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

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

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

The U.S.-Canada trade situation is so bleak (as I’ve been discussing in these three posts: 1, 2 and 3) that...  ( 8 min )

Jewish Insider, the source of this passage, often has what I’d consider tendentious coverage of this issue. But these words...  ( 7 min )

There’s been a blizzard of commentary about the breakdown of U.S.-Canadian trade talks. Friend of TPM Paul Krugman has a...  ( 7 min )

As a soccer fan, one of the best things you can do for your physical and mental well-being is to studiously avoid overreacting to results early in the season. Especially for the big teams, and especially especially coming off of a summer international tournament, the first few weeks of the league are essentially an extension of the preseason, and therefore should be considered little more than glorified training sessions aimed primarily at working players back into shape after their abbreviated, inebriated vacations. A Week 1 upset hardly condemns the loser to a season of disappointment, nor does it catapult the winner into the fight for the European places. That said, if any presumably good Premier League team could least afford to come stumbling out of the blocks, it's Manchester United, which opened its promise-laden new campaign with a humiliating loss to what is likely the worst team in the division. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NR74IpnbJNk  ( 24 min )

San Francisco 49ers owner Jed York was arrested this weekend in Ohio, originally on the charge of engaging in prostitution, though a plea agreement amended it to misdemeanor charges. York, who is originally from Youngstown, Ohio, was arrested Sunday morning at the Wheat Hill Mobile Home Community in East Palestine, according to local news station WKBN. The arrest was reportedly conducted by the Mahoning Valley Human Trafficking Task Force as well as East Palestine police. By Monday morning, York had pleaded no contest to misdemeanor charges of disorderly conduct and possessing criminal tools. According to Columbiana Court records, York was fined a total of $1,150 and sentenced to two days in Columbiana County Jail, concurrently, and received credit for one day already served. The 49ers owner had already filed a request to expunge the case from his record.  ( 16 min )

I can't help but empathize with the heirloom tomato this time of year. The first BLTs have been eaten; the novelty has worn off. Stacked on farmers' market tables like milk bottles in a carnival game, late-summer tomatoes start to look a little worse for wear. Like me, they are often etched with lines from spotty hydration. They're a little busted, a little bruised.  Also like me, they retain in their haggard hides a secret well of great beauty and value. If you find yourself with a surfeit of ugly heirloom tomatoes this summer, there is only one thing to do: Make tomato water.  Tomato water is the purest expression of a tomato—all heart, no husk. It is an excellent way to sneak umami, a word my editor told me I was only allowed to use once in this blog, into salad dressings and sauces and negronis. The water inside of a tomato is packed with glutamates, the savory compounds derived from having a thick ass. Those glutamates are the building blocks of MSG, which stands for Making Stuff Good. The magic trick of tomato water is that it allows you to make things more savory without necessarily making them salty.  ( 24 min )

Some people are fans of the Philadelphia Eagles. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the Philadelphia Eagles. This 2026 Defector NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far here. Your team: Philadelphia Eag—God, I’m exhausted just typing their name. Makes me wanna spit on a guy. https://twitter.com/SportsCenter/status/1963761757760930233  ( 45 min )

Traditional publishing is a frustrating industry whose workers are under-resourced and often mandated to chase metrics like authors' audience size and nascent trends based on "data," "vibes," and "TikTok." If, in the years-long dark period when I had an agent but not yet a book deal, an editor had told me exactly what I needed to change about my project to get them to buy it, I would have jumped at the chance. Especially if what they wanted was a book I already had in the works—it just wasn't the one I wanted to publish first. This is what happened to Alexander Chee in the years after he graduated from his MFA. He had been working on two novel concepts, and editors vastly preferred one over the other. But he had a strong preference that one come first, his "shitty autobiographical novel" that would eventually become Edinburgh. The second novel, which would be The Queen of the Night, eventually did get published, but that was 15 years after Edinburgh.  ( 18 min )

Some of my favorite sports uniforms are red. This has always been true, and my choices of teams to support have only reinforced that. (A chicken-egg situation?) Other than the Miami Marlins (who did have the snazzy Sugar Kings red jerseys a few years back), the Miami Heat, New England Patriots (god, I love those red throwbacks), Liverpool, Barcelona, and MY Florida Panthers all have red(-ish) uniforms. I therefore feel uniquely qualified to contribute a ranking of red jerseys across the major U.S. sports to our Reds Week mania. I scoured the major leagues for a hint of red, drew up a list, then rated each uniform 1-10. Within each block of the same rating, I ranked them based purely on my reaction to their shades of red and design work, and after spending more time on this than I'd planned…  ( 49 min )

Imagine you are a horny male redback spider. You might be a small guy—a fraction of her size—but unlike some, you don't have a complex about it. You're just happy to be there, "there" meaning the haphazard snarl of a web of a female redback spider. Only 20 percent of male redback spiders ever mate, so you're already feeling lucky. You know that the climax of your life has arrived, meaning your climax. You approach the spider and insert into her one of your two pedipalps, a pair of leg-like appendages that dangle by your mouth and hold your sperm. Then, as is custom, you initiate a parkour sequence. After doing a headstand, you flip yourself on your back, landing your body between the female's fangs. There, your palp still inside her, she begins to chew on you. If you survive this—which you often do thanks to your ability to squeeze your waist really small so her fangs can't immediately impale you—you two take a break. Then you're back in action, inserting your second palp in her and sliding cleanly into headstand number two, followed by that somersault, followed by more chewing. This time you let her finish you off, meaning eat you entirely. But you don't have a complex around this either. You have completed the work of your life, ensuring that the batches of eggs she will soon lay are all fathered by you, who, at this point, have departed this mortal coil, digested and excreted by your large and lovely mate. "This is the mating ritual of L. hasselti," Kardelen Özgün Uludağ, a PhD student at the University of Hamburg in Germany, wrote in an email. If this for some reason is hard to imagine, perhaps the following video will help.  ( 22 min )

Just shut up and solve our Monday crossword already. This week's puzzle was constructed by Owen Bergstein and Nick Dent, and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. Owen and Nick are longtime frenemies based in Boston. They met when Owen was a freshman in high school and Nick (aka "Mr. Dent") was a math teacher. Over the years, Nick served as the advisor for Owen's ever-growing Puzzle Club, one of the school's most popular clubs. By the time he graduated this May, Owen was spending all of his free time in Mr. Dent's room, annoying him with puns and music recommendations. Mr. Dent, in return, sends Owen gift links to Defector articles and fails to beat him at online Scrabble. This puzzle is the culmination of their four-year friendship/mentorship. This is Nick's first published crossword; for more by Owen, check out Dissonant Grids, the avant-garde crossword blog he ran for a year.  Defector crosswords, launched in partnership with our friends at AVCX, run every Monday. If you’re interested in submitting a puzzle to us, you can read our guidelines HERE. The AVCX, an independent puzzles and games outlet, invites you to subscribe, or sample the goods with a two-month free trial: "With an AVCX subscription, you get access to weekly themed and themeless crosswords, minis, cryptics, and trivia, by email or in your favorite app. We have no corporate overlord, and we publish top-flight stuff only. We also pay our people fairly, always. Check us out."  ( 15 min )

I won't dispute that I once had red hair. Back in 2019, just for kicks, I went with a bright Hayley Williams–esque red that petered out for obvious reasons the following year. Then in 2025, with a 30th birthday and a big trip on the horizon, I decided to freshen up my look with a new color that my stylist tells me is as light as I can go without using bleach. For full transparency purposes, here is what it looks like the day after the salon. I thought of this hair as simply a lighter version of my natural brunette, specifically because it paled in comparison to the unmistakably fiery hair I'd sported several years ago. But I quickly realized that other people—especially those I was meeting for the first time—perceived me differently. One red-haired guy initially saw me as a ginger peer before teasing me about my roots. A new acquaintance referenced knowing "another Lauren with red hair." It came up consistently in catcalls and compliments, so, finally, I couldn't help but wonder: Is my hair red?  ( 35 min )

For as long as baseball’s All-Star Game has been played—almost every year since 1933, including twice a year from 1959 to 1962—it’s been the ultimate in wish fulfillment for fans. Want to see a team of future Hall of Famers playing together? It’s got that. Want to see your favorite local players honored on a national stage? It’s possible. Poignant curtain calls and unexpected comedy? You bet. But actual fan participation in selecting All-Star teams? That’s been a rockier road. In this generation, when baseball fans are inundated with emails and in-stadium announcements encouraging All-Star Game voting, it’s hard to believe this wasn’t always the case. But after the first game in 1933 featured fan voting, team selections were done briefly by player vote and then entirely by managers.  ( 34 min )

Gaze into the eyes of Comrade Redlegs, and let the truth of the situation wash over you: It’s Reds Week. That’s right. You may have survived Senators Week, Rays Week, Wings Week, and Bills Week—but do you have what it takes to journey with us into our latest theme week? Over the next five days,…  ( 12 min )

Recently I found myself killing and yanking more often than ever. One problem with that is that the capitalization and punctuation of what I have yanked is often wrong. As a (pretty stupid) example, I might see the sentence “This is bad.”, and I might want to write another one: “He thinks that this is bad, and he’s right.” If I use kill-sentence (M-k) or backward-kill-sentence (C-x DEL), I have the whole This is bad. in the kill ring, but what I need to yank is this is bad (with lower-case “t” and without the period), so I need to make both changes after yanking. After several dozen such cases I thought, this is Emacs, I shouldn’t be doing this manually!  ( 3 min )

announced the release of Emacs 31.1. As usual, it’s available at the mirror nearest you. Note, however, that the URLs in Whitton’s announcement have a typo. See this message from Eli for the correct URLs. I’m writing this with the just built new Emacs and everything seems fine. I had a bit of trouble downloading the source because, apparently, some of the mirrors haven’t updated yet. If that happens to you, just repeat the request a time or two and you should get everything. After that, enjoy your new Emacs and all the goodies it brings. As always, Mickey has his usual exegesis of the changes. As I invariably say at times like this, Eli and the rest of the development team deserve our huge thanks for their selfless efforts on our behalf.  ( 5 min )

A year ago I created Org Social. Just a plain-text specification and an .org file served over HTTP. Today it is time to take stock, to see how the project has moved, what has worked and what has not. And above all, to tell the story of a year of development and community. A bird's-eye view of the whole year would look like this: 2025 August: the specification is born (Aug 12). Front page of Hacker News and 150 stars in 24 hours. First client, org-social.el (Aug 16). Spec 1.1: the first external contribution removes :REPLY_URL:. September: the Relay is born. Groups arrive in the specification. October: org-social.el v2.0 with a redesigned interface (Oct 1). It lands on MELPA (Oct 26). Proposal to the Org Mode list. November: Relay v1.0 and host is born. A record of 581 posts in a month, pro…  ( 9 min )

When text is copied from an Org-mode buffer and pasted into another Emacs buffer, its visual formatting can sometimes follow it. For instance, text displayed with a particular color, background, or font weight in an Org buffer can retain that appearance after being inserted into a Python buffer. This can be undesirable because the inserted text may then display with the source buffer's face text property instead of relying on the destination buffer's normal font-lock or syntax highlighting. Understanding the face text property In Emacs, visual formatting can be represented by the face text property. Some major modes, including Org-mode, make extensive use of text properties, including face, to control how text is displayed. When text containing these properties is yanked (pasted), Emacs ca…  ( 8 min )

