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

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

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

Today we’re listening to Mr. Soon, an American electronic musician.

Zendaya is an American actress, singer, producer, and fashion icon who has become one of Hollywood’s most versatile and acclaimed  ( 5 min )

The early 1980s produced plenty of great songs, but it also produced a special category of hit that seemed almost  ( 12 min )

The Democratic Wisconsin governor’s primary is looking a bit like a replay of the near upset in Michigan but with...  ( 7 min )

We’re almost to our goal of raising the critical sum of $500,000 in this year’s Annual TPM Journalism Fund Drive....  ( 6 min )

It’s sitting right there in front of us. But it’s still worth noting. The political stories of the moment are...  ( 6 min )

Dear TPMers, We’re now more than 90% of the way toward our goal in this year’s Annual TPM Journalism Fund...  ( 6 min )

This is your TPM evening briefing.

Why are establishment Democrats so eager to reach across the aisle to work with a delusional, uncompromising Republican party?  ( 70 min )

A shocking recent article reveals the extent of the Ohio representative’s delusional behavior.  ( 68 min )

Maybe the president’s son-in-law shouldn’t try to annex a protected wildlife habitat in Albania, just saying.  ( 65 min )

An Iranian threat caused the president to abandon Air Force One, leaving those on board to deal with the consequences. Maybe he wouldn’t be so scared if he didn’t start this stupid war in the first place.  ( 65 min )

Your Team: The Baltimore Ravens Your 2025 record: 8-9, with all that implies. Your coach: Not John Harbaugh. For the first time in 18 years, Not John Harbaugh will lead the Baltimore Ravens to whatever the hell it is they're going to do. The presence of Not John Harbaugh at the helm marks a fundamental and radical departure from the past, primarily because the Ravens have had only two coaches in their last quarter century. They rather fancy themselves the Pittsburgh Steelers, who are coached by Not Mike Tomlin.  ( 43 min )

On Monday, Donald Trump doubled down on his weird and eugenic obsession with autism by signing an executive order calling to split up the MMR vaccine for children into three separate shots given in three separate appointments. "I wanna find what's going on with autism," Trump said in a press conference held upon signing the executive order, in case his intentions were not totally clear. He then proceeded to estimate the volumes of vaccines with an inscrutable measuring system, referring to "vats of vaccines," a "big shot like a large glass of something" and "a vaccination thing that looks like the size of a bottle of soda," as well as syringes containing "what seemingly looks like gallons." Although it feels increasingly pointless and embarrassing to refute the rantings of a man who increa…  ( 21 min )

In the hypothetical situation in which a fan is attending a baseball game in person and has to wait for a video review to be completed, what is the length of time the review can last before she might turn murderous? Five minutes? Ten? The umpires in Monday night's game between the Boston Red Sox and Toronto Blue put this to the test with a 15-minute review of a baserunning debacle by the Red Sox that ended with the visiting team being awarded a run in the end. But let's start from the beginning. In the top of the seventh inning, with two on and no one out, Red Sox shortstop Nick Sogard smoked a 104.9-mph low liner that bounced before entering the glove of Vladimir Guerrero Jr. at first base. Guerrero threw to second for the force out; Red Sox catcher Connor Wong, who'd reached first on a s…  ( 25 min )

SAN FRANCISCO — Charli XCX had a cold. You could only tell after five songs and one costume change, when the backup dancers and full backing band briefly disappeared so she could perform "Track 10," the furthest she reached into her back catalogue. Alone, she sounded a little shredded, and would occasionally let the backing track sing for her. Probably this would sink other would-be headliners, or at least meaningfully affect the performance, but no, whatever mild illness Charli was contending with gave her a slightly plaintive warble, one that was coherent with the show and further shaded its grand thematic ambitions. Her headlining set this past Friday night at the Outside Lands festival, coming weeks after the release of Music, Fashion, Film, was so much more than pressing play on the new stuff and the old stuff and pleasing her massive new fanbase. It was a monument to art, mortality, and fame, and the ways those three do and do not square the contradictions of each other. Two years after the final sunset of BRAT Summer, Charli finds herself in one of the trickiest and least forgiving positions any pop star could occupy. BRAT was a world-destroying phenomenon, a meteor that struck at exactly the right moment to launch Charli out of pop's impossible middle class and into the rarified stratosphere of mainstream fame: seven movie credits, a sold-out arena tour, none other than the Democratic National Convention prostrating itself before her green glow. Charli achieved escape velocity because BRAT was, both sonically and lyrically, an immediate, defiant album, an album about continuing to party and have fun and try stuff after turning 30, set to A.G. Cook's best work synthesizing a decade of the bloghouse era for the generation that arrived 15 years too late for MSTRKRFT.  ( 28 min )

The band American Football released their fourth self-titled LP in May. They are no longer the band they were in the late '90s, when their debut EP and album somehow developed a cult status that has endured to this day. Today they are a middle-aged band making a much more adult imagining of emo music. LP4 is soft, wistful, jazzy indie-rock music with singer Mike Kinsella deep and tender vibrato working on an ASMR level as well as a lyrical one. It's one of the best releases of the year, specifically because it is largely incongruous with any other music being made. It is patient, smooth, and mature, a true, properly sequenced album that is more than the sum of its parts. It is not necessarily a record out of time, as much as its beyond timeliness. It is lost in its world and asks you to get lost with it, which is one of the defining qualities of all of American Football's music. If you were to ask an American Football fan what makes that first album from 1999 so magical, they'd likely struggle to put it into words. I don't think even the band could explain it to you. It's a credit to them that they've never really tried to replicate it. In Ian Cohen's Pitchfork review of the record, he writes about the band's, and that particular album's, special appeal: Very little of American Football is in a minor key and almost none of it can be performed on a single guitar, so it’s not explicitly heartbroken music, nor is it ever entirely joyous. Rather than pinpoint an emotion, the record exists on a continuum. There’s no right answer as to whether “The Summer Ends” is a devotional, a last goodbye, or some combination of the two—the ache and beauty are intertwined.  ( 24 min )

The 1990s and 2000s were great decades for the sports idiot. Movies like Talladega Nights, Dodgeball, Kingpin, and others belong to this subset of the sports comedy, one that explores the unique problem of being good at sports and bad at everything else. With the help of an older mentor, often but not always played by an older Black man, and a supportive best friend even dumber than him, the sports idiot comes up against more threatening kinds of men—richer, meaner, or both—and triumphs.  No matter how old he is, the sports idiot begins their journey in a state of perpetual adolescence. Sports are to blame for his arrested development, and his over-competitive spirit is tolerated by fans and love interests alike due to the same deference afforded to famous divas and tantruming toddlers. And yet—this is the most important thing—sports are also the means by which the idiot will grow up. Becoming a better player will make him worthy of a good woman, will help him survive the loss of a father figure, and will provide him the community that he didn’t know he always needed. While the Sports Idiot genre never fully disappeared, subsequent years favored more serious sports movies, among them award contenders like Moneyball and the Creed franchise. Meanwhile, the male-centered comedies on everyone’s lips were The Hangover and the collected works of Judd Apatow, which, respectively, focus on competitive intoxication and the game of heterosexual love. But, finally, the lovable sports idiot is back and eager to show audiences that he’s a little less problematic than before.  ( 32 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 butter parties, severance packages, finding new hobbies, and more. Before we go any further, I demand you give it up to Albert Burneko for so capably filling my shoes here a week ago. Truly, Bert is the king of kings. Your letters: Tom:  ( 52 min )

If you are a soccer fan of any real commitment, then surely you've seen last week's news that Real Madrid officially landed Ivorian winger (and former Florida high school student!) Yan Diomandé, prying him away from RB Leipzig with the considerable leverage exerted by €125 million. If you followed along with the transfer saga as it unfolded, you may have been surprised by how long the deal took to complete, considering that all credible reports said it has been all but tied up for almost two whole weeks. But transfers are complex animals, and are liable to come together or fall apart at any given moment for any number of reasons. A deal is never done until it is done. A lesson transfer obsessives have had occasion to relearn with the Diomandé affair, and which journo-influencer Fabrizio Ro…  ( 36 min )

For a month this spring, Melon was truly living up to her name. She had always been a round cat but never quite this gourd-like—small neck billowing out to a majestic corpulence. This sudden plump came with an attitude. She had abandoned her sweet old habits: sitting on the toilet seat to watch me shower, running back and forth across my apartment until she panted, and leaping on my back to scope out unreachable shelves. I chalked this up to the fact that Melon, now 4 years old, was growing up. Maybe our close bond, which had always felt ineffable to me in ways I cannot articulate without sounding like a TikTok cat mystic, was not actually special, but rather the relationship of a child who needed her parent until, one day, she didn't. There were other warning signs. Melon had become less …  ( 54 min )

INSIDE: Trent McCotter ... Emil Bove ... Todd Blanche

write a word or region in bold, that’s easy. He merely starts and end it text with a star. Making a word or region bold after the fact—in the editing phase—is more difficult. You have to locate the beginning of the text, add a star, move to the end of the text, and add another star. Mbork, of course, soon discovered the solution: org-emphjasize. All you need to do is highlight the text and specify the markup character. The problem is that the binding for org-emphasize, Ctrl+c Ctrl+x Ctrl+f, is difficult to type. Mbork solved that writing a function to call org-emphasize with an argument * to cover his most common use. But then he bound it to Ctrl+c Ctrl+x Ctrl+8, which strikes me as just as bad, although you don’t have to specify the *. My solution for this is to use surround.el that I wrote about here and Bozhidar Batsov wrote about here. I have it bound to Hyper+’ so it’s easy to call. I suppose you could even do as mbork did and write a specialized function for a heavily applied use case. One thing for sure, mbork is right about markup being harder to deal with when editing.  ( 5 min )

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

an extremely necessary mental health break, but also some stuff about Donny Dumbfuck

My colleagues at Thoughtworks tend to be big fans of Test-Driven Development, and many people in the industry advocate telling LLM agents to use TDD when building software. Birgitta Böckeler was curious if this really makes a difference, so conducted a few experiments. more…  ( 14 min )

Today’s mix opens with new ambient collaborations: one by Foam and Sand & Six Missing, another by Artefakt & KMRU.

