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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This week on Nothing But Respect, we mostly talked about dumb stuff with a smart guy. The guy in question was Jake Bittle, staff writer for Grist and the author of The Great Displacement: Climate Change and the Next American Migration, while the dumb stuff was Jake's amazing spree of Twitter fights back when that was something worth doing, and also Drake. Jake is a Raptors fan, and Harry knows a ridiculous amount of ball on all things rap, so it was a long time coming. We also talked about the new politics of climate vis-a-vis Silicon Valley's right-wing turn. Primo offseason stuff, and not all dumb! You can find Nothing But Respect in Apple Podcasts or whatever podcast app you use. Follow the show on Instagram, and contact the Broke Jumper Tip Line at (347) 380-6426. Thanks for listening!  ( 15 min )

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Few things represent the “DEI, but for unqualified goons” approach President Donald Trump takes to his Cabinet appointees better than this June 2 headline from The Washington Post: “Trump picks mortgage chief Bill Pulte to lead on national intelligence.” Perfect. A 38-year-old pal of Donald Trump Jr. with a degree in broadcast journalism and experience in finance and home building, coupled with zero background in intelligence or national security, will now be America’s acting director of national intelligence. I feel safer already. Pulte has been serving as director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, though his actions have largely been serving Trump and his unquenchable thirst for revenge against political opponents.  Pulte pushed the Justice Department to launch mortgage-fraud invest…  ( 15 min )

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is your TPM evening briefing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

the stupid is off the charts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is your TPM evening briefing.

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

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

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

Some pathetic, frontrunning dorks are fans of the Rams. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the Rams. This 2026 Defector NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far here. Your team: Los Angeles Rams. Your 2025 record: 12-5. Heh. Haha. MWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!  ( 86 min )

Time for your weekly edition of the Defector Funbag. Got something on your mind? Email the Funbag. You can also read Drew over at SFGATE, and buy Drew’s books while you’re at it. Today, we're talking about iPhone complaints, America’s infrastructure tragedy, changing clothes at the airport, and more. Your letters: Monte:  ( 49 min )

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

what kind of bullshit is ‘Lake America’?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is your TPM evening briefing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We're ending the month with a challenging themeless puzzle. Keep an eye out for tricky clues and fun wordplay. This week's puzzle was constructed by Greg Snitkin and Glenn Davis, and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. Greg is a dad with three small kids and a hedge fund controller from South Orange, N.J. He's been in a fantasy football league with Glenn since 2013 and spanks him every year. Glenn is a reformed sports blogger now working in the non-profit space. He and his wife live in New Jersey with two human children and two cats. He won the league in 2018, so Greg is an unreliable narrator. Defector crosswords, launched in partnership with our friends at AVCX, run every Monday. If you’re interested in submitting a puzzle to us, you can read our guidelines HERE. The AVCX, an independent puzzles and games outlet, invites you to subscribe, or sample the goods with a two-month free trial: "With an AVCX subscription, you get access to weekly themed and themeless crosswords, minis, cryptics, and trivia, by email or in your favorite app. We have no corporate overlord, and we publish top-flight stuff only. We also pay our people fairly, always. Check us out."  ( 15 min )

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

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

it’s the skirmish that has never happened the most

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No content preview  ( 4 min )

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some people are fans of the San Francisco 49ers. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the San Francisco 49ers. This 2026 Defector NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far here. Your team: San Francisco 49ers. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXtMFDcAprg  ( 51 min )

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton seems hell-bent on making his race for a U.S. Senate seat against Democratic state Rep. James Talarico one of the dumbest spectacles in American political history. Rather than focus on the needs of Texans he might represent, Paxton has zeroed in on impotent suggestions that Talarico isn’t masculine enough to represent the Lone Star State and false claims that the Democrat – GASP! – is somehow not carnivorous enough to serve. That latter point is nonsense stemming from false claims that Talarico is a vegan. He has made it clear he’s not. But truth has no place in Paxton’s campaign, which apparently revolves around highlighting goofy Texas stereotypes, then accusing Talarico of not fitting the mold. Macho-man Ken Paxton challenges James Talarico to dinner Th…  ( 14 min )

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

As a hardworking American who loves his country, I was honored to learn some of my tax dollars will contribute to the construction of President Donald Trump’s $200 million White House ballroom that is now going to cost $600 million. On June 16, The Washington Post reported that the price tag on what Trump originally called a “taxpayer-free” ballroom that would be paid for “100% by me and some friends of mine” has patriotically ballooned to $600 million, with about half of that money coming from taxpayers.  Some America-hating liberals out there will undoubtedly call that – and please imagine me using heavily sarcastic American-made air quotes here – “an outrageous amount of money to spend” when “high grocery prices” are “making it harder for people to make ends meet.” They’ll whine about h…  ( 13 min )

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

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

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

guess who it is

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

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

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

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

This is your TPM evening briefing.

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

An officer shot someone and likely lied about the circumstances of the shooting but isn’t going to face punishment? Only in America.  ( 76 min )

You’re telling me that U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro’s crack prosecutors couldn’t even get remand on this dude?  ( 61 min )

Allow me to break down our respective states by the numbers.  ( 59 min )

I saw an amusing Reddit post recently with an Emacs user thinking about declaring “Emacs bankruptcy” with a config file falling in the 800-900 line range. Many users in the replies were happy to point out that even 10-12K lines is nothing if you understand what’s going on, and it’s well-documented. This reminded me of something I’ve been experimenting with lately. Instead of updating my config, I’m trying out directory-local variables per project. Having local configurations in a project avoids the extra cogitation of worrying about conflicts with other file types or projects down the line. I like this. Also makes settings easier to transfer to a similar project in the future. Table of Contents Manage multiple project settings with ease What’s in the dir-locals.el file? How to ke…  ( 5 min )

