I was introduced to the work of Kane Parsons via my YouTube algorithm. His first Backrooms video, “The Backrooms (Found Footage)”, came up on my homepage the week he uploaded it in early 2022. I remember it well because the video—impressive on its own for being slick, professional, and, crucially, scary—quickly racked up views over the course of a few days. I wasn’t familiar with the Backrooms concept, born from a 4chan thread imagining an endless series of drab and empty yellow-tinted rooms that look like abandoned ’90s conference halls. Sometimes otherworldly beings dwell in these places, where furniture and walls meld together in awkward, nonsensical angles. Other times, you are simply trapped in an ever-expanding liminal space that has no end or exit. Parsons expanded on this idea by c…  ( 29 min )

Let this completely neutral observer start by saying it would have been more appropriate if UCLA had won this game. Nothing against Dave McKenna's beloved Texas Tech; the Bruins just had the coolest highlight. Sunday night's Women's College World Series clash between these two programs was an elimination game where the winner would go on to the semis and the loser would be banished from Oklahoma City. New-money Texas Tech is a target for the anger of opposing programs (jealous ones, arguably) for the way they've aggressively pursued top transfers to put themselves on the map, and they were fighting for their lives after a gripping 2-1 extra innings loss to Tennessee the previous day. UCLA, a perennial participant in the WCWS, had bounced back from a Day 1 defeat against Alabama with an 11-0 KO of Arkansas. Both sides got their bats going early, with the score 3-2 Tech by the middle of the third. UCLA plated a run and loaded the bases in the bottom half, but Kaitlyn Terry, who transferred to Tech from the Bruins, entered in relief to get the last two outs and keep the score tied three-all. From there, Terry shut down her former team while the Red Raiders took a 6-3 lead into the bottom of the seventh and final inning. She got pulled, however, when Ramsey Suarez hit a leadoff dinger. NiJaree Canady returned to the mound, and she gave up a single before earning a strikeout and a fly out.  ( 14 min )

You'll ace our Monday crossword. This puzzle was constructed by Zachary Edward-Brown, and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. Zach is a Chicagoan who enjoys playing soccer and basketball and rooting for the Bears. He's always open to collabs. 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."  ( 13 min )

It didn't take very long for the people who sell baseball to us to sour the vibe of a season that is barely a third of the way along. What promises to be an excruciating negotiation (and occasionally a refusal to negotiate at all) over Major League Baseball's next collective bargaining agreement opened with the MLB Players Association making an initial proposal, and owners responding with a gobbledygook-intensive counter built around a salary cap. It was a sufficiently inauspicious beginning that five entire months of baseball will be played this year in the shadow of a likely lockout. This is earlier than we thought they'd be-turd the punchbowl, to be honest, but it's happening not because the owners want to get a jump on the process but so they can define the rest of your year with their…  ( 26 min )

The New York Knicks are in the NBA Finals. The way the team's been playing lately, that means fans have only a little time to make a big decision: Are they gonna cheer or jeer when James Dolan holds up the Larry O’Brien Trophy? It’s been a long time since the Knicks have gotten this close to a ring. An awful long time, with an awful lot of awful teams. And Dolan, who has controlled day-to-day operations of the organization since the turn of the century, has been blamed for the last two-and-a-half decades of that awfulness. That means that John Madden's alleged description of winning as a "great deodorant” could soon be put to a test. Because few owners in sports have stunk like Dolan. There aren't enough pixels to retell everything Dolan did along the way to becoming an enemy of his own team’s fans. But any list of his ungreatest hits would include:  ( 25 min )

No content preview  ( 5 min )

I’m back a.cta_button{-moz-box-sizing:content-box !important;-webkit-box-sizing:content-box !important;box-sizing:content-box !important;vertical-align:middle}.hs-breadcrumb-menu{list-style-type:none;margin:0px 0px 0px 0px;padding:0px 0px 0px 0px}.hs-breadcrumb-menu-item{float:left;padding:10px 0px 10px 10px}.hs-breadcrumb-menu-divider:before{content:'›';padding-left:10px}.hs-featured-image-link{border:0}.hs-featured-image{float:right;margin:0 0 20px 20px;max-width:50%}@media (max-width: 568px){.hs-featured-image{float:none;margin:0;width:100%;max-width:100%}}.hs-screen-reader-text{clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);height:1px;overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;width:1px} 96 ul > li { te…  ( 3 min )

The redistricting war isn’t only about voting rights. It’s about affordability, too a.cta_button{-moz-box-sizing:content-box !important;-webkit-box-sizing:content-box !important;box-sizing:content-box !important;vertical-align:middle}.hs-breadcrumb-menu{list-style-type:none;margin:0px 0px 0px 0px;padding:0px 0px 0px 0px}.hs-breadcrumb-menu-item{float:left;padding:10px 0px 10px 10px}.hs-breadcrumb-menu-divider:before{content:'›';padding-left:10px}.hs-featured-image-link{border:0}.hs-featured-image{float:right;margin:0 0 20px 20px;max-width:50%}@media (max-width: 568px){.hs-featured-image{float:none;margin:0;width:100%;max-width:100%}}.hs-screen-reader-text{clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);height:1px;overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;width:1px} …  ( 5 min )

using EWW to avoid paywalls and my experiments to see if it really worked. As I reported, it did in a surprising number of cases. But as I also wrote, I’m not that interested in avoiding paywalls so I didn’t expect to get much out of the experiment other than satisfying my idle curiosity. It turns out though that I discovered using EWW could be very restful. As I wrote in that last post, The other thing I learned is that reading content with EWW can be a very restful experience. No ads, no blinkenlights, and sometimes, no paywall either. I didn’t try running EWW with eww-readable but that would probably make the experience even more restful. My normal procedure is to read my feeds with Elfeed—the world’s best RSS reader—and to display the original Web page in the same buffer with elfeed-webkit. That gives me a browser like view of the page. The problem is, my ad blocker doesn’t work with elfeed-webkit so I get all the trash and abuse one gets with a default page load1. During my experiment I discovered that calling EWW when a site gets out of control is an excellent solution. The latest version of elfeed makes this easy so if I site becomes too obnoxious, I simply switch to EWW and invoke eww-readable with R to provide a quiet and restful wall of text (complete with the accompanying pictures). It’s amazing how much junk we just take for granted when all we want to do is read an article or post. EWW takes away a lot of the sting. No, it’s still not going to replace the browser but it’s an excellent companion to it. Footnotes: 1 John Gruber has an excellent screed on one part of this default behavior. There are plenty of others.  ( 5 min )

Plus, Hawaii taxes millionaires to feed families and Dem governors take on insider corruption

96 *{box-sizing:border-box}body{margin:0;padding:0}a[x-apple-data-detectors]{color:inherit!important;text-decoration:inherit!important}#MessageViewBody a{color:inherit;text-decoration:none}p{line-height:inherit}.desktop_hide,.desktop_hide table{mso-hide:all;display:none;max-height:0;overflow:hidden}.image_block img+div{display:none}sub,sup{font-size:75%;line-height:0} @media (max-width:660px){.stack .column{width:100%;display:block}.mobile_hide{min-height:0;max-height:0;max-width:0;display:none;overflow:hidden;font-size:0}.desktop_hide,.desktop_hide table{display:table!important;max-height:none!important}.row-1 .column-1 .block-1.image_block td.pad{padding:10px 10px 0 10px!important}.row-1 .column-1 .block-1.image_block td.pad div{margin:0 auto!important}.row-1 .column-2 .block-1.paragra…  ( 1 min )

96 Failure @media only screen and (max-width: 620px) { table.body { width: 100%; min-width: 100%; } table.body .content { padding: 0 !important; } table.body .container { padding: 0 !important; width: 100% !important; } table.body .main { border-spacing: 10px 0 !important; border-left-width: 0 !important; border-radius: 0 !important; border-right-width: 0 !important; } table.body .img-responsive { height: auto !important; max-width: 100% !important; width: auto !important; } } @media all { .ExternalClass { width: 100%; } .ExternalClass, .ExternalClass p, .ExternalClass span, .ExternalClass font, .ExternalClass td, .ExternalClass div { line-height: 100%; } .apple-link a { color: …  ( 12 min )

France Looks Like Hogwarts And You Can Call Me Lil Yachty96 :root { color-scheme: light; supported-color-schemes: light; } body { margin: 0; padding: 0; min-width: 100%!important; -ms-text-size-adjust: 100% !important; -webkit-transform: scale(1) !important; -webkit-text-size-adjust: 100% !important; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased !important; } .body { word-wrap: normal; word-spacing:normal; } table.mso { width: 100%; border-collapse: collapse; padding: 0; table-layout: fixed; } img { border: 0; outline: none; } table { mso-table-lspace: 0px; mso-table-rspace: 0px; } td, a, span { mso-line-height-rule: exactly; } #root [x-apple-data-detectors=true], a[x-apple-data-detectors=true], #MessageViewBody a { color: inherit !important; text-decoration: inherit !important…  ( 7 min )

they really expect us to believe this bullshit

Accountability Blitz Friday was a blitz of important news on the accountability front — an ICE agent arrested on state...  ( 11 min )

Justices Thomas and Alito insist that the Court must hear disputes between two states. Florida v. California is a good example of why I remain unpersuaded.

“When it happens” — the phrase became a meme almost overnight, as Troy Farah recently observed, in no small part because, even in our attention-addled age, people understand what it means. Donald Trump, who turns 80 this month, is not well, which has led to waves of speculation about his health and, at times, even rumors that he has died. The president regularly nods off on camera during public meetings. He appeared to nap during the May 27 Cabinet meeting, even though his appointees were competing with each other to offer empty flattery, which is usually his favorite activity. His hands are not only covered in bruises, but they have also started to swell alarmingly. While he struggles to stay awake during the day, the president is often up at odd hours of the night, raving incoherently on…  ( 8 min )

From “77 percent say Trump policies increased cost of living: Survey” by Sarah Davis at The Hill: A majority of Americans blame President Trump for heightened consumer costs, according to new polling. A new CNN survey released on Tuesday found that 77 percent of U.S. adults believe the president’s policies have increased the cost of... Read more »  ( 7 min )

The justices have 26 cases outstanding. Even the best-case scenario isn't great. Also: Trump's slush fund "settlement" is getting court scrutiny. And, for paid subscribers: Closing my tabs.

I just completed Ziglings! It's wicked fun! Zig is a programming language and Ziglings is a collection of fun exercises to help you learn it. I heard about if from this interview with Andrew Kelley. He is the creator of Zig (but not the creator of Ziglings, that's Dave Gauer). Zig is still under development (it has yet to release version 1.0), so it's changing a lot and Ziglings is changing right along with it.  ( 1 min )

I recently installed Harper on my Linux Desktop to work with Emacs, but since I’m running Kubuntu, I ran into difficulties. In short, there’s no Flatpak or Apt option when it comes to Harper. After a few interesting changes to the way I journal in Emacs (this is something I hope to discuss soon), I decided to go for the full version, and that meant installing Rust and Cargo. This was another “programming quest” I didn’t know how to start in the past. I used Claude.ai to guide me, but as usual, I asked a million questions about everything, so I can explain it again here (this is my test to myself). So if you’re new to all of this like I am, take the explanations with a grain of salt, and if you’re an experienced developer who understands Rust (and curl, for that matter) feel free to reach o…  ( 4 min )

Karthik Chikmagalur in response to Emacs Chat 24: Omar Antolin Camarena. 16:00 - Omar's embark-on-last-message is gold! I implemented it and have already used it a dozen times in an hour. 17:00 - Omar mentions his tmp package for creating throwaway buffers. I use the scratch package for this. M-x scratch will open up a scratch buffer. If you had a region selected, that will be copied to the scratch buffer. By default, it will use the same major mode as the buffer you calling it from. Calling M-x scratch with a prefix arg will let you pick the major mode you want. I have some additional customizations to try to automagically pick a major mode based on what I have selected: https://github.com/karthink/.emacs.d/blob/3deed38c0e02e95fdfab6812c494b1736b945a1e/lisp/utilities.el#L36…  ( 4 min )

In the early 1990s, children’s television was experiencing a golden age. Saturday mornings and weekday afternoons were filled with colorful cartoons, clever writing, and enough pop culture references to keep parents entertained alongside their kids. Among the most beloved animated shows of the era was the Warner Bros. hit Tiny Toon Adventures, a fast-paced, irreverent...  ( 9 min )

96 *{box-sizing:border-box}body{margin:0;padding:0}a[x-apple-data-detectors]{color:inherit!important;text-decoration:inherit!important}#MessageViewBody a{color:inherit;text-decoration:none}p{line-height:inherit}.desktop_hide,.desktop_hide table{mso-hide:all;display:none;max-height:0;overflow:hidden}.image_block img+div{display:none}sub,sup{font-size:75%;line-height:0} @media (max-width:620px){.image_block div.fullWidth{max-width:100%!important}.row-content{width:100%!important}.stack .column{width:100%;display:block}.mobile_hide{min-height:0;max-height:0;max-width:0;display:none;overflow:hidden;font-size:0}.desktop_hide,.desktop_hide table{display:table!important;max-height:none!important}.row-3 .column-1 .block-4.text_block td.pad{padding:5px 15px!important}.row-2 .column-1 .block-1.paragraph_block td.pad>div{font-size:13px!important}.row-2 .column-1 .block-1.paragraph_block td.pad{padding:15px 10px 0 10px!important}.social_block .social-table{display:inline-block!important}.row-1 .column-1,.row-1 .column-1 .block-1.image_block td.pad,.row-2 .column-1{padding:0!important}.row-3 .column-1 .block-1.divider_block td.pad,.row-3 .column-1 .block-5.divider_block td.pad{padding:10px!important}.row-3 .column-1 .block-1.divider_block td.pad table,.row-3 .column-1 .block-5.divider_block td.pad table{display:inline-table}} sup, sub { font-size: 100% !important; } sup { mso-text-raise:10% } sub { mso-text-raise:-10% } The new policy will be effective on July 1, 2026  Slate has updated its privacy policy. The new policy will be effective on July 1, 2026.    Update your email preferences or unsubscribe from all email.     © 2026 The Slate Group   15 Metrotech Center, 8th Floor, Brooklyn, NY 11201    Kill the Newsletter! feed settings

Don’t miss what’s next /* resets */ p {margin:0px;margin-bottom:0px;padding:0px;} table {border-spacing:0;} table, td {border-collapse:collapse;} * {-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased;-moz-osx-font-smoothing: grayscale;text-size-adjust: none !important;-ms-text-size-adjust: none !important;-webkit-text-size-adjust: none !important;} /* end resets */ /* outlook / hotmail */ .ExternalClass{width:100%;} table, td {mso-table-lspace:0pt;mso-table-rspace:0pt;} img{-ms-interpolation-mode:bicubic;} .ReadMsgBody {width: 100%;} /* end outlook / hotmail */ /* gmail */ u + #body a {color: inherit;text-decoration: none;font-size: inherit;font-family: inherit;font-weight: inherit;line-height: inherit;} img + div {display: none!important;} /* end gmail */ /* ios */ body{-webkit-text-size-…  ( 2 min )

Baseball is the only sport that regularly produces the following thought in my head: Does everyone who is good at baseball actually kind of suck at baseball? The existence of Shohei Ohtani makes it impossible to ever answer with a definitive "yes," but the question lingers still. Related to this matter is the plight of Fernando Tatis Jr. Not so long ago, he was a young Padres shortstop showing signs of becoming the best player in the league. He produced 6.7 bWAR across 143 games in his first two seasons, and then broke out in year three with 42 homers, a .975 OPS, and 6.6 bWAR. But then, oops, he got suspended for taking PEDs and missed the entirety of the 2022 season. Since then, he's remained a highly productive if slightly less powerful player in the seasons. He hasn't hit more than 25 homers in a season since his suspension, but he played 155 games last year and finished with 6.1 bWAR. Twenty-five homers is significantly fewer than 42, but it is also not a small enough number to have signaled that Tatis would start the 2026 MLB season swinging a damn noodle bat. Coming into Saturday's game against the Nationals, Tatis had gone 55 games without hitting a homer, and was in the midst of the longest homer-less streak (238 plate appearances) of any player in the league. That humiliating streak mercifully ended yesterday when he clobbered a pitch 451 feet into the left-field seats.  ( 17 min )

When I was a kid, I loved baseball. I loved playing it, I loved watching it, and I really loved attending games. Some of my favorite memories of growing up in Miami came at the old Dolphins/Marlins stadium, a truly horrible place to watch any sporting event, but also one that was a mere 10 minute drive from my home. I went to countless Marlins games in the summer of 2003, watching them slowly put things together into what would eventually be an improbable second World Series title that fall. (I was lucky enough to attend Game 5 of that World Series, back when tickets were merely expensive and not expensive.) Baseball's constant motion kept me grounded in the rudderless months of Miami summer, when the heat is so stifling that you could get tickets behind home plate for Sunday afternoon gam…  ( 30 min )

Viewed strictly within the context of the Western Conference Finals, there was nothing all that shocking about the San Antonio Spurs' 111-103 road victory over the Oklahoma City Thunder in Game 7. That doesn't make what happened on Saturday night feel any less destabilizing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1bOMYQFgK4I Consider everything that went wrong for the Thunder throughout this series. Injuries to Jalen Williams and Ajay Mitchell reduced their all-important depth and left Shai Gilgeous-Alexander with very little support in the offensive backcourt. Victor Wembanyama's mere presence gummed up their offense, leaving their turnover-generating defense and timely shooting from role players as their most reliable methods for producing points. Unless Wembanyama was playing like shit, the Thunder's chances for victory in every game this series were banished to the margins.  ( 21 min )

By their very nature, cup finals do not necessarily make for exciting matches. For every 2022 World Cup final, there are 15 2019 Champions League finals. That does not excuse what happened on Saturday in Budapest, though. Over 120 minutes, Arsenal forced Paris Saint-Germain into a torture rack of Mikel Arteta's creation, and the result was a tense and relatively even affair. Ah, who am I kidding? The result was a big ol' piece of crap match that was excruciating to watch, a perfect distillation of every critique I (and others) have had about Arsenal's style of play this season. Saturday's Champions League final did buck one trend, though, as Arsenal was not ultimately rewarded for its offensively defensive performance. PSG came back from an early and nearly match-killing 1-0 deficit to first even things up and then win in a penalty shootout. Oh, and don't worry: The penalty shootout was also terrible. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tRnJRQmVMTg  ( 28 min )

Great news that’s terrible for Trump

but also a short rant about Preznit Fuckwit

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 )

96 Weekly Scorecard: May 23 - 29, 2026 @media only screen and (max-width: 620px) { table.body { width: 100%; min-width: 100%; } table.body .content { padding: 0 !important; } table.body .container { padding: 0 !important; width: 100% !important; } table.body .main { border-spacing: 10px 0 !important; border-left-width: 0 !important; border-radius: 0 !important; border-right-width: 0 !important; } table.body .img-responsive { height: auto !important; max-width: 100% !important; width: auto !important; } } @media all { .ExternalClass { width: 100%; } .ExternalClass, .ExternalClass p, .ExternalClass span, .ExternalClass font, .ExternalClass td, .ExternalClass div { line-height: 100%; } …  ( 12 min )

body,a{word-break:break-word;}.feed__title a{text-decoration:underline;}img[data-emoji]{height:1.2em;width:1.2em;vertical-align:middle;}table{border-collapse:collapse;}.headline h1,.paragraph h1,.text-element h1{line-height:1.5;margin:0.5em 0;}.headline h2,.paragraph h2,.text-element h2{line-height:1.5;margin:0.5em 0;}.headline h3,.paragraph h3,.text-element h3{line-height:1.5;margin:0.5em 0;}.headline h4,.paragraph h4,.text-element h4{font-size:20px;line-height:1.5;margin:0.5em 0;}.headline h5,.paragraph h5,.text-element h5{font-size:18px;line-height:1.5;margin:0.5em 0;}.headline h6,.paragraph h6,.text-element h6{font-size:16px;line-height:1.5;margin:0.5em 0;}.headline p,.paragraph p,.text-element p{line-height:1.5;margin:0;}.headline div,.paragraph div,.text-element div{line-height:1.5;m…