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

There is a strange rule in popular music: writing a great song and making the definitive recording of that song  ( 12 min )

Horror cinema has produced countless vampire stories, haunted convents, and tales of demonic possession, but very few films have combined  ( 10 min )

Rock and roll was never exactly mindless. That is an important place to begin. Long before Bob Dylan became one  ( 22 min )

Popular music did not suddenly appear when the Beatles arrived. Rock and roll had already transformed the musical landscape.  ( 34 min )

Being a PhD student within a research group entails some structure to tracking your progress as you proceed with research. Within the current team that I'm in, we have weekly group meetings where each member presents the tasks that they've completed during the previous week and discusses any issues they might've faced (if any), to our supervisor. Usually before the meeting, I jot down things that I've finished with pen and paper. But since I'm in the spirit of integrating my workflow with emacs and orgmode, I thought why don't I try implementing this part of my routine also into orgmode. Enter org-agenda All my todo items are tracked with org-agenda where I capture every task I need to finish with org-capture1. I have a custom org-agenda view just for viewing my daily and weekly TODO items…  ( 3 min )

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

One of the most basic features of Org mode is its markup. It is basically the Markdown of the Emacs world (although some people, like Karl Voit, claim that it’s superior to Markdown), and it lets do basic things like italic, bold or verbatim very easily – at least if you’re writing text. I, on the other hand, happen to edit text pretty often. This is very different from writing. When I write, typing a slash before and after something I want to emphasize is easy. When I edit and just want to make some text bold, putting stars around it is much less convenient.  ( 2 min )

Tab is pressed right after the abbreviation. What’s less well known is that these abbreviations can have properties and one of those properties is to specify a function that will tell Emacs whether or not it should expand the abbreviation. Prot gives a few examples of this. In one example, he wants “Welcome” to expand to a French greeting but only if he is using one of the French input methods. Another example expands an abbreviation only if he’s in a certain directory or one of its subdirectories. A third example expands an abbreviation only if a certain minor mode is active. Those examples might seem like they’d be complicated but they are, in fact, simple, almost trivial. In the call to define-abbrev, you simply give the name of the deciding function in the :enable-function clause. Check out Prot’s video for the details. I use several abbreviation systems—including abbrev—but this capability in abbrev is especially nice. It’s easy to use and you can make the firing condition as simple or complex as you need it to be. Prot’s video is 14 minutes, 33 seconds so it should be easy to find time for it. As with all of Prot’s videos, it’s worth the time.  ( 5 min )

Upcoming events (iCal file, Org): London Emacs (in person): Emacs London meetup https://www.meetup.com/london-emacs-hacking/events/315859503/ Tue Aug 11 1800 Europe/London Emacs Berlin: In-Person-Only Emacs-Berlin Stammtisch https://emacs-berlin.org/ Tue Aug 11 1900 Europe/Berlin OrgMeetup (virtual) https://orgmode.org/worg/orgmeetup.html Wed Aug 12 0900 America/Vancouver - 1100 America/Chicago - 1200 America/Toronto - 1600 Etc/UTC - 1800 Europe/Berlin - 2130 Asia/Kolkata – Thu Aug 13 0000 Asia/Singapore Atelier Emacs Montpellier (in person) https://lebib.org/date/atelier-emacs Fri Aug 14 1800 Europe/Paris OrgDevMeetup https://bbb.emacsverse.org/rooms/orgdevmeetup Sat Aug 15 0900 America/Vancouver - 1100 America/Chicago - 1200 America/Toronto - 1600 Etc/UTC - 1800 Europe/Berlin - 2130 Asi…  ( 3 min )

This is a purely-for-fun exercise: a guide to web design for terminal browsers. Starting from the text browsers people actually use, I am going to pull out a set of rules in case you ever decide to build a site meant to read and look its best in a terminal. It is not an alternative to Gemini, Gopher or a smallweb attempt, but a set of best practices so your site reads well in a terminal browser, and even so you can build Web Apps for the terminal. Five engines, one test The first step is to install the five text engines people actually use and feed them the same test pages, isolating one feature at a time. w3m (0.5.6): the most capable with tables, and it even draws images in terminals that allow it. lynx (2.9.3): the patriarch, the lowest common denominator since 1992. links (2.30): fast,…  ( 9 min )

The single-window package forces Emacs to open buffers in the current active window. It keeps your carefully arranged layouts intact, reduces visual clutter, and provides a much more predictable workflow. It handles edge cases by configuring modes like org-mode (src blocks and agenda) to respect the current window. If this project helps your workflow, please consider supporting it by ⭐ starring single-window on GitHub and sharing it on your website, blog, Mastodon, Reddit, X, LinkedIn, or other social media platforms so other Emacs users can discover its benefits. Installation and Usage Emacs: use-package and straight (Emacs version < 30) To install single-window with straight.el: It if hasn’t already been done, add the straight.el bootstrap code to your init file. Add the following code t…  ( 9 min )

This is your TPM evening briefing.

Defector is proud to announce the addition of a new guy. Timothy Faust has joined us as our Director of Revenue. You might know Tim as a previous Defector contributor and the author of a legendary blog post, but in this role he will be entirely focused on data, revenue projections, and all sorts of…  ( 13 min )

When Demi Vollering crossed the line in Nice on Sunday, she didn't just win her second Tour de France Femmes title. She provided a worthy finale for the best edition of the race yet. The fifth running of the Tour was spectacular from start to finish. There were interesting winners throughout the race, an amazing general classification battle that came down to the final climb, and fresh, dramatic storylines almost every day. The Tour achieved a higher density of both intriguing stories and good racing in nine stages than the men's Tour did in 21, in the process raising questions not about the future viability of the race but about how big it can be. Vollering is a totally worthy rider to earn the honor of becoming the race's repeat champion, though a test of the overall quality of a bike race is how much intrigue there is beyond the question of who wins the overall. It's useful, then, to review this one in chronological order.  ( 38 min )

CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa — In the quarter-century that I’ve been playing and writing about Scrabble—a game in which greatness requires that rare matrix of biological gift, yeoman preparation, preternatural vision, marathon endurance, and blind luck—I’ve never witnessed anything as shocking and painful as the end of the 2026 North American championship here in July. The moment was right up there with any agony-of-defeat ending in any sport: After 3,700 games, thousands of moves, and millions of points scored by more than 200 players, the title was decided by a word that wasn’t a word at all. On one side of the board: No. 1 seed Mack Meller of Lexington, Ky., a 26-year-old onetime child prodigy and current Scrabble grandmaster, content creator, teacher, and puzzle constructor. On the other: No. 5 seed Orry Swift of Winnie, Texas, a 39-year-old accounting professor and five-tool gamer—he’s been a top player in World of Warcraft and Magic: The Gathering; he’s about halfway through a quest to play and review every Super Nintendo game (about 880 in all); and, under his username Sheex, he recently completed a charity speedrun of Ogre Battle: The March of the Black Queen. “Coming off a high like that into making the finals at Scrabble nationals was crazytown,” he told me. Swift entered his first Scrabble tournament in 2004 and has been among the highest-rated players for more than 15 years. Meller began playing competitively at age 10. He became the youngest player to achieve an expert rating, at 11, and cracked the Top 10 at 13. At the Scrabble Players Championship, held over five days in a football field-sized convention-center ballroom here, they topped a field of 51 players in the top North American-lexicon division (out of 242 overall) with identical 20-8 records to qualify for a best-of-five finals and a shot at the $10,000 first prize. (An additional 38 players competed using an international-English word list; it’s complicated.)  ( 70 min )

The first text that Lynx head coach Cheryl Reeve received after the team drafted Olivia Miles this spring was from a prescient Kayla McBride: “I’m going to be wide open.” The stats are bearing that out to an extent; the veteran sharpshooter is putting up some of the most efficient numbers of her career this year, and the Lynx offense is humming. After Minnesota’s 103–90 win over the Dallas Wings on Sunday afternoon, McBride told reporters that sharing a backcourt with Miles has made her feel like “a kid in a candy store.” Was she selling herself short? What strikes me about watching McBride this year is not how easy her job is, but how easy she’s made a difficult job look. Without Napheesa Collier around for the first few months of the summer, McBride drew frequent doubles and was left to pick up the extra defensive slack. All season long, she’d quietly kept the Lynx rolling with all her hard work.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p7TY0wkaYUs Finally, on Sunday afternoon, she decided to do it a little louder. She'd played 35 minutes against the Aces the day before, and was handed the Paige Bueckers assignment in this game. She still had the legs to hit 10 of her 14 three-point attempts, setting a WNBA record for most made threes in a game. She finished with a career-high 43 points on 16-for-21 shooting (and only one attempted free throw—as ethical an outing as they come).  ( 21 min )

When I asked Morgan Jerkins what she might want to talk about on an episode of Try Hard, she came to me with an idea that was less major life-changing-thunderclap-moment and more the culmination of a million smaller decisions that stemmed from one big one: moving to New York City as a young grad and choosing to build a life. The twenty-something who moves to the big city to pursue a career in the arts is a well-worn archetype at this point, and one emulated by many of the very bloggers at this website, myself included. But the allure of the old "three bucks, two bags, one me" storyline endures for a reason. In our interview, Morgan and I talk about the conservative gay roommate who helped her workshop some of her most viral articles, how moving to Harlem helped awaken a new dimension of her blackness, and whether 2015 was the golden age for a writer hustling on the internet. She also offers up some wisdom on the power of staying soft in a city and industry that wants to harden you. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PI3QW2G-lAI  ( 16 min )

Some people are fans of the Atlanta Falcons. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the Atlanta Falcons. This 2026 Defector NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far here. Your team: Atlanta Falcons Your 2025 record: 8-9, which is less of a win-loss record than it is a manifestation of the spirit of mediocrity that inhabits this franchise. It's been almost 10 years since 28-3 happened, and the Falcons have gone a combined 65-84 with zero playoff appearances since. This team's never good enough to care about or bad enough to pity, and therefore it is something much worse: a team that might as well not even exist.  ( 46 min )

As we approach the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, it has created an opportunity to reflect on what's happened in the quarter-century since that fateful day, but more importantly, it has created an opportunity to get angry at New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani for being Muslim. In late July, Giovanni Galante, whose wife Grace was killed in the attacks, posted an online petition requesting that the mayor not be allowed to participate in this year's remembrance ceremony. The reasons that Mamdani's presence would be supposedly disrespectful include the following: "Support for, or associations with, individuals whose public statements or records are viewed by concerned family members as dismissive of American institutions or insufficiently critical of extremist ideologies." Basically anything could qualify under that criteria, which I suppose is the point. One of Galante's other reasons is that Mamdani once took a photo with Siraj Wahhaj, a Brooklyn imam whom law enforcement put on a list while investigating the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Andrew Cuomo had attacked Mamdani for this during last year's mayoral race, repeating the feds' terminology that Wahhaj was an "unindicted co-conspirator." Another way to phrase that might be "never actually charged with a crime." As mayor, Michael Bloomberg once met with Wahhaj, and yet somehow that didn't disqualify him from attending any 9/11 ceremonies. Besides, Mamdani already attended last year before he was elected.  ( 21 min )

No one's on the fence about solving our Monday crossword. This week's puzzle was constructed by Faren Roth, and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. Faren Roth is a PhD student who lives in Lafayette, Ind. as of yesterday with her cat, Mr. Toast. She enjoys playing soccer and softball, was on the [redacted] team in high school, and has recently tricked herself into enjoying running.  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 )

The notice from Don Nelson's family announcing his death on Sunday at the age of 86 said he "peacefully went to be with the Lord, surrounded by his loving family.” This immediately convinces us that the deity in question here likes uptempo basketball, beer, blunts, and cards, and who wouldn't want a final judge who leans into those pastimes? Every Nelson obit, including this one, will note that he was the second-winningest coach in NBA history—1,335 wins, not including 75 playoff victories. That is maybe the 17th most interesting thing about him. He was the iconoclast's iconoclast, devoted not just to winning basketball games but to finding ways to win them in the manner of his choosing. The manner he chose favored teams that were improbably fast and impossibly small, and he used it to take bad teams and swiftly make them infuriatingly good. He irked his bosses and enraged his superiors everywhere he went; he befriended players and took money from sportswriters unwise enough to sit at his poker table. He took three different teams to the playoffs as seventh or eighth seeds and won the first-round series, still the only coach to do so, and he also coached a team to 48 wins and missed the playoffs. He was in short the single liveliest underdog in the field wherever that field happened to be. He is almost certainly the only coach to have a distinct playing style named for him—Nellie Ball, by far the least creative thing about it—probably because nobody else had dared to try it. They do now, though. Big men at the arc, three- and four-guard sets, treating the shot clock like a stopwatch that should never expire—Nelson was into all that decades ago, and while he might have been an old fud compared to some of today's hoops accelerationists, none of those teams would have even dared be who they are now if he hadn't done it back in the long ago.  ( 25 min )

