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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is your TPM evening briefing.

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

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

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

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

Even the little victories matter.  ( 71 min )

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

fix the country you broke, asshole

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is your TPM evening briefing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is your TPM evening briefing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

This week's episode of Nothing But Respect was a really fun one. We set out to make a Broke Jumper Tip Line–focused episode, but only got to the BJTL about 50 minutes in because we had too much other good stuff to talk about with frequent guest Ock Sportello. As to that other stuff: We chatted about the Brooklyn Nets fan's experience of the Knicks title run, spent a lot of time talking about the scourge of AI rap music (read Ock's excellent review of the new Tyga album and Iz's story on Fenix Flexin), and played a game involving the new Pat McAfee album. As for the BJTL: We talked about the hoops acumen of Barack Obama and Chris Hayes (who I'm just realizing now I misidentified as Chris Haynes), and reveal a funny tip about Draymond Green's email behavior.  ( 15 min )

Time for your weekly edition of the Defector Funbag. Got something on your mind? Email the Funbag. You can also read Drew over at SFGATE, and buy Drew’s books while you’re at it. Today, we're talking about reunions, the extinction of the hard T, dinosaurs, and more. Your letters: Dusty:  ( 49 min )

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

scenes from a performative meltdown

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is your TPM evening briefing.

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

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

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

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

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

There's no 'I' in crossword. This week's puzzle was constructed by Matthew Stock, and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. Matthew is a crossword constructor and stay-at-home dad from Dallas. His work can be found at happylittlepuzzles.com. Defector crosswords, launched in partnership with our friends at AVCX, run every Monday. If you’re interested in submitting a puzzle to us, you can read our guidelines HERE. The AVCX, an independent puzzles and games outlet, invites you to subscribe, or sample the goods with a two-month free trial: "With an AVCX subscription, you get access to weekly themed and themeless crosswords, minis, cryptics, and trivia, by email or in your favorite app. We have no corporate overlord, and we publish top-flight stuff only. We also pay our people fairly, always. Check us out."  ( 14 min )

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

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

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

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

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

his appearance on Meet the Press proves it

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

the crew aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln deserve better than this

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This month's Emacs Carnival theme is The Search For Knowledge, which is kinda something near and dear to my heart. I wrote an Obsidian to Emacs post from a little over a year ago and one of the things that I mentioned is that Obsidian has a Knowledge Graph that I didn't use. denote-explore does have one and I set graphing up once but I don't use it at all. I work just fine without a Knowledge Graph. Using Denote, ripgrep, and consult, things work great for me. It's smooth and not a lot of fuss. I literally do all my knowledge management now within Emacs in a Denote system. I dump all of my notes into one folder in org format. Denote puts a time stamp on the file name as well as the title and the tags. Searching by tag is really just a filename search. See examples from my own denote folder…

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

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

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

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 )

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

The one-hit wonder label has a funny way of shrinking a career down to three or four minutes. An artist  ( 13 min )

Another month, another agent-shell update. If you missed the last one, have a look at the 0.63 update. While this post showcases the latest highlights, the full list of changes is far chunkier than what we'll cover. What's agent-shell? agent-shell is a native Emacs mode to interact with AI agents powered by ACP (Agent Client Protocol). agent-shell enters the chat Since inception in September last year (yikes nearly a year), agent-shell has featured a shell-like experience, powered by comint mode. There's also viewport mode (via agent-shell-prefer-viewport-interaction), if you prefer a more focused experience, and now we have chat mode. Chat mode fuses comint mode with a more traditional chat-like labelling experience. We're living on the edge here, so chat mode is now enabled by default. …  ( 7 min )

The Emacs Cat, of whom I’ve written many times, has a post on a broken change in Ubuntu that affected Emacs. The TL;DR is that the Cat upgraded to Ubuntu 26.4 but when he tried to use Emacs he discovered a problem with Dired. At first he thought the problem was with Emacs 30.2, which is the default Emacs with that version of Ubuntu. But the actual problem turned out to be with Ubuntu’s implementation of ls. The Cat solved his problem by using the “old” version of ls from GNU coreutils. Ubuntu had decided that it was a good idea to rewrite the core Unix utilities—such as ls​—in Rust. Maybe I’m just old and grumpy but this seems to me to be a terrible idea. Utilities like ls have been around and working more or less flawlessly for close to 50 years. What, really, was the reasoning behind the decision to rewrite ls? Twenty six years ago, Joe Spolsky answered that question and explained why the rewriting is almost always a bad idea. It may have been written a quarter of century ago but Spolsky’s explanation remains true. There really is no reason—other than fashion—to rewrite core utilities that have been working perfectly well for longer than many of us have been alive. When you do, you can expect exactly the sort of problem that the Cat stumbled on. The problem with the new ls was very specific involving an obscure parameter but it reached out to disable a major Emacs functionality and probably affected other applications as well. The annoying thing is that there really wasn’t any reason for this to happen: just someone who decided it would be a good idea to rewrite an application that was working fine.  ( 5 min )

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

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

A follow up to last night’s post on Mike Huckabee, now U.S. Ambassador to Israel. Axios reports that Donald Trump...  ( 7 min )

The president’s fixation this time has something to do with catapults, and no, it’s nowhere near important.  ( 80 min )