Missouri’s new congressional map could get legally blocked. Republicans want to use it anyway.96 :root { color-scheme: light; supported-color-schemes: light; } body { margin: 0; padding: 0; min-width: 100%!important; -ms-text-size-adjust: 100% !important; -webkit-transform: scale(1) !important; -webkit-text-size-adjust: 100% !important; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased !important; } .body { word-wrap: normal; word-spacing:normal; } table.mso { width: 100%; border-collapse: collapse; padding: 0; table-layout: fixed; } img { border: 0; outline: none; } table { mso-table-lspace: 0px; mso-table-rspace: 0px; } td, a, span { mso-line-height-rule: exactly; } #root [x-apple-data-detectors=true], a[x-apple-data-detectors=true], #MessageViewBody a { color: inherit !important…  ( 11 min )

Royals catcher Carter Jensen was shifted to the leadoff spot on Saturday with the club searching for offensive production. The young backstop came through with an RBI single and a two-run homer. Kansas City scored six runs in the contest after having put up a total of five runs in four games this week. “I […]  ( 8 min )

I’ve been hard on Lisp lately. Last time I wrote here, I called it a curse — a language so powerful that everyone who touches it ends up building their own private dialect, until no one can quite understand anyone else. A small Tower of Babel, assembled out of parentheses. I still think that’s true. But I left something out of that post, because it didn’t fit the argument I was making. The same Lisp idea that scatters programmers did the opposite thing to me, once. It didn’t scatter anything. It pulled something very old back together. It gave me back my ancestors. Let me explain, because it sounds like more than it is. I’m not a Lisp programmer by trade. I just love the elegance of the thing — I’ve lived inside Emacs for years, written my own Elisp, poked at Clojure enough to feel what ma…  ( 7 min )

~373 words. ~1 minutes. tags: emacs May I recommend…, I would like to recommend two cool org minor modes I discovered recently, in the order of me discovering them. org-num-mode * 1 heading ** 1.1 subheading *** 1.1.1 subsubheading ** 1.2 subheading * 2 heading org-toggle-pretty-entities prettify-mode does). You can get a list of all available entities(symbols) using org-entities-help. BTW, it is also possible to define your own in org-entities-user. 1_1 a_b^q q_p p^q 1 a b q q p p q C-x 8 RET (insert UTF-8 character, for those who are not aware)?", you can't do a superscript q or subscript q, since those symbols don't exist! Which is why I chose q for my demo above. C-x 8 RET, and that reminds me, there is a similar feature to this which actually inserts UTF-8 characters into your buffers, C-x RET C-\ TeX RET. Then you just type the TeX markup as you normally would, and it inserts the actual symbols, but this too has the same problems as with directly inserting symbols, some symbols are simply not available. q q I want. Also, org automatically exports it correctly when exporting to HTML!  ( 1 min )

He uses the Password app instead of OAuth2 and says that you can get everything set up in about 20 minutes. Take a look at his post for the details. He provides everything you need to get things running. Webframp notes in a comment that Pan’s solution might not work if you have Google’s advance protection enabled. I can’t comment on that because: not a Gmail user. Well, actually, I suppose that technically I am a Gmail user because I do have a Gmail address. I can’t remember the last time I got any mail from it but irrational paranoia keeps me from deleting it. How, then, do I deal with Gmail? Simple. I forward it do my main email account so that it appears normally without having to do anything special. Like many of you, I have several email accounts and I do the same thing with all of them: I forward them to my main email account. Mu4e makes sure that my answers come from the appropriate email address. If you’re using Gmail as a secondary account, forwarding it to your main account may make more sense than jumping through Google’s hoops. Regardless, if you want to retrieve Gmail directly, Pan’s post has a good solution.  ( 5 min )

Kitty! A sticky note program which lets you write in Markdown. andrewyurmd-sticky I am not recommending this. It reminded me of using a web browser which was better than Netscape. OmniWeb test builds A great resource for people starting out with Emacs. cloudstreet-dev/Emacs-for-Goodness-Sake: Emacs for Goodness’ Sake An utility to convert things into other things. nuance-dev/convierto: A native macOS file converter app I used to know this. Then I forgot about it. Reminded by ongoing by Tim Bray · Tab Trick Hyper Key. It is an useful addition for the keyboard command centric folks. HyperCaps — Jorvik Software is one way to get it. Hyperkey is another way. Both work. Both are free. Get one. Become a keyboard command ninja. Or don’t. Your call. This is a feeling I share. “…make you wonder whether anyone at Apple actually uses their software.” Apple Papercuts - Tao of Mac A free font manager for macOS. Pica, a MacOS font management app. I liked this article. Tim Cook steps down as CEO of Apple. Several observations on his tenure from a long-term Apple customer and observer. | Riccardo Mori. Most of the coverage on Tim Cook and his retirement has been full of praise for him. This is a critical look at his tenure. macosxguru at the gmail thingie. Note: Thanks to Photo by Baku Kerimbekova: https://www.pexels.com/photo/cozy-fluffy-cat-sleeping-on-bed-linen-32157260/

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 )

96 *{box-sizing:border-box}body{margin:0;padding:0}a[x-apple-data-detectors]{color:inherit!important;text-decoration:inherit!important}#MessageViewBody a{color:inherit;text-decoration:none}p{line-height:inherit}.desktop_hide,.desktop_hide table{mso-hide:all;display:none;max-height:0;overflow:hidden}.image_block img+div{display:none}sub,sup{font-size:75%;line-height:0} @media (max-width:620px){.image_block div.fullWidth{max-width:100%!important}.row-content{width:100%!important}.stack .column{width:100%;display:block}.mobile_hide{min-height:0;max-height:0;max-width:0;display:none;overflow:hidden;font-size:0}.desktop_hide,.desktop_hide table{display:table!important;max-height:none!important}} sup, sub { font-size: 100% !important; } sup { mso-text-raise:10% } sub { mso-text-raise:-10% } D…  ( 2 min )

96 *{box-sizing:border-box}body{margin:0;padding:0}a[x-apple-data-detectors]{color:inherit!important;text-decoration:inherit!important}#MessageViewBody a{color:inherit;text-decoration:none}p{line-height:inherit}.desktop_hide,.desktop_hide table{mso-hide:all;display:none;max-height:0;overflow:hidden}.image_block img+div{display:none}sub,sup{font-size:75%;line-height:0}#converted-body .list_block ol,#converted-body .list_block ul,.body [class~=x_list_block] ol,.body [class~=x_list_block] ul,u+.body .list_block ol,u+.body .list_block ul{padding-left:20px} @media (max-width:620px){.row-content{width:100%!important}.stack .column{width:100%;display:block}.mobile_hide{min-height:0;max-height:0;max-width:0;display:none;overflow:hidden;font-size:0}.desktop_hide,.desktop_hide table{display:table!…  ( 7 min )

96 Let’s call the death of the VRA what it is: Racism. p{ margin:10px 0; padding:0; } table{ border-collapse:collapse; } h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6{ display:block; margin:0; padding:0; } img,a img{ border:0; height:auto; outline:none; text-decoration:none; } body,#bodyTable,#bodyCell{ height:100%; margin:0; padding:0; width:100%; } .mcnPreviewText{ display:none !important; } #outlook a{ padding:0; } img{ -ms-interpolation-mode:bicubic; } table{ mso-table-lspace:0pt; mso-table-rspace:0pt; } .ReadMsgBody{ width:100%; } .ExternalClass{ width:100%; } p,a,li,td,blockquote{ mso-line-height-rule:exactly; } a[href^=tel],a…  ( 5 min )

Artists Flee Trump’s State Fair, Proving MAGA Radioactive as Ever#outlook a { padding:0; } .ExternalClass { width:100%; } .ExternalClass, .ExternalClass p, .ExternalClass span, .ExternalClass font, .ExternalClass td, .ExternalClass div { line-height: 100%; } table td { border-collapse: collapse; mso-line-height-rule: exactly; } .editable.image { font-size: 0 !important; line-height: 0 !important; } .nl2go_preheader { display: none !important; mso-hide:all !important; mso-line-height-rule: exactly; visibility: hidden !important; line-height: 0px !important; font-size: 0px !important; } body { width:100% !important; -webkit-text-size-adjust:100%; -ms-text-size-adjust:100%; margin:0; padding:0; } img { outline:none; text-decoration:none; -ms-interpolation-mode: bicubic; } a img { border:none;…  ( 9 min )

The regime can’t stop losing

Bobby Brainworms gets bit, Preznit Fuckwit gets hit, and so much more...

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This post is part of a series chronicling news coverage of rising prices in the United States. See more here.  ( 2 min )

This post is part of a series chronicling news coverage of rising prices in the United States. See more here.  ( 4 min )

Right-wing media are defending the living conditions at Delaney Hall, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center in New Jersey, following reports of a detainee hunger strike sparking protests outside. In addition to repeating Department of Homeland Security talking points about the conditions, media figures have attacked protesters outside the facility, claiming the demonstrations are “performance art,” among other allegations. According to NBC, one lawyer who represents multiple detainees said her clients at Delaney Hall “have been given expired food and meals with worms in them” and that some “have been released in recent months because they were not receiving medication or treatment for cancer, diabetes, depression and other conditions.”  The Department of Homeland Security has denied that a hunger strike is taking place at the facility, and both DHS and private prison company the GEO Group, which operates Delaney Hall, have rebuked claims that conditions are unsanitary or “subprime.” In the past year, reports of poor conditions at ICE detention centers have arisen across the country, including from locations such as Fort Bliss Army Base in Texas and the so-called “Alligator Alcatraz” facility in Florida.  Right-wing news pundits and podcasters have contested such reports, repeating DHS talking points claiming that conditions in immigration detention facilities are “clean and nice” and possibly offer “better meals” and “better healthcare” than detainees had previously. Further, several have argued that it shouldn’t matter whether the detainees are on a hunger strike. Besides defending the facilities, right-wing media figures have also attacked the protesters demonstrating outside Delaney Hall, encouraging escalation from the federal government and accusing protesters of being an “organized agitator group” that aims to stir up votes for the midterm elections and set violent criminals loose on the streets.  ( 5 min )

As Roll Call reported in March: Robert Malone, an ideological ally of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is stepping away from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s vaccine advisory committee following a court ruling that effectively nullified the panel. Malone was one of several picks by Kennedy in a controversial reworking of the entire Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices last year.  ... While on the panel, he supported more limited COVID-19 vaccine recommendations, arguing that Americans should be guided by consultations with health care providers rather than “propaganda, marketing and other activities that are not based in an actual, real world assessment of their risks and benefits.”  ( 3 min )

Welcome back to Media Matters’ weekly newsletter. This week:  With a potential Iranian deal on the horizon, MAGA media’s drawing red lines.  Amid negotiations to end the war with Iran, Trump posts praise from Fox News. Fox's deranged reaction to NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani's affordable housing proposal.  If you want this delivered straight to your inbox, subscribe here.  ( 4 min )

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After New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani unveiled his plans to make affordable housing more available in the city, Fox News personalities and guests fixated on the plan’s efforts combating negligent landlords. They declared that enforcement against negligent landlords amounted to “public theft,” said it was a “throwback to Stalin,” and ranted that legal action to turn over properties from them to more responsible stewards will lead to “mass killing” and similar atrocities.  ( 5 min )

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NEW: USPS proposal to carry out Trump’s executive order could create new barriers to mail voting96 :root { color-scheme: light; supported-color-schemes: light; } body { margin: 0; padding: 0; min-width: 100%!important; -ms-text-size-adjust: 100% !important; -webkit-transform: scale(1) !important; -webkit-text-size-adjust: 100% !important; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased !important; } .body { word-wrap: normal; word-spacing:normal; } table.mso { width: 100%; border-collapse: collapse; padding: 0; table-layout: fixed; } img { border: 0; outline: none; } table { mso-table-lspace: 0px; mso-table-rspace: 0px; } td, a, span { mso-line-height-rule: exactly; } #root [x-apple-data-detectors=true], a[x-apple-data-detectors=true], #MessageViewBody a { color: inherit !importa…  ( 5 min )

An embarrassing week for the Royals @media (max-width: 1024px) { .typography .pullquote-align-left, .typography.editor .pullquote-align-left, .typography .pullquote-align-right, .typography.editor .pullquote-align-right, .typography .pullquote-align-wide, .typography.editor .pullquote-align-wide, .typography .pullquote-align-center, .typography.editor .pullquote-align-center { float: none; margin: 0 auto; width: 100%; max-width: 100%; } } @media all and (-ms-high-contrast: none), (-ms-high-contrast: active) { .typography .markup table.image-wrapper img, .typography.editor .markup table.image-wrapper img, .typography .markup table.kindle-wrapper img, .typography.editor .markup table.kindle-wrapper img { max-width: 550px; } } @media (min-width:…  ( 10 min )

I Talked To Mina Kimes About Games As The New Social Network96 :root { color-scheme: light; supported-color-schemes: light; } body { margin: 0; padding: 0; min-width: 100%!important; -ms-text-size-adjust: 100% !important; -webkit-transform: scale(1) !important; -webkit-text-size-adjust: 100% !important; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased !important; } .body { word-wrap: normal; word-spacing:normal; } table.mso { width: 100%; border-collapse: collapse; padding: 0; table-layout: fixed; } img { border: 0; outline: none; } table { mso-table-lspace: 0px; mso-table-rspace: 0px; } td, a, span { mso-line-height-rule: exactly; } #root [x-apple-data-detectors=true], a[x-apple-data-detectors=true], #MessageViewBody a { color: inherit !important; text-decoration: inherit !import…  ( 10 min )

“Congress gave the Kennedy Center its name, and only Congress can change it.” Trump responded ... as one would expect.

Louisiana is erasing a majority-Black district a.cta_button{-moz-box-sizing:content-box !important;-webkit-box-sizing:content-box !important;box-sizing:content-box !important;vertical-align:middle}.hs-breadcrumb-menu{list-style-type:none;margin:0px 0px 0px 0px;padding:0px 0px 0px 0px}.hs-breadcrumb-menu-item{float:left;padding:10px 0px 10px 10px}.hs-breadcrumb-menu-divider:before{content:'›';padding-left:10px}.hs-featured-image-link{border:0}.hs-featured-image{float:right;margin:0 0 20px 20px;max-width:50%}@media (max-width: 568px){.hs-featured-image{float:none;margin:0;width:100%;max-width:100%}}.hs-screen-reader-text{clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);height:1px;overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;width:1px} 96 …  ( 5 min )

Breaking: USPS to implement Trump’s crackdown on mail voting a.cta_button{-moz-box-sizing:content-box !important;-webkit-box-sizing:content-box !important;box-sizing:content-box !important;vertical-align:middle}.hs-breadcrumb-menu{list-style-type:none;margin:0px 0px 0px 0px;padding:0px 0px 0px 0px}.hs-breadcrumb-menu-item{float:left;padding:10px 0px 10px 10px}.hs-breadcrumb-menu-divider:before{content:'›';padding-left:10px}.hs-featured-image-link{border:0}.hs-featured-image{float:right;margin:0 0 20px 20px;max-width:50%}@media (max-width: 568px){.hs-featured-image{float:none;margin:0;width:100%;max-width:100%}}.hs-screen-reader-text{clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);height:1px;overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;width:1px} 96 …  ( 2 min )

96 *{box-sizing:border-box}body{margin:0;padding:0}a[x-apple-data-detectors]{color:inherit!important;text-decoration:inherit!important}#MessageViewBody a{color:inherit;text-decoration:none}p{line-height:inherit}.desktop_hide,.desktop_hide table{mso-hide:all;display:none;max-height:0;overflow:hidden}.image_block img+div{display:none}sub,sup{font-size:75%;line-height:0} @media (max-width:670px){.image_block div.fullWidth{max-width:100%!important}.row-content{width:100%!important}.stack .column{width:100%;display:block}.mobile_hide{min-height:0;max-height:0;max-width:0;display:none;overflow:hidden;font-size:0}.desktop_hide,.desktop_hide table{display:table!important;max-height:none!important}.reverse{display:table;width:100%}.reverse .column.first{display:table-footer-group!important}.rever…  ( 1 min )

96 All Eyes on Bondi img{-ms-interpolation-mode:bicubic;} table, td{mso-table-lspace:0pt;mso-table-rspace:0pt;} .mceStandardButton, .mceStandardButton td, .mceStandardButton td a{mso-hide:all!important;} p, a, li, td, blockquote{mso-line-height-rule:exactly;} p, a, li, td, body, table, blockquote{-ms-text-size-adjust:100%;-webkit-text-size-adjust:100%;} .mcnPreviewText{display:none!important;} .bodyCell{margin:0 auto;padding:0;width:100%;} .ExternalClass, .ExternalClass p, .ExternalClass td, .ExternalClass div, .ExternalClass span, .ExternalClass font{line-height:100%;} .ReadMsgBody, .ExternalClass{width:100%;} a[x-apple-data-detectors]{color:inherit!important;text-decoration:none!important;font-size:inherit!important;font-family:inherit!important;font-weight:inherit!important;line…  ( 6 min )

GOP's relentless gerrymander push hits roadblocks a.cta_button{-moz-box-sizing:content-box !important;-webkit-box-sizing:content-box !important;box-sizing:content-box !important;vertical-align:middle}.hs-breadcrumb-menu{list-style-type:none;margin:0px 0px 0px 0px;padding:0px 0px 0px 0px}.hs-breadcrumb-menu-item{float:left;padding:10px 0px 10px 10px}.hs-breadcrumb-menu-divider:before{content:'›';padding-left:10px}.hs-featured-image-link{border:0}.hs-featured-image{float:right;margin:0 0 20px 20px;max-width:50%}@media (max-width: 568px){.hs-featured-image{float:none;margin:0;width:100%;max-width:100%}}.hs-screen-reader-text{clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);height:1px;overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;width:1px} 96 …  ( 6 min )

[2026-05-31 Sun]: Updated transcript and added a link to Karthik's notes. I chatted with Omar Antolín Camarena about Emacs, keyboard macros, temporary buffers, Embark, and other workflow tips. Video not supported. Thumbnail: View in the Internet Archive, read the transcript online, watch or comment on YouTube, download the audio or the transcript, or e-mail me. Related links: Omar Antolín Camarena: a researcher at Instituto de Matemáticas, UNAM in Mexico City M-x apropos Emacs oantolin/emacs-config: My personal Emacs configuration · GitHub oantolin/placeholder: Emacs package to treat any buffer as a template with placeholders to fill-in · GitHub oantolin (Omar Antolín Camarena) · GitHub Omar Antolín (@oantolin@mathstodon.xyz) - Mathstodon u/oantolin on Reddit #Emacs #Embark…  ( 37 min )

global-auto-revert so that any file open in Emacs that gets changed by an external process has the changes reflected in the Emacs buffer. Sometimes, though, you don’t want that to happen. Mbork gives the example of viewing a PDF file while LaTeX is updating it. The question is: how to prevent auto revert from updating certain modes. That turns out to be pretty easy. As usual, Emacs has us covered. The global-auto-revert-ignore-modes variable lists all the modes that should be ignored by auto revert. You can check mbork’s post for the details but it’s really quite simple: you list the modes that auto revert should ignore and that’s it. This is, really, a niche concern but if you have it, mbork’s post tells you how to avoid it.  ( 5 min )

#emacs #brainiac #productivity #systems Time has come to release a new version of Brainiac. The whole configuration file has been almost completly restructured, cleaned up and properly commented. So I will declare this to be version 2.0. Following changes have been made: READ.md has been extended to explain the installation and usage. Readability improvements: All colors decisions are now left to Modus themes, we only change typografy, e.g. underline the PROG tasks to encode work in progress. Multiple Org elements were restyled, e.g. ellipsis, tags etc., to improve scanability in large documents. Added the configuration for fixed and variable pitch fonts. You may set the font family to your liking. Packages org-bullets, org-appear and diminish introduced. Priority cookies are removed after the task is closed, to remove visual clutter. When saving, the tags will be aligned automatically. Added number of matches to isearch. Repeaters are now visible in the agenda. When jumping to items from the agenda, automatic narrow is done to improve focus. Capture from anywhere is now implemented by a custom script based on org-protocol. Many, many small tweaks, fixes and changes. Get the new release from here. Enjoy and keep hacking!  ( 2 min )

When California’s nonpartisan top-two primary concludes on June 2, there will be a lot of national media interest in how well reality star Spencer Pratt does in his over-the-top challenge to Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass. At New York, I explain why Pratt’s candidacy isn’t that serious: In its initial phases, the 2026 Los Angeles... Read more »  ( 9 min )

