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

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

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 )

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 )

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

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

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

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

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 )

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

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

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

Monday, 2pm ET - Colette Delawalla of Stand Up For Science joins us live to talk about their urgent new campaign - Stop Vought. Save Science - join us, invite others!

Europe doesn’t need your bullshit, thank you very much

The resistance had a week. Trump had a disaster.

The Art Of Not Asking Why describes a problem—and its resolution—that I didn’t know existed. The TL;DR is that photographs taken with an iPhone are always captured in landscape mode but Apple’s software detects portrait photos and corrects the orientation on the fly. That leads to the problem: when iPhone portrait mode photos are shown on Linux using Org mode they are shown in landscape mode. You can get the details from JTR’s post. The fix is pretty easy. He uses the mogrify tool of ImageMagick to auto-orient the photos based on their EXIF data. Since he’s viewing these photos in Org mode he wants an easy way of making the conversion from within Emacs. That’s a perfect job for Álvaro Ramírez’s dwim-shell-command, which JTR uses. Take a look at the code and see how simple it is. Even if you aren’t an Elisp expert, it’s easy to do things like this with dwim-shell-command right from Emacs.  ( 5 min )

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

The list that could end free elections 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 )

Yordan Alvarez of the Astros and Yandy Diaz of the Rays remain neck and neck in the battle for the top slot in the Baseball Musings Batter Rankings. Alvarez is now 0.27 points ahead of Diaz after Alvarez posted a one for three with a walk and a grand slam in a 13-2 win over […]  ( 26 min )

The Log5 Method yields these top projected hit averages versus starting pitchers: 0.324, 0.712 — Jackson Chourio batting at Kyle Freeland. 0.322, 0.700 — William Contreras batting at Kyle Freeland. 0.319, 0.702 — Christian Yelich batting at Kyle Freeland. 0.319, 0.698 — Andrew Vaughn batting at Kyle Freeland. 0.310, 0.693 — Brice Turang batting at […]  ( 26 min )

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96 Weekly Scorecard: May 30 - Jun. 5, 2026 @media only screen and (max-width: 620px) { table.body { width: 100%; min-width: 100%; } table.body .content { padding: 0 !important; } table.body .container { padding: 0 !important; width: 100% !important; } table.body .main { border-spacing: 10px 0 !important; border-left-width: 0 !important; border-radius: 0 !important; border-right-width: 0 !important; } table.body .img-responsive { height: auto !important; max-width: 100% !important; width: auto !important; } } @media all { .ExternalClass { width: 100%; } .ExternalClass, .ExternalClass p, .ExternalClass span, .ExternalClass font, .ExternalClass td, .ExternalClass div { line-height: 100%; …  ( 10 min )

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Here’s why California’s election results take time96 :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-…  ( 13 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 )

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 )

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 )

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 )

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 )

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 )

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 )

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 )

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

As 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 )

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 )

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 )

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

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

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 )

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

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

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 )

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

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

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

It’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 )

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

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

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

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 )

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 )

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’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 )

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 )

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

pdf-tools and PDFtk. ;;;###autoload (defun sacha-pdf-view-replace-current-page-with-file (file) "Replace the current page in PDF View with FILE. Requires pdftk." (interactive "FFile to insert: ") (let ((temp-file (concat (make-temp-name "pdf-view") ".pdf"))) (call-process "pdftk" nil nil nil (concat "A=" (expand-file-name (buffer-file-name))) (concat "B=" (expand-file-name file)) "cat" (format "A%d-%d" 1 (1- (pdf-view-current-page))) "B" (format "A%d-end" (1+ (pdf-view-current-page))) "output" temp-file) (rename-file temp-file (buffer-file-name) t))) This is part of my Emacs configuration. View Org source for this post You can e-mail me at sacha@sachachua.com.  ( 1 min )

Sebastián Monía1 offered some alternatives to the exeln function that I posted on June 4.2 First, he pointed out that there's no need to bind asynch with the let function. Instead he suggested that I use (when arg "&") to append the ampersand when there's a prefix argument. Thus, shell-command can be called this way: (shell-command (concat (buffer-substring (line-beginning-position) (line-end-position)) (when arg "&"))) Second, call async-shell-command rather than shell-command with the "&" as suggested in shell-command's doc string, which says, "You can also use async-shell-command that automatically adds '&'."3 Third, use thing-at-point from the built-in thingatpt.el library to return the line at point rather than calling buffer-substring. (defun exeln (arg) "Execute current line as a shell command. With prefix ARG, run asynchronously." (interactive "P") (funcall (if arg #'async-shell-command #'shell-command) (thing-at-point 'line t))) And although he didn't mention it explicitly, he reworded the doc string -- it blends in seamlessly with the native functions' doc strings. I set out to contribute to the Emacs community, but I'm getting so much more out of it than I expected! Thank you again, Sebastián Monía! 1 https://site.sebasmonia.com/ 2 exeln-execute-line.html 3 GNU Emacs online shell-command help  ( 9 min )

the first Emacs 31 pretest, emacs.31.0.90, is available for download. It’s been almost two years since the first Emacs 30 pretest came out so we’re pretty much on schedule for our yearly major release. As always, Irreal wants to give a huge shout out of thanks to all the developers who work so hard to keep the Emacs development bandwagon rolling. They do all this for free so we each owe them a word of thanks and, as I always say, the drinks are on us if we find ourselves in the same bar as one of them. Whitton’s post has all the details concerning downloading and verifying the latest tarball. If you don’t mind living on the edge, give it a try and report any problems.  ( 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: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% } It’s not too late to reserve your space today ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌…  ( 2 min )

96 Most Americans don’t trust the news. Honestly, can’t blame them. 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…  ( 5 min )

The Worst Advice for Democrats on How to Win Elections#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 { …  ( 12 min )

SCOTUS season will end with a bang 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 )

Today, 230pm ET - The US Men's National Soccer Team plays Germany in their last warm up before the World Cup kicks off this week. Going to be a big match!

I had only met National Affairs Staff Reporter Russell Payne briefly while I was in New York and have found his reporting essential in understanding the state of American politics today, especially when it comes to the electorate. When I was working with Russell for a recommendation in the Bob Ross issue of The Swell, however, I suspected there was another side of him after reading his thoughts on the “post-Tame Impala mid-2010s psychedelic indie boom.” Ah, this is a true music critic. As it turns out, he was a DJ at his college’s radio station. Last but certainly not least, “Standing Room Only” host and Senior Writer Amanda Marcotte has made no secret about her love for music and concerts (hello, the theme of her newsletter and show!). In particular, the “Encore” section of her show reve…  ( 7 min )

Mike pumps it, Donny dumps it, and so much more...

Onward!

The Rays and Marlins continue the battle of Florida as Shane McClanahan takes on Lake Bachar. McClanahan owns a 2.45 ERA thanks in large part to just two home runs allowed in 55 innings, and an opposition .240 BABIP. Bachar will open, with just 19 hits allowed in 31 1/3 innings. By the way, there […]  ( 25 min )

Friday’s games brought a slight change to the top five of the Baseball Musings Batter Rankings as Junior Caminero and Yandy Diaz of the Rays now rank one and three respectively. Caminero posted a perfect night at the plate with a three for three with two walks and two doubles for a game score of […]  ( 26 min )

The Log5 Method yields these top projected hit averages versus starting pitchers: 0.293, 0.709 — Brandon Marsh batting vs. Brandon Eisert. 0.288, 0.688 — Josh Jung batting vs. Tanner Bibee. 0.287, 0.688 — Ildemaro Vargas batting vs. Zack Littell. 0.282, 0.655 — Tristan Peters batting at Andrew Painter. 0.277, 0.655 — Chase Meidroth batting at […]  ( 26 min )

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A few weeks ago I was on vacation. Of course I brought back quite a few pictures with me. When I got back, I sat to select some of them to make a gallery for my family and friends. I started with copying all pictures from two mobile phones and a camera to my laptop. Then I wanted to copy a few carefully chosen images to one directory. To my surprise, Emacs’ Image mode does not have a command to copy the currently viewed image to another directory.  ( 1 min )

After adding floating and inline tables of contents in BlogMore the other day, it was time to update blogmore.el to include commands to toggle the related frontmatter. So, with the release of blogmore.el v4.6.0, two new commands are now available: blogmore-toggle-show-toc toggles the show_toc frontmatter property. blogmore-toggle-show-toc-inline toggles the show_toc_inline frontmatter property. Both have also been added to the transient menu so they're easy to discover and use.  ( 1 min )

Spam is an eternal problem, and while SpamAssassin is pretty good (I get around 700 mails per day, of which 670 are rejected as spam), there’s still some stuff that persistently gets through. A goodly portion of that is traditional random spam from random accounts, and there’s not much to be done about that, but there’s a recent trend of legitimate-looking things coming from persistent accounts — like BackerHome and BackerHive. I’m guessing that eventually these will get so bad reputations that they end up on RBLs and will disappear into the mists, but meanwhile… I just thought that there should be a mechanism in Gnus to split these message to the spam group — without having to do much work. Tada! It’s a small package, and you can find it on Microsoft Github. It’s basically a tiny minor mode that adds a couple of commands, so you just hit z, check the entry (or not) and then C-c C-c. (There’s also a command to edit the split data if things go off the rails, or just because you want to.) B t to check the split trace, as normal. So there you go. May your inboxes be slightly less spammy. (And it’s fun doing some Gnus work again for the first time in years… I’ve forgotten what all the functions are called, though, so I had to use Claude to remind me. *gulp*)  ( 4 min )

There are movies that are confusing because they’re ambitious. There are movies that are confusing because they’re trying to tell a complicated story. Then there are movies like Facade (1999), which seem confusing because nobody involved stopped for five seconds and asked, “Does any of this actually make sense?” If you actually want to try...  ( 10 min )

Breaking: Trump admin takes another big step toward implementing anti-mail voting order 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 week Alabama turned back the clock — and the Supreme Court approved 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} …  ( 6 min )

96 The Fight for Answers About Deaths in Immigration Custody img{-ms-interpolation-mode:bicubic;} table, td{mso-table-lspace:0pt;mso-table-rspace:0pt;} .mceStandardButton, .mceStandardButton td, .mceStandardButton td a{mso-hide:all!important;} p, a, li, td, blockquote{mso-line-height-rule:exactly;} p, a, li, td, body, table, blockquote{-ms-text-size-adjust:100%;-webkit-text-size-adjust:100%;} .mcnPreviewText{display:none!important;} .bodyCell{margin:0 auto;padding:0;width:100%;} .ExternalClass, .ExternalClass p, .ExternalClass td, .ExternalClass div, .ExternalClass span, .ExternalClass font{line-height:100%;} .ReadMsgBody, .ExternalClass{width:100%;} a[x-apple-data-detectors]{color:inherit!important;text-decoration:none!important;font-size:inherit!important;font-family:inherit!impo…  ( 7 min )

‘There is no longer a Voting Rights Act in America’ 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 )