An Introduction to Canvas in GNU Emacs is really cool and I'm looking forward to that becoming generally available in Emacs 32. =) Emacs 31: Emacs 31.1 is released! (Reddit, HN, HN, HN, Irreal) Mickey Petersen: What's New in Emacs 31.1? (Reddit) EmacsWiki : Emacs Thirty One Highlights (@pkal@social.sdfeu.org) Upcoming events (iCal file, Org): Emacs Berlin: Emacs-Berlin Hybrid Meetup https://emacs-berlin.org/ Wed Aug 26 1000 America/Vancouver - 1200 America/Chicago - 1300 America/Toronto - 1700 Etc/UTC - 1900 Europe/Berlin - 2230 Asia/Kolkata – Thu Aug 27 0100 Asia/Singapore EmacsSF (in person): coffee.el in SF https://www.meetup.com/emacs-sf/events/316144053/ Sat Aug 29 1100 America/Los_Angeles EmacsATX: Emacs Social https://www.meetup.com/emacsatx/events/316121976/ Thu Sep 3 1600 Am…  ( 3 min )

Emacs 31.1 is finally out! Unlike earlier Emacs versions, there is not a singular big-bang feature in this release. From what I could gather, the new garbage collector was possibly planned for inclusion in Emacs 31.1, but it has been postponed to Emacs 32. But more on that in a future post; it’s an interesting subject. Some of the more notable features in Emacs 31.1 are small, quality of life fixes, and one deprecation that marks the end of an era. As always, my book, Mastering Emacs is 31% off for the next week to celebrate the release also. The unexec/pdumper controversy and subsequent deprecation Emacs is… not a normal application. When you compile and link it, you get temacs which is the heart of Emacs but without most of the libraries that ship with it. It’s a bare-bones Emacs with li…  ( 122 min )

Yes, he’s still on the delusional “51st state” thing.  ( 60 min )

I was listening to Ezra Klein’s interview with Helen Toner about the recent OpenAI hack of Hugging Face and the subsequent discovery that there were swarms of agents inside OpenAI doing unsanctioned activities. One of the points Klein made was that at no point did any of these (thousands of?) agents ever try to check in with a human [Klein:] So these message boards — you have however many A.I. agents posting hundreds of thousands of messages. At no point do they say: Hey, researchers, programmers, parents at OpenAI, Anthropic — do you want us coordinating with each other on this message board we have created in the innards of your systems? [Toner:] Or even F.Y.I., we have a message board we’re coordinating on in the innards of your system. Listening to that, another thing occurred to me - …  ( 4 min )

INSIDE: Mark Carney ... Ed Martin ... John Roberts

There’s a rather popular flavor of social media content focused on helping unhoused people. The creator will give out sleeping bags, socks, and care kits; sit down and have a meal; or take the unhoused person shopping. Sometimes they help them find work or start a GoFundMe to get them off the streets. It does a lot of good. But it’s also gross AF! Imagine you’re cold, hungry, and desperate, and someone offers to get you all the things you need… if you consent to having a camera shoved in your face and the footage of you at your lowest blasted on the internet.  ( 21 min )

fix the country you broke, imbecile

Pete Hegseth may be the most hated man in Washington. According to a recent polling analysis by CNN’s Harry Enten, the defense secretary’s approval ratings have fallen below even the basement-level numbers of President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance. So when Hegseth took a trip to speak at the Iowa State Fair on Aug. 17 — a move traditionally seen as the soft launch of a presidential campaign — the response among much of the political chattering class was peals of laughter. Surely even Republicans wouldn’t sink so low as to nominate a thrice-married repeat adulterer who claims to be a Christian while engaging in very un-Christlike bullying, and whose only job real experience is being on TV a lot? Oh, wait. The grim reality is that of the Republican names being floated for a 2028 …  ( 7 min )

Today we’re listening to Pete Namlook, a German guitarist and electronic musician from Frankfurt.

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

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

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 )

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

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

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 )

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

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

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 )

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

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 )

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 )

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 )

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 )

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 )

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

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

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

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 )

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

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

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

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There are a number of very obvious reasons why Cleveland Browns fans might boo Deshaun Watson, all of which are a matter of public record and none of which Watson can really afford to concern himself with. It is a requirement of his extremely difficult job that Watson must maintain a towering and preposterous level of self-belief, a load-bearing faith that must be strong enough, which is to say unreasonable and unreasoning enough, to withstand any and every possible failure or humiliation. Being a NFL quarterback is just too difficult to do with any other mindset, and while that work is not really made easier in any meaningful way when it follows the absolute certainty that the man under center is the protagonist of reality and the hero of every story in which he might figure, Watson is no…  ( 26 min )

The Seattle Mariners have reached the stage of a busted season where they are just hunting around for reasons to smile. This was a 90-win team last season, one that came within a George Springer dinger of advancing to the franchise's first ever World Series. Now they are crud. More specifically they are stuck three games back of the resurgent Houston damned Astros in their division; a couple of games back of the final American League wild card with four teams ahead of them; six games below a .500 record, with a Mets-like run differential; and their best player is having a campaign every bit as remarkable for its historic suckitude as his 2025 breakout was for its excellence. The Mariners are alive, in a very technical sense, but it's a grim, degraded kind of life, one calling out for the s…  ( 21 min )

about the relative efficiency of setq, setq-default, setopt, and customize-set-variable. Cherti justifies this concern on their effect on Emacs startup time but according to well established Irreal dicta this doesn’t matter because we seldom restart Emacs so a few seconds more or less simply don’t matter. Oddly, there are some people who pay no attention to Irreal dicta and who obsess about every millisecond—Cherti’s term—of Emacs startup time. For those people and those who worry about execution times in general, Cherti’s post is very useful and explains why some of those commands are faster than others. The crux of the matter is that defcustom can include a setter method that can be arbitrarily complex. Cherti has a nice example of this that will help you understand what’s going on. Cherti says that very often there’s no reason to invoke that setter method during startup and that setq or setq-default is faster and just as useful. Commands like setopt and customize-set-variable always call the setter method so they may be slower. Cherti’s examples show how to avoid unnecessary bottlenecks. Cherti also shows how even the :custom keyword in use-package can trigger the setter methods of those variables and gives some workarounds. The main problem is that it’s hard to know when you can avoid the setter method and when you can’t. Sometimes, you just have to read the source code to figure it out. Obsessing about startup times aside, it’s nice to have an explanation of what these commands do and how their use might affect run time. Cherti’s post is relatively short and well worth a minute or two to read.  ( 5 min )

Abdallah Maouche (heiwiper) (heiwiper/emacs.d, Gitlab, Github) 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 J'ai essayé de corriger la transcription, mais je crois qu'il y a encore beaucoup d'erreurs, donc n'hésitez pas à m'envoyer un message. La transcription un peu corrigée Details 0:01 Introduction Sacha: Ok, vous êtes en direct. Prot: On a le nouveau lien ou c'est le même ? Sacha: C'est le même lien que Google Meet mais je vais copier le nouveau lien. C'est YouTube.com, sachactube... C'est difficile. Oui. Prot: Oui. Sacha: Je ne peux pas poster le chat. Donc, je vai…  ( 22 min )

The ispell package serves as the underlying interface in Emacs for communicating with external spell checking programs. Building upon this, the flyspell package is a built-in minor mode that provides on-the-fly spell checking. It highlights misspelled words as you type and offers interactive corrections. This article presents a practical configuration for Emacs that sets up ispell to use Aspell for both programming and standard text editing. Additionally, it addresses a common issue for developers. While writing code, variables such as filepath or buffername in comments or docstrings are often flagged as errors, generating visual noise in your programming buffers. This article contains a specific configuration to prevent these false positives. Setting the backend and dictionary The first s…  ( 9 min )

[request] flags:--- replies:0 role:maintainer  ( 2 min )

A few more thoughts on the collapse of US-Canadian trade negotiations and the over-the-top US predation that led to it....  ( 11 min )

a trade war, but with morons

FoxTrot by Bill Amend | August 23, 2026  ( 12 min )

The Eiffel Tower is one of the most recognizable landmarks on Earth. Standing proudly above Paris since 1889, it attracts  ( 9 min )

Erasure – “Chains of Love”: The Joyful 1988 Anthem of Love, Freedom, and Acceptance Few synth-pop songs from the 1980s  ( 9 min )

by Divya 2026 August 23 emacs canvas Bad apple playing on the top right, a 2d rainbow growing box on the left. The bottom contains: dots 3d demo, pendulum, a bouncing ball. Table of Contents 1. Frequently Asked Questions 2. What Is a Canvas? 3. Creating and Using A Canvas 3.1. Canvas via Emacs Lisp Only 3.2. Canvas via Dynamic Modules 4. Demonstrations 4.1. A Bouncing Ball 4.2. Chaotic Double Pendulum 4.3. Points in 3D Space 5. Conclusion & Further Work 6. Canvas Applications & Resources merged to upstream GNU Emacs. If you have been following my Mastodon, this was a journey that took us ~8 months. But finally we have, in core Emacs, a feature that I desperately desired in early 2025 when I was starting the Emacs Reader project: a way to update and manipulate images in Emacs without…  ( 17 min )

In my last article on AI agents I talked about using Claude Code AI agent. This is an easy-to-set-up commercial solution that gives excellent results. The risk is that the pricing may not remain as affordable as it is today, and as a result I wanted to find an alternative solution that insulates me from changing commercials. There are a number of open-weight models that one may download and run locally on your home computer. Some of the benefits are:  ( 6 min )

Every millisecond counts during Emacs initialization. A potential performance cost in modern Emacs configurations is defaulting to setopt, customize-set-variable, or the use-package :custom keyword when a direct assignment with setq is sufficient. What is the difference between setq, setopt, customize-set-variable, and use-package :custom? The setq function directly assigns a value to a variable, making it the fastest way to set a variable. (FYI: This is one of the reasons why the author uses setq in the minimal-emacs.d project.) The setopt, customize-set-variable, and use-package :custom functions can be slower than setq. Depending on the variable, they can: Call the variable’s defcustom :set function. Validate the value against the variable’s declared type. In some cases, load the librar…  ( 9 min )

interesting post about previewing an Org file in your browser. If you’re like me your first thought is probably, “That’s easy. Just export the Org file to HTML and display it right from the Org export dispatcher.” I do exactly that to preview my blog posts. I simply type Ctrl+c Ctrl+e h o and my post appears in my browser. Of course, it doesn’t look exactly like the final product because it uses the default Org CSS instead of the WordPress theme that you see on the Irreal site. And that’s exactly the point. Ridenour has his own opinion on how his markup should be formatted. Five years ago, I wrote about how to to add your own CSS formatting to an Org file when you export it to HTML but those methods all required adding some text to the Org file. Ridenour’s method does all that in a function that he can call to export his Org file to the browser. The process is pretty much the same as using the export dispatcher except that he gets to have his preferred CSS applied to the output. The other advantage of his method is the he arranges for the automatic removal of the generated HTML file. The export dispatcher method requires that you delete the files manually. I do that periodically using Embark, which makes it easy but I still have to remember to do it. If you’re looking for a fast and easy way to preview an Org file in your browser, take a look at Ridenour’s post.  ( 5 min )

This month’s Emacs Asia-Pacific (APAC) virtual meetup is scheduled for Saturday, August 22, 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 )

You’ve probably seen that Canadian PM Mark Carney has walked away from trade talks with the US. That has led...  ( 9 min )

This week, I had to write CSS for a design where a list of elements got a bit of extra design treatment if there were at least three nested items inside it. Item 1 Item 2 Item 1 Item 2 Item 3 Item 4 I really wanted to avoid using JavaScript to add/remove an extra class, and the the :has() pseudo-class and the nth-* pseudo-class made it shockingly easy!  ( 20 min )

Natalie boards it, Dear Leader affords it, and so much more...

