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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

July 26, 2026  ( 12 min )

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fence (2015). M3 testing Tri-X at 1600 Suddenly this morning, my Org Agenda was empty. It should never be empty. Emacs had already been running, idle, so I've no idea how it happened. A restart fixed it, but it was unsettling enough that I created a separate blog script to replace the emacs-dependent parts of my blogging workflow. Now I can do blog journal or blog post or blog cover in a terminal, and it does the right thing, then opens the file in $VISUAL. Feels safer this way. The Emacs functions were 90% just calling out to existing shell scripts anyway, so there's only a small amount of duplication. I've spent several hours this morning making stuff work on my Mac that already worked fine on Linux, because "what if?". It's exhausting. On the plus side, I'm editing this post in BBEdit, which is always just so damn comfortable. ✍️ Reply by email  ( 1 min )

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Today we’re listening to GENDEMA, an Argentinian electronic musician from Morón, Buenos Aires.

Substitute provides a set of commands that perform text replacement (i) throughout the buffer, (ii) limited to the current definition (per narrow-to-defun), (iii) from point to the end of the buffer, and (iv) from point to the beginning of the buffer. Variations of these scopes are also available. These substitutions are meant to be as quick as possible and, as such, differ from the standard query-replace (which I still use when necessary). The provided commands prompt for substitute text and perform the substitution outright, without moving the point. The target is the symbol/word at point or the text corresponding to the currently marked region. All matches in the given scope are highlighted by default. Package name (GNU ELPA): substitute Official manual: https://protesilaos.com/emacs/su…  ( 1 min )

I’ve been working on my Emacs config for three weeks now, coming this weekend. It’s one of the deepest and most fun rabbit holes I’ve been exploring. As I stumble upon new ways to do things, I dig deeper, learn more, and keep tweaking my config, which makes this rabbit lair even bigger. Eventually I realized that if I wait until I’m done to upload the config file, it will never happen: by the time I’m done, I will accumulate enough fixes and additional tricks and tweaks to warrant a whole new file. The conclusion is what I should have done from the beginning: apply changes in chunks and explain what I’m doing and why as these happen. I’m starting with changes to my .emacs1 file on my mac2, before we’re even touching the “good stuff” in my main emacs-settings.org file. Why? Because Emacs wa…  ( 6 min )

This series about the notable changes in CIDER 2.0 continues with the change you’ll bump into first, whatever your workflow: the transient menus, and the broader push to make CIDER’s functionality discoverable. The problem: CIDER is huge CIDER has well over 300 interactive commands. I’ll admit something I’ve said before: there are features in CIDER that even I forget exist, and I wrote half of them. For users, historically, the options for finding functionality were: memorize cryptic key chords (C-c C-w i, anyone?) grep the (very long) manual read the source stumble on a feature by accident three years in and feel robbed That’s not great for a tool whose whole pitch is making you more productive. The Emacs answer to this problem was demonstrated years ago by Magit: transient menus, which t…  ( 5 min )

What would have happened if Emacs' default buffer had been a terminal emulator? Conceptually, from the outside, it would be perceived as a terminal on steroids with Lisp as its scripting language. Maybe we would be talking about iTerm2 vs Emacs, or Kitty vs Emacs, or even Bash vs Emacs. And what if the default buffer had been Dired, the file manager? History might have created rivalries such as Total Commander vs Emacs, or Finder vs Emacs. But history took another path. We already know that if you launch an Emacs instance without any configuration whatsoever, what you see is a buffer with the following message: ;; This buffer is for text that is not saved, and for Lisp evaluation. ;; To create a file, visit it with ‘C-x C-f’ and enter text in its buffer. A notepad with an embedded Lisp int…  ( 10 min )

making a window dedicated. A dedicated window is one that is locked to its current buffer. That means, for instance, that if you have a particular window configuration in place and call some other function, the new function can’t hijack the dedicated window and spoil your configuration. Batsov has an animated Gif that shows this in action. The notion of a dedicated window has been in Emacs for some time but what’s new is a quick way of dedicating a window. That way is toggle-window-dedicated, which is bound to Ctrl+x w d by default. As shown in Batsov’s Gif, that toggles the dedicated state for the current window on and off. Sadly, I have Ctrl+x w bound to a function that starts up elfeed. I use that several times a day and have a significant investment in muscle memory so I either have to change the toggle-window-dedicated binding or simply call it directly. Since I doubt I’ll be using it that often, I’ll probably just call it directly. With my fuzzy command completion I need only enter Meta+x tog win to get the desired result. There’s one other aspect that Batsov mentions but doesn’t explain: strongly dedicated windows. If a window is strongly dedicated, you can’t change the buffer displayed by the window. You can make a window strongly dedicated by specifying the universal argument in the call to toggle-window-dedicated. If you like to set up a specific window configuration for some of your workflows and you don’t like random commands stepping on it, toggle-window-dedicated is just what you need.  ( 5 min )

Thu 23 Jul 2026 emacs I have hundreds of README.org files. Almost every project I write has one, and every SRFI repo has one, too. There are often three or four open in my Emacs session at a time. When I look at a buffer, knowing the path, not just the buffer name, helps me tell them apart. An obvious idea is to put the path in the mode line, but paths are often too long to fit comfortably. My mode-line-path package abbreviates paths to make them fit. It shortens them further using environment variables. I use short environment variable names to identify many directories. For example, Emacs configuration is in /home/arthur/.emacs.d/. If the environment variable e points to that directory, I can open /home/arthur/.emacs.d/lisp/init.el by doing C-x C-f $e/lisp/init.el RET. (See this Emacs Info page.) My mode-line-path package takes advantage of such environment variables, and displays $e/lisp in the mode line. That abbreviated path fits even in narrow windows. If there isn't a suitable environment variable, mode-line-path uses ellipses instead, e.g. .../.emacs.d/lisp. Since I wrote the package in 2013, I've used it every day. It's time to share it. I've cleaned up the code, and added caching, customization variables, and tests. After the package is loaded, configuration is as simple as: (setq-default mode-line-buffer-identification '("%b" " (" mode-line-path ")")) I've submitted mode-line-path to MELPA. If it is approved, I'll update this blog post. Here is the README.org.  ( 3 min )

Interesting trick, discovered by mistake: Dragging and dropping a file into Emacs while in a folder with Dired copies it there, just as Finder would. Did you know that? I didn’t!  ( 2 min )

Here I thought the administration was only burning American to the ground in the figurative sense, but nope—climate change has worse plans for us.  ( 80 min )

Sooner or later, you just run out of sports. There are currently a couple of regular seasons going on at the moment, but after a thrilling NBA playoffs led directly into a blast of a World Cup, a three-game series against the Cincinnati Reds happening 71 percent of the way through a long season can't help but look weak in comparison. This was a fun way to disrupt our normal sports watching biorhythms, but it was not a permanent one. It was with that in mind that we invited the bestselling novelist Paul Tremblay, author of the new Dead But Dreaming Of Electric Sheep, onto the show this week. The idea was that, with no top-of-the-news sports to talk about, we could talk about basically anything. And so we did. The episode begins with talk about Paul's prostate cancer experience, complete with thematically appropriate Dreamcatcher comps, an arachnid surgical robot, and a surgeon no-selling his pre-operation attempt at a joke. It is a good deal funnier than it had any right to be, even before the phrase "penile rehab" was spoken aloud. We also spoke about his experience getting roasted by teenagers while continuing to teach high school math after authoring several bestselling horror novels, what it's like to sue OpenAI, and what his own lengthy deposition in that case revealed about big AI's legal strategy and effectively nonexistent capacity to read a room. We also discussed his new book, invented a verb form of Weekend At Bernie's, and talked about the thrills and relatively mild indignities of the contemporary book tour.  ( 20 min )

There's a Massachusetts–based restaurant chain that offers a free kids meal—kid must be present, limit two per party—the day after a Boston Red Sox win. When the team was scuffling at the bottom of the AL East and manager Alex Cora was fired for a dismal start, the promotion became an easy joke: The children of New England were hungry. So hungry. Offensive struggles and one-run losses had turned them into the wee ragamuffins of Oliver Twist. But around the end of June, after dropping two of three to the lowly Colorado Rockies, something changed: The Red Sox began providing meals. They swept the New York Yankees in a four-game series in Boston, the finale an invigorating win courtesy of Jarren Duran's walk-off hit, then added one more victory against the Washington Nationals for a nice little five-game streak. They did drop two games to the Nats, one in which Cade Cavalli was a little racist, but from that point on, the Red Sox didn't lose. From July 3 to the night of July 22 (including the all-star break), Boston won 15 straight, improving their record from 37-48 to 52-48 and putting themselves firmly within the wild card race. The streak tied a franchise record last accomplished in 1946, back when Ted Williams was having an MVP season. For the majority of this month, the children of New England have feasted on cheesy flatbreads and chicken tenders—perhaps even a fried shrimp for the more adventurous eaters. They've gone Augustus Gloop mode. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yOkpaVgs248  ( 21 min )

LIV Golf's honchos, the poor suckers, are still out there scrambling around, looking for investors to keep their dipshit tour afloat after the Saudi Public Investment Fund suddenly booted them into the wilderness back in April. Now that LIV Golf has lost its utility as a sportswashing spectacle and as a wedge for market disruption, it is left with zero authentic value whatsoever. Nobody was clamoring for more golf, for golf with stupid team names, or for much noisier golf. A formerly endlessly resourced and attention-bloated LIV Golf couldn't bring the PGA Tour to its knees and thus force a merger, and now it is left to make an argument for itself, an argument that became comical the moment the tour was declared a dud by the most brazen and profligate entity in world sports. If the ROI on …  ( 27 min )