The following is excerpted from a chapter of Trudeau & Doonesbury: A Biography, by Joshua Kendall. The book is available for purchase now. In the spring of 2015, like many Americans, Garry Trudeau figured that the upcoming 2016 election would essentially be a repeat of 1992, as it would also feature a Bush versus a Clinton—in this case, former Florida governor and younger ­brother of 43, Jeb Bush, versus former First Lady and Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton. When asked by Chuck Todd how he would likely depict the 2016 candidates, Trudeau stated, “I have a long history of unpacking the baggage of the Bush ­family.” He added that it would be hard to draw Hillary Clinton ­because “­we’re just waiting for her to make ­mistakes.” But in the end, Trudeau would never draw a strip about either Jeb Bush or Hillary Clinton, because the 2016 election became a nonstop Donald Trump reality TV show.  ( 60 min )

There are many ways to measure the success of an expansion team. Are they filling stadiums? Do local fans seem engaged? Do they have an identity on the field? And, of course, are they any good?  It’s generally wise to keep expectations for new sides relatively low. Since 2021, only two of the NWSL’s six expansion teams have made the playoffs—San Diego Wave in 2022, and Bay FC in 2024—and the rest have finished closer to the table’s basement. Evaluating an expansion team by their results, then, is a recipe for disappointment. But there’s a better metric out there, one that corresponds to the NWSL’s best trait: chaos. When I’m judging a new team, what I’m looking for is fun. If I tune into a game they’re playing, am I going to have a good time? Ten games into its existence, the Denver Summit already has me answering that question in the affirmative. They began the season with a bang—their inaugural match, a loss against Bay, included three total goals and a red card for the new squad. They went on to take points from both of the league’s most recent champions, tying the Orlando Pride 1-1 and beating Gotham 2-0. Then came a couple duds: scoreless draws against Washington and Gotham. Those goose eggs seem to have steeled Denver’s determination to make things happen moving forward, and since the April international window, each game they’ve played in has been full of goals.  ( 26 min )

From the moment you begin Robert Coover’s 1968 novel The Universal Baseball Association, Inc. J. Henry Waugh, Prop., you are in a rarified space. What kind of title is that for a novel, so long and unwieldy? The recent reissue of the novel by New York Review Books gives little clue as to what could happen inside its cover. Behind the title there are several misshapen die with colorful dots and crumbling edges. It is a strange book, with a strange protagonist, and a sentence structure so mesmerizing that I couldn’t put it down.  When I picked up this book, I had no understanding of it except that it was “about baseball.” But the book isn’t about baseball, at least not in the traditional sense. It’s about a version of baseball that exists only in the mind of the book's protagonist, J. Henry …  ( 64 min )

At the start of this year, a seismic shift occurred in my life: The number of cats I saw regularly went from zero to three. First, my friend who lives three doors down from me adopted a sweet little menace off the streets of Rochester, N.Y. Her name is Clementine; she is a tuxedo cat, and approximately 8.5 pounds and 1 year old. Second, I made new friends who have two cats of their own: A tortico former mother named Guagua (or 瓜瓜, a cute way of saying melon or gourd in Chinese) who is perhaps the most perfect and angelic cat I have ever met, and a weird little man named Sesame. Our three protagonists are pictured below. Clementine (left), Guagua (center), and Sesame (right). Not to scale; though Sesame is, as previously mentioned, a "weird little man," he is physically huge. While I met Clementine first, my self-employment as cat tutor only started when I met Guagua and Sesame, and my friends told me that Guagua knew tricks. I had never before met a cat in real life who knew tricks. The trick-knowing cats I saw on various internet platforms appeared to me like unusually dignified and intelligent creatures, sometimes upsettingly purebred, and now Guagua—a normal cat from the streets of Philadelphia who does not have teeth—had proved herself part of that circle. She demonstrated her suite of tricks: sit, spin, paw, other paw, high-five, other high-five, down, and going wherever she was pointed. She was, it was clear to me, a genius, and also extremely food-motivated, which in animals tends to be related.  ( 27 min )

This past Saturday, Barcelona Femení met OL Lyonnes in the Champions League final and crushed them by a score of 4-0. The scoreline was a little misleading, but only a little. On one hand, the first half of the match tilted heavily in Lyon's favor. The French team put their Spanish counterparts to the sword, dominating Barça in a way no opponent has probably since Lyon won this very matchup four years ago. Only great penalty-box defending and heroics from Cata Coll in goal kept Lyon from getting the go-ahead goal they by all rights deserved. On the other hand, if the present moment of European club soccer, and arguably women's soccer as a whole, could rightfully be described as the Barcelona era, it's because the Blaugrana has more exceptional players than anyone else, players with long histories of coming up big in the difficult, decisive moments that separate victory from defeat. From the second half's outset, Barça looked like a different team, one better equipped to escape the man-to-man press that had stymied them so thoroughly in the first 45 minutes. Where Lyon earlier had had its chances to convert its run-of-play superiority into a scoreboard lead but let them go begging, Barça was ruthless. In the 55th minute Ewa Pajor put Barcelona ahead with the game's opening goal, and already it felt like the match had taken its final shape. A fatigued Lyon sought more open, direct attacks in an attempt to get back into the game, which only presented Barça more time and space in which to keep the ball and attack. Pajor struck again in the 69th minute, more or less putting the result out of Lyon's reach, and a pair of late strikes from Salma Paralluelo killed any chance of a comeback. The gaudy final scoreline might not have reflected the tension of the match, but did testify to the greater omnipotence this Barcelona team has demonstrated over and over for the better part of a decade now. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7yI9ng8Yp7A&t=1s&pp=ygUOYmFyY2Vsb25hIGx5b27SBwkJDQsBhyohjO8%3D  ( 40 min )

The deaths of NASCAR driver Kyle Busch and hockey player Claude Lemieux are chronologically circumstantial but linked in a broader sense by public reaction, which has run largely along the line of grudging admiration turning to fulsome admiration, not despite but because of all those grudges. They were highly and sometimes objectionably competitive men, and as such were held to be villains of a sort during their careers. In both cases, their brilliance became easier to acknowledge after the hesitations and qualifications related to all that were shocked back into perspective by their deaths. Busch died at age 41, allegedly due to sepsis caused by bacterial pneumonia. That shockingly untimely death ended a nearly two-decade run as the driver who most, in the words of fellow driver Ryan Blan…  ( 22 min )

CBS News Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss is making big moves. This week, she declined to renew the contract of 60 Minutes correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi, whose report on the hellish conditions at the Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo prison in El Salvador was pulled off the air last December for not offering enough deference to the Trump administration; Alfonsi was one of three departures from the program. Weiss also installed Nick Bilton as the new executive producer of her network's flagship newsmagazine program. If you're having trouble remembering who Bilton is, that's because he's a specific type of dolt from a bygone era. There was a moment in the media industry in which one could build a lucrative career by being a guy with glasses and branding oneself as a tech reporter who "covers the intersection of technology and culture." Bilton spent many years executing this maneuver at The New York Times, where he edged out some stiff competition to briefly claim the title of the paper's worst columnist. His greatest hits include a column about the time he couldn't find a pen, and one about the cancer risks presented by wearable technology that was so factually fucked, it now contains a 203-word editor's note and a 98-word correction. Bilton eventually left the Times for Vanity Fair, where he got busy pretending like he was the one who'd owned the Theranos story and getting all googly-eyed over the Apple Vision Pro, which he promised was "taking us into the future, into a new era of computing." I guess technically the jury's still out on that one.  ( 15 min )

When the dead body of Timmy the humpback whale beached itself last week off the shores of the Danish island of Anholt, it was only a matter of time before Timmy would risk of the fate that befalls many a beached whale: https://twitter.com/achillghost/status/2058958519747887516 The residents of Anholt, per the BBC, have watched Timmy slowly balloon in size as its guts and stomach begin to decompose. Timmy's body, skin taut and distended by gases, now lolls around a sandbank a short distance from the beach and drifting in the shallow waves. As one German television channel aired a livestream of its dead body, the channel included the number of a suicide hotline.  ( 29 min )

With less than three minutes to play in the first half of Game 6 of the Western Conference Finals, San Antonio Spurs rookie Carter Bryant drove past Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and threw down a huge, nasty, two-handed dunk, pushing the Spurs' lead to 12 and sending the home crowd's decibel level into Krakatoan territory. When Devin Vassell immediately followed it at the other end by rejecting Chet Holmgren's point-blank dunk attempt and woofing in the dead-eyed noodleman's face about it, Thursday's game seemed on the verge of breaking open. It had been threatening to do that ever since the Spurs opened the night on a 9-2 run. The Oklahoma City Thunder reeled it back in, as they reliably do. Alex Caruso beat the shot clock with a three to salvage that possession, Gilgeous-Alexander hit a tough …  ( 24 min )

The justices are quietly helping Trump tighten his grip on federal immigration courts. The post In the NAIJ Case, the Supreme Court Pretends Trump Is a Normal President appeared first on Balls and Strikes.  ( 7 min )

Fund Halted Until At Least June 12 In a ruling just out this morning, a federal judge has temporarily blocked...  ( 11 min )

His own Park Service couldn't hide it. Democrats boxed in his slush fund. Michigan grabbed a mop. Congress builds an anti-corruption coalition

every goddamn day it’s some new nightmare

The smartest way for Donald Trump to deal with his E. Jean Carroll problem would be to accept defeat, pay her what he owes and never speak of her again. Both the media and the public seem, sadly, to have moved on after not one but two civil juries found in May 2023 and January 2024 that the retired journalist told the truth when she said Trump sexually assaulted her in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room in the ’90s. Even though he has been accused of sexual abuse or harassment by more than two dozen women, a majority of voters either forgot or didn’t care enough about the allegations by the time the November 2024 election came around, instead voting him back into the White House. With this history, the politically wise move for the president would be to stop creating news hooks reminding eve…  ( 7 min )

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Right-wing media are lobbing attacks at Texas Democratic Senate nominee James Talarico, resorting to playground insults and seeking to define him as “unlikable,” “gay,” and “against meat.”  ( 4 min )

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In the 19 hours following the breaking news, Fox News failed to cover the Justice Department's new criminal investigation into E. Jean Carroll, who previously "won a $5 million civil judgment against Mr. Trump that he had sexually abused and defamed her." Now, the Justice Department has opened a criminal investigation into whether Carroll committed perjury when she testified in a 2022 deposition that she had not received outside financial backing for her initial lawsuit. In contrast to Fox’s lack of coverage, all 12 CNN shows that aired since the news broke have covered the story, and 7 of 8 such MS NOW programs have covered it.  ( 2 min )

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This post is part of a series chronicling news coverage of rising prices in the United States. See more here.  ( 3 min )

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Judge lets Trump’s anti-voting order stand, for now a.cta_button{-moz-box-sizing:content-box !important;-webkit-box-sizing:content-box !important;box-sizing:content-box !important;vertical-align:middle}.hs-breadcrumb-menu{list-style-type:none;margin:0px 0px 0px 0px;padding:0px 0px 0px 0px}.hs-breadcrumb-menu-item{float:left;padding:10px 0px 10px 10px}.hs-breadcrumb-menu-divider:before{content:'›';padding-left:10px}.hs-featured-image-link{border:0}.hs-featured-image{float:right;margin:0 0 20px 20px;max-width:50%}@media (max-width: 568px){.hs-featured-image{float:none;margin:0;width:100%;max-width:100%}}.hs-screen-reader-text{clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);height:1px;overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;width:1px} 96 …  ( 5 min )

Some Glimmers of Hope in the GOP's Bleak Bid to Disenfranchise Black and Dem Voters#outlook a { padding:0; } .ExternalClass { width:100%; } .ExternalClass, .ExternalClass p, .ExternalClass span, .ExternalClass font, .ExternalClass td, .ExternalClass div { line-height: 100%; } table td { border-collapse: collapse; mso-line-height-rule: exactly; } .editable.image { font-size: 0 !important; line-height: 0 !important; } .nl2go_preheader { display: none !important; mso-hide:all !important; mso-line-height-rule: exactly; visibility: hidden !important; line-height: 0px !important; font-size: 0px !important; } body { width:100% !important; -webkit-text-size-adjust:100%; -ms-text-size-adjust:100%; margin:0; padding:0; } img { outline:none; text-decoration:none; -ms-interpolation-mode: bicubic; } a …  ( 10 min )

96 *{box-sizing:border-box}body{margin:0;padding:0}a[x-apple-data-detectors]{color:inherit!important;text-decoration:inherit!important}#MessageViewBody a{color:inherit;text-decoration:none}p{line-height:inherit}.desktop_hide,.desktop_hide table{mso-hide:all;display:none;max-height:0;overflow:hidden}.image_block img+div{display:none}sub,sup{font-size:75%;line-height:0}#converted-body .list_block ol,#converted-body .list_block ul,.body [class~=x_list_block] ol,.body [class~=x_list_block] ul,u+.body .list_block ol,u+.body .list_block ul{padding-left:20px} @media (max-width:620px){.image_block div.fullWidth{max-width:100%!important}.row-content{width:100%!important}.stack .column{width:100%;display:block}.mobile_hide{min-height:0;max-height:0;max-width:0;display:none;overflow:hidden;font-size…  ( 7 min )

Our third new video bonus for paid subscribers walks through the three rulings in argued cases that the Supreme Court handed down on Thursday, May 28, 2026.

A district judge who conducted an affair in their chambers, lied about it, and threw a clerk under the bus deserved more than a "private reprimand."

On Thursday, Justice Kavanaugh wrote his second majority opinion for the court upholding protections against racial discrimination in jury selection.

The most maddening moments the New York Liberty have to offer are not the bad ones—not the turnovers, the biffed layups, the “just vibes” possessions on offense—but the moments here and there when things click and the whole team starts to play well. Those flashes of competence suggest there’s a switch that can be flipped for these nominal championship contenders. The maddening part is how rarely the Liberty seem inclined to flip it.  If we learned anything from their 84-74 win over the Phoenix Mercury on Wednesday, it’s that booing can flip the switch. A usually forgiving Brooklyn crowd started to grumble when the home team came out of halftime looking lifeless. It worked! The Liberty’s full-court press forced nine Mercury turnovers in the quarter, and they ended the third on a 23-0 run. It was enough to snap their three-game losing streak and bring them back to .500 on the season.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VyiImT6Wg54  ( 21 min )

When we first had New Yorker staff writer and bestselling author David Grann on the podcast back in 2023, Drew and I mostly asked him the sort of things that we would ask one of our heroes when he happened to be out there promoting a new book. We had a good conversation about that book and his process as a writer, but the real surprise of the episode came at the end, when Grann revealed that he was a true sicko of a Knicks fan. It's one thing to talk to one of your favorite writers about writing, and quite another to talk to that writer about Eddie Lee Wilkins. We made a note that we'd have him back on someday to spend a whole episode talking about the Knicks, at some point when they were playing well enough to warrant a whole episode of their own. Well, about that: "The world is shit," the author of Killers of the Flower Moon and The Lost City of Z said early in our interview, "but the Knicks are great." We focused mostly on the last part of that, and much of the episode is given over to a somewhat giddy discussion of whether one of the NBA's most reliably tragicomic franchises really has figured something out, and whether they actually have a shot against whichever juggernaut escapes the Western Conference Finals. Grann does know ball, but he also knows the Knicks well enough to know that this moment of cheering for a juiceful and flourishing team is a pretty severe outlier.  ( 19 min )

Going into Roland-Garros, there was clear consensus: The greatest threat to Jannik Sinner was the Sun itself. It's the type of snappy one-liner that gets slung on the TV broadcast a dozen times a day, but it wound up prescient as the No. 1 seed melted down Thursday in a stupefying second-round loss to Juan Manuel Cerundolo. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Spv9oa4rwUQ Outside of celestial bodies, the top men's player wasn't slated to face much of a threat at the clay Slam. His rival Carlos Alcaraz had recently announced that he would sit out the summer to recover from a wrist injury. Part-time tennis player Novak Djokovic had barely clocked in for work since his impressive win over Sinner in Australia in January. In the meantime, Sinner had regained the No. 1 ranking, stomped the tour, and racked up records. When he arrived in Paris, he was winding down one of the best clay seasons in tennis history, having swept the three Masters titles, a feat previously achieved by only Rafael Nadal. Along the way, Sinner dropped only one set. Zooming out slightly further, Sinner had strung together six Masters titles in a row, which had never been done. He became the second player to complete the full set of nine Masters trophies, and he accomplished it seven years faster than Djokovic. I could bore you with even more, but I'll leave you with this simple number: Sinner had a 30-match win streak heading into his second-round match at Roland-Garros. I expected that number to extend to 36, and for him to lift the title that brutally eluded him by just one point last season.  ( 24 min )

James Wood is a pretty good leadoff hitter. Rookie Nationals manager Blake Butera, a disturbingly young fellow who looks like he should be one of the nine guys in this video, moved Wood to the top of Washington's lineup back in the spring, gradually swapping the places of Wood and former leadoff guy C.J. Abrams, who is now Washington's regular cleanup hitter. Wood is good at leadoff stuff: He leads the National League in walks and on-base percentage, and has successfully stolen 10 bags in 11 tries. Because he gets on base a lot, and because Abrams is thriving behind him, Wood leads the majors pretty comfortably in runs scored. The Nationals, in fact, lead all MLB teams in runs. All you care about is dingers. Wah wah wah, show me the dingers, you are wailing, smacking your sippy cup onto your tray table and shooting milk everywhere. Dingers are only one part of the game! Fine, here's a dinger: https://bsky.app/profile/nationals.com/post/3mms3clnza22y  ( 23 min )

The New York Jets have been pretty uniformly terrible on the field under the ownership of Woody Johnson, but the organization has lately been recognized as an innovative and industry-leading presence in integrating video game rankings and loutish patrician antics into its front-office processes. That hybrid approach has admittedly not yet borne fruit in terms of top-line indicators like wins, or recording even one interception over a 17-game season, but this sort of work takes time and evolves alongside the technology available. A team must accumulate some more abstract wins off the field before those successes show up in the standings. This work is not glamorous or public, but as New York Jets Chief Analytics and Data Officer Iwao Fusillo told Sports Business Journal, he's already seeing results despite just joining the organization in January after a long career in corporate America. The Jets organization, he said, has already made strides, because "91 percent of the Jets’ front office now uses Microsoft Copilot on a day-to-day basis—up from 'a handful' about a hundred days ago—with users averaging two-to-three prompts per day." How should Jets fans feel about the fact that a large and suspiciously precise percentage of the front office is now firing questions into the widely loathed and overwhelmingly unreliable AI modality in Microsoft's office technology? My friend, I am not in the business of telling Jets fans how to feel about things, and as a rule seek to limit engagement in that area to the extent possible. But it seems clear that Fusillo is pleased with the adoption of this bummy technology so far. "I call that level one, or horizon one," Fusillo told SBJ, "which is adoption." (The additional two levels, or horizons, have to do with "deeper levels of workflow automation," SBJ's Rob Schaefer explained.)  ( 24 min )

Don’t tell Jeff Krulik he’s famous, especially if anybody's around. “I’ll be with somebody and they’ll say to somebody, ‘Hey, this is the guy who made Heavy Metal Parking Lot!” says Krulik. “And I know what’s coming next: A blank stare." "It's humbling," says Krulik, who really is one of the guys who made Heavy Metal Parking Lot. But he is grateful for whatever renown he's gotten from the enduring, adored-by-all-who've-seen-it 1986 guerilla documentary. It all started 40 years ago this weekend, when he and buddy (and fellow budding indie filmmaker) John Heyn showed up early to a Judas Priest show at the Capital Centre with a video camera borrowed from the local public access TV station and their eyes wide open. They rolled tape while cruising outside the Largo, Md., arena, capturing gaggles of great unwashed metalheads in their element. Period-piece characters now known by the film’s faithful fans as “Graham of Dope” “DC101 Guy,” “Zebraman,” and “The Girl in the White Dress,” all of whom make Beavis & Butthead look preppy and lucid, spewed unscripted, unintentionally hilarious and unforgettable dirtball verse at a rat-a-tat-tat rate throughout the movie's 16 minutes. Rick Ballard, who appeared in Parking Lot as a teen Priest obsessive then grew up to have a career in TV and run his own record label, hailed the movie in a 2016 interview as “the Citizen Kane of wasted teenage metalness.”  ( 22 min )