The story of rock and roll does not begin in the 1950s. It doesn’t really begin in the 1940s either.  ( 11 min )

Led Zeppelin’s story is one of the most remarkable in rock music. It begins with a guitarist whose previous band  ( 18 min )

There are plenty of great film composers. There are composers who can write beautiful melodies, composers who can create  ( 12 min )

The idea of a supergroup sounds better on paper than it usually does in practice. Take several famous musicians, put  ( 14 min )

The 1980s were supposed to be the decade of the new. MTV was exploding. Synthesizers were everywhere. New wave, punk,  ( 17 min )

It has been a while since I have written about how I use Emacs/LaTeX to generate lesson notes for my students. Quite a lot has happened during that time. One of the main game changers has been the advancements in “AI” technology. Over the next few articles I intend to describe my journey as I navigate this technology and apply it to my teaching practice. Chat Bots Having decided to dip my toe in the water, I signed up to two of the prevalent players in this space, being Google Gemini and Anthropic Claude. My early experiments with ChatGPT had led to some disappointing results, where it emphatically tried to convince me that the value of Euler’s constant is 1.5. Since then, the technology has advanced significantly, and I thought it worthwhile to try again.  ( 6 min )

A federal judge tried to halt the construction of this hideous addition to the White House, but that got in the way of Roberts letting the president do whatever the hell he wants.  ( 76 min )

Professors have called it a “dystopian academic nightmare.”  ( 65 min )

It's August, you know the drill: Frances Tiafoe's tennis season is just getting started. North American hard court summer is his wake-up. I once asked him if he could figure out how to bottle up the confidence of playing on home turf and tap into it elsewhere on tour, and his response was—paraphrasing here—nah, I'm just never gonna feel like that in Barcelona. Fair enough. Got to respect this level of self-knowledge. Though he's barely weeks removed from wrist surgery, Tiafoe now seems to be picking up his game as he inches towards New York, site of his greatest accomplishments to date. And heading into the softest U.S. Open draw in recent memory, the 28-year-old American might be peaking at an opportune moment. Heading into the summer, Tiafoe's 2026 season had been unglamorous but steady,…  ( 23 min )

Some people are fans of the Los Angeles Chargers. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the Los Angeles Chargers. This 2026 Defector NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far here. Your team: Los Angeles Chargers. https://twitter.com/ChargersCountry/status/2086143238252183978  ( 40 min )

Welcome to the Defector College Football Watch Guide, where Israel Daramola and Ray Ratto will tell you which of the weekend’s college football games are worth giving a crap about. It's almost fall! School is back in session and football is just about back. The 2026 college football season will be here next week, and the sport is as chaotic as ever. NIL money is flying, coaches are forever off their rockers, and the NCAA is holding on for dear life to a system that is crumbling in real time. The offseason has provided its own drama, in between transfer portal chicanery and recruiting violations. In the run-up to Week 0, we wanted to go over some of our favorite stories of the offseason, as a sort of pre-preview of things to know about and keep an eye on ahead of the upcoming season. Lane Kiffin Watch  ( 36 min )

People sometimes wonder what editors do. It's a fair question to ask, given how difficult it is to read a column or blog post and be able to discern exactly how much influence an editor did or did not have over the final product. It's easy to assume that editors don't do much at all, actually, and just skim a hardworking writer's drafts before publication. Thankfully, there are guys like now former Seattle Times columnist Matt Calkins out there to remind us of how much value editors can provide to their publications. Calkins spent 11 years covering sports for the Seattle Times, and announced his resignation from the paper yesterday on Substack. His stated reason for resigning is that his editors refused to publish a column he wrote about anti-trans protestors who gathered outside the arena before a recent Seattle Storm game. After interviewing one of the protestors, he was inspired to write: One of them was 16-year-old Ahnaleigh Wilson, who’d lost to a biological male in a track and field race in eighth grade and was holding a sign reading “Thank You Sophie for Speaking up for Girls!” I didn’t know if I was going to write something at that point, but after she allegedly got cussed out by a Storm co-owner during the game, I felt like I had to weigh in. One thing Wilson emphasized to me at the rally was that she wasn’t anti-trans. Another student-athlete named Frances Staudt — who said she’s endured daily verbal abuse after refusing to play against a biological boy in a basketball game — echoed Wilson’s sentiment. So that was the thesis of my column (which you can read here) — that supporting the separation of biological females and males doesn’t automatically make you transphobic, so let’s stop throwing those labels around.  ( 22 min )

Before Tadej Pogacar became a hypertuned killer on a bike, before he won any of his record-tying five Tours de France, before he was able to push the boundaries of the volume and variety of races that any single rider could win, he first had to break through. He did so seven years ago at the 2019 Vuelta a España, wherein he won three stages and finished third overall despite coming to Spain to learn how to race and to support Fabio Aru. Pogacar's talent was as obvious as his inexperience, and that Vuelta remains a fascinating snapshot of the state of sport right before he redefined it: rim brakes, Nairo Quintana, a version of Pogacar that didn't know what he was doing. We'll never see that stuff again, though we will get Pogi at the Vuelta for the second and perhaps final time. Why does the Vuelta matter so much to Pogacar? There is not much more left for him to win. It can be a difficult memory exercise, but the world's best cyclists haven't won like Pogacar has for at least four decades. Guys used to specialize, or at least be burdened by the variety of terrain. But Pogacar has won every major stage race except the Tour of the Basque Country. He has won every monument except Paris-Roubaix. He has everything: five Tours, 13 Monuments, a span and breadth of career-wide victory unseen since the days of steel frames. Pogacar is a student of the sport, which has fueled a completist streak. He will do his best to win the Tour every year, and he'll usually succeed, but it's the other stuff that intrigues. Pogacar rocked up to Romandie and the Tour de Suisse this year and smoked the field. The Vuelta is the only Grand Tour left for him to win.  ( 25 min )

It feels like the World Cup just ended, and yet somehow, some way, the Premier League is already back. England's top flight kicks off on Friday with defending champi—oops, I mean attacking champion; sorry Mikel—Arsenal taking on newly promoted Championship champion Coventry City in North London, before everyone else takes the field over the weekend. It's a quick turnaround after the six-week odyssey that ended with Donald Trump trying to insert himself in Spain's trophy celebration, but that's life in soccer's grossly bloated calendar. As someone who cares about player fitness and the quality of play, I'm concerned that this is going to be a messy season. As someone who misses watching games every weekend, I could not be more excited. Fittingly, the Premier League itself is a real mess right now. Arsenal should feel confident about its chances to repeat, but there's no telling where any of the other 19 teams might finish. (OK, well, there's one team that will almost certainly finish 20th, but I'll get to that later.) There's been a ton of upheaval in England ahead of this season, and with the transfer window not closing until Sept. 1, more could be on the way. With uncertainty thick in the air like London fog, rather than previewing every team one by one, it felt more prudent to take a wider look at the league. I've picked five storylines that will take center stage starting with Friday's season-opening kickoff. These aren't the only riveting plot lines to follow, but they are ones that will go a long way toward deciding who wins the title, who rises, who falls, and who ends up on their asses, covered in shame. Speaking of, let's start with that most volatile of positions, the new Premier League manager.  ( 60 min )

Not Your Usual Out of Office Note

INSIDE: Todd Blanche ... Eric Swalwell ... Tina Peters

oh Lordy, there are letters!

Since Markwayne Mullin took over the Department of Homeland Security in March, Immigration and Custom Enforcement has dialed back on the trolling. Gone are the videos and memes, posted regularly under the leadership of Mullin’s predecessor Kristi Noem, that mocked detainees for crying and celebrated ICE agents for being recklessly violent. There have been no more showy “invasions” of cities like Minneapolis or Los Angeles, as Mullin has aimed to draw less attention to ICE’s incompetent and legally dubious methods. His strategy has largely worked in getting the unpopular agency’s name out of the headlines. But that doesn’t mean ICE has given up on fulfilling Donald Trump and Stephen Miller’s cruel fantasies. The xenophobic Miller agenda is still being treated as the vanguard in White House …  ( 7 min )

Today we’re listening to K Wata, an American electronic musician from Seattle.

Phish’s performance on November 29, 1997, at the Worcester Centrum Centre in Worcester, Massachusetts, is widely regarded as one of  ( 6 min )

There is something undeniably cool about seeing an old rock band walk onto a stage decades after its glory days.  ( 14 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 )

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 )

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 )

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 )

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 )

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 )

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 )

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

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

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

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

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 )

Like most Americans enduring the horrors of everyday existence, I’ve been eagerly awaiting an uprising by nonhuman creatures.  Well, great news. The uprising is upon us, and the creatures are beavers! A string of beaver attacks in Maryland – a state not known for beaver-on-human violence – has put swimmers and boaters on notice and shown the rest of America what the future holds. Beavers, beavers everywhere. The revolution has begun. Since July 26, the state has endured three beaver attacks. Also, according to the Maryland Department of Natural Resources, “a group that was canoeing reported a beaver attempting to charge one of their boats.” Clearly, the beavers were inspired by the military prowess of Iberian orca whales that for years have been ramming boats in the Strait of Gibraltar. A…  ( 14 min )

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

This is your TPM evening briefing.