In the absence of any actual NBA basketball to watch, the blogscape is currently lousy with basketball-knowers furiously knowing basketball. It couldn't be any other way, although it is all happening at such a frantic rate that one is left absolutely convinced that LeBron James is going to sign with the Fort Wayne Zollner Pistons by week's end because Brian Windhorst's pal/source Spliffy The Dry Cleaner got a tip, and also that Tyler Herro either punched, was punched by, or has never actually met Bam Adebayo. Every shovel has a name, a job, and a hole that needs digging and filling repeatedly so that the shovelers can try to seem indispensable to the league's information system, at least until such time as they get hired by some team to do some nonsensical job that will be replaced by AI b…  ( 27 min )

The Boston Legacy is not known for being gentle. The expansion team has earned more yellow cards and committed more fouls than any other club in the NWSL this year. On Sunday, that didn’t matter for Leicy Santos. At least twice, the Washington Spirit midfielder found herself with the ball cornered by three Boston players. With remarkable efficiency, she made them all look like fools. After a few deft touches and even better body positioning, she had evaded considerable pressure and released the ball to an open teammate. In fact, I’m not even confident that this didn’t happen more than twice; such is the grace with which Santos can slip out of impossible situations. You only see it if you’re looking for it.  Of course, there was no missing Santos’s contribution on the first goal of the match, a looping one-touch cross to Tara Rudd, who headed the ball back across the goal mouth above the hands of Casey Murphy. Washington went on to win the game 2-1. The performance wasn’t their most flashy, but it was impressive considering it came just four days after they played Gotham FC in abhorrently smoky conditions in New York City. Most starters from that Gotham game were rested against Boston. Santos was not one of them; she was one of only three outfield players to start both games, and played 170 minutes across the two contests.  Halfway into the season, the Spirit sit at the top of the table, and Santos is a big reason why. Her importance to the team is partly borne out of necessity; when the Spirit traded away Croix Bethune, the league’s most exciting attacking midfielder, before the season started, they didn’t bring anyone in to replace her. Fans of the perennial contenders were puzzled. Losing Bethune, as Yuki Nagasato tweeted, was losing the attack’s brain.  ( 24 min )

There’s a type of public relations exercise that unfolds like a joke. In it, a notable figure who has chosen to sit for a longform profile, declined to answer a sensitive question through her representative, posed for a corresponding photoshoot, and recently "hopscotched across the country" to engage in "a slew" of "business opportunities and brand activations" insists she doesn't care what other people think of her. Sophie Cunningham sure doesn't. As Hallie Grossman, the author of an ESPN profile published Tuesday, writes: You might delight in her, or you might decry her; either way, she draws you in. So whether you call Cunningham an enforcer or a dirty player, a role model or a culture warrior, fearless or shameless, brave or brazen -- you will keep calling her. And she won't mind. Which, perhaps, as much as anything, is the key to her ascension. "People love me or they really frickin' hate me," she says. "I just don't care."  ( 23 min )

The Minnesota Lynx are comfy. They woke up Wednesday morning at the top of the WNBA standings with a 21-6 record, the league's best net rating, and a bespectacled point guard who has become the coolest player in the league halfway through her first season. These are the sort of circumstances that allow for an organization to be extremely chill in coming up with a plan for reintegrating a four-time All-WNBA superstar back into the starting lineup. It doesn't get much more chill than a Wednesday afternoon road game against the Seattle Storm, one day before the start of the all-star break. Those are the circumstances under which Napheesa Collier returned to the court for the Lynx. The Lynx won the game, 86-76, and afterwards all the talk was about how Collier, returning to action following offseason surgeries on both of her ankles, is going to be taking it slow. "This is an evolution," head coach Cheryl Reeve said after the game, about Collier's reintegration. "We're not at the end of this ... there will still be ups and downs. There's no doubt about it." That echoed Reeve's pregame caution, when she stressed to reporters that Collier has "a couple more steps to go" and would be playing on a minutes restriction.  ( 20 min )

The actor Eli Gelb has really found a niche for himself as "unassuming guy in a three-hour play who's able to avoid getting directly hit by the drama." Before catching him in Birthright, the new off-Broadway play from Jonathan Spector, I'd last seen Gelb as the sound engineer Grover in the Tony-winning Stereophonic. In that play, which was clearly inspired by the making of Fleetwood Mac's Rumours, he begins the job ambitious and a little naive before the bad behavior of rock stars forces him to grow some protective layers. In Birthright, Gelb's character Noah has a similar professional drive, and he, too, has a core earnestness that you don't want to see overridden by a more convenient posture of cynicism. A viewer might appreciate the satisfaction of an ending like the one in Stereophonic…  ( 25 min )

In many ways, the sunfish could not have been better-designed as an orca's chew toy. The largest species, the oceanic sunfish Mola mola, can grow up to 10 feet long and weigh up to 6,000 pounds. And yet it is almost unfathomably helpless. Its body resembles a serving platter. It has no tail fin, just a tall dorsal and anal fin, which it flaps in unison to get around. A sunfish often spends its time lounging on its side at the surface of the water, basking in the sun and allowing seabirds to nibble on the parasites that riddle its skin. It has no venom or spines; its only real defense is somewhat thick skin. It's not even a very good swimmer. While a sunfish can reach top speeds of around two miles per hour, an orca can rocket through the water as fast as 35 mph. So it's no surprise that such a large and lumbering fish might offer a wandering pack of orcas some welcome entertainment as they cruise in the clear waters off the Gulf of California. Of course, what is amusing for an orca is terrifying for any non-orca witnesses. Something that might make an orca click and whistle with glee will certainly make an adult woman go "Oh my god! Oh my god! Oh my god! Holy shit!" Relatedly, please enjoy the video below.  ( 23 min )

Some people are fans of the Las Vegas Raiders. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the Las Vegas Raiders. This 2026 Defector NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far here. Your team: Las Vegas Raiders.  ( 46 min )

Neal Stephenson: Writing by Hand is Good for your Brain - Here's how to do it: About twenty-five years ago I stopped composing at the keyboard and switched over to fountain pen on paper. Since then I have written many thousands of pages that way. The manuscript of The Baroque Cycle was a stack of handwritten pages 42 inches high. Good lord, how cool is that? As a fountain pen using, hand-writing sort, I found this to be a great read. (h/t Sal) ✍️ Reply by email  ( 1 min )

I've heard so many people complaining about Disclosure Day that I expected to be disappointed. I wasn't. It was a fun ride. It gets a little Spielberg-ey at times, but I didn't mind. ✍️ Reply by email

My one vice. Speed Graphic. HP5+. New55 Monobath R5 I can hardly be bothered writing things anymore. I get an idea for a blog post and thinking about all the words I'd have to come up with makes it just sort of fizzle out. It's a phase, right? Mainspring could be handy. "Mainspring reveals the settings macOS hides — as one-click, fully reversible power-ups. Wind it up exactly how you like it; unwind any change just as fast." I would probably buy it, but it overlaps a lot with Supercharge which I already own. (via Web Excursions for July 23rd, 2026 - BrettTerpstra.com) ✍️ Reply by email  ( 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 )

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

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

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 )

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

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

Today we’re listening to René Urtreger, a French jazz pianist and composer from Paris.

A Tags List is an alternative to the Agenda that the user can configure with org-agenda-custom-commands. The list shows subheadings that have a certain tag. You can edit these list items with the same commands used for the item on the standard Agenda View. For example, you can invoke org-agenda-todo (bound to t) while on a tag list item to change its TODO state. However, the display doesn't always reflect the action that was performed. That can mislead the user into thinking the command had no effect. For example, you can change an item's TODO state to DONE. When you do that for an Agenda item, usually Org Agenda removes the item from the Agenda. However, that doesn't happen to an item on a Tags List. The TODO keyword changes to DONE, but the item remains visible. However, if it's a …  ( 11 min )

The why Regular readers know the pattern by now: if something can be done in Emacs, I will eventually do it in Emacs. Then why not have my iMessages living here as well?! So I made timu-imessage – a package to read and send iMessages without leaving Emacs. Well… I told Claude Code what I wanted. What does it do? A chat list with your entire message history, unread counts included. Conversation buffers that update live as messages arrive – with tapbacks, threaded replies and inline images. Full-text search across every message you ever received, in milliseconds. Sending from the minibuffer. Org integration: a single key captures the message at point with a link back to it. It reads straight from the Messages database on your Mac. Sending goes through a small companion Shortcut. Installat…  ( 1 min )

It all started with a routine task. I use GitHub issues for all of my public-facing projects but my preference is keeping track of things in Org Agenda. To reconcile the two, I would manually copy over the GitHub issue to an Org file, typically the title and description, like an animal. Despite this separation, the duplicated issue allowed me to treat it as a scratchpad for anything I could express in Org. In this way, I used the duplicated issue in Org as both a dedicated area to take notes and a “staging” area to compose follow-up comments that I’d want to share in the public facing issue. I manually copied for far longer than I care to admit. Repeat a task enough times in Emacs and the inevitable thought arises: “I should automate this.” This post recounts how I automated this task and …  ( 6 min )

I’ve been using some variation of the same system for my alarm clock since at least 2011. Probably earlier — I didn’t have a blog before that, so who knows? As the saying goes: What hasn’t been blogged about is lost to the mysteries of time… (Here’s some music to play while reading this blog post (because of the “I feel like an alarm clock” lyrics)… This is gonna be one of those posts that require a lot of scrolling. You’ve been warned.) My alarm clock idea has been the same since the start, but with a varying assortment of components. A numpad to input the alarm… … and a screen/computer to display time and the alarm. (And the temperature. Brrr!) This particular hardware combination has been going since 2019. So I tap in the time I want to wake up (like 9) and then at 09:00 it t…  ( 17 min )

taken the time and effort to do something about them. The problem is that they’re so tricky to configure that it’s not worthwhile so we just suffer with the default. Now Bozhidar Batsov writes about an easy change that anyone can make. As of Emacs 30, it’s possible to right align given elements of the mode line. That was always possible, of course, but it required some tricky padding that was particularly fragile. Now there’s mode-line-format-right-align, which serves as a marker in your mode line definition. Everything before it is left aligned and everything after it is right aligned. Even the right edge is customizable. You can choose the right edge of the window, the left end of the fringe, or the left edge of the right margin. This facility is going to be useful to those who want a customized mode line. My main problem with the mode line is getting all the items I want to fit on it. Even though I make liberal use of diminish, a lot of useful information always seems to fall off the right end. That probably means I need to watch Prot’s video again and buckle down to customizing it the way I want it. In any event, it you’d like to place some items at the right side of the mode line, take a look at Batsov’s post to see how to do it.  ( 5 min )