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

In the seconds after Seth Jarvis scored the winning overtime goal for the Carolina Hurricanes, the Sportsnet broadcast cut to six exuberant men in Jarvis jerseys falling into each other's arms, screaming with joy, and about to cry with happiness. Their smiles were so big. Their enthusiasm was unmatched. Their love for one another is almost as great as their love for No. 24, whose jersey they all wear. These are not normal fans. These are Seth Jarvis's friends. What are their names? I wish I could tell you. I watched hundreds of videos that the boys have posted on their social media (@goodolcanadianboys), but when they said their names—which was very, very rarely—I immediately forgot which one was which. They are not individuals anyway. They are The Jarvy Boys. They are his friends, and they love him so much.  ( 20 min )

The New York Knicks take on the San Antonio Spurs in Game 2 of the NBA Finals tonight, and there is a very real possibility that the Knicks will head into the weekend up 2-0 in the series as they prepare to play their first Finals home game since 1999 on Monday. Can you imagine how good the vibes in New York City would be? Is it even possible to comprehend how electric the crowd inside and out of Madison Square Garden would get in this situation? You might argue, in fact, that nothing could possibly ruin a time as good as that. OK, well, now imagine if a half-alive racist who everyone hates decided to show up and make the whole night about himself. According to ESPN's Shams Charania, Donald Trump is planning to attend Game 3 of the NBA Finals, at the invitation of Knicks owner James Dolan. This will afford fans in the arena and at home a rare opportunity to watch Trump make some of the faces he makes, and also to think about him. Aren't you excited? It's obviously difficult to keep Trump away from any place where he thinks he might get attention, and Dolan has surely been pulling whatever strings he can to make this visit happen. (Dolan inviting Trump to MSG while maintaining his feud with Charles Oakley despite everyone in the world begging him to just be an adult for once is a pretty good representation of his character and priorities.) That's just James Dolan being James Dolan at some point, but you'd hope the league itself might try to resist letting Trump smear shit on what should be one of the most joyous occasions of the season. NBA commissioner Adam Silver couldn't even offer up icy indifference when asked about Trump's planned attendance, though, choosing instead to harp on his bonafides. From ESPN:  ( 17 min )

Border Czar Tom Homan wants you to know that there is definitely not a hunger strike happening at Delaney Hall—a privately run ICE jail in Newark, N.J.—and also that he condemns this non-existent strike. On his ongoing Tour de Fox, one week Homan’s telling Laura Ingraham that he’ll force-feed hunger strikers if he has to. The next, during a “Did You Assault Enough People Today?” performance review with Sean Hannity, he’s saying “there was never a hunger strike” and listing all the food he enjoyed alongside detainees during a surprise visit to the jail. “I had beans, I had green beans, I had bread and rolls, I had drinks, I had dessert.” Get it? Got it.  The strike at Delaney Hall follows months of prisoners and their families sounding the alarm about conditions they describe as psychological and physical torture. Some people have languished in the jail for a year, with no due process or end in sight. Some have already secured court orders for their release. Some signed self-deportation papers rather than suffer through more detention. All of them are still stuck in the hell of Delaney.  On May 22, they decided they were done waiting and launched a combined hunger and labor strike. As many as 400 people began a collective refusal to eat or to work for GEO Group, the private prison corporation and major Trump donor that runs the jail. The strike will continue, they say, at least until they meet with the governor and ICE releases pregnant, young, elderly and medically vulnerable detainees. Their ultimate goal is freedom for everyone jailed inside the detention center.  ( 20 min )

It's almost time for the World Cup. Before the tournament, we'll be previewing each of the top 15 teams by FIFA rankings that made the tournament. Why the top 15? Because that's how many we needed to do in order for the USMNT to make the cut. You can read all of our previews here. Ah, the Netherlands. Pain and misery comes for all but one team at the World Cup every four years, but that pain and misery has magnitudes. A team like Morocco in 2022, for example, will have felt the pain of coming so close to a miracle, but the first African team to make the semifinals left with their heads held up high. It is only for the contenders, the countries that have shaped soccer history over the last century, that the worst disappointments are reserved.  ( 31 min )

Everything about this World Cup is designed to make you hate it. If you live here and you’re a soccer fan, tickets to games are a ripoff, fan zones are built to give you heatstroke, and Fox Sports’ soccer coverage is an unbroken insult to human intelligence. If you’re a local who’s not really into soccer but wants to be part of the fun, you’ll need to work hard to discover pockets of the host cities with any visible sign (flags, bunting, festive paraphernalia) that the World Cup is less than a week away. If you have match-day tickets and want to get to a stadium using public transport, you’ll probably need to sell a kidney to afford the bus or train fare. If you try walking, you’ll probably die (though you’ll keep both kidneys until the end, which may be an acceptable tradeoff.) If you mak…  ( 33 min )

Here is the cheap and lazy way to show that Game 2 of the Stanley Cup Final is the best postseason event of the calendar year so far, courtesy Chris Cuthbert and TSN:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZpKJ11Q5auc And by doing that, we've both saved ourselves the proverbial thousand words and hustled you pretty royally. This game could only be done justice in its original three-hour format, as opposed to the 10 minutes of editors' craft above, and we are even granting grace in that three-hour figure for the often stultifying pregame and between-periods migraineries. To be totally reductive about it, this is that rarest of sporting events in which nobody got cheated and everyone came away better for the experience.  ( 24 min )

Fealty to Trump Wins Out Again In an early morning vote, the GOP-controlled Senate passed the reconciliation bill funding immigration...  ( 11 min )

and we are all here for it

Our new subscription sale and drive got off to a great start yesterday. Welcome new subscribers!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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 )

Nike, Knicks Are Ripping The Script96 :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 !…  ( 7 min )

Veteran catcher Elias Díaz rejected an outright assignment from the Royals in favor of free agency, as reflected on the transaction log at MiLB.com. Players with more than three years of service (or a prior outright in their career) can reject outrights and instead elect free agency. Díaz has more than nine years of major […]  ( 8 min )

So much for the dealmaker

These days, it’s hard to tell if Donald Trump is mocking JD Vance again, or if the president is just sleepy.  “He looks like Eliot Ness,” the president declared of his veep in a televised Cabinet meeting in May while high-level administration officials pretended to laugh. “You ever see Eliot Ness,” Trump continued, saying Vance’s posture “looks like a movie.” It appears the nearly 80-year-old president confused the infamous Prohibition agent with Kevin Costner’s portrayal of Ness in the 1987 film “The Untouchables.” Trump, who is reportedly growing ever more impatient with the vice president, was probably taunting Vance with such an implausible comparison. Still, the reference to 1930s-era Chicago law enforcement was apt, because it was an era of police lawlessness, where unconstitutional …  ( 8 min )

Brandon Young of the Orioles takes the mound in Toronto against Trey Yesavage. Young, in his second season, cut down on his home runs allowed, helping him lower his ERA from 6.24 to 3.35. Yesavage, in his second year, owns a 2.47 ERA in ten regular season starts, and has yet to allow a regular […]

Yordan Alvarez of the Astros went one for three with a double and a walk to remain at the top of the Baseball Musings Batter Rankings, The Pirates won the game 5-1 as Bryan Reynolds went one for four to remain in fifth place. Junior Caminero and Yandy Diaz of the Rays saw their teams […]

Doctors diagnosed Aaron Judge with a stress fracture of a rib. Having experienced discomfort over the past several weeks that was initially diagnosed as a bone bruise near his right rib cage, Judge underwent an MRI on Tuesday at the direction of Dr. Gregory J. Pearl of Dallas, Texas, who specializes in “thoracic outlet syndrome management in […]

The Log5 Method yields these top projected hit averages versus starting pitchers: 0.315, 0.702 — Alec Burleson batting vs. Brady Singer. 0.300, 0.667 — Jordan Walker batting vs. Brady Singer. 0.299, 0.714 — Ernie Clement batting vs. Brandon Young. 0.297, 0.716 — Luis Arraez batting at Edward Cabrera. 0.296, 0.707 — Yandy Diaz batting at […]

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There is a report that doctors referred Aaron Judge to a thoracic outlet syndrome surgery and diagnosis specialist. He’s looking at the imaging to see if anything is there.

The Log5 Method yields these top projected hit averages versus starting pitchers: 0.293, 0.669 — Ben Rice batting vs. Slade Cecconi. 0.291, 0.683 — Jackson Chourio batting vs. Adrian Houser. 0.290, 0.672 — William Contreras batting vs. Adrian Houser. 0.288, 0.681 — Amed Rosario batting vs. Slade Cecconi. 0.285, 0.671 — Christian Yelich batting vs. […]

Yordan Alvarez of the Astros now sits atop the Baseball Musings Batter Rankings, 0.09 points ahead of Shohei Ohtani of the Dodgers. Alvarez went four for five in an 11-9 win over the Pirates, while Ohtani when three for four with two walks in a 7-0 over the Diamondbacks. Pitching and hitting, he posted a […]

Cristopher Sanchez of the Phillies lost his scoreless innings streak but gained the top slot in the Bill James Pitcher Rankings. He moved five points ahead of the injured Tarik Skubal of the Tigers. Logan Webb of the Giants posted the highest game score of the day, a 78, in a 1-0 win over the […]

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Note new time just for this week

In Iowa Democrats now have a fighting chance to retake the Governor's mansion, a US Senate seat, and 3 US house seats. It's become one of our most important battleground states this cycle

The House rebuked Trump on both Iran and Ukraine yesterday. It was another day of remarkable losses for our ailing, addled, failure-in-chief....

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

Lindell Is Really Optimistic for Someone Who Just Lost the GOP Gubernatorial Endorsement: A ‘Perfect Scenario’#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-interp…  ( 10 min )

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96 Bury? Whitewash? Sugarcoat? Not us. img{-ms-interpolation-mode:bicubic;} table, td{mso-table-lspace:0pt;mso-table-rspace:0pt;} .mceStandardButton, .mceStandardButton td, .mceStandardButton td a{mso-hide:all!important;} p, a, li, td, blockquote{mso-line-height-rule:exactly;} p, a, li, td, body, table, blockquote{-ms-text-size-adjust:100%;-webkit-text-size-adjust:100%;} .mcnPreviewText{display:none!important;} .bodyCell{margin:0 auto;padding:0;width:100%;} .ExternalClass, .ExternalClass p, .ExternalClass td, .ExternalClass div, .ExternalClass span, .ExternalClass font{line-height:100%;} .ReadMsgBody, .ExternalClass{width:100%;} a[x-apple-data-detectors]{color:inherit!important;text-decoration:none!important;font-size:inherit!important;font-family:inherit!important;font-weight:inhe…  ( 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 )

Three court appearances next week could represent the most critical moment in the past year for DOJ's effort to target the provision of medical care for transgender minors.