The Montreal Canadiens have chosen an odd and ill-advised moment to test out a new, advanced, and almost transcendental hockey analytics notion. Either that, or the Carolina Hurricanes are putting together the first five-game sweep in history. Either way, we're getting something we've never seen before, and we're only going to get one more chance, Friday night in Raleigh, to see it. That is, unless the Canadiens manage to perfect their new signature move: scoring without shooting. It's only worked once so far, and that by accident, but head coach Martin St. Louis has fallen in love with the concept and has watched his lads lose their last three games in pursuit of it. Indeed, it can be said that the idea, which was sparked by their Game 7 win over Tampa Bay in the first round, has been the…  ( 21 min )

The specifics are a little difficult to pin down, but that’s true of most things surrounding novelist, filmmaker, and playwright Missouri Williams. Here are the facts I’ve been able to piece together: At some point in her young adulthood, Williams began to have seizures. In a 2025 interview with TriQuarterly, Williams said that the episodes began after she had moved to “a new city with a new language” (location and tongue unspecified), and while she was working in a cafe while trying to learn more than simple phrases. As she put it: “I spent a lot of time getting orders wrong, being reprimanded without quite understanding why. It was useful to feel so stupid.” Around this time, misfires in her temporal lobe began to incite epileptic episodes. These issues in the part of the brain responsible for language and memory completely destabilized Williams. Already struggling to get a foothold in her new surroundings, she then began to forget words in her native English. She found that she was thinking entire sentences backward. She made woozy, tenuous connections between ideas and objects. “Everything suggested everything else in the strangest of ways,” she said. Unable to hold onto words, ideas, or memories, Williams began an obsessive cataloging. She built a network of complex sentences that would circle back and collapse in on themselves like murmurating birds. It was as if each word was “driven by the need to confirm each and every thing that had preceded them,” as she wrote for Granta in 2022. Soon these sentences began to pile up, and eventually she was able to shape many of them into a book. The Doloriad, Williams's award-winning 2022 debut, reached an instant sort of cult-classic status, partially for its body-horror grotesqueries, but also for its undeniable beauty and off-kilter theology. The book suggests that as one gets closer to Christ, His wounds open up on your body. The Divine and The Gross often coexist.  ( 33 min )

Ryan Fournier, the co-founder and chairman of the group Students for Trump, was arrested early Tuesday morning in Washington, D.C., after he allegedly assaulted and threatened a woman, according to documents obtained by Defector. The Metropolitan Police Department charged Fournier with simple assault and attempted threats to do bodily harm. According to the affidavit, the…  ( 20 min )

Heads up for readers of this blog who are using Anju or are mouse-curious Emacs users. I’ve recently released the v1.5.0 update for it, now available on MELPA. Many new features and enhancements are in this update as outlined below: Context Menus Enhancements to selected text Query Replace (Regexp)… Enhancements to Org mode support Headline Change to Body Sort… Item Cycle Bullet… Sort… Table Sort… Copy as… Link… Added support for Makefile mode Added support for Info mode Added support for Compilation/Grep mode Main Menu Tools menu enhancements Global Org Commands Macro Recorder Edit › Delete menu enhancement Delete Duplicate Lines Users who work with both Org mode and Markdown formatted text should find interest in the Copy as… capability added to the Org mode context menu. This feature lets one use Org mode as the primary means of authoring text, exporting to Markdown (or another format) using a right-click mouse copy action. Thanks to Marcin Borkowski whose post “Org-mode to Markdown via the clipboard”, inspired this feature. Anju also provides a complementary command “Paste Markdown as Org” for Org mode which lets one paste copied Markdown text into an Org file, doing the conversion of Markdown to Org under the hood using pandoc. In summary, this is a big release with many changes. I invite you to explore all the links above to see what’s available in Anju.  ( 1 min )

Ray on Emacs, Raymond Zeitler has a very nice post on using zap-to-char in reverse. He—hypothetically—was typing some text, inadvertently leaned on a key, and ended up with a long string of a repeated character at the end of his text. Something like this: senteeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee Here’s what I didn’t know. You can cause zap-to-char to delete characters to the left by giving it negative count argument. So in Zeitler’s example, he erases the string of e​s by calling zap-to-char as Meta+- Meta+z t. But that’s not quite right. The problem is that it will also erase the t, which I assume was not his intention. Fortunately, there’s an easy solution that I wrote about almost 14 years ago. The problem with zap-to-char is that it does what you want it to only about half the time. The rest of the time you don’t want to delete the target character; you want to delete up to but not including that character. It turns out that Emacs has a command, zap-up-to-char, to do that but it’s not bound to any shortcut1. I have it bound to Meta+Z. It also honors the negative count argument so the correct solution for Zeitler’s problem is Meta+- Meta+Z t. The mistake aside, this is a great post because it tells me—and maybe you—something I didn’t know: you can zap backwards. Footnotes: 1 Happily, it’s now autoloaded by default so you no longer have to worry about that.  ( 5 min )

vc-mode loyalist (VC-Mode Meets Magit - or Why I Finally Gave In!). My conclusion then was that the two complement each other nicely, Magit for repo-level operations, vc-mode for the everyday file-level stuff, commit a single file, a blame, a quick diff, C-x v and away you go. Well, I have just had a small but instructive lesson in not assuming where the limitations actually lie, because I caught myself about to reach for Magit for something vc-mode handles perfectly well! The scenario: I had a pile of changes sitting in my working tree across a few files, and I wanted to set aside the changes in just one of them, temporarily, without touching anything else. Stash a single file, in other words. I knew that vc-mode had some stash commands through the "z" keybinding when in vc-…  ( 3 min )

Every now and then I like to play a game of chess with my colleagues at the office, without ever leaving my favourite Elisp interpreter. Emacs has a really good package for this, chess, which supports several ways to play: against the machine, over a local network, against internet chess servers (ICS), and even through IRC (I am proud to say I finished implementing that last feature myself). You can check out the official documentation. So I would like to share a brief introduction to playing chess over a network from Emacs. Local network game Lets you play directly between two Emacs sessions over TCP. You can use it to play with a friend on the same local network or VPN. Launch it with: C-u M-x chess RET network RET On startup it asks which role you want: Server: opens a local port and w…  ( 2 min )

With increasing frequency, the conservative justices are using language that is indistinguishable from a Tucker Carlson monologue. The post Clarence Thomas Ponders Whether West Coast Driver’s Licenses Could Justify Civil War appeared first on Balls and Strikes.  ( 7 min )

and Ken Paxton fucking sucks

There Is No Bottom I wish I could say we have reached the nadir of President Trump’s abuse of his...  ( 12 min )

The regime tried to silence four groups of Americans. They got louder instead

BREAKING: Federal judge refuses to block Trump executive order on mail voting — for now96 :root { color-scheme: light; supported-color-schemes: light; } body { margin: 0; padding: 0; min-width: 100%!important; -ms-text-size-adjust: 100% !important; -webkit-transform: scale(1) !important; -webkit-text-size-adjust: 100% !important; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased !important; } .body { word-wrap: normal; word-spacing:normal; } table.mso { width: 100%; border-collapse: collapse; padding: 0; table-layout: fixed; } img { border: 0; outline: none; } table { mso-table-lspace: 0px; mso-table-rspace: 0px; } td, a, span { mso-line-height-rule: exactly; } #root [x-apple-data-detectors=true], a[x-apple-data-detectors=true], #MessageViewBody a { color: inherit !important; text-…  ( 5 min )

96 All too familiar @media only screen and (max-width: 620px) { table.body { width: 100%; min-width: 100%; } table.body .content { padding: 0 !important; } table.body .container { padding: 0 !important; width: 100% !important; } table.body .main { border-spacing: 10px 0 !important; border-left-width: 0 !important; border-radius: 0 !important; border-right-width: 0 !important; } table.body .img-responsive { height: auto !important; max-width: 100% !important; width: auto !important; } } @media all { .ExternalClass { width: 100%; } .ExternalClass, .ExternalClass p, .ExternalClass span, .ExternalClass font, .ExternalClass td, .ExternalClass div { line-height: 100%; } .apple-link a { …  ( 8 min )

96 *{box-sizing:border-box}body{margin:0;padding:0}a[x-apple-data-detectors]{color:inherit!important;text-decoration:inherit!important}#MessageViewBody a{color:inherit;text-decoration:none}p{line-height:inherit}.desktop_hide,.desktop_hide table{mso-hide:all;display:none;max-height:0;overflow:hidden}.image_block img+div{display:none}sub,sup{font-size:75%;line-height:0}.row-4 .column-1 .block-3 .button:hover,.row-4 .column-2 .block-3 .button:hover,.row-4 .column-3 .block-3 .button:hover,.row-5 .column-1 .block-3 .button:hover,.row-5 .column-2 .block-3 .button:hover,.row-5 .column-3 .block-3 .button:hover,.row-7 .column-2 .block-2 .button:hover{background-color:#16688b!important;border-bottom:0 solid transparent!important;border-left:0 solid transparent!important;border-right:0 solid transp…

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 )

From the jump, there has been a crystal clear justification for President Donald Trump’s war on Iran. It involves some combination of regime change, or maybe not regime change, but definitely halting Iran’s nuclear weapon development (or possibly not), but certainly ending a war by starting a war (I think), and absolutely avoiding an imminent (or quite possibly nonimminent) threat.  OK, it may not be all that clear. But that's where we, the American people, come in. We need to help Trump and Co. decide on a justification for this now happening war. We might as well ask you to choose your own justification When Trump launched the attacks on Feb. 28, he said to the Iranian people: “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take.” But on March 2, Trump said: “An Iranian regime armed with long-range missiles and nuclear weapons would be an intolerable threat to the Middle East, but also to the American people.” Republicans have been saying we've been at war with Iran for years, so we needed to start a war to end a war. And Secretary of State Marco Rubio uttered this assortment of random words: “We went proactively in a defensive way to prevent them from inflicting higher damage.” The administration is clearly too busy conducting a war to find time to explain why that war is justified. So I need you to vote in the poll below. Trust me, this is how a healthy democracy overseen by a former reality television star works. Follow USA TODAY columnist Rex Huppke on Bluesky at @rexhuppke.bsky.social and on Facebook at facebook.com/RexIsAJerk  ( 11 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 )

Podcaster and man-somewhat-responsible-for-why-we’re-in-this-mess Joe Rogan has looked at President Donald Trump’s war-of-choice with Iran and declared it “insane” and a betrayal. The war is, without question, both those things. So congratulations to President Trump on getting me, other liberals, and a strong majority of independent voters who think this war is folly to wholeheartedly agree with the man-o-sphere podcasting dude who helped get you elected. Now it’s time for Trump’s MAGA base to again pay attention to their man, Rogan. Joe Rogan: 'A lot of people feel betrayed' During his March 10 show, the podcaster said of the war: “It just seems so insane, based on what he ran on. I mean, this is why a lot of people feel betrayed, right? He ran on no more wars, end these stupid, senseles…  ( 14 min )

So it turns out Americans don’t love widespread cruelty.  For the first time ever in YouGov polling, 50% of Americans now strongly or somewhat support abolishing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Only 39% of respondents strongly or somewhat oppose abolishing ICE and, in a remarkable twist, nearly a quarter of Republicans want ICE gone. That’s a mighty big shift from the not-too-long-ago days when Democrats were warned that “Abolish ICE” was an electorally risky slogan best avoided. ICE has become hugely unpopular. Maybe it's all the cruelty. Perhaps it’s the way roving bands of masked federal agents have descended onto American cities like invading forces, violently stuffing migrants and U.S. citizens into unmarked vehicles while gunning down innocent protesters and later falsely …  ( 15 min )

So a slew of mean people on the internet have been rudely mocking McDonald's CEO Chris Kempczinski over a video in which he gingerly samples the restaurant chain’s latest offering: the Big Arch burger. Because I don’t believe rich people should be made fun of or face consequences for their actions, I’m here to defend Mr. Kempczinski and attempt to right this terrible wrong. If you missed it, the video in question shows the CEO proudly holding a Big Arch in the same way any strong, handsome, wealthy person would hold a thing meant for the poor. The substantial sandwich consists of two quarter-pound beef patties, three slices of white cheddar, pickles, lettuce, crispy onions and a special Big Arch sauce that may or may not be made of people. McDonald's Big Arch is the best food product you c…  ( 13 min )

Oh, they laughed when I lined the backyard with kiddie pools and filled each one with gasoline and covered them all with evaporation lids. And they mocked me when I built an above-ground structure to house even more kiddie pools filled with gasoline. “What the heck is Huppke thinking?” they said. “Didn’t he hear President Donald Trumpbragging about gas being less than $2 per gallon back in February?” Oh, I heard it, all right. In fact, I voted for Trump because I believed he would bring gas prices down. But, because I’m smart and have studied “The Art of the Deal,” I knew the president would first bring prices down, then start an unprovoked war with Iran in an effort to patriotically distract from the Jeffrey Epstein files, sending gas prices soaring. The gas I hoarded in my backyard will …  ( 14 min )

Mean people on the internet have been mocking McDonald's CEO Chris Kempczinski over a video in which he gingerly samples the chain’s latest offering.  ( 8 min )

Federal immigration agents, hot off their success at being widely despised on the streets of American cities, will soon be loitering around airport security lines to lend a not-helping hand.  This is great news if you’re a fan of chaos. It’s less-great news if you’re a fan of going to the airport and getting somewhere in a safe and timely fashion without being kidnapped and wrongly deported to an El Salvadoran prison. President Donald Trump announced this extremely not-wise plan on March 22. That same day, White House border czar Tom Homan went on CNN and said, “I'm currently working on the plan. … We’ll put together a plan today and we’ll execute it tomorrow.” Wow, one whole day to plan the movement of immigration agents not trained in airport security to hundreds of airports across the c…  ( 16 min )

If California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s goal is to become liberal America’s least likable Democrat, he’s doing a bang-up job.  On March 25, responding to some babbling social media post by MAGA influencer Benny Johnson, Newsom’s press office wrote: “We got a call from Grindr after this and said your team was their biggest users. Congrats!” Grindr is an LGBTQ+ dating app. So the joke is that Johnson and his right-wing team are gay! And being gay is embarrassing! What a sick burn here in the year 2026! On behalf of decent people everywhere, allow me to say to Newsom and his team: Get lost. Keep your low-brow, high-school-bigot nonsense to yourselves and stop trying to pretend there’s some mythical “middle” in American politics that wants a Democrat unafraid to make homophobic jokes.  Americans are…  ( 15 min )

I don’t mean to sound controversial, but a president shouldn’t be able to walk away from threatening to wipe out an entire civilization ‒ even setting a deadline, as if Armageddon is a bloody reality show ‒ and then carry on like he’s a normal president. Even if Republicans want you to think it's normal. In the sweep of less than 24 hours on April 7, Donald Trump went from threatening genocide to agreeing to a two-week ceasefire with Iran, a ceasefire that appears to give the Middle East nation a lot in return for nothing. Don’t get me wrong, I’m damn glad he stepped away from mass murder. But let’s be honest: America can’t continue with this kind of “Look at me, I’m a crazy former reality show star, tune in to see what I’ll do next?!?” insanity. The world just spent an entire day not know…  ( 14 min )

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is in a space I didn’t know existed. He’s turning out to not be unhinged enough to please the Make America Healthy Again crowd he nurtured with years of anti-vaccine nonsense and crackpot health theories. But at the same time, he’s acting too loony for the always-whackadoodle Trump administration. What’s a longtime conspiracy theorist who guzzles raw milk and swims in sewage supposed to do?  Kennedy is stuck between an army of MAHA loyalists and wellness influencers who specialize in mistakenly thinking they’re smarter than all of science and a president who very mistakenly thinks he’s smarter than everyone. An explosion of measles made Trump and Co. rethink RFK Jr.'s high profile The Wall Street Journal recently reported: “Aides c…  ( 14 min )

A time of war is a time of sacrifice, friends. So I’m sorry to report that the war we already decisively won against Iran, the country whose military we 100% obliterated, is going to cost an additional $200 billion, presumably to ensure extra decisive winning and a side of further obliteration. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said March 19 the new load of cash ‒ which is almost enough to fill your tank at current gas prices ‒ is necessary because: “It takes money to kill bad guys.” Who am I to question a former Fox News host who routinely uses the words “lethality,” “kinetic” and “warfighter”? All must sacrifice during war, so Trump will hand over his ballroom money As Republicans have told the American people repeatedly since the Iran war began, for no apparent reason, we must all sacrifi…  ( 14 min )

The bad news is more than 82 million Americans are having to skip meals, borrow money or cut back on utilities so they can afford health care. The good news is the Pentagon is swimming in millions of dollars worth of ribeye steak and lobster tails, part of more than $93 billion the U.S. Department of Defense spent in September as the fiscal year closed. So while you were putting off a necessary surgery so you could afford gas, the department overseen by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was, in one month, dropping $139,224 on 272 orders of doughnuts, according to a new report by the nonpartisan public-spending watchdog Open the Books. It’s enough to make you want to grab a torch and pitchfork and start marching. Except marching may be out of the question if you haven’t been able to see a doct…  ( 16 min )

I don’t mean to alarm anyone, but President Donald Trump, the guy who catapulted America into a war of choice with Iran, doesn't seem like he’s doing well in the think-y/speak-y cognitive department.  In just the past few days, the leader of our new mission-less war has: boasted of a conversation with a former president that doesn’t seem to have happened; forgotten the gender of two world leaders, including one he helped put in place; and forgotten the “drill, baby, drill” line he has used endlessly, instead slurring out a bizarre three-word motto used by a New York City energy company in the 1950s. During a March 16 news conference, Trump talked about whether other countries will provide help to secure the Strait of Hormuz, saying that “we want them to come and help us with the strait,” a…  ( 15 min )

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

By proudly announcing “a whole civilization will die tonight,” President Donald Trump appears to have moved on from his dreams of a Nobel Peace Prize and embraced historical infamy. On the morning of April 7, the actual president of the United States of America directed these words to the people of Iran: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will.” Those are the words of a tyrant. They are the words of a madman promising genocide. They are the words of a sick human being unworthy of the position he holds. Trump's civilization-threatening words are shocking, even for him No matter how dulled our senses have become to Trump’s unhinged behavior, those words sent shockwaves across the country and the world. Democra…  ( 13 min )

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

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

As the four astronauts on the Artemis II space mission approached the moon and found themselves farther from Earth than any human has ever traveled, a thought crossed my mind: Can we marvel at this? Please? Amid all the chaos in the world right now, can humanity take one beat and acknowledge something remarkable, an exploratory achievement that pushed us deeper into the galaxy that surrounds us than we’ve gone before? Just before 2 p.m. ET on April 6, astronauts aboard the Orion spacecraft were more than 248,655 miles from Earth, surpassing the previous distance record set in 1970 by the Apollo 13 astronauts. The Artemis II mission challenges humanity to do better As the ship continued its trip around the moon, Artemis II commander Reid Wiseman said, “We will continue our journey even fur…  ( 12 min )

Republicans have made it abundantly clear, from behind the presidential seal and in the halls of Congress and on all manner of news networks, that the extremists in America are liberals like me. We are, in the oft-repeated words of President Donald Trump, “radical left lunatics.” We are agitators. Insurrectionists. Thugs. Our ideas are extreme, always. “Radical left climate extremism.” “Extreme gender ideology.” “WOKE, SOCIALIST, and ANTI-AMERICAN Ideology.” Really, MAGA Republicans? You think liberals are the extremists? To all of that, I say: Seriously? You all kneel at the altar of a narcissistic conman who eviscerates every democratic norm he comes across and slaps his name on things like a dollar-store Mussolini. And you want to gaslight people into thinking liberals are the extremis…  ( 15 min )

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

As attorney general, Pam Bondi lied for President Donald Trump. She hurled insults at Democrats for him. She tried to shield him from the Jeffrey Epstein files. She groveled and doused him with praise in Cabinet meetings. But in the end, doing everything the president wanted, selling her soul and whatever shards of dignity she had left, just wasn’t enough. Trump fired Bondi on April 2, making her the second female Cabinet member Trump has dispatched as his presidency spirals. The first was Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, whom Trump canned and then named “a special envoy for the Shield of the Americas,” which I’m still not convinced is a real thing. I assume Bondi will now become assistant to the regional special envoy for the Shield of the Americas. Or maybe she and Noem can start…  ( 13 min )

