What is Josh Hart? If you had never watched his tenure with the New York Knicks and had to reconstruct the player from box scores, season averages, and the sauced utterances of people milling around outside Madison Square Garden, it would be a puzzling task. OK, so he's 6-foot-5, but teams can guard him with centers, or with no one at all, and he doesn't score much anyway. Fans are yelling the words "hard-nosed," "hustle," "intangibles," and so on. On paper, he's one of the all-time great "rebounding guards"; in reality, he's more of an itsy-bitsy power forward who moonlights as a guard on the fast break. He shot 41 percent from three in the regular season, but that's misleading because it was on low volume, and when you actually see him catch the ball gloriously open at the arc, he turns …  ( 18 min )

The American military has always maintained a relatively strong grip on its public perception. Its most essential message—internally and externally, during peace time and active conflict, under presidents Republican and Democratic—is the necessity of its sprawling, expensive, and secretive imperial apparatus as a means of defending the nation and the very concept of freedom. It doesn’t hurt that the media is often only too happy to play along. In his new book God Forgives, Brothers Don’t: The Long March of Military Education and the Making of American Manhood, journalist Jasper Craven takes a detailed and unflinching look at the bedrock of American military training: the military academy as a locus for and proving ground of antagonistic military policy. America’s war-hungry ethos, embodied to an embarrassingly literal degree by the hare-brained conduct and childish grandiosity of Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, has only recently embraced the enfranchisement of all able-bodied Americans, regardless of gender, race, or creed, to this mission.  Still, the underlying social and cultural principle of the American military has always idolized rugged masculinity—essentializing violence and dominance as natural to the very purpose of manhood. As Craven writes, “the military’s masculine archetype has become one of America’s most coveted assets. Like warfare itself, it is ever evolving. A diluted form of military manliness can be replicated in the civilian world, though it is always a clear knockoff. It lacks the high-and-tight haircut, the posture, the gaze, the mythic war stories of conquest, destruction, and dominance.”  ( 35 min )

In the Western Baltic Sea, fisheries target migrating mackerel and needlefish with pound nets, which funnel passing shoals into a series of smaller nets until they are trapped. The traps are emptied every few days, but as the caught fish idle in the nets, they become quite attractive to passing seabirds, such as cormorants, gulls, and terns. The cormorants sample the fish like a charcuterie board and various enterprising gulls steal the cormorants' catches. Several dozen birds can likely be found loitering near any particular pound net, and their ravenous appetites result in real losses for the fisheries. This battle between pound net fishers and seabirds has been ongoing for decades, and fishers have attempted to fight back in various ways. They've tried covering their catch with a netted cover or providing the fish artificial refuges. But the birds are relentless, and the agile cormorants simply entered the pound nets from below. And the more protective netting the fishers added, the more they found tangled or drowned seabirds alongside their catch. A paper from 2021 estimated that 400,000 seabirds are killed by diving into gillnets each year. As such, scientists have been cooking up new strategies to reduce the number of seabirds snacking on and dying in pound nets. They tried high-contrast panels and bright LED lights, but nothing seemed to work. That is, until Bobby the buoy entered the picture. Here is a buoy similar to Bobby:  ( 23 min )

You know what it is. Many-time NBR guest Noah Kulwin came back this week to talk about the two pretty incredible NBA Conference Finals we have going. Noah predicted both the Boston Celtics' ultimate fraudulence, as well as the New York Knicks' comeback in Game 1, so we had to bring him back. We also talked about the Oklahoman publishing an op-ed comparing the Oklahoma City Thunder to the state of Israel, which Samer wrote about this week. Speaking of Israel, Noah's podcast Blowback (which is great!) is about to drop a mini-series about the history of the U.S.-Israel relationship. It's called "No Daylight," and it drops next Friday, May 29. Subscribe!  ( 14 min )

It took only 33 seconds to safely write off the Montreal Canadiens as just another quaint overachiever, the kind of humorously game yet clinically overmatched entrant that has filled out nearly every conference final field since the National Hockey League decided to have conferences. They come, they seem like an appealing alternative to the oppressive chalk that surrounds them, and then they disappear again to the churn of the pack, hoping for another turn in a decade or so. It subsequently took 27 seconds to rethink ce paragraphe premier, and then another 10 minutes or so to wonder if the quaint overachiever here isn't actually the Carolina Hurricanes. In those 11 minutes and change, the Canadiens not only scored four goals in response to Carolina’s first, but posed the corresponding matter of whether the Canes had too many days off after their two playoff cake tours. Or maybe Montreal is simply the real deal, and we are about to find out that it doesn't matter that they often cut their margins too fine and don't know what they don't know about high-stakes playoff competition. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eDYtHLjs0Xo  ( 21 min )

A late-May crisis has struck Major League Baseball. What seemed on May 17 like a funny, isolated incident, in which Shohei Ohtani scored a Little League home run (officially scored a triple and an error) against the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim, has turned out to be far more insidious. No one at the time could guess what would follow for the next week. No one knows when it will stop. A day from now? A week? Never? First, there was the Washington Nationals' James Wood, who, on May 19, notched his first-ever official grand slam off an inside-the-park homer. Naturally, this event took place against the Mets. The defining characteristic of this play was the ball ricocheting off the glove of Mets left-fielder Nick Morabito as he jumped to the wall and then fell down in front of his teammate, center-fielder Tyrone Taylor. While the ball trickled back into center field, Taylor stared at Morabito who pointed futilely toward the ball, before taking matters into his own hands and running for the baseball. Wood, who is an average runner, would easily beat the off-target throw into home.  ( 21 min )

ESPN will still on occasion tear itself away from the subjects and sports leagues with which it shares bed space, and so it was with Alden Gonzalez's 2,800-word free-weight on the newly innovative (wait for it, and don't spit out your coffee when you see it) Miami Marlins. Whether or not this story is a compelling argument for the resuscitation of this largely cursed and generally ignored franchise, it is at least an acknowledgement that most of what Miami has been doing for the previous three decades has amounted to buying 30 calendars and taking the rest of the year off. Meanwhile, a team that truly changed baseball to its great competitive benefit is closing in on 20 years of mostly consistent success with only two holes in their CV: a World Series, and anyone else giving a damn. Now th…  ( 25 min )

ANAHEIM, Calif. — There is no fandom quite like the fandom of teenage girls. It is powerful and pure, untainted by the burdensome knowledge of adulthood while burning with an intensity that feels beyond human comprehension. That's why the screaming for Alysa Liu sounds the way it does, and why it starts immediately, the moment her thousands of fans believe she is about to head out on the ice. They have come here to cheer, to cry, to sing along with the lyrics to the songs she skates to. They are prepared for this moment in a way that adults cannot really be prepared for anything. But also, in a more basic sense, they are prepared; I am thinking here of the two young people I heard behind me in line for the bathroom, who spent part of the wait time discussing what they would do when the rei…  ( 34 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:660px){.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-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…  ( 1 min )

The Prank Wars Have Come To F1 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 !impo…  ( 7 min )

You open your favorite editor, and, out of the box, Emacs writes state files all over the place. It puts bookmarks in ~/.emacs.d/, drops #auto-saves# next to every file you edit, leaves .~lockfiles~ in your projects, scribbles recentf, history, saveplace, projects, transient/history.el, tramp, network-security.data, multisession/, url/, image-dired/, erc/, rcirc/... you get the picture. The features are great, don't get me wrong. The default locations are what annoy me. Most of those files are not noise. They are the state that makes Emacs feel like Emacs across restarts. So you cannot just delete them. But you also do not want them spread across N different directories with cryptic names. (I know I don't.) I want one directory I control, every cache-bound variable pointing inside it, and …  ( 18 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…  ( 2 min )

Americans United for Separation of Church and State /* CLIENT-SPECIFIC STYLES */ body, table, td, a{-webkit-text-size-adjust: 100%; -ms-text-size-adjust: 100%;} /* Prevent WebKit and Windows mobile changing default text sizes */ table, td{mso-table-lspace: 0pt; mso-table-rspace: 0pt;} /* Remove spacing between tables in Outlook 2007 and up */ img{-ms-interpolation-mode: bicubic;} /* Allow smoother rendering of resized image in Internet Explorer */ /* RESET STYLES */ img{border: 0; height: auto; line-height: 100%; outline: none; text-decoration: none;} table{border-collapse: collapse !important;} body{height: 100% !important; margin: 0 auto !important; padding: 0 !important; width: 100% !important;} /* iOS BLUE LINKS */ a[x-apple-data-detectors] { …  ( 3 min )

The 2028 redistricting war is already here 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 )

The week Georgia Republicans went full-MAGA 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 )

Plus, a village buries Big Tech

Welcome back to Media Matters’ weekly newsletter. This week:  Right-wing media react to Trump’s slush fund with unquestioning loyalty — and some vague skepticism.   Trump’s Fox News Cabinet urges escalation while he ponders a return to the war in Iran.  Millions are projected to lose healthcare coverage due to GOP rollbacks, but Fox News has barely acknowledged it.  If you want this delivered straight to your inbox, subscribe here.  ( 5 min )

let them fight

‘Our Majority Is Melting Down Before Our Eyes’ Senate Republicans have always felt like the weakest of the political bulwarks...  ( 11 min )

Much remains unknown about the recent shooting at the Islamic Center of San Diego that ended with three victims killed and the two teenaged suspects dead by their own hand. Initial reports from law enforcement suggest this was a hate crime. Cain Clark, 17, and Caleb Vazquez, 18, were reportedly radicalized into white supremacy online, and left behind racist writings and symbols of Nazism and the Confederacy. A fuller view of their motives will no doubt emerge from the investigation, but in the meantime, one detail has emerged that’s all too common in cases with underage killers: Clark reportedly stole the guns used in the shooting from his mother.  San Diego police are yet to determine if they will file charges, but they have confirmed the weapons involved belong to a parent and not to eit…  ( 7 min )

From “Democrats Have the Biggest Midterm Election Lead in May, by any Party, in 20 Years:  All signs point to a Blue Wave, and they may need every drop to overcome recent gerrymandering woes and likely presidential scheming” by Bill Scher at Washington Monthly: While the polling industry has taken a lot of guff in... Read more »  ( 8 min )

Like a lot of Democrats, my ears perked up when I heard the DNC had reversed field and released a version of its earlier-suppressed 2024 “autopsy report,” but as I noted at New York, it should have either been completed or deleted: Complaints among Democratic activists and influencers over the DNC’s decision to abort its... Read more »  ( 9 min )

From “Poll: Trump’s election orders would mass disenfranchise working-class voters” by Jordan Zakarin at More Perfect Union: “President Donald Trump’s executive orders on election administration would create significant — and in many cases, insurmountable — barriers for working- and middle- class Americans to voting, according to a new poll from More Perfect Union and Blue... Read more »  ( 10 min )

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According to reporting, Patrick Byrne, a “multimillionaire and prominent election denier” and “one of corporate America’s most vocal proponents” of President Donald Trump's falsehoods about the 2020 election, “often pushed conspiracy theories and found himself ensnared in controversy — long before the former chief executive of online retailer Overstock promoted Donald Trump’s baseless claims of a rigged election.”  ( 3 min )

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President Donald Trump’s unauthorized Iran war and its resulting disruption of international trade in hydrocarbons, bulk cargo, fertilizer, and other products via the Strait of Hormuz is just the latest in a series of policy decisions from his administration that have harmed America’s farmers. National, local, and industry news organizations have repeatedly reported on Trump’s policy harms while Trump’s allies at Fox News have supported these damaging policies.  ( 16 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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As ProPublica previously reported: Gregg Phillips and Catherine Engelbrecht are best known as the election deniers behind True the Vote, a Texas-based nonprofit responsible for amplifying conspiracies that the 2020 presidential election was stolen.  ( 2 min )

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

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Until recently, Fox personalities pushed the narrative that low gas prices and a healthy economy go hand in hand. Just weeks before the Trump administration began bombing Iran, Fox host Sean Hannity told his radio audience, “I think the most impactful measure that is really benefiting Americans, the first and foremost, is the price of a gallon of gasoline.”  Host Laura Ingraham said decreasing energy costs was a message the administration should “keep hammering ... day after day.”  In fact, Fox personalities and guests across the network spread the narrative that lower gas prices — fueling economic growth and bringing prices down across the board — was a winning message for Trump. But as gas prices and then inflation started to climb in response to President Donald Trump’s war with Iran, Fox personalities downplayed the impact to consumers as temporary and a necessary sacrifice and even celebrated the benefit to U.S. oil companies.  ( 6 min )

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After six years of a six-justice conservative supermajority, voters are tired of the Court and more supportive of reforms. Republican lawmakers have taken notice. The post Republicans Sound Like They’re Getting Nervous About Supreme Court Expansion appeared first on Balls and Strikes.  ( 6 min )

As the midterm elections approach, the White House is still looking to nominate conservative stalwarts—but stalwarts with easier paths to Senate confirmation. The post How Many More Trump Nominees Can the Senate Confirm Before the Midterms? appeared first on Balls and Strikes.  ( 10 min )

Trump’s flailing DOJ loses two more voter roll cases 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 )

South Carolina Republicans Advance Map That Aims to Eliminate Jim Clyburn’s Seat#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…  ( 9 min )

Donald Trump is stealing from you 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 )

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…  ( 6 min )

Lower courts tossed out Joseph Clifton Smith's death sentence after a finding him to be intellectually disabled. That decision stands, but SCOTUS refused to stop two other execution efforts.