With the Milwaukee Brewers sitting comfortably at the top of the NL Central, you might think that it's an easy time to be their vice president of communications. Post the Jake Bauers highlight reel, oversee some decent memes featuring Bernie Brewer, and let the good vibes keep on flowing. All you have to do is not commit any big misstep. For example, don’t repost Elon Musk tweets in support of far-right British politicians who peddle racist propaganda about Britain being threatened by violent immigrants. I would go as far as to say maybe just don't retweet Elon Musk at all, but what do I know? I'm not the vice president of communications for the Milwaukee Brewers. Tyler Barnes is, and on Tuesday he popped onto Twitter after a two-year hiatus to weigh in on British politics by retweeting Elon Musk's white genocide propaganda.  ( 18 min )

It's not the sort of anxiety that haunts you, or maybe it just rates below too many of my other haunting anxieties to register. But as a non-soccer person, the quadrennial arrival of the World Cup has a peculiar and not altogether unpleasant anxiety about it; a bunch of stuff is about to happen that I do not really know anything about, and I am going to put myself happily in that wave's way and not know what hit me. I'm fine with that, for the most part, and this year's 48-team World Cup field is sufficiently vast and varied that I couldn't learn everything about it if I wanted to, our own stellar collection of team previews notwithstanding. For the true soccer dunce, the key is to learn enough to enjoy yourself, but not so much that you get stressed out. It was with that in mind that Drew and I welcomed Leander Schaerlaeckens, Guardian columnist and author of the excellent new book The Long Game: U.S. Men's Soccer And Its Savage, Four-Decade Journey To The Top, Or Thereabouts, to this week's episode. I am biased, of course, but I'd call this episode a success on those terms. After the usual goofery—remembering some salient scenes from The Insider, me singing in a Scott Stapp voice, Drew chastising me for referring to Long Island Cryptkeeper Bill O'Reilly a "friend of the pod"—we turned to soccer around the six-minute mark and pretty much stayed there for the rest of the hour. Even and maybe especially as a confirmed soccer dunce—one of two on the pod, as Drew cheerfully allowed—the result was pretty fascinating stuff. Leander knows a lot and explains it patiently, and he answered our questions on the possible positive and negative effects of this year's new and much bigger field, where national soccer styles come from (and whether that question can be answered without doing major cultural essentialism maneuvers), and where the USMNT as a team fits into the current firmament of international soccer both in terms of quality and style.  ( 20 min )

Welcome back to Make It Nice, Defector’s best interior design advice column. Today we have a bathroom color dilemma, a backyard makeover, and someone wondering if they’re DIYing too close to the sun. GB asks:  I own an older townhouse type of condo in the southeast. So, heat and humidity are a foundational concern for the topic I'm going to get into. I've lived here about 3 years, and the room that has always driven me craziest is the bathroom. There is one full bathroom, and it looks like it was renovated relatively recently and not particularly well. I hate the shower and the sink and wish I had the budget, the time, the guts, or some combination to rip the entire thing out and do a full reno, but I do not believe I do. Without the right mix to feel like I could completely renovate it, I…  ( 28 min )

Even a Knicks fan would concede that Karl-Anthony Towns has his demons. They all stem from the whistle. During the regular season, the Knicks center was among the NBA's most foul-prone players, racking up 3.4 per game. He led the league outright with 65 total offensive fouls. I don't think this is all his fault. Officials seem to assume the worst intentions on his part, and overlook when he himself gets clobbered on defense. I don't think I've ever seen a superstar given less leeway by the refs. But yes—it is also sort of his fault, too. Sometimes his limbs appear to flop around autonomously, as though he had the decentralized nervous system of an octopus, and in the course of that flopping they strike an opposing player in an illegal way. If you choose to blame "Karl-Anthony Towns" for wh…  ( 21 min )

In the top of the seventh inning Wednesday night, with Cristopher Sánchez sitting at 81 pitches and his Philadelphia Phillies leading the Padres 1-0, San Diego's Jackson Merrill hit a single into the gap through left field, scoring Ty France and tying the game. This ended Sánchez's scoreless streak, which had lasted 50.2 shutout innings spread over more than a month. After the run scored, the Phillies fans in the stadium gave Sánchez a minute-long standing ovation. In a stunning display of the human element in the modern pitch-clock and ABS era, umpire Hunter Wendelstedt stepped out during the ovation and made sure home plate was clean. While Sánchez had a good run at the longest scoreless streak of any pitcher in MLB history, he didn't quite get there. He will simply have to settle for ha…  ( 19 min )

It's almost time for the World Cup. Before the tournament, we'll be previewing each of the top 15 teams by FIFA rankings that made the tournament. Why the top 15? Because that's how many we needed to do in order for the USMNT to make the cut. You can read all of our previews here. The term "golden generation" is often misapplied, defined downwards to mean "a decent group of good players." In the case of Belgium, though, it was totally apt. How else could one fairly refer to Kevin De Bruyne, Romelu Lukaku, Thibaut Courtois, Vincent Kompany, Mousa Dembélé, Axel Witsel, and the various Hazards that led Belgium to the quarterfinals in 2014 and the semifinals in 2018? This group came up together, fought for a fantastic result in Russia, only to travel to Qatar and eat shit.  ( 23 min )

Before this season, pitching was pretty clearly Shohei Ohtani's secondary talent, and that's not an insult. He was just "also a pitcher" in the same way that Lady Gaga is also an actress or Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is also a writer. In his first two seasons as a Dodger, Ohtani only pitched a total of 47 innings as he recovered from elbow and then shoulder surgery, yet he was still the best baseball player in the world. The fact that he might take the mound every fifth or sixth day when healthy and deliver above-average starts was just icing on top of 50-plus homers and a 1.000+ OPS, and also that one year where he stole 59 bases seemingly just to prove he could. In his ninth season in MLB, the power hitting is a notch lower than we're used to, but Ohtani remains a spectacular hitter: .301 average, NL-best on-base percentage, 165 OPS+. But this time, in something far beyond a simple return to form since his injury, Ohtani's pitching stats are the ones that truly drop the jaw. Through 10 starts, Ohtani has given up just five earned runs over 61 innings, which is good for a 0.74 ERA to go along with a microscopic 0.787 WHIP. Wednesday's outing against Arizona, which the Dodgers won 7-0, was another display of efficiency. Ohtani went six innings allowing just two hits and one walk. He stranded Gabriel Moreno after a two-out double in the fourth, and on his final pitch he got Corbin Carroll to ground into a double play to escape what qualified for him as a jam. That's all the action to speak of—well, except for the fact that Ohtani also picked up three singles and two walks at the plate. Jeez, man. Take a look at some of the highlights from the D-Backs game: https://youtu.be/RKW2aqM3VJw?si=ln_KzvS6M2IqBykP&t=219  ( 18 min )

It's almost time for the World Cup. Before the tournament, we'll be previewing each of the top 15 teams by FIFA rankings that made the tournament. Why the top 15? Because that's how many we needed to do in order for the USMNT to make the cut. You can read all of our previews here. If Brazil is the technicolor standard-bearer of soccer brilliance at the World Cup, then Germany is Brazil's monochromatic counterpart, a country that never fails to produce enough talent to be a serious threat every four years. Except, it appears, over the last two tournaments. Germany went out of the group stage in 2018, the first time the country had failed to advance past the first round since Quite Literally Hitler Times (1938), and then repeated the feat in 2022 to really drive home the doldrums. Throw in a couple of disappointing finishes at the Euros, and Germany enters the 2026 World Cup trying to recover its identity and traditions.  ( 30 min )

Attending a major sporting event can be exhausting, expensive, and demeaning. But there has always been at least one game-day opportunity that can provide a little bit of satisfaction: the ability to buy an ice-cold bottle of water from a guy with a cooler in the parking lot for a buck or two, and then bring your prize into the stadium. Look at you, all hydrated and frugal! Because FIFA seems dead-set on making this year's World Cup as hostile to attendees as possible, however, soccer fans who have already spent at least a month's salary on tickets are now being told that they can't even bring cheap water into the stadium. This information comes to us from The Athletic, which has reviewed emails that FIFA sent out to ticket-holders this week, informing them of the reversal of a previous policy allowing sealed, plastic water bottles to be brought into stadiums: However, according to emails seen by The Athletic, FIFA have informed World Cup ticket holders that they have updated the code of conduct and the correspondence told fans that “reusable water bottles are no longer permitted at the FIFA World Cup 2026™ stadiums”. The code of conduct, which was updated on June 2, has removed the prior guidance permitting an empty and reusable plastic bottle. It now reads: “For the avoidance of doubt, reusable water bottles may not be brought into the stadium.”  ( 16 min )

That photo up there is of Jalen Brunson, who hit some huge shots down the stretch of Game 1 of the NBA Finals, led all players on both sides in scoring, and was talked up by his head coach as the hero of a game the underdog Knicks won, 105–95. "He did what MVP candidates are supposed to do," said a glowing Mike Brown, who pushed every correct button Wednesday night. "In the biggest moments, he shows up, and that's what MVPs are supposed to do. We put the ball in his hands and said we are going to live and die with him." I am going to tell myself that Brown heaped particular praise on Brunson not only because Brunson hit some big shots, or because Brown was still stirred by Brunson's recovery from what looked like a scary leg injury in the first quarter, but because he does not want to draw attention to what really won the game for the Knicks. New York triumphed in Game 1 because they pretty well ate up Victor Wembanyama, because they convincingly won the matchup against the player whose sudden ascendence to the very pinnacle of the sport has been the defining story of this NBA season. Nobody seemed to want to talk about it, after Brunson's theatrics: Across two ESPN recaps, neither coach is quoted so much as uttering the name of the man who outplayed Wemby. Allow me: Put simply, Karl-Anthony Towns kicked Wembanyama's ass. Here was a fun, somewhat bewildering challenge for a Thursday morning: To search among the photos available in Defector's subscription with Getty Images and to find one that contains both Wembanyama and Towns. The image, in this case, should depict these two behemoths in relation to one another in such a way that the composition tells some essential truth about the contest. Shouldn't be too hard! Wembanyama played 37 minutes and Towns played 34 minutes, and the two guarded each other a lot. Turns out, this is an impossible task, possibly because it is just very difficult to frame up two players of their combined size.  ( 29 min )

The Royals have selected the contract of veteran infielder Josh Rojas from Triple-A Omaha, they announced Wednesday. Fellow infielder Jonathan India, who underwent season-ending shoulder surgery back in April, moves to the 60-day injured list to open a spot on the 40-man roster. Righty Stephen Kolek was placed on the family medical emergency list to […]  ( 7 min )

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

Our fourth new video bonus for paid subscribers walks through the three rulings in argued cases that the Supreme Court handed down on Thursday, June 4, 2026.

