sense of joy. The ennui that plagued his fourth Tour win has dissolved. His greatest rival is well behind him. The yellow jersey that weighed him down now buoys him. There's nothing more for him to do as a competitor except rack up more records, a potentially paralyzing dynamic he's seemingly found a way to neutralize. Pogacar has won five Tours de France, equaling four others who were all years older than Pogacar when they won their final Tour. When I asked his director, Matxin Fernandez, what was different about this Tour, he was nearly moved to tears thinking about the accomplishment of getting to five. "Fuck, I mean, it's amazing," he grinned, apologizing for getting carried away. "It's like Hollywood. I remember watching Indurain win his fifth [in 1995] and now Tadej has done it. I'm so proud." So what was different this time around, and what lessons are there to be learned about how the rest of Pogacar's story might go?  ( 36 min )

Let's acknowledge that there is no conversation to be had about who the best player in baseball is, so long as Shohei Ohtani is drawing breath and applying his skills as a two-way player. The gavel has long been banged on that issue. But there's a lot of baseball being played, and a lot of cool guys doing the playing, and one of those guys is Pete Crow-Armstrong, who in an Ohtani-less universe is the best player in baseball. Crow-Armstrong and the Cubs beat the crap out of the Pirates last night, tagging Paul Skenes for five runs in an 11-0 victory. Crow-Armstrong was responsible for most of that damage, going 4-for-5 with a homer, three RBI, and three runs scored. He also hit two doubles and stole a base. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nClz8QqS92g  ( 20 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 )

My old darkroom What does one do when nearly every topic they've always found interesting now bores them to tears? I find myself skimming my RSS and Mastodon feeds and just shrugging everything off because I'm tired of it. Let's hope it's just a moody phase. It feels like a moody phase. ✍️ Reply by email

July 26, 2026  ( 12 min )

I’ve been investing long enough to know that the stock market doesn’t move in straight lines. Some months are exciting,  ( 9 min )

Sports movies have been a Hollywood staple for decades. Classics like Rocky, Field of Dreams, Hoosiers, Bull Durham, Remember the  ( 10 min )

Everything That Happened Around the NBA This Week The NBA offseason never truly slows down. Even though there aren’t any  ( 9 min )

Napoleon Bonaparte conquered much of Europe, defeated powerful armies, reshaped governments, and established himself as one of history’s greatest military  ( 9 min )

Dream Academy – “Life in a Northern Town”: The Ethereal 1985 Hit That Still Feels Timeless Few songs from the  ( 9 min )

ALPE D'HUEZ, France — Roughly halfway up the final climb of Stage 19, and roughly five hours before the riders hit the base, our car indulged the thick snarl of besotted fans who wanted to do the wave with us. This slowed us across a critical speed threshold, beyond which our car was no longer something worth avoiding but rather something worth rocking. I'd seen videos of cars getting shaken the night before, and hoped to get shaken myself, though I was not prepared for how jarring and violent it felt in the car, as if we were pebbles and the hooting mass of jolly Europeans was the flood. This was Alpe d'Huez, the most legendary and chaotic arena in cycling. There is nothing like Alpe d'Huez in all of sports. FranceTV reported that 600,000 people slammed onto the sides of the Alpe, the mos…  ( 34 min )

The Art Of Not Asking Why, JTR has begun a series on his Emacs configuration. This post covers his special arrangements for macOS. There are two tips, in particular, that seem to come up all the time. The first is setting the path. That, of course, is supposed to be a simple process on Unix-like systems but doesn’t work correctly for Emacs on macOS. A long time ago, Steve Purcell solved this problem with his exec-path-from-shell package. You can read the details and what the exact problem is at the package’s GitHub repository. If you’re using Emacs on a Mac, you definitely need this package. The second problem involves Dired. It’s obvious, if you think about it, that Dired depends on the Unix ‘ls’ command to produce its listings and some of its other operations. The problem is that the macOS version of ls is missing some of the options that Dired needs. The solution is to use the GNU version of ls, called gls. That’s easy to do but you first have to install it. The easy way to do that is through Homebrew. Once gls is installed, you need merely tell Dired to use it. All the details for solving these two problems are in JTR’s post so if you’re running on macOS, you should definitely take a look at it. I’ve had both those changes installed for as long as I can remember but I do recall struggling with these issues until I found the solutions. Happily, if you’re new to Emacs on the Mac, JTR has both solutions for you in one place.  ( 5 min )