1. TLDR HyRolo, the full-text search layer of GNU Hyperbole, is a grep-like retrieval tool for records in your knowledge base instead of lines. Rather than retrieving single lines, it retrieves the full hierarchical record surrounding your match, descendants included. HyRolo can search your existing knowledge bases in place (org-roam, Denote, Obsidian, Logseq, etc.), even if you use more than one of these. You can point hyrolo-file-list at any container of files (directories and wildcards) containing text in any of the following formats: Org, Markdown, Koutline (Hyperbole's own outline format), or Emacs outline format. Commands like hyrolo-grep will then display every matching record for your search query in a single navigable *HyRolo* buffer, which you can treat like an outline…  ( 27 min )

Eglot provides built-in LSP support in modern Emacs, giving developers a native interface for autocompletion, linting, and formatting. When paired with python-lsp-server (pylsp), creating a Python development environment comes down to managing the LSP server configuration properly. Historically, setting up this toolchain required wiring together a stack of individual utilities such as flake8, isort, and black. Now, ruff stands entirely apart from that legacy ecosystem by consolidating all of those separate checks into a single, high-performance Rust binary. This article demonstrates how to configure Eglot to detect and use Ruff dynamically when it is present on your system, while retaining a clean fallback to the older stack of tools like Flake8, pycodestyle, and pydocstyle when Ruff is mi…  ( 8 min )

init.el almost from the beginning: (setq ;set reasonable scrolling scroll-margin 0 scroll-conservatively 100000 scroll-preserve-screen-position 1) a really excellent post that expains all the fine points of configuring scrolling. He explains the above lines, which most people probably have in their configuration. If you want Emacs scrolling to behave as it does in every other application, you can leave them as is but you can tweak the behavior a bit if you like. Cherti has all the details. But wait. There’s more. There are similar settings for horizontal scrolling that you might like. I’ve never had any problem with horizontal scrolling—probably because I’ve always wrapped lines in one way or another—but they’re there if you need them. There are some other tweaks that you can apply to delay fontification during scrolling to speed things up a bit. Again, this is not something that I use but if you deal with large files, you may find it useful. In Emacs 29 and later you can set pixel-precise scrolling to make scrolling over images more pleasant. There are a few other tweaks in Cherti’s post so you should definitely take a look at it. There’s a lot of good content and even if you use only a bit of it, you will find his post worthwhile.  ( 5 min )

GCC drive error on macOS: This seems to show up with almost every new Emacs package I’ve been trying recently on my Mac. I remember trying to dig into it, and I went in circles trying to install something from Homebrew. Has anyone fixed this? I’m on GNU Emacs plus 30.2.  ( 2 min )

Generally you would not want to use a word like "catharsis" in relation to a podcast. That is just not what they are for, in my opinion, and it's not really in my range as a podcast co-host or guest to deliver that sort of experience. While last week's episode announcing the end of The Distraction was decently cathartic for me, that was never the point. Of course the final episode of the podcast would be significant for us, and inevitably include a decent amount of Looking Back At All We've Accomplished and such, but part of the reason we invited original co-host Tim Marchman back was to get back to basics before slipping the surly bonds forever. You already know what that means: free association, good-natured muttering, and heated takes about radishes. It's not catharsis; it's something much dumber and more powerful than that. We got the nostalgia stuff out of the way in the first half of the episode, although there was still plenty of vintage nonsense in there between our precious memories of embarrassing moments, famous guests, barking dogs, and the janky prehistory of the podcast during its decade of neglect under our former corporate parents. We swapped stories about our encounters with a leather-encased Buzz Bissinger, and remembrances of Tim Curry, including both his escape to the one place that isn't corrupted by capitalism (space) and his legendary movie-demon performance. We also talked about the unfortunate impact that extended periods of podcasting can have on one's professional legacy and self-image, remembered Chris Bosh getting yoinked off his podcast appearance before things got too stupid, and addressed the Toilet Sandwich Question one last time. If you remember me at all, I hope it will be as I described myself in this segment.  ( 20 min )

Across the 2024 and 2025 NWSL seasons, Temwa Chawinga scored 35 goals—more than many players could hope to score in their entire careers. She won the Golden Boot and MVP both years, and deserved to. The Kansas City Current forward was simply inevitable. There’s a real pleasure in watching an athlete like Chawinga, who provides the near certainty that if you flip on a game they’re playing in, they'll do something that knocks your socks off. Scoring is the hardest thing to do in soccer, not to mention doing it with such consistency and for so long. Chawinga’s scoring pace over the last two years left little doubt that she’d sweep the league’s end-of-season awards.  This year, we’ve been treated to nine goals from Chawinga so far, putting her at an astounding rate of 1.06 goals per 90 minutes played. That she’s kept up her scoring is all the more impressive considering that Kansas City is nowhere near as good of a team as they have been the last two campaigns; she’s able to put a team on her back and not feel the weight of it.  ( 28 min )

Good science journalism is by its nature suspicious of grand or outlandish claims. Good science journalism does not take press releases at face value, but rather investigates the evidence behind those claims and the context in which they appear. Good science journalism is more interested in the truth behind big promises, or at least the likelihood of said promises coming true. By contrast, bad science journalism functions as a hype machine, regurgitating company statements verbatim as if it were the New York Times quoting Israel's Ministry of Defense. Bad science journalism runs with shocking claims precisely because they are shocking, because shock drives clicks, and nowhere is this more apparent than in a headline. I've written about the problematic nature of this type of coverage around mammoth claims of de-extinction, such as when Time and the New Yorker both published headlines claiming that the dire wolf has returned. (Reader; it has not.) Although Colossal gives SpaceX a run for its money when it comes to sensationalism, other less technologically glitzy fields are less prone to sensational slop and arbitrary timelines; zoology is not promising a new monkey by 2027. In fact, I'd wager that space science, with its reliance on otherworldly technology and billionaire braggadocios, might be the most vulnerable to this kind of bad journalism. To this point, I recently and wholeheartedly agreed with this exchange between cosmologist Katie Mack and science journalist Dave Levitan.  ( 33 min )