A single vote in a case that hasn't gotten a lot of attention could portend massive consequences across a range of lawsuits challenging the Trump administration

Long before Trump’s diatribes about the “fake news media,” Scalia was lashing out at journalists who wrote about him in ways he did not like. The post Scalia Cheney Scandal: Antonin Scalia Believed He Was Entitled to Your Trust appeared first on Balls and Strikes.  ( 7 min )

“No-code automation” has been in Emacs far longer than its usage as a term of art. Better known as keyboard macros, this feature has allowed Emacs users to achieve their bespoke needs for decades, all without needing to know a whit about Lisp. I can testify to this personally: though I’ve been using Emacs since the early 90’s, only in the past three years has writing Elisp played any part in it. For most of my Emacs journey, I got by with just making keyboard macros. If you’re unfamiliar with them, here are two links you should get to know: The official Emacs manual for keyboard macros ((emacs) Keyboard Macros) Mickey Petersen’s post - “Keyboard Macros are Misunderstood” My addition to the knowledge of those posts is to boost this fact: mouse events can also be captured by a keyboard macro. If you know where a command is in a menu, you can also record clicking on it. I think the ability to combine both keyboard and mouse events in a keyboard macro is compelling, so much so that I decided to emphasize this in Anju. The recent Anju v1.5.0 release added the menu “Tools › Macro Recorder” to the menu bar as shown below. With this, mouse enthusiasts can create and run keyboard macros without need to recall keybindings or deal with inconsistent command naming, as observed in Petersen’s post. One thing that I TILed about keyboard macros in building this menu was the command list-keyboard-macros (see (emacs) Kmacro menu). This command is available in the “Macro Recorder” menu as the item “List macros”. This lets you manage multiple keyboard macros that have been defined during a session. If this interests you, I invite you install Anju from MELPA and give it a try. Let me know what you think!  ( 1 min )

inhibit-mouse package available. As the name suggests, it disables the mouse while you’re using Emacs. I’ve written about inhibit-mouse before. As I said in my previous post my first thought was that I don’t need this because I’ve already trained myself not to use the mouse while I’m in Emacs. The thing is, though, that I mainly use my laptop—a MacBook Pro—which has a trackpad for mouse operations. Since I often use my laptop on my lap while sitting on the couch, it’s easy to inadvertently touch the trackpad with my palm and change focus from one window to another. Turning off the mouse would eliminate that from happening. Still, I do use my trackpad to scroll Web pages and emails that are displayed with WebKit because there’s no other decent way of doing so. Happily, inhibit-mouse is very configurable and you can, in particular, disable it’s use in any major modes you like. That may solve my WebKit problem. Inhibit-mouse is a reimagining of Steve Purcell’s disable-mouse package. Cherti claims inhibit-mouse has some advantages—such as being more efficient—over disable-mouse. Take a look at the repository to see what they are. If you’re looking for a way to banish the mouse from your Emacs experience, this seems like a good way of doing so. You can even leave a couple of escape hatches if you need to.  ( 5 min )

The following exeln function passes the current line to the system shell, which executes it, thus EXEcuting LiNe. On Windows x86, my GNU Emacs has shell-file-name set to cmdproxy.exe, which is provided by x86_64-w64-mingw32, with which Emacs was compiled. shell is invoked synchronously by default; a prefix argument can change this to asynchronous. (defun exeln (arg) "Execute the current line as a shell command. With prefix arg, operate asynchronously, same as calling (shell-command COMMAND) where COMMAND ends in '&'. Otherwise, execute synchronously." (interactive "P") (let (asynch) (if arg (setq asynch "&")) (shell-command (concat (buffer-substring (line-beginning-position) (line-end-position)) asynch))))  ( 9 min )

Blanche Audition for AG Succeeds Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche’s elaborate audition to out-degenerate Pam Bondi has apparently won him...  ( 12 min )

give it a rest, no one cares

Federal agents left empty-handed, four states told ICE no, and the resistance makes big waves at Delaney Hall

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,.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){.row-content{width:100%!important}.stack .column{width:100%;display:block}.mobile_hide{min-heigh…  ( 1 min )

Logan Webb of the Giants just completed six no-hit innings against the Brewers in Milwaukee. He walked one and struck out four so far as he defends a 1-0 lead. He has thrown 85 pitches, however. Update: Bryce Turang singles with one out in the seventh to break up the no-hitter.  ( 25 min )

The Padres score a run in the top of the seventh to end Cristopher Sanchez’s scoreless inning streak at 50 2/3 innings. It’s the fifth longest streak in MLB history. Congratulations to Sanchez on an impressive run. The Phillies lead the Padres 3-1 in the eighth inning.

Cristopher Sanchez retired the Padres 1-2-3 in the first inning, extending his scoreless inning streak to 45 2/3 innings. That’s the new record for a left-handed pitcher. No score as the Phillies bat in the bottom of the first inning.

The Padres try to end Cristopher Sanchez‘s scoreless innings streak as they visit Philadelphia, sending Walker Buehler in opposition. Sanchez’s streak stands at 44 2/3 innings. It’s the seventh longest in-season streak in the live ball era. In the six games that contain the streak, Sanchez pitched 45 2/3 innings, allowing two runs, 29 hits […]

Jo Adell of the Angels played a ball off his head into a home run. Adell reached up to catch TJ Rumfield’s deep fly for the Colorado Rockies in the fourth inning, but the ball grazed the outside of his glove before bouncing off his head and over the wall for a solo homer. “I was toward […]

The Log5 Method yields these top projected hit averages versus starting pitchers: 0.317, 0.710 — Michael Harris II batting vs. Patrick Corbin. 0.309, 0.654 — Oswald Peraza batting vs. Michael Lorenzen. 0.308, 0.704 — Dominic Smith batting vs. Patrick Corbin. 0.306, 0.714 — Brandon Marsh batting vs. Walker Buehler. 0.301, 0.655 — Wade Meckler batting […]

Bryan Reynolds tops the Baseball Musings Batter Rankings after a drawing two walks in a 10-6 win over the Astros. In the same game, Yordan Alvarez of the Astros went two for three with a walk and a home run, and is now batting .305/.419/.645. He ranks fifth. Two Rays remain in the top five […]

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For democracy, June is the cruelest month 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 )

Supreme Court’s Alabama ruling ‘debases the democratic process’ 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} 9…  ( 5 min )

"60 Minutes'" Scott Pelley was fired 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 )

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 )

96 RIP, VRA: You’re invited to our June 9 webinar img{-ms-interpolation-mode:bicubic;} table, td{mso-table-lspace:0pt;mso-table-rspace:0pt;} .mceStandardButton, .mceStandardButton td, .mceStandardButton td a{mso-hide:all!important;} p, a, li, td, blockquote{mso-line-height-rule:exactly;} p, a, li, td, body, table, blockquote{-ms-text-size-adjust:100%;-webkit-text-size-adjust:100%;} .mcnPreviewText{display:none!important;} .bodyCell{margin:0 auto;padding:0;width:100%;} .ExternalClass, .ExternalClass p, .ExternalClass td, .ExternalClass div, .ExternalClass span, .ExternalClass font{line-height:100%;} .ReadMsgBody, .ExternalClass{width:100%;} a[x-apple-data-detectors]{color:inherit!important;text-decoration:none!important;font-size:inherit!important;font-family:inherit!important;font-…  ( 5 min )

ICYMI: Supreme Court allows Alabama to use racially gerrymandered map for 2026 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} …  ( 2 min )

Tina Peters is out of prison — and she definitely isn’t sorry a.cta_button{-moz-box-sizing:content-box !important;-webkit-box-sizing:content-box !important;box-sizing:content-box !important;vertical-align:middle}.hs-breadcrumb-menu{list-style-type:none;margin:0px 0px 0px 0px;padding:0px 0px 0px 0px}.hs-breadcrumb-menu-item{float:left;padding:10px 0px 10px 10px}.hs-breadcrumb-menu-divider:before{content:'›';padding-left:10px}.hs-featured-image-link{border:0}.hs-featured-image{float:right;margin:0 0 20px 20px;max-width:50%}@media (max-width: 568px){.hs-featured-image{float:none;margin:0;width:100%;max-width:100%}}.hs-screen-reader-text{clip:rect(1px, 1px, 1px, 1px);height:1px;overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;width:1px} 96 …  ( 5 min )

Breaking News - House votes to rein in Trump's failed war!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!/Welcome New Subscribers!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Welcome New Subscribers!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Paid subscribers gather tonight at 7pm ET to review the election returns, and talk about what comes next......

The Indiana Fever have revoked media credentials from longtime Indiana basketball reporter Scott Agness, he said Tuesday in a post on his website Fieldhouse Files. The team's public relations staff told him the decision was due to "the spread of inaccurate and unsubstantiated information" related to Caitlin Clark’s injury status in a game against the Portland Fire on May 20. The Fever announced that Clark would miss that game less than two hours before tipoff in Indianapolis. "I'm told it’s part of a strategic management plan for the season," Agness wrote in a tweet sharing the news. Clark missed 31 games in 2025 with various injuries, but wasn't previously on the injury report before she was ruled out. League rules state that teams must report player injury and illness information by 5 p.m. local time the day before a game, and identify a specific "reason for any player whose participation in the game may be affected for any reason." In his May 20 story on the news of Clark's absence, Agness clarified the "strategic management plan" phrase he'd used in his earlier tweet: "That was not to insinuate load management, but rather emphasize the precautionary measure given what she experienced last season," he wrote. In his post on Tuesday, Agness said Fever PR took issue with that phrase, which he said was based on "information from a trusted league source."  ( 21 min )

Two months ago, Angel in the outfield Jo Adell robbed three home runs in a single game, in what I'm sure will stand up as the best defensive performance of the season. Last night, he made an error that forced me to question if those incredible catches were all just a dream. “It's one of those things where how it happened looks crazy,” Adell said after the game. “It looks like I've never played in the field before, which is disappointing, because it's beyond the truth, but it is what it is. I'm the only one that really knows what happened. I was out there, and it happened to me, so it is what it is.” Well, I can take a guess at what happened. Rockies hitter TJ Rumfield hit a long fly to deep right-center, and Adell ran over to try to make a catch. As he put his glove up for the out, he misjudged where the ball was going to land. It took a very slight deflection off his leather, bonked him in the top of the head, and then traveled over the yellow line for a Colorado home run. From where I'm sitting, it sure looks like Adell got Canseco-ed.  ( 15 min )

The morning of her first round-match at Roland-Garros, Marta Kostyuk learned that a Russian missile attack had killed four people in her native Kyiv, Ukraine, dangerously near her parents' house. "Most of the morning I felt sick …if it was 100 metres closer, I probably wouldn’t have a mom and a sister today," Kostyuk said after her comfortable win against Russian-born Oksana Selekhmeteva. Compartmentalization sometimes impresses as much as any athletic exploit.  In the middle of her fourth-round match against four-time champion Iga Swiatek, Kostyuk was dancing. She'd never taken a set off Swiatek before, but survived the opener 7-5 despite being down a break on two occasions. After a brief chat with coach and blogger Sandra Zaniewska, who spent the match taking notes atop a copy of Sally Rooney's Intermezzo, Kostyuk had a few extra moments before Swiatek returned from her standard bathroom break and got her boogie on to the courtside music to cheers from the crowd. Everybody should have known the eventual result right then. You simply do not dance on court unless your game is singing. An out-of-sorts Swiatek returned from the toilet and broke serve in the first game of the second set, then watched Kostyuk swipe the next six in a row to inflict the most resounding defeat Iga has absorbed at this tournament in seven years.  The day of Kostyuk's quarterfinal on Tuesday, Russian missiles and drones killed at least 22 more Ukrainians, two children among them. Against her countrywoman Elina Svitolina, who had mentored Kostyuk and is in arguably career-best form, Kostyuk won in three sets. The quirks and sharp edges of tennis regularly drive players to various displays of infancy, as if each missed backhand or dubious line call represents a vital part of their life shattering before their eyes. Despite shouldering truly life-altering stress, Kostyuk was even-keeled throughout, greeting misses with smiles or shrugs in which the frustration level looked closer to everyday levels than "Daniil Medvedev."  ( 24 min )