For every decision President Donald Trump makes, some nearby patsy invariably gets blamed when that decision goes south. Trump throws people under the bus so often that there’s not a single bloodless bus undercarriage left in Washington, DC. Knowing that, I think Pete Hegseth, the former Fox News host cosplaying as a U.S. Defense secretary, might want to don his nicest bus-exhaust-pipe-viewing suit and prepare to get tossed. On March 23, Trump was speaking about the Iran war – the one he says is going great even though it’s not going great – and he referenced Hegseth, slyly detailing a new version of how the whole thing started: “Pete, I think you were the first one to speak up. And you said, ‘Let’s do it.’ Because you can’t let them have a nuclear weapon.”  I’ll pause here so you can have…  ( 13 min )

As campaigning for the midterm elections ramps up, I’m curious what issues Republican candidates will run on. Because at the moment, their best and only platform appears to be: “Oops.” The party of President Donald Trump has, in one quick year, left utter chaos in its wake, working hard to protect the wealthy while doing virtually nothing to improve the lives of regular American voters. GOP lawmakers have shown slavish, often embarrassing fealty to their confused and intemperate leader, overseeing shocking domestic cruelty and violence stemming from overzealous mass deportation raids. U.S. citizens have been shot and killed by federal agents on the streets of major cities. Grocery prices remain painfully high, despite Trump’s promises to lower them on day one of his second term. Gas prices…  ( 14 min )

My fellow Americans, our nation is at war, and so it is vital that we set aside our political differences and patriotically rally around our president’s ballroom. President Donald Trump did not demolish the East Wing of the White House for nothing, and if we allow our war with Iran to draw attention away from the president’s planned $400 million ballroom, even for a moment, the enemy wins. On March 29, the president spoke briefly about the Iran war aboard Air Force One before pivoting to the more important subject: ballroom. “I'm so busy that I don't have time to do this,” he said, speaking at length and showing reporters a slew of large ballroom illustrations printed on poster boards. “But I'm fighting wars and other things. But this is very important, because this is going to be with us …  ( 15 min )

Everyone’s laughing at my president, Donald J. Trump, because he cast a mail-in ballot for a March 24 special election in Florida. They think it’s funny that the GOP candidate he endorsed, in a district that contains the president’s Mar-a-Lago resort, lost. They find it hilarious that Trump, who has bravely and boldly and incessantly criticized mail-in voting and suggesting it was “Rigged,” just went ahead and voted that way anyway, even though the polls were open when he was in Florida. Well, hah-hah-hah, you chuckling losers. Very funny. Once again, you’ve proved your own ignorance. Trump used mail-in voting to PROVE that mail-in voting is fraudulent! Is Trump pushing the SAVE Act, which would make it much harder to vote by mail, like a man facing an existential crisis? Yes. Did he say …  ( 13 min )

You know, now that I can’t afford hamburger meat or gasoline and America is stuck in another war in the Middle East, I’m starting to think putting some of the worst people in politics in charge of the country may have been a mistake. I mean, it seemed like a good idea at the time. Granted, Donald Trump had previously proved himself incompetent and tried to overturn a free-and-fair election, but I thought, “Maybe giving a guy this corrupt and unqualified a second chance at being leader of the free world is just what America needs to shake things up.” And then when Trump started his second term by appointing a Cabinet that was a “who’s who” of “who’s nuts,” I rolled with it. Sure, the president selected a wildly incompetent Fox News host like Pete Hegseth to lead the military, but I thought,…  ( 15 min )

Everyone’s laughing at my president, Donald J. Trump, because he cast a mail-in ballot for a March 24 special election in Florida. They think it’s funny that the GOP candidate he endorsed, in a district that contains the president’s Mar-a-Lago resort, lost. They find it hilarious that Trump, who has bravely and boldly and incessantly criticized mail-in voting and suggesting it was “Rigged,” just went ahead and voted that way anyway, even though the polls were open when he was in Florida. Well, hah-hah-hah, you chuckling losers. Very funny. Once again, you’ve proved your own ignorance. Trump used mail-in voting to PROVE that mail-in voting is fraudulent! Is Trump pushing the SAVE Act, which would make it much harder to vote by mail, like a man facing an existential crisis? Yes. Did he say …  ( 11 min )

President Donald Trump has talked endlessly and inaccurately about how his predecessor’s economy was a “disaster” and a “catastrophe.” He even once said, “You could take the five worst presidents in American history, and put them together, and they would not have done the damage Joe Biden has done to our nation in just a few short years. Not even close.” Well, Mr. President, I have some bad news. You’ve bungled your second term so thoroughly that voters are wishing they could return to the halcyon days of “Sleepy Joe” Biden.   A new Harvard CAPS/Harris survey found that more than half of U.S. voters think the economy is worse under Trump than it was under Biden. And 62% blame the current state of the economy on Trump rather than Biden. To adopt a bit of Trump’s typical patter: “They’re beg…  ( 14 min )

As Donald Trump behaves more and more like a mad king than a president – forcing America into an already disastrous war with Iran without congressional approval, targeting political enemies, babbling about building ballrooms and arches – the third round of aptly named "No Kings" protests arrives to highlight just how much our president is disliked. Spoiler alert: It’s a lot. Millions are expected to turn out on March 28 to more than 3,000 planned No Kings events nationwide, filling the streets of big cities and the parks and sidewalks of small towns. And they will be angry with Trump’s version of America, one that is unrecognizable, unpopular and crumbling. War, skyrocketing gas and food prices, now airport chaos. Way to go, Trump! We are at war with Iran for no clear reason. Gas prices h…  ( 14 min )

As NASA’s Artemis II mission continues and the four astronauts in the Orion capsule prepare to leave Earth’s orbit, one of my numerous cislunar sources asked that I relay the following note from the moon, our planet’s only natural satellite. Dear people of Earth: Hey there. It’s me, your moon. Hope you all are doing well and not getting too dizzy! (That’s a planetary rotation joke. Sorry, it’s been a while since I’ve communicated with anyone.) I can’t help but notice you’ve launched one of those tin-can-looking thingies into your orbit again. That’s cool. Yeah. Definitely cool. Anyhoo, I get the sense you all might be aiming that thing in my direction. In fact, I noticed a little write-up on the whole Artemis II mission that says you’re planning to whizz by my dark side and snap some pictu…  ( 12 min )

Is it just me, or does it seem like Pope Leo XIV won’t stop talking about religion? He’s all “the Gospel says this” and “Jesus taught us that” – dude, we get it, you’re head of the worldwide Roman Catholic Church. But does that really make you an expert? As our Catholic Vice President JD Vance, who has a book coming out on his conversion to Catholicism, said, “I think it's very, very important for the pope to be careful when he talks about matters of theology.” Exactly. Vance has been a Catholic since 2019, the year Lil Nas X’s "Old Town Road" hit No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, so I’d take his warning seriously, Pope. He’s seven years deep into the Catholic faith – you don’t wanna mess with him. He’s part of the new Catholicism, the one that’s afraid to say “transubstantiation” beca…  ( 14 min )

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

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 )

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

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

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

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

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

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

So a group of scientists got together and decided to give cocaine to a bunch of salmon. It sounds like the kind of fantastic idea a person comes up with while using cocaine, then talks about for 13 consecutive hours to someone who is also doing cocaine and eagerly nodding in agreement while repeating, “It makes. So. Much. Sense.” Not-at-all shockingly, the resulting study found coked-up salmon swim faster, a conclusion that didn’t really need to involve salmon. Anyway, as weird as the study seemed, there was a point to it. Cocaine and its metabolites are “being excreted and subsequently detected in aquatic environments due to insufficient removal during wastewater treatment,” according to the paper published in the April edition of the journal Current Biology. Humans are sending cocaine in…  ( 12 min )

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 )

SEATTLE — You may not have heard it yet, but America’s legal community recently let out a roar here in the Emerald City, a collective call from retired federal judges and a bipartisan array of academics and legal organizations: The rule of law matters, and it will be protected. The two-day symposium, “Neither Sword Nor Purse,” held at the University of Washington School of Law, was necessary because of one person: President Donald J. Trump. His threats against the judiciary and the ease with which he and his administration ignore or boastfully refuse to follow the law are without precedent. He is, quite simply, a threat to judicial independence, and he shows no hesitation to jackhammer the very foundation of our democracy. J. Michael Luttig, a former federal judge and an icon in the conser…  ( 15 min )

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 )

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

I 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 …  ( 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 )

In any other news cycle, the kidnapping of Nancy Guthrie would be the biggest story in the universe. “Beloved morning show anchor’s mom was kidnapped, and now the ransom negotiations are playing out in full public view” is full-on unprecedented. But you and I are living in the Trump age, in which cries of “this should be the biggest scandal ever!” are a daily occurrence, to the point of fatigue. Thus, it’s been difficult for me to focus on the plight of Savannah Guthrie and her family when I’ve also had to keep tabs on ICE agents killing people in broad daylight, the Trump administration actively suppressing information about history’s most star-studded human trafficking ring, a looming megawar with Iran, and — Christ, I’m tired. The human mind has only so much bandwidth. Yet: HOLY S—T, …  ( 1 min )

A quick disclaimer before we get to the take: The Milan Winter Olympics have been a godsend. It’s the dead of February, there’s no more football on, and every news story coming out of Washington makes me want to take a swan dive off the Golden Gate Bridge. So thank God that you and I have been blessed with two weeks of profoundly exciting winter events (plus cross-country skiing), all set behind the best scenery porn that any live event could possibly offer. I want to go skiing in Italy now. I have to go skiing in Italy now, or I will die. I’ve seen NBC’s drone cam footage of those slopes, and you have, too. No one could possibly deny the attraction that footage elicits. So long as you and I get to actually, you know, watch it. This is where our take begins. Because while NBC’s aesthetic…  ( 1 min )

Given current circumstances, the coming 2026 WNBA season is strictly a theoretical construct. It should begin on Friday, May 8. Opening night should include a late tilt between the Seattle Storm and your Golden State Valkyries. This season could even include reigning league MVP A’ja Wilson playing for a new team, because 80% of the league’s players are free agents. You and I should be excited about all of the sweet, sweet hoops action that all of this promises. The problem is that the WNBA is in some really deep s—t right now.  Thanks to circumstances tragically familiar to any lifelong sports fan, a dispute over money is threatening to scuttle the beginning of this season, and maybe even all of it given how s—tty things are going right now between players and the league. It’s a collecti…  ( 1 min )

As we no longer have a functional journalism industry in the United States, it has fallen to me, a man who’d really prefer to be filling out an NCAA bracket right now, to alert you to the various criminal losers who serve as the face of Trump 2.0. I’ve introduced you to Vice Asshole JD Vance, of course. I’ve also given you a primer on War Department chief Pete Hegseth, who’s hard at work triggering World War III while also frantically searching for the nearest open liquor store. Who else have I had to take notice of against my will lately? Oh right: alleged dognapper Pam Bondi, newly deposed Homeland Security chief Kristi Noem, and Noem’s would-be successor Markwayne Mullin, whose confirmation hearings are going swimmingly as I type this. I wish that was the end of the list, because that …  ( 1 min )

While you were busy paying attention to the continued end of the world this past weekend, you might have missed the story that movies are officially BACK. That’s because “Project Hail Mary,” the sci-fi adventure starring Ryan Gosling, blew past initial box office projections and had the second largest non-franchise opening weekend in history, surpassed only by Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer.” Not only was “PHM” based on an original-ish story, but it was shot on actual sets, just like movies should be. Does this mean that you, the moviegoer, can expect more of this kind of quality cinema at the multiplex in the coming years? Well, I took my 13-year-old to the movie last night and subjected it to my patented Dad Movie Test. Let’s get right to it. What’s the deal with ‘Project Hail Mary’? …  ( 1 min )

The Oscars are happening on Sunday night, and it’s always morbid fun to see which nominees have potentially torpedoed their chances by doing something stupid during right before the ceremony. You might remember last year, when “Emilia Perez” star Karla Sofia Gascon sank her chances at Best Actress, along with “Emilia Perez’s” chances at Best Picture, by being an Islamophobic s—t for brains on Twitter.  This year’s potential backlash victim, Jessie Buckley of “Hamnet,” is a different story. In Gascon’s case, the backlash was justified because of the tweets, and because “Emilia Perez” is a horrible movie. In Buckley’s case, anyone who’s got a bad thing to say about that woman will be on the receiving end of a vicious ass-beating from me. Because Jessie Buckley earned the s—t out of her Osc…  ( 1 min )

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

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

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

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

(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 )

Read Anthony Flaccovento’s “Working People Everywhere Need A Rural New Deal” at Democracy: A Journal of Ideas. Here’s a teaser: A Rural New Deal is urgently needed to help revitalize small towns and rural communities. That should be good news enough. But the added good news is that the policies and actions contained in the... Read more »  ( 8 min )

Putting Paxton’s primary run-off victory in perspective, he got less than 886 thousand votes, compared to more than a million votes that Jame Talarico got in his Democratic primary. Adam Wren and Irie Sentner write in “James Talarico’s theory of victory in Texas” that “Recent internal polling from a pro-Talarico PAC shows the Democrat has... Read more »  ( 10 min )

There’s something magical about fictional bands. Maybe it’s because they only exist in perfectly crafted worlds where every song seems bigger, every performance feels legendary, and every concert scene somehow captures the fantasy of rock stardom better than real life ever could. Over the decades, movies and television have created fake bands that became cultural...  ( 11 min )

Trump’s DOJ voter roll losses are getting louder a.cta_button{-moz-box-sizing:content-box !important;-webkit-box-sizing:content-box !important;box-sizing:content-box !important;vertical-align:middle}.hs-breadcrumb-menu{list-style-type:none;margin:0px 0px 0px 0px;padding:0px 0px 0px 0px}.hs-breadcrumb-menu-item{float:left;padding:10px 0px 10px 10px}.hs-breadcrumb-menu-divider:before{content:'›';padding-left:10px}.hs-featured-image-link{border:0}.hs-featured-image{float:right;margin:0 0 20px 20px;max-width:50%}@media (max-width: 568px){.hs-featured-image{float:none;margin:0;width:100%;max-width:100%}}.hs-screen-reader-text{clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);height:1px;overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;width:1px} 96 …  ( 4 min )

Ken Paxton’s crusade to overturn the 2020 election a.cta_button{-moz-box-sizing:content-box !important;-webkit-box-sizing:content-box !important;box-sizing:content-box !important;vertical-align:middle}.hs-breadcrumb-menu{list-style-type:none;margin:0px 0px 0px 0px;padding:0px 0px 0px 0px}.hs-breadcrumb-menu-item{float:left;padding:10px 0px 10px 10px}.hs-breadcrumb-menu-divider:before{content:'›';padding-left:10px}.hs-featured-image-link{border:0}.hs-featured-image{float:right;margin:0 0 20px 20px;max-width:50%}@media (max-width: 568px){.hs-featured-image{float:none;margin:0;width:100%;max-width:100%}}.hs-screen-reader-text{clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);height:1px;overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;width:1px} 96 …  ( 4 min )

96 *{box-sizing:border-box}body{margin:0;padding:0}a[x-apple-data-detectors]{color:inherit!important;text-decoration:inherit!important}#MessageViewBody a{color:inherit;text-decoration:none}p{line-height:inherit}.desktop_hide,.desktop_hide table{mso-hide:all;display:none;max-height:0;overflow:hidden}.image_block img+div{display:none}sub,sup{font-size:75%;line-height:0} @media (max-width:670px){.row-content{width:100%!important}.stack .column{width:100%;display:block}.mobile_hide{min-height:0;max-height:0;max-width:0;display:none;overflow:hidden;font-size:0}.desktop_hide,.desktop_hide table{display:table!important;max-height:none!important}.social_block .social-table{display:inline-block!important}} sup, sub { font-size: 100% !important; } sup { mso-text-raise:10% } sub { mso-text-raise:-1…  ( 2 min )

Election deniers and Jan. 6 rioters want a piece of Trump's $1.8 billion slush fund a.cta_button{-moz-box-sizing:content-box !important;-webkit-box-sizing:content-box !important;box-sizing:content-box !important;vertical-align:middle}.hs-breadcrumb-menu{list-style-type:none;margin:0px 0px 0px 0px;padding:0px 0px 0px 0px}.hs-breadcrumb-menu-item{float:left;padding:10px 0px 10px 10px}.hs-breadcrumb-menu-divider:before{content:'›';padding-left:10px}.hs-featured-image-link{border:0}.hs-featured-image{float:right;margin:0 0 20px 20px;max-width:50%}@media (max-width: 568px){.hs-featured-image{float:none;margin:0;width:100%;max-width:100%}}.hs-screen-reader-text{clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);height:1px;overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;width:1px} …  ( 5 min )

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The myth that wealthier residents will flee higher-tax cities and states en masse for lower-tax locations has been debunked time and time again by researchers, but right-wing media outlets have repeatedly claimed that higher taxes on the rich that are being implemented by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and New York Gov. Kathy Hochul will cause an exodus of millionaires.  ( 8 min )

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This post is part of a series chronicling news coverage of rising prices in the United States. See more here.  ( 3 min )

This post is part of a series chronicling news coverage of rising prices in the United States. See more here.  ( 2 min )

This post is part of a series chronicling news coverage of rising prices in the United States. See more here.  ( 2 min )

Podcaster Benny Johnson, while discussing ongoing negotiations with Iran during his May 24 show, said that “I don't understand people like Mark Levin,” later asking, “How many people do you think are being paid by Israel?” Levin, a staunch supporter of President Donald Trump’s war with Iran, responded on his May 26 radio show, lashing out at “BJ Benny Johnson” over multiple segments. Here are some things that Levin said; the clips are below with relevant transcript. "Benny Johnson. Never heard of this guy before. He's been a grifter. He's been a drifter. He's got serious questions raised about plagiarism in the past and things of that sort." "BJ Benny Johnson, who I know nothing about other than what I just studied. I researched his background. He's a real sleazeball." "See, if you're low …  ( 14 min )

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Environmental justice coverage — reporting that connects the harmful effects of pollution, environmental hazards, or policy decisions to socially marginalized communities — remained nearly absent from corporate broadcast TV news last year, even as environmental risks and pollution exposure affected communities across the country.  In 2025, ABC, CBS, and NBC aired just 2 environmental justice segments combined, a further decline from recent years and the lowest level recorded since 2018. The absence of environmental justice reporting is not a gap in topic coverage, but a failure to explain how environmental risk is distributed across vulnerable communities. Broadcast networks aired numerous segments about industrial accidents, pollution, and regulatory changes, but these were typically fram…  ( 9 min )

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"The pendulum has swung," DOJ's Jared Littman said in a court hearing Wednesday, arguing that all transgender people — at all ages — can be denied needed medical care.