The WNBA doesn’t have an award for “clutch-ness” the way the NBA does, so it figures that they also do not have an award for “unclutch-ness.” Allow us to fill the vacuum: Defector’s inaugural Unclutchy Award for Outstanding Achievement in Choking and Tanking goes to the Seattle Storm. The voting wasn’t close, which is good; if it were, the Storm probably wouldn’t have won.  WNBA Stats defines “clutch time” as the final five minutes of a game within a five-point margin. It happens to be the time when the 7-28 Storm do their best work. They’ve played 16 clutch games and lost a remarkable 14 of them. Consider it a simple tradeoff. If you want to build around a pair of awesome, athletic teens, you must also accept that teens are fickle and mercurial and sometimes straight up forget how to play basketball. It’s all part of the fun. The 6-foot-4 Awa Fam, 19 years old on draft night, had a reasonable claim to be the first-overall pick in the draft this past spring, but she ended up going to Seattle at No. 3, after Azzi Fudd and Olivia Miles. The term “stretch big” gets thrown around a little casually these days, so it might be more meaningful to say that Fam is a great shooter who only happens to be a big. The percentages won’t wow anyone—she’s making 35 percent of her three-point attempts this season—but the volume (four attempts per game) should. These are contested threes and quick catch-and-shoot looks she’s hitting, not the “somebody left her open” threes most centers take.  ( 22 min )

Cal Raleigh got off to a slow start to the year, which was to be expected. It is impossible to follow up a 60-homer season with another of the same caliber, and between instigating teammate beef on the global stage and dealing with an early-season oblique strain that eventually landed him on the injured list, the slugging Seattle Mariners catcher has had much to fight through, even if partially self-inflicted. Alas, since he returned from the IL in mid-June, things have not gone much better for either Raleigh or the Mariners. Across the second half of the season so far, Raleigh has had a .509 OPS and a 56 wRC+; on the year, he has an OPS of .564 and a wRC+ of 68, meaning he is 32 percent worse than the average MLB hitter. Weighted Runs Created Plus is the most comprehensive catch-all statistic out there but hard to distill in just a few words. Put another way: While Raleigh is not presently qualified for end-of-year statistics because of his stint on the IL, if he were, he would tie for third-worst offensive player in the league with Nasim Nuñez of the Washington Nationals, ahead of only Ezequiel Tovar (of the Colorado Rockies) and Jarren Duran (still, somehow, of the Boston Red Sox). "We're not playing well, that starts with me," Raleigh said after the Mariners lost 4-1 to the New York Yankees on Aug. 11. "I'm awful." (Since then, the Mariners first extended their losing streak to six games, joining the rarefied ranks of teams like the Los Angeles Dodgers, and then promptly snapped their streak with a 1-0 victory in the final game of the series against the Yankees.) Even knowing that Raleigh was not likely to have the same sort of season he had last year, it is difficult to grasp the scope of his drop-off, which is, unfortunately, historic. Per Mike Petriello, Raleigh is currently experiencing the second-largest decline in OPS in baseball history.  ( 22 min )

Welcome back to Make It Nice, Defector’s best interior design advice column. Today we have fancy track shelving, a moody bedroom makeover, and, my favorite, does a non-ugly dog crate exist? Our first “question” comes from recent conversations I had with a few friends who had been admiring photos of Vitsoe “606” shelves online. Both of them were ready to give up their Big Shelf dreams because the Vitsoe would cost them thousands of dollars—one friend was obsessing over a setup that would cost $10,000 minimum. Vitsoe has been making the 606 Shelving System for over 60 years and has captured the hearts of design freaks everywhere. The shelves are iconic, modular, and very, very expensive.  I’m maybe going to upset architects and creative directors everywhere, but Vitsoe is just really nice track shelving, and you can get track shelving anywhere. Vitsoe shelves look so good mostly because of how they’re styled. And that’s something you can learn.  ( 22 min )

It is hard to keep track of the number of free-agent signings and trades made by the Dodgers that have allegedly broken baseball. When Tarik Skubal lands in the dugout at the trade deadline and starts the freakout all over again, it's easy to move on from the last set of acquisitions that was raising qualms and inviting guffaws. But let the record show, before it's too late, that Edwin Diaz was at one point one of those baseball-breaking signings. The Dodgers signed Diaz this past offseason to a three-year, $69 million deal. Diaz was the best reliever on the market, coming off a season with the Mets in which he saved 28 games and posted a 1.63 ERA. The signing was a source of anguish for parity-obsessed baseball fans not necessarily because of the size of the contract, but because of how indulgent it felt from the Dodgers' perspective. The Dodgers front office would have certainly argued that their bullpen needed reinforcement, but throwing $69 million at Diaz felt a little like watching a kid whose bike tire went flat solve the problem by buying 12 more bikes. As it turns out, any fretting about how Diaz's arrival in Los Angeles would put the Dodgers even further out of reach was a big waste of time. Diaz experienced some struggles through his first seven appearances of the season, and then had surgery to remove loose bodies from his throwing elbow. That procedure kept him out for three months, and ever since returning at the end of July he has been pure, unmitigated ass.  ( 20 min )

Some people are fans of the Detroit Lions. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the Detroit Lions. This 2026 Defector NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far here. Your team: Detroit Irritable Bowel Syndrome.  ( 47 min )