Some people are fans of the Buffalo Bills. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the Buffalo Bills. This 2026 Defector NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far here. Your team: It was an interception. Get over it. Your 2025 record: 12-5. As always, Buffalo's dominant regular season meant nothing. In fact, that gaudy 12-5 record wasn't enough to keep the hated New England Patriots from wresting the AFC East crown away from the Bills after five years atop the division. Those same Patriots would go on to play in the Super Bowl, and in just the second year of their young quarterback's career. They might play in—and win!—many more Super Bowls after this. Meanwhile the Bills have had one of the best QBs in the sport for many years and yet still can't navigate their way through the AFC playoff field without tying their dick in a knot.  ( 52 min )

So who believes in Reds Week? The Reds, you fools. The Cincinnati Freaking Reds. And all the rest of you cynical apostates do too. If you didn't know it before, you damned well know it now. And not just for historical, electoral, or tonsorial reasons, either. We're talking the here and now, because Defector is in constant communion with the gods of sport, and we get results. Proof? Proof, you ask? Try this: The Cincinnati Reds, our adopted baseball team until closing time tomorrow, did something that simply doesn't happen, ever. The only reason that it happened is because they felt our devotion and the power of our unified medullae oblongatae and rose to the moment. Also because the San Francisco Giants' bullpen blows half-chewed food all down its shirtfront on a regular basis, but that's not the way we're going to frame it. We know a good story when we make one up. Anyway, here's what the Reds did Wednesday afternoon in San Francisco: They built a seemingly insurmountable 3-9 deficit over eight full innings, in a game so riveting that the announced attendance of 24,130—itself one of the lowest at a Giants home game in this century, COVID conditions excepted—headed toward the street, the buses, the ferry boats, and the waiting fleet of embittered Lyft drivers before the ninth began, confident that they at least saw these utterly abject Giants earn their first three-game series sweep of the season ... until this happened.  ( 24 min )

This is Defector Music Club, where a number of our writers get together to dish about an album. In honor of Reds Week, we're discussing Taylor Swift's 2012 pop-rock hit Red. Patrick Redford: I can’t be the only one whose strongest and first thought about Red is that there’s a sound at the end of the first synth swell in “I Knew You Were Trouble” that sounds just like the jail-cell door slamming closed in Akon’s “Locked Up,” right? Lauren Theisen: I primarily remember the screaming goat remix.  ( 40 min )

The actor Tim Curry died on Tuesday. He was 80. He was as purely and consistently fun a screen presence as anyone else I can think of, a cartoon of a performer, with outrageous charisma and the ability to communicate it through a wild assortment of constraints: obscuring makeup, heavy prosthetics, voice acting, shitty scripts, amateurish productions, small roles. When Tim Curry was in something, it had at least one delightful and magnetic thing in it. Curry most famously portrayed Dr. Frank-N-Furter in 1975's The Rocky Horror Picture Show, after having substantially created the character in Richard O'Brien's The Rocky Horror Show stage production. It's tempting to call this his breakout role—it's incredibly famous now, and it was his debut film performance—but Rocky Horror wasn't a hit on …  ( 23 min )

As with some of my best decisions in life, I bought a red light mask because Kelsey McKinney uses one. I saw Kelsey posting Instagram stories with her face illuminated under the mask's sinister, Sith-like glow. I was newly 30, albeit not especially flirty or thriving, and I wondered if the red light mask might be a good salve for my anxious vanity. Like many others, I want to grow old but still look young—sue me! Every morning I dutifully smear sunscreen on my face, and every night I apply my cocktail of arbitrarily chosen unguents. But if there was something else I could be doing more to stave off spots and wrinkles, I wanted to give it a try. Now that I've had my red light mask for a year, I see that it works, I think? My skin looks good, perhaps even better than it would without the mask. But I sometimes wonder if this is all in my head. Have I convinced myself that red light works simply because I want it to? Every time I put on my mask, strapping my face under its white silhouette like Tom Cruise in Vanilla Sky, I find myself discombobulated, also like Tom Cruise in Vanilla Sky. The logic feels crazy. I understand that light has the power to burn my skin. But the power to preserve it? This wager feels far more fantastical. Even scientists seemed to agree. In one 1989 paper, the biophysicist Tiina Karu, who studied the cellular mechanics of red light exposure, called the therapy "highly incredible and even mysterious." When I tried to learn about the science behind red light's dermatological dazzle, what I found were mostly affiliate-driven product recommendations, which taught me more about the luxuries of various masks but less about the science behind them. So I reached out to some actual dermatologists to see if they could unmask the secrets of my mask. Here is some of what I learned.  ( 32 min )

Welcome to Listening Habits, a column where I share the music and musical topics I’ve been fixated on recently. In the music video for "Time 4 Sum Aksion," the second single from Redman's debut album, you don't really get much of the zany personality that would go on to make him a cultural icon over the ensuing decades. Redman emerged first as a hardcore rapper, combining street tales and golden-age hip-hop swagger with reggae and Parliament Funkadelic attributes. On 1992's Whut? Thee Album, the fresh-faced kid from Newark is full of outlandish, aggressive bravado, backed by one of rap's production heavyweights, Erick Sermon. It makes for an album that is sonically adventurous, sampling a range of artists that includes James Brown, Funkadelic, and the Mary Jane Girls, all the while bringing raw and punchy pulp fiction the whole time. He is every bit deserving of being prime Mike Tyson's ring entrance music. https://youtu.be/NiZMqVXVZgA?si=rAXI9UVOQuMZXMwb  ( 26 min )