ffs provides a minor mode for simple plain text presentations in Emacs, where the slides are separated using the page-delimiter, by default the form feed character (^L). I wrote ffs in early 2022 for my LibrePlanet 2022 presentation the Net beyond the Web, and earlier this year decided to polish it towards being a proper package and submit it to GNU ELPA. The manual still needs some more work, but the overall package is in pretty good shape so I submitted for inclusion in GNU ELPA. Package name (GNU ELPA): ffs Official manual: https://kelar.org/~bandali/gnu/emacs/ffs.html Change log: https://kelar.org/~bandali/gnu/emacs/ffs-changelog.html Git repository: https://git.kelar.org/~bandali/ffs Backronyms: fabulous foolproof slides - for freedom's sake - ffs flips slides ffs and I owe a d…  ( 3 min )

org-remark. It does its magic just as you’d expect. The notes are anchored in the text by highlighting the passage you’re writing about and the position of that highlight and its associated notes are kept in a separate Org file with enough meta data to get back to the original document. The package comes with builtin support for several document types but Holland says that it’s pretty easy to add others and that in fact he’s added them for Elfeed, PubMed, and Wombag. The major shortcoming that I can see is that PDFs aren’t supported. Holland’s post includes an 18 minute, 15 second video that demonstrates org-remark and provides a nice overview of the post. The post itself is long and comprehensive. The org-remark package seems like a nice app that could be a big help for those of us that like to take notes as we’re reading. I could see myself using it to take notes on Web pages that I want to write about for Irreal. If it seems like it might be useful to you, take a look at Holland’s post.  ( 5 min )

Watch on YouTube Related links: https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/RaymondZeitler (config is out of date) https://www.linkedin.com/in/raymondzeitler/ : Electrical Engineer | Electronic RF Components | Scripting & Automation | US Defense and Aerospace~ Modernizing your company’s legacy design tools Acting Historian, IEEE Connecticut Section https://codeberg.org/ZeitRa The rest of his Internet presence is either private (Facebook) or anonymous (two blogs, Github and Gitlab, Mastodon, Bluesky). https://sachachua.com/topic/upcoming-emacs-chats.ics Find more Emacs Chats or join the fun: https://sachachua.com/emacs-chat 0:01 Opening 0:59 Introduction 2:07 I love automating workflows 3:19 Org Mode switch 4:14 diary-float 6:50 Tip: Add links to task titles 6:59 diary-float 8:00 The dif…  ( 2 min )

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It’s great how little you have to think about Paige Bueckers. This isn’t the same as not caring about her. The scads of cheers she gets during player intros, even on the road, are proof that she’s cared about very much. She just happens to be the sort of player whose competence speaks for itself, whose game demands no further tinkering or accommodation. Play her with a big lineup or a small one. Play her at the one, two, or three. Play her off the ball, or on it. Play her in a box, with a fox, in a house, with a mouse. Her versatility lets the Dallas Wings be whatever they want to be.  What they’ve been so far this year is one of the WNBA's most potent offenses. With playmakers at every spot, these Wings are moving, cutting, sharing the ball, and scoring from everywhere, well enough to rank second in the league in offensive rating. On Wednesday night in Chicago, they put up 99 points on a respectable Sky defense and notched their third win of the season. Five games in, they’re already in good position to beat last year’s win total of 10. Conspiracy theories abounded when the Wings bypassed the bigs in this year's draft and used the first overall pick on Azzi Fudd, a much-needed source of shooting and strength in the backcourt, and who, yes, has said in the past that she’s dating Bueckers. The easy explanation is that they’d already made the frontcourt the focus of their free agency when they signed Alanna Smith and Jessica Shepard, both formerly of the Minnesota Lynx. Smith hasn’t shaken her habit of picking up awful fouls, and she’s looked a little out of whack since breaking her nose in the preseason.  ( 20 min )

It is important to have a silly little morning brain thing. Aside from the studies attesting to how beneficial these puzzles and games can be for your cognitive abilities, I just think it's nice to have something fun to do to get your brain stretched out before you put it to work in the significantly less amusing ways that each day requires. We have done a full weeklong collaboration with the people behind my silly little morning brain thing of choice, and this week Drew and I spoke to the person behind Drew's favorite pick: Ian Livengood, editor at New York Times Games and the man who oversees Drew's beloved Pips. We did talk about Pips, which Drew truly loves, but for the most part our conversation focused more on the broader mysteries surrounding puzzles and games and things of that nature. Where do these games come from? Why do they beta-test them in Canada? Is the term "Games Jam" better or worse than "Ideas Party?" We talked about how this business works and how the people who come up with these games think of them, what they're trying to do, what makes the brains of people who can Think In Puzzle different, and figuring out that you are that type of person. There's some silly stuff in there—the word "zarfs" gets said a bunch, the idea of a 28 Days Later disease setting on your phone is floated, and a digression about the Argentinian specialist who devises the hardest logic puzzles in the world was especially gratifying—but Drew is a pretty serious puzzle sicko, and I am interested in how different types of brains work. Ian, for his part, was great company, and very patient with my general questions and Drew's extremely specific Wordle gripes.  ( 18 min )

LAVAL, QUEBEC — I wasn’t close enough to hear Laura Stacey’s screams last Thursday, but I saw her wife’s panic clear as day. “When one of my teammates gets caught, I get fired up,” Marie-Philip Poulin told LSTW last year. “But when it’s Laura, my heart drops. I want to react and it’s hard not to, but I can’t.”  That Poulin was reacting—bending over her wife who laid crumpled on the ice, frantically waving over medical personnel, skating said medical personnel to Stacey as fast as she could, staying with her the whole time she was being examined, begging for them to call an ambulance, giving her a shoulder to lean on as she wobbled off the ice several excruciating minutes later—made me feel nauseous.  “I knew she was in full panic mode, and I was a little bit too,” Stacey said of the moment Wednesday night.  ( 44 min )

“Autobiography,” the critic John Berger said, “begins with a sense of being alone. It’s an orphan form.” Berger wrote these words weeks after the death of his mother, but he was speaking generally, about the project of remembrance which so many artists take up over the course of their lives. That loneliness—that orphanhood—is a matter of separation, a gap between the self as subject and author. We might approach who we once were, but if we are to describe our experiences with any sense of perspective—if we are to be honest about how we have lived—then we must first leave the person we were behind.   In Blue Heron, the debut film from director Sophy Romvari, these experiences belong to Sasha (Eylul Guven), a young girl who has just moved into a new home on British Columbia’s Vancouver Island. It is summer in the 1990s, and her immigrant parents are trying to assimilate into a normal Canadian existence, speaking English with Sasha and her three brothers, and only dipping into their native Hungarian when discussing eldest son Jeremy. The child of a prior marriage, Jeremy has been acting out since he was a child, and the family has made many changes large and small to accommodate his impulsive whims. Now in high school, his behavior is rapidly escalating: He steals, he plays dead on the front steps, he impulsively courts self-annihilation, and he cannot explain why. None of this is lost on the child Sasha, existing not just alongside but actively within her daily life. Nature walks, beach trips, and backyard playdates are so regularly interrupted by Jeremy’s misbehaviors that, for the children, it has all begun to feel of a piece. Their brother can be kind or cruel, indulgent or impulsive, and often all at the same time, his shy, near-wordless demeanor concealing but never containing the violence swirling beneath the surface. As Sasha’s mother tells her, the worst thing is how normal it all seems.  ( 26 min )

I can't claim that it's surprising to see Mitch Marner playing excellent hockey for a Stanley Cup contender, but it does still feel like a novelty. When Marner entered the attacking zone with the Golden Knights up 1-0, cut waaay to his right, and then salvaged the play with a one-timer set-up back to Pavel Dorofeyev, all I could think about was how much it must hurt to be watching from Toronto. https://youtu.be/gENZH-gJn5A?si=OLn1bY-fbNVSPDuZ&t=276 Marner is no stranger to the playoffs, appearing for the Leafs in nine straight until he signed a fat new contract with Vegas last offseason. This year, however, feels totally different, because he isn't playing for a franchise that consistently blows it in the early rounds. By stepping on the ice for the Western Conference Final, Marner made it further into the postseason than Toronto has since 2002, and if Vegas pulls off the upset against the Avs, he'll be playing for a Cup that the Leafs haven't had the opportunity to win since 1967. From a competitive standpoint alone, Vegas made sense.  ( 19 min )

After 50 seasons, Survivor is both a cultural touchstone and a lumbering giant exhaustedly searching for its final resting place. The compellingly nasty, scrappy, oftentimes chaotic "social experiment" in 2000 on the island of Borneo has become a machine that turns a month of competition into a baker's dozen of television episodes that all feel and function more or less the same. The magic of Survivor, which is strange but distinctive and real, occurs when that format and that repetition gets upended. This is often the result of a handful of players who want more from their experience on the show than just a slow march to a predictable ending; the human element, not any kind of clever production trickery, is what makes Survivor different. That magic is why I and other Survivor sickos can n…  ( 31 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, Justin answers a question about the choice to have or not have kids.  ( 26 min )

Welcome to Listening Habits, a column where I share the music and musical topics I’ve been fixated on recently. Have you heard the bad news? Drake has been forsaken: by his rap peers, by his label bosses, and worst of all by the listening public. He has been strung up and nailed to the cross. He has been stabbed in the back by all parties. And yet he has risen once again, bearing three tablets—er, albums—to let us know that we must pay for the sin of not liking him enough. After two years of stewing over losing a rap beef with Kendrick Lamar, being aired out by seemingly the entire rap industry (which had clearly been sick of his shit for quite some), suing his own record label, and getting sued for his shady involvements with his gambling-company sponsor, Drake has made a splashy return with not only his long-awaited album Iceman, but two more bonus albums, Habibti and Maid of Honour. All in total we have 43 tracks, two hours and 30 minutes of music, all essentially based around the same theme: “How DARE You?!?!” https://youtu.be/bpD-JVy2zV4?si=-1RorFWQez81yJ6i  ( 34 min )

The Spurs have a ball-security problem. It was possible to overlook it in Game 1, because of Victor Wembanyama, and because Dylan Harper had a breakthrough performance, and because they won, but it was there: The Spurs turned the ball over 21 times in the victory, and the Thunder scored a whopping 28 points off of those turnovers, including 16 fast-break points. The Spurs were even looser with the ball Wednesday night in Game 2, turning it over another 21 times and allowing another 27 points off turnovers, but in 10 fewer minutes of basketball. Wembanyama was less amazing, Harper looked more like the rookie that he is, and the Thunder evened the series with a 122–113 victory. That's the whole blog. Good day to you. Well, OK, it's not quite so simple. San Antonio was down an important ball-handler in the first two games of this series. De'Aaron Fox can be a bit zany as a lead guard, but he enjoys game-breaking athletic advantages over many of the only people remotely qualified to guard him, and he is in fact not really a big turnover guy. Would it fuck you up pretty good, would it singe your ear hairs to be told that Fox has averaged fewer turnovers per game in his career (2.7) than John Stockton did in his (2.8), and while using a lot more of his team's possessions (28 percent usage to 18.9)?  ( 25 min )

“Grogu is dead. Grogu remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this dead too great for us? Must we ourselves not become Grogus simply to appear worthy of it?” —Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (paraphrased) The reviews are in, and Grogu is dead. His movie, anyway. The toyetic little critter popularly known as “Baby Yoda” co-stars with Pedro Pascal in The Mandalorian and Grogu. A theatrical spinoff of a Star Wars television show, one that way fewer people watched than any given Star Wars movie, was always going to be a heavy lift. By most accounts, director Jon Favreau and his co-writer, Disney Star Wars honcho Dave Filoni, have dropped it like Luke Skywalker trying to levitate his X-Wing.  ( 25 min )

The Colorado Avalanche are not an easy team to root for. They are a deep, übercapable team with few weaknesses. Their star scorer is a weirdo but not in a particularly endearing way. They have their Cup already. In any other year, in any other matchup, I'd be pulling for someone else to have their turn. But in this Western Conference Final, the Avs might as well be Team North America, for all the hopes and goodwill of the hockey world they're carrying. Over the next week or two, I want very badly for them to kick the Golden Knights in their golden nuts. I'm not sure if a professional sports franchise can be ontologically evil, but if one can I know which one it is. This is not, as Vegas fans insist, a matter of pure envy because they keep winning. Or at least it's mostly not that. Sure, th…  ( 20 min )

Our second new video bonus for paid subscribers walks through the three rulings in argued cases that the Supreme Court handed down on Thursday, May 21, 2026.

President Trump's $1.776B "Anti-Weaponization" slush fund underscores the limits of judicial remedies—and the need to reinvigorate (even doomed) political ones.

welcome to the United States of Imbecile

They picked the wrong fight

How Bad It Really Is Even normally temperate legal experts and political observers are aghast at the ways in which...  ( 11 min )

96 Hopeless @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:…  ( 10 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 )

This is my entry to the may 2026 emacs blog carnival hosted by Sacha Chua. It is common knowledge that the default emacs keybindings can be a bit of a strain on the old hands. A common suggestion is to remap the caps lock key to act as control, and i did that for a while, but i don't think it's the perfect solution that is often suggested: stretching the pinky finger sideways and holding it down still results in pain after a while for me. Luckily i have the perfect solution with zero drawbacks: use your thumbs! The first time i tried this was about five years ago. I put control on the key directly to the left of the space bar, and alt on the key directly to the right of the space bar. The thumb is very good at moving in this sideways motion, and i could immediately feel how much more c…  ( 2 min )

I have added two new themes to the current development target of my ef-themes package. Screenshots are available below. Remember that the themes are highly customisable: you can change practically everything about them. ef-arcadia is a light theme with a verdant, humid aesthetic. ef-atlantis is a dark theme with an aquatic feel. Both deliver the familiar colourfulness and good legibility of the ef-themes. Always click to enlarge the image for best results. ef-arcadia ef-atlantis Coming in version 2.2.0 (next stable release) The character of each theme is well defined. I may still make some refinements. Remember that since version 2.0.0, the ef-themes are built on top of my modus-themes. This means that they are highly customisable, support a wide range of packages and face groups, and are extensively tested down to the finest details. Enjoy! The ef-themes are a collection of light and dark themes for GNU Emacs that provide colourful (“pretty”) yet legible options for users who want something with a bit more flair than the modus-themes (also designed by me). Package name (GNU ELPA): ef-themes Official manual: https://protesilaos.com/emacs/ef-themes Change log: https://protesilaos.com/emacs/ef-themes-changelog Sample pictures: https://protesilaos.com/emacs/ef-themes-pictures Git repositories: GitHub: https://github.com/protesilaos/ef-themes GitLab: https://gitlab.com/protesilaos/ef-themes Backronym: Eclectic Fashion in Themes Hides Exaggerated Markings, Embellishments, and Sparkles.  ( 1 min )

his reasons for using EWW as his default browser, I mentioned that Camarena said that one of the benefits of EWW not supporting JavaScript is that JavaScript is mostly used to make the user’s experience worse by doing things like loading ads, reconfiguring the user’s display parameters, and implementing paywalls. If you had asked me, I would have said that any site using a paywall would also require JavaScript to load the content and, indeed, that’s true for some sites such as The New York Times but, as I discovered, it’s not true for a surprising number of sites. After reading Camarena’s post, I decided to experiment a bit to see if it was possible to bypass paywalls simply by not running JavaScript. I mostly don’t care about paywalls because the majority of the sites that use them don’t have content that’s worth the effort of avoiding them. Still, I thought it would be interesting to test if the strategy was feasible. I did this by opening any site that popped up a paywall in EWW. It worked for a surprising number of sites. Again, it’s almost never worth the effort but if you happen upon an article that you really want to read on a site that wants you to sign up for an outrageously expensive subscription, it may be worthwhile seeing if you can open it in EWW, 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.  ( 5 min )