Quick, what number did Jayden Daniels wear when he was at LSU? If you had to think about that for even a second, you might want to lock your doors. Because it's very possible that someone from Daniels's inner circle is on the way to your house to kick your ass. I issue this warning because over the last few days we have discovered that the No. 5 jersey is extremely important to Daniels, or at least it is to someone who spends time handling his affairs. On Wednesday, ESPN reported that an attorney representing Daniels sent a letter to LSU, where Daniels played from 2022–23, informing the school that it can no longer use Daniels's name, image, or likeness in promotional materials. The letter was sent because Daniels is upset that LSU is allowing sophomore cornerback DJ Pickett to wear the No. 5 jersey this upcoming season. A spokesperson representing Daniels also released a statement, expressing the disappointment felt by the "Daniels family" at LSU's decision to let a guy wear a number. From ESPN: "The Daniels family is deeply disappointed and feels profoundly disrespected by LSU's decision to give Jayden's number to another player," the statement from Daniels' spokesperson said. "Jayden and his family had every reason to believe that his number would remain a meaningful part of his LSU legacy and would be honored and protected in recognition of his extraordinary contributions to the university."  ( 20 min )

INSIDE: Aaron Reitz ... Tiffany M. Cartwright ... David Crowley

spoiler alert: he didn’t do that

In era when so much about the news is just plain depressing, what stands out about the burgeoning public rebellion against Flock security cameras is just how fun it all is. The artificial intelligence-powered surveillance cameras, which are sold by Flock Safety as mere “license plate readers” to local governments, have spurred a national cat-and-mouse game between vandals and cops that is being merrily followed on social media, mostly by people rooting for the vandals. City council meetings in which citizens swarm to protest paying for the cameras are the new must-see TV.  In Huntington, West Virginia, a small city in the heart of Appalachia, one man became an internet folk hero when he stood up at a city council meeting and said, “I’m not gonna waste your time; I’m kinda hungry. But one l…  ( 8 min )

My ~/org/notes folder had nearly 4,000 files in it this morning. It now has 170. I deleted the rest. Having lost my religion around "zettelkasten" and "second brains", my notes started to look a little silly. Hundreds of nearly empty files with carefully-curated front matter are not helpful, no matter how many links between them have been created. I mean, what use is a note for, say, "Docker", which contains a link to the Docker website and Github page with a one-sentence summary like "an open-source platform that uses operating system-level virtualization to package, deploy, and run applications inside lightweight, isolated environments called container". All that would take like 5 seconds to look up any time I need it. And backlinks? So what if I mentioned "Docker" in a half-dozen other files. It's all useless to me. I also don't need "clippings" from web pages or books if I haven't added any of my own thoughts about them. I'm only just now learning this. It's not that I've been doing it wrong, but I'm not an academic. I'm not doing research for a book. I'm not studying for an exam. Those tasks might benefit from the whole link-everything-and-generate-a-cool-graph thing, but mine don't. What I actually need from a note-taking system: tips and things I've learned (e.g. "My Fedora post-install tasks") information about people I know projects I'm working on (e.g. "Clean and improve rear landscaping (2026)") a log of what I've done (e.g. "Bought LED bulbs from Amazon (2700K)" or "Had dinner with Shelley and Jeff") Anything that wasn't any of those things has been deleted. It was a lot, and I feel good about it. ✍️ Reply by email  ( 1 min )

STATUS: Trying to simplify everything TODO: Review both Mac and Linux backups (Re)READING: "Devoted" by Dean Koontz WATCHING: Reacher Season 4 I'm about a third through "Devoted", by Dean Koontz and I've been enjoying it. I finally decided to add it to my Hardcover list. When I did, I saw that I'd already read the book in 2020 and gave it 3 stars. It's not uncommon for people to re-read books, but I honestly have no recollection of any of "Devoted". None of it sounds remotely familiar. That's weird, right? ✍️ Reply by email  ( 1 min )

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

You’ve probably noticed, Emacs users tend to be a different breed than other computer users. While you can be reasonably sure that anyone who uses vim or VSCode is probably a developer, or someone who works in software engineering, devops, or systems administration, Emacs users can be from virtually anywhere else on the map. While conventional software has the basics—like users, functions, documentation, and best practices—Emacs has a tradition. In this article, we’ll look at: Table of Contents What is the Emacs pastoral tradition? How doing useless work can be useful Why productivity is not always important Let’s get nutty. The Emacs pastoral tradition Emacs users may come from career backgrounds or intellectual disciplines that have almost nothing to do with software or computer…  ( 6 min )

Fabrice Niessen (Formation Emacs Boost) d'Emacs, de ses flux de travail, de sa configuration, et d'autres sujets en français. Watch on YouTube J'ai essayé de corriger la transcription, mais je crois qu'il y a encore beaucoup d'erreurs, donc n'hésitez pas à m'envoyer un message. 0:00 Introduction 1:46 Le parcours 4:15 Emacs sur Windows : Cygwin et WSL 8:26 Les automatisations 12:15 Emacs Boost 21:15 Emacsclient 28:49 org-html-themes 35:02 Review 37:25 PDF 40:03 Key-chord 45:41 Copier sans sélectionner 48:29 fill-paragraph 50:02 Les macros 51:02 Volatile highlight 52:47 Les tableaux Org 55:43 Les formations et les cours particuliers La transcription un peu corrigée Details 0:00 Introduction Sacha: Ça marche! Prot: Maintenant, nous sommes en direct. Sacha: Succès! Bonjou…  ( 28 min )