If in the future my daughter develops some kind of Pavlovian response to the musical stylings of Pat McAfee, I'll blame the editors who "assigned" this review. But this outcome is unlikely. I almost wish it were a little more plausible. McAfee's debut album, though enticingly titled Diary of a Polarizing Figure, was not powerful enough to polarize any part of my household. If only it had been more stupid, or ugly, or idiosyncratic enough to spark emotion, because in the end it was the musical equivalent of A.J. Hawk's uncannily smooth face. In the same way that McAfee the ESPN commentator has risen to meet the exact needs of the cultural moment—reddish men yapping indefinitely about sports, gambling, and vaccines, to the detriment of traditional journalism and neurons nationwide—McAfee the musician also meets listeners right where they are. Though the former NFL player has claimed that the album he released earlier this month was culled from 20 years of songwriting in private, it is music perfectly matched to the sound of the moment: a congealed country-trap, with skittering snares, gospel touches and autotuned vocals—the soundtrack of Reels America. Sharp critics have tried to understand the genesis of this ubiquitous new genre, but thinking too hard about it makes me feel ill. I tend to see it as the algorithmic stream carving out the path of least resistance. It's music that does barely anything for anybody, but harmlessly rolls off everybody, and can be played anywhere across the land. It's the sound of getting heat stroke on someone's rented boat. It's the reason you know Jelly Roll as anything but a bakery treat. It's the music that's on in your pickup truck, but also at the pump where you stopped to get gas, and again inside the convenience store you entered to restock on Zyn, and then again as you resume driving on the interstate while swiping through short-form vertical video and betting the spread.  ( 23 min )

California: Perhaps you’ve heard of it? It is the edge of the continent, it is the apocalypse state, and it is the subject of many songs by the Red Hot Chili Peppers, though fewer than you might think.  California is one of Californian rock bands’ favorite things to sing about. The dreamy surface and its seedy underbelly, the all-consuming city and the bone-dry wastes of the valley, the homeless encampment outside the library-themed cocktail bar that is decorated with fake books: This is good material for rock music. See “Welcome to the Jungle”; see “California Uber Alles.” Even the songs that are supposed to highlight the sunny side end up saying something about the shitty side, if sometimes unintentionally. The sighing minor chords in Scott McKenzie’s “San Francisco” make the flower-power anthem sound a little like a funeral dirge for an already vanishing age, or like the song has a bad conscience about selling a dream it suspects might be false. Phantom Planet’s “California,” the theme song for The O.C., repeats its chorus—“California, here we coooooooooooooooome”—so many times that it starts to sound a little desperate, as though the band is trying to convince itself that the trip will be worthwhile. When you’re away, California evanesces into fantasy; when you’re there, you remember that it’s just a place. There is a special insularity to a lot of Californian music. California, the mythic land of cults and communes, perfected the art of rock-as-subculture. No region, with the possible exception of Manchester, has produced a higher volume of what I’ve taken to calling "You had to be there" bands. The biggest two are the Bay Area’s Grateful Dead and L.A.’s Black Flag.  ( 42 min )

INSIDE: Greg Abbott ... Christian Castro ... LaMonica McIver

shut the fuck up, Piggy

Lots of organizations are excited about what AI can do to streamline their processes, save money, and juice margins. But AI's capabilities are founded on the data that AI accesses, and for many organizations that foundation is little more than sand. Pramod Sadalage and Prem Chandrasekaran write about how to build a reliable foundation of data that can be accurate and trusted. more…  ( 34 min )

Today we’re listening to The Durutti Column, a post-punk band from Manchester, UK.

There are superhero movies that become beloved classics, movies that become forgotten disappointments, and then there is Batman & Robin, a film so spectacularly committed to its own excess that it eventually became one of the most entertaining examples of Hollywood getting almost everything wrong. Released in 1997 and directed by Joel Schumacher, Batman &...  ( 10 min )

There are movies that are remembered because they’re masterpieces, movies remembered because they’re disasters, and then there’s Mac and Me, a 1988 science-fiction family film that has achieved a strange kind of immortality by being both a genuine Hollywood movie and one of the most shameless pieces of product placement ever put on a screen....  ( 10 min )

There are movies that fail because they don’t have enough money, movies that fail because they don’t have enough talent, and then there is Manos: The Hands of Fate, a 1966 horror film that somehow managed to turn almost every possible filmmaking limitation into part of its enduring charm. Directed by and starring Harold P....  ( 11 min )

There are bad movies, there are entertainingly bad movies, and then there is Birdemic: Shock and Terror. Released in 2010, James Nguyen’s low-budget horror film has become one of the most famous examples of a movie that is so spectacularly inept that watching it becomes an experience all its own. It has terrible special effects,...  ( 12 min )

Before Run-DMC, LL Cool J, Public Enemy, Rakim, Ice-T, N.W.A. and the countless rap stars who followed, there was  ( 20 min )

The Party That Changed Music Forever On August 11, 1973, a back-to-school party was held in the recreation room of  ( 20 min )

In the summer of 1974, hip-hop was not an industry. It was not a genre neatly packaged into record-store bins,

He can’t seem to let go of the damn Kennedy Center, can he?  ( 64 min )

The secretary of health and human services hates vaccines more than he likes helping sick people, it seems.  ( 67 min )

Intro So, Emacs 31 has been released, and a lot of shiny new stuff is there, ready for us to play with. You probably heard of this new markdown-ts-mode and decided to check it out. And guess what? On Emacs version 31, this is marked as an experimental mode. What does this mean? Should you use it or not? Is this ready? Is this just a sketch of a mode? Treat this post as a quick guide to getting this mode up and running and helping yourself find answers to these questions. Where is it in terms of features? This is an experimental mode, right? You need to opt in, so probably not everything will work flawlessly yet, and it needs more testing and feedback. That said, don't let this title mislead you. This does not mean the mode is premature in terms of features. As you will see, this is a very …  ( 30 min )