It's almost time for the World Cup. Before the tournament, we'll be previewing each of the top 15 teams by FIFA rankings that made the tournament. Why the top 15? Because that's how many we needed to do in order for the USMNT to make the cut. You can read all of our previews here. The most successful side of the last two World Cups is France. That's a title that winning the tournament and coming oh-so-close to repeating earns you. But which is the second most successful side? If you picked Argentina, the other winner, I wouldn't push back too hard, especially since the Albiceleste lost to the eventual champions in 2018. Instead, though, I'd argue that it is Croatia, home to only 3.8 million people, that has punched so far above its weight that it should be considered the second-best-performing World Cup team over the past eight years.  ( 30 min )

Both No. 1 seeds in men's and women's singles have now exited Roland-Garros after running the scoreboard right up to the threshold of victory and then suffering bizarre, ignominious collapse. A week after Jannik Sinner seized up, it was Aryna Sabalenka's turn to cave in. Sabalenka was up 6-3, 4-1 on Diana Shnaider in Wednesday's quarterfinal, and leading her service game 30-0. From there, Sabalenka won just one more game in the match. She had a chance to serve it out at 5-4, and got within two points of victory, but after missing a putaway volley, she spiritually vanished from the premises. The husk of Sabalenka which remained on court blew 10 consecutive games to conclude a 3-6, 7-5, 6-0 loss to Shnaider, the No. 25 seed and a punchy 22-year-old lefty who had never previously advanced beyond the second round of this tournament. Sabalenka's loss ensures that there will be a first-time French Open champion in the women's draw, just as in the men's. An inexplicable Sabalenka collapse while holding a big lead at Roland-Garros in windy conditions—why does that sound familiar? It was the exact outcome of the 2025 final, too. Last year, some combination of gusts and Coco Gauff's indefatigable defense unwound Sabalenka's game. This year, the loss of form came two rounds earlier in the tournament, and it was even more sudden and stark. For the back half of this match, Sabalenka's side of the court was a symphony of screams and errors. Nothing worked.  ( 19 min )

Welcome back to Minor Dilemmas, where a member of Defector's Parents Council will answer your questions on surviving family life. Have a question? Email us at minordilemmas@defector.com. This week, Dave answers a question about how to know when to let your kid quit an activity. Ike:  ( 29 min )

It's almost time for the World Cup. Before the tournament, we'll be previewing each of the top 15 teams by FIFA rankings that made the tournament. Why the top 15? Because that's how many we needed to do in order for the USMNT to make the cut. You can read all of our previews here. Soccer may be a fickle game, but on the whole it does a good job of putting things in their rightful place. In that sense, there's maybe no team in the world to whom soccer has been more consistently, maddeningly fair than Mexico.  ( 33 min )

Unremarkable dweeb Nick Bilton has been the executive producer of 60 Minutes for less than a week, and he has already written his name into the history books as one of the media industry's most pathetic bosses. Bilton's week started with him getting colossally owned during his first all-hands meeting with 60 Minutes staffers, a meeting that had to be cut short because of how badly longtime correspondent Scott Pelley was big-dogging his new boss by simply pointing out Bilton's lack of credentials and asking him to explain why a bunch of seasoned and well-respected 60 Minutes employees had been fired. Monday night, news broke that Bilton, having had some time to stew on getting turned inside out by a member of his own staff, has fired Pelley. Several media reporters and publications circulated the email that Bilton sent to Pelley. You can almost hear Bilton sniveling:  ( 19 min )

I call them my dummies, the people who I watch on my big screen in the evenings as a way to calm my nervous system. It's not necessarily that my dummies are stupid, but anyone who agrees to go on a reality television show has to have enough optimism in their body to drown out any truly critical thought. They believe in love, or at least fame. They believe not only that they are special, but that in a villa with 12 other people and hundreds of cameras, where the hottest hotties you’ve ever seen in your life will be brought in to try to destroy your crush, they will come out on top. My dummies. I love them so much.  Love Island has been a staple of British reality television for more than a decade now, and Love Island USA has surged in popularity in the last three years. Like other dating sh…  ( 27 min )

Are you ready to receive a powerful piece of information? OK, here it comes: Politicians can increase their chances of getting elected to office if they are seen as down-to-earth and relatable by their constituents. This novel observation, unearthed for the first time this week, is the premise of a Nathaniel Frum column that appeared on The Atlantic on Tuesday. Before you ask, yes, Nathaniel is awful Atlantic staff writer David Frum's stupid son. Not content with simply blowing his readers' minds by telling them that being likable is a boon to politicians, Frum uses his powerful thinking abilities to lay out a brilliant plan for exactly how a politician might go about appearing more normal and cool: They should express idiotic and insincere sports opinions, as frequently and as loudly as possible, in the spaces where such opinions are most abundant. Frum begins his column by (correctly) dinging New York Governor Kathy Hochul for challenging Donald Trump to name the starting lineup of the Knicks' "1993 championship team," which was in point of fact more of a lost-in-the-Eastern-Conference-Finals team. Hochul came off like a real dope because her error underlined what was already obvious: She only occasionally pretends to like sports in order to curry favor with her constituents.  ( 20 min )

You can say a lot of complimentary things about these Carolina Hurricanes. And I will! They are relentless, squeezing the life out of their Eastern Conference opponents by outskating them to every puck and outworking them on every battle. They are rested, having gone 12-1 on their way to the Stanley Cup Final, with plenty of time between each round to let wounds heal. But one thing they are not, perhaps, is battle-tested. They have not struggled, have not stressed on the way to get here. Each time they have metaphorically punched an opponent in the mouth, that opponent has gone down and stayed down. The Golden Knights punched back on Tuesday, the clear aggressors in a wild Game 1 that saw Las Vegas emerge with the 5-4 victory. So many of Vegas's goals came off applying just a little bit of pressure to Carolina—nothing out of the ordinary for a good hockey team, but the sort of sustained and psychologically erosive checking that lesser teams just aren't capable of mustering for 60 minutes. And the Hurricanes, so poised up until this round, were repeatedly pestered into errors: turnovers, failed clears, lackadaisical backchecking. At inopportune times the Canes looked like ... well, like the teams the Canes have beaten. They'd better internalize quickly that this ain't Montreal. The Knights have a knack for poking and prodding pressure points, and it's on their targets not to flinch under it, because they're not going to let up, and they're not going to miss many opportunities to take advantage of lapses. "It's those mistakes we made tonight that really [we] just don't make. And we made too many of those," said coach Rod Brind'Amour. "They forced us into them and we didn't handle pressure particularly well."  ( 20 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 The scoreless innings record is in play @media only screen and (max-width: 620px) { table.body { width: 100%; min-width: 100%; } table.body .content { padding: 0 !important; } table.body .container { padding: 0 !important; width: 100% !important; } table.body .main { border-spacing: 10px 0 !important; border-left-width: 0 !important; border-radius: 0 !important; border-right-width: 0 !important; } table.body .img-responsive { height: auto !important; max-width: 100% !important; width: auto !important; } } @media all { .ExternalClass { width: 100%; } .ExternalClass, .ExternalClass p, .ExternalClass span, .ExternalClass font, .ExternalClass td, .ExternalClass div { line-height: 100%; …  ( 12 min )

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

96 *{box-sizing:border-box}body{margin:0;padding:0}a[x-apple-data-detectors]{color:inherit!important;text-decoration:inherit!important}#MessageViewBody a{color:inherit;text-decoration:none}p{line-height:inherit}.desktop_hide,.desktop_hide table{mso-hide:all;display:none;max-height:0;overflow:hidden}.image_block img+div{display:none}sub,sup{font-size:75%;line-height:0} @media (max-width:660px){.stack .column{width:100%;display:block}.mobile_hide{min-height:0;max-height:0;max-width:0;display:none;overflow:hidden;font-size:0}.desktop_hide,.desktop_hide table{display:table!important;max-height:none!important}.row-1 .column-2 .block-1.paragraph_block td.pad>div{text-align:center!important;font-size:12px!important}.row-1 .column-2 .block-1.paragraph_block td.pad{padding:0 10px 10px 10px!impor…  ( 1 min )

Your Country(‘s Men’s National Team) Needs You96 :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…  ( 8 min )

The White House’s proposed nondisclosure agreement for federal employees places great weight on the fact that the Supreme Court also wants to keep you in the dark. The post The Proposed Trump NDA Is Following John Roberts’s Bad Example appeared first on Balls and Strikes.  ( 5 min )

oh, you want an answer? go fuck yourself.

Mourning All We Have Lost Laying awake last night processing the Supreme Court’s latest galling decision, I reflected on how...  ( 10 min )

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

The bullies had a rough week

Here’s a niche problem: When viewing iPhone-captured photos in org-mode on Linux, they always appear in landscape orientation, even if you took them in portrait. The reason is that the sensor of the camera on the phone is physically embedded in landscape mode, so all photos are in landscape mode; when you hold the phone in portrait mode (which is how you hold it most of the time), the phone detects that and implements a fix in the EXIF data file. Essentially, a software fix to a hardware design issue. Since most photos I take are usually in portrait orientation, it means I need to twist my neck and view images at a 90-degree angle when I look at my Journelly entries. The source of the problem seems to stem from how org-mode interprets EXIF data in the photo: it doesn’t. It relies on other parts of Emacs, which in turn rely on parts of the OS, to do the job. On Linux (at least on Kubuntu, which is what I use these days), those parts don’t handle EXIF orientation information. Why and how, I am not sure, it’s more digging than I have the time for right now… but anyway - there’s a simple fix. Auto-orient, which is part of ImageMagick’s mogrify tool. And if you use Emacs on Linux, good chance it’s already installed: This operator reads and resets the EXIF image profile setting ‘Orientation’ and then performs the appropriate 90 degree rotation on the image to orient the image, for correct viewing. To execute on an image file: mogrify -auto-orient . And because I use Emacs, of course there’s a dwim-shell-command solution: (defun jtr/dwim-image-auto-orient () "Auto-orient images based on EXIF data using mogrify." (interactive) (dwim-shell-command-on-marked-files "Auto-orient images" "mogrify -auto-orient '>'" :utils "mogrify" :silent-success t)) That last part,:silent-success, closes the empty buffer that pops up after successful execution, as mogrify doesn’t really produce an output window. So, it will just bring us back to Dired.  ( 3 min )