You’ve carefully arranged your windows just the way you want them - source code on the left, tests on the right, maybe a shell at the bottom. Then you run some command that calls display-buffer, and suddenly one of your carefully placed windows gets hijacked to show a *Help* buffer or a compilation log. We’ve all been there. The display-buffer machinery is one of Emacs’s most powerful features, but also one of its most frustrating. Emacs 30 adds a simple, practical tool to help tame it: toggle-window-dedicated. How it works The concept of “dedicated” windows has existed in Emacs for a long time - a dedicated window tells display-buffer “don’t touch me, display your buffer somewhere else.” But setting this up required Elisp: (set-window-dedicated-p (selected-window) t) Not exactly someth…  ( 2 min )

Of Course, John Roberts Helped Fuel This Disaster, too

96 Aboard Newsletter: The Other AI Content Paradox img{-ms-interpolation-mode:bicubic;} table, td{mso-table-lspace:0pt;mso-table-rspace:0pt;} .mceStandardButton, .mceStandardButton td, .mceStandardButton td a{mso-hide:all!important;} p, a, li, td, blockquote{mso-line-height-rule:exactly;} p, a, li, td, body, table, blockquote{-ms-text-size-adjust:100%;-webkit-text-size-adjust:100%;} .mcnPreviewText{display:none!important;} .bodyCell{margin:0 auto;padding:0;width:100%;} .ExternalClass, .ExternalClass p, .ExternalClass td, .ExternalClass div, .ExternalClass span, .ExternalClass font{line-height:100%;} .ReadMsgBody, .ExternalClass{width:100%;} a[x-apple-data-detectors]{color:inherit!important;text-decoration:none!important;font-size:inherit!important;font-family:inherit!important;font…  ( 10 min )

Good things both sides of the agreement are known to be completely trustworthy.  ( 70 min )

I’m baffled that the GOP keeps getting away with nominating people like Andy Biggs—who allegedly helped plan the “Stop the Steal” movement—for major offices.  ( 68 min )

During a Tuesday House subcommittee meeting, Republicans sounded like a bunch of fourth graders while crusading against “woke” ideology in American museums.  ( 77 min )

In some ways, the omnipresence of mystery in everyday life can be comforting. Why is it always cold at the end of the hallway? How did my cat make that noise at 2 in the morning? Why does my car’s brake light keep going out on the driver’s side? Sure, there may be explanations, but I’m not going to be the one to get to the bottom of this. I didn’t grow up watching Ghostbusters aspirationally.  Today’s gossip raises the age-old question: Who you gonna call? If your house might actually be haunted and your kids are freaking out, you’d better come up with an answer. https://youtu.be/tVM4RvqxBak  ( 18 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, Giri answers a question about how parenting can reorient your life.  ( 29 min )

VOIRON, France — Last week, my colleague Jonny Long from Escape Collective (EC) remarked that he speaks to more old people at the Tour de France than he does the whole rest of the year. It's true, and not altogether surprising: France has an aging population, so they have old guys, and cycling's culture is one of reverence for the legends of yore, so the old guys are here. Tour crowds aren't monolithic—I find myself pantomiming French toward all manner of locals and tourists alike—yet they skew white, Western European, and older. But really, "old guys" is too narrow a descriptor. What defines the crowds here at the Tour is more the omnipresence and internal diversity of the uncs on display. We got uncs watching the race from the roadside, uncs strolling around with VIP passes, uncs gathering at the start to stare at the bikes, open-mouthed, with hands clasped behind their back like umarells. The press corps is largely composed of unc-type individuals. As I write this from the press room near the finish of Stage 17, I see the strange German reporter who exclusively asks terrible questions and exclusively wears capris and rhinestone-bedazzled shirts; the evil Italian TV guy who does Julius Randle moves while trying to box people out of press scrums; and the two Spanish reporters who keep falling asleep, to the delight of the rest of the Spanish press corps. If you want to know what sorts of people flock to the Tour de France, know the uncs. I am now going tell you about some of my favorites, in the order I encountered them. For organizational purposes, I find it useful to judge our subjects on four axes: the Sunburn Index, Severity of Frenchness, the Indifference Quotient, and Poison Binary. All scores are out of seven, and are self-explanatory, except maybe the last one though it's a binary so you can probably figure it out. Allez.  ( 30 min )

ESPN staff was hit by another round of layoffs this week, which in some sense barely registers as news given that the network is stuck in a constant state of downsizing. This round of cuts was notable, however, due to some of the recognizable names who were let go: Karl Ravech, David Lloyd, Stephania Bell, Cam Newton, Ryan Clark, and Tom Pelissero were among the cuts. Whether you wish to cheer or jeer any particular departure, there's no denying the significance of ESPN cutting loose someone like Ravech, who has been with the network since 1993 and became synonymous with its baseball coverage. Lloyd started with ESPN in 1997 and has become one of the more familiar faces on SportsCenter; Bell pioneered fantasy-focused injury analysis and turned that into a gig that lasted nearly 20 years; Pelissero is an NFL insider who is just as plugged in as Ian Rapoport and Adam Schefter. These are people sports fans have real relationships with. It is also impossible not to think about these layoffs in the context of some other recent news about ESPN. In June, The Athletic's Andrew Marchand reported that the network was in the midst of negotiating a new contract for host Pat McAfee, which would pay him more than $60 million per year. Even McAfee himself wasn't immune to making this connection, and attempted to defend his worth during Tuesday's episode of his daily television show:  ( 21 min )

There's not a lot of NBA news happening right now, so we must welcome any sort of chaos we can find, even of the accidental kind. On Tuesday night, the excruciating wait for LeBron James to make up his damn mind about where he is going to play next season wore down the faculties of at least one social media employee, as the Miami Heat accidentally published an unlisted video on its YouTube that signaled LeBron's introductory press conference for the team he won his first (and second) title with will happen on July 27. https://twitter.com/WadexFlash/status/2079742594586952066  ( 18 min )

"The city was question and answer in one," Colson Whitehead writes early on in Cool Machine, the final novel of his Harlem Trilogy. "Cause and effect and everything else, too." You can forgive the lifelong New Yorker for being a little romantic about his hometown, which is both the setting and central metaphor across the tales of Harlem furniture salesman-cum-not-so-reluctant-crook Ray Carney, whose misadventures come to a conclusion with Machine. Carney's capers, inspired by heist movies, are presented as discrete novellas, with each book—Harlem Shuffle and Crook Manifesto are the first two—consisting of three parts. Collectively, they span both a whole array of thieving and schemes as well as nearly three decades of New York history.  These vivid, pulpy, compulsively readable novels allo…  ( 34 min )

The San Francisco Giants are a rotten, poisoned, blighted organization. I offer to the jury, by way of evidence, the following exhibit: Monday evening a representative of the Giants saw a story from the San Francisco Chronicle about fans who still feel hurt and angry over the mess the organization made of its annual Pride Night celebration, and the front office's tepid, quarter-hearted, wildly inadequate response to public outcry. That team representative then logged onto social media so that they could blame the continuing controversy on online discourse and clickbait reporting. That representative, hilariously, was the team's chaplain, a man named Christian Huang. The story Huang was commenting on was published Monday, and it begins with an anecdote about a longtime Giants fan who attend…  ( 22 min )

Today we’re listening to Kane Parsons, an American filmmaker and composer from Petaluma, California.

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 )

This is a small Emacs package that automatically highlights the current line after certain functions are invoked. It can also highlight a line or region on demand. The idea is to make it easier to find where the point is, what was affected, and also to bring attention to something in a buffer. Watch the original demo (2022-03-14). Package name (GNU ELPA): pulsar Official manual: https://protesilaos.com/emacs/pulsar Change log: https://protesilaos.com/emacs/pulsar-changelog Git repositories: GitHub: https://github.com/protesilaos/pulsar GitLab: https://gitlab.com/protesilaos/pulsar Backronym: Pulsar Unquestionably Luminates, Strictly Absent the Radiation. Below are the release notes. Version 1.4.0 on 2026-07-22 This version fixes a few bugs and brings quality-of-life improvements to an…  ( 3 min )

It hasn't been long since the 0.55 update, but plenty has landed since. Let's go through the highlights as of v0.63. What's agent-shell? agent-shell is a native Emacs mode to interact with AI agents powered by ACP (Agent Client Protocol). Supported agents The roster keeps growing. This cycle adds two new agents: Grok Build (xAI), #720 by @eddof13. Oh My Pi (omp), #631 by @tychoish. Additionally: Cursor now runs on the official Cursor CLI (agent acp). Note a recent CLI is required, as the acp subcommand was only added in 2026. Codex now uses @agentclientprotocol/codex-acp. Cline now accepts a default model and session mode via defcustoms (#693 by @nhojb). Goose no longer requires an OpenAI key by default (#711 by @hoyon). Qwen now has explicit support for OpenAI-compatible keys. Custom mark…  ( 6 min )