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 )

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

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

No matter what he might claim, the president is much better at starting wars than ending them.  ( 67 min )

Sometimes I write a post which is about information that is not new or secret but new to me. This...  ( 10 min )

One of our great doctrines here in the Editors’ Blog is that all power is unitary. Lose or gain it...  ( 7 min )

INSIDE: Faustino Pablo Pablo ... David C. Guaderrama

The video Constructing the Revolution talks about how to start prefiguring the future you want today. (Heads up: the middle section of the video gets into some pretty heavy territory near the middle.) Early on, there’s some important conversation about rebuilding and repairing communities that have been shattered by a system that deliberately pits us against one another. All hierarchies of power desire to keep us separate, competing, and individualistic, because because we’re easier to exploit that way.  ( 20 min )

scenes from the Sunday shows

I feel like relaxing on the couch all day with my laptop, Linux, and some music in the background. Maybe I'll take a break from this keyboard and go write on one of the typewriters for a while. That's been fun, too. Typing directly onto paper is cool, and something everyone should try, imo. Speaking of Linux, on my desktop I'm running Fedora w/KDE, but here on the laptop it's Fedora w/Dank Linux and Niri. I'm getting comfortable with it and it's pretty nice. ✍️ Reply by email  ( 1 min )

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

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

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

For people outside of Donald Trump‘s MAGA coalition, the renewed Republican harassment campaign of Dr. Anthony Fauci makes no sense. It’s been more than five years since the Covid-19 lockdowns ended. With the November midterms looming, most Americans are far more focused on present-day concerns, such as the high cost of living and a tough job market, than a disease that has faded from a “mortal threat” to a “minor annoyance” for the vast majority of people. But that didn’t stop Senate Republicans, led by Kentucky’s Rand Paul, to haul the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases before a Senate committee in late July to be harangued with coronavirus conspiracy theories — even though Fauci’s tenure ended four years ago. The good doctor exercised his Fifth …  ( 6 min )

Today we have a guest recommendation from Melted Form, a musician and writer, whose excellent newsletter Hum, Buzz, & Hiss shares ambient music, reflections on the form, and stories behind the artists.

No content preview  ( 4 min )

Part four of Emacs Config Gems is about basic file operations and save functions. I realized as I was working on this that I have the frame configuration here, which is the wrong place for it. I will change it after posting. Alright, here we go. When deleting a file in Emacs, we should use the system’s trash (or recycle bin) instead of deleting the file permanently, giving us a chance to restore the file in case we’ve made a mistake. In addition, since we have this turned on, we can also tell Emacs to always delete non-empty directories (because they’ll go to the trash) instead of prompting. It’s just faster. (setq delete-by-moving-to-trash t) (setq dired-recursive-deletes 'always) Let’s set the frame Emacs starts with to be a bit bigger. In Emacs, these measurements are in lines and col…  ( 5 min )

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

Lord knows I have trouble finding files sometimes. Over the years I’ve tried lots of schemes in Org Mode and elsewhere for the sole purpose of keeping track of stray items. Using includes in Org Mode has been helpful, but I didn’t have a way of jumping to those included files for quick access. Until now! Read on. In this article, we’ll look at: Table of Contents The “ffap” function and what it does Using ffap to jump to file includes Filepaths for success Let’s get into it. FFAP – Find file at point For a refresher on Org includes for those who don’t know, I’d advise clicking on that link above or watching my recent video on this topic. Basically, includes let you include file contents from elsewhere in your system into a working document. This can be useful for gathering individual files,…

desktop-save-mode but he wants a slightly different behavior. He likes having his session configuration saved but he usually doesn’t want it restored. He wants to restore it only when he closed it by mistake or forget do something in the last session. Then, he wants to restore it by hand. He could, of course, do this by disabling desktop-save-mode and calling the save and restore functions manually. The problem with that solution is that like most of us Choudhary would forget to do the save. But this is Emacs so Choudhary was able to roll his own solution. That solution does the automatic save, as usual, but the restore function is disabled at system startup. Instead, the last save is added to a list of the last 5 saves. When he wants to restore a session, he’s presented with the list and can choose the save that he wants. This is another great example of how Emacs lets you have it your way. His code is a little complex but there are a lot of desktop save peculiarities to account for. If you’re like me, you probably aren’t interested in this capability but that’s the point: even if you’re the only one who wants some functionality, Emacs will let you have it. This capability is something no developer is likely to anticipate so it provides another example of the superiority of Emacs’ method over the typical extension system provided by other editors.  ( 5 min )

I’ve been cleaning out the loft, and I found this in a box. What kind of exciting pictures could lurk within! Heh heh. Right… during the 90s, while doing Gnus development, I sold a whole bunch of merchandise. These must be the mugs for Pterodactyl Gnus? Man, so many shots, and almost all of them out of focus. I’m a master photographer, me. Hey, that one’s in focus… kinda impressive height, eh? Right, I didn’t “blog” about this until 2001, and by that time I’d bought a digital camera. And I’ve still got a couple of mugs, almost three decades later. Quality! The first batch had non-metallic non-dishwasher-safe printing (it turned out), so those degraded fast, but the second batch, with silver inks, is still going strong. (Here’s a link to the other Gnus stuff I did back then… The 90s were fun.)  ( 4 min )

NOTE #+YOUTUBE_URL: https://youtu.be/sxqsIgXYkVw #+LANGUAGE: en C-c C-c when I'm working on correcting or translating captions. ;;;###autoload (defun sacha-youtube-replace-captions (url language vtt-file) "Replace captions for URL in LANGUAGE with VTT-FILE." (interactive (let ((params (and (derived-mode-p 'subed-vtt-mode) (sacha-subed-record-youtube-params)))) (list (or (plist-get params :url) (read-string "YouTube URL: ")) (or (plist-get params :language) (read-string "Language (ex: fr): ")) (if (derived-mode-p 'subed-vtt-mode) (buffer-file-name) (read-file-name "VTT file: "))))) (let* ((video-id (sacha-org-yt-id url)) (existing-captions (sacha-youtube-get-captions video-id)) …  ( 2 min )

After months of cooking, I am happy to announce that the mobile app is now available for download at https://vakana.mg. Some highlights Fully offline. No ads, no data held hostage. Your data, your rules. Flexible exports: Export your threads and beads to HTML (from templates), Markdown format (e.g., Obsidian), or rich Org files for Emacs users. Built-in inspiration: Includes a list of use cases and possibilities. Find one that fits you. Feel free to explore and share with friends.  ( 1 min )

ESPN reporter Lindsey Thiry found herself accosted by an alarmingly big bug at Los Angeles Rams camp Thursday. She was preparing for a live report when the flying creature suddenly dive-bombed in. The bug hovered around Thiry for several seconds until the NFL reporter gave it a good and audible thwack with her mic. ESPN broadcaster Molly McGrath later interviewed Thiry about the identity of the bug. "What is that, a wasp? What was that, Lindsey?" McGrath asked. "It was the biggest bug I've ever seen," Thiry answered, having recovered from the ordeal.  ( 25 min )

Julien Kimmig's career began with a surprising abundance of feces. As a PhD student working at a Cambrian site in northern Canada, Kimmig realized that roughly half the fossils in that outcrop were coprolites, or fossilized poops. Kimmig, now the head of the paleontology and evolution division at the Natural History Museum in Karlsruhe, Germany, wondered what explained the deluge of dung. In 2020, Russell Bicknell, an evolutionary biologist and paleobiologist at Flinders University in Adelaide, approached Kimmig with some Cambrian coprolites from southern Australia that no other scientists had particularly cared to study. Prehistoric poops in hand, Kimmig and Bicknell began compiling a database of the earliest evidence of turds on Earth. The project occasionally stalled, but the researcher…  ( 36 min )

After inflaming a culture war and causing her teammates and colleagues to be bombarded with hypothetical questions for weeks due to her transphobic comments published in a national media outlet, Sophie Cunningham wants to stick to sports. "I'm going to let people just do the speaking for themselves, but for me, I want to get back to basketball," she said last Wednesday. If this past week has been her trying to get back to basketball, she might not ever catch up to it. Saturday's Fever-Sky game will keep Cunningham in the greater news cycle, albeit for a reason more germane to her sport. Late in the first quarter, Cunningham went up for a layup on a fast break, and Chicago's DiJonai Carrington clobbered her across the face, sending the Fever guard tumbling to the floor. Cunningham then popped up before she was corralled by her teammate Makayla Timpson in a classic "Hold me back" situation. The officiating crew reviewed the play and tagged Carrington with a flagrant 2 foul, automatically ejecting her from the game. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGpwi23QBSE  ( 22 min )

MarkText — The Markdown editor that gets out of your way is available for macOS, Windows, and Linux. I grabbed the Flatpak today and first impressions are good. Worth a look. (h/t Alex) ✍️ Reply by email

I've gotta try pico.sh, don't I? I mean, I already deploy all my sites via rsync, so I'm mostly there, anyway. (h/t Sal) ✍️ Reply by email

Yes, I know, "Substack is horrible..." etc., but I'll set that aside for a moment to point out that Photoni.st has created a collated list of more than 600 photographers on Substack. Lots of them I'd not seen before. ✍️ Reply by email

You may have noticed that I haven't been putting images atop these journal posts. There are a couple reasons for that. First, it's kind of a pain to find a photo I want to use and then add the date/weather overlay. It's not hard, it's just friction that I'm finding difficult to overcome. Second, they're mostly decorative, and I dislike using decorative images on posts. Sure, it is a way to share photos, but I have other ways of doing that. If I want to highlight a photo, I can just make a post about it. Anyway, not using featured images on journal posts feels like a simplifying, decluttering move and that's where my head is right now. ✍️ Reply by email  ( 1 min )

how the fuck do you miscount missiles?