Embark is one of those packages that quietly rewires how you use Emacs. Think of it as a context-aware right-click: you invoke embark-act (I keep it on C-.) on whatever’s at point - a file name, a symbol, a URL - and Embark offers a menu of things you can do with it. The neat part is that it’s completely extensible, so you can teach it about new kinds of targets. Lately two of my projects, CIDER and Projectile, have grown Embark integrations, in slightly different ways, and both are worth a look. Let’s start with CIDER, and teach Embark about Clojure symbols, so embark-act on one offers a bunch of CIDER commands: So d shows the documentation, . jumps to the definition, r finds references, i inspects the value, c opens ClojureDocs and a runs apropos - the usual CIDER commands, a keystroke …  ( 5 min )

CIDER’s code completion has quietly gotten quite good over the years, and I don’t think it gets enough credit. It’s all built on Emacs’s standard completion-at-point, so it works with whatever completion UI you prefer - the built-in one, Corfu, company - without any special setup. Under the hood compliment does the heavy lifting for Clojure (and clj-suitable for ClojureScript), which means smart, backend-driven matching: mai completes to map-indexed, cji to clojure.java.io, and an unimported BiFun to java.util.function.BiFunction. The candidates come back ranked by the backend and are context-aware - it knows when you’re inside a -> or completing a deftype field. Lately I’ve been giving the Emacs side of things some attention, to bring it in line with the modern completion stack so many of…  ( 3 min )

Fence (2015). M3 testing Tri-X at 1600 Suddenly this morning, my Org Agenda was empty. It should never be empty. Emacs had already been running, idle, so I've no idea how it happened. A restart fixed it, but it was unsettling enough that I created a separate blog script to replace the emacs-dependent parts of my blogging workflow. Now I can do blog journal or blog post or blog cover in a terminal, and it does the right thing, then opens the file in $VISUAL. Feels safer this way. The Emacs functions were 90% just calling out to existing shell scripts anyway, so there's only a small amount of duplication. I've spent several hours this morning making stuff work on my Mac that already worked fine on Linux, because "what if?". It's exhausting. On the plus side, I'm editing this post in BBEdit, which is always just so damn comfortable. ✍️ Reply by email  ( 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 )

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

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

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 )

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 )

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 )

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 )

Donald Trump and large parts of the Republican Party have spent 2024–2026 loudly warning that Democrats, progressive candidates, and democratic socialists represent a “hardcore, godless Communist” threat—the greatest danger to America since its founding, worse than world wars or 9/11 in some of the more theatrical formulations. The rhetoric intensified after certain Democratic primary wins...  ( 9 min )

If the “Never Vance” slogan on social media is any indication, our vice president isn’t the “Sensible Republican” political media makes him out to be.  ( 86 min )

Here’s your reminder that the president doesn’t care about our people in uniform.  ( 67 min )

I like writing. Really. However, I have problem finishing my drafts. As you might be able to read in my OKRs, I mentioned multiple times that I have quite a lot of blog drafts that I haven’t completed. I don’t want to blame anyone and it’s completely my fault: I have problem focusing on a task. I have an attention problem. In the past, I could blame things like Twitter for distracting me from getting shit done. But now, I don’t use any of these social media services anymore. I am running out of excuses. I wanted to change my writing routine and would like to see if it would make a difference. Then, I watched a video by Veronica (of Veronica Explains) on her (new) writing setup. She reused an old laptop and made it a dedicated writing machine, or “writerdeck.” In that writing machine, she o…  ( 3 min )

If you've ever written an Emacs function only to find out that it was there all along, masquerading as something else, this post is for you. I just finished writing an Emacs function that copies the link at point to the kill ring in EWW. It will remain unpublished. Why? Because I discovered that shr-maybe-probe-and-copy-url (bound to u and w in eww-mode) does the same thing. Just position point on a link and invoke it. It's not obvious that pressing w will do this. In fact the major mode help for eww-mode suggests that w will not copy the link because it's bound to eww-copy-page-url. But it turns out that if point is on a link, w will invoke shr-maybe-probe-and-copy-url, "which copies this link's URL to the kill ring." The manual goes on to say, "If point is not on a link, pressing w calls eww-copy-page-url, which will copy the current page's URL to the kill ring instead."1 Before writing my function I had been looking through the mode help (C-h m from within a EWW buffer) and the EWW source code for any function that looked like copy-link-at-point. So how did I find out about this? I wanted to ensure that I was following the standard for capitalizing EWW, so I searched the web. This took me to the GNU Emacs manual, which has a section on EWW and shows it in all caps. But then my distractibility encouraged me to read a great deal more. I've known that keybindings can change depending on the major mode. But it seems a keybinding can change based on context (i.e. the position of point). This idea is new to me. Maybe it's common for a function to "hand off" to another based on context. But in this case it seems irresponsible to omit documentation for the alternate behavior of a w key press. Suppose a user expects to copy the page URL and gets the URL of a link, instead? While this was a frustrating experience, it is yet another reminder to RTFM. WDYT? 1 GNU Emacs EWW Basic Usage  ( 10 min )