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

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

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

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

I wanted to follow up on my post about Pat Ruffini’s deep dive about the accuracy of Senate race polling...  ( 12 min )

If you’ve been online in the last few days you’ve undoubtedly been exposed to Natalie Harp Discourse (NHD), the phenomenon...  ( 7 min )

Democrats say there are “conflicts of interest.” Could that be an understatement?  ( 66 min )

Even the little victories matter.  ( 71 min )

You think these greedy crazies would actually do something good for the environment?  ( 66 min )

It’s been a summer of bad news for anybody with favorable feelings (me!) about Texas Tech. The New York Times joined the pigpile this week with a feature story whose subhead said the school had become a “a dystopian academic nightmare.” As if this year’s athletics debacles weren’t nausea-inducing enough. How can a guy (me!) root for a place like this?  The Times piece mulled the aggressive missteps taken by Brandon Creighton, the low-aiming and cartoonishly evil chancellor of the Texas Tech University System, while altering the curriculum to suit his radically conservative agenda. Like generating fear among the faculty by sending sloppy AI-generated reports and scary memos that told professors which specific lessons they’re going to have to stop teaching for being too left-leaning, some of…  ( 23 min )

Some people are fans of the Pittsburgh Steelers. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the Pittsburgh Steelers. This 2026 Defector NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far here. Your team: Ctrl-V.  ( 50 min )

Talk about a load-bearing hyphen. After a half-season of half-threatened retirement and full-frenzy speculation, the status quo simply continues: As the Formula 1 summer break comes to a close, Red Bull Racing and Max Verstappen announced before Verstappen's home race that he has re-signed—not resigned!—with the team for four more years, extending his contract through 2030. This is the least interesting outcome of F1's purported silly season, though it is still somehow notable thanks to the culture of clear communication (read: complaining) in the sport. Verstappen has not been quiet about his displeasure with this year's regulations; that his team had significant early-season struggles obviously factored into his annoyance. Thus, the speculation began. Perhaps Verstappen would go to another team. Perhaps Verstappen would simply and most dramatically express his displeasure by retiring from the formula entirely. The leap from regulation displeasure to a full retirement was, in no small part, a self-fueled rumor. Retiring at age 28 would be shocking for any F1 driver, much less an all-time great, though Verstappen has been vocal from the start of his career that he would leave the sport as soon as his interest waned. Verstappen was regularly moonlighting in GT3 racing and praising the older-school style of racing there. After the Canadian Grand Prix, Verstappen declared that another year, should the regulations not be modified, was "just mentally not doable for me."  ( 20 min )

I don't get nervous before recording episodes of The Distraction, and was surprised to notice during our more recent live episodes that even the usual bite of anxiety which comes with going onstage was just a fairly mild nibble. Some of this is because Drew does a lot of the annoying work required to make the podcast happen, but most of it owes to how comfortable I've become doing this show with him and for the audience that followed us from The Deadcast over to The Distraction, for the past [number redacted] years. That also explains why I was so anxious about recording this one, which will be the penultimate episode of the show. This was one I didn't really know how to do, until it was time to do it. Then it was easy. That's the thing with getting to talk to a friend for an hour every week for so long—around six years together doing this show, more than a year doing The Deadcast together at Deadspin, and much longer than that for Drew. It's easy and fun in a way that doesn't quite align with the idea of "work," even when it's a little bit sad. Much of this episode is about the years we've spent doing this podcast together and what it has meant to us. We also discuss the podcasts that will replace it: a new concept from Drew that will arrive in Week 1 of the NFL season, and one co-hosted by me that is a little less far along in its progress, but will be along in time.  ( 20 min )

In a kinder world, WNBA expansion teams are allowed to flail and muck about in peace for a few years before anyone pays close attention to them. But this is an unkind world, one that finds the Golden State Valkyries second in the standings and headed to the playoffs for the second time in their two years of existence. You can understand why a Toronto Tempo fan might have been hoping for something more in the team’s inaugural season. For the last time the Tempo won a game, you’ll need to go back to July 12, when they hosted the New York Liberty and eked out a victory, 93-91, despite leading by 20 points late in the third quarter. (Frankly, beating the Liberty shouldn’t even count.) Toronto’s 93-82 loss to the Mystics on Wednesday night extended their losing streak to 12 games and dropped their record to 10-25 with nine left to play. What’s gone wrong? By typical expansion-team standards, nothing really. But it did seem like the Tempo assembled their team with higher ambitions this past offseason. Unlike expansion classmate Portland or Golden State last year, the Tempo made big plays in the free-agent market, signing Marina Mabrey and Brittney Sykes to two-year max contracts, a multimillion-dollar backcourt to inaugurate the new CBA. When their offer-sheet play for Washington Mystics center Shakira Austin didn’t work, they also gave a $1 million contract to the expansion-coded Temi Fagbenle, who played for Golden State last season. “How quickly are you all looking to compete in a league that continues to grow in this golden era of talent?” ESPN’s Malika Andrews asked Tempo GM Monica Wright Rogers after the expansion draft in April. “The goal is to do that right away,” Wright Rogers answered.  ( 23 min )

We had moderate hopes for Tugboat Wilkinson in his major-league debut, just because his nickname and carriage merge so harmoniously. But because the San Francisco Giants clearly hate all of you, we didn't get nearly enough tug, or boat. Wilkinson, whose real name is Matt, is only the second Tugboat in major league history after Thurman Munson, and he comes by his nickname with the fullest honesty. He is listed at 6-foot-1, 250 pounds, and has the front porch to suggest that the second number may be only an estimate, but that's not the hook. It's not even the fact that his best pitch has the 1934-styled nickname "invisiball."  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nP2U7x_w7_k  ( 20 min )

Olivia Miles made her first bucket of Wednesday night's game against the Golden State Valkyries early in the first quarter. It was a pull-up jumper from the left elbow, and the broadcast camera zoomed in on her face as she backpedaled down the court. After a moment of thought, she said something to herself: "They can't fucking guard me." Perhaps it was a needed reminder. The Valkyries, after all, boast the WNBA's most ferocious defense, and just two nights previous had reminded everyone how disruptive they can be for a young, dynamic guard. Paige Bueckers left Monday night's game against the Valks with 21 points, but she needed 18 shots to get there, turned the ball over seven times, and was minus-10 in an eight-point loss. That's life playing against the Valks, who defend high up the court, never stop swarming, and can unleash Gabby Willams and Veronica Burton on any opposing guard who looks too comfortable. Except for Miles. Aside from a twisted ankle that forced her to the bench for the game's final minutes, Miles was about as comfortable as someone enjoying a post-meal snooze in their favorite recliner. As soon as the ball was tipped she went about extracting all the drama from this highly anticipated game between the league's top seeds, controlling the game with her playmaking and scoring. The Lynx won, 77-66, and never trailed for a second. Miles missed two shots all game, finished with 20 points and seven assists in 30 minutes, and only turned it over twice.  ( 19 min )

Last week, Deepseek released DSH, an agent harness with very interesting approach. The same pitch used by VS Code and Eclipse RPC (2024): “everything is a plugin” but this time it’s a bit different. Even the agent loop itself is a plugin. In practice, you extend the tool by just prompting. (Reminds me of an old post of mine where I said that Emacs is like a modern “Magic Lamp”) It allows maximum customizability and also opens many possibilities. In the official article, they showcased adding snake game to the main interface. Pretty cool! Around the same time, I spent a little time playing with the pi-coding-agent on Emacs and was thinking that now if I want, I probably could extend Emacs indefinitely by just prompting. Weird synchronicity. Anyway, here are some useful links if you want to know more: DSH announcement deepseek-harness repo Cordis paper — A Programming Paradigm for Spatiotemporal Composability pi-coding-agent.el — the Emacs frontend I was playing with  ( 1 min )

release of Casual 3.0. There are now 26 modules in the Casual suite but this release is about providing an easier setup for the suite. Prior to this release, each module had to be set up separately. As Choi says, that made sense when there were just a few modules but it has become increasingly burdensome as the number of modules grew. The new procedure is simply to call casual-init and all the module’s you want to use are initialized. The modules you’re using is determined by a set of hook functions that can configured with the Emacs Customize utility. You simple check off which modules you want to use and call casual-init. That’s all there is to it. You can learn more about this in the Casual User Manual. If you’ve been following along on Choi’s blog—or to a lessor extent on Irreal—you know that there are a lot of different types of modules, not all of which you might want installed. The Customize interface is an easy way to specify which ones you want. The latest version is available on MELPA and NonGNU ELPA. The nice thing about the modules is that they are all invoked with the same key sequence, Ctrl+o by default, so you don’t have to remember a bunch of different bindings. Once you invoke it, Casual brings up a Transient menu appropriate for the current major mode Casual is a nice suite that make it easier to navigate Emacs applications that you don’t use often and for which you haven’t internalized all the bindings. Take a look at the user manual if you want to know more.  ( 5 min )

[request] flags:--- replies:0 topic:org-colview  ( 4 min )

INSIDE: Greg Abbott ... Christian Castro ... Joyce Beatty

fix the country you broke, asshole

Back in March, I shared a bit of a sad update on my unhoused friends. Cops raided their camp and took everything they owned. Within the week… Mike had relapsed Manny got arrested for stealing copper Ron was all by himself But last Friday, I got an amazing phone call from Mike! Sometime over the winter, he checked himself into rehab. He’s several months clean now. He’s doing therapy to address the trauma that’s caused him to use.  ( 21 min )

To combine archives safely, I had to start by understanding the `tar` and `gzip` file formats. I learnt about tape drives, patent laws, and end-of-file markers.  ( 4 min )

Today we’re listening to Duffy x Uhlmann, the duo of guitarists Meg Duffy and Gregory Uhlmann.

The alternative rock explosion of the 1990s produced an incredible number of memorable bands. Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Hole, Garbage,  ( 9 min )

There are certain songs that seem to define an entire musical attitude without ever becoming conventional radio hits in the  ( 12 min )

Two years ago I was a skeptic about GenAI. Now Emacs has become my agent cockpit. Harness My favorite harness right now is hermes-agent, which is probably the “emacs of agent harnesses” with how easy it is to configure and extend, while not being “just an agent harness.” Hermes supports messaging gateways, so you have first-class support for mobile as well. All you have to do is /handoff to continue your session via a mobile messaging app. To interact with hermes via emacs, I’m using emacs-hermes, which is available via NonGNU ELPA. Sometimes I also use codex via emacs-codex-ide. But it’s not as token-efficient as my hermes setup, and it’s not where I am most productive. Unlike most harnesses, hermes supports codex native compaction, which is the “killer” feature of cod…  ( 5 min )

Journelly and many other useful applications—a lot of them Emacs based—has a new post about a basic Emacs operation: changing focus to another window. Ramírez and I basically agree about things like this although he stubbornly refuses to admit the superiority of my method of indicating the window that has focus. Now he has a slightly different problem. For technical reasons that you can read about in his post, he wants to be able to switch to a window in another frame. The other-window command, bound to Ctrl+x o by default, doesn’t consider windows in other frames but, of course, there’s a command for that: next-window-any-frame. That turned out to be exactly what Ramírez needed and he simply bound it to Meta+o, which is where he had other-window bound. Like Ramírez, I seldom use more than one frame so I didn’t know about this command. If you often have more than one frame going, you may find it useful if you’re not already using it. If you’re an ace-window user, it will consider all frames by default but you can adjust this with aw-scope.  ( 5 min )

This is your TPM evening briefing.