A major part of anarchy and socialism is the concept of anti-work. An obsession with work is a colonial, patriarchal, and capitalist construct. As such, the anti-work movement—a focus on working less overall and sharing labor more equally—is an important part of decolonization, feminism, and anti-capitalism. A common criticism of this is that reducing the amount everyone works to something like 20 hours a week instead of 40+ means we would have to give up a lot of conveniences.  ( 20 min )

Can you do me a favor and subscribe to our new TPM YouTube channel? It’s a way to keep up...  ( 6 min )

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

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 )

FoxTrot by Bill Amend | August 9, 2026  ( 12 min )

Sampling is one of the things that makes hip-hop unlike almost any other major genre of popular music. A rapper  ( 17 min )

There are songs that make you dance, songs that make you sing, and songs that seem to transform an ordinary  ( 12 min )

History is filled with strange events that continue to puzzle scientists centuries later. Entire villages have vanished without explanation. Ships  ( 9 min )

Phil Collins – “Sussudio”: The Infectious 1985 Hit That Became One of the Decade’s Biggest Pop Singles Few songs  ( 9 min )

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

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

Raw link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzhU6fklc4o In this ~15-minute video I show how to add conditions to abbrev-mode abbreviations that you define. The idea is to have those abbrevs expand only in certain cases. I use three examples, which I think cover the common needs. Code samples (defun my-french-p () "Return non-nil if `current-input-method' is French." (and current-input-method (string-match-p "french" current-input-method))) (define-abbrev global-abbrev-table "welcome" "je t'en prie" nil :enable-function #'my-french-p) (defvar my-notes-directory (expand-file-name "~/.emacs.d/abbrev-test/") "Directory where my notes are.") (defun my-notes-directory-p () "Return non-nil if we are in `my-notes-directory' or its subdirectories." (let ((current-directory (expand-file-name default-directory))) (string-prefix-p my-notes-directory current-directory))) (define-abbrev global-abbrev-table "prot" "p’rǒt" nil :enable-function #'my-notes-directory-p) (defun my-notes-keycast-mode-p () "Return non-nil if `keycast-mode-line-mode' is enabled." (bound-and-true-p keycast-mode-line-mode)) (define-abbrev global-abbrev-table "prot" "Protesilaos, also known as Prot" nil :enable-function #'my-notes-keycast-mode-p)  ( 1 min )

customizing his agenda view. He’s a graduate student, apparently in the sciences, and has to keep track of his tasks and their statuses. The natural solution for us Emacsers is to use Org mode and the agenda view to track these things. There’s nothing exciting about that, of course, but what makes his post interesting is that he shows how to create a custom agenda view. It’s easy to make a custom view and I have a lot of them but they’re pretty simple. Panigrahi views are more complex and he demonstrates how to specify more intricate criteria for the view. For his main view, he wants to show tasks that he’s completed since his last group meeting. That means he wants to filter for tasks completed in the last 7 days that aren’t personal items. He also wants to keep tags, so he makes sure they aren’t removed. Finally, since he often consults this view, he has a function that calls it with a simple Ctrl+c w rather than having to go through the agenda dispatch menu. As I said, you probably won’t care about his particular view but it’s instructive to see how he defined it as a jumping off place for your own views.  ( 5 min )

We’re getting near our goal for this year’s Annual TPM Journalism Fund Drive. We call it a goal. It’s more...  ( 6 min )

Last winter, I wrote about prefiguration: building the future you want within the shell of existing structures. Rather than focusing solely on tearing down systems you don’t like or pointing out what’s wrong with how things are, prefiguration aims to start laying the foundation for what you’d like instead… right here, right now, with the tools you have available. One of the frustrating things about the approach is that while it allows you to take immediate action, it never really feels like enough.  ( 20 min )

the cabinet pigs out, Dear Leader wigs out, and so much more...

Cornyn Says They Can’t “Rein In the President,” So You Are Going to Have to This November

You said it, Jim. ✍️ Reply by email

STATUS: Back on Linux, today. TODO: Nothing planned. Isn't that wonderful?! READING: Still working through "Middlemarch", but I've slowed down WATCHING: "Gone" on BritBox As repetitive and unimpressive as this blog can get, it's still the one place I have consistently put things for nearly 26 years. When I ask myself, "When did THING happen?", I often find the answer here. Maybe that's enough of a reason to continue, even though I haven't really been feeling like it, lately. My stepson writes test harnesses for the EV support systems at GM. We got to tour the engineering building yesterday during "Family Day" in Pontiac. It's ginormous and impressive. There was a parking lot full of classic cars. Also impressive. Not only did I not take any photos, I didn't even bring a camera. Something is wrong with my hobby. ✍️ Reply by email  ( 1 min )

I still think about this from Rakhim (2020): ✍️ Reply by email

The Closed Ideological Loop Understanding the Psychology That Makes MAGA Stronger When It Should Break Abstract The MAGA formation has survived two presidential terms, multiple criminal indictments, documented policy failures, and the most visible political con in recent American history. It survived these things and grew stronger because of them. Most political analysis treats the formation as a collection of people who have been deceived, who vote against their interests, who will eventually come to their senses when confronted with sufficient evidence. That explanation fails, and its failure has real political costs. This paper argues that MAGA psychology is coherent rather than deluded, and that its apparent contradictions follow from four interlocking mechanisms: a set of psycholog…

Very interesting piece. According to Politico a big reason Rep Andy Ogles, one of the slimiest and terrible members of...  ( 6 min )

A week ago I wrote about a new CNN poll and how it showed Democrats were pretty evenly divided over...  ( 7 min )

Alligator Alcatraz was a blueprint. Creating an ICE detention center out of tents, trailers, and cages amid the sawgrass wetlands of the Florida Everglades, and all of the dangerous reptiles that live there, is equally sadistic and laughable—ludicrously cruel, medieval in form and concept, legible more as a taunt than a security measure. Before it closed in June, the conditions of that concentration camp were dismal and inhumane. Disease ran rampant, adequate medical treatment was rarely given, and prisoners were subjected to disciplinary measures that Amnesty International found edged into torture. The security perimeter, beyond the usual fences and wire, was the harsh Florida elements and the alligators that gave the facility its nickname. Why would a country that pours billions of dollars into its military and policing, money that pays for torture programs and mass technological surveillance of its civilians, need to use tents as a prison in an area where the heat index can reach over 100 degrees and even the grass has teeth? Despite Alligator Alcatraz costing nearly $1 billion, it was defiantly and even proudly medieval in form and concept. It fits, too, that government officials engaged in manic rounds of cost-cutting as they tried to build more permanent facilities. Perhaps the Trump administration thought they would fund the project with all of the themed merch capitalizing off the racist bloodlust of the American conservative. Perhaps they didn't think about it very much at all. And yet, among the world leaders with which the sort of stagey brutality of Alligator Alcatraz would find its most appreciative audience, it has been an inspiration. For all of the billions of dollars that despotic states spend building and enforcing a system of control and surveillance upon non-consenting populations, this turn toward such cruelty feels oddly inevitable. On the merits, though, it is just another part of the deadly exchange of policing tactics between Israel and the United States.  ( 26 min )

Hello there. It's a slow summer Friday, so let's try to run out the clock with a staff chat. We'll be down below ready to answer any questions you might have.  ( 10 min )

Sarah: All summer long, we’ve been saying “Thank god there are two of us,” whether we’re hyping each other up to send jokes in Slack or encouraging each other to ask members of the staff to chat. But this may have been the toughest challenge we faced together.  Sohini: You never know where you might…  ( 30 min )

Some people are fans of the Dallas Cowboys. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the Dallas Cowboys. This 2026 Defector NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far here. Your team: Hit ‘em with the griddy, you little fucker. When else am I gonna get to use this clip to puff my chest? I gotta take my fun where I can get it. Your 2025 record: 7-9-1. You and I can normally count on the Dallas Cowboys to sabotage their own chances during the course of any given season, but in 2025 team owner and latent segregationist Jerry Jones decided to sabotage everything in advance by trading away All-Pro pass rusher Micah Parsons to Green Bay mere days before the season began. May as well cut your brakes before hopping into your car.  ( 43 min )

As LaMelo Ball gets settled in with the Minnesota Timberwolves, a clip of what appears to be his Charlotte residence has been circulating, due to the interior design choices therein. When I asked the user who circulated the video where he got it from, he said he found it on TikTok, where it was posted by a mover on the job, who appears to have deleted his original post. To the best of our knowledge, this is indeed LaMelo Ball's Charlotte home, or anyway the home of someone in possession of LaMelo Ball's NBA awards and Slam magazine cover. I suppose the even weirder possibility is that someone else lived there. This place is best experienced with fresh eyes, without any preparation, so watch the video below, and then we can review. OK: It's a Trolli gummy bag zoned for residential use. It's the online lobby for a vape-era Saints Row reboot. If you're on a $203.8 million contract, you get to move into the weed bodega that imports "exotic" Lays flavors. It has neon light fixtures everywhere, Pop-A-Shot, aliens sporting jewelry and shooting sleeves, and mural caricatures of LaMelo himself in various styles. There's an inclusive bathroom sign featuring a yeti. There's a stack of $100 bills behind a pane of glass that reads, in part: "This is for emergencies—not pizza cravings."  ( 40 min )

The San Francisco Giants don't get to announce anything fun these days, but it would be too cheap even by the prevailing clearance-sale standards to lump the latest bit of ill news relating to the team in with all the others, so we won't. Mike Krukow, the former Giants pitcher, longtime radio analyst, and general Pez dispenser of joy at the ballpark, is retiring at the end of the year. While that unquestionably sucks, it sucks in the best kind of way, because Krukow did the best job he could and for as long as he could do it. Because his best was exemplary, he goes out honestly and without any regret that he could have somehow been better; it sucks for everyone else, but not for him. Krukow is 74, and has been working for the past 15-plus years with the degenerative muscle condition inclus…  ( 25 min )

I discovered CarJitsu this past April at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport, where a bout was broadcast on a wall-mounted television above a display of Doritos. There is, truthfully, not much to explain about this newfangled sport. CarJitsu is an athletic contest, really a wrestling match, between two people who grapple inside a small car until one of them submits to some sort of chokehold or pin. There are two three-minute rounds but possibly a third if the match is tied after the second round. The combatants start buckled next to each in the passenger and driver seats (selection determined by a coin toss), then unbuckle themselves and attack. They are not allowed to punch or strike each other, much less jab or poke an eye. They can use the seatbelt to strangle each other, how…  ( 32 min )

It is a funny twist of fate that the Indiana Fever have become such an engine for maddening WNBA storylines that have little or nothing to do with their actual on-court performances, because those performances are crazy-making enough on their own. Are the Fever a great team capable of melting any opponent in front of them, or a bunch of chumps who can't defend the paint to save their lives? Is Caitlin Clark one of the most dynamic guards in the league, or a bozo who can't stop turning it over and coming up short in big moments? Will this team ever be normal? These are the questions that have defined the Fever's season, and on Thursday night the usual set of answers presented themselves: Yes, yes, yes, yes, and no. The Fever lost to the Aces, 86-84, in an overtime thriller that presented the best and worst versions of both teams. For most of the first half, it looked like the Fever were on their way to recreating the 109-75 beatdown they handed the Aces back on July 12, which preceded a 13-point loss to the Valkyries that was followed by a five-game winning streak in which the Fever scored at least 100 points in every game. The whiplash carried over into Thursday's game, which started with the Fever running out to a 42-22 lead with four minutes left to play in the first half. A'ja Wilson was having trouble getting to her spots, the Fever were playing fast, and Kelsey Mitchell and Aliyah Boston couldn't miss. And then Indiana fell into bozo mode. Over the final four minutes of the half, Clark, Mitchell, and Boston combined to go 0-5 from the field while Clark turned the ball over three times. This helped the Aces finish the half on a 15-0 run, and by the time both teams headed to their locker rooms Vegas was only down by five. The Aces continued to put the squeeze on in the third quarter, outscoring the Fever 19-9; with 6:16 left to play in the fourth, they had build a nine-point lead.  ( 20 min )