I’m old enough to remember when Texas was a Democratic state, and am happy to report that the extremism of the Lone Star GOP could make it highly competitive this November, as I explained at New York: For people of a certain vintage, or students of history, the idea of Texas being an absolute wasteland... Read more »  ( 10 min )

This stub from following article, “A Simple Model for Forecasting the Impact of Mid-Cycle Redistricting on the 2026 House Elections,” is cross-posted from centerforpolitics.org: A House forecasting model based on post-World War II history, the number of seats the presidential party holds going into the midterm, and House generic ballot polling can give us a... Read more »  ( 7 min )

A kind reader suggested I try the view-lossage command to display a list of recent keystrokes. This would be helpful for those times when I press a key accidentally and don't know what I did (as described in "zap-to-char M-z"). The output resembles what you'd get from edit-kbd-macro (assuming that a keyboard macro had been defined). This provides an alternate way to define a keyboard macro -- just select the desired portion of the output and invoke read-kbd-macro .  At this point you can "play back" those keystrokes with C-x e. After I understood view-lossage ,  I skimmed through the list of commands that start with view- (by doing M-x view- TAB ). The commands view-buffer ,   view-file (and variants that view in another buffer , window , frame ) provide a safe (read-only) way to examine the contents of a buffer or file. Entering M-x view-file-other-frame .emacs allows me to display my init file in a new Emacs frame and close it (by pressing "q") when I'm done with it. And then I don't have to worry about changing it inadvertently.  ( 6 min )

this post by Case Duckworth about Emacs bankruptcy but this post isn’t really about Duckworth’s post. Rather, it’s about the whole notion of Emacs bankruptcy and whether it’s something we should embrace as a routine activity. Some writers view it as part of the cycle of our Emacs life and recommend it as a regular activity. As I wrote last year, my init.el is an organic entity that grows and adapts as my needs change. Sometimes I delete configurations or packages that I no longer use but most often I add a configuration or package as my needs change or I learn something new. I’ve put a lot of work into evolving my configuration and I can’t think of any reason that I’d want to abandon all that work and start over. Much better to fix the parts that need fixing and save the parts that are working. My configuration is by no means a carefully considered project that has grown according to some master plan. Rather, it has evolved to meet my changing needs and newfound knowledge. Sometimes there are experiments that don’t work out and when that happens, I simply delete the offending lines and keep going. At no point have I ever felt the need to just quit and start over. That strikes me as crazy. It is, I suppose, an Emacs specific example of the urge to scrap an existing system and rewrite it. As Joel says, that always ends in tears. The TL;DR is that I reject the idea of Emacs bankruptcy and think that in almost every case, you should too.  ( 5 min )

1. TLDR   tldr space-tree is a tree-based workspace manager for Emacs. Workspaces are a battle-tested UX concept across operating systems, but in Emacs and most OSes alike, they're flat: you get a row, a grid, or a numbered list, but never a workspace inside a workspace. My requirements for a workspace manager were arbitrary-depth nesting, no naming tax, no mandatory persistence, no per-workspace buffer scoping, and a build that leans on Emacs's existing window-state primitives. The cognitive-psychology case for hierarchical organization turns out to be unusually robust: working-memory ceilings (Cowan 2001), expert chunking (Chase & Simon 1973), and direct gains in recall (Bower et al. 1969) all support the idea that a user-authored tree is easier to hold in mind than the same work flat…  ( 40 min )

96 Ask a Manager - new articles p{ margin:10px 0; padding:0; } table{ border-collapse:collapse; } h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6{ display:block; margin:0; padding:0; } img,a img{ border:0; height:auto; outline:none; text-decoration:none; } body,#bodyTable,#bodyCell{ height:100%; margin:0; padding:0; width:100%; } .mcnPreviewText{ display:none !important; } #outlook a{ padding:0; } img{ -ms-interpolation-mode:bicubic; } table{ mso-table-lspace:0pt; mso-table-rspace:0pt; } .ReadMsgBody{ width:100%; } .ExternalClass{ width:100%; } p,a,li,td,blockquote{ mso-line-height-rule:exactly; } a[href^=tel],a[href^=sms]{ color:i…  ( 3 min )

.ck-link { text-decoration: underline; } @media only screen { .email * { word-break: break-word; } } @media screen and (max-width: 384px) { .mail-message-content { width: 414px !important; } } @media only screen and (max-width:600px) { .ck-mobile-font-size { font-size:50px !important; } } Here's how to brag about yourself in a way that's appealing to your recruiter  ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ …  ( 6 min )

It’s OffBallFC Launch Day, We Have An Arsenal Of Goods96 :root { color-scheme: light; supported-color-schemes: light; } body { margin: 0; padding: 0; min-width: 100%!important; -ms-text-size-adjust: 100% !important; -webkit-transform: scale(1) !important; -webkit-text-size-adjust: 100% !important; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased !important; } .body { word-wrap: normal; word-spacing:normal; } table.mso { width: 100%; border-collapse: collapse; padding: 0; table-layout: fixed; } img { border: 0; outline: none; } table { mso-table-lspace: 0px; mso-table-rspace: 0px; } td, a, span { mso-line-height-rule: exactly; } #root [x-apple-data-detectors=true], a[x-apple-data-detectors=true], #MessageViewBody a { color: inherit !important; text-decoration: inherit !important; f…  ( 8 min )

Welcome back to Minor Dilemmas, where a member of Defector's Parents Council will answer your questions on surviving family life. Have a question? Email us at minordilemmas@defector.com. This week, Giri answers a question about how to talk with other parents about having an easier-than-expected experience raising a baby.  ( 22 min )

This week on Nothing But Respect, we were thrilled to be joined by the comedian and actor Gavin Matts. You may know him from his special Progression, or his work on the TV series Hacks or Ramy, though we know him primarily as a ball-knower and British Columbian of distinction. We had a long, fun conversation about Gavin's love for the New York Knicks, the relocation of the Vancouver Grizzlies that forced him into Roninhood, how he got kicked out of the NYC comedian run (which previous NBR guest Devon Walker talked about in January), his scouting report on Ramy Youssef's game, and how he tried to get into the White Men Can't Jump remake. It was a fun one! You can find Nothing But Respect in Apple Podcasts or whatever podcast app you use. Follow the show on Instagram, and contact the Broke Jumper Tip Line at (347) 380-6426. Thanks for listening!  ( 14 min )

There comes a time in every skeleton's death when, upon their being discovered in a grave hugging another skeleton, modern people start foaming at the mouth guessing at what that relationship might have been. This is understandable and quite defensible from my perspective as a modern person. An embrace is a gesture that transcends however many centuries might separate us. Of course we might wonder who these two people were to each other. We might want to know the nature of their love. This is of course an assumption. An embrace is not proof of love, but it is a powerful suggestion of it. In archaeology, people buried in double and multiple burials are often interpreted as having some kind of connection, whether through social or family ties. An adult buried with a child might be interpreted to be the grave of a mother and a son, for example, and a double burial of two adults, male and female, is often interpreted to be a couple. But sometimes assumptions are overturned by evidence. In 2024, a paper that extracted ancient DNA from the skeletal material in Pompeii's plaster casts challenged several traditional interpretations. For example, the casts of an adult with a golden bracelet and a child sitting on their lap, traditionally assumed to be a mother and child, were revealed to belong to an adult male who was not related to the child. And the smaller of two people who died in an embrace, traditionally interpreted as sisters or lovers, was revealed to be a man who was unrelated to the other skeleton. This suggests this man might have died embracing another man or a tall woman, both of which are certainly more exciting options than sisters.  ( 21 min )

A terrible thing keeps happening to me. About three hours before the start of each game of the Western Conference Finals, I start to enter the "pumped and jacked zone." That's when I get pumped and jacked for the game, and plan my evening around my excitement to watch it. And then, without fail, at the moment that my anticipation has reached its peak, I am cruelly yanked from the pumped and jacked zone and thrown headlong into the "what the fuck is this?" zone by NBC's stupid camera angle. Several times during this series, NBC has broadcast early portions of the game from a camera angle that sucks. Someone involved in the broadcast seems to think this is a cool and novel experience for viewers at home, but I can assure this person that they are wrong. I do not feel like I am being offered a visual treat during these moments. Not only does this angle make it feel like I am watching the game from the perspective of a perplexed ghost unable to fully ascend to my eternal reward, it makes it harder to follow the action. As soon as the ball gets swung to the opposite side of the court, the badly angled camera loses it behind all the bodies standing in the way. It would be one thing if it only made me feel kind of nauseous at the start of each game, but I routinely can't tell what the hell is going on.  ( 14 min )

I know that every Presidents' Trophy winner has lost in the playoffs before the Cup Final in each of the last 13 seasons, and that the Colorado Avalanche advancing even this far made them more successful than your average No. 1 seed. I get that Cale Makar was too injured to play for the first two games, and that Nathan MacKinnon didn't finish the series anywhere near 100 percent. I'll even concede that there was a certain amount of hot goalie woo-woo with Carter Hart in net for Vegas. Doesn't matter. This sweep was total humiliation for the Avalanche. It was a vulgar disgrace to the city of Denver and state of Colorado and much of the Mountain Time Zone. It was antagonistic to the idea of a fun Stanley Cup Final. It was an insult to those who ever praised the Avalanche, perhaps in blog form. The last four games lost by this 121-point Colorado team were so shamefully ugly that they actually reached back in time and made the rest of the division look like crud by comparison. You're telling me the Wild could only take one game off of these chumps? Contract the Dallas Stars. Facing a team that changed their coach with eight games remaining in the regular season, the Avs couldn't find a way to take even just one measly game, not even a game they led by three goals. They couldn't score. They couldn't keep Vegas off the board. They lost because they stunk. With their season on the line, Vegas made the Avs look like a bunch of high schoolers at open skate. A deep, creatively inspired roster that ranked first in both goals scored and goals allowed ranked first in shittiness when it mattered. With maybe one or two exceptions they served up only the limpest of challenges for Hart in goal. The Avs were caged by Vegas, who seemed to play with more excitement and enthusiasm than the guys whose season and legacy were on the line. Colorado gets to return nearly the whole of this lineup for one more year if they so choose, but after such a shocking crashout, they might not want to.  ( 15 min )

The Vegas Golden Knights are a grudgingly acquired taste with one of the gristliest coaches in modern North American sport, but when they serve the meal as they did Tuesday night, you're eating it because the alternative is leaving hungry. Sweeping the battered Colorado Avalanche with a clinical 2-1 win puts them back into the Stanley Cup Final, and doing it the chesty and bullying way they did, is very much a Vegas copyright. The NHL has a performatively polite veneer when someone in their midst succeeds, but it does so through gritted teeth when it comes to Las Vegas, and you will hear that reluctance for the next week while Montreal and Carolina sort out the right side of the bracket. To call in John Tortorella to add tacks to that sandpaper makes little sense until you see it in action and discover that it was the only thing to be done.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WiYsxEjAe7k Last night's closeout game didn't look particularly unique, except that the Knights took the early lead after spotting the Avs the first period of the previous two. But once the games got legs, they played out the same way: with the Knights controlling play, space and time. They were healthier than Colorado, but injuries are not granted a high level of mitigation in hockey. It's a far more cynical and binary matter: If you're playing, you're healthy enough.  ( 18 min )

Every spring, as the flowers open and the days warm, Knicks merchandise bursts out of closets in New York City. Hats, T-shirts, and jackets adorn eager New Yorkers across the five boroughs. I wish I were a mature enough person to handle this particular bandwagoning with grace, and I do arrive there eventually. But there's always an initial tingle of irritation at the stolen valor. Hey, well-adjusted young urban professional who brought their kid to the playground: You didn't suffer for that shirt. You weren't with me watching every Emmanuel Mudiay turnover of the 2018-19 NBA season. The mere name "Isiah" doesn't trigger a twitch in your eyelid. Your mind is unburdened by the knowledge of what lined Kevin Knox's draft-day suit. You haven't encountered the general concept of Mike Sweetney. I know that after each Knicks team flames out in the postseason, you will take that hat off just as breezily as you put it on. You don't know the pain of watching this franchise discover vivid, exotic ways to fail: the squandered leads, the sputtering fourth quarters, the apocalyptic injuries, the Haliburton bounce. Your hat is just a wardrobe decision; the brain beneath it bears no scars. That's what's so surreal about the spring of 2026: This time, there are no new scars at all. By completing a sweep of the Cleveland Cavaliers Monday night, the Knicks have already clinched a spot in the NBA Finals, at least two games before their future opponent. What, in regards to basketball, will we even have to complain about to our grandchildren someday?  ( 22 min )

The Oklahoma City Thunder have options. Their best player got off to a rough start in Game 5. Before scoring a single point Tuesday night, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander committed three live-ball turnovers and a shooting foul, leading to seven points for the visiting San Antonio Spurs, and he missed four shots of his own, including a pair of layups. "If it was four or five mes out there, we would've been down 20 after the first quarter," Gilgeous-Alexander said after the game. The Thunder were not down 20 after the first quarter; they were, in fact, up two points, and would spend the rest of the night lengthening their lead and fortifying their advantages, cruising to 127–114 victory. While Gilgeous-Alexander struggled for space and rhythm, Chet Holmgren took and made some tough mid-rangers over …  ( 30 min )

Green Bay Packers running back Josh Jacobs was arrested on Tuesday in relation to an alleged domestic violence incident that occurred on May 23. He has been charged with battery, criminal damage to property, disorderly conduct, strangulation and suffocation, and intimidation of a victim. The news of Jacobs's arrest was announced by the Hobart-Lawrence Police Department in Hobart, Wis. The department put out a press release on Tuesday announcing that officers had been dispatched to a disturbance involving Jacobs at 8:37 a.m. on May 23. The subsequent investigation led to Jacobs's arrest on Tuesday. The department's press release also stated that it will be releasing no further information. Attorneys representing Jacobs have released a statement denying the allegations against their client. From ESPN:  ( 13 min )

The Royals have designated struggling left-hander Bailey Falter for assignment, per a team announcement. He’s out of minor league options, so simply sending him to Triple-A Omaha without a DFA wasn’t possible. Righty Mason Black was recalled from Omaha in a corresponding move. Falter, 29, has appeared in five games (two of them starts) for […]  ( 8 min )

A three-judge panel concludes that Alabama lawmakers discriminated against Black voters, and that the question is not a “particularly close call.” The post Federal Judges Uninterested In Supreme Court’s Excuses For Alabama’s Racist Map appeared first on Balls and Strikes.  ( 8 min )

Friday’s ruling that Kilmar Abrego Garcia was the victim of vindictive prosecution by the Justice Department has already been cited...  ( 11 min )

oh, please

Four wins the regime didn’t see coming

John Cornyn probably never had a chance to keep his seat. The senior Republican senator from Texas has repugnant, far-right politics. He even used the confirmation hearing for Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson to float legal theories for ending same-sex marriage. But he is mild-mannered — a flaw in today’s GOP — and he doesn’t have a history of flashy corruption scandals and adultery, unlike Ken Paxton, the state attorney general who handily defeated him in the Republican primary on Tuesday night. Paxton is just a bigger scoundrel than Cornyn, so of course he drew a last-minute endorsement from Donald Trump, who took credit for Paxton’s victory, gloating on Truth Social with a meme declaring “Ken Paxton wins! Endorsed by Trump!” over a photo of the president glowering in a face he believes loo…  ( 8 min )

The Royals sent veteran catcher Elias Díaz outright to Triple-A Omaha, according to the MLB.com transaction log. It’s unclear if he’ll report or elect free agency. Díaz was designated for assignment last week when K.C. recalled speedy outfielder Tyler Tolbert. Kansas City had carried three catchers for the previous five weeks. Salvador Perez and Carter Jensen have each logged […]  ( 7 min )

Royals left-hander Cole Ragans will be shut down from throwing for the next few days after feeling stiffness in his elbow. Kansas City’s ace went to the injured list with a left elbow impingement in early May. Ragans pitched well in a rehab outing on Saturday, but “did not recover well” from the start, manager […]  ( 8 min )

The motion highlights other cases either dismissed by courts or by the Trump administration itself in the wake of other vindictive prosecution claims.

Raw link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xl-ifABU45A Tomorrow, the 28th of May 2026 at 17:30 Europe/Athens time, I will join Sacha Chua’s live stream. We will talk about the Emacs blog carnival topic for this month, which is “May I recommend”. The video will be recorded for future reference. I already have some ideas and am looking forward to our chat!  ( 1 min )

Sometimes I discover an Emacs feature after an accidental keystroke. If I can remember the keystroke, I'll invoke the keystroke help (C-h k) to learn about it. Or sometimes the prompt in the mode line will suggest the function's name. Today, the keystroke was M-z, which is bound to the function [[zap-to-char][zap-to-char]]. It seems to be ideal if, like me, you doze briefly while typing a senteeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee Oops, there I go again! To fix that I can just press M-- M-z t to delete all the trailing "e" characters. Note that M-- is invoked by holding down the Alt key while pressing hyphen. It defines a negative prefix argument, which instructs zap-to-char to "go backward," deleting all characters from point to the specified character ("t"). I'm not sure how or why you'd want the default "forward" behavior. What accidental keystroke have you discovered recently?  ( 8 min )

adopting mu4e as his email client. It’s not an uninformed decision. Martin has tried lots and lots and email clients and mostly hates them all. As a long time Mac Head, he doesn’t care for the mu4e UI—it is, he says, the opposite of what a proper Mac app UI should be. But yet. It does have a lot of features that other mail clients don’t have. You can take a look at his post for the details. Martin complains, rightly, that mu4e is hard to configure, especially considering that you also have to deal with isync/mbsync or something similar to retrieve email from it’s IMAP server. Longtime readers will remember my own struggles with that. I managed to avoid one of the problems that Martin dealt with by forwarding all my email accounts to a single account from which I retrieve them. That saves a lot of trouble on the mbsync end but still allows me to handle each account separately within mu4e. If I answer an email, mu4e looks at the address the email was sent to and automatically sends it from the right address. If I initiate an email, it’s a simple matter to arrange it to be sent from any of my accounts. Martin’s post on mu4e is actually a pretty good review of the app and worth looking at if you’re an Emacs user looking for a new email client.  ( 5 min )

As I started to write more emails to other bloggers, the annoyance with macOS' built-in email client grew. It wasn’t just the fact that it has small text that’s hard on the eyes especially on the harsh white background anymore; it just started to feel restricting. Emacs is my natural writing environment for longer texts, like blog posts or the kind of emails I end up writing. I’ve considered mu4e before, but setting it up seems a daunting overkill: the place I would benefit from mu4e is work, but I’m blocked by Microsoft-only 2FA authentication, so I have to stick with Outlook; meanwhile, for the three or so emails I write to other bloggers, it doesn’t require such heavy lifting. One day about two weeks ago, I just fired up Denote, and suddenly it clicked. Denote, when you invoke it for a …  ( 3 min )

Americans United for Separation of Church and State :root { color-scheme: light dark; supported-color-schemes: light dark; } ReadMsgBody { width: 100%; } .ExternalClass { width: 100%; } .ExternalClass, .ExternalClass p, .ExternalClass span, .ExternalClass font, .ExternalClass td, .ExternalClass div { line-height: 100%; } body { height: 100% !important; margin: 0 auto !important; padding: 0 !important; width: 100% !important; -webkit-text-size-adjust: 100%; -ms-text-size-adjust: 100%; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; word-spacing: normal; } a[x-apple-data-detectors] { color: inherit !important; text-decoration: none !important; font-size: inherit !important; font-family: inherit !important; font-weight: i…  ( 4 min )

Today was a bad day for Trump in the redistricting war a.cta_button{-moz-box-sizing:content-box !important;-webkit-box-sizing:content-box !important;box-sizing:content-box !important;vertical-align:middle}.hs-breadcrumb-menu{list-style-type:none;margin:0px 0px 0px 0px;padding:0px 0px 0px 0px}.hs-breadcrumb-menu-item{float:left;padding:10px 0px 10px 10px}.hs-breadcrumb-menu-divider:before{content:'›';padding-left:10px}.hs-featured-image-link{border:0}.hs-featured-image{float:right;margin:0 0 20px 20px;max-width:50%}@media (max-width: 568px){.hs-featured-image{float:none;margin:0;width:100%;max-width:100%}}.hs-screen-reader-text{clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);height:1px;overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;width:1px} 96 …  ( 5 min )

Top stories 05/20/2026_copy#outlook a { padding:0; } .ExternalClass { width:100%; } .ExternalClass, .ExternalClass p, .ExternalClass span, .ExternalClass font, .ExternalClass td, .ExternalClass div { line-height: 100%; } table td { border-collapse: collapse; mso-line-height-rule: exactly; } .editable.image { font-size: 0 !important; line-height: 0 !important; } .nl2go_preheader { display: none !important; mso-hide:all !important; mso-line-height-rule: exactly; visibility: hidden !important; line-height: 0px !important; font-size: 0px !important; } body { width:100% !important; -webkit-text-size-adjust:100%; -ms-text-size-adjust:100%; margin:0; padding:0; } img { outline:none; text-decoration:none; -ms-interpolation-mode: bicubic; } a img { border:none; } table { border-collapse:collapse; m…  ( 6 min )

Subscribe to read for only $2/month /* resets */ p {margin:0px;margin-bottom:0px;padding:0px;} table {border-spacing:0;} table, td {border-collapse:collapse;} * {-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased;-moz-osx-font-smoothing: grayscale;text-size-adjust: none !important;-ms-text-size-adjust: none !important;-webkit-text-size-adjust: none !important;} /* end resets */ /* outlook / hotmail */ .ExternalClass{width:100%;} table, td {mso-table-lspace:0pt;mso-table-rspace:0pt;} img{-ms-interpolation-mode:bicubic;} .ReadMsgBody {width: 100%;} /* end outlook / hotmail */ /* gmail */ u + #body a {color: inherit;text-decoration: none;font-size: inherit;font-family: inherit;font-weight: inherit;line-height: inherit;} img + div {display: none!important;} /* end gmail */ /* ios */ body{-webki…  ( 2 min )