Limiting enabled tree-sitter modes Emacs 31 Is Around the Corner: The Changes I'm Already Daily Driving I simplified my setup and turned on all the tree-sitter modes (treesit-enabled-modes t) yaml-ts-mode is rather unusable.1 I switched back to yaml-mode and adjusted the value of treesit-enabled-modes to include what I have use for (the change): (treesit-enabled-modes '(bash-ts-mode c++-ts-mode c-or-c++-ts-mode c-ts-mode dockerfile-ts-mode go-mod-ts-mode go-ts-mode go-work-ts-mode json-ts-mode python-ts-mode rust-ts-mode typescript-ts-mode)) treesit-enabled-modes contains a list of all the supported modes. I hope someone will take pity on yaml-ts-mode and make it usable soon. Tree-sitter grammar for Cabal files treesitter-based mode for Haskell I failed to find a tree-sitter grammar for Cabal files so I wrote a rather rough one myself. My hope was that it could serve as a base, or motivation, for someone else to write a proper one. It took more than 2 years, but now it's finally happened! I've switched my mode to use Curtis's grammar and I'll be archiving mine. (The change.) Hello editable xref, good bye wgrep Rahul's post also mentions that editable xref buffers. I had the same itch to have editable xref buffers, and I'd added a function to turn them into grep buffers to be able to edit them. I've now switched to using the built-in support, and removed the function. At the same time I also decided to remove wgrep and instead use the builtin function for editing grep buffers. Footnotes: 1 A mode for an indentation-sensitive language really ought to at least handle indentation! Tags: emacs haskell  ( 1 min )

Fabrice Niessen d'Emacs, de ses flux de travail, de sa configuration et d'autres sujets en français. Voici ses notes. Watch on YouTube [2026-08-27 Thu 07:30]–[2026-08-27 Thu 08:30] dans le fuseau horaire America/Toronto, soit 0730H EDT / 0630H CDT / 0530H MDT / 0430H PDT / 1130H UTC / 1330H CEST / 1430H EEST / 1700H IST / 1930H +08 / 2030H JST. Voici notre conversation précédente : Watch on YouTube View Org source for this post You can e-mail me at sacha@sachachua.com.  ( 1 min )

Please note that org‑get‑cust‑priority has been updated. The code that was published on 2026-07-10 causes org‑tags‑list to crash. 1 I was disappointed to learn that valid priority characters are limited to 0–9 and A–Z. I thought it would be neat if the exclamation mark ("!") could represent the ultimate priority, a sort of "drop everything and do this immediately" kind of priority. It turns out that you can use "!" for this purpose, regardless of which priority characters you've configured. The trick is to write a function and assign it to org-priority-get-priority-function. The function (which I named org-get-cust-priority) simply looks for "!" in the priority cookie and returns one hundred times the value that would be returned by the highest valid priority. If it doesn't find …  ( 10 min )

bit of humor to help you get through the day. If you’ve ever wondered why an S-expressions is called an sexp, here’s your answer. Like all humor, there’s a bit of truth here. Not the part about sexp, of course, but the notion that many of us come to Emacs for some particular feature, venture too close to the init.el event horizon, and never escape.  ( 4 min )

Just recently I upgraded one of my Dell laptops to the latest Ubuntu 26.04 LTS with a clean install. The installation process was smooth and enjoyable. Ubuntu 26.04 ships with Emacs 30.2, which made me happy, so I installed it immediately—more precisely, the emacs-pgtk Wayland-optimized package, since Wayland is the default windowing system on Ubuntu 26.04. The Problem I started Emacs and, after a short time, ran into a problem: Dired (C-x d) did not work properly. It displayed a strange mess of unsorted, chaotic entries, as shown below. It was a big surprise. Click or tap to view the full-size picture. I’ve been using the same .emacs multi-platform config file for Linux, macOS, and Windows for years and have never had any problems with Dired on different platforms, let alone acros…  ( 3 min )

Projectile 3.4 is out! After the four releases that preceded it this summer, this one is polish rather than ambition. Most of it came out of an annoyance I’d been living with for years without ever quite naming it: a lot of what I work on isn’t one directory. CIDER is really CIDER plus cider-nrepl plus orchard plus clj-refactor plus a handful of others. RuboCop is RuboCop plus rubocop-ast plus rubocop-rails and the other extension gems plus the style guide. I’ve been maintaining families of repositories for the better part of a decade. Lately I’ve also been reaching for git worktrees far more than I used to, so the same repository is now checked out two or three times on my disk at any given moment. Projectile saw all of that as a pile of unrelated projects, which is exactly what it looks …  ( 5 min )

Among Phish fans, certain jams become so unique that they earn nicknames of their own. One of the most famous  ( 6 min )

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

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

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 )

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 )

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

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

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 )

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 )

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

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Here’s something to keep a close eye on. Mike Huckabee, who as part of Trump’s fun house diplomacy is now...  ( 8 min )

Please contribute today to get us over the finish line. Out of $500,000 we needed to raise this year for...  ( 6 min )

I noted a few days ago how many of the news stories of the day are knock-on effects of earlier...  ( 7 min )

This is your TPM evening briefing.