If there were an underappreciated web browser feature, it would be this: history. On many browsers, history is invoked with C-h (Ctrl+h). Vivaldi shows history as a calendar. The user can choose from time intervals of Day, Week or Month and search for a keyword within that time interval.1 I tend to write about a topic after I've forgotten where I read about it. Suppose I recall reading about "nslookup" but can't remember when or where. Simple. Vivaldi remembered that I visited a page with "nslookup" on Windows Central on July 3 at 21:26. Being able to find such references helps. History helped me track my hours when my employer required bi-weekly timesheets. I would combine browser history with Org's clock report to get a result I was actually proud to submit. I …  ( 10 min )

quick post on a recent enhancement to Emacs Flymake. The TL;DR is that you can arrange for Flymake to append a diagnostic at the end of any line with a problem. It’s a quick way of seeing what the problem is and maybe fixing it without a lot of extra work. As Batsov (and the documentation) says, that can get a little noisy so (of course) Emacs gives you a setting to control how much information is displayed. Take a look at Batsov’s post for the details. I’ve never warmed up to Flymake but lots of people, I know, love it. If you’re one of those people, be sure to take a look at Batsov’s post. Everything is controlled by a single variable so it’s easy to try out the various options. This feature is available only with Emacs 30 and later. Getting it may be a good reason to upgrade if you haven’t already.  ( 5 min )

For those unfamiliar with the lineage, MicroEmacs originally dates back to 1985 when Dave Conroy built a tiny, portable Emacs clone, later maintained for decades by Daniel M. Lawrence (and famously still used by Linus Torvalds today!). Around 1988, Jon Green and Steven Phillips forked MicroEmacs 3.8 to build Jasspa, it uses a subset of full emacs command set and it can emulate the keybindings from Microemacs, GNU Emacs, and even Windows CUA keybindings. It's a much enhanced version of the Daniel Lawrence's original MicroEmacs 3.8 of 1988 and they have grown it into a remarkably feature-packed environment with syntax highlighting, windowing, and a macro language and its still regularly updated! One thing that immediately caught my eye in Jasspa was its file manager (a dired equivalent th…

Emacs users have long wanted the ability to push certain mode line elements to the right edge of the window. Think of it like having a left-aligned and right-aligned section in your mode line - buffer name on the left, maybe the time or some status info on the right. Before Emacs 30, achieving this required various hacks involving padding calculations and propertized strings. It was doable, but fragile and ugly. Emacs 30 makes it trivial with mode-line-format-right-align. How it works Just insert the symbol mode-line-format-right-align into your mode-line-format. Everything before it is left-aligned (as usual), and everything after it gets pushed to the right edge. (setq-default mode-line-format '("%e" mode-line-front-space mode-line-mule-info …  ( 2 min )

PHILADELPHIA — I thought I would be miserable going to this game, watching two teams I hate (the Phillies and the Dodgers) ride high on their own egos amid overpriced concessions that jam a “ph” everywhere an “f” should be. I did it only so that I would finally get to see Shohei Ohtani play in person. But where was the phantastic two-way player, six-time all-star, and four-time MVP? Certainly not in the City of Brotherly Love. Whatever phacsimile was at the plate went 0-for-4 with two strikeouts and an intentional walk. In other words, the most Ohtani did in that game was have a reputation for being a threat. Yes, I know players have bad games. But I’ve seen enough to understand that Shohei Ohtani is nothing compared to baseball’s real two-way player, Trea Turner, who was such an important force for both teams that he was responsible for almost half the runs scored in the Phillies' 10-7 win.  When Turner played short, ostensibly trying to help the Phillies prevent runs, everything hit his way turned to butter. Only one of his mishaps was ruled an error—a dropped ground ball from Mookie Betts in the top of the first which allowed the Dodgers to load the bases—but his defense assisted Los Angeles in several different ways. In the fourth inning, Turner misplayed a grounder from Alex Call to produce a single instead of a third out. In the sixth, he bobbled Andy Pages’s ground ball when he could have ended the inning with a simple throw to first, allowing Teoscar Hernandez to score. In the ninth, he misplayed Tommy Edman’s line drive up the middle to allow another runner on base and advance Pages. But also, because Turner is such a great two-way player, he hit two home runs and a double, bringing in a total of phive runs for the Phillies. His dual loyalty was so confusing that those in the ballpark couldn’t decide how to feel about him. When Turner stepped up to bat, they booed, then cheered, then decided simply to make ambiguous noise.  ( 19 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 food hangups, cockroaches in heaven, shitting your pants on the football field, and more. Before I get started, you guys might know that I moonlight as a weekly columnist over at SFGate. I joke that I work for the only two decent news sites left in America, because it's kinda true. But SFGate, like virtually every other media company dependent on ad revenue, got hammered when Google turned its search product into an AI mill. To help counter the losses, my overlords at the gate rolled out a subscription app for the site last week. Like Defector, it’s a cheap date, it has a clean, ad-free interface, and it protects the company newsroom from being decimated by outside forces. So if you can spare five bucks a month, please consider giving it a whirl. Now, your letters:  ( 50 min )

A day after the French Open ended in May, the website tennis.com shut down its editorial operation. The brand dates back to the founding of Tennis magazine in 1965, and though the mag folded in 2022, the website continued to produce news, analysis, and feature articles. At least, until after the clay season. The new site amounts to a scoreboard for ongoing tournaments with tabs for the upcoming schedule and rankings. Endure a long scroll to the bottom of the page and you'll find a link to the news archive: all the articles on the website, still online for the moment.  A scrap of an explanation rested on the second page of an FAQ, stating that the website "evolved into a dedicated scores, and tournament information destination. For the full Tennis Channel experience—analysis, and original programming—visit tennischannel.com or the Tennis Channel app." (Tennis Channel owns tennis.com.)  Tennis was the standard-bearing publication about the game for decades. Pete Bodo, among the longest-tenured and most influential tennis writers alive, spent 50 years of his career there. Bodo wrote magazine profiles at the beginning of his career, getting to know the players and delivering accurate, poignant portraits of them to the public. His 1994 tennis tome The Courts of Babylon is studded with raw, startling anecdotes about players, like Ilie Nastase charging his German opponent in the locker room after a match at the 1976 US Open with a cry of "Fuck you, Hitler!" By the time the site folded, Bodo had shifted to part-time, but continued to write columns and features for tennis.com right up until the end of the website.  ( 48 min )

"Everything ends badly, otherwise it wouldn't end." As it is in life and love, so it is in soccer. From the outset, the 2026 World Cup was sure to mark an ending for Lionel Messi—not to his career as a whole, and likely not even to his days with the Argentina national team, but to his time on the sport's center stage, the venue which featured the 20-year unfurling of the exciting, hopeful, heartbreaking, agonizing, inspiring, and triumphant story that has defined one of the greatest tales sports have ever told. Across its full length, Messi's career at the World Cup was anything but predictable—featuring defeat when it seemed he would win, wins when it seemed victory had passed him by, and, most ridiculous of all, one last final against a teenager he had, unsuspectingly but almost literall…  ( 46 min )

This is the fourth MLB season with a pitch clock, so one might think that any beef around the rule change has long ago expired. But José Caballero's got a huge supply of dry-aged steak in the walk-in freezer. The Yankees' base-stealing utilityman, who hits just a tick below league average, has made himself notorious around the league for the way he takes advantage of the pitch clock protocol. The big book of rules says that the batter needs to be ready for the pitch with eight seconds remaining on the clock—"ready" meaning in the box and making eye contact with the pitcher—and Caballero's favorite time to lock eyes with his opponent is something like 8.001 seconds remaining, which ideally gets him inside the pitcher's head and messes with his routine. Sometimes the pitcher, unused to coming set and delivering within those eight seconds, will run afoul of the clock and take an automatic ball. This strategic equivalent of "I'm not touching you!" earned Caballero a dramatic umpire warning in Toronto last month, though afterward his manager, Aaron Boone, sought and received assurance from MLB that he's just on the right side of the rule. It makes for the kind of line-toeing peskiness that keeps everyone alert. "There's some gamesmanship to what he does, but he's a smart, gritty player," Boone said in June.  ( 18 min )

While many of us can agree men are in trouble, few can agree on the exact cause. America has a masculinity crisis. Men are in trouble. The "masculinity crisis" is real. The male loneliness epidemic has received radically different diagnoses from men’s rights activists, religious conservatives, feminists, and heteropessimists. The manosphere, a loose affiliation of men who hold women in low esteem and value “alpha” behavior over weakness, ranges from hardcore redpilled incels and influencers, like Andrew Tate, to those who focus more on maximizing their own physical bodies, like Bryan Johnson and Clavicular. The blatantly sexist, racist, and homophobic language of figures like Christian nationalist Pastor Doug Wilson, who says women shouldn’t vote, and influencers like Myron Gaines has garnered a fair amount of inquiry and alarm—most recently in Louis Theroux’s recent documentary Inside the Manosphere. But not all men want to treat masculinity as a math problem that cheapens women. Former GQ editor Sean Hotchkiss has recently written a “memoir of male rage and recovery,” provocatively titled Hating Women. After years of engaging in hookup culture, he’s become a life coach focused on creating positive masculinity.  Hotchkiss joins the chorus of those claiming that heterosexuality is in crisis. Instead of arguing for nihilism, he proposes a kind of radical optimism. Men, he believes, can be reformed. He knows this because he was once the kind of guy who used women for relief. While Hotchkiss never quite seemed to try on the manosphere-inflected world of conspiracy theories and intense fitness, he did enjoy a certain amount of wealth and promiscuity. Yet, he discovers, “women held this incredible power over” him. Porn was his first line of defense in terms of stress relief.  ( 28 min )

ÉVIAN-LES-BAINS, France — After several years of lurking in the shadows, the specter of doping once again looms over the Tour de France. Though nobody has tested positive—or no positive test results have been made public—the biggest story at this year's Tour is a renewed aggression from testing authorities and a resultant increasing hostility from the riders. The tactics executed by anti-doping officials and the legal justifications marshaled to support them represent a modernization of anti-doping rules, intended to disrupt hypothetical cutting-edge pharmacological routines designed specifically to beat previous testing methods. The International Testing Agency (ITA) and the Union Cyclistes International (UCI) are no longer passively accepting that the extant testing regime is good enough. Here we see the latest iteration of an eternal story in cycling. The uneasy symbiosis between professional cyclists and the UCI is built on a shared interest in winning the public's trust. However, the sport's history makes that a fraught proposition, and while the riders would argue that a dearth of positive tests shows that nobody's cheating, the authorities would counter that no doping cases only means nobody's getting caught. Though riders and authorities ultimately want the same thing, it's incredibly difficult to balance labor's desire to be treated as trustworthy against management's desire to appear strong, without the former looking like liars or the latter looking like fools. So what's changed this year, and what does it say about the future of that delicate balance?  ( 33 min )