Two years ago I wrote a super simple todo package for Emacs to see whether I could get over my tendency to 1) procrastinate a lot and 2) being annoyed at my tendency to procrastinate. Reader, you won’t believe the answer: Yes and no. Or rather, no and yes. That is, I still procrastinate a lot (but less than before), but I’m way less annoyed about it. As you can clearly see from the Emacs mode line above, I’ve got 27 “new” things on the todo list, 4 things that are “in progress” and… tada! 616 things that have been done! It cannot be! That’s about one thing per day! (Although it’s more like no things most days and then eight things on a random day.) I’ve had a look at other todo systems, but like I said two years ago, they seem to be specifically made to enable further procrastination…  ( 5 min )

1. TLDR first argued that Incremental Completing Read (ICR) is a structural property of an interface, not an interface itself; the next four made it concrete with the VOMPECCC framework, my Spotify client (spot), a produce picker, and a VOMPECCC showcase. This one coins a term for a special case, Incremental Suggesting Read (ISR), where the candidate set produced by incrementally typed input is a suggestion, rather than a literal completion of that input. The ability to generate inferred matches in addition to literal matches vastly expands the scope of what a 'completion' system can do. Two conceptual sources supply the suggestions: 1) semantic retrieval and 2) generative synthesis. This post is more speculative than useful, so carry that pinch of salt with you as you watch the vide…  ( 15 min )

Even by Donald Trump‘s erratic standards, his latest meltdown is bad — and deeply concerning. It all began with two major insults to his fragile ego. On May 27, Freedom 250, the president’s initiative for celebrating the American semiquincentennial, announced the musical lineup for the Great American State Fair. But just hours later, most of the marquee artists — including country star Martina McBride and soul legends the Commodores — had dropped out, seemingly unaware of the event’s connection to Trump when their representatives booked the gig. Then two days later, on May 29, a federal judge ruled that the president cannot rename the Kennedy Center after himself or shut it down for renovations, a move that was announced — suspiciously — after a slew of artists canceled shows at the Washin…  ( 8 min )

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

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

The majority invoked “our colorblind Constitution” to expand and transform April's Callais decision. Sotomayor, in dissent, highlighted the "grave harms" the majority "inflicts."

The court's split ruling would protect current trans service members from discharge but allow the Trump admin to keep new trans recruits from joining the military during litigation.

Meet two of our most important new Democratic primary winners from tonight's elections....

PA-01 is one of four great opportunities we have to flip House seats in Pennsylvania this year

We have primaries today in California, Iowa, Montana, New Jersey, New Mexico, and South Dakota - good luck everyone!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1

Matt Vierling of the Tigers owns a double and a triple through five innings. That’s the tough part of the cycle as Detroit plays at the Rays with a 5-0 lead. Vierling doesn’t have much home run power, so that might be the tough hit for him tonight. the Tigers offense appears to be coming […]

The Guardians visit the Yankees on Lou Gehrig Day with Joey Cantillo facing Cam Schlittler. Cantillo walks a ton of batters, 31 in 58 innings this season and 88 in 192 innings for his career. The last two seasons he pitched out of trouble, keeping his ERAs in the threes. Schlittler holds opponents to a […]

The LA Times publishes an article about how MLB wants to blame players for continued blackouts of local games because they won’t accept a salary cap. Fine. I just want to note that the MLBPA is not that anti salary cap, just when it applies directly to MLB players. Last decade, they were more that […]

It’s Lou Gehrig Day, as MLB supports ALS research. Gehrig for his career owned a high batting average and a high OBP, didn’t strike out much by today’s standards, and collected a hit in nearly 75% of the games he played. I was eyeballing the early years of his career, looking for a long streak, […]

Monday featured lots of runs on lots of walks and homers, bringing more churn to the top five of the Baseball Musings Batter Rankings. The nine games averaged 11.4 runs per game, the second highest run/game of the season with at least nine games. Yandy Diaz of the Rays moved into first place with a […]

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

96 We’re willing to cut through the noise. img{-ms-interpolation-mode:bicubic;} table, td{mso-table-lspace:0pt;mso-table-rspace:0pt;} .mceStandardButton, .mceStandardButton td, .mceStandardButton td a{mso-hide:all!important;} p, a, li, td, blockquote{mso-line-height-rule:exactly;} p, a, li, td, body, table, blockquote{-ms-text-size-adjust:100%;-webkit-text-size-adjust:100%;} .mcnPreviewText{display:none!important;} .bodyCell{margin:0 auto;padding:0;width:100%;} .ExternalClass, .ExternalClass p, .ExternalClass td, .ExternalClass div, .ExternalClass span, .ExternalClass font{line-height:100%;} .ReadMsgBody, .ExternalClass{width:100%;} a[x-apple-data-detectors]{color:inherit!important;text-decoration:none!important;font-size:inherit!important;font-family:inherit!important;font-weight:…  ( 5 min )

They were brought in to kill 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} 96 …  ( 6 min )

Subscribe for 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 */ body{-webkit-te…  ( 2 min )

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

Polars 1.41, Email, Great Docs, 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%; } table,td{…  ( 5 min )

The Royals have claimed outfielder Matthew Lugo off waivers from the Angels, according to announcements from both clubs. The Halos had designated him for assignment last week. The Royals have optioned him to Triple-A Omaha. Additionally, the Royals announced that they have selected the contract of right-hander Beck Way and optioned right-hander Eli Morgan. Kansas […]  ( 10 min )

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

This is an excellent little tweak to org-mode deadlines. I added it and it makes them look just a bit nicer.

when I learned from mbork how to get my own copy of Webster’s 1923 dictionary my dictionary use was vastly improved. If you don’t know why having Webster’s 1923 is a big thing, here’s my original post on it from 2015. For Emacs users, the package you need is quick-sdcv.el, an update of the original sdcv package. Actually, quick-sdcv useful for a lot more than just Webster. You can even use it to access the Oxford English Dictionary from within Emacs. Obviously, there’s a lot to like. The point of this post is to pass on the announcement that sdcv-quick has been updated. If you do any writing at all you need sdcv and Webster’s 1923. Having the OED is a bonus. Happily, it’s easy to have it all in Emacs with sdcv.  ( 5 min )

The text editor I'd used for 20 years on an MS-DOS platform would change the shape of the cursor to distinguish between insert mode and overwrite mode. A filled rectangle (or box, in Emacs terms) indicated overwrite mode; an underscore (hbar), insert mode. It's a nice way to make overwrite mode obvious. The video starts out with Emacs in Insert Mode. Then Overwrite Mode is activated, which changes cursor-type from hbar to box. The word "Overwrite" replaces "Insert" to demonstrate the effect. Incidentally, you might enjoy listening to some sound while playing back the video. One of my favorites is "Forest Voice" from https://mynoise.net, by Dr. Stéphane Pigeon. Anyway, here's a function to implement that behavior in Emacs: (defun zeit-change-cursor-shape () "Set cursor shape depending on overwrite mode. When overwrite-mode is nil (off), set cursor-type to hbar. Otherwise, set it to box." (interactive) (if (not overwrite-mode) (setq cursor-type 'hbar) (setq cursor-type 'box)))

Emacs Update Things have slowed on the Emacs front. I am not tweaking the init file every day and trying to get things just right. It is a good state to be in. There are no pain-points in the use of Emacs which has been bugging me and after all this time, it is a relief. Don’t get me wrong. I love tweaking. I love discovering new packages and trying them out. That is fun for me. But the basic configuration is stable, I understand it, I am trying to incorporate it into my muscle memory and things are peaceful. That doesn’t mean I haven’t discovered a few nice things from the last time I wrote one of these articles. Here we go. anddo.el I found A Super Simple Todo Package For Emacs – Random Thoughts. The GitHub repo is larsmagne/anddo.el: A very simple todo package for Emacs. This is a simpl…

Many of the president’s second-term nominees share his commitment to resegregating institutions across the federal government. The post Katie Lane Confirmed: How Trump Is Making the Federal Judiciary White Again appeared first on Balls and Strikes.  ( 6 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 gambling, World Cup loyalties, griddles, window seat etiquette, and more. Your letters: Capn Po:  ( 49 min )

By racing the Giro d'Italia, Jonas Vingegaard chose to court the most pressure possible. Not only would he face the unrelenting scrutiny of being the sole favorite for the race, whatever he did would be judged against his archrival Tadej Pogacar's authoritative 2024 Giro. If any of the other challengers for the Giro ever got a wheel past him at any point, he'd face serious questions about whether trying the Giro–Tour de France double represented a brush with hubris. Even if he bested them, if he did not also banish the ghost of Pogacar in the process, he'd have offered further evidence to skeptics that beating Pogacar this summer in France and beyond was outside of his abilities. It's worth remembering this pressure, because it seems like such a distant worry after the nearly perfect Giro …  ( 23 min )

It's almost time for the World Cup. Before the tournament, we'll be previewing each of the top 15 teams by FIFA rankings that made the tournament. Why the top 15? Because that's how many we needed to do in order for the USMNT to make the cut. You can read all of our previews here. Colombia comes into the 2026 World Cup as one of the hungriest teams in the field. After missing the 2022 edition of the tournament, Los Cafeteros are back, having breezed through the hardest qualifying test in the entire world: CONMEBOL’s grinding 18-match crucible, which Colombia finished in third place, eight points safe of the intercontinental playoff spot. Along the way, Colombia beat both Argentina and Brazil at home, the first time it had toppled the latter in World Cup qualifying history, and also added a runner-up finish at the 2024 Copa América, taking Argentina deep into extra time before losing to a 112th minute winner. In other words, despite the disappointment of the last World Cup cycle, this is an experienced and battle-tested side, one coming into the 2026 tournament with plenty of talent in a starting XI that can compete with anyone.  ( 26 min )

The great Hanif Abdurraqib joined us this week on Nothing But Respect. You are probably familiar with Abdurraqib's work as a poet, author, journalist, and subject of a Giri Nathan profile, which was timed to the release of Abdurraqib's 2024 book, There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension. We talked a bit about the book, a good amount about his beloved Minnesota Timberwolves, and a lot about the forthcoming NBA Finals between the Knicks and Spurs. I also asked Abdurraqib to give us his own scouting report, which he generously provided. This was a fun one! https://art19.com/shows/nothing-but-respect/episodes/3f32c963-2f70-4be5-9a6d-fa95bcb693ce  ( 14 min )

Hoopheads across the nation begin their annual vigil Wednesday in anticipation of receiving the thing they most crave in all the world—a new team to admire, love, fear, and hate simultaneously. And you can't really blame them for their baffled antipathies. Their favorite sport is both defined and repelled by dynastic teams and the silly little debates they shape, which are always on the menu as a kind of bland and ubiquitous comfort food, the sort of tastes-the-same-everywhere sludge you can eat and regret along any of the nation's highways. And these fans are starving for it; they haven't had that level of reliability in this sport in nearly a decade now. But they live in hope, and dread, that a new dynasty is upon us, this one governed by Wemby The First (and so far Only) and sure to run…  ( 25 min )