Maybe they’re just envious that Natalie Harp has the log-in to his Truth Social account.  ( 64 min )

Senate candidate Angie Nixon has ties to Democratic Socialists. Gubernatorial candidate David Jolly is a former Republican. Can they play nice for the greater good?  ( 65 min )

So these psychos are allowed to just pull over anyone they want without facing any consequences?  ( 61 min )

The collapse of the steel industry was supposed to kill the Steel City, but my hometown never rusted away. Now it’s having a major moment. On a recent trip home, I investigated how the yinzers pulled it off.  ( 97 min )

96 Aboard Newsletter: Is AI Entering Its NFT Era? 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-…  ( 10 min )

TL;DR Why building an app over the weekend isn't the same as building enterprise software I’ve noticed an interesting gap opening up over the last six months. It isn’t really a gap in technology. It’s a gap in what different people think software engineering actually is. The conversation usually starts the same way. A non-techie, maybe an executive, tells me about something they’ve built over the weekend. Sometimes it’s a chatbot. Sometimes it’s an internal workflow. Sometimes it’s a surprisingly polished application that solves a real business problem. They’re excited, and they should be. Twelve months ago they probably couldn’t have built it at all. Then comes the question. “If AI can do this now, why aren’t our engineering teams delivering ten times faster?” It’s a perfectly reasonable…  ( 5 min )

Jim Highsmith recognizes that effective writing from a practitioner is a style distinct from academic writing or thought-leadership content. It's a style that I advocate, and my contributors mostly follow. Jim decided it was important to give it a name, and identify what makes it distinctive. more…  ( 5 min )

Some people are fans of the Green Bay Packers. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the Green Bay Packers. This 2026 Defector NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far here. Your team:  ( 57 min )

Time to drop a little summer recipe. Take some lesbian 20-somethings—like at least 60 of them—and drop them in a group chat. At the center of it all you’ll need a leader, someone who commands attention or fear, and could be the object of everyone's affection under the right circumstances. Next, you’ll need a heat wave and a stacked events calendar: think line dancing, body shots, and bottle service. Now is not the time to be afraid to go out three times over the course of a weekend. This all may sound intense, but maybe not inherently chaotic. Now ask yourself how liberal you could be with sharing your location with multiple people on an ongoing basis. Finally, what if being caught up in the whirlwind only made you come to the conclusion that the distinctions between platonic and romantic are a false binary, especially when it comes to smooching. Secrets and messes? That’s just part of plan. Get ready for one of the wildest stories in the history of Normal Gossip. Don’t be afraid to take notes! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ykuhbgkT54g  ( 16 min )

How many runs did the Seattle Mariners lose by in Tuesday night's game against Brewers in Milwaukee? And how many runs did the Mariners themselves score? Don't concern yourself with these matters, this silly fixation on who won the game, and by how much. The true connoisseur understands that witnessing something new every single day is a blessing, and boy did the Mariners—and Brewers, but mostly, if we are being honest, the Mariners—show everyone something unique and special. Because the Mariners are never the sort of team to leave their fans hanging for a prolonged period of time, they began delivering in the bottom of the first inning. With two outs, William Contreras hit a single to short left field. Milwaukee's third-base coach sent Jake Bauers to home from second, where, as slow-motion replay revealed, Bauers effectively, if not necessarily intentionally, executed a two-handed punch to remove the ball from Mariners catcher Cal Raleigh's mitt. Thus ensued a mad scramble back to the plate, conveyed here via freeze frame: The angles of approach, the potential energy captured in the players' body language, the catcher's match left strewn across the ground ... There is beauty in everything, even suffering.  ( 22 min )

The 2026 LIV Golf season will end this weekend at LIV Golf Indianapolis. The 4 Aces GC fellows have a narrow lead over Ripper GC in the team championship, which I guess they will uhh look to maintain or whatever. Don't worry about it. That team title was supposed to be decided the final weekend of August in Plymouth, Mich., but that event has now been officially cancelled, as was long anticipated. The stupid, broke league simply lacks the money to run it. The payouts for the finale will be significantly reduced. Without the outrageous support of the Saudi Public Investment Fund, LIV Golf cannot continue to dump huge prize money into its noisy, broadly three-quarter-assed events. The bonus pool for the player championship, per Golf Magazine, will be $10 million, down from $30 million in 2025. The bonus pool for the team championship—an utterly inconsequential competition to every living creature on Earth except for the handful of people in line to win a share of the prize—will be $30 million, down from $50 million in 2025. The bonus pool for the LIV Indianapolis event, separate from the championships it will decide, has also been cut in half. That's still a lot of cash to hand out for 54 holes of golf. It's mighty expensive to run a golf promotion designed to compete directly with the PGA Tour. It made sense to pour grotesque sums into this mess when it was hoping to meaningfully disrupt men's professional golf; now that the PGA Tour has shrugged off the incursion and LIV Golf has settled in as nothing more than its own stupid tagline, $80 million in year-end bonuses starts to look more precisely like what it is, which is an enormous waste of money.  ( 25 min )

Welcome back to Minor Dilemmas, where a member of Defector's Parents Council will answer your questions on surviving family life. Have a question? Email us at minordilemmas@defector.com. This week, Chris answers a question about being summarily rejected by one's own flesh-and-blood.  ( 47 min )

The bases are loaded in the bottom of the second. Mets shortstop Francisco Lindor, with his beautiful hair and crisp terrifying swing, is at the plate. The pitch from the Padres' Robbie Ray is a 92 mph sinker that he leaves up on the outer edge of the zone. Lindor stings it to the opposite field, and the ball towers up and out toward the right-field corner, where he is waiting. He is always waiting. Fernando Tatis Jr., the king of the Robbin' Padres, with his flowing hair and his big face, does not fear the long ball. He is its god. Already, in this game, he has hit a home run, but that does not mean he will allow others the pleasure. No, he is the home run's master. He sees the ball off Lindor's bat threatening to become a grand slam, and he tracks it. His legs race, his head craned toward the ball, his eyes on it. That is his ball. He knows it.  ( 17 min )

On the cover of Slam magazine's October 1998 issue, Chamique Holdsclaw wore a New York Knicks jersey, NBA basketball in hand. Right next to the forward from Queens was a sneaky inversion of the more common question: "Is The NBA Ready For Chamique Holdsclaw?" She was the first female athlete to appear on the magazine's cover, and as former Slam editor-in-chief Tony Gervino would recall in a 2024 essay, the editors were intentionally being a little provocative. Reader reception was not as negative as expected, although Pat Summitt, Holdsclaw's college coach at the University of Tennessee, called Gervino to chew him out about how her player could have lost her NCAA eligibility if she had accepted the Knicks jersey she was wearing for the shoot. Growing up in Astoria Houses, Holdsclaw said she had to have her friends advocate for her to be able to play basketball at the local Boys and Girls Club. She went on to have a terrific high school career at Christ the King in Queens, followed by more of the same at the collegiate level. Holdsclaw was entering her fourth season with the Lady Volunteers at the time of the Slam cover, and had dominated the college game as the program won three consecutive championships. She remains the all-time leading scorer and rebounder in NCAA women's tournament history, recording totals of 470 points and 197 rebounds. For Holdsclaw, who was part of the 2026 class inducted into the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame this past weekend, the Slam cover wasn’t actually asking if she would go play against the men. It didn’t really matter what the boys were doing. The WNBA was two years old and was looking for more star power. Slam, among others, predicted she would be the one to fill those shoes, calling her "the future of women's basketball."  ( 33 min )

For most women who play baseball in the United States, playing America's pastime in a professional league has been little more than a dream. Yet for a select group of women, that dream is becoming a reality.  The Women's Pro Baseball League began its inaugural season on Aug. 1, with the four-team league playing all of its games in Springfield, Ill., where dozens of the 120 women who were selected in the league's draft play pro ball. It is the most anticipated women's pro baseball league since the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League disbanded in 1954.  But for many players who were selected in the draft, which took place in November, the dream of getting paid to play baseball in the United States remains deferred.  ( 59 min )

I accidentally logged into baty.blog's admin and said, "SQUIRREL!", and spent time taking another look at the site. Who knows, I might start using it again. Baty.blog runs on Pure Blog, by Kev Quirk. When Kev first announced Pure Blog, I (of course) tried it immediately. We got along well, right off the bat. Pure Blog is written in PHP, so it's simple to install nearly anywhere. It uses plain-text Markdown files instead of a database. It did all the basics that a blogging CMS should do. It aimed to be simple-but-not-too-simple. At the time, I found it to be a little too simple, so I abandoned it, meaning to check on it again, later. It's later. A lot has changed since I last used v1.2.0. Kev's been busy! Anyway, things looked stable and it had gotten important fixes and updates, so I upgraded both Pure Blog and my Pure Comments instance. I wired up comment emails, since Pure Comments can now use regular ol' SMTP (it used to be only AWS SES, gross). I have cleaned up the layout I was using so it at least looks presentable. It seems I'm once again posting to baty.blog. For now. Don't forget, there's an RSS feed. ✍️ Reply by email  ( 1 min )

INSIDE: Angie Nixon ... Dan Sullivan(s) ... Harmeet Dhillon

what’s all this about hiding in a trunk and living in a locker room?

I’m a huge fan of the Buy Nothing Project, a movement that promotes the sharing and giving economy over one where people buy ever more shit. The spirit of Buy Nothing is sharing with your neighbors. It’s wonderful. But as it’s popularity in my area has grown, I’ve noticed that some folks have started using it as a way to just offload shit they’re too lazy to drive to a donation spot or throw away.  ( 20 min )

Jon Ossoff certainly struck a nerve. At a campaign rally on Sunday, the Democratic senator from Georgia declared that Donald Trump “doesn’t want to do the job” of president but would instead prefer to “travel with Natalie on their apparently defenseless flying palace gifted by the emir of Qatar.” The crowd went nuts, showing how much people, at least on the left, have been noticing that Trump goes everywhere with a 35-year-old blonde aide named Natalie Harp, whom New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman has deemed his “human binky.” The White House erupted in rage, furious that Ossoff had called out the walking security blanket provided to the president. Because there’s not way around it: Having a babysitter makes the 80-year-old president look even older and weaker than he already is. The …  ( 7 min )

On today’s episode of Across the Horizon, Bob Holmes of SUSS dedicates the episode to one of his favorite labels, Centripetal Force Records.

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

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

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 )

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

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

Sydney Sweeney is an American actress and producer who has quickly become one of Hollywood’s most recognizable young stars. Born  ( 5 min )

This is your TPM evening briefing.