Credit to The Athletic for crafting the most haunting lede of 2026. Monday's article about the Eagles head coach begins with a single, chilling sentence: "Nick Sirianni discovered ChatGPT this offseason." The mind reels. More and more of what sucks about modern life is the result of a certain kind of person becoming overly enamored with the capabilities of chatbots. You hear that someone recently "discovered ChatGPT," and you reflexively begin preparing for a near future in which that person will soon be excitedly detailing hours-long conversations they had with their computer. So how far gone is Sirianni?  ( 17 min )

In case you needed another reason to not elect weirdos like representative Chuck Edwards, well, here it is.  ( 68 min )

I went to see the president’s great, big failure myself, and it’s comedy gold.  ( 70 min )

Stella's Lounge (2019) I must be in a funk because I plugged the Mac Mini back in and I'm typing on it now. I just didn't feel like thinking about the computer and macOS does a better job of being an appliance when I need one. The Linux machine is still plugged in, too, so I'm back to one cable swap away from the other OS any time. It's maddening, but I can't seem to claw my way out of it. Worse on Purpose | How Corporate Greed Killed Product Quality What an interesting site! Also rather depressing. papernews looks right up my alley: "news and articles nicely rendered as calm pdf for readers" but it also looks like a lot of fuss and I just don't have the energy for it right now. ✍️ Reply by email  ( 1 min )

With this post, I’ll wrap up my notes from the second Future of Software Development Retreat. But before I do, I should note that the full Thoughtworks report on the retreat is now available. They have five headline findings: Code generation is no longer the bottleneck — verification is. ‘Harness engineering’ is emerging as a distinct, ownable discipline. Organizations are colliding with a real apprenticeship crisis. The executive/engineer expectation gap is a bigger risk than any technical limitation. Legacy modernization is the clearest, most defensible near-term value pool.  ❄                ❄ A session convened around the mismatch of views about using LLMs between engineers using it and the C-suite and boards that were calling for it. The concern is that boards are looking at promised…  ( 8 min )

If you’re new to TimeIsIllmatic, I’m Deedub, a self-proclaimed hip-hop junkie who loves collecting CDs and vinyl. I collect other genres of music as well (i.e., R&B, seventies soul, pop, a bit of rock, and jazz), but a large chunk … Continue reading →  ( 19 min )

Today’s mix opens with a newish ambient track from James Bernard, who’s put together a guest mix for next week.

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 )

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 )

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

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 )

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

I love President Donald Trump’s Great American State Fair. I love its emptiness. Its expensive food. Its ability to confound Trump-friendly media outlets that keep pretending it’s going great. This spectacle on the National Mall in Washington, DC, part of Trump’s Trump-centric celebration of America’s 250th anniversary, is like watching your high school bully host a party that no one attends. It’s a daily humiliation for a wildly unpopular president who coopted what should be a unifying national celebration and turned it into repellent schlock. And I love it so much it hurts. Trump's Great American State Fair humiliation is soothing America I love seeing Fox News broadcasting from the fair, its hosts claiming the place is filled with excited patriots while the scenes behind them show a va…  ( 14 min )

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 )

The post Beautiful Universe appeared first on The Perry Bible Fellowship.  ( 4 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 )

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

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

I 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 )

Pesticides and fertilizers are washing off the state’s farms and into its waterways, sending cancer rates through the roof. Guess who’s backing the chemical conglomerates?  ( 72 min )

Recently I discovered a very cool feature of Emacs. Apparently, it’s been present in Emacs for over 30 years, although the Git log shows that it’s been heavily worked on very recently. Meet Hideshow mode. It’s purpose is simple: it allows to, well, hide or show blocks of code.  ( 3 min )

1, 2, 3, 4], I’ve been changing the Irreal Bunker’s spelling corrector to Jinx. I’ve had a couple of issues—mostly with choosing the correction—but things have mostly been smooth and Jinx has a lot of nice features. One thing I don’t like is the face that Jinx chooses for misspelled words. Ispell used red, which stood out and made it easy to pick out the misspellings. Jinx uses a color that is almost the same as the text and even though misspellings are underlined with a wavy line they’re harder to pick out. There are two colors: one for dark themes and one for light themes. Oddly, there are no options for changing the colors. Happily, this is Emacs so the source code is only a click away. It turns out the color is defined by a defface in the jinx.el file. I copied that to my init.el and changed the color to red Here’s the result: (defface jinx-misspelled '((((class color) (min-colors 88) (background dark) (supports :underline (:style wave))) :underline (:style wave :color "#d2b580")) (((class color) (min-colors 88) (background light) (supports :underline (:style wave))) :underline (:style wave :color "#ff0000")) ; <-- changed color (t :underline t :inherit error)) "Face used for misspelled words.") init.el and choose whichever color works for you. You can, of course, also fix things up for dark themes. Just don’t tell the Minions.  ( 5 min )

Upcoming events (iCal file, Org): Emacs APAC: Emacs APAC meetup (virtual) https://emacs-apac.gitlab.io/announcements/ Sat Jul 25 0130 America/Vancouver - 0330 America/Chicago - 0430 America/Toronto - 0830 Etc/UTC - 1030 Europe/Berlin - 1400 Asia/Kolkata - 1630 Asia/Singapore Emacs Berlin: Emacs-Berlin Hybrid Meetup https://emacs-berlin.org/ Wed Jul 29 1000 America/Vancouver - 1200 America/Chicago - 1300 America/Toronto - 1700 Etc/UTC - 1900 Europe/Berlin - 2230 Asia/Kolkata – Thu Jul 30 0100 Asia/Singapore Sacha Chua: 6 aôut: Emacs Chat: Richard Bonichon Sacha Chua: 20 aôut: Emacs Chat: Abdallah Maouche Beginner: Emacs Docs: The modern documentation website Emacs deserves (Reddit, lobste.rs, HN) How to Undo in Emacs (01:24) How to Find and Replace Text in Emacs (02:52) One shot modifier…  ( 4 min )

If you’ve used modern editors like VS Code, you’ve probably noticed how they display error and warning messages inline, right at the end of the offending line. It’s a nice touch - you don’t have to hover over a squiggly underline or check a separate diagnostics buffer to see what’s wrong. Emacs 30 brings this capability to Flymake with the new flymake-show-diagnostics-at-end-of-line option. Enabling it (setq flymake-show-diagnostics-at-end-of-line t) With this set, Flymake will display diagnostic summaries right at the end of each affected line, in addition to the usual fringe indicators and underlines. Here’s what it looks like in an Emacs Lisp buffer with a few issues (an error, a warning, and a checkdoc note): Display options The option accepts three values: Value Behavior …  ( 2 min )

Just as every film is really about filmmaking, isn't every film also an adaptation of Homer's The Odyssey? The hero's journey. The antihero's journey. The road trip movie. The war movie. Movies set in space or at sea, in the middle of a treacherous jungle or a barren desert. The story of Odysseus is a foundational myth, which makes the proposition of an actual movie of The Odyssey seem, among other things, redundant. And that's before you get to the near impossibility of filming it. But tell Christopher Nolan it's impossible to do something, and he will only want to do it more. And so we have his vision of The Odyssey, a massive, operatic cinematic experience mostly about the story's own operatic massiveness. In many ways, Nolan especially has always been making The Odyssey from the inside out, obsessed as he has been with his own harrowing quest to make big, majestic spectacles. It makes sense for him to just finally go at it for real. Nolan heightens and demystifies the mythology in equal measure, and the result is a throwback to the epic cinematic expressions of David Lean and Fritz Lang. It's also a treatise on Nolan's favorite subject: history's great men and the messes they make. The Odyssey is, of course, the story of wily Odysseus (Matt Damon) and his 20-year journey back home following the Trojan war. He and his men battle the currents, run into giants, cannibals, witches, sirens, and his own dead soldiers in his bid to get back to his wife Penelope (Anne Hathaway) and son Telemachus (Tom Holland), who are barely holding his kingdom together as the many suitors vying for Penelope impose their will in Odysseus's absence. Damon's Odysseus is a wizened general, weary after another battle fought on behalf of King Agamemnon (Benny Safdie). He's a serious, brilliant man, but arrogant in the face of mercurial Gods, which leads to much of his suffering.  ( 34 min )

A WELL-KNOWN VENUE IN THE MEADOWLANDS THAT FIFA WOULD THANK YOU TO CALL “NEW YORK NEW JERSEY STADIUM” BECAUSE IT DIDN’T GET PAID BY THAT STADIUM’S CORPORATE SPONSOR — The grass told the entire story.  If given the opportunity, FIFA would have very happily stripped every seat and beam and light fixture out of the venue that hosted Sunday’s World Cup Final and pawned it all off. In keeping with the organization’s best practices, those prices could have been set dynamically, while also being manipulated into an artificial scarcity that didn’t remotely reflect actual market demand. But only the grass sod that had been rolled out over the regular MetLife Stadium turf wasn’t bolted down, and so that would have to do.  That surface was far too dry and slow for high-level soccer, according to the players who contested some of the biggest games of their lives on subpar grass. Even from way up in the press box, you could see the ball bobbling about unprovoked and dying on its way from one player to the next.  ( 34 min )