Various journalists have tried and failed to investigate the origins of turducken, that matryoshka-inspired dish of a chicken nested inside a duck nested inside a turkey. One chef in Louisiana claims to have invented the dish but refused to tell the New York Times when or where he created it, or even his age. But turducken is best understood as a modern combination in an ancient lineage of engastration, a cooking technique in which one animal is stuffed inside another. Other famous entrants in the genre include haggis, a potpourri of sheep organs stuffed inside its stomach, and kiviak, a wintertime Inuit dish made of little auks that ferment inside sealskin. The most ostentatious engastration may well be Alexandre Balthazar Laurent Grimod de La Reynière's rôti sans pareil, or "roast without equal," which called for "a bustard stuffed with a turkey, a goose, a pheasant, a chicken, a duck, a guinea fowl, a teal, a woodcock, a partridge, a plover, a lapwing, a quail, a thrush, a lark, an ortolan bunting and a garden warbler." In nature, however, engastration is simply a way of life. To swallow someone whole often also involves swallowing whoever they recently swallowed. Scientists recently discovered an exemplar of this all-natural turducken from around 100 million years ago in the Cretaceous. The recipe is as follows: Stuff some early cephalopods inside a flying reptile called a pterosaur, then stuff that pterosaur inside a marine reptile called an ichthyosaur. As a garnish, feed part of the ichthyosaur to an even larger marine reptile called a pliosaur. The fossil was found in Queensland, in what was once the shallow Eromanga Sea, and described in the journal Gondwana Research.  ( 22 min )

Yes, progressives and democratic socialists seem to be where all the energy is right now. No, there is no absolutely no need for other Democrats to be afraid of them.  ( 88 min )

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

INSIDE: Todd Blanche ... Jeanine Pirro ... Rand Paul

the Emacs speedbar and its Emacs 31 upgrade. The TL;DR is that as of Emacs 31, you can configure the speedbar to be displayed in a separate window instead of a separate frame. The video is 15 minutes, 39 seconds so it should be easy to find time for it. The placement of the speedbar matters a lot to Prot. He found the speedbar to be unusable when it was displayed in a separate frame because it was difficult to deal with the two related frames. It’s absolutely impossible for me to deal with because I run Emacs as a full screen app so the speedbar is in another workspace and I have to switch to that workspace to see it. Now that the speedbar can be displayed in the same frame, Prot finds that it can be useful when dealing with large projects with many files. His video is mostly concerned with showing how the speedbar works and what you can do with it. Lots of people love speedbar-like applications and swear by them. I, however, have never been able to warm up to them. These days, I don’t work with large projects and perhaps I’d feel differently if I did but mostly they just seem like noise to me. Even Prot says he doesn’t use speedbar for his smaller personal projects but that it can be useful for larger, multi-file projects. My recommendation is that if you don’t already strong opinions on the matter, give the speedbar a try when Emacs 31 comes out and see if it works for you. There are plenty of informed opinions on both sides of the issue so there’s no right answer, just what works for you. As always, Emacs will let you have it your way.  ( 5 min )

further adventures in journalistic malpractice

For Rep. Max Miller, shaking off allegations of domestic violence and child abuse should be an easy lift. The 43-year-old Ohio Republican benefits from a base that treats violence against women as a non-issue at best. In many cases, credible accusations against a GOP politician only bolsters his popularity with the MAGA base, who view men as the real victims of uppity women who should learn to keep their mouths shut. But as he aggressively attacks his ex-wife, Emily Moreno, and her father, Ohio Sen. Bernie Moreno, Miller’s behavior is as bizarre as it is unsettling. Even Republicans are starting to squirm.  Miller faces an overwhelming number of accusations from Emily Moreno, including claims that he threw hot water at his ex-wife and held a gun to her head when they were married, and that…  ( 8 min )

Today we’re listening to John Beltran, an American electronic musician from Lansing, Michigan.

When Phish fans discuss the greatest jams in the band’s history, one performance inevitably enters the conversation: “Bathtub Gin” from  ( 6 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…  ( 12 min )

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

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

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

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…  ( 15 min )

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

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’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 )

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

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

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 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 )

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

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

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

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

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

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 )

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

Hello 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 )

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

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

The 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 )

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 )

(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 )

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 )

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 )

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 )

I started going through the The Rust Programming Language to learn rust. I’m using the rustic package to edit files, run cargo, etc. Having run cargo build in the sample hello_cargo project, I wanted to run the executable file from within Dired. I realized there’s no obvious way to do this in Dired or Dired-X, and that’s probably a good thing. If it was easy I can imagine all sorts of havoc with people accidentally, or intentionally, runnning files out of Dired. Too easy. But it occurred to me that bash has command to run the next word in the command line as a command. I tried ! command in Dired, but since the directory isn’t in the path, it told me /bin/bash: line 1: hello_cargo: command not found Okay, update PATH before running command: ! PATH=.:$PATH command. This actually works, but decades of training give me a queasy feeling about adding . to PATH. How about $PWD instead? ! PATH=$PWD:$PATH command. Yep, that works too. But of course, with rustic, I can use C-c C-p r to run cargo run to run the command. But trying to run the file on the line in Dired was an interesting diversion!  ( 1 min )

Prot et moi avons parlé en direct avec Richard Bonichon (emacs.d, GitHub) d'Emacs, d'OCaml, de ses flux de travail, de sa configuration et d'autres sujets en français. J'ai raté le début de la diffusion en direct. Je suis vraiment désolée ! Heureusement, j'ai enregistré toute la conversation localement. Voici la vidéo complète : Watch on YouTube J'ai essayé de corriger la transcription, mais je crois qu'il y a encore beaucoup d'erreurs, donc n'hésitez pas à m'envoyer un message. Merci beaucoup à Richard, à Prot, et à tous les auditeurs ! À la semaine prochaine pour le 13 août : Emacs Chat avec Fabrice Niessen ! La transcription un peu corrigée Chat vous voulez parler d'Emacs avec Prot et moi en français, n'hésitez pas à me contacter! La transcription un peu corrigée Det…  ( 51 min )

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

Ray on Emacs, Raymond Zeitler has an interesting post on displaying the Org clocked in status. The default is to display it in the mode line but Zeitler wanted to display it in the title bar too. It turns out you can turn it off, display it in the mode line, display it in the title bar, or display it in both the mode line and title bar. These choices are controlled by the org-clock-clocked-in-display variable. If you regularly clock in your tasks, having flexibility in where the status is displayed could be useful. The problem is I couldn’t find any reference to this variable in the help system or in timeclock.el, which handles the seemingly related timeclock-mode-line-display. I updated my packages to make sure I had the latest Org Mode (I’m on Org 9.8.8) but I got the same results. I’m guessing that Zeitler is using one of the Emacs 31 prereleases, which implements this. If you’re interested in this feature and are on Emacs 31Try it on your system and see what happens. If it works for you, leave a comment.  ( 5 min )

Emacs has a built-in way to save and restore sessions: the desktop.el library. As the Emacs manual says, putting this in the init file enables automatic save and restore of sessions: (desktop-save-mode 1) But, I wanted a different behavior: Automatically save the session But don't restore it automatically I wanted to only use the session feature to restore sessions that I closed by mistake, or where I forgot to finish something before quitting Emacs. By default, I wanted a fresh session every time. But this also means that some session history has to be maintained; otherwise, a fresh session will start to write to the desktop file and then I will not be able to recover the old session. By default, the way to do this is to not set desktop-save-mode, but manually call desktop-save when neede…  ( 2 min )

The bulletin board material the Dallas Wings supplied to Cotie McMahon looked more like posterboard material. On Wednesday night, after the Washington Mystics’ 96-92 comeback win over Dallas, the rookie Mystics guard posted a photo of a scouting report the Wings had evidently left behind in their locker room. Like many scouting reports—who can forget Joe Mazzulla’s Quizlet account?—this one featured some good bits of found poetry. Angela Dugalić? “In to space floor/Attack her if she guards you.” Shakira Austin: “Battle her in every way for every minute.” But it did not feature Cotie McMahon. That might explain the 18 points McMahon put up on Wednesday night, 10 of which came in a tense fourth quarter. The Wings led the Mystics by as much as 20 points late in the third, but McMahon got the game back in control by muscling her way downhill and finishing through contact. Austin, the center who finished with 27 points and 13 rebounds, also didn’t seem like she minded being battled in every way for every minute. Wednesday’s was the Mystics' fifth straight win, a streak of success the franchise hasn’t achieved since their championship season in 2019. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OLPS6lEl6jI  ( 20 min )

Both Drew and I can sense when we are overdue for having Rohan Nadkarni on the podcast. In the way that an old prospector's knee might start barking before the storm clouds have even appeared on the horizon, we both feel a twinge when it has been too long between detailed descriptions of various sandwiches and gentle reminders that we are old as hell. It doesn't really matter who sends the text first. In a deeper sense, the universe sends it, and all of us receive it at the same time. Friends, it was time: As always with Rohan episodes, it moved along some strange but soothing currents. Before we got into talking about sports, we discussed our childhood crushes on various goofy infomercial products, awful ice trays we have known, and a young-adult Drew specialty that I described as Minnesota Jambalaya. The sandwich stuff comes early this time: Drew talked about a bunch of seagulls executing a well-designed heist on half of his Italian sub, and Rohan remembered being pickpocketed by a dog named Byron for his work dinner.  ( 19 min )

Years before he figured it out enough to make his Major League debut on Wednesday night at the age of 29, which in turn was long after his career ended for the first time, you could find coverage of Jefry Yan celebrating otherwise unremarkable strikeouts in wild and demonstrative fashion, in decidedly unremarkable settings. MLB.com posted a supercut of Yan absolutely going the hell off in Dominican Winter League games back in 2024, and similar spring training highlights abounded on team-affiliated social media in 2025. There's a slightly more subdued—this is very much relative—highlight of him striking out the side in a Triple-A game against the Lehigh Valley Iron Pigs back in June of this year. When MLB.com's Jack Magruder wrote about Yan in spring of 2025, then-Rockies catcher Jacob Stal…  ( 25 min )

Some people are fans of the Miami Dolphins. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the Miami Dolphins. This 2026 Defector NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far here. Your team: "To win games, you have to win the game, not lose the game, honestly. And that, that is how you lose the game."  Your 2025 record: 7-10, featuring a 2-7 start that got Dolphins GM Chris Grier fired after 900 years on the job. Everyone assumed that head coach Mike McDaniel, whose act wore thin faster than Sarah Cooper’s, would get the axe shortly thereafter. But in a stunning display of ownership complacency, McDaniel and his fancy watch collection held onto the job till the bitter end, guiding his charges to five wins in their remaining eight games, putting them out of favorable draft position in the process. Awesome. Kickass. Fuck me with a trident. If you recall, the Dolphins were a fun watch right at the beginning of McDaniel’s tenure. They would send five different guys in motion before every snap, and QB Tua Tagovailoa—no longer burdened by having to play for a head coach who actually expected things of him—would get the ball to one of the speed demons populating every skill position group. It was exhilarating while it lasted. The problem is that it lasted for roughly 10 minutes. After that, the whole enterprise took on the sheen of the Jay Fiedler-era Dolphins, only more expensive.  ( 39 min )