No matter how hard the president tries, he can’t seem to outmuscle the prestigious university.  ( 62 min )

Is there any hope of purging the crazy from American conservatism?  ( 76 min )

In my personal mental masthead for Defector, there are bureaus representing the places where my co-workers live. Philadelphia you know about. New York, for better and worse, is implied. Minneapolis, where no Defector staffers currently live, is more complicated. But we have Drew, whose Minnesota sports fandom has put him under this heading even though he hasn't lived there in decades, and we also have Justin Ellis, who was shaped by his experience growing up there even though he, too, is a long time gone. Given that recent years have shoved Minneapolis into the center of American politics, and given that Justin wrote a fine new book about the state's long and complicated history on race called The Cruelty Of Nice Folks, it made sense to get the Minnesota Bureau together on the podcast this…  ( 20 min )

It’s hard to imagine now—like imagining an era when man did not know the sun was huge, hot, and bright—but there was a time when we did not yet understand Russell Westbrook as a basketball player. Slow to hit his growth spurt, Westbrook didn’t dunk until his senior year of high school. Coming out of UCLA after his sophomore year, he was hailed as a defensive stud, with unexplored skill offensively; he still mostly played off the ball. Envision, if you can, an adult Russell Westbrook who had already given over his life to basketball, but did not yet dunk and did not yet dominate the ball. It makes me feel a little insane, like it’s never too late to carve out the defining traits of your life. Go out and remake yourself tomorrow, then decide that that’s you from here on out, and then don’t q…  ( 28 min )

When the Seattle SuperSonics drafted Russell Westbrook fourth overall in 2008, around six weeks before they officially became the Oklahoma City Thunder, the league had no idea what to do with such an athletic and violent point guard. Westbrook, who announced his retirement this week, leaves behind a very different NBA than the one he joined 18 years ago, but, despite the considerable passage of time, the extent to which the game changed, and the extensive accolades he racked up, he never became a player who made sense. No sane coach would ever have instructed any of their charges to play more like Russell Westbrook, less because of the riskiness inherent to such a tactic, and more because of its plain impossibility. Westbrook was singular. Consider the NBA that Westbrook joined. It was ass…  ( 27 min )

This piece was originally published in The Small Bow on Aug. 7. If you like it, consider subscribing. He was always referring to himself as a “guy like me,” in a baffled sort of way, like how the fuck did a guy like me pull this whole thing off? And part of what James Gandolfini meant was the son of the bricklayer and the lunch lady, this King Konging ex-jock with a neck like a paint can, a guy from New Jersey, where they were not what you might call beautiful but were magnificent. They were loud and tough and hugging and kissing; they were mowing the lawn shirtless in sandals and black dress socks, like his father did. They were having operatic conversations with their mothers. They were a little rude and they were breaking shit just for the hell of it, like the night at college Gandolfini broke the automatic arm in the parking garage just by ramming his whole body into it, no reason; that’s showtime, baby.  ( 40 min )

Some people are fans of the Indianapolis Colts. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the Indianapolis Colts. This 2026 Defector NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far here. Your team: The Mayonnaise City Colts Your 2025 record: 8-9, but that only hints at the story of the 2025 Colts, who were 8-2 going into their bye and 0-7 after it. I’ve seen SpaceX rockets with better trajectories.  ( 55 min )

Welcome to Listening Habits, a column where I share the music and musical topics I’ve been fixated on recently. Music's AI revolution has arrived, somewhat ... maybe. And naturally, it has come for rap first. This isn't the kind of trumped-up thing like what has been foretold in the roughly 100 weirdly written profiles about "AI actress" Tilly Norwood, a thing you've probably already forgotten about if you ever even heard about it in the first place. No, AI has been implemented in music production software, and it has officially gotten a real foot in the door of pop culture thanks to a very strange, very viral new hit song. https://youtu.be/qsKSfCCxrnk?si=MJMil-Fc9FD025Ht  ( 26 min )

For many years, I’ve held a pet theory that cultural consumers can be grouped into two broad categories: Primary Source People and Secondary Source People. The former are the book lovers, cinephiles, archive perusers, and history buffs who grew to love their areas of study because of the specific objects that constitute the field: the two women I overheard whispering about how they wanted to fuck Adam Bede, in one of my undergrad classes; the student of mine who disclosed that he loved The House of Mirth because “something similar happened to me recently” (????); or the guy who collects swords as a way into understanding the medieval period are examples of this type. You’ve certainly met these people or been taught by them; they are often motivated by personal attachments to specific works…  ( 45 min )

"On one hand I resent it," Tim Layana told a reporter from the South Florida Sun-Sentinel while watching a 44-year-old Steve Carlton throw a bullpen session at Yankees spring training in 1989. Layana, who was then 25 and had just reached Triple-A, would pitch in three big-league seasons for the Reds and Giants; Carlton was 44, had won four Cy Young Awards and 329 games. He was a veteran of 24 MLB seasons, an easy Hall of Famer, and identifiable as fully cooked from a hundred paces. The Yankees hadn't invited Carlton to spring training, and neither had any other MLB team. Carlton had made it into four games with the Twins in 1988, allowing 20 hits, five homers, and 18 earned runs in 9.2 innings. Yankees manager Dallas Green let him throw at Yankees camp as he rehabbed an elbow surgery and auditioned for a job with whomever might need a pitcher who could do what he did. The story describes Carlton wearing cutoff uniform pants as shorts, and an "an observer" remarking to the Yankees VP for player development that Carlton was "not throwing hard." From that point forward, Layana would be a better big-leaguer entirely by default; Carlton, whose agent had lost tens of millions of Carlton's dollars in bad investments, was trying to get one last job because he needed one, but would not pitch in MLB again. "I guess guys like him and Tommy John and Ron Guidry still have the dream to pitch in the big leagues, like we do who’ve never been there," Layana said, before acknowledging and explaining the resentment he felt about that. "I mean, they’ve had their time, now step aside and give somebody else a chance. But I can understand their desire. If I could still throw at their age, I’d wanna be competitive and try to get people out, too."  ( 31 min )

SQLite corruption? Sorted.  ( 22 min )

INSIDE: Trent McCotter ... Kathleen Williams ... Todd Blanche

further tales of Republican dumbfuckery

Today we’re listening to Alden Hellmuth, an American saxophonist and composer from Connecticut.