Last night I realized two things: I haven’t touched Elfeed in about a month I’ve been reading and interacting more with people’s posts than ever As I was looking at my Inkwell’s RSS feeds and cleaning up, I couldn’t help but notice how nice it looks: And, yes, I prefer it over my list of feeds in elfeed, which are stored in an .org file - essentially lines of text with comments and tags. I’m pretty sure this is the opposite case for most folks who use Emacs. First, Emacs users want to use Emacs more, not less, and second, Inkwell is not available without Micro.blog1. But I think this is the point I’m getting at: Inkwell belongs in Micro.blog; actually, it is Micro.blog. When I started using Micro.blog three years ago, I considered it mostly an alternative to running my own static site with…  ( 3 min )

1. About   notes annotations emacs orgRemark Figure 1: JPEG produced with DALL-E 3 context switching (from the source content to the notebook) tenuous connections (between the source content and the notebook). annotate-in-place, and one elegant implementation of it in Emacs via nobiot's org-remark. What makes this pattern so elegant to me is the familiarity of its experience. I don't know about you, but I've been annotating books and taking notes with pencils and pens for almost my entire life, and this is often the most engaging and soul-lifting experience. There is a je ne sais quoi in this interaction that makes me feel closer to, if not part of, the thing I'm reading. This is a physical annotate-in-place, and it works beatifully. I've been long searching for a cognitive br…  ( 30 min )

I think I’ll take my REPL neat – Bozier Last week I announced Port, a small prepl client for Emacs. Today I’m following it up with another small Emacs package. Meet neat, a tiny, deliberately language-agnostic nREPL client. Why? For years I’ve been hearing some version of the same request: “could CIDER work with my non-Clojure nREPL server?”. Babashka, Basilisp, nREPL-CLR, even some homegrown servers people built on top of nREPL for languages I’d never heard of.1 The answer was always the same kind of squishy “sort of, in theory, with caveats”, because while bare nREPL is genuinely language-agnostic, CIDER is not. CIDER was built for Clojure and assumes Clojure pretty much everywhere. I always thought the right answer was “let’s gradually make CIDER more language-agnostic.” That’s the kin…  ( 6 min )

As Rhode Island Hospital begins turning over documents to a far-right judge in Texas, a number of grand jury subpoenas have been issued and DOJ settled with one hospital.

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 )

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Fox News spent just 30 seconds in the past 4 months covering the steep drop in ACA enrollment following congressional Republicans' refusal to renew health insurance subsidies. Both The New York Times and KFF have estimated potentially 5 million Americans will lose healthcare coverage, but Fox has almost entirely ignored the drop in ACA enrollment.  ( 3 min )

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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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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While Newsmax host Greg Kelly compared Trump's arrangement — which some have called a slush fund — to other government settlements, Mike Masnick wrote for Techdirt about the differences: Let’s first dispense with the most obvious bit of the charade: the idea that this is actually related to the “settlement” of Trump’s already corrupt bullshit lawsuit against the IRS. That’s how this is being presented, but this is entirely separate. Trump needed to drop that lawsuit in order to end it before a judge called bullshit on the fact that he was negotiating with himself to take $10 billion from American taxpayers. As for the actual “fund” everything about it is about as corrupt as you can imagine. This is impeachment-worthy — and not in a partisan way. Republicans should be as offended by this as…  ( 3 min )

Georgia Republicans seize on vote-reporting delay for baseless fraud claims 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} …  ( 4 min )

Southern Poverty Law Center .ExternalClass { width: 100%; } .ExternalClass { line-height: 100%; } body { -webkit-text-size-adjust: none; -ms-text-size-adjust: none; } body { margin: 0; padding: 0; } span.yshortcuts:hover { color: #000; background-color: none; border: none; } span.yshortcuts:active { color: #000; background-color: none; border: none; } span.yshortcuts:focus { color: #000; background-color: none; border: none; } img { -ms-interpolation-mode: bicubic; } img { border: 0; height: auto; outline: none; text-decoration: none; } body { height: 100% !important; margin: 0; padding: 0; width: 100% !important; } img { -ms-interpolation-mode: bicubic; } body { font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 18px; line-height: 150%; color: #000000; font-weight: normal; } a:visited { color: #…  ( 1 min )

Top stories 05/20/2026#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; mso-ta…  ( 6 min )

MAGA, election deniers cheer after governor commutes Tina Peters’ sentence 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 )

One of Donald Trump’s most oddly timed candidate endorsement makes you wonder again if he really wants to win the midterms, as I discussed at New York: Two days into early voting in the Texas runoff that ends May 26 and after months of teasing his choice, Donald Trump endorsed Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s primary challenge to... Read more »  ( 9 min )

From “Kleptocracy“,  Joyce Vance’s latest Substack column: Here’s the bottom line. Donald Trump wants to take $1.8 billion dollars of money that taxpayers like you and me have paid to the government, and he wants to give it to his most hardcore followers, the people who stormed the Capitol on January 6. Trump calls them... Read more »  ( 7 min )

The post-retirement track record for your hyper-competitive, multiple-champion GOAT-class athletes is not necessarily one you'd want for yourself. So often they seem stranded, often surrounded but generally quite alone, peering down from atop a mile-high butte of money and notoriety at a world that is much too far away to recognize; the people moving through and within it, to the extent they are visible at all, have a busy and eminently squashable ant-like aspect. We can probably assume that we look roughly as strange and unreal to them as they do to us. There is something alien about this type of person that goes beyond their superhuman and highly public accomplishments, and that is true even before wealth and fame shove them further and further into abstraction. That otherness is sort of…  ( 30 min )

When I first read that Daniel Radcliffe would be doing Every Brilliant Thing on Broadway, I didn't think it would work. It's not that I was worried about Radcliffe, who besides his film and TV career has established himself as a bona fide stage entertainer. I was worried about everybody else in the theater, because this play runs on audience participation. For Radcliffe in particular I imagined it could be like navigating a minefield, especially in a show about depression and suicide. Every description I've heard or read about him involves the word "charming" somewhere in there, but he's also someone I associate with intense scrutiny and obsessive fandom, thanks to the whole Harry Potter phenomenon. For example, someone who worked at a theater where Radcliffe had previously performed once …  ( 25 min )

All season, you could hear the complaints. Arsenal is boring. Arsenal's exclusive source of goals is the corner kick, which they treat as something between an offensive-rebounding exercise and a defensive line trying to get the quarterback. Arsenal is lucky, living free and easy thanks to down years from the other big clubs, who otherwise would have mounted stiffer challenges. Arsenal plays ugly, cynical anti-soccer, an aesthetic betrayal of the man who made the modern Arsenal. Arsenal is unworthy, barely scraping past the worst teams in the league instead of blasting them to hell. Arsenal is the apotheosis of all the worst trends in the game, a club by center backs, for center backs, dedicated to squeezing the very heart out of the game as part of a cold, rationalist approach. There's no match Arsenal won't try to win 1-0, no attacker Mikel Arteta won't try to coach the joy and creativity out of, no spontaneity the club won't kill. I found some of these points reasonably valid and some of the defenses offered by Arsenal supporters thin. But more than anything, I found the whole exercise pointless. Both complaints about the supposedly ugly soccer played by the Premier League champions and attempts to defend it on the merits assume that the title carries with it some sort of moral weight, as if a champion has to justify themselves on something other than competitive grounds. The point is not to play beautiful soccer, to win hearts and minds, or to prove the doubters wrong. The point is to win. A title justifies itself. After 22 years, a botched transition out of the Arsène Wenger era, several full cycles of promising young players' ultimately title-free careers, and three consecutive, variously agonizing second-place finishes, the Gunners are now champions of the Premier League. That's all that matters.  ( 21 min )

One of the strangest tales in Icelandic folklore concerns a creature called the Loðsilungur, or the furry trout. The trout, as you might imagine, looks like a fish covered with a white shag of fur, which it allegedly evolved to stay warm in Nordic waters. The people of Iceland, especially the men, knew not to eat the furry trout. If a man did eat a furry trout, he would suffer the unfortunate fate of becoming pregnant and delivering the child through his split scrotum. In the early 1900s, the legend of the furry trout somehow migrated to the United States, where various humorists assembled and mounted furry trouts to gift to unaware museums, a prank that, I think, stands the test of time. There is of course no such thing as a furry trout, in Iceland or America. But now a country famous for its development of some of the most ridiculous, bizarre, and frankly alarming animals has stepped in with a furry trout of its own. The fish in question is a new species of ghost pipefish called Solenostomus snuffleupagus, named for Sesame Street's Mr. Snuffleupagus, which it resembles quite closely. (One can only imagine how a Philadelphia-based marine biologist might have risen to this naming occasion.) The scientists who described S. snuffleupagus gave it the common name of the hairy ghost pipefish, according to a paper in The Journal of Fish Biology. This fish lives in waters off Australia, which might be the world's most consistently excellent producer of strange animals, such as the platypus and the cassowary. But even by Australian standards, this fish looks crazy.  ( 21 min )

After 26 days of gameplay and almost three months of real time spent arguing and crashing out online, Survivor 50 has finally arrived at its endgame. From a starting count of 24 iconic (and, well, "iconic") players down to a Final Five, the supersized season has been...well, let's call it "polarizing." At its best, season 50 was a real celebration of Survivor lore and 26 years of characters; the premiere was wonderful, the emotions on exhibit—particularly from the players who know this is their last chance to play this incredible game—were raw and touching, and it has been pretty reliably funny! This is all good. Unfortunately, though, it has not all been good. At its worst, season 50 has been a demoralizing harbinger of what Survivor is becoming as it inches closer to whatever endgame it …  ( 48 min )

When I was 24, a stranger on the internet called me a white man, and it sent me into such a tailspin that I changed my byline. Before then, I was going by “Alex Laughlin,” just my first and last name. I had started writing about race, and I’d made a podcast about multiracial identity called Other, but if my name was to represent me on its own, there was no way for a stranger to know that very special fact that seemed like it defined me exclusively: I was Wasian. My Korean name is 수정, which is most often romanized as Soo-Jeong or Soo-Jung. No one has ever called me this. But in 2017, I decided to adopt it as part of my professional identity, as a way to signal my mixed ethnicity to strangers. However, when I tried to add my name to my Twitter account, I found that the standard spelling was too lengthy to fit with my long-ass last name. In order to squeeze my name into my Twitter header, I took some liberties, and for the last decade, my byline has essentially been a misspelling of my own name. It was more intolerable to be perceived imprecisely by a stranger than it was for me to commit to being perceived as what I imagine is the “Ashleigh” of Korean name spellings. It was these awkward attempts at self-expression that defined my long path to moderately well-adjusted Wasian adult, and I recognize my younger self with a bit of affectionate cringe when I see fellow Wasians insisting on their identities in loud, public ways. I used to make a big deal out of every time someone asked me “What are you?” I used to have my feelings hurt when the servers in Korean restaurants brought my food with a fork. Now, however, I am more preoccupied with simply living a good life—I went to a Korean restaurant last night and smiled while the server explained tteokbokki to me. I want to offer my elder wisdom to this younger generation of Wasians. But I cannot and should not interfere. As they say on the internet: It’s a canon event.  ( 29 min )

As a rule, a college graduation is a miserable affair. If you’re an outgoing senior, you have wait around for hours on end in the sweltering heat, all while hungover and wearing a full-length black gown. If you’re a parent, you have to sit in a folding chair in the middle of a lawn for the same amount of time, seething about how you had to park your car so far away from everything. Everyone in attendance just wants to get to the roll call, and even that part is torture because, even if your last name starts with an A, they still make you stay in your seat until Zachary Zzyrowitz receives the final diploma. But before you get to that roll call, you must endure an endless procession of deans introducing other deans, students who aren’t your kid receiving prestigious awards, and, worst of all, the keynote speaker. Let’s see what kind of sage wisdom this year’s crop of speakers had for tomorrow’s leaders! https://bsky.app/profile/cabel.panic.com/post/3mlk75u3om22e  ( 24 min )

Can you call a team that has advanced to the Eastern Conference Finals "unserious"? I'm honestly not sure, but it's very difficult to find another descriptor for the Cleveland Cavaliers the morning after they blew a 22-point fourth-quarter lead in Game 1 against the Knicks. It's not just that they blew it, but how they blew it. The Knicks won the game in overtime, 115-104, while playing about 16 total minutes of good basketball. Both teams started terribly, but New York led 23-16 after the first quarter. From that point until the 7:39 mark of the fourth quarter, the Cavs outscored the Knicks 77-48. I can see you doing some quick math in your head, and yes, it's true: that means that for the rest of the game the Cavs got beat 44-11. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zg2MDj-I1vc  ( 19 min )

Like the universe itself, the United States tax code is ever-expanding, and no one can claim to know its exact size. There are statutes enacted by Congress; implementing regulations issued by the Treasury Department; rules from the Internal Revenue Service explaining how other rules apply to specific circumstances; and a patchwork of court decisions that may or may not supersede everything else, depending on who you ask. All told, these impenetrable documents could total 40 million words. Imagine seven-hundred copies of Masters of Atlantis, stacked six stories tall. In dozens of other countries, governments make it easy for people to navigate labyrinthine tax laws. Ordinary wage-earners receive a pre-filled return from the state, and they can either sign or dispute it. Americans have different, decidedly worse options. We can white-knuckle our way through a mess of hard-copy paperwork, pray we didn't make any errors, and file via mail. Or, if we want the convenience of calculating and submitting our returns electronically, we can pay a tax-prep monopolist to do it for us.  This is lunacy. Find the nearest third-grader. Tell them they have homework, and they will be sent to prison if they don't complete it. Then explain that the best way to do so requires spending money, perhaps several hundred dollars, on homework-submission software. They would, quite justifiably, lose their mind. Adults, on the other hand, have grown numb to this kind of petty extortion, spending an average of 13 hours and $290 on filing their taxes, each and every year.  ( 61 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 )

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-2 .column-1 .block-8 .button:hover,.row-4 .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 transparent!important;border-top:0 solid transparent!important;color:#fff!important} @media (max-width:660px){.social_block.desktop_hide .social-table{display:inline-block!important}.mobile_hide{display:non…  ( 1 min )

This Man, This Alien They Call Wemby96 :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 …  ( 8 min )

All the way from Fort Worth, Texas, Reed O’Connor has decided that he’s in charge of a federal probe of a Rhode Island hospital that provides gender-affirming care.   The post Reed O’Connor Is Delivering For Trump’s Anti-Trans Agenda appeared first on Balls and Strikes.  ( 7 min )

what war does Dear Leader imagine he’s fighting?