By default, scrolling in Emacs often recenters the screen abruptly when the cursor hits the edge of a window, and rapid scrolling through large, heavily syntax-highlighted files can introduce noticeable input lag. This article outlines configurations that make scrolling more predictable and responsive. Customizing scroll recentering Adjusting the automatic scrolling behavior can prevent Emacs from making large jumps when point moves beyond the visible portion of the window: ;; Scroll by up to 20 lines to bring point back into view before falling back to ;; the normal automatic scrolling behavior. (setq scroll-conservatively 20) When point moves off-screen or into the scroll margin, setting scroll-conservatively to a moderate value like 20 causes Emacs to scroll the text by up to 20 lines t…  ( 12 min )

define-word. It pops up a definition of the word at point in the minibuffer. I use it several times a day. Lately, though, it has been returning “zero definitions found” on every invocation. This problem predated my update to Emacs 31.1 so it’s not related to the version of Emacs. Today (Tuesday) I finally got fed up and decided to track down the problem. It wasn’t too hard. It turns out that the problem is that define-word calls the on-line dictionaries with HTTP rather than HTTPS and the sites are rejecting the connections. There’s already a pull request (2026-08-22) for the fix but as of today (2026-08-25) it hasn’t been merged or uploaded to MELPA. I messed around for a while but couldn’t get any of the obvious solutions to work so I gave up and added :init ;; Until define-word is updated in MELPA (defcustom define-word-services '((wordnik "https://wordnik.com/words/%s" define-word--parse-wordnik) (openthesaurus "https://www.openthesaurus.de/synonyme/%s" define-word--parse-openthesaurus) (webster "https://webstersdictionary1828.com/Dictionary/%s" define-word--parse-webster) (offline-wikitionary define-word--get-offline-wikitionary nil)) "Services for define-word, A list of lists of the format (symbol url function-for-parsing). Instead of an url string, url can be a custom function for retrieving results." :type '(alist :key-type (symbol :tag "Name of service") :value-type (group (string :tag "Url (%s denotes search word)") (function :tag "Parsing function")))) use-package for define-word. That’s just a copy of the definition of define-word-services from the define-word source. Note that it’s important that it goes in the :init section so that the definition gets established before define-word is loaded. It’s a messy solution but it will do until the fix is merged and percolates up to MELPA.  ( 5 min )

Back in 2019 I wrote about dealing with Jekyll post URLs, where I shared a tiny command that spared me from having to remember the exact file name of every article I wanted to link to. That command has been in my config ever since, and over the years it quietly grew a few siblings. Recently I finally gathered them all in one place and turned them into a small package - utterson. The common Jekyll tasks I guess anyone who blogs with Jekyll knows the drill. Jekyll is great and I have no intention of switching, but a few of its conventions generate a steady trickle of manual work: posts live in _posts and their file names have to start with the publication date, as in 2026-08-26-some-post.md every article needs a bit of YAML front matter at the top - a layout, a title, a date, some tags linki…  ( 8 min )

If I had a dollar for every time someone asked on the Clojurians Slack in #cider why C-x C-e evaluated “the wrong thing”, I’d probably be writing this post from a yacht. The answer was always the same: the cursor wasn’t where CIDER expected it to be. The upcoming CIDER 2.1 release changes that - the evaluation commands now figure out which form you mean from where your cursor actually is. A bit of history Emacs has a very particular tradition when it comes to evaluating code: eval-last-sexp (the venerable C-x C-e) acts on the expression before the cursor. Not the one you’re looking at, not the one you’re inside of - the one that ends exactly where your cursor stands. SLIME follows this tradition, Emacs Lisp itself follows it, and for the past 15+ years CIDER has followed it too.1 If you g…  ( 4 min )

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

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

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

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

(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 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 )

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 )

This is your TPM evening briefing.

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

Some people are fans of the Chicago Bears. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the Chicago Bears. This 2026 Defector NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far here. Your Team: The Chicago Bears, who are not yet the Hammond, Indiana, Bears Your 2025 record: 11-6, a staggering outlier for a franchise far more comfortable with 6-11. A new coach, a repaired and better protected quarterback, and the next big running game. We were comfortable with the Bears being persistently mediocre, and now we have to deal with the possibility that they could own the NFC North for more than one year, which they haven't done since 2006, when Rex Grossman roamed the earth.  ( 60 min )

"High Sierra" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvKRwNR7kXw On Tuesday, in the moments after I heard that Dolly Parton had died, I returned immediately to "Light of a Clear Blue Morning." It's a song I've always loved, even when I was a child, and that feels so cathartic to me: the slowness of the opening verse followed by the beat of the chorus, the reminder that things are going to be OK, that fun will exist if you just wait. But every year, I keep a playlist of new (to me) songs I've discovered, and a playlist of not-new songs that I've put on repeat through the year. At the end of the year, the second playlist is usually the one that creates a kind of soundtrack for my life. And yesterday, when I looked through my playlists for the last 20 years, it wasn't "Light of a Clear Blue Morning" that was my most frequently repeated Dolly song. It was "High Sierra."  ( 45 min )

It’s a rite of passage to get your ideals smashed in your early twenties, just in the normal course of trying to get your feet under you. It doesn’t seem to matter what exactly you care about, either. Whether you’re voting and then watching election results, or you’re trying to make a college relationship last beyond graduation, or you believe that with enough energy and grit, you and your ideals can save the trees, you’re in for a few bruises.  But every bright-eyed youth loses innocence in their own way. Today’s friend of a friend is out to solve the affordable housing crisis, but she’s about to learn that all of us, however committed to “the work” we may seem, have a greater aptitude for mess than for the revolution.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KH1-Htdmg9U  ( 17 min )