The 1990s produced an incredible wave of rock bands that reshaped popular music. Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Alice in Chains,  ( 9 min )

JTR from the blog The Art Of Not Asking Why sent me a few questions regarding Emacs themes, my opinion on the Solarized colour scheme, and even my choice of wallpaper. JTR asks about Solarized because I consider Ethan Schoonover’s Solarized an excellent project, given what Ethan was trying to achieve. I asked JTR if I could publish my thoughts and they agreed. JTR has also written the article Back to Solarized. Note that throughout this article I am only commenting on Ethan Schoonover’s Solarized (the original Solarized). There are many Solarized-like themes out there with lots of additions on top, including higher colour contrast, which are separate themes as far as I am concerned. I should also point out something I always mention: themes are a personal choice and there are many factors …  ( 10 min )

Emacs produces a backup of each file by default. It does this by appending a tilde to the file's name. For example, Myfile.txt is backed up to Myfile.txt~. It's a reasonable strategy, assuming that a Version Control system is in place. But in the absence of version control, you're limited to restoring just the previous version; older versions need to be restored from backup. I use git for coding projects that I share to the public. But I didn't create a repository for my home directory. So when C-c a m TAG1 generated an error instead of a list of TAGged items, I hoped fervently that the latest init file change was to blame. After finding and fixing the problem quickly, (and realizing I was lucky this time), I resolved to be more diligent about disaster recovery. I looked into what backup schemes Emacs already provides. Emacs can create unique backups for a file rather than overwriting the previous backup. When Emacs sees a numbered backup for a given file, it will make a new, sequentially-named file for each backup of that file, while continuing to use the "append tilde" method for other files. Once I renamed (or copied) .emacs~ to .emacs.~1~, Emacs created backups named .emacs.~2~, .emacs.~3~ (and so on). I didn't even need to change a variable -- when Emacs detected .emacs.~1~, it knew that backups of .emacs needed to be numeric, so it acted accordingly. Emacs continues to use bills.org~ as the backup for bills.org. Until I tell it otherwise. Read the Emacs Manual to learn more about numbered backups. 1 C-c a m invokes org-tags-view The default values for the pertinent backup variables are: make-backup-files is t backup-by-copying is nil version-control is nil  ( 9 min )

he jumped in the deep end and downloaded and built Master (Emacs 32) fully expecting to find lots of broken things. It didn’t turn out that way. He was, in fact, surprised to discover that almost everything worked well. The only problem he had was evil on Windows and he solved that by simply upgrading evil. As for the rest, he found that Emacs was super-responsive and all the functionality that seemed laggy in that other editor was snappy in Emacs. There are two lessons here. The first is that Emacs, far from being moribund, is undergoing continuing development and introducing new features. The second point is that Emacs is, unlike some of its competitors, continuing to produce upgrades that simply work and don’t make their users crazy. Very shortly, we should see the release of Emacs 31 but work on Emacs 32 is already ongoing and amazingly stable for what is, after all, alpha software. The next time someone tells you that Emacs is old and moribund, refer them to gonstrider’s post.  ( 5 min )

Years ago, when I started the old blog1, I discovered Solarized. I liked it. The colors were beautiful and worked for me, but eventually I switched to the Gotham theme in Emacs, which, if you take a look, is not much different — just a bit darker. I stayed with this theme for a long time, tweaking it a bit after a trip to New Mexico. When I received my Mac and started working on it at home, I enjoyed its automatic switching between dark and light themes. At the same time, Prot started coming out with more of his excellent Ef Themes, and I adopted ef-reverie for my light theme and ef-night for my dark one (once again, if you look at the images, you’d see they’re not far off from Solarized, especially my choice of a light theme). This has been the state of affairs until the beginning of this…  ( 4 min )

This is your TPM evening briefing.

Over the last few days as we’ve been discussing Francesca Hong’s campaign, Thanksgiving abolition and “defunding the police,” I’ve made...  ( 8 min )

From TPM Reader AB … I am but one anecdotal data point from Wisconsin, but as a politically engaged liberal in...  ( 9 min )

We’re almost to the critical goal we need to hit in this year’s Annual TPM Journalism Fund Drive. We have...  ( 6 min )

Having discussed the results and prediction markets, let me address a different question I saw brought up last night. If...  ( 10 min )

We went late into the evening waiting for absentee ballots in Milwaukee County last night. But Milwaukee County executive David...  ( 9 min )

After eight months on a boat suffering from food shortages, mold, and unclean water, sailors are jumping overboard. The president better fix whatever’s happening on the USS Abraham Lincoln fast.  ( 67 min )

Now that the Wisconsin primaries are over, it’s clear that political media needs to give this narrative a rest.  ( 75 min )