Virginia just did what Congress won’t

Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely President Trump’s corrupt $1.776 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund” is the gift that keeps on giving … to...  ( 11 min )

The surest sign that a MAGA leader knows they screwed up? When they try to pass off the stupid thing they said as a “joke.” But the right-wing podcaster Eric Metaxas was not joking at Sunday’s Rededicate 250 event on the National Mall when he said, “It’s hard to believe that it would take two centuries for the Lord to raise up a great man to bring that ballroom finally to stand where it needs to stand. It’s extraordinary.” He had gotten a laugh a moment before when he mocked President James Madison for not having a ballroom when the White House was burned by the British during the War of 1812. But when Metaxas praised Donald Trump and claimed that God’s providence is on the president and his ballooning ballroom project, the crowd’s cheering was loud — and serious. “For God so loved the wo…  ( 10 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 )

The New York Times reports: The Trump administration announced on Monday the creation of a $1.8 billion fund to compensate those who claim they were targeted by the Biden Justice Department and Democrats, forging a pipeline to funnel taxpayer money to President Trump’s allies. The highly unusual “anti-weaponization” fund was denounced by critics as a slush fund and as a brazen misuse of a once-independent Justice Department to carry out the president’s personal and political agendas. The announcement provided few details of how the disbursement would work or who would be eligible. But the arrangement raised the possibility that American taxpayers might end up writing checks to those prosecuted for the attack on the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob on Jan. 6, 2021, and others the president has ca…  ( 3 min )

Denote aims to be a simple-to-use, focused-in-scope, and effective note-taking and file-naming tool for Emacs. Denote is based on the idea that files should follow a predictable and descriptive file-naming scheme. The file name must offer a clear indication of what the contents are about, without reference to any other metadata. Denote basically streamlines the creation of such files or file names while providing facilities to link between them (where those files are editable). Denote’s file-naming scheme is not limited to “notes”. It can be used for all types of file, including those that are not editable in Emacs, such as videos. Naming files in a constistent way makes their filtering and retrieval considerably easier. Denote provides relevant facilities to rename files, regardless …  ( 10 min )

Pretty much every project that I actively maintain on my GitHub account has a change log of some description. For a long time now, whenever I add a new entry to the log, I'll include a link to the PR that implements that change. Inevitably, this results in me adding the ChangeLog entry, creating the PR, then doing a follow-up change and commit now that I know the PR number, which allows me to add the link. So I've created next-gh-pr.el to save me just a little time and let me be just a little more lazy. Inside it I've currently got a next-gh-pr-insert-markdown-link command which, when run, as you might imagine, inserts a link to the next likely PR URL as Markdown. Working out the next URL is simple enough: get the latest issue and PR number, take whichever is the highest, and add 1. There is the wrinkle that discussions also cause this number to bump, and getting the latest discussion number is a little extra faff that I can't be bothered with right now, but my projects very seldom have discussions taking place anyway.  ( 1 min )

to write some code to implement the missing feature. The code, which you can see at his post, is pretty simple and easy to follow. What wasn’t so easy were some annoying design decisions. For example, what constitutes the current day? Is it 24 hours ago until now or is it the previous midnight until now? And by the way, should that be UTC or local time? The natural interface is to specify the number of previous days you want to mark as a prefix argument but that leaves open the question of how to unmark the last n days. The natural solution—and the one mbork chose—is to use a negative n to mean “unmark the last n days”. So positive n, mark files modified in the last n days; negative n unmark file modified in the last n days. What about 0? Mbork made the arbitrary decision to have that mean mark files modified in the last 60 minutes. There are a couple of other nuances that you can read about in mbork’s post. The real takeaway for me is how tricky it can be to get the small details right. That seems especially true when you’re dealing with time calculations. Questions like, “What, exactly, does ‘yesterday’ mean” turn out to be a lot harder to answer than they first seem. Take a look at mbork’s post to see what I mean.  ( 5 min )

Election deniers could run Georgia’s next presidential vote 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 )

The Briefing: Epic corruption in plain sight #outlook a { padding: 0 } /*overriding blue links*/ .blueLinks a { color: #000 !important; text-decoration: none !important; } span [x-apple-data-detectors] { color: #000 !important; text-decoration: none !important; font-size: inherit !important; font-family: inherit !important; font-weight: inherit !important; line-height: inherit !important; } /*end overriding blue links*/ .ReadMsgBody { width: 100% } .ExternalClass { width: 100% } .ExternalClass * { line-height: 100% } body { margin: 0; padding: 0; -webkit-text-size-adjust: 100%; -ms-text-size-adjust: 100% } table, td { border-collapse: collapse; mso-table-lspace: 0; mso-table-rspace: 0 } img { border: 0; …  ( 7 min )

Email from The Democratic Strategist /* The following 2 styles are for handling signup landing pages /* Set the default value for the targeted layout to display: none */ .layout--email_signup_fineprint { display: none; } /* Display the targeted layout only if the doc contains email_address input */ body:has(label[for="email_address"]) .layout--email_signup_fineprint { display: block; } @media only screen and (max-width:480px) { .footer-main-width { width: 100% !important; } .footer-mobile-hidden { display: none !important; } .footer-mobile-hidden { display: none !important; } .footer-column { display: block !important; } .footer-mobile-stack { display: block !important; } .footer-mobile-stack-padding { padding-top: 3px; } } /* IE: correctly scale images with w/h attbs */ img …  ( 6 min )

Subscribe for breaking news and exclusive benefits /* 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…  ( 2 min )

After getting caught sending an intern in ill-fitting jeans out to snoop on a Middlesbrough practice session ahead of an EFL Championship playoff match, Southampton has been booted from the promotion playoff final. During the league's independent disciplinary panel's investigation, Southampton copped to having sent spies to record opponents' practices on two additional occasions. Boro will now take Southampton's place in the final, where they will face Hull City for a spot in the Premier League next season. This incident will immediately go down in English soccer history as one of the dumbest own goals the game has ever seen. The potential rewards for spying on a soccer practice are, in the best of circumstances, miniscule. Evidence of this truth can be found in the Saints' record in the three matches they in which they enjoyed this dubious advantage: a 2-1 loss to Oxford United in December, a 2-2 draw with Ipswich Town in April, and a 0-0 draw with Boro in this month's playoff first leg. The marginal gains of spying on practice are so small that that fact was actually the strongest argument that maybe Southampton didn't deserve to be DQ'd from the final. Ultimately, the disciplinary panel disagreed, and only the biggest of Southampton homers could make the case that the punishment wasn't well-earned, for the sheer stupidity if nothing else. https://bsky.app/profile/johnspacemuller.com/post/3mlqlxexo422m  ( 15 min )

Time for your weekly edition of the Defector Funbag. Got something on your mind? Email the Funbag. You can also read Drew over at SFGATE, and buy Drew’s books while you’re at it. Today, we're talking cooking violence, living with your own mediocrity, actors as P.I.s, and more. Your letters: Mick:  ( 45 min )

Late last week, the Commonwealth Foundation announced the five regional winners of its 2026 Short Story Prize. The quintet will move on to a final round of judging ahead of the grand prize announcement on June 30, though we can probably count out Caribbean regional winner Jamir Nazir. It seems Nazir's "The Serpent In The Grove," published last Tuesday in Granta, was written by a large-language model. On Monday, Wharton associate professor Ethan Mollick pointed this out, noting in the process that the AI-checker he used tends toward false negatives more than false positives. Nazir's online footprint is small: a self-published 2018 poetry book called Night Moon Love: Poems For All Who Have Loved Or Dreamed Of Love and a prolific, AI-fueled turn on LinkedIn as an AI evangelist. The Commonwealth Foundation told the Bookseller they are "conducting a thorough, transparent review of the selection process." A Granta spokesperson, meanwhile, said that they simply copy-edit the stories selected by the Foundation—this one includes the lines "She had the kind of walking that made benches become men," and "The girl smiled like sunrise over a sink," raising the intriguing possibility that "The Serpent in the Grove" won an award and got published in a prestigious literary magazine without anyone ever actually reading any part of it—that they were "alarmed by the speculation," and would keep the story up until the review is complete. Granta publisher Sigrid Rausig also turned to Anthropic LLM Claude for some help analyzing the story, and quoted Claude at length in her statement, in case anyone was feeling sympathetic toward the magazine. Nobody could get in touch with Nazir, who appears to be a real guy with a fake profile picture.  ( 23 min )

I still can't help but associate Montreal goalie Jakub Dobes with a game I went to in New Jersey in November. It was an OT win for the Devils, and the first loss of the season for a 24-year-old netminder who'd only made 15 starts for the Habs the previous year. He took it hard. Talking to media in the postgame, he seemed devastated in a way that better fit a Game 7 defeat, putting all the blame on himself for a loss he took very personally. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BEeGlpv1pRQ&t=196s "I'm just disappointed in myself. That's pretty much it," he said.  ( 18 min )

It's easy to come out of Game 1 of the Western Conference Finals with only Wemby on the brain. Do you focus on the defensive presence that threw off Oklahoma City's entire roster, save for Alex Caruso? Or the Steph Curryesque three-pointer at the end of overtime? Or the aura farming in front of his awed teammates? Victor Wembanyama gave everyone what they wanted on Monday night, which is why it falls to me to ignore the nine-foot-tall alien and ask a very important question: Dylan Harper, are you serious? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2riVtF8ynE In any other game, on any other night, with any other teammate, Harper would be the story coming out of Game 1. Having come off the bench for most of the season and all of the playoffs so far, the rookie from Rutgers notched his first postseason start on Monday, thanks to a late scratch for De'Aaron Fox (ankle soreness). And what a time for that to happen: Game 1, on the road, against the defending champions. The Spurs were very patient with Harper this season, letting him grow without overexerting him (he only averaged 22 minutes per game in the regular season, a figure that only increased to around 25 minutes through the first two rounds of the playoffs). That patience, and Harper's growth not just as a scorer but as an all-around star-in-the-making, paid off on Monday: 24 points, 11 rebounds, six assists, and a ludicrous seven steals. Even that stat line doesn't do a complete job of hyping up the best game of Harper's young career.  ( 22 min )

For the first time in six years, I have closets. At the Brooklyn apartment I just moved out of, all available evidence points to them just screwing up the blueprint. My bedroom was twice the height of a normal bedroom, and there's no reason why they shouldn't have extended the other bedroom, a flight of stairs up, over my room. There was a secret, unfinished space above the kitchen, accessible by vent, which we only discovered five years into our residence thanks to a beeping smoke detector. And there wasn't a single closet anywhere in the apartment. I kept my clothes in a bulky wardrobe assembled out of canvas and poles: hangers in the middle, other stuff sorted into compartments on either side. I stuffed as much as I could into that thing, and by the end I think the only thing keeping it from falling over was that it was wedged between two sturdy pieces of furniture. Moving to my new spot in Queens, I was excited to store my clothes in a place that didn't constantly carry the threat of structural failure. But the thing about changing apartments is that it forces you to reckon with the physical mass of the things you own. When I first moved within New York City, all of my stuff fit inside my dad's SUV. When I moved into my last place, it required two trips. This time—probably the last occasion I'll ever move without a dedicated van of some sort—it took three. Some of this is because I now actually own real furniture, but I can't deny that my clothes collection has grown astronomically over the last several years. As I organized outfits in my new bedroom—and reluctantly resigned certain pieces to boxes under the bed—I had the chance to listen to the stories they told, about me then and about me now.  ( 23 min )

This weekend, history repeated itself on the unnecessarily pyrotechnic stage of Eurovision as singers from Israel and another country waited to hear which would be crowned the winner of the increasingly contentious song contest. In the end, the Bulgarian banger "Bangaranga" by singer Dara edged out Israel's "Michelle" by singer Noam Bettan. Last year, Austrian singer JJ served as a similar spoiler with his operatic "Wasted Love." Now Eurovision, it would seem, plans to proceed as if everything were normal, announcing the competition will take place next year in Bulgaria. But, of course, something is rotten in the state of Eurovision, a competition where many fans find themselves in the harrowing position of rooting not for their favorite song, but for anyone but Israel. In recent years, ar…  ( 24 min )