This month’s Emacs Asia-Pacific (APAC) virtual meetup is scheduled for Saturday, July 25, 2026 with BigBlueButton and #emacs on Libera Chat IRC. The timing will be 1400 to 1500 IST. The meetup might get extended by 30 minutes if there is any talk, this page will be updated accordingly. If you would like to give a demo or talk (maximum 20 minutes) on GNU Emacs or any variant, please contact bhavin192 on Libera Chat with your talk details:  ( 1 min )

Emacs 31.0.91, the second Emacs 31 pretest, is now available. If you’re interested in trying it out, you can get a copy from https://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/emacs/pretest/emacs-31.0.91.tar.xz. It’s signed so you should also get the signature file from https://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/emacs/pretest/emacs-31.0.91.tar.xz.sig. This is good news, of course, because it means that Emacs 31 is that much closer to release. There’s some great new features coming in Emacs 31 (see the NEWS file for details) so I’m looking forward to its release. On the other hand, it’s good that the devs are being conservative and trying to wring all the bugs out before the official release. If you don’t mind living (slightly) on the edge, try it out and let the devs know if you find any problems.  ( 5 min )

[request] flags:--- replies:0 role:maintainer  ( 1 min )

There are aspects of being president of the United States that Donald Trump is really bad at, and others at which he is significantly worse. It goes without saying that none of that is improving, but what is most notable about his performance in the position is the extent to which he has never really bothered to figure out what the job is. From the earliest days of his presidency there was a sort of inchoate yearning that emanated from the more respectable reaches of the political culture for the possibility that Trump would not so much grow into the job as be transformed by its sheer prestige into a totally different type of person—not just chastened by the awesome responsibility of it all, but changed by it in a way that forced him to become human in all the ways that he had spent his li…  ( 28 min )

DUBLIN — The All-Ireland Senior Football final, the Irish Super Bowl, takes place July 26 at Dublin's historic Croke Park. This year’s game mismatches Kerry and Mayo, Gaelic football’s biggest winners against the most notorious losers in the ancient sport’s history.  Kerry fans expected their team to be here. They always do. They’re the defending champs and will be playing for their 40th title. No other county comes close. Legendary manager Paidi Ó Sé once called his team’s supporters "the roughest type of fucking animals you could ever deal with,” because of their Sam Maguire Cup-or-bust standard. The star-laden squad relies most on David Clifford, a three-time player of the year and the only player of his generation that comes up in GOAT conversations.  All of Ireland expects Mayo to lose.  ( 26 min )

Perhaps there was no weirder possible conclusion to this saga: LeBron James is moving to Philadelphia. Shams Charania reported Friday that James will sign with the 76ers on a two-year, $8 million deal with a player option. The 41-year-old won't be ring-chasing with Steph Curry, Giannis Antetokounmpo, Nikola Jokic, nor any other top-10 player, nor his hometown Cavaliers. Instead he'll join an undeniably talented but aesthetically hideous assortment of Sixers looking to take advantage of a reshuffled Eastern Conference. Can't say I understand it on any level: narrative, on-court, commercial, or otherwise. Perhaps it has something to with James's long-standing belief in cumulative star talent rather than a specific mesh of skillsets; remember when he thought Russell Westbrook would work well alongside him? Perhaps he's sympathetic to Jaylen Brown, and is picking up a sword in the anti-"analytics" battle for the game's soul. But this is certainly not his best route to winning a fifth title. His most talented teammate, Joel Embiid, played 38 games in the last regular season. Maybe James was really enamored with one or two of his performances in last season's playoffs, but there are more medically sound bets to make when it comes to a late-career title hunt. Tyrese Maxey and VJ Edgecombe are spry young guards, and they'll be a delight with James in transition, but neither is the sort of knockdown off-ball shooter that optimizes James in the halfcourt. I look forward to the facial expressions he'll make the first time a Brown iso fritters away the end of a close game. The Sixers' starting lineup will leave lots of weak points for opposing offenses to attack—do not tell me that 32-year-old Embiid will be anchoring a championship defense. Again, there's a lot of talent on this roster; I just have no idea how it will all fit together. That's Nick Nurse's job, if he can keep it.  ( 18 min )