It is not news to you that the West Sacramento Athletics are deeply un-good. Even when they led the AL West in April and May, they somehow managed to do so while maintaining a solidly negative run differential. But since their last day at .500, on June 19, they have been, by both advanced and less-advanced metrics, Galactically Ass. Their three best hitters, Nick Kurtz, Shea Langeliers, and Brent Rooker, are hurt, their pitching struggles to be shambolic, and as a result they have lost 35 of their last 44 games, a winning percentage of .205. Over a full season, that would be the fifth-worst in professional baseball history of any team that ever played a subsequent season, including the first year of the Phillies (1883), and five Negro League teams, including the New York Black Yankees, whose last six years were a cumulative 42-187. There. We spared you a gratuitous Cleveland Spiders reference. You're welcome. But while the A's have been baseball's foremost adherents of zombie baseball since that date, that is a role they have played before. More notable is the fact that they may have also gotten a few bites in against the best team in baseball in that span, the Boston Red Sox, simply through physical proximity. It is too early to say whether the Red Sox are showing signs of infection, but their recent stumbles are further proof that, as a general rule, it is poor hygiene to hang around the A's. The A's and their opponents should both be forced to wear masks, and if the owners weren't perfectly fine with an industrial pandemic that thins out the union membership, they would be.  ( 21 min )

Out of nowhere, and after only a few short days of negotiations, Joshua Kushner and Bob Iger have agreed to buy the Los Angeles Lakers from Mark Walter for a reported record price of $12.5 billion. Every part of that sentence is wild, especially given the recent financial maneuverings of Walter and Kushner. Let's start with Walter, who bought the Lakers in June 2025 for $10 billion. Walter also owns the Los Angeles Dodgers and has turned them into an organization so hyper-competent that it has made people who should know better argue for a salary cap in baseball. Walter's takeover of one of the NBA's flagship franchises was the most significant acquisition in a recent wave of sales that included the Celtics, Trail Blazers, and Timberwolves. As of the second half of this past season, Walter was beginning the process of replacing longtime functionaries of the previous ownership group, the Buss family. With Luka Doncic around, the long-term future of the team seemed secure. However, Walter's position was not as secure as it seemed. Bloomberg reported on July 20 that the federal government was conducting an investigation into Walter's Guggenheim Partners over some suspicious accounting. The heart of the issue is billions of dollars in private credit deals between companies within Walter's business empire. Private credit has been having a moment on Wall Street for a few years now, for the way the financing tool allows sprawling entities to move around money without as much regulatory scrutiny. At specific issue in this investigation, per the Wall Street Journal, is that nearly "$21 billion in loans extended to companies tied to Walter or his conglomerate, TWG Global, wound up on the books of insurance companies he owns after passing through a third entity." Insurance companies, in this case Delaware Life Insurance and Clear Spring Life, are subject to stricter regulations than many other financial institutions, because the money needs to be in place for when policyholders make claims.  ( 20 min )

All of us have that one friend who fully commits to the bit. And frankly, there is no better time in your life for taking new hijinks for an extended walk than the college years. But what if the bit was ancient Nordic weaponry?  Our friend of a friend today sets off to college with the axe of her dreams in hand—we do mean an actual axe—and together they forge an extravagant bond. She find community and minor fame, even love. But her boyfriend’s fondness for her axe quickly becomes excessive, and the cracks in their relationship only grow from there. "Axe boyfriend" has a nice ring to it, don’t you think?  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=anhHsMxIu68  ( 17 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.  Today, Ray tackles a question about the merits of having an only child.  ( 19 min )

This week on Nothing But Respect, we welcomed back Maya Goldberg-Safir, one of my favorite WNBA writers and thinkers. Maya runs Rough Notes and has written a handful of amazing Defector stories, and I consider her to be the best person covering the history of women's basketball. On this episode, we talked about Maya's time at WNBA All-Star weekend in Chicago (which she wrote about for Bustle), the Sophie Cunningham situation, and the critical importance of understanding the past few decades of women's basketball history as a way into the controversies of today. We also did some trademark NBR meta-discourse and planned the Golden State Valkyries' championship parade. Also! Next week, we are doing a special Broke Jumper Tip Line episode, so please send in any stories you have about anyone notable interacting with basketball in any way! (347) 380-6426!  ( 15 min )

Let me cut right to it: Why can’t I get curry fries over here? Look, I just got back from a work trip to Dublin (where everybody says "Look" to start a sentence), and curry fries are weighing heavy. The trip went as swell as possible. I not only got to cover an all-timer of a football match, but also had my fill of curry chips, in the local parlance, just as I'd hoped and dreamed. Good god, they’re good. And they’re everywhere in the Irish capital. But upon returning, I got peeved by the lack of curry fries in my own country. How can something so ubiquitous and cheap and delicious over there be impossible to find stateside? We love fries: A 2025 study found the average American eats 17 pounds of 'em a year. Researchers found lots of love for curly fries; curry fries got nothing. I’m not aware of any place in Washington, D.C., where I live, that sells curry fries. Yeah, OK, my editor may have located a pub that is 1.5 miles from house and serves curry fries shortly after I filed this, but what I truly desire is ubiquity. A huge part of the pleasure of my curry fry experience in Dublin was largely derived from knowing that the scrumptious snack was never far out of reach. Pubs, chip shops, food trucks—they were everywhere and all had what I wanted.  ( 21 min )

Some people are fans of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. This 2026 Defector NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far here. Your team: Tampa Bay Buccaneers. https://bsky.app/profile/profootballtalk.bsky.social/post/3mrurzuufhk2u  ( 38 min )