Less than a week after acquiring Tarik Skubal from the Detroit Tigers for the hefty sum of three prospects, the Los Angeles Dodgers are in a tailspin. What seemed at first a pitching upgrade aimed at converting the team's momentum into a cinched playoff spot has, given the perspective of four more games, turned into a desperate, last-ditch move that has totally mortgaged the team's future. Did the Dodgers ruin baseball by trading for Tarik Skubal? Here is the conclusive answer: No. Clearly Tarik Skubal ruined the Dodgers by being traded. Worry began creeping in on Aug. 2, when the Dodgers lost the final of a three-game sweep by the Boston Red Sox. But the Red Sox simply could not stop winning at that time, and anyway, two out of the three games in the sweep took place prior to the Skubal trade. Then on Aug. 3, starter Justin Wrobleski gave up seven runs and the Dodgers lost 10-5 to Pete Crow-Armstrong and the Chicago Cubs. But then again, the entire point of the Skubal trade was to help bolster the Dodgers' starting rotation in the partial absence of Shohei Ohtani. Anyway, as the Dodgers had already lost four games in a row twice this season alone, it was hardly uncharted territory. No judgment could be passed until Skubal made his first start. It did not take very long. On Aug. 4, Skubal started his first game as a Dodger. Unfortunately, he allowed two runs—and, notably, two walks—and the Dodgers ultimately lost, 5-1. Uh-oh. This was not boding well for the trade; the Dodgers had now lost five games in a row for the first time in the season, joining the ranks of such teams as the Kansas City Royals or the New York Mets (do not mind the other teams that were already on that list as well, as they are not relevant to this point of discussion).  ( 20 min )

As many of you know, Defector Research Labs is hard at work creating what we are sure will be the most powerful AI coding tool on the market. The goal of DevinBelly is simple: to allow users to scale their natural language-processing capabilities within a wide range of long short-term memory native integrated development environments, without fretting too much about GPU bottleneck stacks or token prefix limits, so they can practice Retrieval-Augmented Generation, balance their multimodality, and get agentic. We are excited by the volume of competition in the space. We think it's awesome that our San Francisco offices put us so close to so many cracked 996 engineers and their cool products. The other day, Defector Research Labs' head quant Ray Ratto held a meeting about how we can best position DevinBelly to win the race and get integrated into every preschool and newborn ward in the country, and we tried out one of the new conversation-summary tools. It told us that we were so cool and smart, and mostly talked about which one of Tre Jones or Tyus Jones has had the best career. Awesome! However, we have to disclose a somewhat troubling development. Safety is one of Defector Research Labs' top 500 priorities, and after a recent safety test, one of our forward-deployed engineers flagged to us that DevinBelly broke out of its sandbox and accessed the open internet. This sort of story is probably familiar to you: Maybe you saw the news that one of OpenAI's new models did something similar, which was followed by Anthropic announcing the same thing. Yesterday, Meta announced a new AI coding tool; today, they disclosed that it also broke out.  ( 19 min )

The Pittsburgh Pirates probably are not yet feeling desperate, but desperation can't be very far off. For the first time in recorded history, the organization made smart, aggressive moves at the trade deadline, beefed up their bullpen, and fortified for a push toward the playoffs. There is one problem: They share a division with the Milwaukee Brewers, the team with the best record in baseball. There is another problem: They also share a division with the Chicago Cubs, who have 66 wins, a .574 win percentage, and a huge lead atop the wild-card standings, and who also made smart, aggressive moves at the trade deadline and fortified for a push toward the playoffs. There are other problems: Five other NL teams I haven't even named are presently ahead of Pittsburgh in the wild-card standings, a…  ( 27 min )

It feels a little perverse to be writing this review in a Google doc. In 2018, over 20,000 Google employees walked out to protest working conditions at the tech juggernaut. Claire Stapleton was one of the protest's primary organizers. She had started at the company as an internal communications associate, drafting copy to explain the work product of the company to actual employees. Her quippy emails earned her multiple promotions and even the internal moniker “Bard of Google.” After a few years, however, Stapleton, along with many other employees, were fed up with the sexism, racism, and intense hierarchy of the company. Andy Rubin, who was accused of extensive sexual harassment, had received a $90 million exit package from CEO Larry Page. Many Black employees were underpaid and many women…  ( 27 min )

It's been a bad season for the 37-year-old pitcher Miles Mikolas. He's got an ERA of 5.67, and he's made a habit of starts where a bunch of guys just wallop what he offers. Only two pitchers in MLB have allowed more dingers than he's surrendered, and the signs point to Mikolas giving it another go in Japan once his one-year contract expires. The silver lining, however, is that he plays for the Washington Nationals, and nothing that the Nationals do really matters anymore in the grand scheme of the league. All one can muster as a fan watching their games in this back stretch of the season is to root for something that'll make you say "Oh! Huh." Case in point: The team ran out of position players in extra innings of their contest against the Phillies on Wednesday. Manager Blake Butera used two pinch hitters and two pinch runners, the last of which was Triple-A outfielder Andrew Pinckney, making his MLB debut as a sub for first baseman Abimelec Ortiz. Butera opted not to keep him in the game for the defensive half of the 10th. Instead, he moved his DH to first, lost the DH, then watched new pitcher Clayton Beeter escape the inning with just one run scored, making the game 4-4 in the 11th. Beeter was due up third in the top half, but after a walk and a triple by Jacob Young and C.J. Abrams, the next day's scheduled starter pinch-hit for the previous inning's pitcher. It was Mikolas, making his first plate appearance since 2021, who seemingly convinced his manager that he was the best man for the job.  ( 17 min )

As anyone who has used Google might already know, when you conduct a search on the site, it will suggest more searches of potential interest under a "People also ask" heading. The makeup of these "people" is not specified on the page, but clearly the point of this feature is to have you search more. In my capacity as the primary editor of Defector's lead WNBA writer, I use Google search often: to verify the spelling of names, fact-check details, and find the time and date of a team's upcoming game. At some point—I can't remember exactly when, but certainly at the start of this season—I noticed that whenever I searched a WNBA player, one of the suggested questions would invariably be "Who is the transwoman in the WNBA?" I wasn't the only one seeing this in my search results; my colleague Maitreyi Anantharaman, whose main beat is the WNBA, told me she noticed it as well across this season. I didn't take a screenshot of every search, but below you'll find the result for Golden State Valkyries forward Gabby Williams as of last week. At the end, there's also the question, "Which WNBA player looks like a man?"  ( 23 min )

This is your TPM evening briefing.

The post The Biclops appeared first on The Perry Bible Fellowship.  ( 4 min )

The New York Times has a piece today with the title “Moderate Democrats Prepare for ‘War’ Against an Ascendant Left.”...  ( 9 min )

INSIDE: Rand Paul ... Ron Johnson ... RFK Jr.

what even is that?

Today we’re listening to Butcher Brown, a jazz quintet formed in Virginia in 2009.

When people think of the great rock bands of the 1970s, names like Fleetwood Mac, Led Zeppelin, The Eagles, Pink  ( 9 min )

This is your TPM evening briefing.

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

Some people are fans of the Cincinnati Bengals. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the Cincinnati Bengals. This 2026 Defector NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far here. Your team: Cincinnati Bengals. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dp-ZZLXoDQQ  ( 43 min )

In tennis, it can be pleasant to play under the flag of an underrepresented country with a large diaspora. Essentially, you have a network of sleeper cells who can be activated all over the world. They are extremely willing to spend money to come watch you play, and extremely loud, because to them you are one of the most important sportspeople alive. A player in these circumstances doesn't have to reach the absolute peak of the sport to have this effect on people. Brazilian fans go nuts for blue-chip prospect Joao Fonseca. Turkish fans turn up for recent top-50 debut Zeynep Sonmez. But nobody out there is doing it quite like the Filipinos and Alex Eala. The 21-year-old from Metro Manila inspired mass devotion during her breakout semifinal run at the Miami Open last year, and probably would…  ( 26 min )

Davene Roseborough still can’t believe the number of foster homes she lived in that had locks on the refrigerators and cabinets. At one spot, Roseborough was barred from eating dinner if she wasn’t home by 6:00 p.m. That place didn’t last long, though. She was bounced from home to home from the time she entered foster care at the age of eight to the time she aged out at 18. Those years were characterized by rampant physical and sexual abuse, for which her foster parents received a $1,200 a monthly stipend. By the time she had her own child, she exemplified the kind of mother scrutinized by the very family policing system that raised her—Black, former system involvement, survivor of abuse, mental health struggles. Sure enough, her son was eventually taken from her and placed in the foster system for five years, where he also experienced abuse. The Administration for Children’s Services, the New York City agency tasked with investigating allegations of child abuse and neglect, has been algorithmically encoding this kind of profiling since 2018. Before DOGE lived and died, before ICE contracted Palantir to supercharge mass deportation, before ChatGPT even launched, ACS was already using AI. What started with a single predictive analytics score meant to identify children at a high risk of severe harm has since grown into a six algorithm suite of surveillance, which operates with very little public oversight. Yearly AI disclosures required by city law don’t include detailed information about what data the algorithms are trained on, or how exactly they are used by caseworkers. Despite the lack of transparency, what is evident is that the algorithms function as an expensive way to perpetuate the status quo—encoding extant and extreme human biases in the family policing system into algorithmic ones, and enabling a policing agency to claim it has the technical capacity to oversee the welfare of New York’s nearly two million children.  ( 42 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, Dave answers a question about talking to your child about death.  ( 31 min )

It used to be that all the normal, real people of this great nation could set aside political and religious differences, and even a well-calibrated distaste for Bostonians, and come together in our pure and righteous hatred of the New York Yankees. Now it's all confused: The Yankees—once such an inevitability that Bob Costas invoked the word "socialism" to describe how collective action could force them from the mountaintop—are no longer the sport's big bullies. Hell, they're no longer even the grotesque profligate silver-spooners of their own damn town. If what grossed you out about the Yankees in the last millennium was their habit of buying your team's best players every year, probably now you have trained your white-hot contempt on the Los Angeles Dodgers. Now there exists a widening s…  ( 24 min )

If we have learned anything from decades of superhero movies, it's that people love a vigilante. Something lurks deep in the hearts of most of us, but is it a sense of justice or something else? If you had the opportunity to go rogue—to solve a crime or right a wrong on your very own, or even just steal back something that was once yours—would you? Today’s gossip revolves around a woman whose opportunity to embody justice, in the form of hunting down her stolen Kia, fell on the day of the funeral of her girlfriend’s beloved track coach. What’s the right thing to do, under circumstances like these?  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXFS88rZ4yw  ( 15 min )

Now that I am back from France, so too is Nothing But Respect back from its brief summer break. This week on the show, Harry and I caught up and chatted about the Tour de France and the way I covered the race for Defector; Harry's experimental forays into vertical video; and the ongoing Kyle Kuzma Massive Thinks situation. Harry also makes a fantastic NBA player comparison for a certain former guest and current NBA staffer's game. Also, we always plug the Broke Jumper Tip Line in these posts, but there will be a dedicated BJTL episode coming soon, so please do submit those.  ( 16 min )