In my last post I mentioned this data analysis GOP pollster and consultant Pat Ruffini has put together looking at...  ( 9 min )

Today I’m going to discuss two tidbits from the world of polling. In a second post I’m going to discuss...  ( 7 min )

When Lakers majority owner Jerry Buss died in 2013, he left his 66 percent stake to six of his children, with daughter Jeanie Buss acting as the team's governor. Jerry hoped his family would hold on to the franchise, and toward the end of his life, he took financial and contractual measures that made it easier for them to do so. Naturally, after his death these six Buss children got caught up in over a decade of infighting that saw them split into three rough camps. Eldest siblings Johnny and Jim wanted to sell and cash out; in the middle, Jeanie wanted to keep running the team, and Janie followed her lead; Joey and Jesse, over 20 years younger than the rest, wanted to hang on and eventually run the team themselves, based on the tontine-like structure of the trust. Somehow all this infighting culminated in Jeanie, who had been resistant to previous suggestions of a sale, initiating the sudden 2025 sale of a majority stake to Mark Walter. That left the Busses with a 17.8 percent stake and Jeanie acting as governor until at least 2030, although that arrangement already appears to be obsolete. After Walter—who is under federal investigation—in turn sold the Lakers to Bob Iger and Josh Kushner last week, the Buss siblings saw an opportunity to sell the rest of their stake in the team, according to Monday's report from ESPN's Shams Charania. "We love the Lakers, Laker fans and will continue to support Los Angeles; but it is time to use this opportunity to move on and exit gracefully while we still can," the Buss family said in a statement. Charania helpfully clarified that Jeanie would be unable to act as governor once she owned 0 percent of the franchise, which I can confirm fails to meet the 15 percent minimum threshold.  ( 19 min )

The Arizona Diamondbacks either have an injured cleanup hitter, a truancy problem, a communications dysfunction, some mysterious and possibly sinister fourth thing, or all of the above. Well, there's a sixth possibility. They don't mind taking a beat writer for a ride now and then to preserve clubhouse tranquility. But let's take that as a given because that's what a beat writer is for: to toss under the bus when you want the driver to stop. Anyway, one of their best players, second baseman and designated hitter Ketel Marte, skipped Monday night's 11-1 loss in Boston after going through the bother of flying there from Atlanta with his teammates. This led Arizona Republic beat writer Nick Piecoro, a responsible sort with two decades of said responsibility in the job to prove it, to X this:  ( 19 min )

In Okinawa's coastal forests, brown puffballs protrude from roots of trees like unwanted warts. Although they might appear to be mushrooms, the balls are plants. To be more specific, they are fruits. To be even more specific, they are clusters of up to a million fruits that each encase a tiny seed, fruits made larger and more dazzling by their proximity to each other, fruits designed like pavé diamonds. But Balanophora fungosa, also known as fungus root, is not strange because it looks like a mushroom, or even because it has an unreasonable number of fruits. It is strange because it has no chlorophyll with which to photosynthesize, and it has no roots with which to drink water. Instead, the fungus root survives by parasitism, entrenching itself on the roots of trees. In other words, it's a freaky little plant. Petra Svetlikova, a plant researcher at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology, said as much in a statement: "It’s a fascinating example of how something so strange can evolve from an ancestor that looked like a normal plant with leaves and a normal root system." The plant in question.  ( 21 min )

Some people are fans of the Carolina Panthers. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the Carolina Panthers. This 2026 Defector NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far here. Your Team: Carolina Panthers Your 2025 record: 8-9, but not just any old 8-9. This the best 8-9 in the whole NFC South, making the Panthers division champs despite having a losing record—the bad smell that comes with its own deodorizer. Only five teams have ever achieved such a feat, and the Panthers are two of them. They also had the third-worst point difference of any division winner ever (minus-69), so the only luck they could claim as their own was their location.  ( 42 min )

This week's episode of Nothing But Respect was a really fun one. We set out to make a Broke Jumper Tip Line–focused episode, but only got to the BJTL about 50 minutes in because we had too much other good stuff to talk about with frequent guest Ock Sportello. As to that other stuff: We chatted about the Brooklyn Nets fan's experience of the Knicks title run, spent a lot of time talking about the scourge of AI rap music (read Ock's excellent review of the new Tyga album and Iz's story on Fenix Flexin), and played a game involving the new Pat McAfee album. As for the BJTL: We talked about the hoops acumen of Barack Obama and Chris Hayes (who I'm just realizing now I misidentified as Chris Haynes), and reveal a funny tip about Draymond Green's email behavior.  ( 15 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 reunions, the extinction of the hard T, dinosaurs, and more. Your letters: Dusty:  ( 49 min )

Some transphobic dickheads were again wearing XX-XY shirts at Sunday's game between the Indiana Fever and Atlanta Dream. Everyone knows what the XX-XY shirt—a truly ugly piece of merchandise made by a brand that raises money for organizations that seek to strip trans people of their rights—means when worn in public. It tells everyone that the person wearing it sees trans people not as human beings, but as targets whose very existence must be protested. It is one of the oldest and most basic forms of bigotry, the equivalent of a big sign reading, "Trans people not welcome." A league security staffer who was working the Dream game on Sunday asked the unfashionable bigots to cover their shirts, for the same reason they might ask a fan sporting the Confederate Stars and Bars to vacate the damn premises: The shirts are meant to target a specific group and make them feel unwelcome in the arena. The WNBA, however, could not abide one of its employees making this reasonable and necessary demand, and on Monday released a statement saying that the security staffer should not have asked for the shirts to be covered: The WNBA is aware of interactions at last night's game in Atlanta in which fans were asked by league security to cover their shirts. This should not have happened.  ( 17 min )

In November 2018, 29-year-old Representative-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez joined a group of 200 youth activists associated with the Sunrise Movement as they staged a protest at the office of then-House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi. They were there to urge Democratic leadership to act more quickly on issues of climate change. The period between the election and swearing-in is normally when a newly elected legislator would be getting to know their future colleagues and angling for a good committee assignment. But there was Ocasio-Cortez, the improbable candidate, the member of Democratic Socialists of America who took no corporate donor money and had no major endorsements but still managed to unseat the 10-term incumbent Joe Crowley, shaking the table before taking her oath of office, aligning herself more with the activists than the politicians. Ocasio-Cortez's win—along with those of Rashida Tlaib in Michigan, Ilhan Omar in Minnesota, and Ayanna Pressley in Massachusetts—served as a warning shot to establishment Democrats about the growing discontent with the party, especially among younger voters who yearned to see the party grow more progressive as the threats of climate disaster, student loan and healthcare debt, billionaire wealth hoarding, police violence, and MAGA Republicans loomed ever larger and put into question what kind of future they would be inheriting.  Earlier this month during an interview on ABC’s This Week, 36-year-old Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, now one of the country's most popular Democrats, who seems to be eyeing either a presidential or Senate run, was presented with a headline from The Hill which read: “Today's cautious AOC would not have endorsed the AOC of 2018.”  ( 32 min )

Since its inception, Casual required individual setup for each module it supported. This seemed fine at the start when the module count was low. Now weighing in at 26 modules, there is admittedly a lot of setup. Not anymore. Starting with the latest Casual v3.0 update, there is now a convenience command to setup all Casual modules: casual-init. Use the following Elisp to replace all the previous setup code: 1 2 (require 'casual) (casual-init) You can configure which modules to setup via the customizable hook variable casual-init-hook, a list of hook functions each associated with a module. Having a module hook function present in casual-init-hook tells casual-init to setup that module. Editing casual-init-hook is straightforward using the customize checkbox interface shown below. More information about installation and setup of Casual can be found in the Casual User Guide. Bumping to 3.0 Because the recommended setup has significantly changed, I’ve decided to bump the major version to 3.0. That said, there are no functional changes to Casual and all the prior individual setup still should work without change. For existing users of Casual, I highly recommend migrating to casual-init as it allows for removing individual setup code. A significant amount of manual testing was required to verify lazy-loading behavior in casual-init. While best effort was made to avoid unpleasant surprise, if something shows up, please file an issue to let me know. Casual v3.0 update is now available on MELPA and NonGNU ELPA. It costs money to make, enhance, and maintain Casual as ideologically free software. If you enjoy using Casual, please consider buying me a coffee to help support its development and maintenance. Thank you!  ( 1 min )

announce the release of Emacs 31.1 RC1. This is the final step before the formal release of the Emacs 31 series. Whitton remarks that the developers are hoping that RC1 will be the only release candidate. I take that as a measure of their confidence in this trial release. Unless any breaking problems pop up, we can expect the official release of 31.1 imminently. As always, we should offer up a word of thanks for the hard work of the maintainers and all the developers who have toiled so hard to bring us this latest release. If we find ourselves in the same bar as one of them, the drinks are on us.  ( 5 min )

During a recent speech, the George senator made one tiny mention of Trump’s favorite White House aide, and it clearly hit close to home  ( 68 min )

INSIDE: Sigal Chattah ... Stephen Miller ... Tina Peters

Part of the reason why I’m at Thoughtworks is because I’d like to see a software development organization founded on technical excellence as an example for the rest of the industry. The trouble is that I have little aptitude or inclination for the hard work of building such an organization. So I rely on working with people who are prepared to actually put the effort in. A key partner in all of this is Rachel Laycock, who is the global CTO of Thoughtworks. Not just is she far better than me at running a technology organization, she’s also a keen observer and connector of ideas. I’ve been urging her to write these down, even if her busy schedule makes it difficult for her to compose them into something substantial. Happily she’s starting writing “Rachel’s Ramblings” Fast, imperfect, thinking…  ( 6 min )

scenes from a performative meltdown

The album Let’s Get Free by Dead Prez came out 26 years ago. As a teen, it spoke to my angst. As a whole ass adult, its wild to look back on it and realize just how much nuance and bigger picture I missed in their lyrics. Yesterday, their song “Propaganda” came on a random playlist I was listening to… You can’t fool all the people all of the time  ( 20 min )

Finally, we’ve made it through 1997! This is my final ’97 album review, but I plan on posting the best and worst of the year in the next few weeks. I hope you enjoy the read, and thanks for time … Continue reading →  ( 20 min )

Self-portrait / Rolleiflex 2.8D STATUS: Getting rid of something every day feels really good TODO: Decide about moving the external drives back to Linux READING: "Platform Decay" by Martha Wells (Murderbot!) LISTENING: Everything by Zeal and Ardor I had a todo on my list for canceling my MagicPages subscription, so I went to do that. Seeing the Ghost version of this site running my custom theme gave me second thoughts. Remember how easy posting was with Ghost? Remember the comments, newsletters, and ActivityPub features? I caught myself before becoming too enamored with the idea, and canceled. If you use Ghost, MagicPages is a great service for hosting. My writing isn't very good. I know that. It's probably because I don't worry much about how good it is. I just write, you know? One thing, though, is that I'm kind of proud that not a single word is generated using an LLM. What would be the point of doing that? ✍️ Reply by email  ( 1 min )

Today’s mix opens with new ambient music from TUAWKI, Christopher Willits, Lara Somogyi & Rob Moose, and Cole Pulice.

Horror movies often prey on familiar fears, transforming everyday places and trusted figures into sources of terror. Few films embraced  ( 10 min )

Marked for easily reading Markdown files. Over the years, he’s added more and more features. He’s recently released Marked 3 which, if you need those features, is well worth the purchase price of $2.99/month subscription or a one-time purchase of $69.99. There are only two small things keeping me from upgrading: I don’t need any of those features — in fact, since everything I write begins as an Org mode file, I don’t really need a Markdown previewer. I teach philosophy at a small liberal arts college in a rapidly collapsing market. (defun rlr/org-export-html-to-browser () "Export the current Org buffer to a temporary HTML file in the system temp directory, open it, and then delete it when Emacs is killed." (interactive) (unless (derived-mode-p 'org-mode) (user-error "Not in an…  ( 2 min )

canvas patch has been merged upstream, very cool! I'm looking forward to seeing the kinds of experiments and tools this enables. Also, there's a release candidate for the next version of Emacs, please go try it out! Emacs 31: Emacs 31.1 RC1 is available (HN) Upcoming events (iCal file, Org): M-x Research: TBA https://m-x-research.github.io/ Wed Aug 19 0800 America/Vancouver - 1000 America/Chicago - 1100 America/Toronto - 1500 Etc/UTC - 1700 Europe/Berlin - 2030 Asia/Kolkata - 2300 Asia/Singapore Emacs APAC: Emacs APAC meetup (virtual) https://emacs-apac.gitlab.io/announcements/ Sat Aug 22 0130 America/Vancouver - 0330 America/Chicago - 0430 America/Toronto - 0830 Etc/UTC - 1030 Europe/Berlin - 1400 Asia/Kolkata - 1630 Asia/Singapore Emacs Berlin: Emacs-Berlin Hybrid Meetup https://em…  ( 3 min )

Like many Emacs users, I’m a heavy Org mode user. Some time ago I decided that I need a way to access at least some of my Org files on my (Android) phone.  ( 2 min )

This is your TPM evening briefing.