In observance of Reds Week at Defector, Lauren and Alex decided to try a red lip, as modeled in this brief tutorial. Here, in the style of The Not-So-Great Defector Bake-Off, are their results. Lauren: Hi Alex! So as we start with moisturizer, I wanted to ask right up top, what’s your history with red lip, and, I suppose, lip products in general? Alex: The first thing that feels important to note is that my lips have always been a source of insecurity for me because they are very small! The closest I’ve ever come to considering injectables was when lip flips came out and the possibility of full, lovely lips was dangled in front of me. I haven’t done it—I think any change would simply be too drastic for me to get away with because I’m starting with so little! But in my kinder moments, I also think to myself: I have my mom’s mouth, and I like her mouth, so I can live with this one.  ( 39 min )

The competition for the much-coveted Who Won The Offseason Prize is nearly over. Despite a late rally from the Cleveland Browns, who became the first team to eliminate themselves from the regular season by quintupling down on the disaster that has been, is, and seems hell-bent on continuing to be Deshaun Watson, it seems clear that the winner will be the San Francisco 49ers. Besides, it's Reds Week, not Oranges Week, which means that even with that photo of Jed York in his jail smock, red is still the color of the day. And York is part of that, too, with his arrest on Monday capping what has perhaps been the single weirdest offseason in recent NFL memory. Not only did the owner of the Red And Gold (see, we told you) get arrested near a trailer park in East Palestine, Ohio and midwife the p…  ( 21 min )

This week on Nothing But Respect, we spent the entire episode talking through the last 13 years of Los Angeles Lakers ownership drama. Our guest Harrison Faigen is a longtime Lakers media guy, and he joined us for a lengthy discussion on Mark Walter, Joshua Kushner, and Johnny, Jimmy, Jeanie, Janie, Joey, and Jesse Buss. It's crazy they're all named that. The tie-in to Reds Week is that my name is Patrick Redford. You can find Nothing But Respect in Apple Podcasts or whatever podcast app you use. Follow the show on Instagram, and contact the Broke Jumper Tip Line at (347) 380-6426. Thanks for listening!  ( 15 min )

The most awe-inspiring thing in music is when an artist takes over the world. At least back when there was a monoculture, it was possible for a single person to dominate collective attention, at least for awhile. And 1998 should always be remembered as the year DMX did just that. Throughout the '90s, Earl Simmons, aka DMX, had been making waves that steadily grew into real, earth-shaking tremors over the back half of the decade. Prominent guest spots on songs like Mic Geronimo's 1995 track "Time to Build," where X traded verses with fellow burgeoning acts Jay-Z and Ja Rule, the LL Cool J–led posse cut "4, 3, 2, 1" in 1997, and the Lox's single "Money, Power, Respect" in early 1998 indicated that he was on the cusp of a full breakout. While 1998 marked a definitive before and after, his ascent that year was the culmination of a long, hard struggle to break into the industry. https://youtu.be/zAZqlaDCLSI?si=iGT2MxqLWsYktPSZ  ( 34 min )

There are certain types of players that just are not coming back. Some of these guys have been written out of the story by changes in the game's rules; future generations will be unable to comprehend the wealth of saturnine lefty specialists whom the world once watched trudge-jogging from the league's bullpens, not just because the mind naturally reels at such beauty, but because the role no longer exists as such. An evolving set of best practices has also narrowed the field of Guys, or just refined it in a way that puts the squeeze on elite specialists and the lumpen class of ham-and-egger generalists alike. In baseball's optimized future, pinch-runners and innings eaters will both be endangered species. If you're old enough to remember a version of the game that was not like this—all tho…  ( 23 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, Albert answers a question about a kid who might be a little bit of a mess.  ( 32 min )

A couple of blocks from my office is a steep hill. Sometimes at lunch I go out into the sun and walk up the hill. The hill is very California: asphalt so newly laid that it looks AI generated; a handful of wheeling turkey vultures; golden dried grass edging up to fortress-like new construction. I usually march up the sidewalk but there’s also a path that winds through blackberry vines and over the creek, past where people without other places to stay have been sleeping. It’s a Diebenkorn painting; it’s the place he runs to at the opening of The Beginning Place. Walking up the hill restores me to myself when I am tired or cranky or worried about something I have done or failed to do at work. The only problem is that I have to face down death. At the end of the first block is a stoplight. If you turn right at that stoplight you find yourself in a shopping center with a Lucky and a Home Depot. This shopping center is used a lot while the sidewalk that goes up the hill is used significantly less. Drivers are always turning right to go to the shopping center, or turning right as they come out of the shopping center, and often they make those turns without regard to whether or not there is a pedestrian about to step into the roadway.  This is galling, especially because it’s one of those California intersections where in order to cross legally I, the pedestrian in question, have to hit a button before the light turns green in the direction I want to go or else I am stuck there first watching the traffic stream in my direction, then the traffic making the protected left, then the traffic going in the opposite direction, then the traffic making the protected left in the other direction. This probably takes a minute and a half—it feels like a lifetime.  ( 33 min )

INSIDE: Greg Abbott ... Sigal Chattah ... Dolly Parton

the poor little dipshit is having a hard time coping

As a general matter, people who write about or strategize about politics greatly overestimate our collective ability to shape how...  ( 7 min )

When some stars or legends die, they spur outpourings and commemorations that appear to transcend the mere mechanics and scaffolding...  ( 9 min )

I don’t particularly care for Dolly Parton’s music, but I loved Dolly Parton. She was literally the best of us. Unapologetically herself whether people liked it or not. Did not give a single fuck about what was “expected” of her based on her age, gender, career aspirations, and so on. Could have been a billionaire, but chose to invest tremendous amounts of money in communities that were underserved instead. A highly visible counter-argument to the idea that older white cishetero folks can’t help being racist, sexist, and homophobic because of when and where they grew up.  ( 20 min )

Having kids is easy, and anyone who says otherwise is an ugly feminist trying to scare other women out of their only true source of joy and fulfillment: This is the narrative that has grown up in the MAGA movement in recent years. The right has become increasingly obsessed with nostalgia for the imagined bliss of 1950s-era white families with housewives-in-aprons raising large broods. At the same time, they have become progressively vitriolic toward anyone who notes that the era’s realities were much harsher than what was shown on Nick at Nite sitcoms. Part of their story, then, is that it’s a vile myth that pregnancy and motherhood can be hard on women.  Before his death in September 2025, Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk regularly advised young people to “get married young and have…  ( 7 min )

Today we’re listening to Lusine, an American electronic musician from Texas.