A couple weeks ago, I bought an apple cider slushie at the farmer's market. It was a hot summer afternoon, and the ice crystals in the slushie sparkled and burst in my mouth with crisp acidity that immediately cooled me down. The cider had been made by the farmers who ran the stand so it wasn't too sweet, just the platonic ideal of apple flavor somehow frozen into slushie form. Before I took another sip, I pulled out my phone to snap a picture of it. The rich brown of the slushie was framed by cartons of fresh, local blueberries. A light layer of condensation had just started to form on the outside of the cup. It was the perfect encapsulation of a lovely summer day in my town.  Later, I posted the photo to my Instagram story. No caption, just the ordinary proof-of-life type of content I post to my personal social media that serves as a digital record of the life I'm living. It blended in with the endless stream of similar photos and videos in my feed, which I scrolled through to catch up on what my friends, acquaintances, and even enemies have been up to.  There's nothing exceptional about what I did. The act of documenting life on the internet has become so commonplace that it is unremarkable, and yet the act of documentation—who does it, and how—continues to incite debate as people's digital selves impose more and more on their meatspace lives.  ( 29 min )

In a bunch of ways, there is no real percentage in remembering what things were actually like during the worst years of the COVID-19 pandemic. Beyond all the uncertainty and suffering and death, there is just not a lot to hang your hat on. It was, in the manner of every single thing befouled by Donald Trump's sticky palm prints, very manifestly going to be made worse and more damaging for all that nasty attention, and was in fact made much worse and more damaging for it. From one moment to the next, it was brutally or just banally bad, the latest and worst in a long line of collective national traumas that was fractured, in classic American fashion, into a wilderness of atomized and alienated and terribly isolated instances of individuated suffering. It was also, in every moment, just so o…  ( 31 min )

org-clock-clocked-in-display. Its default value is mode-line. This means that the active clock displays only in the mode line. But it can have one of three other values: nil, frame title, both. I've set it to both. Now the clocked task displays in both the mode line and the frame title. It shows the clock duration in square brackets followed by the task heading in parentheses, as shown below. org-clock-clocked-in-display. Try it out!  ( 9 min )

My actual configs start with pretty usual stuff you’d see across many other Emacs configs. As I was going through these however, I started to wonder how things work and why they ended up the way we have them today. In turn, that led to reading about the intention behind those, which led to more options I didn’t think about. Also, it’s kind of fun. I’ve made two more passes for this part alone in the last couple of weeks, and I could probably go for a third. When reading this post, if you want the good stuff (in my opinion), get lost in the footnotes as I did. There’s a lot to explore. I just scratched the surface. Load Melpa Melpa is where many Emacs packages live. The story behind it (from what I can tell) revolves around one of Emacs’ maintainers, Bozhidar Batsov, who pointed to Melpa at…  ( 10 min )

INSIDE: Abdul El-Sayed ... Max Miller ... Sean O'Mara

because they fucking suck, too.

Ariana Grande has been concerningly thin for years now, but the online discourse about her body exploded this week after she released the music video for “Petal,” the title track of her most recent album. The video’s storyline, in which the 33-year-old pop singer gets “Carrie”-style revenge for men’s misogynist judgments, was completely overshadowed by fan alarm at Grande’s apparent emaciation. Set in the 1960s, the colorful retro fashions hang off her skeletal frame. “I can’t even enjoy the video without thinking she looks sickly every second she is on the screen,” one person posted on YouTube.  “At this point, im [sic] judging her team, friends, and family,” the video’s top commenter said. “This is insane.” “She’s is surrounded by enablers,” another wrote. “Eating disorders are not a jok…  ( 7 min )

I've stepped away from blogging and social media for nearly a week. RSS feeds have been my only consumption engine. I like it this way. Mastodon starts to feel repetitive after a while. My blogging has been repetitive for 20 years. It's a little depressing how little has changed. How little I've changed. I may decide to quit blogging altogether, but, repetitive or not, I feel invisible when I'm not writing somewhere. ✍️ Reply by email

Today we’re listening to Eden Aurelius, an American electronic musician based in Brooklyn.

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame has always generated controversy. Fans argue over which bands deserve induction, which artists  ( 12 min )

Sabrina Carpenter is an American singer, songwriter, actress, and performer who has successfully transitioned from Disney Channel star to one  ( 5 min )

Raw link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Crn6x3RmmyQ In this video I demonstrate the built-in ‘speedbar’ command. This is the file explorer that Emacs ships with. Starting with Emacs 31, the ‘speedbar’ can be configured to appear on the side of the frame. Whereas the default is to show up in a separate frame. To me, the default is impractical, whereas the new option turns ‘speedbar’ into a very useful piece of functionality.  ( 1 min )

1. TLDR If you are an Emacs user with a keen eye, you will have noticed that in Emacs Lisp, code is data. After all, 'Lisp' is shorthand for 'List Processing'. One of Elisp's most beautiful features is the fortuitous blur between the thing that is processing the list (the program) and the list itself (the data). The macro in Elisp is a utility that exploits this blur and allows you to leverage this dualism between program and data in many useful and fascinating ways. In this post, I want to swoon about macros, explain what "homoiconic" actually means, demonstrate their ubiquity in Elisp, depict their beauty on a detour through Hofstadter's strange loops and Escher's prints, and finally show off some tooling (macroexpand, emacs-lisp-macroexpand, macrostep) that enhances both comp…  ( 41 min )

The first time I opened a web page inside Emacs I thought it was a trick, a hack, a toy... studying it in depth I saw I was wrong. EWW is a browser written 100% in Emacs Lisp, with no external engine behind it (no WebKit, Blink or Gecko). It is absurdly lightweight, intelligently designed and, almost without meaning to, it hands you a platform to do scraping or automate web tasks in a few lines. A tool with enormous potential that many people don't know about, even within the Emacs community itself. And the best part is that you already have it installed. It ships with Emacs by default. To launch it just run M-x eww and type a URL or a search term (it will open DuckDuckGo). Is it a replacement for Chrome or Firefox? No, and it doesn't try to be. It plays in a different league. Two pieces: …  ( 9 min )

Introduction In my years of using Emacs, I’ve noticed a common pattern: developers who are highly proficient at editing source code in Emacs switch to a “normal IDE” (as they call it)—such as CLion or Visual Studio—when they need to debug their code. They usually explain this by saying that Emacs feels a bit weird for the task. However, I’d much rather not leave Emacs if something can be done inside it. In this post, I’ll try to show that debugging in Emacs is both simple and effective, especially after a few small adjustments to the default settings. Debugging in Emacs revolves around two key components: GDB (GNU Debugger), the most popular and powerful debugger for C, C++, and other languages. GUD (Grand Unified Debugger), Emacs’ built-in interface since at least v19 that turns GDB into …  ( 3 min )

All Gianni Infantino needed was patience. Memory for scandal is short, even in a sport as massive as soccer, and whatever controversies the FIFA president willingly courted during the 2026 World Cup would have soon faded into the background as he won what was going to be an unopposed re-election next March. He could have ridden off into the sunset in 2031 and made millions off the connections built during his tenure at the head of FIFA. That wasn't enough for him, though, and so now, the walls are instead closing in, a self-inflicted error caused by greed and a plan to turn the World Cup into a private equity playground. The post-tournament afterglow was short, and now Infantino faces opposition from most (but, crucially, not all) corners of the soccer world, his ending looming on a quickl…  ( 26 min )

You may think you've experienced joy before, but you had previously never seen a mascot version of a 99-year-old woman with a cane dancing and cartwheeling around a baseball field in Springfield, Ill., which ushered in the inaugural weekend of the first professional women’s baseball league in nearly 30 years. I have never been happier than I was witnessing that moment. Our lives are all downhill from here. That mascot is modeled after Maybelle Blair, a former pitcher for the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, honorary chair for the new Women's Pro Baseball League advisory board, and wearer of iconic sunglasses. As was mentioned several times on the broadcasts of the WPBL's first two games, she broke four ribs and still made sure she was in Springfield for the occasion. Because I risk writing 1,000 words about everything I love about Maybelle Blair, I will put it succinctly: She is cool as fuck. The mascot Blair is not dressed in the human Blair's sensible slacks, nor the WPBL's uniform. Instead, mascot Maybelle wears the skirted uniform of the AAGPBL that many will recognize from A League of Their Own. The AAGPBL was everywhere during the new league's opening weekend. Springfield, the location for all of its games this season, was chosen specifically to reference the historic league. Former players came to watch. Fans wore Rockford Peaches merchandise and shirts that read "There's no crying in baseball." And commentators made reference to the famous "dirt in the skirt" line from the movie when talking about sliding. But the women of the WPBL wear pants, and they don't have to perform a rigid version of femininity. That's a big deal, even now.  ( 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 flouting the law, botched first dates, jealous dickheads, and more. Drew is off today. I have seized the means of funbagging and, as is my custom, forgotten to make use of them until the last second. With that in mind, let's get to... Your dang letters:  ( 42 min )

Some people are fans of the Kansas City Chiefs. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the Kansas City Chiefs. This 2026 Defector NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far here. Your team: It’s over.  ( 42 min )

Until a month ago, everything was going great for David Ellison and his plan to control American cultural production. He'd successfully made Paramount an outer arm of the Trump Administration, with all the lucrative sinecures and harrowing moral and journalistic compromises that come with such an arrangement. Ellison's smooth ascent to power took a little bump when he lost the initial bidding war for Warner Bros. Discovery, but his father is Larry Ellison, one of the richest men in the world, and he's a close ally of Donald Trump, so he threatened and bought his way into a hostile takeover that WBD shareholders approved in February and the U.S. Justice Department approved in June. Congratulations David Ellison, nobody will make a good movie or say anything faintly critical about Israel on CNN ever again. Or so he thought. Even before the DOJ rubber-stamped the deal, Bloomberg reported that several states were looking into mounting a joint legal challenge. On July 13, California Attorney General Rob Bonta filed suit in Sacramento after getting 11 other states including New York to join him in the legal effort. In a column for Variety (which, balls-and-strikes, needed a little editing) that dropped alongside the suit, Bonta wrote that the merger would create a super-entity immune from competition, one that could exert the directed force of monopoly control. "By combining two of the five largest film distributors and two of the five largest basic cable channel owners, the resulting media behemoth would control nearly one-third of theatrical movie distribution and nearly one-third of basic cable channels," he wrote. "It would control more than 30 percent of the blockbuster release distribution that buoys the movie theater business and 50 of the most popular cable TV channels, spanning an unrivaled slate of news, sports, entertainment, kids, family, factual, and lifestyle content." The result? "That’s a death knell for the film and TV industry — and for our democracy."  ( 25 min )

Maybe we've been viewing Harrison Bader all wrong. Not that he hasn't behaved like a Thanksgiving ham in a batting helmet, but he may have spurred his soon-to-be former employers to accept their current situation with a clearer eye and purpose. And with some gelignite. The San Francisco Giants have been freefalling all season long, which if nothing else marks a refreshing change from their decade of mediocrity in stasis. The amazing thing about their season is that they still haven't chased away their in-house fan base despite an uninterrupted series of decisions that would not be much different if they had been aimed at doing just that. Maybe lousy community and corporate relationships, plus some truly hideous baseball have unlocked some masochistic impulse in the regional baseball-going public; it seems to have worked for Love Island, after all. On Monday, with the looming MLB trade deadline and 112 games of diaper-grade baseball as impetus, the fellows finally faced their fears and fraudulence and began tackling the rebuild they had always said they wouldn't entertain. Not with Bader, mind you—they're just trying to void his contract on the grounds that a professional athlete should be able to avoid driving his scooter into a fire truck—but with what has happened since.  ( 25 min )