Short answer: no one yet. Chennedy Carter has been everything the Las Vegas Aces imagined she could be when they signed the 27-year-old guard to a one-year deal this offseason, a signing that marked her return to the WNBA after a 2025 spent playing in China and Mexico. In Carter's first five games of the year, she’s scored 97 points, a league record for a player coming off the bench. She wrecks whole defenses with what Aces head coach Becky Hammon called “eye-popping” speed, “especially if you haven't really seen it or you haven't seen it in a while.” https://www.youtube.com/shorts/6KwwOS4Gnvg That is indeed the experience of watching Carter for the first time in a long time. At points in Sunday's Aces-Dream game, an 85-84 Vegas win in Atlanta, even the camera seemed like it was struggling to keep pace. Speed aside, there may not be a deeper bag than Carter's in the WNBA. She can pull up on a dime, snake her way through clusters of defenders on her way downhill, or cross over the very athletic Allisha Gray (see above). The depths of that bag have been tested by some of the gnarliest spacing situations the WNBA can offer a young downhill scorer. In Chicago, she’d managed 17.5 points per game despite sharing the paint with two non-shooting bigs. She simply doesn’t need much help. In a 20-point game on 7-of-13 shooting in her 21 minutes, only two of her buckets were assisted.  ( 21 min )

Late in Monday night's Game 1 of the Western Conference Finals, a beleaguered Shai Gilgeous-Alexander dribbled tentatively into the mouth of San Antonio's defensive zone. That zone had been total hell for the two-time reigning MVP. Now, with the Thunder down four points inside the final minute of the game's second overtime period, Gilgeous-Alexander was pretty well wasted. He'd played 50 minutes of intensely frustrating basketball; he'd been guarded by approximately 78 different sturdy and long-armed Spurs, often by two or three at a time; with few exceptions, every time he'd carved out a sliver of attacking space, he'd looked up and seen Victor damn Wembanyama looming up in front of the basket. He'd tried floaters, and step-backs, largely to no avail; he'd tried hesitations and Nash dribbles, to even less avail; he'd tried kick-outs to the corner, a really striking number of which had been deflected or intercepted by opportunistic Spurs defenders. That was his night: waves of pesky guards and sturdy wings, zipping around in impossible numbers, and backed always by that huge menacing Frenchman. That Frenchman, by the way, was putting the finishing touches on the defining performance of his still-young career. He would finish the Spurs' 122-115 victory with 41 points, 24 rebounds, and three blocks. Moments before Gilgeous-Alexander embarked on the aforementioned drive, Wembanyama had snatched an entry pass, tossed away Oklahoma City's best defender, pirouetted in the paint, and smashed a two-handed dunk, through a foul, directly in the mug of the home team's best rim protector. Minutes before that, he had sent the game into its second overtime by rising up for and burying an audacious 28-footer in semi-transition. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gHzi6r5TbE  ( 35 min )

It is a perfectly reasonable assessment of the Montreal Canadiens that they are recipients of a long and lingering tongue kiss from the gods. It is equally rational to remind Habs fans in their moment of glorious triumph that the gods are treacherously profligate trollops who distribute their drooly favors indiscriminately and without a moment's thought for whomever they kissed last.  But that's tomorrow's broken heart. In the immediate moment, the hyperplucky Habs are the charmed ones, and rarely more so than Monday night in the seventh game of the Eastern Conference semifinals against Buffalo, in Buffalo, before the most beloved and never rewarded fan base on the continent. Months of indomitable Sabre-hood boiled down to one last superb performance foiled in the end by the impish Alex Newhook.  https://youtu.be/pnTboPwMKiw?si=RBwq993ghh7FNuik&t=984  ( 20 min )

Agentic Architecture, Python is Weird, 3.15, 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 )

For decades, Congress routinely reauthorized the Voting Rights Act on a bipartisan basis. But influential conservative lawyers had other ideas. The post How the Conservative Legal Movement Became Obsessed With Killing the Voting Rights Act appeared first on Balls and Strikes.  ( 8 min )

Not Possible in a Functioning Democracy A whirlwind of developments closed the deal yesterday on what is arguably the single...  ( 12 min )

why do we even have laws, if some shithead gets to ignore them?

Plus, small town takes the regime to court

In “Billionaire Trump’s Secret Trading Spree Alarms Wall Street,” Laura Eposito writes at Daily Beast: “Donald Trump’s Wall Street side hustle is starting to look like a full-time job…During the first three months of 2026, the billionaire president pocketed tens of millions of dollars through 3,700 investment trades involving companies with direct ties to his... Read more »  ( 10 min )

Donald Trump’s second term has devolved into what critics describe as one of the most brazen eras of presidential self-dealing in American history. Promises of fiscal responsibility and “draining the swamp” have given way to taxpayer-funded luxuries, legally dubious settlements funneled to supporters, family crypto schemes that allegedly rug-pulled billions from supporters, and apparent insider...  ( 20 min )

Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward and Frank Bisignano, the chief executive officer of the I.R.S., signed Monday's “settlement agreement.”

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Since the early stages of President Donald Trump's Iran war, Fox News personalities and guests have parroted his administration's assertions that Iran's military has been severely decimated or destroyed. Yet on May 12, The New York Times reported that those assertions are “sharply at odds with what U.S. intelligence agencies are telling policymakers behind closed doors” and that Iran has “restored operational access to 30 of the 33 missile sites it maintains along the Strait of Hormuz." Liberal Fox host Jessica Tarlov was met with interruptions and deflections on May 13 after citing both the Times' reporting and an earlier Atlantic piece discussing Vice President JD Vance's concern about dwindling U.S. missile stockpiles. Co-host Jesse Watters dismissed the reporting as "deep state leaks." Fox continues to paint a rosy picture of U.S. efforts against Iran more than two months after the initial attack: Since the early days of the war, Fox News has pushed the Trump administration line that it has destroyed Iran’s military.  ( 8 min )

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org-jira for the first time. You can see the config I've written around it here. This works basically exactly as expected, although I have had to do something a bit hacky to keep the API token properly stored. Storing the key on MacOS as recommended in the readme wasn't working for me, so instead I've stored it as a generic password. When launching Jira, this password is fetched into the kill ring to be pasted into the prompt if needed. This is kind of terrible, but it does work well enough. (when (equal system-type 'darwin) (kill-new (string-trim-right (shell-command-to-string (concat "security find-generic-password -a \"" jiralib-user "\" -s \"jira\" -w"))))) You should be careful when storing the API token with add-gene…

As anyone reading my blog knows, I’m a big fan of Dired. One of its killer features is the set of marking commands, which allow marking files based on their extensions, names (regex-based), contents (also regex-based). There is also a “universal marking command”, dired-mark-sexp, which allows the user to provide an Elisp expression serving as a predicate and marks all files satisfying that predicate. What’s even more, you can use several symbols in that predicate, like size or name (head to the docs to learn more). What I found lacking is an easy (that is, not requiring me to type a convoluted expression each time) way to mark “recently modified” files.  ( 3 min )

oantolin's tip about using Eww. It's always interesting to see what people can do when they apply Emacs's power and composability to all sorts of things, including evaluating code snippets from webpages. Outside Emacs, there was a lively conversation on HN about personal software. Enjoy! Upcoming events (iCal file, Org): M-x Research: TBA https://m-x-research.github.io/ Wed May 20 0800 America/Vancouver - 1000 America/Chicago - 1100 America/Toronto - 1500 Etc/GMT - 1700 Europe/Berlin - 2030 Asia/Kolkata - 2300 Asia/Singapore Emacs APAC: Emacs APAC meetup (virtual) https://emacs-apac.gitlab.io/announcements/ Sat May 23 0130 America/Vancouver - 0330 America/Chicago - 0430 America/Toronto - 0830 Etc/GMT - 1030 Europe/Berlin - 1400 Asia/Kolkata - 1630 Asia/Singapore Emacs Berlin: Emacs-Ber…  ( 3 min )

Of all the built-in editing commands in Emacs, the commands that work with rectangles delight me the most. Once understood, they can save effort in many situations. That said, the biggest downside to rectangles is the amount of setup it takes to use them. As with many things Emacs, by default you have to memorize a bunch of keybindings to get anything done with them. In Casual, I addressed the above downside by providing a Transient menu for rectangle commands. Since building that, I've come to use rectangle commands routinely. But even then, there is ceremony to set up a rectangle selection. With my recent work on mouse-driven interactions in Anju, I’ve learned that rectangle selection is trivial via C-M- dragging. Once selected, having a menu of rectangle commands makes working with them even easier. So I made one for the latest v1.4.0 update for Anju, now on MELPA. The “Rectangle” sub-menu is available via the main menu bar “Edit” menu (as shown in the screenshot above) or via context menu. Using rectangle commands in conjunction with the align-regexp (“Edit › Align Regexp…”) and whitespace-cleanup (“Edit › Delete › Whitespace Cleanup”) can make short work of editing text that is laid out in columns. Anju makes both of these commands available from the main menu. Side note: on using C-M-, sometimes Emacs will only read M- and do a secondary selection, leaving an unwanted highlight. Enter M- to dismiss the highlight. If you find Anju to be useful, please support its development by buying me a coffee. I’ve got a number of new features planned for it.  ( 1 min )

C-x v bindings. I never really felt the need for Magit, honestly. VC-mode just works, right? Until it does not. Or rather, until you need something that is not quite available. As vc-mode is source code control agnostic then there were always going to be some limitations and my git usage is now starting to become a little more advanced. Recently I hit a divergent branch situation, remote had moved on, I had local commits, and git refused to push, I reached for C-x v m (vc-merge) to pull in the upstream changes, and that worked fine as a merge. But what if I wanted a rebase instead? Clean linear history, no merge commits? Turns out there is no vc-rebase at all in Emacs! You can use vc-pull and it will rebase if pull.rebase is set in your git config (I think, although I …  ( 2 min )

The president designed his settlement with the IRS to do something he could not otherwise accomplish—and to shield his actions from judicial review and congressional oversight. The post The Trump IRS Lawsuit Settlement Will Use Your Tax Dollars to Make January 6ers Rich appeared first on Balls and Strikes.  ( 8 min )

The administration’s view is that the mere presence of students of color at elite schools is incontrovertible proof of discrimination against white people. The post Trump DOJ: Yale’s Medical School Has Way Too Many Black Students appeared first on Balls and Strikes.  ( 6 min )

Confusion reigns ahead of Alabama’s post-gerrymander primary 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 )

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:-10% } Join LDAD tomorrow for a discussion with UCLA Law Professor Scott Cummings and LDAD Executive Director Lauren Stiller Rikleen on what lessons American lawyers can learn from Hungary's experience of democratic resistance to autocracy. There is still time to register for tomorrow's webinar, a discussion with UCLA Law Professor Scott Cummings and LDAD Executive Director Lauren Stiller Rikleen on what lessons American lawyers can learn from Hungary's experience of democratic resistance to autocracy.    Webinar Details:  Date: Tuesday, May 19, 2026   Time: 4:00 pm ET    Register here (there is no charge to attend): Webinar Registration   Thank you, Lawyers Defending American Democracy   Please follow, like, and share our posts on social media:   Donate to LDAD, a 501(c)(3) organization:  Online donations welcome. Checks may be sent to: Lawyers Defending American Democracy P.O. Box 1922 Framingham, MA 01701 United States     If you believe you received this message in error or wish to no longer receive email from us, please unsubscribe. Kill the Newsletter! feed settings  ( 1 min )

The legacy media ignored this. Democracy Docket prepared for it. 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 )

The Oklahoma City Thunder are the defending champions, with a talented roster that should set them up for years of success, so it makes sense that they'd have their share of detractors. A team at the top always does. There are other reasons why a neutral observer might not root for them: the origins of how OKC got an NBA team, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander's reliance on drawing fouls, that "What a Pro Wants" commercial. That's just sports writ large: You can accept that people will hate your team for some rational or irrational reason, or you can try to argue with all of them and achieve the same level of success as trying to fight the ocean. If you pick the latter option, at least try to make sure your argument doesn't sound insane. According to Eitan Reshef's bio, he's a native Oklahoman now based in Chicago, and works in digital commerce. He's not a regular columnist for the Oklahoman. While Reshef's article appeared under the publication's URL, it's a guest column for the opinion section and carries the following disclaimer at the top: "This piece expresses the views of its author(s), separate from those of this publication." Actually, it was a guest column; the article was deleted sometime Monday afternoon, hours after it was published. You might understand why when you see the headline: "Like Thunder, Israel is an underdog that has become hated." Here's the opening paragraph:  ( 21 min )

Ronda Rousey and Gina Carano fought for 17 seconds longer than they should have over the weekend. Their brief Saturday encounter in a Southern California hexagon, a comeback for both after ridiculously long layoffs yet still promoted by Jake Paul’s MVP outfit as the biggest women’s MMA fight in history, ended as soon as Rousey set Carano up for an arm bar, the ex-judoka’s trademark finishing move from back when she was relevant. Carano, who gave up the cage for acting and right-wing mouthpiecing, tapped quicker than Fred Astaire.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rg4OWWAEoCY  ( 19 min )

There are many ways that Donald Trump is currently making your life worse, not to mention generally waging war on the concept of "the future": accelerating the death of the biosphere, doing his best to eliminate the federal government and university as sites of middle-class employment, driving up the price of energy now and food in the immediate future thanks to the idiotic war with Iran he's losing alongside his buddy Benjamin Netanyahu (who, if you are Palestinian, Lebanese, or Iranian, is trying to kill your family with Trump's help), and making it impossible for you to vote against any of this. He is also straight-up stealing your money to redirect it to the freaks and sex offenders who stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. In January, Trump, two of his sons, and the Trump Organ…  ( 18 min )

For tennis fans who do not know how to be normal (i.e. me), rooting for Jannik Sinner is as comforting as it can get. There is an aspirational calmness in Sinner's rituals—not elaborate enough to be Nadal-like, but consistent enough to be a little Nadal-lite—that, though it can't eliminate fan neuroses, at least soothes them. He goes to the towel after making a poor error. One can count as he bounces the ball seven times on first serve (four bounces, a glance up at the opponent, then three more) and five times on second serve (three, glance, two). Also, at some point this year, he forgot how to lose. Sinner beat Casper Ruud 6-4, 6-4 at the Rome Open on Sunday. It was his first-ever victory at his home tournament, following a loss to Alcaraz in the final last year. Sinner became the first I…  ( 29 min )