ORCIÈRES-MERLETTE, France — When Richard Carapaz spread his arms in celebration after pounding up the final climb of Stage 18, I felt a sense of relief. The champagne flowed, the tears streamed. The hundreds of days that dozens of support staff worked in the cloistered, unforgiving world of professional cycling had paid off. EF Education-EasyPost had finally validated its strong Tour de France with a stage win. The Tour de France awards a wide bounty of prizes beyond the yellow jersey to its 23 teams. You can target one of the other three jerseys, which take comprehensive three-week efforts and team support. You can go after one of the 21 stages, more a matter of tactics than strategy, and also subject to the whims of the biggest teams. Or you can scrap for the smaller stuff like winning s…  ( 27 min )

Some people are fans of the New York Jets. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the New York Jets. This 2026 Defector NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far here. Your team: New York Jets. https://twitter.com/iJordanMoore/status/2075649848762569003  ( 39 min )

My eyes kept going back to the hand, so tender and gently placed that you could forget these were bodies forged from marble. For all of the grabbing passion and sexual infatuation of Auguste Rodin’s The Kiss, the hands always seemed to suggest something much softer and loving. The woman, leaning back and on the edge of the rough base stone, could easily slip. But without any grabbing or force, his hand steadies her. His palm and thumb hover over her leg, and the only touch is by the tips of his fingers, as if she is breakable and precious. The bodies embrace haphazardly, but the hands are patient and deliberate. The lovers were modeled after the adulterous lovers, Francesca and Paulo, from Dante’s Divine Comedy. But I could never feel anything doomed or sinful about the pair. All I saw was the tension between the hesitancy and the urgency of a first kiss—the feeling of fear and desire all wrapped up in one.  The Kiss was my first introduction to the works of Rodin. From then on, I became fascinated by the stone figures Rodin seemed to capture in motion, as well as the depths of feeling he built from the subtle details of the body. My first summer in Philadelphia, I spent many afternoons journeying to the Rodin Museum, sitting in the sculpture garden or wandering the small rooms to take in the subtleties. Just like with The Kiss, my eyes are always drawn to the hands.  Writing on his weeks spent observing Rodin, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote:  ( 23 min )

Jimothy crept into our lives like any good cryptid—as a blurry, scuttling thing. Kiana Hall, the Seattle local whose firsthand footage resulted in Jimothy's newfound fame, first thought she had spotted a cat running under a car. But upon closer inspection, the creature was no feline. "I was seeing some kind of gray, fluffy creature that was shaped sort of like an orb with really long legs," Hall said in an interview with Reuters. Hall's vertical video captures the creature, which she christened Jimothy, scampering enigmatically across a desiccated lawn. Although the animal's coat and black mask identifies them clearly as a raccoon, Jimothy is undeniably orb-shaped, as if a planet suddenly sprouted a cluster of legs so that it might prance about to unsettle and delight Seattleites lucky enough to glimpse them. The raccoon has since become unofficially canonized as a local saint, inspiring various effigies in the media of mural, mathematics, medieval marginalia, and even a Mariners in-game cameo. Although Jimothy's adoring fans use he/him for the raccoon, Jimothy's sex is unknown. "If a video emerges where Jimothy is standing on his (or her!) hind legs and facing forward, then we might be able to determine Jimothy's sex," Lauren Stanton, a cognitive ecologist at the University of California, Berkeley, wrote in an email. So until we are fortunate to be flashed by Jimothy, we're all just guessing. The reason behind Jimothy's distinct shape, however, is more decipherable. When Kent Morton, a veterinarian at Compassionate Care Animal Hospital in Michigan who co-hosts the podcast Vet Med For Idiots By Idiots, first saw images of Jimothy, he felt he could diagnose the raccoon. Jimothy appears to have a congenital issue called short spine syndrome. "The soft tissues in the spine will fuse the vertebrae, and that's what gives them the short neck appearance," Morton said. "It's a very distinctive condition," he added.  ( 27 min )

I imagine the pitch for Danny McBride’s new short story collection, Thrilling Tales of Modern Men, went a little something like this: Hey, this is Danny McBride’s agent. Yeah, that guy. He wants to write a short story collection called something like Thrilling Tales of Modern Men. And I imagine the response from the editor at Random House was similar to my own, upon hearing about the book: Hell yeah. Amidst a moment in our culture where the question of what defines the contemporary man is subject to quarterly declarations of a loneliness epidemic and, in a fun new twist, mandatory testosterone tests, there's basically nobody better suited to probe the hollow inner workings of modern masculinity than McBride. He’s had a lot of practice, after all. As a screenwriter and performer, he’s demon…  ( 31 min )

What I should be doing is creating new things rather than constantly rearranging the things I already have. Maybe I like to switch between operating systems because it feels like rearranging my office. A fresh view feels good. Today I'm running Dank Linux as my desktop. It's so weird and I dig it. ✍️ Reply by email