I begin this internship having recently clawed my way back into society after escaping the grips of the common cold. The last week has been packed with a variety of riveting activities that range from staring up at my ceiling to staring straight ahead at my wall, broken up by the occasional times I dragged…  ( 16 min )

I wanted to spend the week before I started at Defector relaxing, reclined and pensive while reading books and watching movies that would inspire brilliant blogs I could pitch to Lauren and Brandy. I was in Southern California, where I grew up, visiting my parents before going to a wedding.   Relaxation is not what came…  ( 19 min )

No matter what brought you here—if you live with or without birds, if you have lain awake at night pondering the problem of your parrot's predilection for wanking it in the wee hours, or if you have no clue that or how a bird might whack off in the first place—I am here to tell you that yes, it is OK for birds to masturbate. In fact, it is not just OK; it is natural. As such, the birds in your life should be allowed to beat off as they please, without your permission and certainly without your hindrance. (No, a bird did not write this blog, but I certainly hope a bird would approve of it.) These are the conclusions of four researchers who want to set the record straight about bird masturbation, with a paper that led a great Guardian headline: "Masturbation among birds is ‘natural’ and should not be punished, say experts." Go off, experts! One of said experts speaks from personal experience. (She is not a bird.) Chloe Heys, an evolutionary ecologist at the University of Lancashire in Preston, England, had a pet cockatiel named Billy, who masturbated up to 10 times a day during the breeding season. "She'd rescued Billy from a pretty nasty situation, and was worried his masturbation might be a sign of unhappiness," Tom Price, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Liverpool in England, told Audubon. "On the other hand, she thought he looked like he really enjoyed masturbating." Should Billy be masturbating? If so, how much? These questions served as the basis of the new paper out in Ecology and Evolution, which takes to task the unjustly invisibilized history of birds fapping it, in and out of captivity.  ( 26 min )

Three years after making the playoffs together and contesting a beautiful, ultimately futile first-round series against the defending champs, Mike Brown and De'Aaron Fox are going to the NBA Finals. All they had to do was flee Sacramento. As the San Antonio Spurs and New York Knicks gear up for what should be a thriller of a Finals, the world will dissect the two team's strengths and flaws, weigh what a title would mean to each franchise, and study their conference-winning compositions. It's that final bit that will raise the curious matter of how each team's marquee offseason addition—defined somewhat expansively, though the Spurs of February 2025 were more or less already in their offseason—was collaborating with the other's just 18 short months ago, on the sorriest-ass franchise in all …  ( 22 min )

The crowd at Arena Monterrey belted "Cielito Lindo," and the mariachi band played the hero to the ring. The match was mask vs. mask, each luchador putting their identity on the line, and the fans were unanimous in their loyalty. They gave him more love than you'll see for any active wrestler in Mexico not named Mistico. Absorbing all the cheers and adulation from the crowd was ... a German guy named Marcel Barthel, better known as WWE bit player Ludwig Kaiser, who was portraying the masked man known as "El Grande Americano." https://www.youtube.com/live/JhRRxgaK_sI?si=LoYUfQv5jrLuLl12&t=5028 Let's go backward. There's a high-stakes wrestling war happening in Mexico, pitting longstanding tradition against WWE's corporate might. CMLL is the oldest promotion in the world, with regular shows at Arena Mexico that are a must-see for any tourist interested in the platonic ideal of lucha libre. They've had an especially strong run of late, with attendance figures that did not escape the notice of America's largest wrestling behemoth. In 2025, WWE bought CMLL's little-brother rival, AAA, and started supplying it with bigger-name talents.  ( 21 min )

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

Iran, Israel, the corrupt slush fund, and more...

The resistance delivers

Fool Me a Thousand Times … A confusing mishmash of reporting Monday afternoon inadvertently revealed that Donald Trump can still...  ( 12 min )

96 One swing @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 )

Priority Records was a distribution company and record label founded by Bryan Turner, Mark Cerami, and Steve Drath in 1985. The Los Angeles-based label dealt with several genres of music, but it was a cornerstone in bringing West Coast Gangsta … Continue reading →  ( 18 min )

TL;DR If you use both Scrim and Emacs on macOS, you can “Open in Emacs” a file or directory from Finder via the “Quick Actions” context menu. This is implemented as a macOS Shortcut, shared as an iCloud link: “Open in Emacs” Shortcut iCloud Link Motivation I find macOS drag-and-drop operations from Finder to Emacs (in particular, the NS variant) to be frustratingly inconsistent. Dragging a file or folder from Finder to a non-Dired buffer will visit it. Not always! This behavior can be mode-specific. Dragging a file or folder from Finder to a Dired buffer will copy it. Dragging a file or folder from Finder to the Emacs icon in the Dock will visit it in a new frame. Add to that, drag-and-drop isn’t graceful with a long traversal path on a large screen. Ultimately, what I want is a single con…  ( 3 min )

Underappreciated Emacs Builtins. There is a lot of functionality in default vanilla Emacs that is certainly less talked about. I'm going to constrain myself to talking about specific functions that exist, instead of overarching themes like portability. Regional Commands Buffer Narrowing Indirect Buffers narrow-indirect package speeds up this process a bit, but all of this functionality is built in by default. Register Directory Local Variables a whole eval hook to play with. Some example uses of this are to automatically log in to AWS when the project is opened, or automatically starting the project for debugging, etc. Tramp sudo, but it works great for accessing files inside of Docker containers too (useful when working with devcontainers), and that functionality extends to: …

AI and scholarship: a manifesto | University of Cambridge Emacs and Vim in the Age of AI | (think) The Emacsification of Software — Quarrelsome (HN) The Lisp Curse EmacsConf EmacsWiki: Usergroups Emacs calendar Matei is an anthropologist; ethnographic research Matei: I'm an anthropologist. What I actually do for work is to do ethnographic research, to interview people. I've written a lot about scientific communities. For instance, I've written articles on behavioral scientists who work with animals and how they think about knowledge and technology and stuff. Completely independently of that, I kind of got into Emacs and got really excited. About four years later, I was, like, wait a minute, why don't I do an ethnography of Emacs as a community? Sacha: Really cool people. Matei: Rig…  ( 29 min )

[2026-06-01 Mon]: Thanks to everyone who participated! I've included the links below. It's May and I like puns, so I'm going to suggest "May I recommend…" as our Emacs Carnival theme this month, building on lively conversations about people's favourite packages on lobste.rs, Reddit, and Hacker News. Let's go beyond packages and talk workflows, tips, practices, perspectives… whatever you'd recommend! It was pretty nice having a wiki page that people could edit without needing to wait for me, so if you write about this topic, feel free to edit the wiki page and add your link. If you run into problems doing that, please e-mail me and I can add the link for you. People have already started sharing their recommendations: May Emacs Carnival, Carlos Pajuelo May I Recommend EWM, Dilip What we talk about when we talk about recommending Emacs packages, David Dimagid May I recommend… escaping the minibuffer, Alessio Vanni May I recommend… vibemacsing?, by Giampaolo Guiducci May I recommend… to only add items to your init files you understand and document?, by MartinStemplinger May I recommend… Stop messing around and get work done., by Curtis McHale May I recommend declaring bankruptcy from time to time, by Case Duckworth May I recommend eww for Emacs's innovative UI?, by Omar Antolín Camarena May I recommend… understanding Emacs's patterns, by Charlie Holland May I recommend using your thumbs on Meanwhiling May I recommend thinking of Emacs as your Fortress of Solitude, by Martin Sosic Sacha and Prot Talk Emacs: May I Recommend… May I recommend… Treating Emacs as Emacs, by SouthFox May I recommend: lesser known org-modes, by tusharhero May I Recommend: org2blog, journaling & reading hacks, by Wenshan Ren May I recommend… less stretching for your common commands, by Neil M View Org source for this post You can e-mail me at sacha@sachachua.com.  ( 2 min )

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

May I recommend", very cool! Looking for something to write about next? Check out the June theme Underappreciated Emacs Built-ins hosted by Ross A. Baker. Help wanted: elfeed getting ready for 4.0 release, bug reports welcome (@minad@mastodon.world) Help wanted: testing canvas patch on Windows and Mac OS (@divyaranjan@mathstodon.xyz) Upcoming events (iCal file, Org): Emacs.si (in person): Emacs.si meetup #6 2026 (v #živo) https://dogodki.kompot.si/events/67d716c3-6c04-4530-9c1a-f67aa44d31bc Mon Jun 1 1900 CET Emacs Paris: S: Emacs workshop in Paris (online) https://emacs-doctor.com/ Thu Jun 4 0830 America/Vancouver - 1030 America/Chicago - 1130 America/Toronto - 1530 Etc/GMT - 1730 Europe/Berlin - 2100 Asia/Kolkata - 2330 Asia/Singapore EmacsATX: Emacs Social https://www.meetup.com/e…  ( 3 min )

While walks are up overall this season, they have been coming down steadily on a week by week basis. This spreadsheet shows walk and strikeout percentage (percentage of plate appearances) by season week. Note that while strikeouts vary week to week they bounce around more than they decline. Walks coming down in my mind indicates […]

Landen Roupp of the Giants visits Shane Drohan and the Brewers. Roupp seems to be Mr. Decision this season, with a 5-5 record in eleven starts. Allowing just three home runs in 60 innings helped him to a 3.30 ERA. Drohan owns a 1.82 ERA in his 10 appearances as a reliever, but gave up […]

The best batter of the month turned out to be a tough choice for May. The top of the OBP list gives us Jonathan Aranda (also top in BA by a wide margin) of the Rays at .464 and Nick Kurtz of the Athletics at .456. Both slugged well, but not mind blowing well. The […]

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

Black voters urge SCOTUS to reject Alabama’s last-minute bid to revive intentionally racist map 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:1p…  ( 5 min )

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

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

PA-07 is one of our best pick up opportunities in the country this year, and Bob Brooks is one of our very best candidates.....

Big week ahead in Washington - we need to be very loud everyone

Welcome new subscribers!