Professional tennis has a way of breeding misery. It begins with the dream of reaching the No. 1 ranking, but almost everybody falls short. Those who find the promised land feel puzzlingly empty once there. Familial and coaching roles blur. Prodigious children bear the responsibility of feeding and enriching their families. The mechanism through which matches are decided is a torturous maze disguised as a scoring system. Tune in and you may see grown adults reaming out their support staff, family, the chair umpire, and themselves; tearful breakdowns mid-match; balls whacked out of the stadium, into the stands, or occasionally into a tournament employee's vital organ; rackets thrashed and mangled on the court. It's that last image which resides on the cover of Matthew Futterman's new book T…  ( 51 min )

Reading: What is it? Why does anyone do it? Can anyone at Axios do it? No. Maybe that is why they write like that. When you read a book, the stuff in the book goes into your mind, and your mind assembles all of the stuff into imagery and thoughts and feelings, and alchemizes meaning from it. A person reasonably could consider this "what's good about reading," or "the point of reading," or "buddy that's actually just ... what reading is," but that all assumes that your reason for reading anything is that you want to learn something from it, even if it's only at the level of, like, what ultimately happens to the Whos down in Whoville. Before today, I had taken for granted that this, the desire to put into one's head something that wasn't already in there, was the only reason anyone would want to read anything, ever. Even the reading people do in furtherance of the most dismal goals—even when somebody reads some miserable how-to-get-ahead-in-business book, or a sociopathic pickup-artist manual—they do because they hope to extract from the text something useful, which will reside in their brain long enough to be exploited. The compulsory reading students do for school, likewise: They hope to retain enough of this dry 19th-century novel about variability in the relative politeness of indistinguishable British persons to score a decent grade on the upcoming test. In all cases, the goal is best understood as putting something into your mind that wasn't there before.  ( 24 min )

My name is Noelle and I'm a fan of the world's largest operating steam locomotive. I used to think this was a unique fact about me. But recently our tiny fandom has exploded. Big Boy, as he’s called—Christian name: Union Pacific No. 4014—retired in 1961 when diesel-electric engines made cumbersome steam trains unnecessary. In recent years, he has emerged from hibernation for heritage tours out west, so his fans can see his 1.2 million-pound body and human-sized wheels up close. And this year, Union Pacific announced something unprecedented: Big Boy would travel off his home turf, cross-country, all the way to the East Coast and back.  Officially this was in honor of America’s 250th birthday; unofficially, people surmised this had something to do with Union Pacific’s intended merger with Norfolk Southern, which owns track in the East. But train enthusiasts—who prefer “railfans” and definitely do not prefer “foamers”—didn’t care why Big Boy was coming. All that mattered was when and where. Every day they flooded Facebook with dozens of fresh, breathless sightings—there he was in Argos, Indiana; Payne, Ohio; Portageville, New York—and every day another tiny, desperate Rust Belt chamber of commerce announced its local Big Boy celebration with an AI slop flyer.  Everywhere Big Boy chugged, people screamed, waved, sometimes cried or took wedding photos or, in one case, tried to climb him and fell and went to the hospital for a spine fracture. On July 2, a police department in Pennsylvania’s Muhlenberg Township declared the Big Boy watch event a “mass casualty incident” after the heat sent 35 people to the hospital.  ( 52 min )

96 Aboard Newsletter: The Shapeshifter’s Little Brother 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…  ( 11 min )

INSIDE: Kilmar Abrego Garcia ... John Larson ... Jeanine Pirro

and fuck yeah, Democratic Socialists

I had to buy a new watch so that I would stop wanting more watches. I know it's counter-intuitive, but hear me out. I like watches. It started after I bought a nice Tag Heuer automatic to reward myself for some achievement (which I've forgotten). It's a nice watch. Expensive. It's fifteen years old and I've never wound it or replaced a battery. This was my window into automatic watches. Then came the Apple Watch, which I wore for years, dutifully upgrading every couple of years. I grew to dislike it. It's too needy. Then I rebelled and started buying cheap watches instead. First it was a little Casio F91W for like $20. Then I upgraded to a few different G-Shocks. It turned out that out of all of them, the G-Shock GWM5610 was the one I always wore. My recent attempts to "Reduce & Simplify" have been somewhat successful, so I wanted to do it with my watches. I didn't have that many, but still. I get a kick out of wearing cheap watches, so I haven't been wearing the Tag except for "nicer" things like going out to dinner. Even then it bugged me, so I decided to find something simple, decent looking, and less expensive than the Tag for wearing out. I landed on a VAER C5 Tactical Field Solar. I think it's great. Large, easy to read numbers (with 24-hour times, too) that glow brightly in the dark. It's solar, so never needs winding. It has a screw-down crown, so it's "ocean proof". Sapphire glass so it's at least somewhat scratch-resistent. It came with two bands. One silicon for normal wear and one nylon one for a nicer look. I dig it. It cost $349. Anyway, I now only wear either the G-Shock or the VAER. They cover every occasion. See? I bought something so I could stop buying things. I think it'll work ✍️ Reply by email  ( 1 min )

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

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

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

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 )

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

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

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In MAGA’s self-mythology, they are a family first movement that encourages Americans to have more babies. Over the past year, some of the coalition’s most prominent figures have touted a responsibility to pro-create. In December 2025, Lara Trump said on Fox News, “We’re going to be in a pickle if we don’t get more babies coming.” Three months later, in a speech at the 2026 March for Life, Vice President JD Vance congratulated himself for impregnating his wife Usha, saying he “practices what he preaches” when he calls for “more families and more babies.” Katie Miller, the podcaster and wife of White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, used the same wording to announce her pregnancy on X in late 2025: “The White House practices what they preach about increasing the fertility rate.” E…  ( 8 min )

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