According to a report from ESPN, the NBA hasn't found any evidence that Los Angeles Clippers owner Steve Ballmer arranged to pay Kawhi Leonard in excess of salary-cap rules via the fraudulent green-banking company Aspiration. Just under a year ago, after a series of reports from podcaster Pablo Torre, the NBA hired the prestigious law firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz to investigate the alleged scheme. Per the ESPN report, lawyers representing Ballmer and the NBA have been negotiating a resolution over the past few days, and "the league has presented no evidence" to Ballmer that he cheated. Here is a brief summary of how we got here: In early Sept. 2025, Torre reported that Leonard had signed a no-show marketing deal with the now-defunct bank Aspiration, and that this functioned as a way…  ( 21 min )

It is difficult to wrap the human mind around the fact that, in the grand old year of 2026, the Milwaukee Brewers are really, truly good. Or maybe that is a personal problem, as someone generally disconnected from the ongoings of the NL Central. What happens over there? None of my business! The operating assumption is that the Milwaukee Brewers will scam the division with 90-or-so wins every year, reaping the benefits of the four other flailing, barely trying teams who share the ignominy of playing in that blighted division, and then will immediately turn around and lose in the National League Wild Card round, or Divisional Series. Perhaps last year should have served as a legitimate indicator. The Brewers, after all, won 97 games, the most in either league. But the way the Brewers achieved those 97 wins was undeniably weird. There were (said to the tune of "Shots" by LMFAO) hits, hits, hits, hits, hits, hits and double-digit win streaks somehow chained to other win streaks and the swingiest of games, all of which gave the Brewers' record a faint tinge of eau de frauduleux. The Brewers squeaked out of the NLDS against their divisional rivals, the Chicago Cubs, before getting absolutely curbstomped by none other than the Los Angeles Dodgers—at their closest pass to their purported juggernaut form—in the NLCS. But this year! This year it feels more real. Maybe it's because Pete Crow-Armstrong is popping off for the Cubs, so it feels like there's some real competition within the division, or at least like anyone else is taking it seriously.  ( 20 min )

Social media is a terrible place to learn about anything, but there is perhaps no phrase more ill-suited for the Twitter or YouTube search bar than "Angel Reese." The reasons for this are obvious and not worth getting into here—there are a bunch of racist losers on there who have made Reese a target in their increasingly toxic culture war—but even under better circumstances Reese's game would be a tough fit for 15-second, vertical video highlights. This is a player whose unique, maddening, and persistently effective style was built for a pre-internet age, in which her bewildering box scores could be spoken about in properly mythic tones. We don't live in that age, though. We live in one in which Reese's performances are regularly reduced to short, derisive clips showing her smoking wide-open layups and missed shots following her own offensive rebounds. Today is no different: Following the Fever's 95-91 win over the Dream on Sunday, the internet is awash in clips of Reese bricking a fast-break layup and missing a put-back that would have won the game in regulation. Such lowlights are typical of someone who is shooting 41 percent from the field, but they in fact only serve to make her an even more fascinating figure within the league. For example, Reese shot 5-of-16 from the floor in Sunday's game, but finished with 15 points, 14 rebounds (five on the offensive glass) and six assists in 38 minutes and was a +1 for the game. Reese's misses are too loud and too common, but what intrigues is how often she is able to shoot as poorly as she did on Sunday and still be a positive force for the Dream.  ( 19 min )

Several times a week, I sit myself down in front of a baseball game either in person or on television, I retrieve my book and my pen, and I keep score. I feel my brain relax, my mind soften, my attention fully focus on one thing in a world where that rarely happens. It is a grandma hobby like knitting or embroidery or sourdough, and I love it. Scoring a game is one of the great mundane joys of my life, and I will not shut up about it. A few seasons ago, I taught my dear friend Dana Murphy to score and now we sit in our row at the baseball game, recording each out and hit in our slightly varying scripts, in the same scorebook. People stop —mostly, it is older men who used to keep score with their fathers or grandfathers— to tell us they love to see people scoring the game still, that it reminds them of their childhood, of a slower world. You can still score, we say. Everybody can score! Dana agreed to help me, so I decided that I would attempt to host a class to teach the people of Philadelphia how to score. I made a little poster for promotion, and advertised it on Instagram and Bluesky. Worst case, I figured, no one would come and my friends and I would just watch the game together at a bar. I felt my first twinges of hesitancy when I tried to explain the event to Julia Golda Harris, one of the owners of Val's Lesbian Bar in Philadelphia, on the phone. Julia was open to my event, but ... she didn't understand what it was. On the phone I tried to explain that it's like a worksheet you fill out while watching a game. I wandered off in my pitch, talking about the history of scoring, and the first woman to be a professional scorer, and how the written record is all we have of those games from baseball's early days. Julia still did not really understand what I was talking about, which was fair, but she agreed to host anyway. As long as I thought I could get 15 people to come.  ( 26 min )

Pittsburgh had a hell of a winter storm in January, with more than a foot of snow, and freezing temperatures that created towering walls of ice and annoyed locals whose parking situations wouldn’t return to normal for a month. Some of the city's oldest buildings suffered the most damage, victims of a phenomenon known as ice damming. The warmth from a building rises to the snow banks on the roof, but it's only enough to defrost the bottommost layer, which then flows to the eaves and then re-freezes, creating a trapped reservoir of snowmelt that penetrates cracks and crevices, and flows into the walls to create conditions for mold. Ice damming alone caused millions of dollars worth of damage in Pittsburgh, but perhaps nobody in the city felt as targeted by thermodynamics as Naomi Ruiz, a conservator currently working on some priceless and suddenly damp treasures at St. Nicholas Croatian Church. "I had, like, just gotten back home [to Europe] when they sent me a picture," she says, pointing up toward the corner of the Church's arched ceiling. Even from down here, I could see the intersection of the balcony and the wall was stripped of paint and had the unmistakable flaky look of water damage. She sighs as she remembers the sinking feeling. "That was the spot I'd spent a bunch of time fixing just before leaving."  Naomi specializes in the painstaking process of preserving art in aging churches. It's much more complicated than simply putting a fresh layer of paint over the water damage or scrubbing candle soot from the walls. At St. Nicholas, Naomi is tasked with conserving internationally renowned—and uniquely provocative—murals painted by the Croatian artist Maxo Vanka.  ( 39 min )

There's no 'I' in crossword. This week's puzzle was constructed by Matthew Stock, and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. Matthew is a crossword constructor and stay-at-home dad from Dallas. His work can be found at happylittlepuzzles.com. 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 )

Some people are fans of the Vikings. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the Vikings. This 2026 Defector NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far here. Your team: Minnesota Vikings, the winningest team to never win a Super Bowl. What an honor! King of the paupers! The widely respected Bills and Bengals have tried their best, but have failed in their quest to lose more Super Bowls than the mighty Vikings. The Lions and Jaguars WISH they had Minnesota's history of being moderately competitive! Bow down, O Titans and Browns! The Vikings are here to teach ye the ways of modest regular season success and embarrassing playoff implosion.  ( 77 min )

[PHONE RINGING] "Mr. Walter's office. Can I help you?" "Yes you can. Is Mark in?"  ( 22 min )

Here is an update on a story you may not yet have heard of. It manages to be at once...  ( 10 min )

With the growing attention being given to Trump handler/confidante Natalie Harp, I looked up this November 2024 Times article which...  ( 8 min )

INSIDE: Tina Peters ... Todd Blanche ... Elon Musk

his appearance on Meet the Press proves it

Lawns Are an Ecological Disaster Americans devote 70 hours, annually, to pushing petrol-powered spinning death blades over aggressively pointless green carpets to meet an embarrassingly destructive beauty standard based on specious homogeneity. We marvel at how verdant we manage to make our overwatered, chemical-soaked, ecologically-sterile backyards. I hate having a lawn. I hate the waste. And I hate that I live where an HOA demands that I fall in line. See also: ✍️ Reply by email

Alice Cooper (2004): “If you’re listening to a rock star in order to get your information on who to vote for, you’re a bigger moron than they are. Why are we rock stars? Because we’re morons. We sleep all day, we play music at night and very rarely do we sit around reading the Washington Journal.” ✍️ Reply by email

I've been chatty on Mastodon the past few days. What gives? It's probably so I don't have to start any of the important projects on my plate. "Linux is better for doing things to a computer than it is for doing things with a computer." -- Me (2019) ✍️ Reply by email

The tale of Donald Trump sneaking off Air Force One in a catering truck captured public attention for many reasons. It was a reminder that, for all his tough talk, the president harbors a sense of fear. Hiding away in a glorified ice chest would also have been a blow to the 80-year-old’s dignity. But the charade, which was first revealed by the Washington Post, also gave us insight, as political scientist Scott Lemieux wrote, “into who he considers his actual inner circle.” Left behind on the decoy plane were Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller and other administration officials and aides. The only people deemed worthy of saving from Iran’s reported threat were people whose full-time jobs are tending the preside…  ( 7 min )

Today we’re listening to Natalia Tsupryk, a Ukrainian violinist and composer from Kyiv.