On Sunday, the Oklahoma City Thunder, Atlanta Hawks, and Dallas Mavericks completed a three-team trade that was depressing for at least two big reasons. The first reason: Just two years after being selected first overall in the NBA Draft, Zaccharie Risacher has been kicked to the curb. The 21-year-old Frenchman had already fallen out of Atlanta's wing rotation during the regular season, and saw scant garbage-time minutes in the team's first-round playoff exit. To acquire a former No. 1 pick entering his third season, the Mavs only had to give up a second-round pick and undersized backup point guard Ryan Nembhard, who will go to Atlanta. The 2024 draft was thought to be a weak crop, but plenty of players taken in the first round, and possibly a handful taken in the second, appear to be headed for more fruitful NBA careers than Risacher. On an optimistic read, he's still got enough size and shooting to stick around someone's rotation after his current contract, but the fact that this is even a subject of speculation for a player of this pedigree is grim. The second reason this trade is a bummer: Just one year after winning the NBA championship, the Thunder are already cutting costs and losing depth. Lu Dort, a beefy, goofy, dirty wing whose contributions were crucial to OKC's title run—even if his offensive shortcomings hurt them in their 2026 playoff push—was shipped to Atlanta, where he'll play out the last year of his current contract. In return, the Thunder merely picked up three second-round picks.  ( 21 min )

Well, well, well, would you look at that. We have a fancy new website. This redesign is the result of a lot of hard work by our esteemed partners at Lede, and they have provided us with a homepage that is much more customizable. We now have the ability to highlight specific stories, coverage areas,…  ( 13 min )

And let the conspiracy theories begin. George Russell had spent the past three race weekends painstakingly narrowing the gap to his wunderkind Mercedes teammate in the Drivers Championship standings. Luck, for once, fell in his favor. And then on Sunday, at the Belgian Grand Prix, Russell yet again had a hellish day. With luck a tired nemesis, it fell upon spectators to find another cosmic horror to blame. Such as: Mercedes boss Toto Wolff. Here are some factual observations. Russell, who started third on the grid, had a relatively poor start off the line, and was swarmed by both Ferrari drivers from behind. While Russell managed to cling to his position through the first corner, his engine struggled to deploy energy on the Kemmel Straight, leaving him a sitting duck. First, Charles Leclerc zipped by. Then, Lewis Hamilton stayed on the inside of Russell through the next corner, washed slightly wide, and spun Russell out of the race. Russell was far angrier about the lack of straight-line power than the collision. "I had no fucking battery down the straight!" he yelled on the radio after literally crashing out. Over the course of the past three race weekends, Russell had managed to close the gap by 25 points. After less than one lap of racing, all of that progress had been undone. That collision with Hamilton helps demonstrate why it is easy to theorize in F1. Though Hamilton was on cold tires during the first lap of the race and left plenty of room for Russell—and both Russell and commentator Jolyon Palmer dubbed the collision a racing incident—Hamilton was saddled with a harsh five-second penalty. Meanwhile on lap eight, Hamilton's teammate, Leclerc, took the liberty of trying to squeeze the McLaren of Oscar Piastri off the race track and just bumped into the side of him, and somehow went entirely unpenalized.  ( 25 min )

One Defector intern explains baseball to another. Sohini: When I used to call it boring, my dad used to tell me that baseball is a game of immense strategy. I didn’t doubt him exactly, but it did carry the vibe of “Dad saying stuff to fit in with other dads.” I never took the time to familiarize myself with that strategy, and have instead treated the handful of baseball games I’ve been to as loud, fun, kitschy bars. So when it came time to fact check a baseball blog in the process of obtaining this internship, I had to first familiarize myself with obscure concepts like “dingers,” “extra-base hits,” and “Mookie Betts.” Sarah, this is My Fair Slugger. I am Eliza Doolittle, and you are Henry Higgins. By the end of this blog, I hope you will transform me from someone who doesn’t know the top of a bat from its bottom into a tobacco-chewing baseball savant.  ( 31 min )

Even before his historic election as New York City’s mayor in November 2025, democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani had reportedly begun searching for “common ground” with the city’s rank-and-file police officers. He publicly apologized for prior statements describing the department as “racist, anti-queer & a major threat to public safety,” and for an earlier endorsement of defunding the police. He also signaled his “openness” to keeping Eric Adams’s NYPD commissioner Jessica Tisch—a plan which he has since honored—despite her reputation as a law-and-order booster for “quality of life” policing, an opponent of bail reform, and a fierce defender of the city’s Strategic Response Group, a police unit known for its violent repression of protests since its creation in 2015, among other disreputabl…  ( 47 min )

Count your blessings: There's a new Monday crossword. This week's puzzle was constructed by Brian Callahan and Geoffrey Schorkopf, and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. This is Brian and Geoffrey’s second collaboration at Defector. The player at 11-Down in their first puzzle went from one of Brian’s teams to one of Geoffrey’s teams this past offseason. Geoffrey is quite pleased. Brian isn’t. Defector crosswords, launched in partnership with our friends at AVCX, run every Monday. If you’re interested in submitting a puzzle to us, you can read our guidelines HERE. The AVCX, an independent puzzles and games outlet, invites you to subscribe, or sample the goods with a two-month free trial: "With an AVCX subscription, you get access to weekly themed and themeless crosswords, minis, cryptics, and trivia, by email or in your favorite app. We have no corporate overlord, and we publish top-flight stuff only. We also pay our people fairly, always. Check us out."  ( 14 min )

ÉVIAN-LES-BAINS, France — Exactly 84 minutes after Jonas Vingegaard spiked his right collarbone into a curb and limped into an ambulance and out of the Tour de France, the assembled press watched him gingerly wince his way down the steps of the Visma bus and into a waiting team car. A scrambled pack-job followed. A soigneur could barely hold the pile of backpacks and duffel bags he was carrying off the bus. A team doctor stood by holding two large red-and-yellow first-aid kits, adopting the tense posture and alert facial expressions of someone who knows they can't help but desperately wants to. The eventual driver nearly spilled Vingegaard's stuff all over the tarmac of a wholly unremarkable road, in an unremarkable town, at the base of the final climb of Stage 15 of the Tour de France. An…  ( 28 min )

It seems somehow right and proper that the final game of the World Cup was such a screeching drag, if only to remind us that the chief byproduct of a global anything is for most of the participants and supporters to grouse about how it ended. I mean, Spain had a great time, to be sure, as it got to not only write but prove all its best narratives, but every tournament has one winner and a thousand envious and angry losers. When you frame it that way, the vision of the Turnip-in-Chief and his throw pillow Gianni Infantino handing out the medals last night is both galling and instructive, for reasons that will come clear shortly. And it is right and just for you to rise in moderate dudgeon and exclaim, "But I enjoyed the tournament," if you did. Good on you. Fun is not easy to come by, so you should enjoy every bit of what you can. A lot of this past month was indisputably enjoyable. There were a fair number of quality matches that exceeded what you would expect from a hastily bloated tournament, specifically those involving Vozinha and Cape Verde. There was also the next generation of international stars who will replace the ones to whom we bade farewell, teams that didn't fire their coaches the day after their exit, and the bars that survived the Scottish fans. There was plenty to cozy up to over the past month. But joy is how you choose to find it, and sometimes in soccer it is in focusing on the miscreants that enraged you by making you care so much that you still have the rage and disappointment smeared across your chest. Hey, it's how we do stuff in our pre-apocalyptic world—when in doubt, recriminate. For example:  ( 25 min )

The World Cup kicked ass, as it almost always does, but Sunday's final between Spain and Argentina was a well-timed reminder that the game is not always as beautiful as it has been over the last month. And in the immediate aftermath we were served up another reminder, that no matter how capable the World Cup is of redeeming itself through what happens on the field, shameless venality is never far away. For example, it might plant its hideous form squarely in frame for the post-championship photo op, and then try to play dumb when told to get the fuck off the stage. https://youtu.be/ojcs-mLcBY0?t=197 Well, at least Gianni Infantino finally got to do something useful.  ( 18 min )

Donald Trump’s Great American State Fair was widely mocked as a great American flop: overpriced, uncomfortable and, above all, dull. Well, bad news for fans of fun: Trump’s billionaire buddies, Larry and David Ellison, are about to bring MAGA-ified misery to the rest of entertainment. Unless the courts side with 12 states who sued to stop the merger of Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery, movie theaters, cable TV and other entertainment products could become a lot more MAGA — and you’ll have to pay more for the privilege of being bored. Larry and David Ellison are the father-and-son duo behind Paramount’s attempted purchase of Warner Bros., a move that would consolidate most of Hollywood into a few hands and dramatically reduce free market competition in the entertainment industry. The tw…  ( 7 min )

Today we’re listening to Haruhisa Tanaka, a Japanese ambient musician based in Tokyo.

It sure looks like Spain has found the formula for winning World Cup finals. All it takes is a truly hideous game, marked by defensive intensity and borderline tackles, and a late goal from a Barcelona player. In the Wario to the 2010 final, Spain beat 10-man Argentina 1-0 thanks to Ferran Torres's emphatic 106th minute winner. But that's not why Spain won the World Cup. Spain won because it played the exact same game it played every knockout match on its way to a second World Cup title: defending with intelligent and patient possession, and immediately suffocating opponents on the rare occasion the Spanish players lost the ball. This was an ugly World Cup final, the ugliest I've been sentient for, but there's nothing disappointing or unearned about Spain coming out on top. This was the best team in this tournament both by results and by efficiency, a murderous machine of tiki-taka and furious counter-pressing. Argentina never had a shot. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IOKvRNGoZbc  ( 26 min )

There's probably no reason for the World Cup third-place match to exist. Unlike the Olympics, when a coveted bronze medal is at stake, third place at the World Cup doesn't offer much to teams. By and large, these matches tend to involve mentally checked-out players mainly concerned with avoiding an injury so that they can fully relax once they get to the beaches and/or yachts they will spend the next several weeks sitting on, where they will nurse the pain from the semifinal loss and rest up ahead of another long club season. Because of that lack of stakes and interest, the quality of play in these games, especially on the defensive side, is usually at an all-star game level. Those less-than-intense conditions are exactly what made England-France on Saturday so wonderfully stupid to watch. At the end of a hot and humid afternoon in Miami, England clinched its first-ever third-place finish at a World Cup with a scoreline of 6-4, after a match that was an orgy of offense. Defense was indeed optional and broadly eschewed by both teams, first by France for the entirety of the first half and then by England in an 18-minute French burst to start the second half. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XDZco2h-zcw  ( 31 min )