The Washington Nationals won their Rivalry Weekend series against the Baltimore Orioles. This was their second consecutive series win; they have won eight of their last 13 games overall. The plucky Nats today have the top performing offense in the majors by runs scored, and that is despite having played the second-strongest schedule to date among all MLB teams. Where's the hoopla? Clearly they don't want you to know about the surging Nats. What they do want you to know about—and by "they" I am referring to several of the very worst people to have ever been born, grown up and positioned in the upper-deck seats of Nationals Park for Sunday's series finale—is white genocide. Three MAGA freaks unfurled a large banner in the stands above the first base line during the home team's regular "Salute to Service" segment, seeking to direct attention to the website of a group called Crusader Active Club, with the URL of whitereplacement.org. Allow me to save you the click: The group's website claims that they are standing up "against the 3rd world invasion" and boasts that Crusader Active Club is the No. 1 "Christian/Conservative activist app in the world." There's a ridiculous doomsday tracker on the website's home page, which when I checked it this morning showed that there were more than "90,000,000 million" total foreign-born immigrants, labeled "invaders," in America today.  ( 19 min )

Solve our Monday crossword, bit by bit. This week's puzzle was constructed by Paul Leistra and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. Paul is from Hamilton, Ontario where he works as an instructional designer. Paul first started constructing crosswords for his four children to solve, particularly on long road trips. Replacing "Are we there yet?" with "Any know what 18-Across is?" was a delight. Defector crosswords, launched in partnership with our friends at AVCX, run every Monday. If you’re interested in submitting a puzzle to us, you can read our guidelines HERE. The AVCX, an independent puzzles and games outlet, invites you to subscribe, or sample the goods with a two-month free trial: "With an AVCX subscription, you get access to weekly themed and themeless crosswords, minis, cryptics, and trivia, by email or in your favorite app. We have no corporate overlord, and we publish top-flight stuff only. We also pay our people fairly, always. Check us out."  ( 14 min )

Tom Dundon readily admits his parsimony. I guess no one ever got turbo-rich by being profligate, but few billionaires brag so much about how they pick up pennies from the ground or turn off unused room lights. He claims he does not display this behavior when it comes to putting the sports teams he owns in position to win. This is a questionable assertion. As the owner of the NHL's Carolina Hurricanes, his philosophies manifested in offering league-low salaries for GM and head coach. That coach, Rod Brind’Amour, was initially making less than many assistant coaches around the league. Many successes and one extension later, Brind’Amour got a raise that kept him in the bottom half-dozen coach salaries. Now on his second extension and in his eighth straight postseason, he's somewhere in the middle of the pack, salarywise—all he had to do was put together the league's most consistently successful team for Dundon to pay him like a normal coach. The Hurricanes' victories are entirely due to their canny front office and uniquely coached systems, and one suspects that the lesson Dundon has taken from striking gold while mining for tin is that he is a genius, and that everyone else is overpaying for talent. When Dundon finalized his purchase of the NBA's Portland Trail Blazers earlier this spring, he almost immediately started putting the screws to the budget. He is reportedly offering well below market rate for a head coach. Interim coach Tiago Splitter, who did a fab job since taking over unexpectedly in October, is reportedly getting lowballed already. Jared Dudley, architect of the Nuggets' disastrous defense, is reportedly a candidate, presumably because he'd come cheap; he surely won't have other suitors.  ( 23 min )

After federal law enforcement officers shot and killed two people in Minnesota earlier this year, Maryland Governor Wes Moore got busy talking and typing. Moore went on Fox News to blast the DHS forces as “untrained, unaccountable, and unqualified—and, by the way, armed.” He brought the same wording and vitriol to MS NOW. He posted…  ( 40 min )

There was a moment early in the first quarter of Sunday's Game 7 between the Detroit Pistons and Cleveland Cavaliers when James Harden had the ball and was isolated against Tobias Harris. "James Harden, acquired from the Clippers, this was the big move that the Cavaliers made for moments like this," said play-by-play man Ian Eagle moments before Harden drove to the lane and kicked a grenade out to Evan Mobley in the corner, who missed a shot as the clock expired. I smiled to myself when this happened, and did so again a few possessions later when Harden committed the first of his two shot-clock violations. I was thinking about the blog you are reading right now, and how the story of this game, as it has been so many times before, would be about Harden melting down in the playoffs. Well, I was partially right. Harden did indeed submit what might have been his worst performance yet in a big playoff game—nine points on 2-10 shooting, 0-6 from three—but the Pistons unveiled a surefire method for squandering a vintage "Big Game" James performance: simply have your entire team play like James Harden did. The Pistons got absolutely rocked, 125-94, in what might have been the most dispiriting loss in a postseason that has been full of them. Game 7s rarely live up to expectations, but this one fell especially short. A nervy, low-scoring contest full of exhausted players can still be fun if the score remains close, and even a blowout can be neat if it happens in front of a raucous home crowd or is the result of the superior team accruing tactical advantages over the course of the series. This was the worst kind of blowout, though: a wire-to-wire domination in front of a crestfallen home crowd that offers little explanation aside from "The Pistons played like shit."  ( 21 min )

The Royals announced that left-hander Kris Bubic has been placed on the 15-day injured list due to left elbow soreness. Right-hander Eli Morgan has been recalled in a corresponding active roster move. More to come.  ( 6 min )

I-70 Let Down @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) { .typograp…  ( 11 min )

The Other World Cup You Need To Know About96 :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: in…  ( 8 min )

The resistance holds.

BREAKING … In a new filing this morning, President Trump attempted an end run around a federal judge by purporting...  ( 12 min )

March 3, 2026, 6:02 a.m. ET  ( 9 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 )

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

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 )

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 )

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…  ( 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 )

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 )

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 )

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 …  ( 15 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…  ( 15 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 )

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 )

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 )

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 )

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 …  ( 16 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 )

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 )

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 )

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 )

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 )

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 )

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 )

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…  ( 15 min )

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

I’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 )

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 )

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 )

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 )

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 )

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 )

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 )

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

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

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 )

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 )

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 )

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 )

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 )

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 )

President Donald Trump has dragged America into a war of his choosing, attacking Iran with little public support, zero congressional approval and virtually no public justification. The path forward is unclear, and our self-absorbed leader is already speaking about the loss of American lives with the nonchalance one expects from a small man never held accountable for the consequences of his actions. Announcing the deaths of four U.S. service members following the attack launched Feb. 28, Trump said in a video posted to social media: “And sadly, there will likely be more before it ends, that’s the way it is. Likely be more.” The ease with which that man dismissed present and future casualties was sickening. “That’s the way it is,” he said. He might as well have added a “Ho-hum,” such is his …  ( 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 )

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  ( 12 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 )

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 )

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…  ( 13 min )

President Donald Trump has dragged America into a war of his choosing, attacking Iran with little public support, zero congressional approval and virtually no public justification. The path forward is unclear, and our self-absorbed leader is already speaking about the loss of American lives with the nonchalance one expects from a small man never held accountable for the consequences of his actions. Announcing the deaths of four U.S. service members following the attack launched Feb. 28, Trump said in a video posted to social media: “And sadly, there will likely be more before it ends, that’s the way it is. Likely be more.” The ease with which that man dismissed present and future casualties was sickening. “That’s the way it is,” he said. He might as well have added a “Ho-hum,” such is his …  ( 12 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 )

This week in “What The Hell Is Wrong With These People?” I give you U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi. Here’s Pam Bondi sitting before Congress to defend the hire of a Jan. 6 rioter to her Department of Justice (her defense is that President Donald Trump had pardoned the man, so he couldn’t have done anything wrong, you see). Here’s Pam Bondi refusing to answer a question from California Rep. Sydney Kamlager-Dove and instead staring down at her papers, as if it might render her invisible to everyone else in the room. Here’s Pam Bondi complaining, “This is so ridiculous,” when another Democratic congressmember asks her whether Trump and now-deceased child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein ever partied with “underage girls.” Oh, and here’s Pam Bondi refusing to acknowledge the other Epstein vict…  ( 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 )

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 )

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 )

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 )

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 )

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 )

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 )

(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 )

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 )

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 )

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 )

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 )

scenes from another stark barking batshit event

Justices may soon testify at a Senate hearing for the first time since 2011. The practice used to be more common; there are good reasons for bringing it back.

The siren call was apparently irresistible. “Kennedy Starts a Push to Help Americans Quit Antidepressants,” read a New York Times headline from early May — phrasing that seemed to normalize Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the anti-science, roadkill enthusiast who is currently running the Department of Health and Human Services, and to assume that he wants to help everyday Americans. But reading the article should disabuse anyone of the notion that Kennedy has sincere, much less helpful, motivations in shepherding an event called the “Mental Health and Overmedicalization Summit,” held by the MAHA Institute, a far-right group organized to wage war on responsible healthcare systems. “No major medical organizations were represented at the gathering,” Times reporter Ellen Barry noted, and it’s not a sur…  ( 10 min )

At commonplace.org, Oren Cass interviews Ruy Teixeira: The Democratic Party continues to reel from its 2024 electoral defeat and struggles to connect with the American people. But the party remains captured by special interests and sacred cows that its leaders refuse to confront. Few understand this dynamic better than Ruy Teixeira, author and senior fellow... Read more »  ( 7 min )

Watch on YouTube – (America/Toronto) = Fri May 29 1030H EDT / 0930H CDT / 0830H MDT / 0730H PDT / 1430H UTC / 1630H CEST / 1730H EEST / 2000H IST / 2230H +08 / 2330H JST 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 (Omar Antolín Camarena) · GitHub Omar Antolín (@oantolin@mathstodon.xyz) - Mathstodon u/oantolin on Reddit https://sachachua.com/blog/2026/05/may-29-emacs-chat-with-omar-antolin-camarena/ Find more Emacs Chats or join the fun: https://sachachua.com/emacs-chat View Org source for this post You can e-mail me at sacha@sachachua.com.  ( 1 min )

Now you can change the todo keyword of a task directly from the notification tray of your phone

can do a lot and a ”real“ browser is only a keystroke away.” In another May Emacs Carnival entry, Omar Antolín Camarena offers his reasons for using EWW. He agrees with the conventional wisdom that EWW isn’t a replacement for a normal browser but that it is useful in many situations and even has some advantages over your default buffer. He believes that one of the chief advantages of EWW is that it doesn’t run JavaScript. That’s ironic, of course, because EWW’s lack of support for JavaScript is one of its most oft cited shortcomings. But Camarena says that lack is often an advantage because JavaScript is often used to load ads or a paywall or to reconfigure your display preferences often choosing low contrast colors that are hard for anyone but the young to read. His second reason for using EWW is that it brings the power of Emacs to your Web browsing. Among the advantages he lists are: You can easily resize images without changing font and other sizes. You can read the Web site content in multiple columns using follow-mode. You can use occur for a search and keep a list of results and easily navigate among them. You can evaluate ELISP directly in the EWW buffer and many other language as well with a bit of plumbing. You can use eww-readable to eliminate a lot of the junk that comes with many Web pages. eww-browse-with-external-browser, bound to & by default.  ( 5 min )

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Philip Kaludercic wanted to continue the conversation from YE24: Sacha and Prot Talk Emacs - Newbies/Starter Kits. He's spent a lot of time thinking about this as one of the main contributors to newcomers-presets. View in the Internet Archive, watch or comment on YouTube, read the transcript online, download the transcript, or e-mail me. Related links Chapters Transcript Chat Some types of new users to think about Sketching out their learning journey Other notes Some screenshots of a fresh Emacs Trying pkal's Emacs Configuration Generator Related links A proposal for a "beginners" (user-option) theme - Philip Kaludercic Re: some file-related options to consider for newcomers-presets - Philip Kaludercic A newcomer's feedback on newcomer presets - Abdulnafe Toulaimat Emacs Config…  ( 49 min )

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It came in the top of the eighth, with the Dodgers already ahead of the Angels by four on Saturday night. Shohei Ohtani walked to the plate with two outs and runners on first and second, thanks to a Max Muncy single and an Alex Call walk. On the second pitch, Ohtani looped the ball off the end of his bat, the baseball dropping just inside the line then bouncing off the ground and over the wall. Ground-rule double, right? Except the ball didn't go into the stands. It hit the netting that now sits atop the wall and bounded back onto the field. That netting is new, the Associated Press reported, added to Angel Stadium this year. (This is as good a time as any to pause and remember that netting is good—it makes going to baseball games safer for fans.) So was it out of play, or a live ball? On the replay, you can see Angels right fielder Jo Adell, a noted home run thief, throwing his arms in the air, signaling the former. The broadcast team thought the same, at first believing the ball had gone into the seats until it became clear that it had not. Because the moment felt so much like that routine ground-rule double, the broadcast didn't stay on Ohtani for long, necessitating a sudden zooming-out of the camera to capture his sprint toward home and easy slide into the plate.  ( 18 min )

From the Adriatic Sea up into the heart of the Tuscan-Emilian Apennines, the peloton tirelessly chased the breakaway. Stage 9 of the 2026 Giro d'Italia tempted a strong, organized group up the road and away from the bunch, yet Felix Gall's Decathlon CMA CGM team invested heavily in bringing them back in order to set things up for their leader. With three kilometers left and only a flagging Giulio Ciccone up the road, Gall made his move. The maglia rosa was shot out the back, along with every other general classification contender except for Jonas Vingegaard. Gall spent the next two kilometers turning around in a futile attempt to get Vingegaard to work with him, which he did not, only going to the front with 800 meters left to drop Gall like a stone. It was exactly how Vingegaard likes to race: clinical, efficient, and ruthless. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZhO3_roH_mg Depending on how you look at it, Vingegaard is either settling in to an impressive ride for the pink jersey, or he's confirming to the world that he no longer has it. He is either flying toward a sweep of all three Grand Tours, or he's cementing his status as a second-tier contender by failing to win the race against Tadej Pogacar's ghost. As we hit the second of somehow three rest days, Vingegaard is first among GC contenders, with 35 seconds on Gall and more than two minutes on the rest of a below-average pack of hopefuls. He's taken both summit finishes. In terms of the 2026 Giro alone, he's crushing it. The problem is, he's going to be judged against the impossible standard of Pogacar's 2024 Giro.  ( 23 min )

Now that we are one game away from the halfway point (by one metric) of the NBA playoffs, it is time to review them as a whole, on both aesthetic and competitive grounds. I think this is a useful exercise at this point, as the process of considering the eventual champion's worthiness or luck is a matter of confirmation bias that both overemphasizes the Finals and elides what is actually great about this postseason: the process. For example, last year's Finals were great, masking a middling-to-bad playoffs. We have not had what this reviewer would term a great playoffs since before the pandemic, with some notable stinkers (2021, when everyone got hurt, and 2024, which had precisely one good series) in the intervening years. Not anymore. This year's playoffs have been fantastic. We've had close games, wild series, and game-winners. Both legends and frauds have been forged. Here is the evidence, in three parts. Case Study 1: Cavaliers-Pistons, And What Follows  ( 27 min )

Justice Jackson: "I cannot understand the Court’s rush to extinguish [life], much less in the circumstances of this case." And, for paid subscribers: Closing my tabs.