There was a particular magic to the American ska-punk explosion of the 1990s. The music was fast, loud, melodic and  ( 11 min )

Miley Cyrus is an American singer, songwriter, actress, and entertainer whose ability to reinvent herself has made her one of  ( 5 min )

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

She not only made incredible music but was also a force for good.  ( 63 min )

The Shadow Docket once again worked its magic on Monday evening.  ( 63 min )

On Monday, the day after his arrest on a criminal charge of engaging in prostitution—later pleaded down to disorderly conduct—San Francisco 49ers owner Jed York, through his lawyer, submitted a motion in his criminal case. Specifically, he asked to the court to seal all records related to it. His stated justification? The owner's request, which you can see in full by clicking here, gave a bit of background on the case before outlining the following reasons: 2. The Defendant is an eligible offender as defined by R.C. §2953.31. 3. There are no criminal proceedings pending against the Defendant. 4. The Defendant has been satisfactorily rehabilitated and poses no risk of recidivism. 5. The Defendant's interest in having the official records pertaining to the cases sealed outweighs any legitimate need of the government to maintain those records.  ( 21 min )

A not-insignificant part of my job is fielding phone calls from freelance writers who have questions. The questions can vary—Have you heard of any job openings? Are you interested in this pitch? An editor at another publication is trying to screw me, what should I do? Can you help me get a credential to this…  ( 21 min )

Some people are fans of the Jacksonville Jaguars. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the Jacksonville Jaguars. This 2026 Defector NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far here. Your team: Jacksonville Jaguars. Your 2025 record: 13-4, which got you a division title and a brief mention on page 18 of the newspaper, right under the foreclosure announcements. Curious how your chronically irrelevant team pulled this off? Put your Crocs in sport mode and take a walk with me.  ( 49 min )

The Vuelta a España, long the runt sibling among cycling's Grand Tours, promised to be bigger and better than usual this year, thanks primarily to the participation of Tadej Pogacar. The protests that stymied last year's race had successfully de-Israelized the peloton, and the 2026 edition had the glitz of a Monaco start, the showcase of the best rider in the world going for the win, and an interesting, adversarial course. But this is the Vuelta, where weird stuff happens, and the race stumbled into a controversy of its own making on its very first day because the organizers hired a viral vertical-video prankster to promote it. Meet Erola Jons. The 28-year-old Catalan influencer has racked up millions of followers (and presumably millions of Euros) by going around with a tiny microphone and pranking unsuspecting passersby by pretending to flirt with them. The Vuelta gave Jons an all-access pass with the idea that she could take people behind the scenes, interview riders and staffers, and bring all 21 stages to the world. https://twitter.com/lavuelta/status/2091205277081043398  ( 22 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 Tommy John, Tony Romo, babies at the movies, and more. Your letters: DP:  ( 48 min )

The Arizona Diamondbacks are angry at Quintin Berry, third base coach for the Chicago Cubs. Several Diamondbacks, including manager Torey Lovullo, suspected Monday night that Berry was picking up the changeup grip of Diamondbacks starting pitcher Merrill Kelly and then using not-subtle-enough hand gestures to ping information to Cubs hitters, relayed through a runner on second base. This matter came to a head in the fifth inning, with Michael Busch facing a full count at the plate and Seiya Suzuki on second base following a double off the wall in left. Berry did something with his left hand and Kelly stepped off the rubber and glared at him. Diamondbacks bench coach Jeff Banister, who has a terrific old worn-out baseball face, first lit into Berry, and then pitching coach Brian Kaplan shouted across the diamond to Cubs bench coach Ryan Flaherty, and then the two dugouts woofed back and forth and exchanged theatrical finger wags. https://youtu.be/cuajtaM9xas?t=408 Pitch-tipping is regarded as largely the problem of a sloppy pitcher, and exploiting it is well within the bounds of acceptable gamesmanship. The Diamondbacks do not disagree. What they apparently object to, as Kelly explained after the game, is when a coach gets involved in the action. The way Kelly sees it, he is a player competing against other players, and if those players pick up on his grips and kick his ass, that's just how it goes. But he is less cool with the involvement of some middle-aged bozo from over on the other side of the base line. Kelly makes a reasonable case.  ( 24 min )

John Ross knows a thing or two about self-deception. The songwriter and frontman of Wild Pink fills Still Coming Down, the latest from the shapeshifting New York indie group, with stories of men who have cooked their brains and lost their souls, without gaining much in the bargain. They rob banks, fall down internet rabbit holes, go to bars to bet alone on their phones. They tell themselves stories, but they don't really believe them. "Your brain is very kind to make you think you're warm inside," one man allows, but even he knows it's a ruse: "You're so cold, you're dying." These are all-American losers, too hopeless to hate, but without much going for them all the same, and Ross is their bard. Wry and ironic, with a wide-ranging mind and just a smidge of compassion, his songs have the ring of a confession made by someone who does not really want to be forgiven. "How much of God's love can you take day-in and day-out?" he asks on "Plates Keep Spinning," the story of a man who fears waking back up in the afterlife and having to keep on with the same old shit. His narrators are exhausted, resigned to lives they've slumped into and lack the will (or the energy) to change. "Thought it was something, turns out it's nothing," he sings on "Dead for a Sec," a lifetime condensed into a single exhale. "I still don't really understand where the time went." Ross might understand these men, but he's hardly a slacker. With Wild Pink he has put out six albums in the last nine years, not to mention plenty of EPs and standalone singles. Restless and ambitious, he has pushed the band's sound from dreamy bedroom pop through War On Drugs–style space rock and on into wall-of-sound opus territory. This approach hasn't always worked out—2022's self-produced ILYSM has some luminous songs, but never finds a center—but it's been exciting to follow, and has produced a diverse and surprising body of work. As Ross put it on 2024's "Eating the Egg Whole": "My stupid ass is always searching." Well damn, mine too.  ( 29 min )