Email from Substack @media (max-width: 1024px) { .typography .pullquote-align-left, .typography.editor .pullquote-align-left, .typography .pullquote-align-right, .typography.editor .pullquote-align-right, .typography .pullquote-align-wide, .typography.editor .pullquote-align-wide, .typography .pullquote-align-center, .typography.editor .pullquote-align-center { float: none; margin: 0 auto; width: 100%; max-width: 100%; } } @media all and (-ms-high-contrast: none), (-ms-high-contrast: active) { .typography .markup table.image-wrapper img, .typography.editor .markup table.image-wrapper img, .typography .markup table.kindle-wrapper img, .typography.editor .markup table.kindle-wrapper img { max-width: 550px; } } @media (min-width: 1024px) { .ty…  ( 8 min )

I finally took your advice and went on vacation a.cta_button{-moz-box-sizing:content-box !important;-webkit-box-sizing:content-box !important;box-sizing:content-box !important;vertical-align:middle}.hs-breadcrumb-menu{list-style-type:none;margin:0px 0px 0px 0px;padding:0px 0px 0px 0px}.hs-breadcrumb-menu-item{float:left;padding:10px 0px 10px 10px}.hs-breadcrumb-menu-divider:before{content:'›';padding-left:10px}.hs-featured-image-link{border:0}.hs-featured-image{float:right;margin:0 0 20px 20px;max-width:50%}@media (max-width: 568px){.hs-featured-image{float:none;margin:0;width:100%;max-width:100%}}.hs-screen-reader-text{clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);height:1px;overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;width:1px} 96 …  ( 4 min )

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This post is part of a series chronicling news coverage of rising prices in the United States. See more here.  ( 3 min )

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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 )

Polars Sort-Merge Joins, Zen, Resolving Lazy Imports, and More body,#bodyTable,#bodyCell{ height:100% !important; margin:0; padding:0; width:100% !important; } table{ border-collapse:collapse; } img,a img{ border:0; outline:none; text-decoration:none; } h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6{ margin:0; padding:0; } p{ margin:1em 0; padding:0; } a{ word-wrap:break-word; } .mcnPreviewText{ display:none !important; } .ReadMsgBody{ width:100%; } .ExternalClass{ width:100%; } .ExternalClass,.ExternalClass p,.ExternalClass span,.ExternalClass font,.ExternalClass td,.ExternalClass div{ line-height:100%; …  ( 5 min )

NEW YORK — On Monday night, the Knicks punched their ticket to the NBA Finals. Local fans of the Finals-bound team had gathered to watch the game together at Radio City Music Hall after the team decided to change the venue for the official watch party, because authorities thought things got too rowdy outside of Madison Square Garden in the aftermath of Game 3's blowout win in Cleveland. Regardless of where, though, New York was ready for the moment. And because the result of Game 4 was never in doubt from the second quarter on, Monday's watch party was mostly one long celebration. The beauty of New York City is its melting pot, and the vibes at Radio City were a perfect example of it. Knicks fans of every race, gender, ethnicity, and religion got together to collectively lose their minds a…  ( 21 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 belts, the Thunder, remembering some book characters, and more. Your letters: Dave:  ( 52 min )

In 2025, McLaren came in fully prepared for its drivers to lead the championship battle. For McLaren, this meant doing the equivalent of writing up a 100-page legal document to try to settle the championship with as little actual conflict as possible. The year's paltry tension and intrigue were achieved by performing elementary arithmetic on points totals and McLaren making some of the worst gaffes you'll see a championship-caliber team make, rather than any true narrative propulsion. By the end of it, one was almost starting to prefer that an asteroid strike earth and put everyone out of their misery—i.e. for Max Verstappen to win the Drivers' Championship. Experiencing Mercedes and its drivers now is like taking a sip of fresh water and only then realizing how parched you'd been all along. In the standings, the championship battle is not particularly close. One Mercedes driver has won the last four races, though perhaps not the one you would have expected going in. Much of the early-season excitement has been the result of that divergence from pre-season expectation, with teenage phenom Kimi Antonelli repeatedly beating presumptive favorite George Russell via dominant pole-to-win conversions. But this Sunday's Canadian Grand Prix finally gave both drivers the opportunity to answer the all-important question: How will they race each other, wheel-to-wheel? The answer: very, very hard. Because the Canadian GP is one of six tortured sprint weekends this year, Saturday provided a spoiler for Sunday's racing. Perhaps some grace must be given here: It did also give us a plea from Mercedes team boss Toto Wolff to Antonelli to "concentrate on the driving please, and not on the radio moaning." But despite Wolff admonishing Antonelli for his extensive public complaints, and no doubt experiencing flashbacks to the notoriously acrimonious Lewis Hamilton–Nico Rosberg era of the team, whatever private discussions before Sunday did not diminish the spectacle. Spectators can only be grateful.  ( 23 min )

The Enhanced Games, a marketing stunt for direct-to-consumer steroids dressed up in a thin Olympics disguise, were held this past weekend, on the far north end of the Las Vegas strip. The event was a miserable failure on every front it supposedly contested, serving as neither an effective marketing stunt nor a worthwhile athletic competition. If anything, it was a testament to the limited power of steroids. The pitch for the Enhanced Games (TEG) was that allowing athletes to dope as much as they wanted would facilitate the mass shattering of putatively clean world records, proving in the process that human physiology and talent were ultimately less important for athletic performance than pharmacological enhancement. Is an athlete a body or are they the sum of their inputs? In an attempt to prove the latter, TEG attracted a decent crop of Olympic-level athletes in pure performance sports (i.e. nothing with a skill element, which you can't dope your way into), thanks to a massive prize pool and the support of investors like Peter Thiel and Donald Trump Jr. TEG is open about its intentions, which are to sell testosterone, peptides, and more right-coded versions of the stuff you can find on any direct-to-consumer telehealth service. "What I'd like to be remembered for is not bringing the Enhanced Games to life, but bringing the enhanced age into existence," founder Aron D'Souza—who has been credited with piloting Thiel's anti-Gawker legal strategy and also runs an AI-based media bias detection company—told the Wall Street Journal's Josh Robinson last October. "Who would want to be a Human 1.0 when you can exist in the world of Humans 2.0?"  ( 21 min )

Everybody knows Bumpus Jones, even (maybe especially) you! He was iconic for one single day: Oct. 15, 1892, which surely you remember. I definitely do. Little Bumpus was a mere rookie, up in the show for the first time for the Cincinnati Reds. Back then there wasn't even a mound, just a pitcher's box where Charles Leander "Bumpus" Jones stood for his first game as a big leaguer and threw a damn no-hitter. Was it perfect? Definitely not. He walked four guys, and a run came in on his throwing error. But he still pitched a no-hitter in his major-league debut. Sadly, for more than a hundred years, he has been all alone in that success. But no longer! I come bearing great news: A new Bumpus Jones has been crowned. His name is Alimber Santa, and on Monday he made his MLB debut for the Houston Astros. He did not start the game like Bumpus did, and when he came on as a reliever in the eighth, the Astros had a 9-0 lead. It was a fine time for a rookie to make his debut. Sure, there was technically a combined no-hitter on the line, but whatever. Let the kid try! We needed a new Bumpus.  ( 16 min )

Amid all the joyful preening and proclamations of destiny deferred but no longer denied, the most obstreperous of New York Knickerbockers fans arose today to the knowledge that they were dead-ass wrong about coach/reformed pariah Mike Brown. At least for now, anyway. There is still another series to be played, and the team the Knicks will face in their first NBA Finals since 1999 will have just emerged from a ferocious rock fight that is barely halfway done. This means that there is still time for them to turn back to their original position on him, which was "We should have hired Tiago Splitter instead of this retread boob." Doctrinal error is always something that the person committing the error will try to justify as soon as possible. For the moment, though, Mike Brown is on citywide scholarship. The man condemned on day one for replacing Tom Thibodeau—and remember that Brown didn't fire Thibs, just replaced him—has on day 323 become a genius in the town that wanted so much to hate him. Indeed, if the Knicks had behaved as they normally do, and wrapped their season up when they usually do, the demand for Brown's immediate firing would be a rare point of consensus among New Yorkers. This is what Knicks fans do, mostly: believe, hope, hallucinate, binge-eat disappointment, demand heads on pikes, repeat. They're like most other fans in that sense, only louder, surer, and more insistent. Some of them are also famous.  ( 23 min )

Welcome back to The Not-So-Great Defector Bake Off, where Kelsey and Chris attempt to complete the technical challenges from the newest season of The Great British Bake Off in their own home kitchens, with the same time parameters as the professional-grade bakers competing on the show. The idiots of the Not-So-Great Defector Bake Off recently convened at a fancy rented kitchen in Philadelphia—not merely to say mean things about Paul Hollywood, although plenty of mean things were said about Paul Hollywood, but for some baking. It was an intense experience, as you'd expect from a series that has produced so many burned fingers, so many dangerous sprays of molten caramel, so incredibly many sobs of purest anguish. We were there for more than the usual thrills of a timed baking challenge: We were there to satisfy the requirements of Defector's much-hyped 2025 Tip Jar drive. We and our terrible baking were, in a very real sense, the raffle prize.  ( 62 min )

The Canadiens are being outplayed by the Hurricanes. You can see it in the shot differential, where the Canes held a 38-13 advantage in Game 3. You could see it just by watching, as the Habs struggled again and again to move the puck up the ice without ceding possession to a ruthless Carolina defense. And you can see it—barely—in the conclusion: 3-2 Canes in overtime, to take a 2-1 series lead. Game 3 followed much the same script as Game 2, down to the final score and overtime outcome. But for all the ways that Carolina dominated the run of play, Monday night was in reality as tight as playoff hockey gets. The Canes peppered Jakub Dobes and a few got through; their offense is built on the laws of probability. Montreal, with less volume, required some individual inspiration and luck to keep pace. Maybe the most extraordinary part is that they did, for 74 minutes. Shayne Gostisbehere opened the scoring for the Canes, and Taylor Hall snagged one before intermission, in a period where the Habs were outshot 15-5. But in between those two, Mike Matheson, the old dog on D, got Montreal on the board. He was in the right place at the right time to receive a pass up high after some grimy play beneath the net, and with no bodies between him and Freddie Andersen, Matheson lasered a shot into the near-side corner that the Canes goalie could not catch.  ( 18 min )

I have a sort of hazy memory to share. I was a kid, riding in my parents' car on a bright sunny day, and we were sitting in traffic on a bridge over the Dulles Toll Road in Northern Virginia. I looked to my right, where you could see several miles of the highway stretching off toward Dulles Airport. Hundreds of cars streamed in both directions. Far off, wayyyyy the hell out there, where the cars were just little dots, the sunlight glinted a little differently off the chrome armature of a police cruiser's rooftop lights, on the half of the highway headed toward our bridge. Because our family's succession of beater cars often had (or seemed to have, at the scale of a small child's experience) things like busted taillights and expired tags, and because by then I'd been in the backseat at least a couple of times when my dad had gotten alarmingly irate about being pulled over, I had learned the habit of looking out for cop cars and speed traps. So I said, to no one in particular, "There's a cop coming," and pointed. What made this memory stick in my mind was that when my mom, in the passenger seat, turned and looked, what I was pointing at was so far beyond the range of her eyesight that she could not discern that there was anything at all there, much less that there were individual vehicles, much less that one of them could be identified as a police car headed our way, distant enough that we'd have to wait a couple of minutes to be able to verify it. For all that she could see, I could have been pointing at the clear blue sky. I might just as well have told her I saw Neil Armstrong's bootprint on the surface of the moon.  ( 29 min )

Knicks fans travel well, especially when there is a series sweep on offer. The Philadelphia 76ers' home arena was bursting with belligerent New Yorkers during Game 4 of the second round, and that augured grim possibilities for the Cleveland Cavaliers headed into what would be the last game of the Eastern Conference Finals on Monday night. Would Cavs owner Dan Gilbert be able to keep Knicks fans from entering his arena and dicking around while his team got swept like chumps? More importantly, would he be able to keep the rich and famous Knicks fans off the floor? One surefire way to keep Timothée Chalamet from stunting on you in your own building is to not be ass and go down 0-3 in a series. With that option foreclosed, Gilbert and the Cavs chose instead to leverage the power of legalese. Fat Joe became this controversy's whistleblower when he went on an ESPN pregame show and disclosed that, despite purchasing courtside tickets for Game 4, he was informed by the Cavs that his tickets were canceled and that he was being moved back a few rows. "We had bought some courtside tickets to the game, and then once they found out it was superfan Fat Joe, it was like, I can't sit courtside. New York Knick fans can't sit courtside," said Fat Joe. "They took the tickets away." Knicks beat writer Stefan Bondy did some additional reporting and talked to 10 other Knicks fans who had purchased courtside seats, only to receive a phone call from a Cavs executive telling them that they were being moved to a different section. When asked to explain why this was happening, the Cavs provided Bondy with a statement:  ( 16 min )

Congress wrote the Reconstruction Amendments to protect the rights of Black people to participate in democracy. The Supreme Court had other ideas. The post The Supreme Court Never Cared About Keeping the Fifteenth Amendment’s Promises appeared first on Balls and Strikes.  ( 7 min )

New Frontiers in Jan. 6 Revisionism The “Anti-Weaponization Fund” is just a part of the broader rewriting of the history...  ( 10 min )

just another batshit day in America

Plus, California steps up to protect workers over AI layoffs

96 Another wasted opportunity @media only screen and (max-width: 620px) { table.body { width: 100%; min-width: 100%; } table.body .content { padding: 0 !important; } table.body .container { padding: 0 !important; width: 100% !important; } table.body .main { border-spacing: 10px 0 !important; border-left-width: 0 !important; border-radius: 0 !important; border-right-width: 0 !important; } table.body .img-responsive { height: auto !important; max-width: 100% !important; width: auto !important; } } @media all { .ExternalClass { width: 100%; } .ExternalClass, .ExternalClass p, .ExternalClass span, .ExternalClass font, .ExternalClass td, .ExternalClass div { line-height: 100%; } .apple-l…  ( 12 min )

From “Republicans worry the Cornyn-Paxton fight is tearing their party apart: After months of mudslinging, several Republicans are bracing for a messy primary finish — and an even more costly general election.” by Liz Crampton and Samuel Benson at Politico: “…The John Cornyn vs. Ken Paxton showdown ends Tuesday night, but the brutal primary has... Read more »  ( 10 min )

Will Smith is easily one of the most recognizable faces and names on the planet. After launching his acting career as The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air for six seasons, he became a mega successful film actor with leading roles in … Continue reading →  ( 19 min )

Prot about the May 2026 Emacs Carnival theme "May I recommend". I'd love to turn this into a joint braindump of quick recommendations for people at different points in their Emacs journey, building on our conversation about newbies/starter kits and the newcomer experience all the way up to power users, Emacs Lisp coders, and package developers. Watch on YouTube – (America/Toronto) = Thu May 28 1030H EDT / 0930H CDT / 0830H MDT / 0730H PDT / 1430H UTC / 1630H CEST / 1730H EEST / 2000H IST / 2230H +08 / 2330H JST This session will be recorded, and I'll update this blog post with notes: https://sachachua.com/blog/2026/05/may-28-sacha-and-prot-talk-emacs-may-i-recommend/ You can add the iCal for upcoming Yay Emacs episodes to your calendar. https://sachachua.com/topic/live/upcoming-livestreams.ics Find more Yay Emacs posts or join the fun: https://sachachua.com/topic/live View Org source for this post You can e-mail me at sacha@sachachua.com.  ( 1 min )

I quite like the global Auto Revert mode. It is especially useful when I something else than Emacs sometimes changes my files. (I bet some readers immediately thought about the now-fashionable agentic coding, but plain old git switch is enough!) It has one drawback, however. I hardly ever use TeX nowadays, but when I do, I use pdf-tools. Auto Revert mode doesn’t play nice with pdfs open in Emacs, often trying to revert them before TeX finishes writing to them, which results in ugly flickering.  ( 1 min )

I mentioned OSM for emacs briefly before, but I haven’t played with it much. That’s because the maps never showed up correctly in the buffer: the map tiles were not aligned correctly and some appeared blank. As it turns out, someone else had this problem and also found the culprit: visual-line-mode. I have it turned on by default as the majority of my work in Emacs involves org-mode and I need my lines wrapped in the buffer. With visual-line-mode disabled, OSM works as expected, including zooming in and out. Good stuff. Now that I fixed OSM, I was wondering about something else I wanted to do for a while: having Journelly’s latitude and longitude fed automatically to OSM in Emacs, so I can view the location on a map. Journelly captures locations and weather information for each note and stores those under properties, like so: PROPERTIES: :LATITUDE: ##.########## :LONGITUDE: ##.########## :WEATHER_TEMPERATURE: 62.1°F :WEATHER_CONDITION: Cloudy :WEATHER_SYMBOL: cloud :END: The OSM function that calls for those is osm-goto. So what we need is a simple function to feed the properties values directly: (defun jtr-goto-from-properties () (interactive) (let ((lat (org-entry-get (point) "LATITUDE")) (lon (org-entry-get (point) "LONGITUDE"))) (if (and lat lon) (osm-goto (string-to-number lat) (string-to-number lon) osm-default-zoom) (message "No LATITUDE/LONGITUDE properties found on this entry")))) This is an interactive function that I use when I’m standing on the header in Journelly I want to see on a map. It’s quick and works well. Now I can use my Journelly entries, which are already in org-mode, as a base for a post with a map tile inside Emacs. OSM doesn’t have a native function to export an image, but since I usually want to annotate the image anyway before I make a post out of it, a regular screen-capture app is a good solution, at least for now.  ( 2 min )

Looking closer at Claude Generated Lisp Code. (Spoiler: people write nicer code.) Help wanted: Demo site for a proposed re-design of the GNU ELPA (emacs-devel, Reddit) - feedback wanted Upcoming events (iCal file, Org): Emacs Berlin: Emacs-Berlin Hybrid Meetup https://emacs-berlin.org/ Wed May 27 1000 America/Vancouver - 1200 America/Chicago - 1300 America/Toronto - 1700 Etc/GMT - 1900 Europe/Berlin - 2230 Asia/Kolkata – Thu May 28 0100 Asia/Singapore EmacsSF (in person): coffee.el in SF https://www.meetup.com/emacs-sf/events/314950692/ Sat May 30 1100 America/Los_Angeles Emacs.si (in person): Emacs.si meetup #6 2026 (v #živo) https://dogodki.kompot.si/events/67d716c3-6c04-4530-9c1a-f67aa44d31bc Mon Jun 1 1900 CET EmacsATX: Emacs Social https://www.meetup.com/emacsatx/events/31480995…  ( 3 min )

Did you know that "EMACS" is a valid Wordle word?  Check it out:  ( 6 min )

Table of Contents A New Prioritization Hierarchy Default Org Agenda View Customized Org Agenda View Trick 1: Visual Deadlines with Custom Leaders Trick 2: Expanding the Warning Window to a Month Conclusion A New Prioritization Hierarchy task management workflow, my day-to-day focus was heavily centered around scheduled dates and TODO states. Today, my prioritization hierarchy has fundamentally evolved to: Deadline + Priority > Schedule > TODO States Deadlines + Priorities represent my primary focus. Deadlines show what must be delivered and when, while priorities help determine which deadline to tackle first. Together, they serve as the main driver for my planning. Scheduled dates are reserved for habits, recurring chores, or temporary "snoozing" (hiding tasks until they need to b…  ( 3 min )

Thanks for Being Part of OffBall!96 :root { color-scheme: light; supported-color-schemes: light; } body { margin: 0; padding: 0; min-width: 100%!important; -ms-text-size-adjust: 100% !important; -webkit-transform: scale(1) !important; -webkit-text-size-adjust: 100% !important; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased !important; } .body { word-wrap: normal; word-spacing:normal; } table.mso { width: 100%; border-collapse: collapse; padding: 0; table-layout: fixed; } img { border: 0; outline: none; } table { mso-table-lspace: 0px; mso-table-rspace: 0px; } td, a, span { mso-line-height-rule: exactly; } #root [x-apple-data-detectors=true], a[x-apple-data-detectors=true], #MessageViewBody a { color: inherit !important; text-decoration: inherit !important; font-size: inherit !im…  ( 8 min )

Sports Still Happened, Even Though You’re Chillin’ Today 96 :root { color-scheme: light; supported-color-schemes: light; } body { margin: 0; padding: 0; min-width: 100%!important; -ms-text-size-adjust: 100% !important; -webkit-transform: scale(1) !important; -webkit-text-size-adjust: 100% !important; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased !important; } .body { word-wrap: normal; word-spacing:normal; } table.mso { width: 100%; border-collapse: collapse; padding: 0; table-layout: fixed; } img { border: 0; outline: none; } table { mso-table-lspace: 0px; mso-table-rspace: 0px; } td, a, span { mso-line-height-rule: exactly; } #root [x-apple-data-detectors=true], a[x-apple-data-detectors=true], #MessageViewBody a { color: inherit !important; text-decoration: inherit !important…  ( 6 min )