Kash Patel holds a fucked-up Pearl Harbor snorkel party

There's never been a better time to get WIRED /* 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…  ( 2 min )

Americans United for Separation of Church and State 96 @font-face { font-family: 'Overpass'; font-style: normal; font-weight: 300; font-display: swap; src: url('https://fonts.gstatic.com/s/overpass/v19/qFda35WCmI96Ajtm83upeyoaX6QPnlo6ovPbPpqKl8Kuo8Az.woff2') format('woff2'); unicode-range: U+0000-00FF, U+0131, U+0152-0153, U+02BB-02BC, U+02C6, U+02DA, U+02DC, U+0304, U+0308, U+0329, U+2000-206F, U+20AC, U+2122, U+2191, U+2193, U+2212, U+2215, U+FEFF, U+FFFD; } @font-face { font-family: 'Overpass'; font-style: italic; font-weight: 300; font-display: swap; src: url('https://fonts.gstatic.com/s/overpass/v19/qFdU35WCmI96Ajtm81GgSdXCNs-VMF0vNLBdeqqIncOMp9gyUsE.woff2') format('woff2'); unicode-range: U+0000-00FF, U+0131, U+0152-0153, U+02BB-02BC, U+02C6, U+02DA, U…  ( 8 min )

Trump is raising a voter intimidation army 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 )

Eleven states, twenty-three attorneys general, four federal judges, and a country that decided to fight

“I believe wholeheartedly that you can’t force revival,” Lucas Miles declares in his stump speech for the Make Heaven Crowded tour. Miles is the director of TPUSA Faith, a spinoff of the late MAGA influencer Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA organization, that is dedicated to equipping Christians “who are prepared to defend our God-given rights.” And he’s been on the road this spring and summer, insisting to one audience after another that he does not believe you can “manufacture a revival.” The irony of this is thick — manufacturing a revival is exactly what Miles is trying to do. The Make Heaven Crowded tour, Miles explains to congregations and the press along the way, was started after a late September memorial service for Kirk, who was killed by a gunman’s bullet earlier that month. At …  ( 9 min )

The Royals have placed reliever Matt Strahm on the 15-day injured list with right knee inflammation, MLB.com’s Jeff Jones reports. Bailey Falter (left elbow inflammation) was reinstated from the IL in Strahm’s place. Strahm has dealt with right knee inflammation in the past. The first occurrence was in September 2020, and in that case, Strahm […]  ( 8 min )

the Space Nazi rolls it, Dear Leader doles it, and so much more...

interesting contribution to May’s Emacs Carnival, which this month is on the topic “If I may recommend…” His notion is that Emacs is an effortless bloom. The “effortless” part is because Emacs—contra conventional wisdom—is easy to use and can, in fact, significantly simplify your work flow by providing a uniform interface to several different computer programming languages and their environments. If you’ve ever had to negotiate such a collection, you know that this is not a trivial thing. The “bloom” part is more nuanced. The idea is that like a rose whose roots “fan in” water and nutrients and whose flower “fans out” its petals and beauty to encourage pollination, Emacs has its own fanning in and out. The center of this action is the text buffer. Data from various sources can be fanned into a buffer from which it can be fanned out to various functions for processing. The altered text buffer can then be fanned out to other targets. Holland’s post is a bit lyrical so you need to read it to get the full impact of his fan in, fan out metaphor. He considers whether any other editor could achieve the same power as Emacs. He concludes that any editor could, in theory, achieve the same power but in order to do so it would have to replicate the idea of the buffer as the single important data structure on which everything else operates. It’s an interesting post worth a few minutes of your time.  ( 5 min )

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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…  ( 3 min )

What are Americans worried could go wrong in the 2026 midterms?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 !imp…  ( 11 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){.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% } Join our US Civil Rights tour this fall ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌…  ( 2 min )

96 Virginia used to be for lovers. Now, it’s for data centers. 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 )

How Trump and His Famous Golfer Buddy Are Trying to Sportswash the Presidency#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 { …  ( 13 min )

He plastered his name on everything. We’ll bring the sledgehammers

Rewrite Bun in Rust, there's something that needs to be said, because no one is saying it.  ( 4 min )

I walked into the Sphere in Las Vegas expecting something transcendent—a marriage of ’90s ska-punk energy and the most advanced immersive venue on the planet. What I got was an enjoyable, heartfelt reunion show that delivered plenty of hits and warm fuzzies but left me wondering why this band needed the Sphere at all. It...  ( 8 min )

Election denial group releases blueprint to severely restrict 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} …  ( 5 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 )

The messy and unpredictable California gubernatorial primary is causing renewed heartburn among Democrats about non-partisan “jungle” primaries like that state’s top-two system, as I explain at New York. For decades, many Democratic and Republican centrists (along with good-government types) have blamed partisan primaries for a lot of our political system’s ills. In 2009, one Republican... Read more »  ( 10 min )

From “The New Civil Rights Movement Starts Now” at The Contrarian: Democracy is not a spectator sport. Whether you want to exercise your right to vote, join a protest, call your elected officials, run for office, or keep tabs on the week’s hottest issues and protests, The Contrarian has you covered. Here are our top... Read more »  ( 7 min )

Kansas City scored six or more runs in five consecutive home games, forcing Hawaiian Bros to give out thousands of free lunches to HB Rewards members.

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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.  ( 2 min )

Right-wing evangelical Christian media personalities — including figures who claim to share prophecies, or messages from God, with their audiences — are hailing “Rededicate 250: A National Jubilee of Prayer, Praise & Thanksgiving,” an all-day prayer festival on the National Mall. They are celebrating that the government is going to “rededicate the land to the Lord and build an altar to almighty God,” calling it “the culmination” of “three to four decades of work to see this happening in the public arena,” and saying the event is “like the prodigal son where he's returning to God.” Rededicate 250, scheduled to take place on May 17, will reportedly feature “a slate of political, military and religious leaders” and “will be rooted in giving thanks for God’s presence” and “asking for his guidance for the next 250.” Notably, the religious leaders scheduled to speak appear to be “mostly evangelical” and the speaker list does not feature any “leaders from mainline Christian or historically Black denominations,” or “representatives from other non-Christian faiths, such as Islam or Indigenous spiritual traditions.” Republican leaders scheduled to speak include Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA). The event comes at a fraught moment in Trump’s relationship with some segments of Christians — especially Catholics — while some journalists and religion scholars have noted how “charismatic Christian prophets have gained new influence since becoming identified with” Trump.  ( 10 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 )

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

Welcome back to Media Matters’ weekly newsletter. This week:  As Trump accuses news outlets of “TREASON,” Fox models MAGA Iran coverage.  Right-wing figures are spreading “plandemic” conspiracy theories about the hantavirus.  If you want to see how the costs of high fuel prices are adding up for Americans, look to local media.  The Fox News cabinet through the looking glass: A Trump cabinet official and his Fox News host spouse are producing a reality show in which they drive across the country. The ethical issues are legion. If you want this delivered straight to your inbox, subscribe here.  ( 5 min )

A Debacle on the South Side @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)…  ( 13 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-2 .column-1 .block-7 .button:hover{background-color:#16688b!important;border-bottom:0 solid transparent!important;border-left:0 solid transparent!important;border-right:0 solid transparent!important;border-top:0 solid transparent!important;color:#fff!important} @media (max-width:660px){.social_block.desktop_hide .social-table{display:inline-block!important}.mobile_hide{display:none}.row-content{width:100%!important}.sta…  ( 2 min )

96 Swept out of Chicago @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 )

Dylan Harper Is The Post-er Child For The NBA’s ‘Clip It’ Gen96 :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 !impor…  ( 8 min )

Today is Sean Kuhn’s last day at Defector. Sean has been our Head of Subscription Strategy for the last four years, and in that time he has become one of our favorite dudes. The only reason we’re not furious at him is because he’s leaving us for a dream job: doing fancy math crap for…  ( 76 min )

Around 59,000 years ago, somewhere in the Altai Mountains of southwestern Siberia, in lands prowling with woolly rhinos and cave hyenas, a Neanderthal had a toothache. The tooth was a molar, rooted in the lower left corner of the Neanderthal's mouth, and it had begun to rot. Such a dilemma is diabolically familiar to us modern humans, but at least we are fortunate to have dentists, who inflict upon us mild pain and terror in exchange for lasting relief. But a new paper in the journal PLOS One suggests that this Neanderthal had a dentist all of their own. After analyzing this ancient molar, which sported a strangely deep hole at its center, a team of researchers suggest this tooth is evidence of the world's earliest dental procedure, which, if true, might hold the superlative of being the w…  ( 25 min )

This article originally appeared May 11 on The Small Bow. Early on Saturday mornings, Amy Wallace would be yanked out of bed by her big brother, David. He was determined not to miss the start of the cartoons. At their home in Urbana, Illinois, the siblings situated themselves in front of the television and waited for the color bars to turn to The Road Runner Show, David eager, impatient, full of energy. Eventually, he would splay out on the carpet and Amy would sit behind him on the couch. More than 50 years later, Amy is still haunted by the sensory experience of that couch. It was pea-green and scratchy, yet she dutifully—and gladly—sat there as part of their sibling ritual.   Their mother, Sally Foster, described the scene this way: Amy spent her mornings watching David watch TV. But that’s not quite right.  ( 59 min )

Donald Trump was in China this week for a series of meetings with Chinese leader Xi Jinping. In order to cover the historic summit, major American broadcasters sent their newscasters overseas to broadcast from Beijing. Even the dolts from Fox News managed to get over there and commit a parking violation. Absent from the party, however, was beleaguered CBS Evening News anchor Tony Dokoupil, who at this point really seems to be cursed. "Right now, I'm just about 100 miles off the coast of mainland China," is how Dokoupil began Wednesday night's broadcast from the balcony of a hotel in Taipei, Taiwan. Tony was being kind to himself: Taipei may be very close to mainland China itself, but it is 1,000 miles away from Beijing, where all of the important stuff was happening. The reason Dokoupil was stuck on that hotel balcony is that CBS failed to secure a visa for its man. Semafor's Max Tani reported that as a result the network had to send Dokoupil to Taipei at the last minute. Not content with personally fucking with her handpicked anchor's teleprompter and crashing his show's ratings, CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss now seems to have robbed the network of its ability to complete basic logistical tasks. Things didn't get better for Dokoupil once he got over to Taipei. Wednesday night's broadcast was brought to a strange and sudden end when Dokoupil's cameraman collapsed (CBS later released a statement saying the cameraman is OK):  ( 16 min )

The Corruption: IRS Edition A corrupt agreement is in the works between President Trump and his underlings at the Justice...  ( 11 min )

Plus, the resistance stopped the GOP’s election scheme cold

her job is to keep Donny stupid and happy

After Donald Trump blasphemed the Christian faith by posting what any fool could see was an artificial intelligence-generated illustration of himself as Jesus Christ, many members of the Beltway chattering class hoped the religious right would finally quit the president. The answer, of course, was a robust “heck no,” and this weekend, the White House is offering a reminder why. Trump is devoted to a blasphemy that is far more important to them: rewriting history to push the false claim that the United States was founded as a Christian nation. On Sunday, May 17, the White House will kick off the celebrations of the nation’s 250th anniversary with an alarming event: Rededicate 250: A National Jubilee of Prayer, Praise & Thanksgiving, an all-day prayer festival featuring administration offici…  ( 10 min )

Prot as an Emacs coach to help with doing review passes over my upcoming ffs package as I work on polishing and documenting it in preparation for offering it for inclusion in GNU ELPA. Today we had our third session where we started by reviewing and talking about my recent changes to ffs, then ventured to other Emacs-related topics with the overarching theme of the flexibility and extensibility of GNU Emacs, including display-buffer-alist, keyboard macros, defining a custom ox-bhtml Org export backend derived from Org's ox-html for ultimate flexibility when exporting my site's pages from Org to HTML, Org capture, plain text files and Emacs's diary and how it compares to org-agenda, and keeping a journal with the help of Emacs. Here is the video recording of our session, which I share with Prot's permission: Sorry, this embedded video will not work, because your web browser does not support HTML5 video. [ please watch the video in your favourite streaming media player ]​ You can view or download the full-resolution video from the Internet Archive. Lastly, here is the snippet Prot shared for having Isearch treat space as a wildcard, helpful for more easily matching multiple parts of a line: (setq search-whitespace-regexp ".*?") (setq isearch-lax-whitespace t) (setq isearch-regexp-lax-whitespace nil)  ( 1 min )

Yesterday I met with Amin Bandali to talk about Emacs. Amin asked me if he could record the session, which I agreed to. The video is available on Amin’s website: https://kelar.org/~bandali/gnu/emacs/ffs-emacs-ext-prot.html. We started with a review of the latest changes to the ffs package that Amin has been developing. We had looked into it before and wanted to check on its current state. Amin then asked me about the display-buffer-alist, which I had mentioned before. To me, this is the single most important variable for making Emacs feel more like your own. The reason is that it allows you to control the placement of buffers to match your expectations. I demonstrated some of the main ideas. Another nice little feature is the built-in isearch. I explained how it is especially helpful while recording keyboard macros. Though it is nice to use in general. One tweak for it is to display a counter with its matches. Another is to change how it treats spaces, so that it can match any character in-between. This is not as flexible as, say, consult-line (from the consult package) when combined with vertico and orderless. Though it still has its uses. [ I have lots of little extras for isearch, but those should be good for most users. ] Amin told me about rediscovering the value of Org in the context of statically generating his website. He showed me the custom Org HTML export backend he has been working on. Org has so many nice features which can be used independent of each other. In this light, we also discussed the diary compared to the Org agenda. Find all of Amin’s publications on his website: https://kelar.org/~bandali/.  ( 1 min )

the choice between Bazaar and Git as the new version control system for Emacs. Twenty years ago, Emacs was still using CVS, a venerable RCS that was well past its sell date.. It was clear to everyone that a new system was needed. The question was which one. The two contenders were Bazaar and Git. On the technical merits the choice was clear. Git was faster and more reliable and most, if not all, of the developers wanted to move to it. But there were political considerations. Bazaar was a GNU project and Git was not. RMS felt strongly that the GNU project should support its own applications and insisted that Bazaar be used and given a chance to improve. It was maintained by Canonical but they eventually abandoned the effort. Even though the development was stalled and error reports were piling up unresolved for years, RMS insisted on staying the course. The saga would probably still be going on were it not for Eric Raymond (ESR). He had been working for some time on a utility to import various RCS systems into Git while maintaining whatever metadata the old system offered. At one point he decided to convert Emacs to Git. It was a particularly difficult problem because there was more than one source RCS in play and because some of the records were old and incomplete. Nonetheless, ESR managed the conversion and in 2014 announced that he had the conversion scripts ready and was set to go. In November 2014 he ran his scripts and suddenly Emacs was available as a Git repo. The developers started using it and the battle was over.  ( 5 min )

My Summer Kalshi Portfolio96 :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 !important…  ( 7 min )

Thomas and Alito each authored a separate dissent.