It's nearly impossible to relay a single fact about former Cincinnati Reds owner Marge Schott that does not stop an unfamiliar recipient dead in their tracks. For example: She was suspended from baseball in 1993 for the repeated use of racial slurs, which included referring to Reds stars Eric Davis and Dave Parker as her "million-dollar niggers." A few years after her suspension, MLB forced her into selling the team, in part because she said, of Adolf Hitler, "Everything you read, when he came in he was good. They built tremendous highways and got all the factories going." She kept a Nazi armband in a desk drawer in her house. She was an alcoholic, and was probably drunk when she took the field before Game 1 of the 1990 World Series and told the assembled crowd that she was dedicating the …  ( 50 min )

The last real star in the universe will be a red dwarf. This will not be for some time yet. The conditions are ripe for stars to be formed, to live out their lives, to burn out or explode, in cycles for the next 100 trillion years. The universe is, then, unimaginably young, as far as things go, at just 13.8 billion years. If the lifespan of the so-called Stelliferous Era were a single 24-hour day, we'd be nearly 12 seconds in. But one day, all that stellar fuel will be used up, distributed, converted from delicious and powerful hydrogen to more complex elements useless for star formation. The day will come when no new stars are being born, and the ones that exist will start to go out, one by one, forever. Of the hydrogen-burning stars, red dwarfs will hang on the longest. G-type main-sequence stars like our Sun get a few billion years before they exhaust their fuel. Red dwarfs possess a lifespan of about 10 trillion years. We think. It's all theoretical, since we have yet to actually observe the death of a red dwarf star, because—again—the universe hasn't existed nearly long enough for any of them to die.  ( 25 min )

Post-apocalyptic comedies have not been in vogue since the notably less comic actual apocalypse has started filling our windscreens. Even moderately depraved cultural products like Survivor and Squid Game have stopped short of ritually killing and eating lesser characters as part of the competition. Then again, those shows don't pretend to be comedies, and so could easily make cannibalism part of the show without a sizable loss in audience. We bring that up to open your minds to the idea of the Survivor contestants rising up as one and finishing off Jeff Probst with a nice coconut chianti once and for all. Now that would be comedy. But because that hasn't happened (yet), we can say that this genre pretty much topped out with Red Dwarf, the hydraheaded British comedy of yesteryear that took…  ( 32 min )

This is your TPM evening briefing.

Eglot ships with Emacs as a built-in, lightweight LSP client, and its default configuration is sufficient for most projects. However, working with large codebases can cause noticeable latency. When Eglot becomes sluggish, the problem may involve work performed by Eglot and Emacs as well as the language server itself. JSON-RPC event logging, filesystem watching, diagnostics, completion, and other editor activity can all contribute to latency. This article covers practical changes for keeping Eglot responsive when working with large projects. Auto-shutting down idle Eglot servers This reduces resource usage when switching between multiple projects. The eglot-autoshutdown variable shuts down the LSP server after the last managed buffer has been killed. (setq eglot-autoshutdown t) This is usef…  ( 10 min )

A quick update for my Emacs config Gems series: I am working on part 5, and I’m trying to finalize a few things first. Currently it’s Ispell (I’ve not been using it to its full capacity) and completion… more details soon.  ( 2 min )

the dumbest history repeats itself

INSIDE: Greg Abbott ... Christian Castro ... Tulsi Gabbard

Today’s mix opens with a track from Matthewdavid’s new ambient EP, Lysergic Snack Bar. That’s followed by some ambient classics by Chihei Hatakeyama, Oneohtrix Point Never, and Asmus Tietchens. There’s new music by Damian Dalla Torre, Total Blue’s Anthony Calonico, and Moola (h/t

The 1980s produced an impressive number of hit songs that were difficult to describe using a single genre. Pop could  ( 13 min )

Music has produced thousands of great singers, but greatness and recognizability are two very different things. There are singers with  ( 21 min )

Holiday horror has become a beloved subgenre, offering twisted takes on celebrations that are normally associated with warmth, family, and  ( 10 min )

Progressive rock, or prog rock, was one of the strangest and most ambitious musical movements to emerge from the  ( 28 min )

The Ramones did not look like the kind of band that was going to change music forever. They were four

What does religious liberty even mean when the wing nuts won’t let anyone else follow their own beliefs and traditions?  ( 65 min )

The Democrats are already making moves in anticipation of a big midterm swing. They should be doing penance first.  ( 64 min )

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

This is your TPM evening briefing.

Continuing my explorations on malleable computing with Emacs is examining access to OS/Platform-specific resources, in this case with macOS. macOS provides a number of mechanisms for high-level inter-process communication, among them AppleScript & Automator Actions (now considered legacy but still maintained) and App Intents, Entities & Shortcuts (introduced in macOS 13 and considered by Apple a replacement for the former). This post both announces and covers the implementation of an Emacs integration with the Shazam music recognition service that is packaged with macOS. This Emacs integration is called shazam.el (https://github.com/kickingvegas/shazam) and is now available for installation via MELPA. To understand the shazam.el implementation, the following background information is provi…  ( 3 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 )

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 )

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 )