The Rams just traded for Cleveland Browns superstar pass rusher Myles Garrett. But before you ooh and ahh at the prospect of the NFL’s reigning Defensive Player of the Year joining Sean McVay’s superteam-in-waiting, you should probably consider what Los Angeles gave up to acquire him. Cue a wince: According to multiple reports, the Rams are giving up Jared Verse, a 2027 first-round pick, a 2028 second-round pick, and a 2029 third-round pick. This is a move that harkens back to the 2021 offseason, when Los Angeles GM Les Snead—with the blessing of head coach McVay—traded QB Jared Goff plus two first-round picks to the Detroit Lions in exchange for QB Matthew Stafford. That trade, as you now know, resulted in the Rams winning a Super Bowl, with Snead basking in his win-now approach to team building by wearing a “Fuck Them Picks” T-shirt after the fact. This time around, with Stafford locked in for two more years, Snead decided to fuck them picks again, and to fuck Jared Verse for good measure. Snead and McVay hit the jackpot going against the grain five years ago, but the circumstances are different this time around. For one, when they traded for Stafford, they acquired a future Hall of Famer at the most important position in the sport. History also tells us that, in aggregate, giving away all of your draft picks is still really fucking stupid. Now, over the past few years, Snead was able to make up for the loss of those picks by grabbing the likes of Byron Young, Kobie Turner, Braden Fiske, Puka Nacua, and Verse with his remaining picks. Verse was the 2024 Defensive Rookie of the Year, Young rates as an even better pass rusher than Verse, and Nacua—despite being a world-class moron—is arguably the best wideout in football. Those draft picks by Snead are the reason that L.A. has remained in serious contention as Stafford has neared the end of his career.  ( 19 min )

It's almost time for the World Cup. Before the tournament, we'll be previewing each of the top 15 teams by FIFA rankings that made the tournament. Why the top 15? Because that's how many we needed to do in order for the USMNT to make the cut. You can read all of our previews here. The World Cup is too big and important to require its participants to seek any extra sources of motivation. You don't step onto the field of the planet's biggest sporting event with desires as petty as "proving the haters wrong" filling your head, because no hater can exceed the meaning of a World Cup. But if there is one team coming into this year's tournament that might be able to find some extra motivation elsewhere, it's Senegal.  ( 28 min )

Three drop shots, three aces—that's a sequence that I'll never forget. Nineteen-year-old Joao Fonseca wrapped up his upset of Novak Djokovic in scandalous style. Friday's third-round match at Roland-Garros had the gravity of a classic final: the shot-making, the comeback from two sets down, the nearly five-hour span, and especially the intergenerational warfare, as the youth brought revolutionary firepower to bear on a historically great elder. Djokovic will never see a clearer path to major title No. 25. He had been advancing through a wide-open draw devoid of the two junior nemeses who finally managed to wrench the sport out of his hands: Carlos Alcaraz, out with injury, and Jannik Sinner, downed by cramps in the second round. Instead Djokovic was taken down early by a colossal talent from an even younger cohort. His perfect 18-0 record when playing teenage opponents at the majors ended when Fonseca polished off a 4-6, 4-6, 6-3, 7-5, 7-5 victory. It was only the second time in Djokovic's career that he had lost a match from two sets up. Tennis arguably reveals an individual's composure under pressure with even higher fidelity than do team sports, because of the magic of shot selection. Every time a player sees the ball coming at him, only he can choose a reply. The bravery (or cowardice) of that choice will come to define him, both in that particular match and general reputation. Simply flip to "Zverev, Alexander" for the cautionary tale here. Fonseca was already known for his tendency to go big, and we'll never need more conclusive proof than his performance in the tensest moments of this match, played against a 39-year-old whose own mind has been tempered like steel over the last two decades, and who clearly delights in unraveling less experienced opponents.  ( 23 min )

Nick Bilton, the dumb, dull, and severely underqualified former tech journalist who is now running 60 Minutes at the behest of Bari Weiss, had his first meeting with his new colleagues on Monday. It ended with him more or less being chased out of the room. You can tell a lot about how much a boss is hated by his colleagues based on how quickly the details of a specific staff meeting leak to the press. In this case, news of Bilton eating shit made its way to various media reporters pretty much as it was happening, and it wasn't long before The New York Times and other outlets had obtained full audio recordings of the meeting. The results are in: Everyone at 60 Minutes already hates this goof's guts. The highlight of the meeting was a confrontation between Bilton and longtime 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley. Pelley is instantly recognizable as the guy from the show who has a square jaw and stentorian voice, which makes him the ideal person to mix it up with a twerp like Bilton. This is a gravitas mismatch on par with James Harden finding himself switched onto Jalen Brunson in isolation.  ( 15 min )

Going into the third season of Euphoria, the much-delayed, much-discussed, maybe final season of the hit HBO series, a friend roped me into catching up on the show's first two seasons. I had avoided the show during its initial run and the peak of its hype machine, mainly because the internet discourse had been so exhausting, ping-ponging between rational conversations about on-set mistreatment, exploitation of young actors, and the inflated ego of the nepo baby at the helm, to brain-melting conversations like "Is the graphic depiction of the sex lives of minors OK when it's 25-year-olds playing teenagers?" The series practically exists to trigger the worst kinds of online discussions imaginable, which, unsurprisingly, has helped it become HBO's biggest hit since Game of Thrones. It's the t…  ( 25 min )

In my early twenties, a huge part of my job was to convince older journalists in my newsroom to use social media. This is the kind of job that only a young person could have, not just because of my total facility with the social media apps I was proselytizing, but also because only someone with the hubris of an undeveloped prefrontal cortex could summon the confidence to tell a Pulitzer Prize-winning critic that her journalism would be immeasurably improved by her posting on Snapchat. I sincerely believed that, by the way.  I rarely managed to convince anyone to view social media as more than a chore; most of them saw it as a pedestrian medium that watered down ideas and discourse. It was a poison to our industry, a threat to everything they held dear. This was wild to me. The internet was clearly where the most interesting conversations were happening, and anyone who wanted to continue to have a career in media must accept that, and adapt. It turns out we were both right.  I promised myself I would never become one of them. And then one year became 10, and I aged out of the demographic whose consumption habits drove the Next Big Thing. I think I first heard of video podcasts in 2018; my sister, who was in high school at the time, mentioned a podcast she “watched” and I laughed at the anachronism. But as the years passed, they went from a strange, niche idea to the dominant mode of the industry I’ve spent my entire career in.  ( 20 min )

It's almost time for the World Cup. Before the tournament, we'll be previewing each of the top 15 teams by FIFA rankings that made the tournament. Why the top 15? Because that's how many we needed to do in order for the USMNT to make the cut. The story of the past decade of American soccer has been the eastward migration of the nation's best young players out of MLS purgatory and into the best teams and developmental academies in the world. That story is supposed to have a happy ending for the national team, or at least some positive plot developments. So far it has not, though the Jürgen Klinsmann prophecy has yet to be really tested. That's what's at stake in this 2026 World Cup: a resolution. One moment, one goal, one game goes your way, and everything is different. This is the competition that matters.  ( 28 min )

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

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

You'll ace our Monday crossword. This puzzle was constructed by Zachary Edward-Brown, and edited by Hoang-Kim Vu. Zach is a Chicagoan who enjoys playing soccer and basketball and rooting for the Bears. He's always open to collabs. Defector crosswords, launched in partnership with our friends at AVCX, run every Monday. If you’re interested in submitting a puzzle to us, you can read our guidelines HERE. The AVCX, an independent puzzles and games outlet, invites you to subscribe, or sample the goods with a two-month free trial: "With an AVCX subscription, you get access to weekly themed and themeless crosswords, minis, cryptics, and trivia, by email or in your favorite app. We have no corporate overlord, and we publish top-flight stuff only. We also pay our people fairly, always. Check us out."  ( 13 min )

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

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

The court’s decision to strike down voter-approved district maps is not just a story about democracy. It’s a story of how state courts too often protect entrenched power. The post The Virginia Supreme Court Has Been a Thorn In the Side of Working People For a Long Time appeared first on Balls and Strikes.  ( 6 min )

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

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

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

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

they really expect us to believe this bullshit

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

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

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

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

GNU & FSF GNU Emacs: ffs-0.2.2: I finally polished and published my ffs package for GNU Emacs on GNU ELPA. Many thanks to Protesilaos for rounds of code review and feedback for improving and polishing the package in preparation for submission to GNU ELPA. bug#81101: Trying to visit https://www.emacswiki.org in EWW I noticed it fails with a Somebody wants you to give them money error due to the anti-bot challenge being served with a HTTP 402 (Payment Required) response. So I landed a patch 12eec781ed6 to no longer do that. Thanks to Emacs comaintainer Sean Whitton for reviewing and approving my proposed patch. bug#81107: I noticed that in EWW, unlike HTML buttons, elements were not tab-stoppable, leading to poorer usability and accessibility. So I landed a patch ec3d662de0b to fix that. Thanks to Emacs comaintainer Eli Zaretskii for reviewing, providing feedback, and accepting my proposed change. Emacs Chat with Sacha Chua: I joined Sacha for a new episode of her Emacs Chat podcast, where we talked about Emacs and life. I gave a quick tour of my Emacs configuration, discussing at length my configurations for EXWM (Emacs X Window Manager) among other topics like Emacs's facility for visually indicating buffer boundaries in the fringe by setting indicate-buffer-boundaries and my convenience configuration macros. maintainers@: I started the next long-overdue round of emails to GNU package maintainers to confirm the contact information we have on file for them and get a brief status update about their packages. Emails are sent in small batches to keep the workload of handling the responses manageable for assistant GNUisances. GNU Spotlight: I prepared and sent the May GNU Spotlight to the FSF campaigns team for publication on the FSF's community blog and the monthly Free Software Supporter newsletter. Debian #1120837: ITP: expected-lite – expected objects for C++11 and later #1137609: ITP: sobjectizer – C++ implementation of Actor, Publish-Subscribe, and CSP models  ( 2 min )

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

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

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

Giant This past Friday, I had the chance to see "Giant," the play written by Mark Rosenblatt. A few friends asked for my take on social media so I thought I'd write my thoughts up here. apology. John Lithgow Filicity Crosland Rachael Stirling - Dahl's mistress, fiance, and later wife. Tom Maschler Elliot Levey - Executive at Dahl's publishing company. England based. A Jew who's family fled Vienna after Nazi annexation when he was five. Jessie Stone Aya Cash - Sales employee of Dahl's publishing company. Also Jewish. Based in America. Hallie Stella Everett - Domestic employee of the Dahl's Wally Suanders David Manis - Groundskeeper for the Dahl's. While the meeting depicted in the play was fictional, Dahl, Crosland, and Maschler did indeed exist though I have no idea if Crosland or Maschler's depictions were in any was based in their real personalities. Stone was created for the play and I'm not sure about the last two.  ( 3 min )

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Our community hit an important milestone this week - $10m raised for battleground candidates and party committees - thank you all!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Great news that’s terrible for Trump

but also a short rant about Preznit Fuckwit

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

With Trump faltering it is time for us to be very, very aggressive now my friends....

The regime can’t stop losing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Prot about the May 2026 Emacs Carnival theme "May I recommend". It was a joint braindump of quick recommendations for people at different points in their Emacs journey, building on our conversation about newbies/starter kits and the newcomer experience all the way up to power users, Emacs Lisp coders, and package developers. Video not supported. Thumbnail: View in the Internet Archive, watch or comment on YouTube, read the transcript online, download the audio or the transcript, or e-mail me. Related links EmacsWiki: CarnivalMay2026: "May I Recommend…" Top (GNU Emacs Manual) Top (The Org Manual) Top (Programming in Emacs Lisp) Top (GNU Emacs Lisp Reference Manual) Mastering Emacs Emacs Lisp Elements | Protesilaos Bookmarks (GNU Emacs Manual) Keyboard Macros (GNU Emacs Manual) Ho…  ( 38 min )

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

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

Turns out we are ending another one of those weeks on all sorts of up notes!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Join our new campaign to help Rebecca Bennett flips NJ-7 blue!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

every goddamn day it’s some new nightmare

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