The Justice Department keeps handing massive taxpayer-funded settlements to President Trump’s political allies. The post DOJ Used To Fight Public Corruption. Now, It’s Facilitating Public Corruption Instead appeared first on Balls and Strikes.  ( 6 min )

In the years since his 1996 conviction, the state’s case against Carruthers has collapsed. But courts have repeatedly rejected his requests for a new trial, leaving him with no recourse. The post Tony Carruthers Was Forced to Represent Himself at Trial. Tennessee Is About to Execute Him appeared first on Balls and Strikes.  ( 9 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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Our first new video bonus for paid subscribers walks through the two rulings in argued cases that the Supreme Court handed down on Thursday, May 14, 2026.

As we enter the OT2025 homestretch, we're introducing two new features as a thank you to paid subscribers.

Here's a little secret about elite performers: They're always working to get better at their craft. The example I tend to use is Patrick Redford, who hosts both the Nothing But Respect and Only If You Get Caught podcasts here at Defector, but who is also always in the lab. He blogs. He has a lucrative sideline in the canine protein supplement space. And this week, with the NBA playoffs at full tilt, he joined us on The Distraction. The grind never stops, although it sometimes takes an ad break. Both of Patrick's podcasts are really good, although we focused most of our conversation on Nothing But Respect, which has quickly carved out a unique space in the basketball discourse as a place for ball-knowers who do not work in the ball-knowing space to get some shots up. Nothing But Respect has surely hosted more Pitchfork Best New Music honorees than any other basketball podcast, and the show has become a refuge and resource for people who would otherwise be forced to keep their basketball sicko opinions to themselves.  ( 18 min )

When you lay out the chain of events that have led to Mark Vientos playing first base for the New York Mets every day, it becomes less surprising that the Mets have been one of the worst teams in baseball this season. During the winter, the organization made the decision, which will likely seem pretty smart in the long term but was highly unpopular in the moment, to let another team pay full price for Pete Alonso's next five seasons. To replace the franchise's all-time home run leader, the Mets signed Jorge Polanco, with an eye on moving him to first base. Vientos, along with fellow not-quite-busted corner infield prospect Brett Baty, was surely a trade candidate during the offseason, but wound up on the Opening Day roster as depth and a platoon-specific option at designated hitter. That t…  ( 23 min )

SAN FRANCISCO — Stuffed with dumplings, walking off the 22 bus past my neurologists' office and across Third Street up to the Golden State Valkyries' arena with the sun at our backs, I told my friend that the first thing he needed to know about the Chicago Sky is that they were a clown organization. These were not serious people. We were going to roll them. Though the Sky had signed a bunch of veterans and traded for one of the realest hoopers in the WNBA, they had also done an astonishing amount of losing on the margins. Olivia Miles, the coolest player in college hoops, was suiting up for the Minnesota Lynx instead of the Sky. The two expansion teams, one of whom was about to secure the first win in team history that night, fleeced Chicago for second-round picks in exchange for not taking any of the young players they were about to cut anyway. Had Golden State also made a strange draft-night move? Sure, but it had earned the benefit of the doubt, because it is a smart organization that knows how to conduct itself. As I warned of the Valks' questionable depth in the middle and detailed the steep competency gradient among WNBA ownership, I grew even more confident that my first trip to Ballhalla this season to be a glorious one.  ( 24 min )

Plus, courts tell ICE no 10,000 times, and a failed gerrymander in Mississippi keeps Rep. Bennie Thompson on the ballot

Judges Rein in the Administration and … I want to give you the flavor of a handful of new smackdowns...  ( 11 min )

In the early weeks of 2026 massive popular outrage triggered by the clearly unjustified shooting of Renee Good and Alex Pretti forced the Trump administration to significantly slow its grotesque campaign of mass deportation. The violent, storm trooper like abductions of ordinary pedestrians and workers—frequently involving brutal assaults on women as well as men—were curtailed... Read more »  ( 7 min )

From “Working Class Weekly: Cracks Emerge Among White Working Class Voters in North Carolina” at The Working Class Project: “In late April, we conducted two virtual focus groups with white working class swing voters in North Carolina– one with women, one with men. Most participants voted for Trump in 2024…As one of two Republican-held U.S.... Read more »  ( 10 min )

remember when we used to be proud of our national monuments?

The intersection of fame, unchecked desires, and risky sexual practices has produced some of the most shocking and tragic celebrity deaths in history. While many stars have passed away during or immediately after consensual sex from natural causes like heart attacks, a subset involves extreme fetishes—particularly autoerotic asphyxiation (AEA), where individuals restrict oxygen to heighten...  ( 8 min )

At least seven judges have blocked invasive administrative subpoenas targeting gender-affirming care for minors, so DOJ appears to be trying a new tactic to get the info it wants.

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Fox News and Fox Business have completely ignored President Donald Trump’s statement that he isn't considering Americans' financial situations during negotiations with Iran, as gas prices and inflation continue to soar in large part due to his ongoing war.  ( 3 min )

As concerns about the spread of hantavirus emerge, right-wing and far-right figures are spreading conspiracy theories on podcasts and social media that the virus came from a lab and may be a new “plandemic” (planned pandemic) created to push vaccines, disrupt upcoming elections, or achieve other nefarious goals. The conspiracy theories are similar to those spread among the right during the COVID-19 pandemic that harmed efforts to mitigate the spread of the virus and contributed to declining vaccination rates.  ( 5 min )

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

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PBS surpassed every other broadcast TV news network in coverage of LGBTQ issues last year, accounting for 66% of weekday evening news segments about the topic and airing over 4 times the coverage in minutes of CBS, NBC, and ABC combined. Discussion across networks frequently mentioned legislative or policy challenges to LGBTQ rights and subjects related to the transgender community, but networks largely failed to feature trans voices in their coverage. LGBTQ rights faced unprecedented rollbacks at the federal level in 2025, with trans and gender-nonconforming Americans particularly impacted. President Donald Trump signed a series of executive orders in the first weeks of his second term that undermined the legal recognition of trans people, as well as their ability to serve in the military, access gender-affirming care, and play on sports teams that align with their lived gender.  These executive orders followed a recent surge of anti-LGBTQ legislation at the state level, and legislators continued to challenge LGBTQ rights in 2025, with an emphasis on restrictions targeting trans Americans. Some bills faced legal scrutiny, including at the highest level, where the Supreme Court upheld a 2023 Tennessee ban on youth gender-affirming care and ruled with Maryland parents aiming to opt their children out of LGBTQ-inclusive public school lessons. Meanwhile, broadcast networks experienced significant pressures. ABC and CBS faced legal challenges from Trump or his administration in late 2024 and 2025. The president also cut federal funding to PBS and threatened to revoke NBC’s and ABC's licensing. Nevertheless, according to a 2025 LA Times report, an estimated 18 million people watched ABC's, CBS', or NBC's evening news program every night, and the most recent data available shows that nearly 2 million people watched PBS' News Hour nightly in 2022.  ( 8 min )

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Local news outlets across the country are covering how communities are trying to provide support to families losing their Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits due to newly imposed restrictions in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Fox News, which advocated for work requirements and other restrictions and celebrated the resulting loss of benefits for millions, is also helping the Trump administration push other changes to the food stamp program that experts say are likely to reduce beneficiaries’ access to groceries and kick millions more people off the program.  ( 9 min )

Watching with horror the Supreme Court-enabled assault on majority-Black districts made me tremble with fear for the 2026 midterms, but also tremble with fury at the GOP, as I explained at New York: Republicans from Donald Trump on down are excited that the landmark Supreme Court ruling in Louisiana v. Callais has invited a wave of partisan gerrymanders in states they... Read more »  ( 9 min )

A Court that claims to be skeptical of “judicial tinkering” with elections has no problem allowing Republican lawmakers to re-gerrymander their states—even when voting is already in progress. The post The Alabama Redistricting Fight Is Exposing the Supreme Court as a Farce appeared first on Balls and Strikes.  ( 7 min )

After starting to make use of the GitLab/Codeberg sync approach for various repositories, I found that my muscle memory in Magit was getting the better of me and, on occasion, I'd push a new branch to backups when I wanted origin. I sensed there had to be a way round that. Here's what I settled on: (advice-add 'magit-list-remotes :filter-return (lambda (remotes) (delete "backups" remotes))) Now I never see backups in Magit and now I can keep using my muscle memory (rather than actually reading what is in front of me, it seems).

a splendid post on cl-flet, cl-letf, and cl-labels. I didn’t get a chance to write about it then but his post is very useful for understanding these macros and how they differ. The macros are the replacements for the now deprecated flet, which, in turn, was imported from Common Lisp with the added feature of having dynamic scope. As Batsov points out, making the scope dynamic conflates the notion of local and dynamic scope, which can be a bit confusing. This behavior is preserved by the cl-letf macro for those who need it. The cl-flet macro is just like the flet macro from Common Lisp. It defines a local function whose definition is available only from within its scope. The salient fact is that its definition is not available from within the function definition so it can’t be called recursively. The cl-labels macro is like labels from Common Lisp. It’s similar to cl-flet except that its definition is available from within the function definition so it is recursive. Finally, the cl-letf macro largely replicates the behavior of the old (Elisp) flet macro with the addition that it can dynamically replace the definition of any setf-able definition. This can complicate its use a bit. See Batsov’s post for the details. If you’re like me, you don’t use any of these macros that often so it’s easy to forget the details. For that reason it’s worthwhile bookmarking Batsov’s post so that you can refresh your memory whenever you need to.  ( 5 min )

1. About Figure 1: JPEG produced with OpenAI gpt-image-1 Consulet regarding Romeo Montagnu "Emacs is an Effortless Bloom," or at least, this is what my brain has been screaming into its own void for the past few months…. I have recently been publishing posts to my blog as part of a composite series on the usage patterns that make Emacs powerful to its most fluent users. I don't know if "Emacs is an Effortless Bloom" will be the name of the series when all is said and done…. Maybe it's more of a mantra, or perhaps even a haunting brain spasm at the moment. At least, this phrase has been popping involuntarily into my mind since I started this series, and I think it's worth thinking about why. In this post, I'll discuss, among others, two core patterns that make Emacs easy…  ( 28 min )

W in dired, which is bound to dired-do-async-shell-command, type mpv (or accept the default guess that my dired-guess-shell-alist-user provides for video files), and the video starts playing. Great. But when I close Emacs, the video dies too. The whole point of an async command is that it runs in the background, right?, so why does it disappear when Emacs goes away?, this is most perplexing! Now I should say, the answer is obvious in retrospect, but it took me a little while to actually stop and think about it properly. The command dired-do-async-shell-command adds a trailing & to the shell command and passes it to async-shell-command, which creates a shell process - Emacs is the parent of that shell, and the shell is the parent of mpv. When Emacs exits, it kills its child pr…  ( 2 min )

Keyboard Commands I ran out of keyboard commands. OK, that sounds weird. Let me explain. In Alfred, I have the following keyboard assignments: ⇧⌃A: App Store ⇧⌃B: BBEdit ⇧⌃E: Emacs I had covered the alphabet. Every letter had an application associated with it. I started a second layer. I assigned ⇧⌃⌥B to Better Finder Rename, ⇧⌃⌥E to EagleFiler and so on. Soon I was running out of choices again. Over a period of almost 15 years, I made do. I loved Alfred, I also loved keyboard commands. I wanted to be able type a keyboard command and then choose from a list of applications which were tied to that keyboard command. I wanted to be able to type something small to be able to navigate this list and launch the application I wanted. I didn’t know how to do this in Alfred. I had hacked together a …

Welcome! Hello to the 300+ new Morning Memo readers who have signed up after seeing Josh Marshall and Kate Riga...  ( 12 min )

and he verbally abused another woman reporter

Plus, a phone call stops ICE

Let’s be clear up front: There is no evidence that Donald Trump has staged any of the three high-profile attempts on his life in the past two years. I’ll likely get some angry reader feedback to that assertion because a lot of people believe at least one of the would-be assassinations — and quite possibly all three — were false flag operations. A new survey from NewsGuard shows that 54% of Americans are open to the theory that at least one of the attacks was staged, with only 38% saying definitively they believe all three were real. When asked about each separate assault — the 2024 shooting that grazed Trump’s ear at a Pennsylvania campaign stop, the arrest of the armed man at the president’s West Palm Beach golf course later that year and the recent incident at the White House Corresponde…  ( 9 min )