Back the fight before midnight tonight a.cta_button{-moz-box-sizing:content-box !important;-webkit-box-sizing:content-box !important;box-sizing:content-box !important;vertical-align:middle}.hs-breadcrumb-menu{list-style-type:none;margin:0px 0px 0px 0px;padding:0px 0px 0px 0px}.hs-breadcrumb-menu-item{float:left;padding:10px 0px 10px 10px}.hs-breadcrumb-menu-divider:before{content:'›';padding-left:10px}.hs-featured-image-link{border:0}.hs-featured-image{float:right;margin:0 0 20px 20px;max-width:50%}@media (max-width: 568px){.hs-featured-image{float:none;margin:0;width:100%;max-width:100%}}.hs-screen-reader-text{clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);height:1px;overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;width:1px} 96 …  ( 2 min )

Last chance: $20 off ends tonight a.cta_button{-moz-box-sizing:content-box !important;-webkit-box-sizing:content-box !important;box-sizing:content-box !important;vertical-align:middle}.hs-breadcrumb-menu{list-style-type:none;margin:0px 0px 0px 0px;padding:0px 0px 0px 0px}.hs-breadcrumb-menu-item{float:left;padding:10px 0px 10px 10px}.hs-breadcrumb-menu-divider:before{content:'›';padding-left:10px}.hs-featured-image-link{border:0}.hs-featured-image{float:right;margin:0 0 20px 20px;max-width:50%}@media (max-width: 568px){.hs-featured-image{float:none;margin:0;width:100%;max-width:100%}}.hs-screen-reader-text{clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);height:1px;overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;width:1px} 96 …  ( 2 min )

It's time to wrap up the month with a challenging themeless. Keep an eye out for tricky clues and fun wordplay. This puzzle was constructed by Will Eisenberg, and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. Will is a French horn player, music teacher, and puzzlemaker. Will is 3rd horn of Orchestra Iowa, and a member of the leadership team for Lil AVCX. Will helped to edit Midis for Minnesota, a charity crossword pack raising funds for Minnesotan immigrant families affected by ICE's presence. 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."  ( 13 min )

A playoff series will eventually teach you how to watch it. Once the players have settled into their matchups and the coaches have made their big tactical adjustments, you can start to zero in on a few things that will decide the series. If Team A is able to do Y and prevent Team B from doing X, then they will win, etc. The nice thing about this year's Western Conference Finals is that you don't have to work very hard to find the series' hinge point. You just have to look at the 7-foot-5 guy standing in the middle of the court. The Spurs won Game 4 on Sunday night, 103-82. If you are wondering how the defending champions were held to their lowest scoring mark of the entire season, look no further than Victor Wembanyama. His 33 points, eight rebounds, and three blocks speak for themselves, but as is always the case with Wembanyama, he has to be seen to be believed. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5OyiDblFCA  ( 20 min )

Plus, a Purple Heart Senator slams Trump

Friday's news in the Khalil and Abrego Garcia cases underscores both the role courts can play in checking immigration abuses and the limits they often confront.

watch what they do, not what they say

Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins isn’t as dramatic with religious theatrics as some of her colleagues in Donald Trump’s Cabinet, like Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, but that shouldn’t fool anyone. A recent lawsuit from staff members alleges that Rollins has been “promoting her own preferred brand of Christian beliefs and theology to the captive audience of employees,” largely through proselytizing emails sent to the whole staff at the USDA, which make them “fear the negative consequences of not sharing the Secretary’s religion.” The details in the lawsuit reveal that the former Cotton Bowl Queen is just as committed a Christian nationalist as the more belligerent Hegseth. That might seem like a bold claim at first blush. Hegseth has drawn attention for his aggressive, even violent rhe…  ( 6 min )

Ruy Teixeira, author of major works of political analysis and non-resident senior fellow of the American Enterprise Institute, explains  why “Trump Is Making the Same Mistake That Doomed Biden” at The Free Press: President Donald Trump has a high opinion of his own persuasive power and political instincts. That is not without justification. Despite massive... Read more »  ( 7 min )

96 Weekly Scorecard: May 16 - 22, 2026 @media only screen and (max-width: 620px) { table.body { width: 100%; min-width: 100%; } table.body .content { padding: 0 !important; } table.body .container { padding: 0 !important; width: 100% !important; } table.body .main { border-spacing: 10px 0 !important; border-left-width: 0 !important; border-radius: 0 !important; border-right-width: 0 !important; } table.body .img-responsive { height: auto !important; max-width: 100% !important; width: auto !important; } } @media all { .ExternalClass { width: 100%; } .ExternalClass, .ExternalClass p, .ExternalClass span, .ExternalClass font, .ExternalClass td, .ExternalClass div { line-height: 100%; } …  ( 12 min )

USA Up All Night, the iconic late-night programming block on the USA Network from 1989 to 1998, became a cultural touchstone for a generation of viewers staying up past bedtime. Hosted by the irreverent Gilbert Gottfried on Saturdays and the glamorous Rhonda Shear on Fridays, the show delivered a mix of B-movies, cult classics, horror,...  ( 15 min )

The 1980s produced an endless wave of British pop bands, many of them built around flashy fashion, oversized personalities, and quickly dated production trends. Yet hidden among the louder and more commercially aggressive acts was a quieter, more refined group whose music has aged remarkably well. China Crisis never relied on spectacle. They didn’t dominate...  ( 9 min )

The 1980s new wave explosion brought synthesizers, angular guitars, and quirky fashion into the mainstream, fueled by MTV and major label push. Bands like Duran Duran, Depeche Mode, and The Police dominated charts and airwaves. Yet beneath the glossy hits lay a vibrant underground of inventive artists crafting innovative tracks that never cracked the Billboard...  ( 11 min )

I'm generally loath to make the same pun that all the other media outlets are running with, but the Colorado Avalanche's current situation makes it irresistible. So here goes: Dude, where's Makar? The Avs were the juggernaut of the NHL this year, and after going 8–1 through the first two rounds of the playoffs (the second against a very tough Minnesota squad), they looked like the betting favorite to break the Presidents' Trophy curse—that no team who posted the best regular-season record in an 82-game campaign has gone on to hoist the Stanley Cup since 2008. But against a Vegas group who looked to have a decided disadvantage, all their swagger and beauty has been caked in mud. The Knights triumphed 4–2 in Game 1 on the road, and then on Friday, they scored two goals in the third period (plus an empty netter) to grab another win, 3–1. What's gone so wrong? Well, in the NHL playoffs, you can always point to the crease. Carter Hart, who returned to the league after he was found not guilty in a sexual assault trial, is outplaying Colorado goalie Scott Wedgewood, a 33-year-old journeyman who'd enjoyed a randomly dominant regular season. That's part of the difference, but an even more stressful issue for the Avalanche has been the absence of Cale Makar, who's missed the last two games due to a shoulder injury.  ( 17 min )

It will comfort New York Giants fans not at all to learn that quarterback Jaxson Dart did not chitter like a raccoon, or bark like a walrus, or vocalize in the manner of any other wild creature, when reached on Saturday by teammate Abdul Carter. A little bit of gibberish might even have been encouraging: Carter and Dart, after all, were clearing the air about the latter having spent a portion of his Friday at a right-wing political rally in Rockland County, New York, introducing Donald Trump to the stage beneath a large sign reading "New York Welcomes President Donald J. Trump." Evidence of a dissociative episode would've softened some of that drearily familiar but still very acute misery of learning that someone you've rooted for is an enthusiastic MAGA freak. Sadly, Carter confirmed that Dart has not started clucking like a chicken. "We spoke earlier as Men," he announced in a tweet, hours after posting his disapproval of Dart's appearance at the rally. Dart really did the shit: Friday afternoon, with "Eye of the Tiger" blaring from the sound system and hundreds of smartphone cameras trained on the dais, Dart strutted up to the microphone, be-mulleted, and addressed the audience in the manner of a thoroughly pre-gamed sixth-year college senior who has just entered a dark and noisy house party and is still trying to figure out if any of his buddies are in the crowd. The speech was not very inspired. https://bsky.app/profile/atrupar.com/post/3mmhowtz3wd2m  ( 17 min )

The Carolina Hurricanes have long known what they've been missing: a dynamite top-line presence (or two) who could force a breakthrough with sheer skill when the team's fundamentally sound play wasn't doing enough to give them an advantage late in the postseason. The underlying engine of the Canes was running without a hitch—this is their eighth straight year with a playoff series win. But in order to beat the very best of the best in the second- and third rounds, which they have yet to do in the Rod Brind'Amour era, there was no way around the fact that the Canes needed more talent. That's easier said than done, of course. Carolina tried their best to just go out and get a superstar when they traded for Mikko Rantanen last year, but they quickly had to annul the marriage after just 13 gam…  ( 21 min )

The Knicks, barring cosmic intervention, are headed to the NBA Finals. All that is left to learn in this series is whether or not New York will let Cleveland have a game. The 121–108 scoreline from Game 3 pretty badly misrepresents the gap between the East's last remaining contenders. The Cavs appear physically spent and mentally boomed. The Knicks, meanwhile, haven't lost in a month, and Saturday night they became just the 10th team in NBA history to win at least 10 consecutive games in the same postseason. Personally, I prefer a quick clean kill to a polite delay, and not only so that I can be spared any more of the sad-sack lower seed. The Western Conference will be sending an ascending juggernaut to the Finals no matter what, so it would be cool if the East's representative is maximally tuned, primed, and in all other ways made ready for the collision. The Cavs, poor helpless clods, deserve precisely the sort of mercy that is traditionally bestowed on the far side of a shed. They are nowhere close to the Knicks. New York spent the closing stretch of Game 1 picking on James Harden, pulling him out and abusing his defensive vulnerabilities. Cleveland's answer in Game 2 was to warp their own defense with traps and double-teams, leading to a career night for Josh Hart and another, far more convincing, Knicks win. If Cleveland had a counter dialed up for Saturday, it was hard to pick out its contours. The Knicks were in a sweet offensive rhythm right from the opening tip, pouring in 37 first-quarter points on absurd 71-percent shooting. New York opened the game with a lightning-quick 9–1 run, and from that point until about the final 150 seconds of the fourth quarter, it felt like Cleveland's entire basketball project had been whittled down to the struggle to merely catch their breath. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1GSM_EpblWk&t=1s  ( 25 min )

I wrote about Harper before, but I wanted to expand now that I have it working on Kubuntu with a couple of more options. Harper is good in two scenarios for me: first, when I want something quick and I don’t feel like starting a browser with Grammarly in it, and second, when I write a personal email and the idea of my words going to some AI grammar bot somewhere makes my skin crawl. Otherwise, for my blog (which is public anyway) and work email (I don’t care about those) Grammarly is definitely better. The issue with Linux is that the makers of Harper geared it toward macOS (Homebrew) and Arch Linux, among other things. It was made for programmers by programmers, and these guys don’t bother with Ubuntu-like distros. Fair, but up until recently it meant I had to jump through hoops. The quic…  ( 3 min )

fonts used by the various federal courts of appeal. For those of you who don’t know, the courts are very strict about the written format of their decisions and of the briefs filed with them. Not only is there a fixed and rigid format, the font used is also specified. Failure to adhere to the standard is prima facie reason for rejecting the filing. That said, each district has it’s own standards and choice of font. Some of those are particularly ugly versions of Courier and others are beautiful fonts such as Century Schoolbook and Equity. The Supreme Court—which used to insist on hot-metal typeset documents—uses Century Schoolbook. Take a look at Gruber’s post for the interesting details. None of this would be Irreal fodder except for a thread on the TUHS mailing list about LaTeX versus Troff for typesetting. Some of the discussion involved the difference between the input languages but a surprising amount talked about fonts as if Troff was still being run on a C/ does have a distinctive look. I wrote two books for a major publisher and typeset them using Troff so at the time I could probably have been considered a Troff expert. Then I started using Lisp and partly as a result I moved to Emacs. Since then, I do all my writing in Org mode, which, of course, uses LaTeX for producing typeset output. Sadly, these days I can’t be considered an expert in either Troff or LaTeX but it doesn’t really matter because Emacs has me covered. I simply write in Org mode and get great results for printed content. I still know enough LaTeX to tweak my results if I need to so I have the best of both worlds: the ease of Org and the power of LaTeX.  ( 5 min )

Even Trump’s own lawyer won’t defend it

Your access to what’s next starts now /* resets */ p {margin:0px;margin-bottom:0px;padding:0px;} table {border-spacing:0;} table, td {border-collapse:collapse;} * {-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased;-moz-osx-font-smoothing: grayscale;text-size-adjust: none !important;-ms-text-size-adjust: none !important;-webkit-text-size-adjust: none !important;} /* end resets */ /* outlook / hotmail */ .ExternalClass{width:100%;} table, td {mso-table-lspace:0pt;mso-table-rspace:0pt;} img{-ms-interpolation-mode:bicubic;} .ReadMsgBody {width: 100%;} /* end outlook / hotmail */ /* gmail */ u + #body a {color: inherit;text-decoration: none;font-size: inherit;font-family: inherit;font-weight: inherit;line-height: inherit;} img + div {display: none!important;} /* end gmail */ /* ios */ body{-webk…  ( 2 min )

what exactly is going on?

"...how can people keep up with what you're learning?"1 I've always kept a low profile on the Internet.  It can be a scary place!  But I've been asked to show glimpses of my online work to the people I was meeting in real life. I agreed to chat with Sacha Chua about Emacs and Life (but not the Universe -- that'll be next time).  Emacs is worth revealing oneself for.  If people really do want to keep up with what I'm learning, they can visit here. My init file2 shows only a small aspect of how I have Emacs configured.  You'll want to see an example of my org file(s), my diary file, and the Lisp I have tucked away under my home directory. Aside from Emacs, my workflow relies on Vivaldi and LibreOffice, so I'll try to show what I'm doing with them, as well.  Perhaps I can provide screen recordings, too! "Sometimes it just takes somebody saying, your stuff is interesting. I'm telling you, your stuff is interesting."3 Thank you, again, Sacha! 1Sacha Chua, https://sachachua.com/blog/#ID-ec23-transcript 2https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/RaymondZeitler 3Sacha Chua, ibid.  ( 9 min )

2026 May 23 Light or dark? GNOME side color-scheme and you can set read and set it from the command line. You can read it from the command line (default light theme is called default) $ gsettings get org.gnome.desktop.interface color-scheme | tr -d "'" default and you can set it from the command line (default dark theme is called prefer-dark) $ gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface color-scheme prefer-dark will change it to dark. (You can also set other preferred GNOME themes this way.) Light or dark? Emacs side Protesilaos has published a gazillion pretty themes, but I prefer his modus-themes for their visual simplicity and also for their UI amenities. For example you can set one light theme (modus-operandi family) and one dark theme (modus-vivendi family) and toggle…  ( 2 min )

Prot as a coach to help review my new ffs package for GNU Emacs as I worked on preparing it for inclusion in GNU ELPA, as well as discussing other Emacs- and life-related topics. In our nearly 2-hour conversation, we discussed at length and in depth various aspects of life in the current times. For instance, feeling overwhelmed in the face of innumerable things happening at once, with technology changing our perception and making events feel proximate and imminent. We talked about seasonality and rhythms in life, including in relation to burnout and knowing our own limitations, and descriptive vs prescriptive thinking when reflecting on the expectations we may place on our self when comparing our self to others through the lens of our necessarily-incomplete impressions and glimpses …  ( 2 min )

thinks that one-shot modifiers are the answer. Others recommend using a split keyboard or simply mapping Caps Lock to Ctrl. A post over at meanwhiling has another suggestion: use your thumbs. That’s also familiar advice but the post goes into specific details. Those details, in a nutshell, are to map the two keys nearest to either side of the space bar to Ctrl and the two keys next to those to Meta. That setup has the advantages that Both the Ctrl and Meta keys can be pressed with a thumb There is a Ctrl and Meta key on both sides of the keyboard so you never have to press the modifier and target key with the same hand. Hyper and Super. I use both of those, especially Hyper, all the time so I need them easily accessible. That’s made easier for me because I don’t mind using the same hand for the modifier and target keys. I still use Caps Lock for Ctrl and my thumbs for everything else. If my pinky ever starts complaining about Ctrl I’ll probably just swap Ctrl and Super. I’d do that anyway except for muscle memory and the fact that my hands don’t hurt. I do think using your thumbs for your most used modifiers make sense and modern keyboards make that pretty easy to set up.  ( 5 min )

This month’s Emacs Asia-Pacific (APAC) virtual meetup is scheduled for Saturday, May 23, 2026 with BigBlueButton and #emacs on Libera Chat IRC. The timing will be 1400 to 1500 IST. The meetup might get extended by 30 minutes if there is any talk, this page will be updated accordingly. If you would like to give a demo or talk (maximum 20 minutes) on GNU Emacs or any variant, please contact bhavin192 on Libera Chat with your talk details:  ( 1 min )

Jesus stops it, Donny flops it, and so much more...

The week’s 8 biggest wins

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96 *{box-sizing:border-box}body{margin:0;padding:0}a[x-apple-data-detectors]{color:inherit!important;text-decoration:inherit!important}#MessageViewBody a{color:inherit;text-decoration:none}p{line-height:inherit}.desktop_hide,.desktop_hide table{mso-hide:all;display:none;max-height:0;overflow:hidden}.image_block img+div{display:none}sub,sup{font-size:75%;line-height:0}#converted-body .list_block ol,#converted-body .list_block ul,.body [class~=x_list_block] ol,.body [class~=x_list_block] ul,u+.body .list_block ol,u+.body .list_block ul{padding-left:20px} @media (max-width:620px){.image_block div.fullWidth{max-width:100%!important}.row-content{width:100%!important}.stack .column{width:100%;display:block}.mobile_hide{min-height:0;max-height:0;max-width:0;display:none;overflow:hidden;font-size…  ( 2 min )

96 America’s 911 system is in the throes of its own emergency p{ margin:10px 0; padding:0; } table{ border-collapse:collapse; } h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6{ display:block; margin:0; padding:0; } img,a img{ border:0; height:auto; outline:none; text-decoration:none; } body,#bodyTable,#bodyCell{ height:100%; margin:0; padding:0; width:100%; } .mcnPreviewText{ display:none !important; } #outlook a{ padding:0; } img{ -ms-interpolation-mode:bicubic; } table{ mso-table-lspace:0pt; mso-table-rspace:0pt; } .ReadMsgBody{ width:100%; } .ExternalClass{ width:100%; } p,a,li,td,blockquote{ mso-line-height-rule:exactly; } a[href^…  ( 5 min )

What’s Going on With Trump’s Big Fascistic Arch Near the National Mall?#outlook a { padding:0; } .ExternalClass { width:100%; } .ExternalClass, .ExternalClass p, .ExternalClass span, .ExternalClass font, .ExternalClass td, .ExternalClass div { line-height: 100%; } table td { border-collapse: collapse; mso-line-height-rule: exactly; } .editable.image { font-size: 0 !important; line-height: 0 !important; } .nl2go_preheader { display: none !important; mso-hide:all !important; mso-line-height-rule: exactly; visibility: hidden !important; line-height: 0px !important; font-size: 0px !important; } body { width:100% !important; -webkit-text-size-adjust:100%; -ms-text-size-adjust:100%; margin:0; padding:0; } img { outline:none; text-decoration:none; -ms-interpolation-mode: bicubic; } a img { border…  ( 10 min )

You have a chance to invest in democracy right now a.cta_button{-moz-box-sizing:content-box !important;-webkit-box-sizing:content-box !important;box-sizing:content-box !important;vertical-align:middle}.hs-breadcrumb-menu{list-style-type:none;margin:0px 0px 0px 0px;padding:0px 0px 0px 0px}.hs-breadcrumb-menu-item{float:left;padding:10px 0px 10px 10px}.hs-breadcrumb-menu-divider:before{content:'›';padding-left:10px}.hs-featured-image-link{border:0}.hs-featured-image{float:right;margin:0 0 20px 20px;max-width:50%}@media (max-width: 568px){.hs-featured-image{float:none;margin:0;width:100%;max-width:100%}}.hs-screen-reader-text{clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);height:1px;overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;width:1px} 96 …  ( 5 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 )