MULHOUSE, France — Stage 12 of the 2026 Tour de France was supposed to be boring. Maybe it would have been were it not for Quinn Simmons, who did what he does best and made the peloton quake with a thumping attack. The American champion seized the initiative with 35 kilometers left, splintering the bunch and dragging a dozen strong riders with him, turning what would have otherwise been a dull procession into a thrilling finale. Very few riders are strong enough to cleave a charging peloton like that on a flat day; fewer still have the casual power to be able to initiate and execute a full-speed high five with their flag-waving father while doing so; and only Simmons could inspire equally strong reactions of annoyance and excitement with such a cool, daring move. https://twitter.com/RNBWCV/status/2077772632246685756 There really isn't anyone like Simmons in the professional peloton. As is evident in the clip, Simmons has one of the biggest engines in the world. While he's won stages at a handful of big races and gotten into some strong top 10s, his racecraft hasn't always matched his strength, so he's still searching for a career-defining win. But what truly makes him stand out is his willingness to use that engine to cut straight into the wind. This makes Simmons both an incredible domestique when he's riding for a teammate and a supreme animator of bike races when he's riding for himself. He helped Jonathan Milan win last year's points jersey and is currently helping Mads Pedersen do the same this year, setting up a dominant breakaway win for Pedersen on Stage 4 and still finding the time to drive several moves. Cycling involves so much strategic passivity. Simmons races in refusal of that notion.  ( 29 min )

The Emacs commands that create a new frame disappoint me. They create a frame that shares the same set of buffers as the main frame. I don't think a Tip Of The Day (TOTD) popup should have access to all the buffers in a session. I want a popup to display some help and be easily dismissed.1 That's why I designed my Tip Of The Day to run in a separate Emacs instance. Instead of invoking the TOTD function directly, Emacs asks the operating system to launch a second Emacs process. One of the command line switches loads the Lisp file in which the TOTD function is defined, and another runs the function. This is achieved by invoking call-process-shell-command to run a one-line batch file2 that contains this: "path_to_emacs\emacs.exe" -Q -g 80x42-2+2 -l totd.el --eval (zto…  ( 11 min )

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I still have both eyes. I don't know why I bother trying other tools. I'm just going to end up back in Emacs, anyway. ✍️ Reply by email

I was really looking forward to "The Hawk". I usually get a kick out of Will Ferrell. Not this time, I'm afraid. I don't mind if a show is silly, but it also needs to be funny. This is not funny. One problem is that the actors, especially Ferrell and Molly Shannon, seem to be playing themselves, not the actual characters. I gave it two episodes, but that's all I could handle. ✍️ Reply by email

FoxTrot by Bill Amend | July 19, 2026  ( 12 min )

en français Pour le Carnaval d'Emacs de juillet sur la programmation (merci à AndyDrop de l'accueillir !) : Je m'occupe principalement de ma fille (particulièrement pendant les pauses scolaires comme l'été), donc mon temps, mon attention et mon énergie sont très limités. Je dois avancer petit à petit car c'est difficile de trouver plus d'une heure pour du travail profond. Je suis chanceuse si je finis une ou deux de mes propres tâches pendant la journée. Presque toute ma programmation est pour mes propres objectifs à l'exception de quelques heures de temps en temps quand je travaille comme consultante. Pour mon client, j'écris des prototypes en utilisant JavaScript (ou Python, rarement). Je préfère écrire la plupart de mes outils dans Emacs Lisp parce qu'Emacs me donne une interf…  ( 5 min )

Raw link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x3rqjpNm3e0 In this ~22-minute video I explain how Emacs performs completion in a buffer. I cover what happens behind the scenes with the variable completion-at-point-functions. Then I also go to the frontends, which affects the modalities of interaction. I cover t built-in Completions buffer, the packages Corfu and Company, and the built-in completion-preview-mode. Finally, I comment at some further length on how to control the grouping of results in the completion-at-point-functions. In that context I also mention the Cape package, as well as some extra functionality that the Company package provide. I wrote an article which covers all of what is in the video as well as code samples. Its text is below. Table of Contents Make TAB complete when it …  ( 6 min )

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All my notes live in Denote, the fantastic Emacs package by Protesilaos Stavrou. The system is perfect while I am at the computer... but I wanted to read and edit my notes from my phone. I did not find anything that respected the Denote convention, so I built it myself: Dotdenote, an iOS app that reads, edits and creates notes following the Denote naming scheme over WebDAV. It is open source, you can browse the code at git.andros.dev/andros/dotdenote. The app does not lock your notes anywhere: it talks to any WebDAV server, so they remain plain text files under your control. In this mini tutorial we will set up a WebDAV server with Docker, put an Nginx in front of it, and connect the app to your existing Denote notes. In less than 10 minutes you will be browsing your Zettelkasten from y…  ( 4 min )

Embark but I never got around to learning it and it has sat unused ever since. Then I saw this post by Bozhidar Batsov and decided to take another look. The problem with Embark is that it’s hard to understand and the documentation is long and complex. Too long, I discovered, to read and understand in one sitting. I approached the problem by reading a section at a time and trying out examples in my Emacs. Even so, it still took some experimentation to completely figure things out. The process is ongoing but I’m making progress. All of the above sounds pretty negative but I actually think Embark is a real win. Once you figure things out it’s really useful. For example, one of the things I’ve never been able to get working reliably is following a link in an arbitrary buffer to its target. Embark does that easily and if you use embark-dwim it’s a single keystroke. I use Hyper+. for embark-act and Hyper+, for embark-dwim. I have Hyper bound to the right ⌘ Cmd key so it’s very easy to invoke either of those commands. Batsov is all in on Embark. He and I often share preferences and this is an example of that. The more I find out about Embark, the more I like it. The commands that work on a group of files can be difficult to grok but once you do they’re very powerful. I’ve resigned myself that learning Embark is an ongoing process but I think it’s worth it.  ( 5 min )

Richard Bonichon (Github) d'Emacs, de ses flux de travail, de sa configuration, et d'autres sujets en français. Je suis un peu intimidée, mais si vous posez vos questions dans le chat, je pense que nous pouvons survivre à mon faible niveau de français. =) Notes : https://sachachua.com/blog/2026/08/le-6-aout-emacs-chat-richard-bonichon/ Watch on YouTube La diffusion en direct aura lieu le [2026-08-06 Thu 07:30]–[2026-08-06 Thu 08:30] dans le fuseau horaire America/Toronto, soit 0730H EDT / 0630H CDT / 0530H MDT / 0430H PDT / 1130H UTC / 1330H CEST / 1430H EEST / 1700H IST / 1930H +08 / 2030H JST. Si vous voulez parler d'Emacs avec Prot et moi en français, n'hésitez pas à m'envoyer un courriel ! View Org source for this post You can e-mail me at sacha@sachachua.com.  ( 1 min )

Abdallah Maouche (heiwiper) (Gitlab, Github) d'Emacs, de ses flux de travail, de sa configuration, et d'autres sujets en français. Je suis un peu intimidée, mais si vous posez vos questions dans le chat, je pense que nous pouvons survivre à mon faible niveau de français. =) Watch on YouTube La diffusion en direct aura lieu le [2026-08-20 Thu 07:30]–[2026-08-20 Thu 08:30] dans le fuseau horaire America/Toronto, soit 0730H EDT / 0630H CDT / 0530H MDT / 0430H PDT / 1130H UTC / 1330H CEST / 1430H EEST / 1700H IST / 1930H +08 / 2030H JST Si vous voulez parler d'Emacs avec Prot et moi en français, n'hésitez pas à m'envoyer un courriel ! View Org source for this post You can e-mail me at sacha@sachachua.com.  ( 1 min )

which-key is one of those packages I recommend to pretty much everyone - newcomers and grizzled Emacs veterans alike. You start a key sequence like C-x, pause for a moment, and it pops up a handy cheat sheet of every key that can follow. I’ve had it in my config for ages, and I suspect a lot of you have as well. Here’s the good news - as of Emacs 30 you don’t need to install it anymore. which-key is now a built-in package, so there’s one less thing to fetch from MELPA when you set up Emacs on a fresh machine. Enabling which-key Being built-in doesn’t mean it’s enabled by default, though. You still have to turn it on explicitly: (which-key-mode 1) That’s the whole setup for most people. Now start any prefix key - C-x, C-c, C-h - wait a moment, and a popup appears at the bottom of the fra…  ( 3 min )

Sayid 0.8 is out! It’s the third release since I brought Sayid back from the dead a couple of weeks ago, and it has a clear theme: making the tool easy to pick up. The revival releases were mostly about the engine - bounding the recording, consolidating the API, getting the data out. This one is about the experience. If you’ve ever bounced off Sayid because you couldn’t figure out what to press, or what it was trying to tell you, 0.8 is for you. It started with a bug report Shortly after the revival post, someone reported that pressing c i in the workspace view - “inspect this captured value” - printed Def'd as $s/* and then… nothing. The fix turned out to be a one-liner: Sayid was calling a CIDER function whose signature changed years ago, and nobody had noticed since. Which tells you eve…  ( 4 min )

Projectile 3.2 is out!1 That’s the third Projectile release this month, and by now you probably see the pattern - a whole lot of nothing for a couple of years, then everything at once. Where 3.0 was the big cleanup and 3.1 the pile of long-standing feature requests, 3.2 is a focused release with one clear theme: search and replace. Plus one bonus feature I’ve wanted for ages, but more on that below. Replace, but with a preview projectile-replace has always been one of those commands that technically worked, but that I never quite trusted. It walks the project file by file with query-replace, asking you about every match with no way to see the big picture, and once you start there’s no graceful way out. I’ve been promising myself a better story there for years (that’s #1924, if you’re keepi…  ( 4 min )