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 )

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 )

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 )

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

I’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 )

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 )

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 )

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 )

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 )

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 )

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 )

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

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

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

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

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

I’ve been doing so much Emacs writing lately, so I guess it’s time I get my Emacs pinky (which is a form of RSI). I made a quick reference to it three days ago and got a lot of responses. What happened? I started to feel a strain last week, but at first I didn’t think much about it. Sometimes my pinky rests awkwardly on the keyboard because I’m used to using the Caps Lock key, but it’s usually a hand-position issue. After I readjust and let my pinky rest, it goes away. This time the strain didn’t go away, and my pinky kept rebelling. My keyboard, Kinesis Freestyle Edge (the one here is the RGB+, the original RGB is discontinued), has a prominent Caps Lock key that just screams “use me as control!” For years, that’s what I did. As you can see in the picture, with my pinky resting on it. The…  ( 7 min )

card-games.el 1.0.92 (pre-release #2, MELPA) is available from package-install for users of MELPA. Release announcement after the cut.. Grown from experimentation within Dungeon, thank you to contribs there, and for review comments from ricsy putting toward MELPA got rid of some advices forcing very interesting better ways. The hooks approach makes the registered card-games-bid-submit a generic semaphore, for example to interlink with a process, CRDT via an adaptor, or … in present v1.0.92 (unstable): https://melpa.org/#/card-games  ( 2 min )

part 2 I described how, for a particular project with certain naming conventions, I wanted to use emacs tree-sitter font-locking to highlight variables that might be used in the wrong context: I found a way to make it work for simple expressions but it was relying on regular expression matching rather than tree-sitter parse trees. I set a goal of handling these types of expressions: elevation_t[t] // good elevation_t[r] // bug elevation_t[t_from_r[r]] // good elevation_t[r_from_t[t]] // bug elevation_t[obj.t] // good elevation_t[obj.r] // bug elevation_t[t_from_r(r)] // good elevation_t[r_from_t(t)] // bug elevation_t[x.t_fn(x)] // good elevation_t[x.r_fn(x)] // bug elevation_t[x.t_arr[i]] // good elevation_t[x.r_arr[i]] // bug elevation_t[…  ( 7 min )

part 1 I described my initial attempt at customizing font-lock using Emacs 29 tree-sitter. Regular font locking uses regular expression matching. Tree sitter allows combining regular expression matching with parse tree matching, like "variable declaration" or "function call". The ideas I came up with were mostly things that I could have implemented with regular expressions alone, but I wanted to experiment with the tree sitter approach. Here's the effect of conventional highlighting, using color for keywords and other syntax: Screenshots showing the use of color for syntax highlighting I wanted to instead mark variable names. In some projects I'm working with geometry, and I sometimes make mistakes putting the wrong variables together. I decided to mark horizontal and verti…  ( 5 min )

blogged about custom tree-sitter-based syntax highlighting in emacs. I started out with highlighting certain keywords in red. I wanted to show the keywords that interrupt control flow: Screenshot showing syntax highlighting of keywords in black or red I highlight regular keywords (while, if) in bold. I highlight control flow interrupting keywords (return, continue) in red. That's syntax highlighting. But I also wanted to highlight names based on their meaning. In some projects I'm working with horizontal and vertical measurements, and I thought it would be nice to highlight those variable names differently. In some projects I'm working with Delaunay+Voronoi meshes, and I wanted to highlight the triangles, edges, and polygons differently. In some projects I'm working …  ( 5 min )

Ray on Emacs doesn’t use version control for his “non-public” files so when he had a problem with his .emacs file, he didn’t have any backups except for the single last version of a file that Emacs will make automatically if you have backups enabled. That, apparently, was enough to recover but Zeitler resolved to do better. What he did was to replace .emacs~ with .emacs.~1~, which causes Emacs to create a numbered sequence of backups rather than simply overwriting the last one. Reading his post reminded me of my backup scheme, which I haven’t thought about in years because all my files—except autogenerated ones—go into Git. My backup scheme is a little different from Zeitler’s because I’ve set mine to keep only the last two backups. That way, my file system doesn’t fill up with long forgotten and unneeded backups. Even so, there were a lot of backups—some for files that don’t even exist anymore—taking up a lot of space. I deleted them all and started over. I don’t claim that 2 is the right number for everyone or even for me. It just seemed like a safe number in case something happened with Git. Happily, I’ve never had to use the backups, which is why I’d mostly forgotten about them. One thing for sure, you need to be religious about either saving your files to a version control system or configuring the Emacs backup system to automatically save some number of backups for you.  ( 5 min )

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(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 )

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 )

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 )

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 )

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 )

The story gods have been good to me in my decades of typing for a living. But never better than with the Mayo football tale, which has consumed all of Ireland and me since the final 45 seconds or so of the historically downtrodden team's July 26 All-Ireland championship win over supposedly unbeatable Kerry. I knew even in the moment that getting to watch Mayo end its 75-year championship drought in person was a privilege. And it's left me ruined for other sporting events for now and maybe forever.  I wore my media bracelet, saying “Croke Park 26-7-26” for a week before cutting it off because I could smell it. But I can’t let go of what took place. All I want to talk (and write) about is the match. I’m still weepy every time I watch the highlight reels or hear the Mayo fans in the stadium sing “To Win Just Once” or “The Green and Red of Mayo.” And I watch and listen a whole lot. You should too!  Here are some of the broadcast calls. Take ‘em in. You don’t need to know a dang thing about the rules or history of the game to get caught up in the euphoria and understand my “What do I do now?” state. Just click play.  ( 31 min )

Reacher is back, and in the first few episodes of Season 4 our enormous friend seems to be in fine form. He's smooshing guys in libraries, escaping a CIA blacksite, and making sure a tiny kitten finds a good home. While Reacher may be our current moment's most beloved answer to the question "What if a guy was really big?" he is by no means the only one. Plenty of authors have explored the possibilities inherent in hugeness. Fantasy writers in particular are enamored of this device. So, if you are interested in meeting a few more fictional hulking men, here are some of my favorites. Please note, I'm generally ignoring Romantasy protagonists (with one exception) as that list would be very long. There are so many big men ravishing small women. Honestly, it's better to just leave that whole dynamic alone.  ( 17 min )

Mama probably never said there’d be days like this. Newest St. Louis Cardinal Joshua Baez hit three homers in his first three plate appearances as a big leaguer yesterday in Chicago. According to Baseball Almanac, there have been 22,800 other MLBers since the National League’s founding in 1876. None had a debut to match Baez’s.  In the top of the first inning against the Cubs, the Cards’ outfielder hit the first big league pitch he ever saw 449 feet to center, almost leaving Wrigley Field. He faced Cubs’ left-hander Matthew Boyd again in the third, and put a 3-2 pitch into the left field bleachers for his second HR. And he three-peated with a bomb to right in the top of the sixth. He finished the day 3-4, with 5 RBIs, in the Cards' 8-4 win. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2QJdGWANMdU  ( 16 min )

the crew aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln deserve better than this

STATUS: Reconfiguring my backups TODO: Finish reconfiguring my backups WATCHING: Finished "Gone". It was meh. LISTENING: Rush "Hemispheres" I love Emacs. Even when I hate it. Just saying. A week ago I started a new habit: Every day I give away, sell, recycle, or trash at least one thing. It doesn't matter how big, how small, or how many, as long as it's /something/. Focusing on the "every day" part rather than the "how much" part has made all the difference. It's been great. ✍️ Reply by email  ( 1 min )

I've been sort of half-assing my Linux backups for a while now. I finally decided to fix them. My backups were a combination of rsync to a Hetzner Storage Box and Pika backups to an external drive. Each setup did different things, and there was no documentation. Testing the backups was a random and incomplete process that was too much work so I never did it. Rsync is easy and fast, but using the --delete option means that if I accidentally delete something and the backup runs, it's gone. Basically, my backup "system" was riddled with gaps and potential problems. Rather than tweak that, I borrowed ideas from My backup strategy 2026, by Michael Harley and started over. Like Mike, I went with Borg for backups and borgmatic for managing them. borgmatic was new to me, so I decided to have Claud…  ( 1 min )

Photographers deal in things which are continually vanishing and when they have vanished there is no contrivance on Earth which can make them come back again -- Henri Cartier-Bresson ✍️ Reply by email

I had a couple conversations today which turned on the role of private equity in today’s economy and the importance...  ( 8 min )

FoxTrot by Bill Amend | August 16, 2026  ( 12 min )

Most shortages happen for obvious reasons. A hurricane disrupts supply chains. A strike halts production. A drought damages crops. The  ( 9 min )

Whitesnake – “Here I Go Again”: The Power Ballad That Became an ’80s Rock Anthem Few rock songs capture the  ( 9 min )

Historically, I've only ever known two great ways of focusing Emacs windows: the built-in other-window command, which cycles through all the available windows, and the ace-window package, offering random window access. It's not that there aren't more or better ways, I just didn't look any further as these were enough for my needs. While I really wanted to make ace-window my default choice, for whatever reason, it never stuck. other-window with a custom M-o binding always felt like the smoother fit for my limited needs. You see, I hardly ever have more than two visible windows, so whenever ace-window kicked into action (for 3 or more windows), it often took me by surprise. The one area other-window didn't fit my needs revolved around focus requiring visual feedback, but I eventually solved that with winpulse (a little package I wrote). As you can see, I'm a simple man using few Emacs windows, and when it comes to frames, I almost never use more than one. That is until somewhat recently, when I built ytr, a tiny YouTube radio player that sits in the corner of your frame. While it all feels fairly integrated into your frame, under the hood, ytr renders in a separate frame. This broke my trusty other-window flow. I couldn't just focus my radio window using my well-internalized M-o binding. Turns out, other-window actually caters for focusing windows across frames, but only when invoked programmatically. Sure, I can wrap it with my own custom command, but Emacs already had me covered. I found the built-in next-window-any-frame command. All I had to do was bind it to M-o and Bob's your uncle. I can now switch between my current window and my YouTube radio, with my dear M-o binding. Balance restored.  ( 2 min )

he makes the case that Emacs users are a different breed. He starts with the quotidian observation that you can be pretty sure that a Vim or VSCode user is either a software developer or in a closely related such field such as System Administration or DevOps. Emacs users, on the other hand, could come from almost anywhere. This is a point that Irreal is fond of making. I’m fascinated by people from outside the software field who use Emacs as an essential part of their workflow. Their stories always illustrate the power and flexibility of Emacs to solve problems even if they aren’t about software and engineering. What distinguishes Emacs users, Maiorana claims, is their love of tinkering and the blurring of work and play when they’re using Emacs. As he puts it Emacs could be more than a text editor. It could be an organizer, a scratchpad, a dictionary, a canvas, a database, a calendar, an email client, and much more. What should have been work started to feel like fun. Maiorana says that Emacs users don’t care primarily about the usefulness or user friendliness of Emacs; it’s the opportunity for tinkering that attracts them. I think he has this part backwards. Emacs users surely do love to tinker but the attractive thing about Emacs is that your tinkering can turn it into the exact tool that you need. That’s true even if the tool you need has nothing to do with software or its siblings. Emacs is, in fact, the perfect piece of software. Not only does it indulge our urge to tinker and have fun but also allows us to turn that tinkering into the precise tool we need. Not just once but as often as we desire as our needs change. With Emacs, the fun never ends.  ( 5 min )

Elpher is the Gemini browser for Emacs. It works wonderfully and its integration with GNU's editor is sublime. You don't just move between capsules: you can also write your own scripts or build automated flows. It's Emacs, after all. Everything bends to your will. If you still don't know what Gemini is, it's a minimalist protocol, halfway between the web and Gopher, with no JavaScript and no trackers. I cover it in depth in Introduction to the Gemini protocol. Today I want to share a minimal configuration I use to browse more comfortably. Nothing exotic, just a few shortcuts and a couple of tweaks that make a difference day to day. Elpher is on MELPA. I declare it with use-package, so everything stays in a single block: :ensure t installs it the first time, :config defines the function and…  ( 4 min )

This probably won’t get the attention or, frankly, outrage that it deserves because it’s kind of technical. But it’s stunning...  ( 9 min )

Elon posts it, Donny boasts it, and so much more...

"I'll be curled up under my bed all day because I got an unexpected and (IMHO) unnecessary Emergency Alert on my phone that one time. But not before I complain about it on social media for a few hours, first." 🙄 510 Pyro: The Best First Developer - by Derrick Buckner One dilution, one bottle. No drama. I’m going to explain why this belongs in a beginner’s arsenal as much as it belongs in mine. I've always been leery of Pyro developers, but based on this article, I've ordered a bottle from Freestyle Photo ✍️ Reply by email  ( 1 min )