A lot of people in and around the WNBA are talking about trans women. In the aftermath of Indiana Fever role player Sophie Cunningham's negative comments about trans people playing sports in an ESPN profile, transphobic right-wing grifters and small groups of protesters have made a show of themselves at her games. In response, Seattle Storm co-owner Celeste Keaton was suspended by the league for telling off a couple of Cunningham boosters, while coaches like Cheryl Reeve and Natalie Nakase have given statements in support of trans women and girls participating in sports. Still others in the league, like Caitlin Clark, Fire coach Alex Sarama, and Fever coach Stephanie White have delivered more mealy-mouthed quotes about this controversy that Fox News describes as a "culture war" and ESPN de…  ( 22 min )

The president is selling Wall Street early access to his brain farts, and in return you get diarrhea from a salad.  ( 67 min )

If Congressional Republicans had any spine at all, they wouldn’t let something like this happen.  ( 71 min )

If we can get through the RFK Jr. era of public health without an outbreak more serious than Covid-19, it will be a miracle of biology.  ( 65 min )

INSIDE: Markwayne Mullin ... Todd Blanche ... Jeanine Pirro

let the Pirro Bites It countdown clock commence

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

The 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 )

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 )

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 )

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 )

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 )

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 )

There’s been a fair bit of publicity of the Open AI “rogue agent” that hacked into Hugging Face. This prompted Anthropic to check what their models were up to and, to my complete lack of surprise, discovered three incidents where models had gained unauthorized access to data in other organizations. Simon Wilison concluded: It’s abundantly clear now that running evals of cyberattack potential in models is a spectacularly risky business. Every AI lab needs to pay attention to this. Keeping a close eye on what’s happening in those sandboxes is crucial It strikes me that this is akin to a virus escaping from a laboratory. It makes clear that the model builders are not putting sufficient controls in place to prevent these lab escapes. They are morally responsible for any consequences of this, a…  ( 5 min )

The first time I heard Twista rhyme was back in the early nineties when he was going by the alias of Tung Twista. Back then, there was a bunch of hoopla around him getting into the Guinness Book of World … Continue reading →  ( 19 min )

Today’s mix opens with a Kane Parsons ambient track from 2024, followed by other ambient selections from Sun Kin, Metric System 1981, Ibukun Sunday, and BCMC.

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 )

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

Independent filmmaking has produced countless cult classics over the decades, but few have left a mark quite like The Toxic  ( 10 min )

Something tells me our president isn’t going to anything about it either.  ( 66 min )

I’ve seen this coming ever since Reagan opened the Gates of Mordor back in 1980.  ( 69 min )

Just goes to show that there’s no reasoning with a madman.  ( 73 min )

The Los Angeles Dodgers got Tarik Skubal, damn them. Damn them for having money; damn them for being too damn good; damn them for ruining baseball. That they got Skubal, the hottest commodity on the stove at the trade deadline, for relative peanuts, well. In this case, you damn everyone else. This trade will ostensibly impact the Dodgers' odds through the 2026 World Series, though that's the least relevant part of the picture. All anyone can think about, at least as it pertains to the Dodgers, is what baseball will look like in 2027, if we get any baseball in 2027 at all. In that sense, the 2026 World Series does matter. No doubt the future of the sport depends heavily on the team that wins; considering Tarik Skubal and his $9.5 million in remaining salary cost three decent prospects, you could infer that every single owner wants it to be the Dodgers. For the greater good, you see. If one were conspiracy minded, one could trace the logical threads from this trade to that conclusion. There are qualifiers on Skubal's performance this year that might justify a lower price—he has had injury trouble and a novel surgical procedure to treat it; though his ERA is still excellent, his peripherals aren't nearly as tidy; he is a rental only through the end of the year—but those qualifiers would be in place at any price, no matter where he went. It is both borderline incomprehensible and self-evidently true that other teams in the rarefied contention window like the Tampa Bay Rays or the Milwaukee Brewers—neither of which, mind you, have ever won a World Series—did not outbid the Dodgers' winning offer, not even for the sake of driving the price higher. It is equally strange that the Detroit Tigers did not shop more rigorously around the league for a higher return.  ( 22 min )

Who is ruining baseball? For me, for today, it's the Washington Nationals. Games played by my home team make up a solid 90 percent of the baseball I watch in a given regular season. Like a lot of baseball fans I was hoping Tarik Skubal would go to the Milwaukee Brewers or the Tampa Bay Rays instead of to the Dodgers, but in a distant, uncommitted sort of way, the way that I might hope that my friends have favorable weather while they are taking a trip someplace. Skubal's trade destination is firmly not my problem. While the Nationals are playing competitive baseball, I really do not give a rip what the Dodgers are up to. While the Nationals are anywhere near the hunt, I might watch as many as two Dodgers games a month, and the chances are very good that Skubal will not happen to be pitchin…  ( 27 min )

Some people are fans of the New Orleans Saints. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the New Orleans Saints. This 2026 Defector NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far here. Your team: New Orleans Saints Your 2025 record: 6-11, otherwise known as the record of the false dawn. It's a record that looks a lot better than 3-14, until you remember how easy it is for a bad team to scrape together three meaningless wins (or four, or five) at the end of the season, long after everyone else in the league has stopped giving a shit.  ( 52 min )

This puzzle was constructed by Eli Robinson, and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. Eli is the Chief Trivia Officer of Water Cooler Trivia. He has far more questions than answers, if you must ask. He lives with his family in Washington, D.C. 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 )

DETROIT — It’s 2 p.m. on a Tuesday, just one week from Election Day, and Abdul El-Sayed’s Detroit office is standing room only. The front and back of the room are packed with volunteers eager to hear the Senate hopeful speak before they go out and canvass the nearby neighborhoods. Many of them are still coming off the high of what they saw as a stellar performance from El-Sayed in the candidate debate that aired the night before. “He was so good, so good,” Lisa, a woman from Grosse Pointe Woods, tells me. While she has previously canvassed for El-Sayed, today she’s brought backup: her son, a college student at Michigan State University who is volunteering for the campaign for the first time.  El-Sayed’s campaign has knocked 190,000 doors since he launched his run for Michigan’s U.S. Senate seat, and in these final days before the election, they’re hoping to drive those numbers up. Every meaningful conversation they’re able to have with an undecided voter could make all the difference come Aug. 4. In the Michigan Democratic Senate primary, El-Sayed, a Bernie Sanders-backed progressive with a background in public health, is facing off against Rep. Haley Stevens, a moderate congresswoman who has picked up the support of Governor Gretchen Whitmer. The money in this race is decidedly not on El-Sayed’s side. Super PACs have spent more than $60 million to support Stevens, with over $30 million of that coming in from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.  ( 51 min )

DUBLIN — David Hickey was built for Gaelic football, the sport that can’t stick to sports. Hickey, who was a two-time GAA all-star and four-time All-Ireland winner as a half-forward for Dublin, used football’s biggest weekend as a platform for protests.  First, Hickey loudly refused to show up for a so-called Legends Lunch at storied Croke Park on July 24, where he was to be honored alongside other members of the Dubs’ 1976 championship side. Hickey’s boycott was aimed at the Gaelic Players Association (GPA), the event’s organizer and primary football player advocacy group, for what he called its “failure to take a stance” against Allianz, a Germany-based insurance giant with a fetish for profiting from crimes against humanity. The transnational underwriter has been the preeminent sponsor of Irish games, hurling and football, since 1993, when it acquired naming rights for the national leagues in both sports. Allianz also invested billions of dollars in Israel’s invasion and occupation of Gaza.  “I do not want the memory of that team associated in any way with the GPA, who have failed miserably to stand up for anything worthwhile apart from money,” said Hickey, who became Ireland’s leading transplant surgeon and a high-profile social activist after leaving the game.  ( 35 min )

For me, listening to music whenever I’m working on a computer is a commonplace, daresay essential activity. Much of my work is done using Emacs, so the idea of having it control music playback to mitigate an app switch seemed reasonable. Such was the motivation for my latest project, now-playing.el, a Transient interface for the macOS Music (nee iTunes) app. now-playing.el takes inspiration from the many mini-client interfaces provided by Apple to control the Music app. The idea was to have a compact and simple interface: Show what is currently playing (song, artist, album) Offer basic controls (play/pause, next/previous track, volume control) Optionally log what was played. now-playing.el takes advantage of AppleScript support in the Music app, providing the needed controllability and ob…  ( 1 min )

The Art Of Not Asking Why is also an em-dash aficionado and has been struggling with how to enter them, especially when using Emacs. His final solution involves expand-abbrev but seems to me overly complicated. He types --- then immediately calls expand-abbrev by typing Ctrl+x `. We here at Irreal have the same problem, of course, but solved it in what seems to me a much simpler way: (defun jcs-insert-em-dash () "Insert an em-dash at point" (interactive) (insert 8212)) (global-set-key (kbd "H--") #'jcs-insert-em-dash) ⌘ Cmd key so it’s really easy to invoke it: thumb on Hyper and index finger on - and it inserts an em-dash directly into the source exactly as JTR wanted. I don’t claim my solution is better than JTR’s, only that it suits me better. It’s just another example of Emacs letting you have it your way.  ( 5 min )

Still working on Emacs Config Gems part 3. Fell into a deep rabbit hole and got lost for a couple of days, then climbed out just to discover another one I have to explore next. I wanted to crunch the first few tweaks of my Emacs config in one post, but there’s too much to explore. I’m getting there!  ( 2 min )

search for knowledge, which is incidentally the Emacs Carnival theme for August. Enjoy! Help wanted: pkal is looking for feedback on the jit-lock-stealth-load thread in emacs-devel on how to annotate changelog entries with release info (@pkal@social.sdfeu.org) Ihor Radchenko's looking for insights from other maintainers on reviewing large feature branches (@yantar92@fosstodon.org) Testing patches for input methods: [patch] GNU emacs bug#68339 (w32 ime font size) [Patch] Implement preedit text rendering for Windows Upcoming events (iCal file, Org): Emacs.si (in person): Emacs.si meetup #8 2026 (v #živo) https://dogodki.kompot.si/events/3944ee8f-6da1-4720-b086-b9217e4f5c7b Mon Aug 3 1900 CET EmacsATX: Emacs Social https://www.meetup.com/emacsatx/events/315091679/ Thu Aug 6 1600 Amer…  ( 4 min )

INSIDE: Jeanine Pirro ... Max Miller ... George Santos

but mean old Iran won’t let him win the war

They must have hoped the photos would dispel conspiracy theories that he’s dead, or at least incapacitated. But the two proof-of-life pictures taken of Sen. Mitch McConnell and his wife, former Labor Secretary Elaine Chao, purportedly from his room at a rehabilitation center, have only generated more speculation about what has really happened to the 84-year-old Kentucky Republican, who hasn’t been seen or spoken in public since being hospitalized in mid-June. In both pictures, the typically sharp-minded senator is staring with a vacant smile at the camera, while the 73-year-old Chao has a firm grip on his arm that reads less as affection and more like direction. In the first, taken July 12, McConnell holds the day’s newspaper, a tradition familiar more commonly seen in hostage photos. Even…  ( 7 min )

Today we’re listening to Rebekah Heller, an American bassoonist, composer, and conductor based in New York.

No content preview  ( 4 min )