Me windsurfing in the 80s STATUS: Family Reunion, today TODO: Get through the reunion. I like everyone, but it's way too much peopleing I've really gone and over-complicated things now. ✍️ Reply by email

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 )

To avoid awkward line breaks, I'm adding CSS to inline code snippets that contain hyphens or spaces.  ( 2 min )

I didn't know to check for UTF-8 byte order marks, so I made a mistake when converting text files. I was meant to use `encoding="utf-8-sig"`.  ( 3 min )

For decades, the college movie has served as Hollywood’s ultimate sociological petri dish, capturing the exact moment teenagers step away from parental supervision and stumble headfirst into the terrifying freedom of young adulthood. But look past the legendary keggers, elaborate prank wars, and questionable academic decisions, and you’ll find that the campus film is actually...  ( 11 min )

In December 1996, Wes Craven’s Scream radically rewrote the rules of Hollywood horror by introducing hyper-aware, pop-culture-savvy teenagers who knew exactly how to survive a slasher film. The movie became a massive box-office juggernaut, proving to studio executives that the young adult demographic was an absolute goldmine. But while a flurry of traditional copycat slashers...  ( 11 min )

On January 11, 1992, a seismic shift occurred in popular culture that boardrooms in Los Angeles and New York never saw coming. For nearly a decade, the Billboard 200 charts had been dominated by the heavily lacquered, high-glam excess of hair metal and the pristine, factory-calibrated dance-pop of late-80s icons. Pop culture was a world...  ( 12 min )

Goddamn, Canada just makes them crazy.  ( 85 min )

This is an American horror story.  ( 78 min )

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 )

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 )

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 )

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 )

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 )

On Monday, in the city of Biddeford, Maine, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents in an SUV rammed the passenger side of a civilian vehicle and, after the vehicle stopped, approached it with their guns drawn. The driver reportedly was 26-year-old Colombian national Joan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, who was not the target of the warrant the ICE officers were supposed to be executing that day, and who had his three-year-old daughter in the car with him. Within moments, one or more of the agents fired at least six shots, at least four of which went through the windshield. As recorded on eyewitness video, the agents then pulled Durán Guerrero's limp body from the car and shackled his wrists. He did not survive. This killing—at least the 11th that agents of the nation's anti-immigr…  ( 22 min )

James Dolan keeps pooping on his own parade.  The Knicks owner should still be basking in the warmth of his beloved NBA team’s first championship in 53 years, like the rest of New York. Instead, he’s suing journalists. Dolan’s corporation, MSG Entertainment, filed a defamation lawsuit Thursday in New York supreme court against Wired magazine for a story published last week titled "Madison Square Garden Kept a List of Gay Celebrities." The piece went into detail about the owner's fetish for keeping tabs on many of the Garden's famous visitors.  ( 18 min )

There was a very awkward moment in the July 16 episode of The Executive Show on KNBR in San Francisco. The hosts, Brian Murphy and Markus Boucher, were talking with Giants executive Buster Posey, making his first appearance on the show since May 21. According to SFGate, that May interview was "testy," and Posey subsequently bailed on the episode scheduled for June 25, possibly due to hurt feelings but also possibly because he was too busy making a huge mess of the team's stupid Pride Night meltdown. So his return to the show Thursday was a bit of a delicate matter. It did not go well. Posey is a huge drag on the radio. The Giants stink, and as the architect of this mess, Posey is probably not in a great mood these days. What's particularly deflating is his way of inflecting his voice so that it sounds like he's just speaking plain truths, just being square with you, and then you listen closely to what he's saying and there's just nothing of substance to it. It's like listening to a lecture on home warranties, but somehow delivered in platitudes, by Eeyore. During the show's middle segment, Posey was asked to evaluate his team's first-half performance and to share his impressions of what has gone right and what has gone wrong so far this season. The Giants are presently 41–55, fourth in their division and third from the bottom in the National League. They are a plodding, weary, strikingly juiceless team: The Giants are last in walks and stolen bases, but don't do nearly enough slugging to make up for it, and as a consequence have scored fewer runs than all but one NL team. Also, they have the league's third-worst fielding percentage. Hell, while we're here, Giants rookie skipper Tony Vitello has the National League's worst overturn percentage among managers. It's a bad baseball team.  ( 17 min )

The burying beetle Nicrophorus vespilloides is famously good at parenting. In the leaf litter of forests around the United Kingdom, the beetles scurry around in search of the small carcasses of mice and birds. Once the beetles find a suitable corpse, they get to work. First they strip the carcass of its fur or feathers and disembowel it. Then they smear it with brownish-red antimicrobial fluid. Finally, they roll the flesh into a ball and bury it in the sand. Once under the soil, the corpse is ready to become a nursery for the beetle's offspring—a putrefying rat refurbished into an artisanal crib. (Here is a photo of one such crib, if your curiosity is piqued.) A nursery needs babies, and so the beetles must also get to a different kind of work. By this I mean the beetles must mount each other. If you are having trouble imagining this, please enjoy the art below. Is it just me or does this burying beetle mating illustration look like Plato's Allegory of the Cave?  ( 21 min )

Here's how we got on this. Billy was in soccer chat speculating on how soccer might have turned out differently if Lionel Messi had "accidentally" drowned baby Lamine Yamal in that bathtub. He then posted the poster for 2004's The Butterfly Effect to illustrate the concept of the butterfly effect. Luis piped up to say that The Butterfly Effect may have been the worst movie he's even seen in a theater. Now we're all sharing our worsts. Giri Nathan The only movie I've ever walked out of was Kazaam. If I remember correctly, I told my mom I had to go pee and then after that we simply decided not to go back inside. I think even at that age I clocked it as irredeemable. The angriest I've ever been at a movie while sitting in a theater was Rise of Skywalker. I left with plumes of steam coming out of my ears.  ( 44 min )

Like every previous edition, this World Cup has been great at producing stories. The most uplifting was the one about the shrinking gap between soccer's established powers and the rest of the world, as told by the group-stage success of the African teams, and most memorably by Cape Verde. You also had the tactical story of the tournament, in how the teams with the most fluid and attractive attacking play achieved it by eschewing the sport's dominant strategic meta—the spread-'em-wide-and-pin-'em-high positional gambit, which has grown boring to watch and increasingly easy for defenses to counteract—to instead bring players closer together, looking to create space through spontaneous movement, collaboration, and deception, producing unpredictable moves full of technical inventiveness that b…  ( 39 min )

1. About This month I'd like to host the Emacs Carnival! I've been an enthusiastic participant for a while now. I wrote entries for May, June, and July (that last one hosted by Andy over at Plain DrOps). Now it's my turn to hold the torch. Reading other people's carnival posts has consistently been the highlight of my month, and I find I learn a lot through this structured prompting for insight from other Emacs users. This month's topic is "The Search for Knowledge". This combines a couple of concepts that I think are near and dear to the hearts of many Emacsapiens, and have seen a recent surge in attention: Information Retrieval, or more abstractly "Search" Knowledge Management Knowledge graphs: How much do you use the knowledge graph? Do you use the visualization or s…  ( 14 min )

When you write a tree-sitter major mode, it’s tempting to think the parser handles everything. It doesn’t. Tree-sitter drives font-lock, indentation, and structural navigation, but a whole layer of everyday Emacs behavior still runs on the humble syntax table: forward-sexp and friends, electric-pair-mode, delete-pair, forward-word, and anything built on syntax-ppss. (I wrote about that structural layer in Essential Structured Navigation and Editing Commands.) I got a sharp reminder of this while building neocaml, my tree-sitter mode for OCaml. The grammar parsed everything beautifully, yet delete-pair and sexp motion kept misbehaving around a couple of OCaml constructs. The fix turned out to be a classic tool that long predates tree-sitter: syntax-propertize-function. Here’s the story, sin…  ( 4 min )

As part of the ongoing overhaul of my Emacs setup I’ve been trying to make the most of the built-in functionality that recent Emacs releases keep quietly shipping. My in-buffer completion setup is based on corfu and cape these days, but it turns out I had overlooked a nice Emacs 30 addition in the same area - completion-preview-mode. It gives you inline completion suggestions - the “ghost text” UI that GitHub Copilot and friends made famous1 - except here it’s powered by plain old Emacs completions. What It Does As you type, completion-preview-mode shows a grayed-out preview of the top completion candidate right after point - inline, in the buffer itself. No popup, no minibuffer, no fuss. If the suggestion is what you want, press TAB to accept it. If not, just keep typing and the preview u…  ( 3 min )

We’re at a stage with prestige TV now where a series that might have dominated online small talk 15 years ago will, thanks to an ever-splintering entertainment landscape, go unnoticed. Take “Your Friends & Neighbors,” for example. No, I’m not talking about the 1998 Neil LaBute film featuring one of the most unnerving monologues in film history. I’m talking about an Apple TV series that, perhaps unbeknownst to you, is booting up its second season this Friday. It’s a good show, and not merely because it’s NOT based on LaBute’s misery-fest. It’s because it stars Jon Hamm: the silver screen’s handsomest cad. You know Hamm, of course, from “Mad Men,” one of those early prestige TV dramas that did monopolize the virtual water cooler over its seven-season run. Hamm was perfect on that show as Do…  ( 1 min )

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

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

(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 )

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

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 )

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 )

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

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

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 )

Pete Hegseth has once again decided to humiliate the American military, this time by claiming the troops need more testosterone. But the defense secretary, armed with his perfectly coiffed hair and alleged makeup studio, is ready to restore their manhood. In a video released Wednesday, Hegseth discovered spoke of how “the modern battlefield is brutal and unrelenting” and “demands maximum psychological and mental readiness.” His solution? “High-T,” as he put it. Despite his loathing of “beardos,” Hegseth is excited about “fixing” those he deems falling short in the manhood-measurement department. Since he can’t actually pull out a ruler and demand his “warfighters” drop trou, the former Fox News host is doing the next best thing: making testosterone level testing mandatory for all service m…  ( 7 min )